lecturer at the University of Virginia equally at home at the High Table or pacing the battlefields of the American Civil War". Wheeler-Bennett who owned an estate in Virginia and wrote a weekly column in The Evening Standard become Lothian's principal adviser on American affairs. Wheeler-Bennett as a wealthy "gentleman of private means" was not an official employee of the British embassy, which proved to be a great advantage because as a private citizen Wheeler-Bennett was exempt from the rules forbidding embassy employees against openly lobbying to influence American public opinion. Wheeler-Bennett was Lothian's main contact man with the Fight for Freedom Committee. Though Wheeler-Bennett had doubts about Lothian's suitability as ambassador, but he discovered that Lothian tended to accept his advice that the best way to "sell" the British cause was by identifying it with the American values. To handle "black propaganda" in the United States, Lothian appointed a Canadian businessman William Stephenson to head the British Security Co-ordination group from his office in New York in order to provide some distance from the British embassy. In late 1939, Lothian came into conflict with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, whom he discovered had opened a correspondence with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which Lothian objected to as undercutting his role. Lothian demanded that Churchill stop his correspondence with Roosevelt, and the dispute was mediated by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Halifax declared in January 1940 that Churchill could continue his correspondence, but had to provide copies of the correspondence to Lothian to ensure that the ambassador was being "kept in the loop". In January 1940, Lothian faced his first crisis when the State Department submitted a note of protest to him against the British blockade of Germany as the Royal Navy stopped American merchantmen and tankers in the Atlantic on their way to Germany or to places where the supplies would be shipped on to the Reich. Jay Pierrepont Moffat, the head of the State Department's European Affairs Division, told Lothian that "there was a general feeling that the United States had been particularly friendly towards Great Britain, had even gone out of its way to give special forms of help, but that Great Britain has taken this friendship for granted". Lothian told Moffat that he "wanted to be of help" while a dispatch to Lord Halifax presented the issue as a matter of public relations, warning