This did not augur well

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 310.

“Before Nehru embarked on his first visit to the US in the autumn of 1949, Henderson advised Washington that the Indian leader was a ‘vain, sensitive, emotional and complicated person’. For an agnostic he talked a lot about spirituality. Many of his less attractive characteristics stemmed from an America-hating English nanny and his education at Harrow, where ‘he consorted with and cultivated a group of rather supercilious upper middle class young men who fancied themselves rather precious . . . He acquired some of their manners and ways of thinking.’ Unlike them, being just a drunk or deeply stupid did not mitigate Nehru’s snobbery, for he was neither. Prolonged exposure to the fashionably ‘progressive’ Mountbattens, including an intimate – although perhaps non-sexual – relationship with the promiscuous Edwina, had coloured his view of Americans as ‘a vulgar, pushy, lot, lacking in fine feeling’ with a culture ‘dominated by the dollar’. Although the Americans were anxious to make the visit a success, they contrived to send a plane known as The Sacred Cow to convey Nehru from London to Washington. This did not augur well.