The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson 3030722759, 9783030722753

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The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson Edited by  Michael Patrick Cullinane Martin Farr

The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson

Michael Patrick Cullinane  •  Martin Farr Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson

Editors Michael Patrick Cullinane Department of Humanities University of Roehampton London, UK

Martin Farr School of History Newcastle University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-72275-3    ISBN 978-3-030-72276-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: PjrTravel / Alamy Stock Photo Rob Crandall / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the School of History at Newcastle University for making possible the symposium from which this volume developed, and to the Presidential History Network for co-sponsorship. The symposium took place at Newcastle University on 26 and 27 May 2017, when eleven of the contributors presented their drafts for what then was planned to be a collection of essays. The editors owe special thanks to all the contributors to this volume, the number of whom increased as the project developed into a full Palgrave Handbook. At Palgrave Macmillan the editors would like to thank Molly Beck for seeing the project in, Lucy Kidwell for seeing it out, and Joe Johnson for bringing it all together at the end.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Michael Patrick Cullinane 2 Presidents and Prime Ministers  7 Kathleen Burk 3 Grover Cleveland and Lord Salisbury: A Shared History 35 Andrew Ehrhardt and Charlie Laderman 4 Theodore Roosevelt and Arthur Balfour: Friendship Without Familiarity 57 Michael Patrick Cullinane 5 Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George: Uncongenial Allies 79 John A. Thompson 6 Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt and Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain: Amelioration of Rivalry in the 1930s101 B. J. C. McKercher 7 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: Power Relations133 A. Warren Dockter 8 Harry S. Truman and Clement Attlee: “Trouble Always Brings Us Together”157 Clive Webb

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9 Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden: A Common Cause?179 Justin Quinn Olmstead 10 John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan: Dependence and Interdependence199 Nigel Ashton 11 Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson: Pragmatist v. Pragmatist217 Sylvia Ellis 12 Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Harold Wilson and James Callaghan: Personal Diplomacy, Friendship and US-UK Relations in the 1970s241 Todd Carter 13 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Not So “Special” Relationship?273 James Cooper 14 George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and John Major: A Tale of Two Relationships297 Victoria Honeyman 15 Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Tony Blair: The Search for Order319 James Ellison 16 Barack Obama and David Cameron: The Ostensible Relationship347 Martin Farr 17 Donald Trump and Theresa May: The Incredible Relationship383 Martin Farr 18 Donald Trump and Boris Johnson: The Unfulfilled Relationship417 Martin Farr 19 Conclusion439 Gill Bennett

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 Correction to: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: Power RelationsC1 A. Warren Dockter Appendix: Biographies and Timeline451 Index479

Notes on Contributors

Nigel Ashton  is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (Yale, 2008); Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955–59 (Macmillan, 1996). In addition, he has edited The Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conflict and the Superpowers, 1967–73 (Routledge, 2007) and The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives (Routledge, 2013). Gill  Bennett, MA, OBE, FRHistS  was Chief Historian of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office from 1995 to 2005, and Senior Editor of the FCO’s official history of British foreign policy, Documents on British Policy Overseas. A specialist in the history of secret intelligence, she has worked as historian in Whitehall for over 40 years, and is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute. She has published widely on intelligence and on British foreign policy. Her most recent book The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Kathleen  Burk  born in California and educated at Berkeley and Oxford, where she was also Rhodes Fellow for North America and the Caribbean, is Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at UCL. She is the author or co-author of eight monographs and the editor or co-editor of four books of essays. They include Britain, America and the Sinews of War 1914–1918 (1985); Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (2000); Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (2007); and The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires 1783–1972 (2018). She also writes on wine. Todd  Carter  is a DPhil student in History at University College, at the University of Oxford, and formerly a Graduate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. His forthcoming thesis focuses upon the conduct of British and American policies towards the Rhodesian problem, from 1963 to 1980, in xi

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the context of the Cold War in Southern Africa. His research sheds light both upon the Unites States’ and the United Kingdom’s coordination of Cold War strategy and policy and, furthermore, demonstrates that the “special relationship” was a distinctly malleable construct, dependent upon the capacities, characters and propensities of the policymakers involved, and the political contexts within which they operated. James Cooper  is an Associate Head of the School of Humanities at York St John University, where he leads the programmes in History, American Studies and War Studies. Previously, he has held positions at Oxford Brookes University and Aberystwyth University. In 2012–2013, Cooper was the 20 FulbrightRobertson Visiting Professor of History at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and in 2016 was a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Centre. Michael Patrick Cullinane  is Professor of U.S. History at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of Theodore Roosevelt’s Ghost: The History and Memory of an American Icon and The Open Door Era: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century. He edits the book series New Perspectives on the American Presidency. A.  Warren  Dockter is a lecturer in International Politics at Aberystwyth University. He is a graduate of the University of Tennessee and gained his Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham. He has taught at the University of Exeter and the University of Worcester, and was an Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College and Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of Churchill and the Islamic World (2015) as well as the editor of Churchill at the Telegraph (2015). Andrew  Ehrhardt is a postdoctoral fellow with the Engelsberg Applied History Programme at King’s College London. He recently completed his doctorate which examined the British Foreign Office and the creation of the United Nations Organization. Sylvia Ellis  is Professor Emerita at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of Freedom’s Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights, A Historical Dictionary of Anglo-American Relations, and Britain, America, and the Vietnam War. James Ellison  is a Reader in International History in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. He researches and teaches the history of Anglo-American relations, Britain’s relationship with Europe, and the War on Terror. He has published two books and is currently researching a third about the history of international order after the Cold War. Martin Farr  is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History at Newcastle University. He has published widely on British politics and public life since the First World War, and co-edits the Palgrave series, Britain and the World.

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Victoria  Honeyman is an Associate Professor of British Politics at the University of Leeds. Her first book, Richard Crossman; A Reforming Radical of the Left, was published in 2007. Her current research focuses on British Foreign Policy, including Britain’s overseas aid policy, and she has written on the foreign policy aims and objectives of the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments, with her current writing focusing on Theresa May and Boris Johnson. She also appears in the media frequently, speaking on issues relating to both domestic and foreign policy in Britain. Charlie Laderman  is a Lecturer in International History at the War Studies Department, King’s College London. His first monograph, entitled Sharing the Burden, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. It explores the American and British response to the massacre of Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire, offering a window into America’s rise to great power status, decline of the British Empire and emergence of a new Anglo-American-led international order after World War One. It was awarded the Arthur Miller Institute First Book Prize from the British Association for American Studies as the best first book on any American studies topic in 2019 and was shortlisted for The Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in British History. B.  J. C.  McKercher, FRHistS  is Professor of International History at the University of Victoria. A former Chair of War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, he writes largely on interwar British foreign policy and the United States. His most recent publications are Britain, America and the Special Relationship, 1941–2015 (2017); with Antoine Capet, co-editor, Winston Churchill: At War and Thinking of War before 1939 (2019); and with Erik Goldstein, co-editor, Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles: Of War and Peace (2020). He has been editor of Diplomacy & Statecraft since 2007. Justin  Quinn  Olmstead  is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma. He has published The United States’ Entry into the First World War: The Role of British and German Diplomacy (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) and edited two books: Reconsidering Peace and Patriotism during the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Britain in the Islamic World: Imperial and Post-Imperial Connections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Currently, he is the assistant editor for The Middle Ground Journal, Treasurer for Britain and the World, president elect of the Western Conference on British Studies, and a Senior Fellow at the Armed Services Institute in the Center for Military Life, Thomas University. His current research includes leadership, the diplomacy of alliances, economic warfare, and the evolution of protective security. John  A.  Thompson is an Emeritus Reader in American History and an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine’s College at the University of Cambridge. His principal research interests have been American liberalism and U.S. debate about foreign policy. His publications include Progressivism (Durham, UK,

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1979); Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Woodrow Wilson (London: Longman, 2002); A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Cornell University Press, 2015); and numerous articles and book chapters. Clive Webb  is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sussex and the author of Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (2011), Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (2013), and Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (2001), among others. Webb has also published a number of articles on race and ethnicity in a transatlantic context, Anglo-American relations, and has undertaken a multi-year Leverhulme-funded project on mob violence in the United States.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Michael Patrick Cullinane

Bill Sanderson. “Anglo-American Research on the Human Genome.” 1990 [scraperboard drawing], Wellcome Collection

M. P. Cullinane (*) Department of Humanities, University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_1

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When Winston Churchill first referred to the United Kingdom’s relationship with the United States as “special,” he did so after wartime ally President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died. In his eulogy, Churchill declared that Franklin Roosevelt was “the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old.”1 Naturally, his encomium shrouded their differences—and they had plenty. Instead he projected a personal relationship that remains, for many, the apogee of transatlantic rapport and the template for future relations in the postwar era. Throughout the war, the United States and the United Kingdom forged an alliance that led to a sense of national camaraderie and shared mission, which Roosevelt and Churchill exemplified. In short, the “special-ness” of the Anglo-American relationship derived, at least in part, from that personal relationship. Talk of the special relationship has endured, even if successive presidents and prime ministers do not share the positive regard or the wartime circumstances that forge eternal bonds. John Major barely concealed his support for President George H.  W. Bush’s reelection bid in 1992, and when Bush lost to Bill Clinton, the special relationship appeared in danger of a precipitous decline. State relations did sour when John Major refused to speak with Clinton for weeks in 1994 after the United States issued a visa for Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.2 That public dispute reveals how frosty the bond between a president and a prime minister can get, and how such clashes can give rise to a sense of contrasting ambitions or, perhaps even worse, fractures in the Anglo-American special relationship. Amity among leaders bears promise. Ill-will signifies discord. Yet, this does not scupper long-standing military, intelligence, diplomatic, or economic cooperation. The institutional relationship, in this case, transcended personal relations. Scholars, pundits, and the public have long queried the effect and power of personal relations in statecraft, and a rift exists in how we interpret the importance of personality in diplomatic relations between nations and states. On the one hand are those who put a high value on the systems and circumstances at play, or that of context and the material interest of state actors, institutions, and of security or trade commitments made by treaty or pact. For others, the circumstances of global politics derive from human agency, and the personal or emotional connections that diplomats make with other diplomats to define foreign relations. In the study of Anglo-American relations, this remains an ongoing debate, even in the analysis of the most convivial relationships like that

 Winston Churchill, “The Greatest Friend of Freedom,” 17 April 1945 (http://www.churchillsociety-london.org.uk/DthRovlt.html). 2  Tim O’Brien, “Major ‘Refused’ to Speak to Clinton after Adams got US Visa,” Irish Times, 16 August 2013; Caroline Davies and Owen Bowcott, “Major Apologised to Bill Clinton over Draftdodging Suspicions,” Guardian, 28 December 2018. 1

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of Churchill and Roosevelt.3 Did these leaders catalyze the special relationship because the survival of the Anglo-American way of life depended upon it, or did their personal connection facilitate the wartime alliance and sense of shared ideology? Getting to the bottom of that historiographical riddle might be impossible or inevitably lead to a synthesis that brings our interpretation somewhere between the two sides, but investigating the personal affairs of presidents and prime ministers takes us closer to a fuller picture of Anglo-American relations by recognizing the strategic context of geopolitics, national security, and economic interests of the United Kingdom or the United States alongside the emotional and individual associations made by the power brokers of these states. Media adds another variable in assessing personal relations as it plays an important role in shaping the appearance of harmony or discord. While Churchill and Roosevelt set the high watermark for comity, the public presentation of two like-minded allies obscured substantial differences and belied the changing nature of their relationship. At the time of Roosevelt’s death, the president had gravitated toward Stalin and away from Churchill on many strategic matters facing the wartime alliance. The special relationship between these men suffered, as a consequence. Outwardly, however, Churchill and Roosevelt conjured the image of an inseparable coalition. Their speeches intoned narratives of kindred peoples and shared values.4 In some cases, the public image and underlying realities can prove even more difficult to understand. In January 2017, when Prime Minister Theresa May visited the White House weeks after Donald Trump assumed the presidency, she congratulated Trump on the 2016 election and pushed for new trade deals in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. She also sought to enhance existing security commitments and reaffirm the special relationship. These policy matters vanished almost entirely from the media coverage when Trump gripped May’s hand as they walked along the colonnades outside the West Wing. Public interest in the handholding overshadowed all other details of May’s trip. Editorials speculated on the gesture’s meaning, wondering if their personal fondness symbolized the shared ambitions of their countries. Less obvious in photos were all the ways Trump frustrated British efforts at a closer relationship: his administration’s threat of tariffs, his unorthodox opinions on Brexit or knife crime in London, and his support of conspiracy theories that accused the United Kingdom of spying on Americans, thereby breaking a central tenet of the special relationship. The image of the two leaders holding hands endured, as 3  For an excellent insight into the debate on human agency versus strategic realpolitik in scholarship about Roosevelt and Churchill, see Fraser J. Harbutt, Petra Goedde, William I. Hitchcock, Wilson D.  Miscamble, Kimber Quinney, and Frank Costigliola, “A Roundtable on Frank Costigliola’s Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War,” Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review 44, no. 1 (April 2013): 8–21. 4  David Woolner, The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 171, 225–6.

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emblematic, and as the act that captivated public consciousness. It remained so iconic that they repeated the scene when Trump visited the United Kingdom in 2018.5 Whether a president and a prime minister are cordial or acerbic, and whether their image is real or exaggerated, there can be no denying that the relationship matters. The aim of this volume is to demonstrate that personal relationships have bearing on the transatlantic world and, in some instances, on the global order. Although the notion of a special relationship formally dates to the 1940s and the wartime alliance, this book extends the scope to the 1890s when, as historian Bradford Perkins points out, the United States and the British Empire began their “great rapprochement.”6 From this time, in the late nineteenth century, no bilateral relationship between states has proven more important to international relations. As leaders of their respective nations, the personal relationship between president and prime minister has taken on great significance since then. The long history—before and beyond World War II—allows for an expansive view of the Anglo-American relationship and the changing nature of the offices of president and prime minister. In the late nineteenth century, when Britain commanded a vast empire, the United States was a junior partner, even subordinate, but two world wars transformed the United States into an undisputed global leader that outranked the United Kingdom. The dynamics of the Anglo-American relationship changed and with them the dynamics between the president and the prime minister. While we might debate when exactly the tables turned in favor of the United States through economic histories, IR theories, and quantified assessments of military power, the power brandished by successive presidents and prime ministers offers an alternative approach to this question. The personal relations between a president and a prime minister divulge much more than a general assessment of bilateral power dynamics or a profile of transatlantic relations. Because presidents and prime ministers rarely enjoy overlapping tenures and typically interact with multiple counterparts, their personal rapport can add interesting contours to the history of Anglo-American relations, and they can demonstrate continuities and change in policies. For instance, Margaret Thatcher, who is often associated with Ronald Reagan as crusading conservative ideologues, took the keys of 10 Downing Street when Jimmy Carter was president and left office when George H. W. Bush was president. President Warren G.  Harding corresponded with four prime ministers over a truncated term in office, writing to David Lloyd George, Andrew Bonar Law, Stanley Baldwin, and Ramsay MacDonald. The variations in bonhomie, 5  Heather Stewart, “Theresa May Says NATO has 100% Support of Donald Trump,” Guardian, 27 January 2017; Hilary Weaver, “Theresa May Gives Her Perspective on That Awkward HandHold with Donald Trump,” Vanity Fair, 20 March 2017; Catriona Harvey-Jenner, “Donald Trump Held Theresa May’s Hand Again and it’s Painfully Awkward to Watch,” Cosmopolitan, 13 July 2018. 6  Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 5–6.

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or lack thereof, can give us a greater sense of how presidents and prime ministers operate as diplomats; we can draw distinctions between political views and leadership styles. Clinton’s poor relationship with Major contrasted with his chummy relationship with Tony Blair. Why and how could Blair move seamlessly from an affinity with Clinton as a Democrat, to an apparently equal closeness to his successor, Bush, a conservative Republican? Churchill served nonconsecutive terms as prime minister. How did his statecraft differ between Roosevelt and Eisenhower? Equally, personal relations can tell us much about domestic politics and how heavily they weigh upon foreign policy and its formulation. Do leaders get along any better when they come from similar political backgrounds? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were cut from the same ideological cloth, but does that explain their connection? Barack Obama and Gordon Brown hailed from a similar center-left background, but never hit it off. Can we attribute personal camaraderie with times of crisis, as might be the case with personalities as different as Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George, who faced the emergency of the World War I? Context necessarily shapes personal relationships between leaders. In this book we show what no other book does: that personal relationships between any given prime minister and president play a part, however negligible, in the evolution of Anglo-American relations. Occasionally, personal rapport has even broader implications for geopolitics, international trade and commerce, peace and security, or global culture and human rights. In short, this book contends that people matter. Institutions, systems, heritage, and tradition must not be ignored, but the focus of this book, perhaps unfashionably, falls squarely on the personalities and the individuals that take the reins of leadership, seeking to put those characters and their dispositions at the forefront of transatlantic relations. Given the deliberately broad chronology covered, that personal relationship can be understood through a number of lenses. Like Trump and May holding hands, media functions as a regulator of public perception. Whether gleaned from the print media of the late nineteenth century or social media of the twenty-first, a sense of solidarity or dissonance can often derive from journalists and commentators, or even political cartoonists, photographers, and video producers. The reality of these personal relationships might differ considerably from those images. Memoirs, correspondence, government documents, and “hot-mics” often provide a better indication of how presidents and prime ministers felt about each other. Personal relationships here do not preclude those leaders who never met. Grover Cleveland and Lord Salisbury never did; neither did Warren G.  Harding, Calvin Coolidge, or Herbert Hoover meet their British counterparts; Theodore Roosevelt and Arthur Balfour only met after leaving office. Yet even without this face-to-face contact, these presidents and prime ministers still established a relationship, and, in some cases, developed strong feelings about the other. With the advent of aviation and telecommunications, personal statecraft became more common, and since the 1940s presidents and prime ministers have always met in person. The distinction between leaders who have met and those who built relations by distance might offer

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further insight on the extent to which a president or a prime minister builds a friendship without shaking (or holding) hands with their equivalent across the ocean. In the following chapters, seventeen leading scholars take a look at these various questions about the Anglo-American relationship and the presidents and prime ministers who helped define their period in office. Rather than elaborating further on the specific chapters in this introduction, one of the foremost historians of Anglo-American relations—Professor Kathleen Burk—provides an overview of the historical context in the first chapter and the way in which each contributor grapples with presidential and prime ministerial leadership. Burk’s long list of publications covers Anglo-American relations from the colonial era to the present day, and no one is better placed to set out the political, strategic, economic, or sociocultural circumstances that existed in any given era. Following that initial chapter, each successive chapter examines a pair, or multiple pairs, of presidents and prime ministers. In total, the handbook offers a comprehensive account of the key relationships, followed by a lengthy reference appendix that includes biographies of the presidents and prime ministers, a timeline that visualizes any overlap in their offices, and a glossary of events central to the Anglo-American relationship. By way of a conclusion, Gill Bennett, the chief historian of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, considers the special relationship from the perspective of British diplomats, gleaned from the UK Foreign Office archives. In a neat close to the book, Bennett finds the same complexities below the level of president and prime minister. Stereotypes of Americans as brash and assertive seeped into diplomatic exchange, as did the sense of a rising power eclipsing a dwindling empire. More than a century of relations prove that personal relationships matter at every level of statecraft. Regardless of who occupies the White House or Downing Street, people make policy. Common interests and values has kept the United States and the United Kingdom close, a truism that belies a less-­ predictable accord between presidents and prime ministers. The relationship among policymakers highlights power dynamics and ideological fault lines. Regardless of how staged and choreographed their meetings, visits provide opportunities to understand disparities. Crises can cement shaky relations or weaken strong bonds. National interests, geopolitical circumstances, and prevailing ideas shape the Anglo-American relationship, as do the people on both sides of the Atlantic, and no two are more important than the president and the prime minister.

CHAPTER 2

Presidents and Prime Ministers Kathleen Burk

William Allan and J. B. Herbert. “John Bull and Uncle Sam.” Chicago: S. Brainard’s Sons, 1898 [sheet music cover], Library of Congress © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_2

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Looking at the record, it’s hard to find too many examples of one leader, for the sake of personal rapport, deciding to do something which he or she might not otherwise have done. Nations rarely do each other favours, at least not favours that cost anything.1

The overarching question that this book seeks to answer is, to what extent do individuals matter in international relations? This case study has Anglo-­ American relations as its context, considering whether the relationships of the individual presidents and prime ministers with each other exert any influence when conflicts arise. The answer seems to be that they can be significant but not determining. This should not be surprising. The primary duty of a leader of his or her country in the international arena is to work for the national interest. This can be the successful outcome of the specific issue in question; or, it is possible that immediate concessions can serve a larger national interest. Both examples are demonstrated in these chapters. The significance of the Anglo-American relationship was predicted by former Chancellor of the German Empire Otto von Bismarck just before his death in 1898 when he was asked what was the decisive factor in modern history. He replied: “The fact that the North Americans speak English.”2 This is true. Both the British and the Americans are famously monolingual, and it should rather be said that in most cases they only speak English. This common language is important because even superpowers need someone with substantial international experience with whom to talk. However, it should also be pointed out that a common language can allow criticisms to be immediately understood. Yet at least, if not more, important are common interests and approaches, and a supportive public opinion. On the whole, these have been the case in the modern relationship. Nevertheless, the whole idea of a “special relationship,” a term whose usage is widespread, causes some difficulties. First of all, only weaker states claim a special relationship. Stronger states do not need to do so. It can be embarrassing. Remember the story that former US ambassador to the United Kingdom Ray Seitz retails in his memoir Over Here, published in 1998. He had arrived in London after the end of the Gulf War, at which time the very idea of a particularly close Anglo-American relationship appears to have occasioned some hilarity at the White House. A few weeks after Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, Prime Minister John Major went to Washington. According to one account

1 2

 Raymond Seitz, Over Here (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 324.  Winston Churchill, News of the World, 22 May 1938.

K. Burk (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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repeated by Seitz, “Just before the Prime Minister arrived at the White House, Clinton was sitting with a few aides in the Oval Office. ‘Don’t forget to say “special relationship” when the press comes in,’ one of them joked—a little like ‘don’t forget to put out the cat.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ Clinton said. ‘How could I forget? The ‘special relationship!’ And he threw back his head and laughed.”3 There was also the later episode of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the United States going through the kitchen in an attempt to be seen talking with President Barack Obama. To a certain extent, the term is a journalistic construct: whenever one leader is crossing the Atlantic to meet the other, the press looks out for, and practically counts, if, and how many times, the phrase is used. David Cameron’s attempt to rename it as an “essential relationship” quite probably had the support of the Foreign Office, since the last person to describe the Anglo-American relationship as special is a British diplomat: it sounds too much like supplication—and this was certainly the case with Winston Churchill when he came up with the phrase. Thinking about any international relationship would be enormously enhanced by looking over a longer rather than a shorter durée. There is no event, no tradition, no relationship without roots. The idea of using the relationship between heads of governments as a way of approaching the country relationship in a user-friendly manner, combining as it does policies and personalities. But before looking too much at specific couples, a short overview of the development of the Anglo-American relationship until about 1900 might be useful, both to demonstrate its roots and to provide context. In institutional terms, it all began in 1783, with the establishment of the United States. The subsequent years were spent trying to locate the boundary between the United States and Britain’s North American colonies, which would only be completed in 1903.4 As a side issue for Great Britain during the Napoleonic War, the two countries fought a second war, the War of 1812—contemporaneously called the American War in Britain—which, thanks to the fact that on the day after the battle of New Orleans, notification of the signing of the peace treaty in London arrived in the United States, the Americans promptly proclaimed victory. Some US historians refer to it as the Second War of Independence. It certainly released a tide of frenzied nationalism. The United States then turned inward whilst the United Kingdom turned outward. However, since “inward” included trying to gather Canada into the American embrace, Canada was invaded twelve times by Americans over the century, and the Anglo-American relationship remained tense. Meanwhile, during the nineteenth century, the United States remained a literary and economic colony of Great Britain. Englishman Sydney Smith, first  editor of the Edinburgh Review, published a book review in January  Seitz, Over Here, 322.  Kathleen Burk, The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires 1783–1972 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), Chapters 1 and 2. 3 4

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1820  in which he asked, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?”5 That was humiliating, but Americans consoled themselves by bellowing that they wrote MUCH better books than the English did. But in the nineteenth century, American publishers seldom published a book that had not already been published and reviewed in London: Why should they take a chance on an unknown book which might not sell, when they could publish books which had already been reviewed favorably in London? Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn were first published in London for this reason, but also because there they had more copyright protection, something that was absent in the United States.6 In August 1908, the poet Ezra Pound came to London, later writing that the United States was “still a colony of London so far as culture was concerned [and] Henry James, Whitman and myself all had to come to the metropolis, to the capital of the US, so far as arts and letters were concerned.”7 But then the pendulum began to swing towards the United States, and thereafter—and especially after 1945— going to the United States for fame and experience, but especially for money, became, according to Peter Conrad, something of a rite of passage for American writers.8 W.  H. Auden, “as a campus-hopping poetic superstar,” was quite straightforward about this.9 He admitted in his poem “On the Circuit”: I see Dwindling below me on the plane, The roofs of one more audience I shall not see again. God bless the lot of them, although I don’t remember which was which: God bless the USA, so large So friendly, and so rich.10

Looking at the economic relationship, during most of the nineteenth century, the United States was essentially a developing country. It exported raw materials and foodstuffs to Britain, especially cotton, wheat, and tobacco, whilst British exports to the United States were predominantly manufactured goods. Matters began to change in the last quarter of the century. For example, before then, on an international index of steel production, the United States  Edinburgh Review, Vol. 33 (January 1820), 78–80.  James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1833), 106–7; Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London: Little, Brown, 2007), 353–60. 7  Stephen Spender, Love-Hate Relations: A Study of Anglo-American Sensibilities (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974), 146. 8  Peter Conrad, Imagining America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 194. 9  Steve Clark and Mark Ford (eds.), Something We Have That They Don’t: British and American Poetic Relations since 1925 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 10. 10  W.  H. Auden, “On the Circuit” (http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/w_h_auden/ poems/10129). 5 6

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did not feature. But with the so-called second Industrial Revolution—that is the American one—the United States by 1910 produced more iron and steel than all of Europe combined.11 However, when it came to financing the building of steel mills, or building the railways, British financial power was vital. Initial investment bonds were largely bought by Americans, but many were then bought by English investors, and it did not take long before they were being traded in London. By the 1900s, there was a separate category of American railway securities in at the London Stock Exchange to facilitate trade in them.12 America’s development into an economic power was important because, in order to carry out a foreign policy outside of the Western Hemisphere, they had to have the wherewithal to finance embassies and diplomats. Even more funding was required to build and support military and naval forces. The disparity between the size of the British and American armies was significant. The British forces were notably small, in 1880 about 130,000; indeed, as Bismarck commented, if the British army landed on the German coast, he would send the local police force to arrest it.13 Fortunately for Britain, she could also call on the Indian army, which had a ratio of two Indian soldiers to one British and was officered exclusively by the British. These land forces stabilized at about 120,000 and were used primarily in the empire for conquest or police action.14 But small as the British land forces were, the American forces were tiny. No more than the British did the Americans want a standing army, and by fifteen years after the end of the civil war, the numbers stood at 38,000, where they remained until the Spanish-American War, at which point they shot up to a quarter-million. Thereafter until 1917, the numbers remained at about 100,000. As a quick comparison, in 1890, the British plus Indian Army was roughly seven times the size of the American.15 Even greater was the disparity between the two navies: in comparison with the Royal Navy, the condition of the US Navy was pathetic. When in the early 1880s, the Royal Navy had 367 modern warships, the US Navy had fewer than ninety ships, thirty-eight of which were made of wood, and only forty-eight of which were capable of firing a gun. It was a near war with Germany over Samoa in 1889 that brought to Americans the disturbing realization that their navy 11  A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), Table 9. 12  Mira Wilkins, “Foreign Investment in the US Economy before 1914,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 516 (July 1991): 14. 13  Chris Cook and Brendan Keith, British Historical Facts 1830–1900 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 185; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Macmillan, 1983), 201. 14  David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century (London: Longman, 2000), 18. 15  U.S. Bureau of the Budget, Historical Abstracts of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), 736–7. The British regular army in 1890 numbered 153,483 and in 1895, at the time of the Venezuela crisis, 155,403. Cook and Keith, British Historical Facts, 185.

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ranked twelfth in the world, below those of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-­ Hungarian empire, and China, none of which was a celebrated naval power. The following year, Congress agreed to fund the first three modern armored warships.16 As with the army, it took the Spanish-American War, plus the arguments of the American Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1889), to jolt the Americans into building up the Navy.17 Mahan’s book was of great influence in London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo as well. The captain’s efforts worked. In 1904, a British visitor to the United States saw fourteen battleships and thirteen armored cruisers being built simultaneously in American shipyards.18 The point of giving some indication of the comparative economic and military strengths of the two countries is to provide a bit of background to what was the turning point in Anglo-American relations, and this was the Venezuela crisis in 1895–1896. That is why this handbook begins with Andrew Ehrhardt and Charlie Laderman’s chapter on Grover Cleveland and Lord Salisbury. Ehrhardt and Laderman discuss the postcrisis attempts to repair the relationship and spread peace, but in general their assessment of the personal relationship was that it did not exist. This chapter, however, concentrates on the strategic questions and how they were resolved. The question was the position of the border between Venezuela and British Guiana.19 Thanks to a first-class publicist, it came to the attention of the American public in 1895, when Venezuela, not for the first time, invoked the Monroe Doctrine against the claims of Great Britain for its own colony, British Guiana. Heretofore, the US government had pretty well ignored Venezuela, but this time, there was a response. Democratic president Grover Cleveland was in political difficulties thanks to Republican attacks, and the new secretary of state Richard Olney was determined to assert himself and bring Great Britain to heel. The United States offered arbitration. The British—led by Salisbury—declined it. Fundamentally, he argued, the conflict had nothing to do with the United States, and Olney replied with a dispatch of some brusqueness. After setting out the history, as he saw it, of the dispute, Olney issued a stark warning: “Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. Why? It is not because of the pure friendship or good will felt for it. It is not simply by reason of its high character as a 16  Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume II: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 114–6. 17  Captain A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1889). Fundamentally, Mahan argued that great power rivalries had been decided on the sea, not the land, from which he deduced that what was required were large battle fleets to control the oceans, supported by bases on islands or the edge of continents, not large land masses. Overseas colonies were vital for a nation’s prosperity, and the blockade was a very effective weapon. 18  Kennedy, British Naval Mastery, 183. 19  Burk, Old World, New World, 396–411.

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civilized state, nor because wisdom and justice and equity are the inevitable characteristics of the dealings of the United States. It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”20 The problem for Olney and Cleveland was that an aggressive European power—such as Great Britain—on the South American continent could threaten this isolation. Later known as the Olney Doctrine, this came very close to claiming that might makes right, which alarmed and infuriated the Canadians and Latin Americans. The Chilean minister to Washington observed that “if Washington won its point with Salisbury, the United States will have succeeded in establishing a protectorate over all of Latin America.”21 The history displayed in the dispatch, which was 12,000 words long, was bad and the language intemperate, but Olney later explained that the note was designed “effectually even if rudely” to dispel complacency. Its phrases were of a “bumptious order,” Olney’s biographer later explained, but the “excuse was that in English eyes, the United States was … so completely a negligible quantity that it was believed only words the equivalent of blows would be really effective.”22 The British response was heavy with gravitas and ripe with the very sort of de haut en bas tone that might have been calculated to outrage the Americans, which it did.23 Upon the reception of the two dispatches sent by the British, Cleveland blew up. He spent the night in the white heat of composition, read the result to the Cabinet, and sent it to Congress. He had decided that the British had challenged the Monroe Doctrine and that the United States had to take things in hand. His message was received with applause in the Senate, but in traditional diplomatic exchanges between countries, the message was a call for war, and war might well have been the consequence.24 But war was not the consequence. Salisbury, both prime minister and foreign secretary, certainly wanted to ignore the Americans, assuming, as he remarked to a Cabinet colleague, that “the American conflagration will fizzle away,” and that they should just wait until “Cleveland’s electioneering dodge” had blown itself out. Salisbury very much disliked America and Americans, having written in 1850 that “[t]he Yankee, whose life is one long calculation, appears to have bombast for his mother tongue.” What he feared was not her military and naval prowess but her democracy, presumably that it might be contagious. He did not entirely dismiss the American threat, writing on the 20  Olney to Bayard, No. 222, 20 July 1895, Microfilm 77/reel 90, fols. 305–6, Department of State Papers, U.S. National Archives. 21  LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 126. 22  George G.  Eggert, Richard Olney: Evolution of a Statesman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), 212. 23  Salisbury to Pauncefote, 26 November 1895, No. 15, Cmnd Paper United States, No. 1, Parliamentary Papers, February 1896, Correspondence Respecting the Question of the Boundary of British Guinea. 24  Henry F. Graff, Grover Cleveland (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 125.

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2nd of January 1896 to the Chancellor Sir Michael Hicks Beach that “A war with America—not this year but not in the distant future—has become something more than a possibility.”25 It did not, because he could not take the Cabinet, an uneasy coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, with him. In any case Salisbury was losing the unquestioned control he had exercised over foreign policy in previous Conservative governments. Was there any direct contact between the president and the prime minister that influenced the decision of the Cabinet? The answer, as demonstrated in Ehrhardt’s and Laderman’s chapter, was no. What, therefore, did influence the Cabinet? The answer primarily lies in the geopolitical danger in which Britain found itself. The government had to deal with problems with the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and France, as well as clean up the mess left by the embarrassing Jameson raid in South Africa.26 In comparison, America was small beer. The Cabinet, against the strongly expressed opposition of Salisbury, decided that the United States had the right to intervene; the Foreign Office now concentrated on limiting the amount of territory involved. A boundary commission was set up to decide where it actually meandered, an arbitral tribunal was set up, and on the  3rd October 1897 the tribunal handed down its award. As Olney had rather expected, barring two substantial alterations in favor of Venezuela, the boundary in the main followed that claimed by Britain. But the land had not been the point for Olney: rather, it was to bring Britain to acknowledge that the Western Hemisphere, barring the territory held by Britain, was the United States’ sphere of influence, and in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt, by means of the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, would openly proclaim the right of the United States to enforce order within the hemisphere.27 The decisions taken by Britain in Latin America, which would include ceding rights to the building and running of an isthmian canal, were far more important to the United States than to Britain. The United States was a regional power, but Britain’s concerns were global. Britain needed to protect the empire and safeguard the sea lanes, the highways for her trade and for vital imports of raw materials and food. In 1885, Britain imported four-fifths of its food—and the pressures were becoming very great. In short, Britain needed to 25  Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 46, 617. 26  T.G.  Otte, “A Question of Leadership: Lord Salisbury, the Unionist Cabinet and Foreign Policy Making, 1895–1900,” Contemporary British History 14, no. 4 (Winter 2000), 4–9; Zara Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 24; Burk, Old World, New World, 406–8. 27  Ibid., 408–11. The 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—part of Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress—the president said that American “interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical … While they … obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”

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consolidate resources. In response to the alarming enlargement of the French fleet, the Cabinet in 1889 adopted the principle that the Royal Navy must be larger than the next two threatening navies, a decision made even more crucial with the signing of the Dual Alliance between France and Russia.28 Germany in its many guises over the centuries had tended to be a British ally; the Reich was a land power and Britain a sea power, and they were not in competition. But with the combination of its ferociously pro-Boer activities, its challenges to Britain in China, the Middle East, and Africa, the proclamation in its Navy Bill of 1900, “there is only one way of protecting Germany’s commerce and colonial possessions: Germany must possess a fleet of such strength that a war with her would shake the position of the mightiest naval Power,” and that meant Germany had joined France and Russia as huge threats to Britain. The rise of two extra-European powers—the United States and Japan—meant that a balance of power in Europe no longer protected the British Empire. As a result, there was a reconfiguration of British relations with other powers between about 1898 and 1907 by two successive foreign secretaries, Lord Lansdowne and Sir Edward Grey. At the same time, by September 1901, the First Lord of the Admiralty Lord Selborne had decided that Britain no longer enjoyed the naval superiority that it had enjoyed for nearly three-quarters of a century, and changed the shape and deployment of the Royal Navy to meet the new realities. A primary reason for the changes in geopolitical relationships was that the elimination of imperial crisis points would considerably lessen the need for the Royal Navy to maintain fleets around the world and would allow for a reduction in expenditure.29 This was a real concern of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. By 1903, with the growing German naval threat, the Royal Navy would account for 25 percent of government expenditure. The organizing principle of both strategies was to make changes on the peripheries in order to concentrate resources nearer the home islands.30 The first change, both diplomatic and strategic, was fundamental: in 1902, Britain signed a peacetime alliance for the first time in centuries (the last one was the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373) with the Japanese and renewed the Anglo-Japanese Treaty in 1905 and 1911. The purpose was to commit the 28  336 H.C.  Deb., 3rd Series, 1171. The Naval Defence Act was passed on 21 May 1889. Curiously, although the second largest navy was Italian, not Russian, no one thought that Italy and Great Britain would go to war. 29  Chancellor of the Exchequer, “Financial Difficulties: Appeal for Economy in Estimates,” October 1901, CAB 37/58, Vol. 109, p. 8; Cabinet Papers, The National Archive, Kew, London; Table 3-1, “Gross Expenditures 1887–1907” in Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 131. 30  Selborne to Joseph Chamberlain, 21 September 1901; “The Naval Estimates and the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Memorandum on the Growth of Expenditure”; Selborne to A. J. Balfour, 4 April 1902, Add. MSS 49709, fol. 105, Balfour Papers, British Library; “Memorandum for the Cabinet,” 26 Feb. 1904, written by Selborne, signed by Lansdowne; “Cabinet Memorandum: Distribution and Mobilization of the Fleet,” 6 December 1904” in D.  George Boyce (ed.), Selborne, Second Earl, The Crisis of British Power: The Imperial and Naval Papers of the Second Earl of Selborne, 1895–1910 (London: The Historians’ Press, 1990), 126, 129–36, 170–3, 184–90.

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Imperial Japanese Navy to combining with the Royal Navy to contain the other great powers, particularly the combined Russian and French fleets, in the Far East.31 This allowed the Royal Navy to withdraw five battleships and place them in the Mediterranean. The second diplomatic agreement was with France, and by the so-called Anglo-French Entente—not an alliance—of 1904 the two countries settled outstanding imperial conflicts in Africa as well as the question of French access to the rich fishing grounds off of Newfoundland. In due course, the French assumed responsibility for the Mediterranean and the British were able to withdraw ships from that area to station them in the Channel. The negotiations with Russia were much more difficult than those with France, because the imperial rivalry with Russia in Central Asia, which put India at risk, was more ferocious than that with France in Africa. The outcome of the negotiations was the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907, by which Persia was divided into spheres of influence, Afghanistan would be neutral, but with British overlordship, and Tibet would remain neutral. Russia, however, saw this as a breathing space whilst she built up her power after her defeat in the Russo-­ Japanese War, and thus the British had constantly to keep watch on her activities.32 The place of the United States in this “revolution” is clear. Because the value of British commercial interests in the Western Hemisphere was high, and the extent of colonial possessions was larger than the territory of the United States, the British did not like resigning its position to the United States. However, the British did not fear that the United States would attack its colonies; furthermore, if it claimed hegemony, the United States, the British felt, also took on the responsibility of keeping unruly countries in order, which could only benefit those with financial and commercial interests there. Thus, in the face of greater dangers elsewhere, Britain accepted that the United States would dominate the continent. Because there had been a series of agreements, which, almost without exception, reflected American demands, there were virtually no points of conflict left. In recent years, changes in public opinion in both countries meant that both governments had accepted that war between them was unacceptable. The advice of the British War Office was that “the contingency of war with the United States should be avoided at all hazards,” and Arthur Balfour compared war with the United States to a civil war.33 In this situation, each could hope for at least neutrality from the other. The Cabinet had, by 1900, decided that if there was war with the European powers, the United 31  It was also to prevent an imminent Russo-Japanese rapprochement. George Monger, The End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy 1900–1907 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1963), 47. Japan was to destroy the Russian Pacific and Baltic fleets in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. 32  Jennifer Siegel, Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 188–201. 33  Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America 1815–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 362. Balfour stated in 1896 that “the idea of a war with the United States of America carries with it something of the unnatural horror of civil war.” See, W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World, The Review of Reviews Annual (1902–1903): 14.

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States might come in on the European side, and, as a result, the British would probably be defeated. This was a driving concern in sorting out problems between the two countries. Decisions were taken about where the stationing of a Royal Navy battle fleet was vital and where it was no longer necessary. Already in December 1903 it had been decided that the Royal Navy would withdraw from the Halifax (on the east coast) and the Esquimalt (on the west coast) naval bases, thereby handing over the defense of Canada to the Canadians themselves. The Pacific and South Atlantic Squadrons completely disappeared. Three of the four battle fleets were concentrated in European waters, one based on England, one based on Gibraltar, and one based on Malta. The China, East Indies, and Australia Squadrons were based at Singapore, whilst all but a flagship and an armored cruiser, and their smaller supporting craft, were withdrawn from the North America and West Indian Station.34 There was really nothing to be done about any putative American threat, because, in the Western Hemisphere, “the United States,” Selborne wrote, “are forming a navy the power and size of which will be limited only by the amount of money the American people choose to spend on it.”35 And, of course, as a rapidly growing economic power, they had increasing amounts of money available should they wish to spend. Fortunately, not only was there not believed to be a threat from that quarter, but the Cabinet, and probably most of the political class, believed that Great Britain and the United States shared most values and interests. And so, as a by-product of the threats from Europe, Britain had, after centuries, finally withdrawn the Royal Navy from the Western Hemisphere, leaving the Caribbean an American lake. (It is worth pointing out that the implication of the withdrawal from both of the Royal Navy’s bases in Canada was that if it became necessary, Canada arguably was largely under American rather than British protection.) This, at least, was how the Americans saw it, but the British viewed it differently: they had turned over to the Americans the task of defending the hemisphere, thereby incorporating the US Navy into the British defense strategy. But, regardless of how one viewed it, the power of Great Britain to exert virtually unencumbered influence in Central America had ceased. In South America, however, their informal empire remained intact.

34  Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in British North America, 364–5; Boyce (ed.), “Distribution and Mobilization of the Fleet” in The Crisis of British Power, 184–90. After the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese at Tshushima in May 1905, as well as the AngloFrench defeat of the Germans in the 1905 Moroccan Crisis, there was a further redistribution of the fleet, with the object of countering the German threat. Previously, there were sixteen battleships deployed as part of the Channel and Home fleets and seventeen in the Mediterranean and on the China Station. Afterward, there were nine in the Mediterranean, none on the China Station, and twenty-four deployed with the Channel and Atlantic fleets. David French, The British Way in Warfare 1868–2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 159. 35  Boyce, (ed.), “Distribution and Mobilization of the Fleet” in The Crisis of British Power, 184–5.

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What effect did any relationship between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Balfour have on these developments? Theodore Roosevelt thought that the British empire was a good thing, even if not always up to snuff, and that it was not a threat to the United States.36 It is clear from Michael Patrick Cullinane’s essay on Theodore Roosevelt and A. J. Balfour that they never met, they never corresponded, and that whilst they shared a desire for a warming of the Anglo-American relationship, any contact came through intermediaries. Therefore, in the discussions and rearrangements described above, the relationship between the two leaders was virtually irrelevant because, as he points out, a close relationship was not necessary to effect policies. With the First World War, the world changed for both the British and the Americans. Certainly, because of the acquisition of territories in the Middle East which had been part of the Ottoman empire, and in Africa which had been part of the German empire, the British empire in 1919 was substantially larger than it had been in 1914. On the other hand, because of the need to finance the wartime purchases in the United States for Russia, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Rumania, partly for France, and for itself, the pound sterling was severely damaged, and, by the spring of 1919, had exchanged places with the dollar, with the latter replacing the pound as the strongest international currency. For the United States, British purchases had helped finance and accelerate industrialization of the American economy.37 In short, in financial and economic terms, the United States replaced Great Britain as the stronger power. President Woodrow Wilson had intended to use this power to force Britain to accept the American insistence on his Fourteen Points and particularly the “freedom of the seas” clause—in other words that Britain surrender her right to impose restrictions on neutral nations during wartime. In July 1917, Wilson wrote that “When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.”38 This particular comment was made specifically with regard to the peace terms, but also when demanding freedom of the seas. Wilson would soon discover that financial power does not automatically translate into political or diplomatic power. At Versailles, Wilson and the British prime minister David Lloyd George clashed ferociously over these two issues, but when his bluff was called, Wilson backed down. Lloyd George also fought off Wilson’s attempts to include the British empire in his call for the self-determination of peoples.39 In his chapter, John A. Thompson makes the point that Wilson and Lloyd George were not close: there were obvious differences in style, but more 36  William N. Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1997), 241–3. 37  Kathleen Burk, “Financing Kitchener’s (and Everyone Else’s) Armies,” in Keith Neilson and Greg Kennedy (eds.), The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956 – Essays in Honour of David French (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 257–76, 260–1. 38  Wilson to House, 21 July 1917, Box 121, E.M. House Papers, Yale University Library. 39  Burk, The Lion and the Eagle, 373–8; Burk, Old World, New World, 457–8.

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important were the strong differences in policy. The political outcomes in late 1916 in the two countries—the victory in the US presidential election of progressive liberalism, and in Britain  of conservative nationalism with Lloyd George’s accession to prime minister—would inevitably produce strong tensions. Nevertheless, he argues, both men did more to mitigate than to exacerbate these tensions: more drew them together than separated them. There are important points arising from the presidential and prime ministerial couplings thus far. By the end of the First World War and the peace conferences, the world had changed. Many of the captains and kings had departed. The United States had changed, from a developing country to a regional power and now with the potential to be an international power. The majority of work in the field of Anglo-American relations concentrates on the period when the United States was considerably more powerful than the United Kingdom, but it has only been the case for about eighty years that the United States has held that position. During the interwar period, equality or dominance was still an issue, and for more than 300 years before that, it had been the British who were the superior power. This meant that there was a long period during which a few, and then many, and then most Americans disliked and resented the British, who believed that the British looked down on them—which many did—and that the British were so crafty that if Americans did not look out, they would be taken for a ride. See, for example, the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote in 1863: “I never stood in an English crowd without being conscious of hereditary sympathies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that an American is continually thrown upon his national antagonism by some acrid quality in the moral atmosphere of England. These people think so loftily of themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires more generosity than I possess to keep always in perfectly good humor with them.”40 This continued to play out over the first half of the twentieth century, with the intense suspicion of Britain of many Americans, such as Washington politicians and officials during the First and the Second World War, making negotiations and even relations between the two sides difficult.41 There was still a significant amount of envy and resentment around. Envy, resentment and sometimes contempt also dogged the British side of the equation. The long historic relationship gives the British the opportunity to see how the mighty have fallen, and, unfortunately, it includes themselves.42 They encouraged the United States to become a great power because they believed that they would share British interests and would not threaten them. Until after 1945, this was certainly not the case where the empire was concerned—President Franklin Roosevelt put a great deal of pressure on the  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), xi–xii.  John E. Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail: Anglophobia in the United States, 1921–1948 (London: Macmillan, 1999). 42  As predicted by the English poet Rudyard Kipling in his 1897 poem Recessional: “The Captains and the Kings depart/… Far-called, our navies melt away;/ on dune and headland sinks the fire:/ Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Ninevah and Tyre!” 40 41

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British to give India independence, for example—but in the 1930s, when Britain tried repeatedly to make the Americans understand that they, too, had interests at stake in the Far East and should face up to the Japanese threat before it was too late, the Americans refused to comply.43 The British fears about the empire are made clear by the Minute written in February 1932 by Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office: “We are incapable of checking Japan in any way if she really means business and has sized us up, as she certainly has done. Therefore, we must eventually be done for in the Far East unless the United States are eventually prepared to use force.”44 But he had already posited that this was unlikely very soon, writing in the same Minute  that “it is universally assumed that the US will never use force.”45 The British felt a combination of contempt and despair at America’s inaction: Britain had myriad responsibilities but declining resources to carry them out, and the US  evaded what Britain saw as the obligations of power. Stanley Baldwin, once and future prime minister, burst out during the 1931 Manchurian Crisis that “You will get nothing out of Washington but words, big words, but only words.”46 As for the Americans, many believed that the British were just trying to gain help in protecting their empire, which was indeed sometimes the case, and this was anathema to most Americans, including those in Washington. In that area of governmental endeavor in London, contempt was pretty close to the surface. It is important to remember that compared to Great Britain, the United States—even during the fabled rise to world power after 1870—was very much the weaker power. Yes, its economy was developing by leaps and bounds, but was the wealth being transformed into instruments of power? Is a country a world power if it is unable to project it? Even in the 1920s, a period when, according to Frank Costigliola, the United States was the greatest power in the world, it was only a potential, not yet an actual, power.47 To be a great power, two things are required: resources and a sustained will to power. The United States had the resources—population, money, raw materials—but not the sustained will to utilize them if necessary. The British on the whole did not fear the United States. What made them nervous was what the United States could do, if she ever decided that she would do it. What the British tried to do was to guide 43  Burk, The Lion and the Eagle, 397; Kenton J. Clymer, “The Education of William Phelps: SelfDetermination and American Policy toward India, 1942–1945,” Diplomatic History 8, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 14. 44  Minute on Sir J. Pratt, “The Shanghai Situation,” 1 February 1932, No. 238 in Rohan Butler, Douglas Dakin and M.E.  Lambert (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, 2nd Series, vol. IX (London: HMSO, 1955), 281–3. 45  Ibid. But he goes on to say, with some desperate hope, that “I do not agree that this is necessarily so. The same was said of the US in the Great War. Eventually she was kicked in by the Germans. The Japanese may end by kicking in the US, if they go on long enough kicking as they are now.” Of course, that eventually happened. 46  Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters 1931–1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 30. 47  Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

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this great, huge adolescent, as some perceived it, which was soon to be a great power into channels which would help rather than harm Britain. The 1920s are a very interesting decade. During this period, the US Army was smaller than Britain’s, als was the US Navy, whilst the US merchant fleet was considerably smaller still. It was an extremely hostile period between the two powers, primarily because of intense naval rivalry, “which caused the worst level of Anglo-American hostility in the twentieth century.”48 Things became so bad that in November 1928 the Foreign Office issued a strong warning to the Cabinet: ‘Great Britain is faced in the United States of America with a phenomenon for which there is no parallel in our modern history—a state twenty-five times as large, five times as wealthy, three times as populous, twice as ambitious, almost invulnerable, and at least our equal in prosperity, vital energy, technical equipment and industrial science. This State has risen to its present state of development at a time when Great Britain is still staggering from the effects of the superhuman effort made during the war, is loaded with a great burden of debt and is crippled by the evil of unemployment. The interests of the two countries touch at almost every point, for our contacts with the United States—political and economic, by land and sea, commercial and financial—are closer and more numerous than those existing with any other foreign State.’ In summary, Britain needed to spend a good deal of time and effort in sorting out the causes of Anglo-American antagonism, because … ‘war is not unthinkable between the two countries. On the contrary, there are present all the factors which in the past have made for war between States.’49

To try to sort things out, the then prime minister Stanley Baldwin decided to travel to Washington to talk directly with President Herbert Hoover. Unfortunately for Baldwin, the Conservatives lost the 1929 general election, and it was Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald who made the journey. The problem at hand was cruisers—how many of each type would each country be allowed to have? The problem was solved, but not because it was thrashed out leader to leader. There was a great deal of pre-meeting preparation made, but it was useful that, under pressure of the impending visit, President Hoover came up with the breakthrough suggestion. So, was it an example of the magic that can emerge from this type of meeting among presidents and prime ministers? B. J. C. McKercher argues in his chapter that the personal relationship was of secondary importance, and puts the strategic differences in focus: the presidents in the 1930s, Hoover and the prewar terms of President Franklin Roosevelt, maintained America’s isolationism, whilst prime ministers 48  Phillips Payson O’Brien, British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900–1936 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), 5. See also Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy Between the Wars, Volume I: The Period of Anglo-American Antagonism 1919–1929 (New York: Walker, 1968); Burk, Old World, New World, 464–73. 49  Robert Craigie, head of the American Department of the Foreign Office, Outstanding Problems Affecting Anglo-American Relations, 12 November 1928, FO 371/12812.

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MacDonald, Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain were concerned with European and East Asian security. What is possibly of more world historical importance is that the MacDonald-Hoover meeting was the first time the leaders of the two countries had met on home ground purely as an intended one-on-one—and the voyage had been from east to west. What the United States did have during the whole interwar period, to the increasing frustration of Britain, was the strong desire to be considered, in nineteenth century terms, as a great power, to receive the respect and deference that such a position should enjoy, but not shoulder the responsibilities that such a position entailed. The United States would only begin to do so on the outskirts of the Second World War, a period, as it happens, aglow with the close relationship of the American president and the British prime minister. What is the actual importance of the relationship between leaders: Does it often make a difference? This is a layered question, and it invites all sorts of considerations. With regard to the MacDonald-Hoover meeting, it probably did to the extent that the two institutional leaders, not necessarily these two people as individuals, met. But to what extent can one leader possibly sacrifice a national interest in order to accommodate the need or desire of the other? One thing that two leaders often share is an acceptance of the political, the knowledge that sometimes things are just not possible because the political cost to the other would be too high. There are situations where the two leaders, or the two foreign secretaries, or even treasury secretaries, indeed any other person in position of responsibility over sometimes arcane and subtle subjects, have more sympathy with the other than with those on their own side. In this case, some help to the other leader is easier to agree. It is not necessary to spend too much time on the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, as a library of books and articles has been produced on the subject. It is a little difficult to believe entirely in this occasionally myth-like story, and with this A. Warren Dockter agrees, referring to the “mythic proportions” of the relationship. He argues that the Churchill-Roosevelt special relationship reached its zenith on the 7 December 1941, and that thereafter it deteriorated through the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and reached its nadir at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Once Roosevelt had decided that Stalin and the Soviet Union would be America’s partner in building the postwar world, and that Churchill as the leader of an empire would just be in the way, he treated Churchill to a series of humiliations and demonstrated to Stalin that there were few ties between the United States and the United Kingdom. Dockter concludes that geopolitical realities were fast replacing the importance of personal relations. A moral here is that no country, no leader, is accommodating all of the time to another leader, so being a special friend is a position that goes up and down. The relationship between President Harry S. Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee is a good example of the truism that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Because of the Second World War, the United States replaced Britain as the predominant global power, and the American government and much of

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the national political classes gloried in that position. It was rather like Kipling’s cat who walked by itself, and preferred it that way. It was only with the perception that the USSR was unremittingly hostile to the United States that the Americans turned to the United Kingdom as an indispensable ally. In June 1948, the State Department wrote that “British friendship and cooperation … is necessary for American defense. The United Kingdom, the Dominions, Colonies and Dependencies, form a world-wide network of strategically located territories of great military value, which have served as defensive outposts and as bridgeheads for operations … it is our objective that the integrity of this area be maintained.”50 Or, as it was later put by Frank Wisner, head of covert operation for the CIA, in a conversation with Foreign Office official and Soviet spy Kim Philby, “whenever there is somewhere we want to destabilize, the British have an island nearby.”51 The need for an island nearby in 1947–1949 centered on the British Isles, with the stationing of US B-29 bombers in case of crisis, the completion of preparations of nuclear bomb-handling facilities by 1947, and the joint response to the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949. Two years later, just before the outbreak of the Korean War, the importance of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth to the United States was reaffirmed and widened: No other country has the same qualifications for being our principal ally and partner as the UK. It has internal political strength and important capabilities in the political, economic and military fields throughout the world. Most important, the British share our fundamental objectives and standards of conduct … To achieve our foreign policy objectives we must have the cooperation of our allies and friends. The British and with them the rest of the Commonwealth, particularly the older dominions, are our most reliable and useful allies, with whom a special relationship should exist. This relationship is not an end in itself but must be used as an instrument of achieving common objectives. We cannot afford to permit a deterioration in our relationship with the British.52

During this whole period, Truman was the president and Attlee was prime minister. Whether or not there was a close relationship was, fortunately, immaterial, given that there was very little contact and that they were not at all close. Rather, as Clive Webb emphasizes, it was pragmatic national self-interest and the common purpose of opposing the global challenge of the USSR that brought the two countries together. With the growing Cold War, the transatlantic alliance strengthened. The alliance had one of its greatest challenges during the first term of President Dwight Eisenhower, and those of Churchill’s final years at 10 50  Department of State Policy Statement: Great Britain, 11 June 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1948, III, pp. 1091–108, 1092, 1091. 51  Richard J.  Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), 305. 52  Paper prepared for the Department of State, 19 April 1950, FRUS, 1950, III, 870–9.

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Downing Street, and of Sir Anthony Eden premiership. Churchill was not what he had once been, when he and the then General Eisenhower had worked closely together in the Second World War, and by the end of his premiership he had neither health nor full capability of mind. Eisenhower found himself having to be open and friendly to a man who was no longer as important in international affairs as had once been the case and who refused to acknowledge it; he was forced to retire from office as prime minister in April 1955. With the advent of Eden as prime minister, the relationship deteriorated. Indeed, Eden had told the Cabinet in October 1955 that, at least with regard to the Middle East, “We should not … allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support. We should frame our own policy in the light of our interests in the area.”53 Of course, there was much substance in the relationship—NATO, joint interests in the Far East, and in general the containment of the Soviet Union—but the Suez Crisis in November 1956 threatened to damage the Anglo-American relationship. Eisenhower in fact said to his key advisers on the second day of the crisis that “he did not see much value in an untrusty and unreliable ally and that the necessity to support them may not be as great as they believed.”54 As Justin Quinn Olmstead points out in his chapter, both sides of the relationship of course wanted world security and peace. But whilst Churchill evidently thought that Eisenhower lacked leadership qualities, he argues, Eisenhower himself thought that both Churchill and Eden refused to face reality as to the shrinking of the United Kingdom’s place in the world. Even before Eden’s departure, he concludes, Eisenhower saw both of them as useless allies. This may indeed have been the case, but it is interesting to note that the day after the comment quoted above, Eisenhower had met with the US National Security Council, during which he told them that “he could scarcely even imagine that the United States could abandon Britain and France.”55 Accordingly, after Suez he moved rapidly to repair the damage by recreating a nuclear relationship with Great Britain, meeting the new prime minister Harold Macmillan, on 17 January 1957, just eight days after Eden had resigned.56 The relationship that has entered historical folklore as one of the closest in Anglo-American history was that between Macmillan and President John F. Kennedy (the other was that between President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). It was indeed close: in his chapter, Nigel Ashton argues that what truly linked them was that they could share their loneliness 53  Cabinet Conclusions, 4 October 1955 in John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 600. 54  Memorandum of a Conference with the president, 30 October 1956 in FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XVI: Suez Crisis, 854. Dulles suggested that “their thinking might be that they will confront us with a de facto situation, in which they might acknowledge that they had been rash but would say that the U.S. could not sit by and let them go under economically.” Ibid., 853. 55  Memorandum of Discussion at the 302d Meeting of the National Security Council, 1 November 1956 in FRUS, 1955–1957, IX, 911. 56  Burk, Old World, New World, 602–6.

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with each other, and the photograph of Kennedy sitting in “his” rocking chair at Macmillan’s home is iconic. But the question must arise, to what extent did this bond either facilitate or determine policy decisions on either side? A number of crises blew up during their joint periods in office, Katanga and Yemen for example. Publicly, it was the Cuban Missile Crisis which loomed the most in the public consciousness. It is probable that a major aspect of a special relationship during this particular crisis arose from the close and long-standing personal relationship between Kennedy and David Ormsby-Gore, later the Fifth Baron Harlech, who was the British Ambassador to Washington, and who was frequently consulted by Kennedy. Kennedy also spoke several times to Macmillan on the telephone, who contributed advice in a soothing and encouraging voice.57 The event where the relationship may well have been helpful was the December 1962 Nassau Conference. The nub of the argument at Nassau was whether Great Britain was going to contribute its nuclear capabilities to a multilateral nuclear force—the answer was no—and, if not, the United States was going to provide her with Polaris missiles. A fortnight before the conference, former secretary of state Dean Acheson made his celebrated speech at West Point on 5 December, saying that “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role—that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a ‘Commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength … this role is about to be played out.”58 By the time that Macmillan and prime minister of Canada John Diefenbaker arrived on 18 December, “the atmosphere between London and Washington had become electric, even explosive.”59 Anglo-American relations were at a breaking point. US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wanted to deny Polaris to the British because he believed that there should be only one finger on the nuclear button and that it had to be American. US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs George Ball also believed that it should be denied, in his case in order to force Great Britain to join with Europe. The question was, would Kennedy accede to their pressure and deny Polaris to the British? The answer, in the end, was no. What effect did Macmillan’s presentation have? He invoked all of the past glories of the Anglo-American alliance, and then settled down to protracted and fiercely contested discussions. Macmillan had insisted that the United Kingdom would remain a nuclear power, and if the United States refused to help Britain, she would go it alone, “whatever the cost.” And the climax: “We have gone a long way in this nuclear business … but if we cannot 57  Macmillan and Ormsby-Gore became de facto members of Kennedy’s Executive Committee. Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelicow (eds.), The Kennedy Tapes Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 692. 58  New York Times, 6 December 1962. 59  Henry Brandon, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (London: Macmillan, 1988), 163.

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agree, let us not patch up a compromise. Let us agree to part as friends.”60 In other words, this would be the end of a close Anglo-American alliance. This might seem a hollow threat, had not the United States at that point a sad lack of friends: the relationship with Germany was tense, and that with France was unspeakably bad. It would have been more than careless to have tossed Britain aside—as the US secretary of state Dean Rusk said, “We have to have somebody to talk to in the world.”61 Britain, in fact, was never going to be abandoned because, unbeknownst to Macmillan, Kennedy had already decided that, if absolutely necessary, the United States would let the United Kingdom have Polaris. Macmillan’s not-so-­ subtle threat appears to have succeeded in its goal, because the alliance with the United Kingdom was deemed of great importance. As noted above, much has been made of the personal relationship between the two men, and this was doubtless very helpful, not least when Macmillan made it clear that if Britain did not get Polaris, his government would fall. High-level politicians tend to sympathize with this dilemma. But beyond sympathy, the United States would be faced with a government, possibly anti-American, much less to its liking. At the end of the day, countries take decisions based on their perceived national interests, and the interest of the United States was to retain strong links with the United Kingdom. In his chapter, Ashton argues that the outcome of the Nassau Conference demonstrated the strength of the personal relationship, but that, on the whole, the policy which Macmillan pursued, that of a strong interdependence between the two countries, was a failure. With the access to power of President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the relationship lost all sentimentality: as Sylvia Ellis points out in her chapter, it was a clash of pragmatists. There were three main conflicts between them. First of all, there was the Vietnam War, in which Britain refused to fight; this refusal made Johnson incandescent with rage: he did not want troops so much—although that would have been helpful—but the British flag. He asked bitterly, could not the British send even a token force? “A platoon of bagpipes would be sufficient; it was the British flag that was wanted.”62 Secondly, there was the parlous state of the pound. In May 1966, the American Embassy in London wrote to the secretary of state that the United Kingdom had a limited future as any sort of international power: perhaps the United States should cease to help and allow her to find her natural level as a “comparatively lesser middle state.”63 However, the United States did try to help, primarily because if the pound became so weak that it had to be devalued, speculators would turn their attention to the dollar: the overheated American economy and the rapidly growing debt—President Johnson was trying to  David Nunnerley, President Kennedy and Britain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1972), 157–8.  Brandon, Special Relationships, 163–4. 62  Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–1970 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, 1st pub. 1971), 341, 365. 63  C.J.  Bartlett, The Special Relationship: Political History of Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992), 116. 60 61

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finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society concurrently—would attract speculators, once they had felled the pound. The United States, however, wanted to extract damaging concessions from the United Kingdom in exchange for American financial help, and Britain refused. The state of the pound was linked to the third issue between the two leaders, and this was Britain’s role in the world. This was not only the question of Vietnam: worse, the British decided that they had to withdraw from any military responsibilities East of Suez. The Americans hated this, and issued threats against Britain, but economic weakness convinced the Cabinet that there was no choice.64 One Cabinet minister of the time, Richard Crossman, refers in his diary to “bursting through the status barrier … and it’s terribly painful when it happens.”65 Wilson regretted the need to withdraw, not only because of the loss of prestige, but because it signaled the end, for many years, of a close Anglo-American relationship. Countries ally because each has something to contribute to the relationship, but now the United Kingdom had relatively little to offer. Johnson remained contemptuous of Wilson until he left the White House. Ellis, however, concludes that even when the two were at odds, they both continued to act to safeguard the Anglo-American alliance. Nevertheless, Britain remained a gravely weak power during the 1970s, symbolized by the 1976 IMF crisis, when Britain had to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a substantial loan with embarrassing strings attached. Todd Carter in his chapter emphasizes the importance of the personal relationships between Prime Minister James Callaghan with President Gerald Ford and with President Jimmy Carter in dealing with Anglo-American relations. Callaghan certainly believed firmly in the use of his personal diplomacy to influence US foreign policy, but this could only go so far, because the balance of power was so one-sided. It was probably fortunate for the United Kingdom that he was able to wield it as successfully as he did, because his relationship with Carter in particular enabled them to work jointly in dealing with various international problems. Not only that, in March 1979, at a meeting between the two in Guadeloupe, Callaghan dropped by Carter’s bungalow just as the president was about to take a nap. Sitting on his bed in his underwear, Carter agreed that Britain should receive the new Polaris missile with multiple warheads, which later became Trident. This is undoubtedly presidential-prime ministerial informality. The story of the relationship between Thatcher and Reagan is hung about with even more myths than is the Macmillan-Kennedy one. Certainly, they admired each other, particularly in the early years of the relationship. The iconic photographs of their dancing together whilst smiling at each other, the  Burk, Old World, New World, 616–20.  Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume II: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons 1966–1968 (London: Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1976), 639; Kathleen Burk and Alec Cairncross, “Goodbye, Great Britain”: The 1976 IMF Crisis (London: Yale University Press, 1992). 64 65

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stories of their mutual admiration, and the constant repetition of how wonderful each other was all contributed to the public perception of a deep and strong relationship. Yet it is necessary only to look at the history of the Falklands War in 1982 to realize the extent of the tensions between them, with Reagan wondering publicly why the British cared about the ice-cold rocks down in the South Atlantic, the attempts of the secretary of state Alexander Haig for Britain to effect a compromise, and the attempts of the Latin American specialists in the State Department to convince the president to withdraw his support for Britain for fear of alienating Argentina, a fellow-toiler in the anti-communist drive in South America.66 This is a good example of a president sacrificing immediate national interests to ensure longer-term ones. Had Britain not won the Falklands War, the Conservative government would have fallen, and there was a real danger, as the Americans saw it, of its being succeeded by a left-wing government which would be anti-American, anti-Europe, and anti-nuclear weapons, all of which went against American national interests. Furthermore, what conclusions would the Soviet Union draw if the United States refused to support a fellow NATO power? Therefore, Reagan decided to support Britain rather than Argentina. The putative special relationship made it much easier, not least in assuring support in the bureaucracy and in Congress, which was in any case inclined to be pro-British: as Senator Joseph Biden said, “we’re with you because you’re British.”67 James Cooper in his chapter argues that whilst Reagan and Thatcher had common philosophical underpinnings, their relationship was subject to repeated tensions because they put their own national interests first. Even when their interests overlapped, they could differ over details. Of course, there was influence—one occasion was over whether or not Reagan would come to a nuclear agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev, an agreement which Thatcher considered would be a mortal danger to Britain and the rest of Europe, and which was put aside. But what was probably most important to both Reagan and Thatcher were economic issues, and, Cooper concludes, bilateral economic issues were the most chronically irritating. From 1992 to 2008, there were two presidents, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, and two prime ministers, John Major and Tony Blair. This was a new era. The Cold War was over, and the leaders of the two countries exhibited a generational change. It was most obvious between President George H. W. Bush, who succeeded Reagan, and his son George W. Bush, who succeeded Clinton, but also from Thatcher to John Major. What dominated this period was the sheer asymmetry between the power of the two countries. John Major had to deal with two presidents during his period in office: George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. So, of course, did Tony Blair—Clinton  Burk, Old World, New World, 630–8.  Louise Richardson, When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations During the Suez and Falklands Crises (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 202. 66 67

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and George W.  Bush—but he had the advantage of close relationships with both presidents. Major was close to only one, the elder Bush. Also, unlike Blair, Major has, as Virginia Honeyman points out in her chapter, “the unfortunate distinction of being largely forgotten.” Indeed, he was squeezed between Thatcher at one end and Blair at the other, with the result that many have perceived him as rather gray, and as a prime minister who accomplished little of note during his tenure. His relationship with Bush was very good—Bush appreciated no longer having to deal with Thatcher, a visit from whom he welcomed as much as a visit to the dentist.68 Indeed, the two men developed a close relationship and a deep liking for each other. The decade of the 1990s was a period of conflicts, with the Gulf War, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and the genocide in Rwanda. For both the United States and the United Kingdom, to engage in the Gulf War was probably the easiest decision of the four: Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and both international law and oil were at stake. Bosnia and Kosovo was more difficult; both Major and his foreign secretary Douglas Hurd thought that it was just ancient enmities at work and the conflict was therefore of no interest to the outside world. The United Kingdom should stay out of the Balkans, they believed, because it lacked any stake in the area. Clinton temporarily considered intervening, but the decision of the United Kingdom and the other European countries not to do so was decisive.69 What Honeyman considers reprehensible was the total lack of concern about Rwanda on the part of both Major and Clinton, and its apparent fading from the historical discussion. This detachment was mirrored by the relationship itself between Major and Clinton. The coming to power of Tony Blair changed the atmosphere and the dynamic of Anglo-American relations. Clinton had had little time for Major, and the relationship had been allowed to drift. Blair, however, was in a different category. His personality, his energy, and his ideas made him attractive to Clinton, and the two developed a close personal relationship. A significant idea, for Blair, was the “doctrine of international community,” which essentially meant that it was justifiable to intervene in the affairs of another country if genocide was being, or about to be, carried out.70 However, the bombing campaign of Serbia, 80 percent of which was carried out by the United States, although justified by this doctrine, was not decisive, failing to bring Serbia’s president Slobodan Miloševic to the table. What did so were public Anglo-­ American discussions about sending in ground troops. The United States as well had no vital interests in the area, and it is up for discussion as to the extent to which Blair’s arguments were conclusive. Blair was convinced that the United Kingdom had to become involved for the sake of humanity, and his ethical foreign policy dominated the remainder of his period as prime minister.  Seitz, Over Here, 320.  Burk, Old World, New World, pp. 645–6. 70  John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Free Press, 2004), 40, 50–3; Christopher Meyer, DC Confidential (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 103–4. 68 69

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The second half of his premiership unexpectedly saw the two leaders, who were on different sides of the political spectrum, growing very close. Clinton had, in fact, advised Blair to hug George W. Bush close in order to maintain the closeness of the Anglo-American relationship, and Blair followed this advice, too extensively, many Britons have grown to think.71 As it happens, Bush was apparently eager to return the hug, but it was the attack on New York City and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001 which cemented the personal relationship. Blair exemplified the principle that had dominated Britain’s American policy since 1940, which was that the most important element in British foreign policy, to which all other policies must be subordinated. It was to maintain the closest relationship possible. The “how” and the “why” were clearly set out in a report on an informal discussion by a group of high British officials from the Treasury and the Foreign Office, including all of the permanent secretaries, in January 1949 during the negotiations over NATO: “Since post-war planning began, our policy has been to secure close political, military and economic co-­ operation with USA. This has been necessary to get economic aid. It will always be decisive for our security … We hope to secure a special relationship with USA and Canada … for in the last resort we cannot rely upon the European countries.”72 Fortunately, as the State Department reports quoted above show, the United States felt the same way about the relationship with Britain. Thus, most members of successive British governments believed, in the words of Hilaire Belloc, “And always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse.”73 But to ensure this relationship, Britain had to be a dependable ally. Blair was keen to influence American foreign policy, and thus, even if he did not believe wholeheartedly that invading Iraq was an example of liberal intervention on humanitarian grounds, and it seems likely that he did so, he would probably have felt driven to support the American government because of the continuing need for their support. Bush was apparently devoted to Blair, both during his time in office and after. This led him to celebrate the special relationship, and it facilitated the continuation of the close working relationship between the various departments of the governments and of the armed forces. As far as Blair and Bush were concerned, it is likely that the widespread opprobrium against them because of the Iraq War drew them even more closely together. In his chapter, James Ellison concludes that the personal relationship was “consequential” to events of global importance. Furthermore, Anglo-American cooperation was significantly revived whilst Blair was prime minister, resulting in a new level of closeness and action. Unusually, in the era of asymmetrical  Peter Riddell, Hug Them Close: Blair, Clinton, Bush and the ‘Special Relationship’ (London: Politicos, 2003), 198–202. 72  “Policy Towards Europe,” 5 January 1949 in Sir Richard Clarke, Anglo-American Economic Collaboration in War and Peace 1942–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 73  Hilaire Belloc, “Jim – Who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion,” in Cautionary Tales for Children Between the Ages of Eight and Fourteen (1908). 71

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power, Bush seems to have been as devoted to Blair as Blair was to Bush and as both were to the Anglo-American relationship. Nevertheless, Ellison points out, the search for world order could not be accomplished solely by a UK-US design, but would require either multilateral support or accepted legality, and ideally both. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took over the premiership in 2007, was a convinced Atlanticist; however, President Barack Obama was not, and was apparently rather indifferent both to Britain and to the United Kingdom. Indeed, why should he pay any special attention either to Brown or Britain? Brown was weak, leading a badly split party and with a general election looming in the near future; Britain was weak, soon to suffer extremely badly from the 2008 economic crash; and the armed forces were weak, what with their failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and their size subjected to repeated cuts. Britain’s attractions as an ally seemed to be declining. Once David Cameron won the 2010 general election, publicly the relationship with the United States under Obama appeared to improve. There was a distinct informality, with the sharing of hot dogs and visits to sporting events, and a clear personal rapport between the two leaders and, more unusually, between their consorts. Nevertheless, it was Cameron who said publicly that the Anglo-American relationship was not “special” but “essential,” which certainly reflected the difficulties which dogged the relationship. In his chapter, Martin Farr argues that the Anglo-American relationship suffered from the reality of dysfunction and disappointment, the Americans in particular angered by the unreliability of the British. The personal relationship between the two leaders could only occasionally mask this reality. The succeeding relationship, that between Prime Minister Theresa May and President Donald Trump, was more than once worked out in public. From the beginning in Washington when they held hands to his final contemptuous remarks about her failed Brexit policy—it had failed because she had not taken his advice—it was, as Martin Farr points out in his chapter, “spectacularly dysfunctional.” She tried, he did not; she propitiated, he did not; Britain could not be indifferent to the United States, but the United States could be indifferent to Britain, and it was. Trump was a continuous user of Twitter, and was by turns erratic and unpredictable, contentious and dismissive, but always self-­ praising. May was not the only political leader who was bewildered by his words and actions, and unsure about how to deal with him. In the end, it seemed that the best that could be done was to cope: the relationship between the two, such as it was, was terrible. The final chapter, that by Martin Farr on Johnson and Trump, must be largely speculative. The relationship seemed to begin well, with each of the two principals expressing admiration for the other, and Trump promising great things for Britain once the country was entirely free of the European embrace. But “events, dear boy, events” intervened, most importantly the Covid-19 pandemic, with the United Kingdom convulsed by the speed with which it overwhelmed the country. In any case, Johnson rapidly realized that he could

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be badly tarnished by Trump’s deep unpopularity in the United Kingdom. This led to the curious spectacle of a president continually lavishing public affection on a prime minister who did not want such a display. Indeed, the entire relationship was strange, and neither the two men nor their countries benefitted. Farr concludes on a somber note that the Anglo-American relationship is unlikely to ever again be significant or significantly effective. However, from some of the arguments in the other chapters, this might not be wholly irrevocable. It is when the term “special relationship” becomes part of the mix that clarity departs. What does it mean to be special? If you are special, does it mean that you are special all of the time, or just sometimes? To what extent is a population involved, or others besides the leaders: Can a close relationship between a prime minister and a president alone make a relationship special? Surely there is a difference between an alliance, when it is not necessary to like each other, but needs must when the devil drives—consider the Grand Alliance of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin during the second World War—and a special relationship, which needs roots, interests in common, a texture of respect and some liking, a web to connect, and some trust? There is this whole idea of expected, or at least hoped-for, links between prime ministers and presidents because a special relationship has been posited that encourages them and has a natural place for them. If the concept of a special relationship is not entirely accepted because it can be a dangerous lure, does this assumption of a natural closeness between the two leaders still fit in? The general expectation is that there will of course be a closeness between Anglo-American leaders, and that the lack thereof is perceived as a flaw. But of course, this expectation, or hope, mostly runs one way, again from east to west. The only virtually indispensable link between the two countries is the intelligence link, and this does not depend on the leaders. But how much does? Leaders come and go, but bureaucracies and legislators and military leaders and diplomats are more likely to remain—especially bureaucracies. Of course, the relationship between a president and a prime minister can make a difference. There was, for example, the willingness of Reagan to sacrifice substantial US national interests in Latin America to keep Thatcher in power and aid its NATO ally in the Falklands. There was Kennedy’s acceding to Macmillan’s desire for Polaris, by which Kennedy managed to enrage at least two groups in Washington: the defense establishment as led by McNamara, and the State Department Europeanists led by George Ball. There was Callaghan, Carter, and Trident. And more recently, there were Blair, Bush, and Iraq, but, in this example, the accommodation was in the other direction. These relationships between leaders are notable because they can sometimes temper the American approach to negotiation either as lawyers or as elements of nature red in tooth and claw. And talking to someone at your level who knows the problems involved and in whom you have some element of trust is extremely useful for any leader. This closeness in Washington between bureaucracies, between the British Embassy and political Washington, the White House, Capitol Hill, and the

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Pentagon was emphasized by Kissinger when he wrote that the British “way of retaining great-power status was to be so integral a part of American decision-­ making that the idea of not consulting them seemed a violation of the natural order of things.”74 A State Department official once tried in 2003 to describe the situation: It’s been said that there are on most major US national security decisions a number of important inter-agency viewpoints. There’s what does the State Department think, what does the Defense Department think. What do the Joint Chiefs think … What does the intelligence community think about the facts, the analysis. And what does the British embassy think, or the British government, vicariously through the British embassy?75

This is, along with the bones of the military alliance, the intelligence and nuclear relationships, the strongest and most important part of any special or essential relationship. The United Kingdom was a great power for several centuries, whilst the United States has been one for less than a century. A major part of British power was her prowess in diplomacy, her practical approach to solving problems, and in particular her skill at bringing together coalitions. In other words, the Foreign Office not only has infinitely more experience than the Americans do in international affairs, but nearly as important, they have an institutional memory that the State Department cannot match. In short, the British can bring a lot to a discussion about national security. What the Americans can bring is power, both financial and military. Of course, the Americans have diplomatic power as well, but its use can be erratic, depending on the president and, to a lesser extent, the secretary of state. The British will sacrifice much to maintain this priceless access, including their pride. But this access will have an end date if Britain no longer maintains her own power and position in the world, because within a generation the turnover in government departments will ensure that those with personal experience in such matters will have departed. The intelligence relationship is likely to remain; the nuclear relationship is an issue. The prime ministers and presidents of the future are likely to continue to have links, but their usefulness will mirror the power of various types that each can bring to the discussion. This chapter began with a quote from Ambassador Seitz’s Over Here, and it will end with one: A good relationship at the top works at the margins of decision-making, not at the centre. For a president and prime minister, it means a willingness to talk to each other and to listen, an instinct to pick up the telephone for a quick word, a readiness to compare notes about one thing or another. It also means access at the  Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), 140.  Deputy to the Undersecretary for Political Affairs (US State Department) David Gompert, Falklands Roundtable, Presidential Oral History Program, Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, 15–16 May 2003. 74 75

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critical moment. … Good allies bend just that extra inch to take account of each other’s interest. They are just that extra degree more aware of the consequences for the other, and this is more likely to happen when the relationship between the leaders is open and uncluttered. But good or bad chemistry between the respective leaders should never be confused with what the Anglo-American relationship is all about.76

 Seitz, Over Here, 324.

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CHAPTER 3

Grover Cleveland and Lord Salisbury: A Shared History Andrew Ehrhardt and Charlie Laderman

C. J. Taylor. “Let us have Peace.” Puck, 1896 [chromolithograph], Library of Congress

“Let us have Peace”

A. Ehrhardt (*) • C. Laderman King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_3

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In January 1896, the tension between the United States and Great Britain was at breaking point. What began as a call for Britain to submit to arbitration over a disputed boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana had developed into a situation in which the US Congress was throwing its support behind a measure to expand and enforce the Monroe Doctrine. Even against the backdrop of virulent jingoism in some quarters of the United States, it was hard to imagine the countries going to war, yet the option remained on the table. As Prime Minister Lord Salisbury wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Michael Hicks Beach, “A war with America—not this year but in the not distant future—has become something more than a possibility.”1 In Washington, President Grover Cleveland had taken a firm line over the boundary dispute. His view was the combined product of his deep revulsion to imperialism, a desire to deflate claims that he and his administration were pro-­ British, and a secretary of state in Richard Olney, who, armed with a distinct interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, was determined to flex American power in the Western Hemisphere at the expense of Great Britain. In a message to Congress on 17 December, Cleveland warned that open conflict with Britain was a possibility. Drafted by Olney and approved by Cleveland, it stated that once a commission determined the true boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, it would be “the duty of the United States to resist by every means in its power, as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests, the appropriation by Great Britain of any lands or the exercise of governmental jurisdiction over any territory which after investigation we have determined of right belongs to Venezuela.”2 In a case that has been well documented, the Venezuelan boundary dispute was eventually resolved with Britain agreeing to arbitration by November 1896. The following year, the countries agreed to the terms of a wider treaty, only to have it rejected by the American Senate. Still, the crisis and its amicable aftermath, as one historian has noted, “served to establish new rules of order between Britain and the United States.”3 Salisbury and Cleveland played central roles in the crisis, first in the heightening of tensions, and then in its ultimate resolution. While they never engaged in direct correspondence, they certainly held views of their opposite number, opinions that undoubtedly influenced their decisions at the time. In 1901, as he sat down to prepare a lecture on the crisis for a group of college students, Cleveland wrote to Olney asking of the timeline of events. Reflecting in that moment, he wrote, “In reviewing the subject I am surprised to find how mean

1  Lord Salisbury to Sir Michael Hicks Beach, 2 January 1896  in Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 617. 2  Grover Cleveland, Message to Congress Regarding Venezuelan-British Dispute, 17 December 1895, American Presidency Project (https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu). 3  Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 180.

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and hoggish Great Britain really acted; and I like old Mr. Salisbury much less than I did.”4 Despite their roles and their centrality to the events, however, less attention has been given to the relationship of the two leaders and how perceptions of one another—as well as of the country opposite—influenced their diplomacy. The relationship itself is unlike any other in Anglo-American history in that Salisbury and Cleveland are the only prime minister and president to have overlapped twice during their respective tenures in office. Cleveland is the only US president to have served nonconsecutive terms and, for a period during both of his administrations, Salisbury presided over Britain’s foreign policy. The relationship is also anomalous from the others in this volume, in that the leaders never met or even corresponded personally. In discussing their overlapping tenures of office, then, it is necessary to examine their shared history, as opposed to a shared relationship. The views of Cleveland and Salisbury on Britain and America, respectively, as well as their experience as concurrent leaders in the 1880s, sheds light on how they conducted their diplomacy in the 1890s, a decade in which Anglo-American relations were transformed. From the time he first became prime minister in June 1885, Lord Salisbury was the dominant figure in the conduct of British foreign policy. In addition to his duties as the head of government, Salisbury took on the role of foreign secretary, a position he had previously held from 1878 to 1880 under the Conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli.5 While it was unusual for a prime minister to also serve as foreign secretary, Salisbury would combine the positions during all three of his tenures in office, formalizing his preeminent role in shaping his nation’s diplomacy. Although his first term in office was short-lived and his minority government was ousted in January 1886, Salisbury would return to office seven months later and remained there for the next six years. During his first two administrations, Salisbury’s focus was on improving Britain’s precarious diplomatic position. In the Spring of 1885, shortly before he assumed office, Britain and Russia had come close to war over the Penjdeh and Zulficar Pass, areas considered vital to the defense of India from Russian incursion. Within Europe, relations with Germany, France, and Austria-­ Hungary were deteriorating. Consequently, Salisbury’s statecraft was guided by a recognition of the danger that Russia and France posed to Britain’s position in Europe, as well as to its empire overseas. A solution for this, he felt, was a closer working relationship with the central powers of Europe, namely Germany and Austria-Hungary. With his diplomacy directed toward maintaining the European balance of power and protecting Britain’s imperial position, 4  Grover Cleveland to Richard Olney, 3 March 1901 in Alan Nevins, Letters of Grover Cleveland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 546–7. 5  This was unusual for the prime minister to be the foreign secretary. They were usually First Lord of the Treasury in addition to prime minister, although Salisbury did not hold that role in 1885–1886, 1887–1892, and 1895–1902, despite being prime minster.

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Salisbury had little reason to pay much attention to the United States, which was a relatively negligible factor in international politics during a period when its presidents were preoccupied with domestic affairs. Nevertheless, Salisbury had developed some firmly held convictions about the United States, which would help shape his diplomatic perspective as the nation began to take a more active role in the world in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Salisbury’s view of the United States can be pieced together by examining his writings on the country dating back to the Civil War.6 During that cataclysmic struggle, Salisbury was vocal in his support for the Confederate cause. It was not out of admiration for slavery—a practice he detested as “immoral” and “thriftless”—but more for the sovereignty of the southern states.7 The South, he wrote, was victim to the “mob supremacy” of the North. These arguments were products of Salisbury’s longer displeasure with American democracy as a whole, an experiment he believed gave unrestrained and dangerous power to swings of majority opinion. The issue of slavery had been a test, and the republic had failed. “Government is a defensive and remedial institution; its function is to maintain order and avert internal conflict, and it only succeeds when it does so … A knotty point like slavery is the very touchstone to try the metal of a Government.”8 American democracy, Salisbury wrote during the  Civil War, has “brought its present disasters upon itself.” Moreover, “the incompetence of the President is the most conspicuous cause of the present calamities.”9 Lincoln, he said at one point, was comparable to Louis Napoleon or Tsar Alexander II, who was at this time suppressing a nationalist uprising in Poland.10 In one particularly damning opinion, he wrote that “President Lincoln’s despotism outstrips all European 6  Salisbury published a number of articles during the American Civil War. For a complete list of his articles in this period, see Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The Political Thought of Lord Salisbury, 1854–1868 (London: Constable, 1967). See also David Steele, Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (London: Routledge, 1999), 24–7; Paul Smith, Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection from his Articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860–1883 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7  In 1857, Salisbury wrote, “Slavery is not only a crime but a blunder. It is eminently wasteful and inefficient—and that for the simple reason that though you can flog men into moving their muscles according to your bidding, you cannot flog them into ingenuity, or care, or diligence. Fear-service is necessarily eye-service; and therefore, until overseers acquire the attribute of ubiquity, slavery will remain the moth worthless of all kinds of labour.” Salisbury, “The Future of Slavery,” The Saturday Review, 16 May 1857. For “immoral” and “thriftless,” see “Olmsted’s Southern States,” The Saturday Review, 2 November 1861. 8  Salisbury, “Democracy on its Trial,” Quarterly Review 110, Issue 219, (July 1861), 260–1. 9  Salisbury, “The Confederate Struggle and Recognition,” Quarterly Review 112, Issue 224, (October 1862), 551. 10  In an article titled “Democratic Imperialism,” Salisbury criticized Lincoln’s handling of a dispute with Maryland, in which the president overruled the state’s leaders. Salisbury, “Democratic Imperialism,” The Saturday Review, 19 October 1961. Salisbury repeatedly criticized Lincoln as a despot. See for example  “Mr. Bright on America,” The Saturday Review, 20 September 1862. Salisbury said that Lincoln suppressed newspapers, had sent in the military to oversee elections, had judges arrested, and had been imprisoning men without trial --all of which was done without any consultation of the national legislature. For more on this, see Roberts, Salisbury, 49.

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rivalry.”11 His failures had led to the Civil War, a conflict which was the “most ignominious failure that the world ha[d] ever seen.”12 As to American behavior, particularly in the diplomatic realm, Salisbury was scathing: “We have become so accustomed to American breaches of decorum that they no longer affect us as they would do if they came from any other nation in Christendom. They never cease to be ridiculous, but they have become so completely part of the national character that they have ceased to be offensive.”13 Echoes of this hostility toward what he viewed as an American form of statesmanship—brash and undisciplined—were to influence his views of the administrations he would come into diplomatic contact with as foreign secretary and prime minister. His criticism of the United States in his earlier publications, albeit when the country was mired in civil war, developed into suspicion of an Atlantic power as it began to adopt a more assertive international stance in the late 1880s. In August 1887, he spoke with Count Herbert Bismarck about the need to “keep a sharp eye on American fingers” with relation to the American presence in the Pacific, a development he thought posed a danger both to Great Britain and Germany.14 Even though its leaders continued to emphasize its separation from European power politics and its navy was barely a match for that of even a middle-ranking European state—let alone the might of the British fleet— Salisbury saw the United States as a rising power that would inevitably join the competition for overseas influence. His close observation of the American political scene over the preceding decades had instilled in the British prime minister a suspicion of the United States and a distaste for its guiding principles. For the bulk of Salisbury’s time in office during the 1880s, the US President was Grover Cleveland. The first Democratic  leader since the  Civil War, Cleveland arrived in the White House after a bitterly contested presidential election in which political corruption had taken center stage.15 Cleveland’s image as “Grover the Good”—even after threatened by a late scandal—was 11  “The Land of the Free,” The Saturday Review, 23 November 1861. In another article, in November 1863, he wrote of the similarities between the Americans and the Russian Cossacks. See Salisbury, “The Yankee and the Cossack,” The Saturday Review 16, Issue 419, 7 November 1863. 12  Salisbury, “The Confederate Struggle and Recognition”, Quarterly Review 112 (October 1862), 535–70. Also quoted in Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145. 13  Salisbury, “Diplomacy in Undress,” The Saturday Review 14, Issue 374, 27 December 1862, 759–60. 14  This related to the issue of Samoa and Cleveland’s decision to prevent the German annexation of Samoa in 1886. See Memorandum by Count Herbert Bismarck, 24 August 1887, in E.T.S. Dugdale (ed.), German Diplomatic Documents, 1871–1914, Vol. I: Bismarck’s Relations with England, 1871–1890 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928), 244–5. Salisbury would go on to decline Otto von Bismarck’s offer of alliance in January 1889, a proposal which was  aimed at countering France. 15  The Democrat James Buchanan was elected in 1856 and served one term. After Cleveland’s reelection in 1892, there would not be another Democrat elected president until Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

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enough to narrowly defeat former House Speaker James Blaine, a man criticized in the past for having sold his vote to wealthy businessmen.16 As was the custom during the Gilded Age, the nation’s foreign policy played little part in the election and Cleveland entered the White House with neither experience of, nor much specific interest in, international affairs. His inaugural address focused on healing a nation in the aftermath of a divisive election. The principal issues covered were civil service reform, the need for fiscal responsibility across government, the protection of settlers on the frontier, and the improvement of opportunities for Native Americans.17 As for the nation’s foreign policy, he stated that there would be no departure from one that sought to advance independence and neutrality. Invoking Washington, Jefferson, and Jefferson, he said, “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliance with none.”18 In espousing his determination to uphold these hallowed traditions, Cleveland was also implicitly rejecting the more activist polices pursued in the Western Hemisphere by his predecessor Ulysses S. Grant and by James A. Garfield’s Secretary of State James G. Blaine. Cleveland declared his intention to reject “any share in foreign broils and ambitions upon other continents and repelling their intrusions here.” He believed that a conservative, anti-imperial approach to foreign policy set the United States apart from the Old-World European powers, who were then advancing their positions in Africa and Asia. Rather than pursuing territorial aggrandizement, Cleveland believed that the duty of the United States was to help advance the spread of legal arbitration as a substitute for conflict, a view which reflected, in part, his legal education and his experience as a lawyer.19 Yet while Cleveland was opposed to the idea of American expansion, a belief in his nation’s moral and cultural preeminence also underpinned a conviction that no European nation should be allowed to expand its presence in the Americas and encroach 16  One of the more shocking claims was that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock. See Kori Schake, “Grover Cleveland’s Administration: Prequel to America’s Rise?,” Orbis 62, No. 1 (2018): 30–42. 17  As his term proceeded, Cleveland’s  focus moved to currency issues, land policy, and tariff reform. 18  He added, “It is the policy of independence, favored by our position and defended by our known love of justice and by our power. It is the policy of peace suitable to our interests. It is the policy of neutrality, rejecting any share in foreign broils and ambitions upon other continents and repelling their intrusion here.” Grover Cleveland, ‘Inaugural Address as President of the United States, 4 March 1885,’ The Public Papers of Grover Cleveland, pp. 6–9. 19  Trained as a lawyer and experienced in arbitration from his days as the mayor of Buffalo and then the governor of New York, Cleveland placed a priority on the peaceful settlement of disputes. He was far from a pacifist, but he was also critical of those who were quick to threaten war. As he wrote to a leader of the Rhode Island Radical Peace Union, “The ideal of universal peace, has my hearty support and approbation. The abolition of war, as a means of settling disputes among the nations, at first the dreams of the philanthropist, now seems to be getting every year nearer and nearer a reality; and it is to be hoped that our nation will do much in the future, as in the past, to hasten the day when the desire for peace shall be more prevalent among the nations of the earth.” See Grover Cleveland to Charles N.  Plummer, 3 May 1893  in Nevins, Letters of Grover Cleveland, 324.

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on the United States’ dominant position in the Western Hemisphere. Consequently, although Cleveland’s focus was on domestic affairs and he responded to diplomatic controversies on an ad-hoc basis without considering the broader strategic implications, his statecraft would reflect a personal philosophy shaped by anti-imperialism, legalism, and an assertive, moralistic nationalism.20 Over the course of his first term in office, relations with the United Kingdom, while tame in comparison to previous decades, would become the most important foreign relationship that Cleveland would need to manage. One of his first acts in office, though not carried out with Anglo-American relations in mind, ended up preventing a diplomatic crisis between the two countries. The previous two administrations had sought to outmaneuver the stipulations laid down in the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which guaranteed that Great Britain and the United States would share control over any canal which was to dissect the American isthmus. While Secretary of State James Blaine had sought to end the treaty, real progress was made under his successor Frederick Frelinghuysen who negotiated with the Nicaraguan government an agreement which  became known as the Frelinghuysen-Zavala Treaty. Under the terms of the agreement, the United States would build a canal across Nicaraguan territory, retain joint ownership of the canal, and enter into a defensive alliance with Nicaragua.21 The treaty negotiated by Frelinghuysen effectively nullified the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, a move which perturbed Great Britain and risked a larger rupture between the two Atlantic powers. Even before Cleveland moved into the Oval Office, it was all but guaranteed that the treaty would be rejected by the incoming administration.22 Cleveland dedicated a significant portion of his first annual message to the topic of a canal across the American isthmus. While he understood the economic necessity, he disagreed with the idea of the United States paying the sum in full, as well as the commitment of American finance, material, and men to control the canal. It was an argument grounded in what he viewed as the limits of American power and the desire to avoid American imperialism, real or perceived.23

20  Richard E.  Welch, The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 157–60. 21   This larger alliance between Nicaragua and the United States, with the latter guaranteeing the territorial integrity of the former, was a move, as some historians have noted, which sought to established a protectorate over the region. Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 205. 22  Cleveland’s nomination for secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, had been one of the foremost opponents of the Frelinghuysen-Zavala negotiations in the Senate. His appointment during the transition period made clear to the opponents of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty that their attempts to defy the Anglo-American agreement had been in vain. More importantly for Cleveland, the rejection of this treaty was in line with his aversion to binding America into entangling alliances. 23  “As Cleveland stated, Whatever highway may be constructed across the barrier dividing the two greatest maritime areas of the world must be for the world’s benefit—a trust for mankind, to be removed from the chance of domination by any single power, nor become a point of invitation for hostilities or a prize for warlike ambition.” Cleveland, Annual Message to Congress Address, 8

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In addition to his nullification of the Frelinghuysen-Zavala proposal, Cleveland was to address a number of issues between the United States and Great Britain during his first term in office. The boundary dispute between Alaska and British Columbia and the regulation of the sealing industry in the Bering Sea were issues requiring attention, but two of the most important matters involved the fisheries of the North Atlantic and a rogue British diplomat inadvertently injecting himself into Cleveland’s bid for reelection. Both issues were to influence Cleveland’s view of Salisbury and his approach to AngloAmerican relations in his second term. The fisheries controversy between Great Britain and the United States, a matter of recurring tension between the two powers since the American Revolution, would consume much of Anglo-American relations during this decade. It revolved around access to fishing grounds in the North Atlantic and the rights of American and Canadian fishermen in the region.24 Seven months into Cleveland’s first term, on 1 July 1885, the clauses from the most recent treaty dealing with fisheries were set to expire.25 Cleveland’s secretary of state, Thomas Bayard, reached an agreement with the British minister in Washington, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, to extend the agreement through December of that year, so as not to adversely affect the ongoing fishing season. Yet it was clear that, going forward, a renewed understanding between the United States and Britain was necessary. In the latter half of 1885, Bayard worked to formulate a plan in which a joint commission between the United States and the United Kingdom would be convened to examine the issues surrounding the North American fisheries, including the question of boundaries, as well as access to ports, harbors, and shores for Canadian and American fishermen.26 In his first annual message, as the temporary agreement with Britain was winding down, Cleveland encouraged Congress to take up consideration of such a commission. He noted that the questions involving the North American fisheries were “intimately related to other general questions” of Anglo-­ American relations.27 The president was determined to reach a solution that December 1885, The American Presidency Project (https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu). He said it represented “an absolute and unlimited engagement.” Welch, Presidencies of Grover Cleveland, 159. 24  It was an issue that dated back to the colonial period. Regulations had been codified during the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and again in 1818, in the years after the War of 1812. Further understanding was reached in the 1871 Treaty of Washington, specifically Articles XVIII and XIX, which gave American and British citizens the right to fish in certain areas as well as to dry their nets and cure their fish. In return, Canadian fishermen were allowed to sell their fish in American markets. 25  These were agreed upon in the 1871 Treaty of Washington, a settlement that dealt chiefly with Anglo-American antagonisms stemming from the American Civil War. Regarding the fisheries aspect of the treaty, the American Congress was conscious of its impending expiration and wanted just that. They had grown frustrated at the high cost of entry for American fishermen into the Canadian market, while it was much easier for Canadians to sell their catch in American markets. 26  Lester B.  Shippee, “Thomas Francis Bayard” in Samuel Flagg Bemis (ed.), The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, Vol. 8 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928). 27  Cleveland, Annual Message to Congress Address, 8 December 1885 The American Presidency Project (https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu). Other issues  which Cleveland raised in regards to

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could help maintain friendly relations between the two countries. However, a Republican-controlled Senate refused to make it easy on Cleveland. Added to this resistance was pressure from some fishing communities in New England that were growing frustrated by the presence of Canadian fish in American markets.28 As a direct rebuke to the President’s request for a commission, the Senate voted against a resolution recommending a commission on 13 April. As a result, the legal regulations concerning the North Atlantic fishing grounds reverted to those laid down in the Treaty of 1818.29 With the temporary agreement from July 1885 having expired, and with little interaction between American, British, or Canadian statesmen on the matter, confrontations began to dominate the headlines. American fishermen, in particular, began to encounter hostile Canadian officials, a number of whom seized American vessels often without adequate explanation.30 This led to outrage among New England fishermen and, later, the Cleveland administration, who took up the issue with the British government. By the summer of 1886, Cleveland was placing great importance on the fisheries dispute. It was a midterm election year, and his administration could ill afford to be characterized as cozying up to Great Britain at the expense of New England fishermen. In a letter to Bayard he expressed frustration that the British government was not adhering to the guidelines of the 1871 treaty, and he warned that domestic currents were moving against amicable Anglo-­ American relations. He directed Bayard to “strongly intimate to the English government in an entirely prudent way, that a persistence in the present course touching this question is furnishing aid and comfort to an element in this Country hostile to everything English and glad of any pretext to fan the flame of hatred and mischief; that while the conservative people are endeavoring to Anglo-American relations were extradition laws between the two countries and the frontier boundary between Alaska and British Columbia. Cleveland noted that given the discovery of valuable minerals in that region, the issue could be one of considerable importance going forward; thus, it was necessary to settle the issue soon. 28  Protectionism in these years had been one of the most important topics occupying the economic discourse, and the presidential election was no exception. Despite Cleveland’s advocacy of reduced tariffs, there were many American citizens—New England fishermen included—who advocated protectionist measures which might benefit American producers. 29  In particular, Article I in the Treaty of 1818. 30  Examples included the Canadian steam ship Landsdowne, which, on 6 May 1886, seized the American-flagged David J.  Adams and refused to supply an accompanying explanation. In October of that year, an American vessel called the Marion Grimes anchored seven miles off the shore of Shelbourne, Nova Scota, in order to avoid a storm at sea. The next day, as it set sail, it was approached by a Canadian cruiser, the Terror, which forced it to sail back to shore in order to pay a fine of $400. For these and more examples, see Thomas Willing Balch, “The American-British Fisheries Question,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 48, No. 193 (September– December 1909): 319–53. See also U.S.  Department of State, The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the 49th Congress, 1886–1887 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1886–1887), 334–527. Within Canada, Parliament was considering a bill which would have allowed the “seizure and forfeiture” of any American vessel in Canadian waters, unless protected by international law or British and Canadian law. See Shippee, “Thomas Francis Bayard” in Bemis (ed.), The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, 56.

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stem this tide it is exceedingly unfortunate that any conduct of any English neighbor should furnish a stumbling block to their efforts.”31 Cleveland was becoming increasingly conscious of the anti-British strain within American society and its influence on Anglo-American diplomacy. Over the course of his first term, he resisted pressure from such factions, whether in Congress or the public, while at other times, fearing electoral consequences, he played into their hands. Across the Atlantic, Salisbury’s government was largely disinterested, even aloof, from some of the questions concerning the North Atlantic fisheries. When American officials wrote to their British counterparts in London concerning such matters, there was often a long delay in responding, owing largely to the fact that all questions had to pass through the Colonial Office, then to the governor-general of Canada, and then to Canadian legislators, before an adequate response could be given.32 Despite their annoyance at these delays, the Cleveland administration offered a proposal in November that called for a joint British, Canadian, and American commission, which might sort out the key differences in the dispute. Parallel to the efforts of the administration, American congressmen, partly as an affront to Cleveland’s foreign policy, took up their own initiatives concerning the North American fisheries dispute.33 The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations submitted a lengthy report in January 1887 which recommended that, should American fishermen be discriminated against in Canada, the President should be given authority to implement retaliatory measures on Canadian fishermen in the United States.34 The so-called Retaliation Act was 31  Cleveland to Bayard, 15 August 1886, in Charles C.  Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard (New York: Fordham University Press), 243–4. 32  One historian has noted that Bayard, frustrated by the delays, “considered it another example of British high-handedness and indifference to the rights of others.” Shippee, “Thomas Francis Bayard,” in Bemis, The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, 55. Bayard wrote to Phelps on 6 November 1886, stating that he was angered by the “indifference displayed by the British Administration to the insolent provocation and irritating pretensions of the Canadian officials. They have been almost intolerable, and when represented to the British Minister here, make not the slightest impression … the British Government must now attend to this American question and either assume responsible control over it, or abandon it to the Canadians with whom the United States will then be obliged to deal, and in a practical way.” Bayard to Phelps, 6 November 1886, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 246. 33  Republican congressmen were constantly attempting to frustrate Cleveland’s foreign policy. Senator George Hoar put forward a resolution in 1887 attempting to thwart the administration’s call for a joint commission. “It is the judgment of the Senate that under present circumstances no negotiation should be undertaken with Great Britain in regard to existing difficulties with her province of Canada which has for its object the reduction, change, or abolition of any of our present duties on imports.” U.S. Senate, 49 Cong. Rec. (1887), 2191. Cleveland and Bayard effectively ignored the motions of the senators who were attempting to  thwart the administration’s foreign policy initiatives. 34  A portion of this act stated that the President, if he chose, could deny “vessels, their masters and crews, of the British Dominions of North America, any entrance into the waters, ports, or places of or within the United States.” See U.S. Senate, 49 Cong. Rec. (1887), 793.

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approved on 3 March 1887 and later signed  by Cleveland, despite Bayard lamenting that it was “without precedent in the history of our foreign affairs.”35 Although he now had the approval of Congress to enact retaliatory measures against Canada, Cleveland never intended to implement such acts.36 If anything, he was pleased that such authority rested with him, and him alone.37 It was clear to Cleveland that such measures would exacerbate the already-tense relations with Canada and Great Britain. Still, the larger issue concerning the fisheries demanded attention, and the administration was growing frustrated by the lack of response from  British leaders. From London, the American Minister Edward John Phelps, had been meeting with Salisbury and relaying that the Prime Minister was “very discursive … and very non-committal.” Salisbury’s position, as he himself relayed to Phelps, was that Great Britain “stood as the broker between the United States and Canada, and had great difficulty in managing their Canadian clients.”38 Finally, on 24 March 1887, Salisbury replied to the Cleveland administration’s proposal for a joint commission. He added that he was willing to revert to the stipulations laid down in the 1871 Treaty of Washington for the coming fishing season. He admitted that in certain cases, the American government had a point. But other issues would “give rise to endless and unprofitable discussion … inasmuch as they appear … to be based upon the assumption that upon the most important points in the controversy the views entertained by Her Majesty’s Government and that of Canada are wrong, and those of the United States are right, and to imply an admission by Her Majesty’s Government and that of Canada that such assumption is well founded.”39 Despite his reservations, Salisbury’s approval of the joint commission meant that negotiations could begin. This decision could come at no better time. The tension between the two countries was intensifying. In April, Cleveland wrote to the president of the American Fisheries Union that, “This government and the people of the United States must act as a unit—all intent upon … a maintenance of national

35  Bayard to W.  L. Putnam, 20 January 1887, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 251. 36  His endorsement of the Retaliatory Act was a tactical decision. To veto this act would have led to criticism that he was not only abandoning American fishermen but also weak in standing up to Britain. But at the same time, Cleveland now held the authority to decide whether such retaliation would be carried out. 37   Phelps himself was advocating retaliatory measures, due to the lack of response by the British government. As he wrote to Bayard, “They are either afraid or unable or unwilling to attempt to coerce Canada. They will do nothing whatever in this business, unless they are compelled to … No amount of argument, no appeal to the sense of justice, no considerations of friendship or comity will induce them to take any firm ground antagonistic to Canadian views … In my opinion the only way to prevent collisions next season…will be to adopt retaliatory measures so effective and thorough as to bring Canada to terms.” Phelps to Bayard, 5 February 1887, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 255. 38  Phelps to Bayard, 5 February 1887, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 255. 39  Salisbury to White, 24 March 1887, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 259–60.

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honor and dignity.”40 Weeks later, Phelps warned Bayard that there was “a state of feeling very unfavourable to the maintenance of friendly relations, and calculated very much to embarrass the settlement of any dispute.” He continued, “a hostile state of feeling is rapidly growing up in both countries, and a collision on the fishery question may thereby be brought on.”41 In late November, the joint commission met in Washington to attempt to settle their differences over the fisheries question.42 By February 1888, they had reached an agreement that was known at the time as the Bayard-­ Chamberlain Treaty.43 At the final banquet to celebrate the work of the commission, the head of the British delegation, Joseph Chamberlain, spoke in sentimental terms about the Anglo-American relationship. Quoting from the memoirs of President Ulysses S.  Grant, he said, “England and the United States of America are natural allies, and ought always to be the best of friends.” He  continued, “That friendship, believe me, is important to the interests of both our nations. It is demanded by a common origin, by the ties of blood and of history, by our traditions, and by everything that connects us.”44 Cleveland, too, was pleased by the developments, and on 20 February, he wrote to senators urging them to support ratification of the treaty. While the actions of some Canadians had been “harassing and injurious,” the settlement reached by the commission, Cleveland wrote, had presented “a satisfactory, practical and final adjustment, upon a basis honorable and just to both parties.” Moreover, the President  felt that the treaty “had been framed in a spirit of liberal equity and reciprocal benefits, in the conviction that mutual advantage and convenience are the only permanent foundation of peace and friendship between states.”45

40  Cleveland to the President of the American Fisheries Union, 7 April 1887, in George F. Parker, The Writings and Speeches of Grover Cleveland (New York: Cassell Publishing, 1892), 498–500. 41  Phelps to Bayard, 23 April 1887, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 262. 42  On the British side  were  Joseph Chamberlain, Sir Charles Tupper (Minister of Finance in Canada and High Commissioner to England), and Sir Lionel Sackville-West; and on the American side were Bayard, Dr. James B. Angell (then president of the University of Michigan), and Judge William L.  Putnam (lawyer from Portland). After Cleveland’s  appointment of the American delegates to the fisheries commission, leading Republicans in the Senate complained that he had done so without any consultation with Congress. Worse, they claimed he was under the influence of foreign actors. “It is not difficult to see that, in evil times, when the President of the United States may be under influence of foreign and adverse interests, such a course of procedure might result in great disaster to the interests and even the safety of our Government and people.” Quoted in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 308–9. 43  This agreement called for the creation of a joint commission to decide the rights of American vessels in Canadian waters. It also provided for American vessels to enter Canadian ports to buy supplies. Furthermore, if the United States reduced tariffs on Canadian fish in the future, Canada and Great Britain agreed to give American fishermen increased access to certain fishing grounds. 44  “Honourable to Both Sides: Chamberlain commends the fisheries treaty,” New York Times, 3 March 1888. 45  Message Transmitting a treaty between the United States and Great Britain concerning the interpretation of the convention of October 20, 1818, signed at Washington February 15, 1888,

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The good feelings that marked the conclusion of the commission’s negotiations were soon extinguished by the decision of the Senate to reject the treaty.46 Although the administration had been criticized for conceding too much to the Canadians and British, in reality the Republican-controlled Senate did not want Cleveland to achieve such a significant diplomatic victory, especially during an election year. As one Republican Senator remarked, “We cannot allow the Democrats to take credit for settling so important a dispute.”47 Later in 1888, there would be another issue that would cause arguably greater American frustration towards the British. It began when the British minister to Washington Lionel Sackville-West replied to a letter on 12 September from someone claiming to be a naturalized American citizen. “Charles F. Murchison,” as the person was called, asked the minister for advice on how to vote in the upcoming presidential election. On 21 October, the contents of what Sackville-West thought was a private letter were published in a newspaper. “You are probably aware that any political party which openly favoured the Mother-country at the present moment would lose popularity, and that the party in power is fully aware of this fact,” he wrote. But the party “still desirous of maintaining friendly relations with Great Britain” were the Democrats.48 The response was one of outrage from both Democrats and Republicans. The latter hammered home their long-standing claim that Cleveland was pro-­ British, with one New York publication running a headline which read: “The British Lion’s Paw Thrust Into American Politics to Help Cleveland.”49 The administration, on the other hand, felt that the British minister was ­inadvertently sabotaging their campaign. Cleveland, for one, was livid. He wrote to Bayard on 26 October that, “I am very much concerned about this matter and almost feel that if this stupid thing does not greatly endanger or wreck our [election]

in The Public Papers of Grover Cleveland, 4 March 1885  – 4 March 1889 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 287–92. 46  The vote of 21 August 1888 saw 27 in favor and 30 opposed. Two days after the Senate vote, Cleveland issued a message to Congress in which he demanded that Congress pass “immediate legislative action conferring upon the Executive the power to suspend by proclamation the operation of all laws and regulations permitting the transit of goods, wares, and merchandise in bond across or over the territory of the United States to or from Canada.” In essence, this challenged the Republican faction in the Senate—long urging retaliatory measures against Canada in the Northeast—to take comprehensive retaliatory measures against Canada, a move that would have stifled all economic relations between the two countries. Manufacturers and businessmen from Oregon to Minnesota subsequently pressured senators to scale back the imposition of retaliatory tariffs. Allan  Nevins wrote  that it was a “bold stroke” by Cleveland, who, in “compelling the Republicans to face the consequences of their irresponsible rejection of the treaty...had won a marked tactical success.” Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 412–3. For Cleveland’s message to Congress on 23 August 1888, see Parker, The Writings and Speeches of Grover Cleveland, 501–11. 47  Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 318, fn 69. 48  “The Sackville Incident,” The Spectator, 3 November 1888. 49  H.  C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1952 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1955), 521.

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prospects, it will only be because this wretched marplot is recalled.”50 Bayard then wrote to Phelps in London that Sackville-West’s “usefulness in this country is at an end. A strong public sentiment has been aroused, and Lord Salisbury should be permitted as speedily as possible to understand the necessity of immediate action.”51 Back in London, Salisbury sat on the matter, hoping to see for himself the contents of the publication that had caused such a disturbance. But there was little time for negotiation. On 30 October, just nine days after the letter had first been publicized, Bayard sent Sackville-West his passport and demanded that he return to Britain. Eventually, when Salisbury came around to responding to the American demands for Sackville-West’s removal, he replied that while a government was well within its rights to end diplomatic relations with a particular minister, “it has no claim to demand that the other state shall make itself the instrument of that proceeding.”52 In other words, his  protest was more against the procedure than the substance of Cleveland’s decision. It was further evidence of Salisbury’s view that American foreign policy often suffered from the currents of its domestic politics. Among his countrymen, Salisbury downplayed the situation, even seizing the opportunity to ridicule what he viewed as the overreaction of the Cleveland administration. As he told a crowded hall during the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, “England had, perhaps, noticed that popular institutions existed to the westward. Events in America would add more to the history of electioneering than to the history of politics. If there was any complaint against the Washington statesmen it did not involve the two nations. The Washington statesmen had not apparently commended themselves to the approval of Americans.”53 For Salisbury, recent events had left a bitter taste in his mouth. The handling of the Sackville-West incident, he felt, gave further credence to his opinion that American diplomacy was a brash enterprise. As he wrote to Phelps in December, “There was nothing in Lord Sackville’s conduct to justify so striking a departure from the circumspect and deliberate procedure by which in such cases it is the usage of friendly States to mark their consideration for each other.”54 In a move intended to show his displeasure with the handling of the situation, 50  Cleveland to Bayard, 26 October 1888, in Charles S.  Campbell, “The Dismissal of Lord Sackville,” Mississippi Historical Review 44, No. 4 (March 1958): 637. 51  Bayard to Phelps, 26 October 1888, in Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 334. 52  Salisbury to Phelps, 24 December 1888, in Campbell, “The Dismissal of Lord Sackville,” 642. 53  “Salisbury on America,” New York Times, 11 Nov 1888. It is ironic that Salisbury said such things at the Lord Mayors dinner. Years before, in 1862, he had spoken of the diplomatic trouble that leaders have gotten themselves in by playing to a raucous crowd in the Guildhall. “It has been under the combined influence of municipal wine and municipal bores, that several of our foremost statesmen have made some of their leading blunders … The dinner-manifestos uttered for the edification of gaping municipalities involve many more elements of danger … There will always be a tinge of recklessness in the phrases even of a calm and sober speaker, when he is addressing an excited, hallooing, thumping, half-drunk mob of guests.” See Salisbury, “The Guildhall Dinner,” The Saturday Review, 14, Issue 368, 15 November 1862, 584–5. 54  Salisbury to Phelps, 24 December 1888, in Campbell, “The Dismissal of Lord Sackville,” 647.

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Salisbury refused to appoint a new minister to London until after Cleveland left office in 1889. For Cleveland, Anglo-American relations in this period left a similarly sour taste in his mouth. In the final months of his presidency, as he sought reelection, he had had to fight off accusations that he was pro-British. Nearly all of this  criticism was due to  the Sackville-West affair, a scandal that was all the more frustrating because, in Cleveland’s view, it could have been prevented. He was further frustrated that the United States had been put in the position of having a minister in London while Britain left itself unrepresented in Washington for the remainder of his time in office. Cleveland regarded it as a personal insult and, more importantly, a challenge to American honor.55 Having lost the 1888 election, Cleveland left office in March 1889. In the immediate aftermath of his defeat he was unsure whether he would seek high office again but, just over three years later, he was reelected President in 1892, the first, and as yet only, President to serve non-consecutive terms in the White House. More so than in his first term, Anglo-American relations would become strained, this time almost to breaking point. And once again, he would find Lord Salisbury as his counterpart across the Atlantic. When Cleveland returned to the presidency, he was again determined to distinguish his cautious, conservative statecraft from that of a more assertive, expansionist Republican predecessor. His decision soon after entering office to reverse President Benjamin Harrison’s provisional protectorate over Hawaii and restore Queen Liliuokalani illustrated his intention to maintain an anti-­ imperial approach to foreign policy. Cleveland also remained committed to a noninterventionist stance in the hemisphere and to  maintaining harmonious relations among the American republics. As he informed Thomas Bayard, his secretary of state from his first administration and now serving as the first US ambassador to London, “very few incidents attended my last coming to Washington more pleasing than the heartiness with which the representatives of Central and South America welcomed me.”56 Furthermore, while ensuring that the United States showed restraint in the region, he remained antagonistic to any European encroachment there, particularly when it infringed on American interests. During the first two years of his second administration, just like his first term, his focus was on domestic matters. However, the principal foreign policy issues that did attract his attention revolved around countering attempts by European powers to expand their influence in the Western Hemisphere, notably Britain’s maneuvers in Nicaragua, Brazil, and Trinidad.57

55  Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 444–5. Bayard’s affinity for Britain led him to doubt that the British government would act in such a way. Thus, when Phelps asked to return to the United States as a response to Salisbury refusing to send a new minister to America, Bayard refused. He was then overruled by an irate Cleveland, who granted Phelps a leave of absence. 56  Ibid., 549. 57  Walter LaFeber, “The Background of Cleveland’s Venezuelan Policy: A Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review 66, No. 4 (July 1961): 947–67.

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From early 1895, Cleveland became increasingly concerned about the situation in Venezuela, which was bordered by the British territory of Guiana. In the 1840s, a dispute had arisen over the boundary between them, and this had remained a matter of controversy, with the Venezuelan government repeatedly challenging Britain for disregarding its claims. Tensions had heightened after gold was discovered in the contested area around the Orinoco River. For most of this period, the US government had barely involved itself in the quarrel. However, at the start of Cleveland’s administration, the Venezuelans had stepped up their appeals to Washington for assistance and the president was moved by their pleas, regarding it as a clear instance of a European colonial power advancing its position in the Western Hemisphere at the expense of a weaker Latin American state. Cleveland inserted a reference to the dispute in his 1894 annual message, and, after his congressional supporters advocated “friendly arbitration,” he pushed his Secretary of State Walter Gresham to inform London that the United States would “call a halt” to Britain’s “palpably unjust” position unless it was reversed.58 In April 1895, the president met with a close confidant, the Michigan politician Donald M. Dickinson, in Washington and showed him a large map of the disputed boundary region, highlighting the significance of the Orinoco River for interior trade in South America. Soon afterward, in a speech in Detroit, Dickinson denounced Britain, who after “having appropriated Africa, the islands and even the rocks of the sea, and wherever else force or intrigue may gain a footing, [now begins] to take an interest, not altogether born of curiosity or of a purely Christianizing spirit, in this hemisphere.”59 These aggressive remarks were picked up in the press, who commented on Dickinson’s closeness to Cleveland.60 Whether Dickinson was speaking directly for the president, it was apparent that Cleveland had grown increasingly frustrated by Britain’s action. Furthermore, his desire to uphold what he regarded as the traditional US role as protector of the South American republics and promoter of the “law of nations” against national aggression was beginning to push him toward a more assertive diplomatic role.61 After Gresham’s death in May 1895, Cleveland chose a more forceful character, Attorney General Richard Olney, to fill the position of secretary of state. Consequently, when Olney took up the Venezuela issue, he did so in a more aggressive fashion than his predecessor. The draft note produced in early July was even more forceful than Cleveland had expected and led him to advise “a little more softened verbiage.” Nevertheless, the president was adamant that “it’s the best kind of thing I have ever read and it leads to a conclusion that one cannot escape if he tries—that is if there is anything of the Monroe Doctrine at 58  Quotes in Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (Second Edition, Chicago, Illinois: Imprint Press, 1961), 39. 59  Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 632. 60  Washington Post, 11 May 1895. 61  Bayard to Phelps, February 17 1888, 50 Cong., 1 sess, Senate Executive Document No. 226 (1889).

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all.”62 Indeed, the final note that the administration dispatched to London went further than any of its predecessors in claiming “any permanent political union between a European and an American state unnatural” and declaring that “to-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” These remarks were certain to aggravate Britain, particularly considering Canada’s position in the Empire, and historians have speculated that Olney was responsible for their strident tone. Nevertheless, the fundamental proposition that underpinned the message reflected Cleveland’s conception of the Monroe Doctrine and his belief that shibboleth authorized the United States to involve itself in the dispute. Furthermore, the message contained a stark warning that if British Guiana aggrandized its territory, then it would be considered tantamount to “an invasion and conquest of Venezuelan territory.” As this in turn would be “regarded as injurious to the interests of the people of the United States as well as oppressive in itself” and a violation of an “established policy with which the honor and welfare of the country are closely identified,” it would force the administration to set the matter before Congress, which possessed the constitutional prerogative to declare war.63 Just as in his conduct during the Bering Sea fisheries dispute in the 1880s, Cleveland’s tough stance was directed as much at jingoist factions in the United States as it was against Britain itself. He hoped to stake out a position that would allow him to outflank the more belligerent figures in the Republican Party, who were eager to challenge Britain and establish American predominance in the hemisphere. In June, the freshman senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, had taken up the Venezuelan issue in the North American Review and demanded that the Monroe Doctrine be upheld “at once—peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”64 Cleveland was exasperated at the public rhetoric deployed by American politicians at a time when the administration was drafting its dispatch to London, particularly as it appeared that leaks from the State Department were fueling this jingoism. He confided to Olney that it was “very provoking to have such matters as the Venezuela affair prematurely and blunderingly discussed in the newspapers.” Cleveland informed his secretary that he knew “from personal experience” that “vexatious intermeddling” from “newsgatherers and news harvesters” could have baleful consequences.65 Cleveland’s disdain for the manner in which the press sensationalized diplomatic issues, no doubt strengthened by the Sackville-West incident, made him sensitive to the need to keep the discussions with Britain private until he was ready to publicize them himself, which he planned to do when he delivered his annual message in December. Yet this was even more of  a reflection of his  Cleveland to Olney, 7 July 1895, Olney Papers, Reel 59, Library of Congress.  Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States with the Annual Message of the President, 1895, (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1896), 545–62. 64  Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 637. 65  Cleveland to Olney, 6 October 1895, Reel 59, Olney Papers, Library of Congress. 62 63

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determination to control the politics surrounding the dispute. The president hoped that by the time he published his note Britain would have agreed to back down, allowing the administration to celebrate a diplomatic triumph. By couching the American demand in such truculent tones, however, in order to outmaneuver their domestic opponents, Cleveland and Olney risked antagonizing the world’s leading power and forcing the administration to make good on its threats. By the time the note reached London in July, Britain’s Liberal government had fallen and been replaced by a Conservative administration, led by the man who had directed Britain’s diplomacy during Cleveland’s first term, Lord Salisbury. Bayard informed Cleveland that he expected the new government to oversee a “much more satisfactory condition of things in the treatment and settlement of questions between the United States and Great Britain,” reflecting the greater willingness to trust London that he had displayed in the aftermath of the Sackville-West incident.66 In fact, Salisbury would soon tell the ambassador on reading Olney’s note of his “surprise that it had been considered necessary to present so far reaching and important a principle and such wide and profound policies of international action, in relation to a subject so comparatively small.”67 Over the coming months, Salisbury took little interest in the issue and delegated the whole matter to Joseph Chamberlain, now serving as colonial secretary. By September, Chamberlain wrote to Salisbury that Britain should “emphatically repudiate this attempt to apply the Monroe doctrine to the question of the Venezuela boundary, and should place in strong relief the fact that Great Britain is an American Power with a territorial area greater than the United States themselves.”68 This position was the one that shaped the cabinet consensus that Britain should respond to Washington that not only did the Venezuelan claims have little merit, and would not be arbitrated, but that the Monroe Doctrine had no legal standing and no applicability in the boundary dispute. Salisbury and Chamberlain both remembered the fisheries disputes of the 1880s and how Cleveland had responded to congressional threats of war by stepping up his own belligerent rhetoric. Moreover, Salisbury retained his suspicion of American politics, regarding Olney’s note as an example of the sort of crass, inexperienced diplomacy that was only to be expected from a rambunctious, ill-disciplined democracy. From Salisbury’s perspective, the United States remained a relatively inconsequential factor in the international balance of power. With his attention distracted by a multitude of other diplomatic crises—the need to deal with growing instability in the Ottoman Empire that had arisen after the outbreak of largescale Armenian massacres, the attempts by rival European powers to deprive Japan of its spoils of war after its victory over China that year, and the increased tensions with the  Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 635.  Bayard to Olney, 9 August 1895, in Henry James, Richard Olney and His Public Service (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923), 222–6. 68  May, Imperial Democracy, 44–5. 66 67

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Boers in South Africa—the Venezuela dispute was low down on his list of priorities. Furthermore, Bayard’s lack of sympathy with his own administration’s interest in Venezuela, which he regarded as an unstable and unreliable station, meant that he had done little to communicate to Salisbury how seriously Cleveland felt on the issue.69 Consequently, it was not until 7 December, almost five months after Olney’s initial note, that Sir Julian Pauncefote, the British Ambassador to Washington, communicated Salisbury’s dismissal of the Venezuelan case and the applicability of the Monroe Doctrine to the secretary. The haughty tone of Salisbury’s message led the American diplomat Andrew D. White, a confidant of Cleveland, to complain of Salisbury’s “cynical Saturday Review high-Tory style.”70 Cleveland himself was even more infuriated by Salisbury’s slight and resolved to forcefully challenge the British position in his Annual Message, which was just ten days away. Unlike with the previous note, where Cleveland had moderated Olney’s rhetoric, this time the president took the lead in honing the text. The message delivered to Congress on 17 December, declared that the United States would conduct its own investigation into the dispute and respond to any encroachment of Britain on Venezuelan lands “by every means in its power.”71 Cleveland’s response was enthusiastically endorsed by members of Congress and delighted American jingoes. The London Times reported that Lodge was “bubbling over with delight” and this was a “sinister indication of the sense in which the message is understood.” The Washington Post was moved to declare that Cleveland’s “call to arms” showed that “the jingoes were right after all, and it is not to be the fashion henceforth to sneer at patriots and soldiers.” Cleveland’s response depressed his natural supporters though. Carl Schurz, a leading American anti-imperialist, labeled the message “a grievous break in Mr Cleveland’s otherwise so dignified and statesmanlike foreign policy.” Even within the administration, there was dissent. Bayard privately noted that his chief’s actions “depressed [him] greatly” and speculated that Cleveland’s “faculties have been unsettled.”72 Aware of his ambassador’s disillusionment, the president felt moved to explain his conduct. He explained that he based his response on the Monroe Doctrine due to “its value and importance to our government and welfare, and that its defense and maintenance involve its application when a state of facts arises requiring it.” Cleveland was adamant that internal politics had not influenced him, dismissing it as “entirely irrelevant to the case and … had absolutely nothing to do with any action I have taken.”73 Despite Cleveland’s protestations, recent scholarship has suggested that his policies during the Venezuela dispute were shaped by his desire both to counter domestic American jingoism and to further his more anti-imperial conception of the Monroe Doctrine, as against the more expansionist, interventionist role  Ibid., 46–7.  Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 639. 71  James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1902 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1902), 656–8. 72  Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 639, 641, 643. 73  LaFeber, “Background of Cleveland’s Venezuelan Policy,” 964. 69 70

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favored by the likes of Lodge.74 In taking a tough stance against Britain, Cleveland hoped to convince Americans that their natural role remained keeping Europeans out of the Western Hemisphere but avoiding meddling in those republics themselves. However, the strength of American belligerency and the consternation that this caused among his natural constituency unnerved Cleveland. After initial support from chambers of commerce across the country, the business community had become increasingly alarmed as concerned British investors began getting rid of American securities and share prices on Wall Street dropped precipitously. This response disappointed Cleveland, who privately informed a financier friend that “nothing has ever hurt me so much as to know that these people who praised and flattered me … were ready to denounce and abuse me when my obligations to the country at large led me to do things which interrupted their schemes for money making.”75 Despite his defensive tone, Cleveland had begun to recognize that his message had unleashed more powerful forces than he had anticipated. He was soon remarking in private that he had “never intended to threaten anyone.” The ardent displays of American nationalism had also shocked British observers across the political spectrum. Salisbury, though, remained calm about the matter. Despite initially informing one Cabinet minister that war might arise with the United States, he was soon telling Queen Victoria that if “we remain quiet this feeling will slowly disappear.”76 By January, Salisbury was informed by Pauncefote that public anger in the United States was dissipating. Yet any thoughts that Britain could ignore Cleveland’s call for arbitration were soon dispelled, as petitions poured into Westminster from British religious and business groups who favored the idea. Furthermore, as Anglo-German tensions ratcheted up after Kaiser Wilhelm II tactlessly interjected himself into the dispute between Britain and the Boers, arousing the anger of the British public and presenting another diplomatic headache for the government, it became apparent that Salisbury could not afford to defiantly face down the United States over Venezuela. With the overstretched empire faced with rising powers and growing threats across the world, Salisbury and Chamberlain were increasingly open to finding ways to resolve tensions with the United States. While in January 1896 Salisbury assured his cabinet that if they “were to yield unconditionally to American threats another Prime Minister would have to be found,” he did also begin to soften his stance on accepting arbitration.77 74  For more on this, see Jay Sexton, “Anglophobia in Nineteenth-Century Elections, Politics and Diplomacy,” in Gareth Davies and Julian Zelizer (eds.), America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 112; Gerald Eggert, Richard Olney: Evolution of a Statesman (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1974); Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World, 1600–1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 368–74. 75  Nevins, Cleveland Letters, 429–30. 76  May, Imperial Democracy, 59, 48. 77  Quoted in John Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century, (London: Athlone Press, 1964), 68.

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Over the succeeding months, he showed an increased willingness to accept that the Monroe Doctrine might have standing in international law and to entertain the idea of arbitration in the boundary dispute, as long as it concerned lands not already occupied by British settlers. What was not initially clear was how the negotiations would be conducted. By this time, Bayard had lost the confidence of both sides, with Salisbury regarding him as an “amateur diplomat” and Olney privately complaining that the Ambassador’s “self-conceit,” lack of sympathy with the administration’s policy and growing “physical infirmity” had “practically disabled [him] from rendering the services rightfully expected of him.”78 As Cleveland and Salisbury did not correspond directly, much of the negotiation between the US and British governments on this subject was initially carried out through informal diplomatic interlocutors, such as the London Times editor George W. Smalley and the Liberal peer Lord Playfair. Smalley’s involvement led to the surreal spectacle of Cleveland and Salisbury, both conservative practitioners of statecraft, conducting negotiations publicly in the columns of a newspaper in disregard for established diplomatic conventions.79 After these novel procedures resulted in misunderstandings between the two sides, Salisbury returned to official channels and instructed Pauncefote to allow an investigative commission to begin its work, while continuing to insist that settled districts be excluded from arbitration to avoid setting a precedent. While this provided a basis for discussions, progress remained slow and so Chamberlain was dispatched to the United States to negotiate with Olney directly. The breakthrough came when Olney agreed to preclude settlements that had existed for more than sixty years. Eventually, an agreement was signed in 1899, long after the emotional antagonism over the issue had subsided and Cleveland himself had left office. The final settlement enabled both sides to preserve their honor, with British Guiana securing a favorable boundary, but Venezuela maintained its hold of the critical mouth of the Orinoco River. Cleveland’s conduct during the dispute demonstrated a number of paradoxes in his approach to statecraft. Although he had expressly taken up the Venezuelan question on behalf of the Latin American republic, his administration did not even inform its government about its diplomatic dispatches to London nor did it consult Caracas throughout the discussions over a settlement. Indeed, the ultimate agreement aroused such fury that the Venezuelan legislature only ratified it after the police had quelled street rioting in Caracas. Cleveland’s approach reflected the fact that his principal objectives throughout the dispute were less about the specifics of the case and the interests of the country involved. More important was his determination to send a message to Britain that the United States would not accept slights to its national honor or any challenges to the Monroe Doctrine, the national shibboleth that Cleveland revered. The irony is that the nationalist fervor that Cleveland sparked over the  Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F.  Bayard, 735; Olney to Henry White, 30 June 1896, Reel 59, Olney Papers, Library of Congress. 79  Joseph J. Matthews, “Informal Diplomacy in the Venezuelan Crisis of 1896,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50, No. 2 (September 1963): 195–212. 78

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Venezuela dispute would encourage the domestic reaction that it was designed to ward off—a more expansionist, interventionist US approach to the Americas. There were also apparent inconsistencies in Salisbury’s statecraft during the dispute, which appear out of keeping with his prior attitudes. Salisbury had previously dismissed arbitration as one of the “famous nostrums of the age” that “will have its day and will pass away, and future ages will look with pity and contempt on those who could have believed in such an expedient for bridling the ferocity of human passions.”80 Yet in the aftermath of Cleveland’s December 1895 message, Salisbury had been convinced by Chamberlain to take up the possibility of a comprehensive arbitration treaty with the United States that would extend far beyond the dispute at hand and cover all potential disagreements between the two nations. The reason was not Salisbury’s sudden conversion to the general principle of arbitration but a realization that, with the growing global challenges that the British Empire faced, there were tangible benefits to be gained from resolving the antagonism with an increasingly powerful and assertive United States.81 Cleveland’s long-standing commitment to promoting international arbitration, and Olney’s remarkable transformation into a champion of Anglo-American friendship in the aftermath of Cleveland’s 1895 message, ensured that the administration responded favorably to the British proposal and supported the ratification of an arbitration treaty in Congress. Ultimately, however, the treaty, although it attracted support from lawyers, Anglophiles, and arbitration enthusiasts, did not attract the broad-­ based public appeal necessary; when it was voted on in the US Senate on 5 May 1897, shortly after the Cleveland administration had left office, it fell three votes short of ratification. Although the growing spirit of Anglo-American understanding did not find expression in a formal treaty at this time, the fact that a general arbitration agreement was supported by both Cleveland’s and Salisburys’ governments was evidence that a significant shift had occurred in relations between the two countries. Two leaders who had entered office harboring animosity to the other and bitterness about the policies of the opposing country, and who had presided over a crisis that could have resulted in war, were now both promoting an accord that would advance Anglo-American friendship. Although the relationship between Cleveland and Salisbury was not as direct or warm as that between other presidents and prime ministers, its evolution would signify the profound changes that had occurred in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and help prepare the way for the Great Rapprochement that would transform international politics in the coming years.  Treaties of Arbitration, 3 March 1873, House of Lords in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (London: Cornelius Buck, 1873), 1171. 81  With the goal of rapprochement with the United States in mind, Salisbury even permitted Chamberlain to explore the possibility with Olney of a joint Anglo-American intervention in the Near East to stop the ongoing Armenian massacres, which had aroused humanitarian sensibilities on both sides of the Atlantic. See Charlie Laderman, Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 80

CHAPTER 4

Theodore Roosevelt and Arthur Balfour: Friendship Without Familiarity Michael Patrick Cullinane

Theodore Roosevelt at the Guildhall, 1910. [photograph], Library of Congress © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_4

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Few worldleaders in the early twentieth century had more in common than British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and American President Theodore Roosevelt. Born into wealthy and politically connected families, both men naturally exuded the charm and sophistication of Victorian aristocrats. Equally well educated, Balfour followed emerging intellectual debates in psychology and philosophy, while Roosevelt closely read the natural sciences and humanities. They shared a passion for sports—tennis specifically—and a mutual fascination in the new technologies of their age. As politicians they rose to high office somewhat accidentally and without an electoral mandate: Roosevelt became president when an assassin shot and killed William McKinley in 1901, and Balfour succeeded his retiring uncle Lord Salisbury as party leader and prime minister in 1902, although he led the Commons and stood in for Salisbury on numerous occasions before taking the top job. In spite of these points of personal compatibility and fateful circumstances, Roosevelt and Balfour never developed a close personal rapport while in office. Rather than unaware or unimpressed with each other’s accomplishments, Balfour and Roosevelt were hesitant to pay compliments, and the men made few attempts at correspondence. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. As historian Bradford Perkins has observed, “No world statesmen with whom Roosevelt dealt ever completely escaped his criticism, so British leaders were not exempt.”1 Of the young Winston Churchill, Roosevelt emphatically voiced his dislike, calling him a publicity seeker and a man that demonstrated a “lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety.”2 Roosevelt positively hated British foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, and referred to the magnetic colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain as the eccentric “Joe of Birmingham,” a politician so “pure and guileless” that the president could never find a “deep personal understanding” with him.3 Roosevelt told German ambassador Speck

1  Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 107. 2  Robert Pilpel, Churchill in America 1895–1961: An Affectionate Portrait (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 37–8. Roosevelt made similar disparaging remarks about Churchill to his eldest son and British friend George Otto Trevelyan years later. Theodore Roosevelt [hereafter TR] to Henry Cabot Lodge, 12 September 1906, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt [hereafter Letters], ed. Elting E.  Morison, et  al. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952), 5–6: 407–8, 1034, 1329. 3  Kathleen Dalton, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Contradictory Legacies: From Imperialist Nationalism to Advocacy of a Progressive Welfare State,” in A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 487.

M. P. Cullinane (*) Department of Humanities, University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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von Sternburg, “England has not a man I can deal with,” and that included Arthur Balfour.4 Balfour’s character was faulty, Roosevelt supposed, although he never met the prime minister while Balfour held that office. Roosevelt criticized what he presumed was the prime minister’s swings between “levity and cynicism,” traits the president considered “well-nigh as objectionable as corruption itself.”5 More importantly, Roosevelt condemned Balfour’s leadership style as “noisy verbosity” mixed with partisan fence-sitting.6 On the matter of free trade and protectionism, an issue that overwhelmed Balfour’s term in office, Roosevelt said the prime minister “was trying to ride two horses” and that “democracy will always exact a heavy penalty from the statesman who will not speak out and give a clear lead.”7 The trade issue ultimately split Balfour’s Conservative and Unionist Party, a schism that led to his resignation in 1905 and forced a snap election the following year. British voters responded as Roosevelt suspected: they ousted Balfour’s Tories in the most devastating electoral defeat in UK history. Even Manchester East—Balfour’s constituency—voted for a Liberal candidate, the only instance in British history that a prime minister lost their seat for reelection. Balfour had no strong dislike of Roosevelt. Rather, the prime minister thought quite highly of the president. Roosevelt’s military escapades in Cuba with the Rough Riders enthralled Balfour, as did the Colonel’s ability to translate his adventures into a winning political narrative. Balfour closely watched the 1900 presidential campaign and Roosevelt, who crisscrossed the nation as William McKinley’s vice presidential running-mate. “I feel strong sympathy with the views [Roosevelt] puts forward,” Balfour told his American friend Henry White, “I am very sorry that we are not to have the pleasure of seeing Mr. Roosevelt on this side of the Atlantic in the immediate future. I should have liked to add to the great respect and admiration in which I hold him, the pleasure of a personal friendship.”8 Yet as prime minister, Balfour regularly complained about the lopsided affection shown by Americans. Anglophobia, an anti-British sentiment most prevalent among Irish and German-Americans, endangered his desire for a closer union and kept Balfour from making overly affectionate statements for fear of stoking these immigrant communities in the United States. Differences of personality and style or domestic constraints that held back Balfour and Roosevelt from developing a staunch rapport had little effect on 4  Alfred Griswold, Far Eastern Policy of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 106; Perkins, 107; TR to Robert Harry Munro Ferguson, 22 January 1898, John and Isabella Greenway Papers, Arizona Historical Society (http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org). 5  TR to George Otto Trevelyan, 9 September 1906, in Letters (1952): 5, 399–400. 6  Jean Jules Jusserand, What Me Befell: The Reminiscences of J. J. Jusserand (London: Constable and Co., 1933), 269. 7  TR to John St. Loe Strachey, 12 February 1906, in Letters (1952): 5, 151. 8  Arthur J. Balfour [hereafter AJB] to Henry White, 12 December 1900, AJB Papers, British Library (49742).

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Anglo-American rapprochement. The two held a common beliefs in transatlantic collaboration among English-speaking peoples and worked to overcome centuries of colonial history and postcolonial hostility to cement an entente brokered by their predecessors in the last years of the nineteenth century. They accomplished this because they shared a common ideological belief in the racial superiority of white, English-speaking peoples and this conviction resonated in strategic decisions. Once intractable issues like free trade, border disputes, and security became manageable, and the president and prime minister worked toward a series of agreements that left a legacy for future leaders to conceptualize a “special” Anglo-American relationship. Additionally, Balfour and Roosevelt found ways of bypassing these domestic constraints. Using surrogates they created back channels and practiced an artful diplomacy by reaching out to constituencies in each other’s country via trusted liaisons. Roosevelt’s statecraft, in particular, relied on close friendships with British diplomats and politicians outside Balfour’s cabinet, or those with only minor government roles. For his part, Balfour fostered relationships with Americans he admired and, not coincidently, those that had the ear of the president. This chapter examines the three ways in which Roosevelt and Balfour copper-­ fastened Anglo-American rapprochement. They did so through a common racial ideology, strategic policy-making, and inventive diplomatic communications. The president and prime minister had much in common and worked toward mutual ends by crafting a reciprocal relationship, even if they could not develop a personal camaraderie with each other. That Balfour and Roosevelt achieved rapprochement without a close personal relationship has implications for how we view the role of the prime minister and president in Anglo-American relations. By focusing on their era in office, this chapter aims to moderate the impression that personal relations stimulated transatlantic cooperation. In their case, Balfour and Roosevelt worked toward an Anglo-­American entente while hesitant to embrace each other as kindred spirits.

The Ideology of English-Speaking Peoples The concept of an English-speaking race infused the thinking of American and British diplomats in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For as much as realpolitik and balance of power politics mattered, and it did, so did ideas of racial hierarchies. Roosevelt and Balfour, like many other leaders of their day, expected English-speaking people to progress civilization and expand Western culture throughout the world. Their ideas on race offer valuable insights into their worldview.9 9  For a broad overview of the ways in which the British, subjects of the British Empire, and American thinkers projected ideas of race and civilization at the turn of the twentieth century, see Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Duncan Bell, The Idea of

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Roosevelt’s ideology of race derived from debates in natural history and scholarly advances in evolutionary theory.10 Natural selection, or Darwin’s principle of evolutionary progress based on random genetic mutations, provided scientific evidence of biological survival, adaptation, and extinction. It also revolutionized sociology. Victorian intellectuals seized upon Darwin’s theory as an explanation for inequalities among human societies. These social Darwinists imagined that genetic variations contributed to human races ­developing different traits and attributes, and these mutations in turn explained the progress or failure of national fortunes and global cultures. In practice, such logic only validated existing attitudes of racial superiority by casting white people atop an evolutionary pyramid. Although Roosevelt resolutely believed that humans evolved genetically, as Darwin proposed, he also expressed a conviction that human development occurred in a manner unlike other natural organisms. He credited humanity with the faculty of reason and an ability to learn from the past, which put him in conflict with social Darwinists. Roosevelt supposed that humans could acquire traits within a generation, an opinion that ran contrary to strict evolutionary theory that maintained changes to a species occurred only through reproduction, making it impossible for humans to alter themselves or their contemporaries in any given generation. Roosevelt’s thinking complicated neat classifications of racial hierarchies. If the progress of humanity could arise through education and trial, any race could acquire the traits of civilization, including those considered by many social Darwinists to be unteachable because they lacked the genetic basis for evolution. Natural selection and the genetic evolution of humanity “is but one of the features of progress,” Roosevelt wrote, but if “progress was most marked where the struggle for life was keenest the European peoples standing highest in the scale would be the South Italians, the Polish Jews, and the people who live in the congested districts of Ireland.” These people, Roosevelt argued, reproduced in larger numbers and would have a statistically higher probability of acquiring the traits necessary for survival in a Darwinian model, “however, these are precisely the peoples who have made the least progress when compared with the dominant strains among, for instance, the English or Germans.”11 Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1315–53; Edward Kohn, This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895–1903 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). 10  For scholarship on Roosevelt’s idea of race and ideology of civilization, see Frank Ninkovich, “Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 2 (July 1986): 221–45; Thomas G.  Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1980); Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Imperial ‘Character’: How Race and Civilization Shaped Theodore Roosevelt’s Imperialism,” in America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the “Discovery” of Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2012). 11  TR, “Social Evolution,” The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Edition, Vol. 24 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 110.

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Roosevelt credited human evolution with the acquisition of good “character,” a slippery term he defined as an “assemblage of virtues, active and passive, of moral qualities.”12 More specifically, Roosevelt’s idea of good character consisted of unselfish behavior, honesty, and self-control, and when Roosevelt extended these features of personal character to traits of an evolved society he redefined them as a duty to one’s nation, the adherence to Christian morality, and a commitment to law and order.13 Societies, like individuals, gradually learn these virtues, and evolve from tribal orders to complex civilizations that advance humanity on a broad scale. Any individual can acquire character, Roosevelt argued, and thus any race could acquire the attributes necessary for civilization. The American frontier offered a case in point. The president believed the unique environment of the frontier had fashioned American character. In the backwoods and prairies, the God-fearing frontiersmen lived a life of noble strife that brought democracy, the Christian faith, and order to the continent’s “waste spaces.”14 Of course, the expansion of the white frontiersmen came at the expense of Native American populations, an act of genocide rather than genetics; but Roosevelt’s racial theory of good character ignored that inconvenient truth and legitimized American imperialism as the advancement of human development.15 In much the same way, Balfour explained his understanding of the British people and what he believed to be the exceptional attributes of his fellow countrymen and the potential they had to progress global order by expanding the Empire. Rather than rely on natural history as Roosevelt did, Balfour adopted an outspoken opposition to evolutionary theory based on philosophy. Social Darwinism, he believed, displaced metaphysics and religion with a new faith in scientific empiricism that attempted to reduce the existence of man to that of a genetic accident, and the story of civilization to “a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.”16 If followed to its logical end, Balfour wrote, the randomness of natural selection would lead to never-ending metamorphoses of human beings, until eventually, “Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness … will be at rest.”17 Balfour contested the theory of evolution on the basis that human consciousness set it apart from other species, and allowed for nongenetic  TR, “Character and Success,” in Strenuous Life (New York: The Century Company, 1902), 114.  Cullinane, “Imperial ‘Character,’” 35–7. 14  TR, The Winning of the West: Part I (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), 17. 15  Historians Thomas Dyer and Sarah Watts credit Balfour, to a certain extent, as the inspiration of Roosevelt’s racialized worldview, but Roosevelt’s idea of racial hierarchies and American imperialism developed long before he read Balfour’s book Decadence. Since his education at Harvard, Roosevelt had been developing his ideas of race, and arguably even before then. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 13; Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 58. 16  AJB, The Foundations of Belief (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 30. 17  Ibid., 31. 12 13

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development grounded in morality, tradition, and education. Any “expectations of limitless progress for the race cannot depend upon blind operation of the laws of heredity.” Progress, Balfour told, relies on “individual efforts” made in a “sober spirit” that deal with matters of consequence as they arise. Every generation learns from its problems and passes on lessons to posterity.18 The British parliamentarian summed up these learnable traits as “authority,” a confusing label not unlike Roosevelt’s complex notion of character. Historian R. J. Q. Adams has pointed out that Balfour’s idea of authority was not a “synonym for coercive power,” but the basis for personal and social ethics.19 “Authority moulds our feelings, our aspirations, and … our beliefs,” Balfour explained, and authority relied on resolve, adherence to Christian morality, and laws to avoid a decline in self-control and social order.20 Perhaps the best example of Balfour’s application of authority came during his time as Ireland Secretary (1887–1891), a turbulent period when the Irish Question endangered the Kingdom’s unity. “I shall be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law,” Balfour assured colleagues in Parliament, “but at the same time I shall be as radical as any reformer in redressing grievances, and especially in removing every cause of complaint.”21 Balfour proposed to solve the Irish Question by moral force, restoring order by stamping out radical Irish nationalists while vigilantly tempering the demands of perverse landlords that irritated tenants with ever increasing rents. If the Wild West proved Roosevelt’s ideology of the frontiersman and the evolution of the American race, the Irish case had tested Balfour’s notion of British resolve and resiliency. Roosevelt and Balfour espoused indistinguishable principles of race and civilization. Both imagined their race, if not their nations, as one in the same. “We have a domestic patriotism,” Balfour told a Conservative Party gathering in 1896, but referred to Americans as “our own flesh and blood” that share a hereditary bond and racial fidelity.22 The United States shares “the same past as our own; who share our language; our literature, our laws, our religion … and who share in substance our institutions … we have a common duty,” Balfour asserted, “to perform, a common office to fulfill among the nations of the world.”23 Roosevelt, afraid to stoke Anglophobia in the United States, spoke guardedly in public about Americans as part of a wider English-speaking race, but often told of a distinctive “American stock” that had a mutual legacy and bloodline as other English-speaking peoples.24 In private correspondence, however, Roosevelt was more candid. In a letter to first secretary of the 18  AJB, “A Fragment on Progress: Rectorial Address at the University of Glasgow, 26 November 1891,” in The Man and His Work (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 282–3. 19  R. J. Q. Adams, Balfour: The Last Grandee (London: Thistle Publishing, 2013), 158. 20  AJB, The Foundations of Belief, 30–1. 21  E. T. Raymond, Mr. Balfour: A Biography (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1920), 41. 22  “Mr. Balfour on Foreign Affairs,” London Times, 16 January 1896. 23  Ibid.;’ 24  TR, Winning of the West: Part I, 134.

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American Embassy in London Henry White, he expressed his understanding of the race question clearly: the United States was “the greatest branch of the English-speaking race.”25 Like Balfour, Roosevelt subscribed to a worldview that put white, English-speaking peoples at the forefront of global leadership based on a racialized notion that they had acquired the traits necessary to progress civilization. This ideology would come to infuse their foreign policies and contour the Anglo-American relationship during their tenure as president and prime minister. In 1900, while working at the Foreign Office in place of his ailing uncle Lord Salisbury, Arthur Balfour wrote to Henry White that the British bond with the United States “ought surely to produce a fundamental harmony—a permanent sympathy—compared to which all merely political alliances with other states should prove to be the evanescent result of temporary diplomatic convenience.”26 Balfour’s idea of a kindred people matched Roosevelt’s and contributed to a number of foreign policies that cemented the great rapprochement.

The Policies of Peace Even before Balfour took the helm of government, he worked to build the architecture of what became known as the special relationship. One of the most perilous disputes that faced the British Empire and United States at the end of the nineteenth century came in 1895 when a border quarrel in Venezuela stoked American nationalism and tested the limits of the Monroe Doctrine. British Guiana and Venezuela had bickered over national boundaries for decades, but the matter only came to President Grover Cleveland’s attention when Congress proposed that the British and Venezuelans settle the dispute by arbitration. In a rather unfriendly telegram to the British Foreign Office, Cleveland’s secretary of state Richard Olney equated the border dispute to an imperial land grab and invoked the Monroe Doctrine—a relatively untested although frequently cited policy that forbade further European colonization in the Americas. Olney demanded British compliance with arbitration, and Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the New York Police Commission, found Olney’s interpretation of the Doctrine compelling.27 In a letter to a British friend, Roosevelt said the clash boiled down to the “incapacity of even an educated and traveled Englishman to understand America or what America means … the bulk of the American people do believe in the Monroe Doctrine.”28 Publically, Roosevelt chastised the British and established himself as a leading nationalist.

 TR to Henry White, 30 March 1896 in Letters (1951): 1, 523.  AJB to Henry White, 12 December 1900, AJB Papers, British Library (49742). 27  Richard Olney to Thomas Bayard, 20 July 1895, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS] (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 545–62. 28  TR to Herbert de Haga Haig, 6 January 1896 (https://www.raabcollection.com). 25 26

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Most British statesmen had never accepted the Monroe Doctrine as anything other than bluster.29 Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury regarded it  as braggadocio of Roosevelt and Olney, an empty threat. The United States had failed to stop French colonialism in Mexico in the 1860s, or European designs on a transisthmian canal in the 1880s. Until the 1890s, and the expansion of the United States’ Navy, the Monroe Doctrine utterly lacked teeth. Salisbury hastily told the his ambassador in Washington that “the United States is not entitled to affirm as a universal proposition … that its interests are necessarily concerned in whatever may befall those [South American] States, simply because they are situated in the Western Hemisphere.”30 Along with his colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, Salisbury saw the United States as an equal international competitor meddling in an affair well beyond its borders. Balfour, however, took a different position and contended that the Monroe Doctrine adhered to the long-standing British policy toward the Americas. At a gathering of Conservative Party faithful in 1896, Balfour declared that successive British governments “heartily concurred” with the United States’ policy of non-European intervention in the Americas, and that no British government has “ever altered their minds.”31 President James Monroe proclaimed the doctrine in 1823, assisted in part by then British foreign minister George Canning who coauthored the policy and proposed a joint declaration of its precepts. Thus, the British played a central role in the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, and Balfour drew on this historical truth to inform his view of the crisis. In an unusual move, Balfour broke with his uncle Lord Salisbury and managed to convince the majority of Cabinet ministers to his side. Recognizing the legitimacy of the Monroe Doctrine and settling the Venezuela dispute by arbitration not only averted conflict in 1895, it had lasting implications for the Anglo-American relationship. Balfour, more than any other Cabinet minister, deserves the credit for this.32 In 1902, another crisis in Venezuela threatened the region and tested Balfour’s relationship with Roosevelt. Deeply indebted to European lenders, including the British, the Venezuelan government defaulted on its loans and refused to negotiate a settlement. A coalition of European powers blockaded the Venezuelan coast, shut down the customs houses that were a vital source of state revenue, and attempted to force repayment. At first, Theodore Roosevelt supported the European action, saying, “if any South American country misbehaves toward any European country, let the European country spank it,” as 29  Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 124. 30  Lord Salisbury to Julian Pauncefote, 26 November 1895, in FRUS (1896), 566. 31  “Mr. Balfour on Foreign Affairs,” London Times, 16 January 1896. 32  AJB to Morton Frewden, Scottish National Archives GD 433/2/13. For a further treatment on John Hay’s Anglophilia, and the role of other statesmen beyond Roosevelt in the rapprochement, see William Shirey, “The Big Stick Split in Two: Roosevelt vs. Hay on the Anglo-American Relationship,” Penn History Review 24, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 102–28.

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long as Europeans foster no colonial ambition and pay respect to the Monroe Doctrine.33 But as the blockade continued without an end in sight. It endangered commercial order in the Western Hemisphere and worried Roosevelt that a European nation—namely Germany—would attempt to recover debts by way of territorial acquisition. At that point, the president applied pressure on all parties to settle the dispute by arbitration. Roosevelt even resorted to intimidation, telling the German ambassador that the American Navy would sail from Puerto Rico to end the blockade should the Kaiser fail to comply. Balfour was quick to support Roosevelt. The prime minister wrote American industrialist Andrew Carnegie as the crisis reached a crescendo: “we have not the slightest objection, (rather the reverse!)” to the Monroe Doctrine. “These South American Republics are a great trouble and I wish the USA would take them in hand!” Balfour related his “hope that the people of the United States will see that nothing has been done by us in Venezuela which can in the smallest way touch their susceptibilities.”34 It should come as no surprise that Balfour insisted on observing the Monroe Doctrine. After all, when the United States protected small nations from European colonization, they also protected British spheres of interest in the Americas. And it is no wonder that Roosevelt approved of British cooperation in the hemisphere: the British effectively bolstered the United States’ hegemonic position by pushing out competing European powers.35 The resolution to the second Venezuela crisis bears this out. It ended with a settlement that repaid European lenders, albeit a reduced amount, and ensured that Roosevelt and Balfour achieved their diplomatic ends in ways that appealed to their national audiences.36 The Venezuela settlement became the blueprint for Roosevelt’s management of future crises in the Americas. When Santo Domingo defaulted on its European debt, the president again invoked the Monroe Doctrine and even extended it by announcing the “Roosevelt Corollary,” an addendum that allowed the United States to intervene in the affairs of disorderly American republics. The Corollary justified the use of military force to bring order to the Western Hemisphere, a controversial policy in the Americas. Independent Latin American states feared constant intervention from their powerful northern neighbor, but the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere suited  TR to Hermann Speck von Sternberg, 12 July 1901, in Letters (1951): 3, 116.  AJB to Andrew Carnegie, 18 December 1902, AJB Papers, British Library (49742). 35  Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 144–5. See also William N.  Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 36  It is worth noting that the Venezuela blockade included German and Italian warships alongside British ones. The rise of Germany as a world power coincided with the rise of the United States, and British statesmen feared the Kaiser considerably more than they feared the United States. Anglo-American rapprochement was a means of ensuring Germany did not gain a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, a cause that suited both Roosevelt and Balfour. Nancy Mitchell, “The Height of the German Challenge: The Venezuela Blockade, 1902–1903,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 2 (April 1996): 185–210. 33 34

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Balfour. “We welcome any increase of the influence of the United States of America upon the great Western Hemisphere,” the prime minister told a Conservative Party gathering in Liverpool after the Venezuela crisis had been resolved; “I go further, and I say that, so far as I am concerned, I believe it would be a great gain to civilization if the United States of America were more actively to interest themselves in making arrangements by which these constantly recurring difficulties between European Powers and certain states in South America could be avoided.”37 The guarantee of an orderly Latin America maintained by the United States appealed to British traders and promised to preserve the global balance of power. Accordingly, the prime minister worked to help ensure that the United States became the region’s hegemon. Balfour resolved long-standing disputes with Roosevelt’s government, among which included the construction of a transisthmian canal. The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty established joint cooperation in any venture to build a canal, and proposed that neither the British nor the Americans would seek “exclusive control.” Yet, in 1901, Roosevelt’s secretary of state John Hay and British ambassador to the United States Sir Julian Pauncefote renegotiated that position, and the British ceded exclusive control of any future canal to the United States. Historian John A. S. Grenville called the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty “the conscious British recognition of the eventual United States supremacy in the Western Hemisphere.”38 It was more than that. Balfour saw the rise of the United States as part of his global policy. Before becoming prime minister, he told confidants that “with England at Suez and the US at Panama we should hold the world in a pretty strong grip.”39 After becoming prime minister, Balfour recited the same vision of a world dominated by Anglo-American control of the seas. On occasion he did so to Roosevelt’s friends.40 The budding symbiosis of Anglo-American interests in the Western Hemisphere faced challenges as well, most notably in Alaska where an enduring border dispute along the Alexander Archipelago panhandle drew Canada— then a British dominion—into conflict with the United States. In 1903, the British, Canadian, and American governments agreed to an arbitration tribunal that would determine a permanent boundary. Six “impartial” officers led the tribunal and included three Americans, two Canadians, and one British delegate. The Canadians expected deadlock, as did Roosevelt, however, the lone British delegate to the tribunal Lord Alverstone, who was predicted to vote with the Canadian dominion, sided on most issues with the Americans. Alverstone took his cue from Balfour’s Foreign Office, which “made no secret

 “Mr. Balfour in Liverpool,” London Times, 14 February 1903.  J.A.S. Grenville, “Great Britain and the Isthmian Canal, 1898–1901,” American Historical Review 61, no. 1 (October 1955): 48. 39  AJB to Holls, 31 December 1901, AJB Papers, British Library (49854). 40  Henry Cabot Lodge to TR, 29 June 1905, TR Papers, Reel 55, Library of Congress. 37 38

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of [its] great desire for a settlement” with the United States.41 Roosevelt saw the matter in stark terms of national pride, and warned that he would act unilaterally to redraw the boundaries if the tribunal failed to accept American demands. Balfour and the British cared “nothing about the boundary,” and cared only fleetingly “of offending the Canadians.”42 The tribunal resolved the boundary question by neither yielding to the Americans entirely, nor paying much respect to the historical claims of Canadians. It provided a semblance of due process, while ultimately favoring the American position, gratifying Roosevelt, and antagonizing Canadian nationalists. Most importantly, the settlement removed the last major point of political friction between the British and Americans in the Western Hemisphere. By helping the United States securitize the Western Hemisphere, the British boosted the confidence of the emerging world power and gave it some encouragement to take a greater role in global affairs. That process began with the Spanish-American War of 1898, a conflict that launched Theodore Roosevelt’s career. Leading the Rough Riders cavalry regiment up Cuba’s San Juan Heights lifted Colonel Roosevelt to national acclaim and international respect. Upon his return from the war, Roosevelt quickly ascended the political ladder. The War of 1898 also led the United States to acquire far-flung colonial territories, like the Philippines, a sprawling archipelago nearly 7000  miles from San Francisco. Economists and big business speculated that acquiring the Philippines gave the United States an opportunity to trade in China and the Far East. “Annexation of the Philippines” from the British perspective, “was to be welcomed,” historian Jason Tomes has written; the “alternative would have been German infiltration” and the American presence allowed Balfour to rebalance power in the region.43 Russian and German encroachments into northern China, as well as Japan’s rise as a regional force tested the British Empire’s dominance in the East. When the United States joined the mix of world powers involved in the region, Balfour sounded out President McKinley on an Anglo-American declaration of open access to China’s ports. Indeed, Balfour opened similar lines of negotiation with German and Japanese diplomats, but with the United States he felt such an alliance benefited from a common heredity. “If the Americans would so far violate their traditions” of isolation and disinterestedness to protect “the integrity of China, it would open a new era in the history of the world.”44 McKinley refused to consider any joint declarations, yet in 1899 his Secretary of State John Hay circulated a series of notes to world powers invested in the China market. Hay called for an “open door” policy that would provide equal 41  Marquess of Landsdowne to AJB, 8 August 1903, AJB Papers, British Library (49728); Allan Nevins, Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy (New York and London Harper & Bros., 1930), 200. 42  Henry Cabot Lodge to TR, 20 August 1903, Reel 36, TR Papers, Library of Congress. 43  Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 183. 44  AJB to Landsdowne, 11 February 1904, AJB Papers, British Library (49728).

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access to China’s ports and require China to charge the same trade duties for all nations. Over the course of several months, Hay won over the eight major world powers and, in principle, a new era of open access began. Balfour was instrumental in planting the seed, even if the Open Door policy appeared wholly American in conception.45 When Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency, two years after the Open Door became the de facto policy of the United States, he also became the foremost advocate of open access for the Far East. The best evidence of this came when relations in the Far East broke down, and the Russo-Japanese War erupted in 1904. Despite devastating Japanese victories, Russia refused to yield, and the war threatened to drag on and extend the decline of international trade in the region. As world powers heaped pressure on Japan and Russia to end the carnage and chaos, Tokyo and St. Petersberg agreed to have Roosevelt mediate their dispute. In 1905, after six months of negotiations, the warring parties signed a peace treaty that earned Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize. The treaty did not entirely refashion the circumstances that led to the war, however. Among the most significant irritants was the preservation of the Open Door policy that aimed to level the playing field in a region beset with spheres of influence. But if the treaty failed to bring permanent peace (and it did not—the Japanese would extend their sphere of influence throughout the early twentieth century before dramatically increasing their empire in the Second World War), the 1905 settlement nevertheless satisfied Roosevelt and Balfour. It served American national interests by wedging open the door to China, giving the United States a stake in the Far East, and meeting British expectations that  world powers would balance against each other. Japan—a British ally— became a counterweight to Russian ambitions. In the days after he resigned as prime minister, Balfour implored his fellow countrymen to “impartially compare the ten years now concluded with any other decade” in British history. In doing so, he refuted that one could “not find a more essentially successful foreign policy.”46 While an unbiased observer might criticize Balfour’s trade policies, and Roosevelt certainly did, the same could not be said for his efforts to work with the United States to achieve British strategic ends all over the world. In 1905, the British profited from the order established by the United States in Latin America and China, an order fashioned, at least in part, with the support and foresight of Balfour. And if Balfour’s success in extending the Anglo-American relationship cannot be gleaned from the policies of his day, they can by the precedents he set. Shortly after leaving office, a crisis in Morocco over French suzerainty in North Africa pitted Germany against the British and foreshadowed the kind of international rivalries that would lead to the Great War in 1914. Roosevelt 45  The Open Door policy was encouraged, if not conceived, by British diplomats, intellectuals, and agents. See Michael Patrick Cullinane and Alex Goodall, The Open Door Era: U.S.  Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 18–9. 46  AJB, Fiscal Reform (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 267.

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intervened to mediate and insured the status quo, a conclusion to the crisis that suited the British because it further isolated their European competitors, most notably Germany. Another example of Balfour’s lasting impact came in 1911 when the United States and the British signed a formal arbitration treaty that promised to end all disagreements through diplomacy and negotiation. The treaty, hailed by advocates of Anglo-American rapprochement, became an exemplar for world peace.47 Roosevelt and Balfour codified the Anglo-American special relationship by recognizing national interests and long-standing policies such as the Monroe Doctrine, and by collaborating to securitize their respective spheres of influence. They drew other world powers into their orbit through joint intervention and diplomacy. By the end of Balfour’s term, the French and Japanese were allies, and by the end of Roosevelt’s presidency, the United States had orchestrated the reorganization of the Far East order and established hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The more they isolated antagonists that competed for global control of resources and trade, the closer the United States and the British Empire became.

The Intermediaries of Rapprochement Because Roosevelt and Balfour did not develop a close personal bond while in office, they relied heavily on intermediaries to progress the Anglo-American relationship, and plenty of willing friends offered their assistance. The president and prime minister operated within intersecting circles of influence at a time when British friends of the United States and American Anglophiles were sowing the seeds of rapprochement. Theodore Roosevelt cultivated close ties to like-minded British expats long before his meteoric rise in politics. Arthur Lee, the British military attaché to the United States during the Spanish-American War, served by Roosevelt’s side in Cuba and would remain a stalwart confidant throughout his life. John St. Loe Strachey, the editor of Britain’s widely read weekly magazine The Spectator, corresponded regularly and frankly with Roosevelt on affairs of the day, as did British politician and historian of the American Revolution George Otto Trevelyan. Roosevelt developed affectionate relationships with officials in the British government including ambassadors to the United States Mortimer Durand and James Bryce, and Liberal foreign minister Edward Grey. Roosevelt’s purpose for communicating with so many British subjects, so intimately, was his way of overcoming the constraints of their governments. The president’s correspondents provided detailed information about British policy in a way that Balfour, as head of government, could not. In return, Roosevelt could candidly express the American position and shape British 47  Raymond Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries (Waltham, MA: Ginn-­ Blaisdell, 1970), 95–103; C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1889–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 122.

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perceptions of the United States in a direct, yet private, manner. This unusually informal mode of communication generated a dialogue that provided a valuable connection from a number of British constituencies to the president.48 Among Roosevelt’s most frequent British correspondents, one had greater access to the president: career diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice. Roosevelt met “Springy” (as he would come to call him) on a transatlantic ocean liner in 1886. Both en route from New York to London, Spring-Rice picked out Roosevelt as a person of importance and struck up a conversation that would last for the duration of the journey. Their meeting came at a time of great personal joy for Roosevelt who traveled abroad to get married in relative secrecy. Roosevelt’s first wife died shortly after childbirth, and he initially opposed remarriage until his relationship with childhood friend Edith Carow advanced into a love affair. The wedding, a quiet, “almost empty” ceremony in London reflected Roosevelt’s desire to honor his first wife’s memory. The service did not include family or friends, or even a best man for that matter, until Roosevelt asked Spring-Rice to do the honor.49 Although it might seem peculiar that Roosevelt appointed a relative stranger to his wedding party, it attests to the unreserved friendship they struck crossing the Atlantic, one that continued throughout their lives. When the two returned to Washington in 1899— Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner and Spring-Rice as second secretary at the British Embassy—they even lived together for a short time.50 Ideology brought Spring-Rice and Roosevelt closer together, and a common perspective on how best to apply ideas in foreign policy extended their affection. Both believed in the rise and fall of civilizations, in the greatness and potential of English-speaking peoples, and in the strenuous effort necessary to ensure the prosperity of Christian morality and Western culture. The Anglo-­ American alliance offered the means to achieve this. Although Balfour promoted these ideas in much the same way, he chose to keep Spring-Rice from Washington, a partisan decision that upset Roosevelt and may have led to the president’s initial dislike of the prime minister. Spring-Rice was an outspoken Liberal, and Tories dominated politics throughout the young diplomat’s early career. Spring-Rice rose through middling ranks of the Foreign Service, playing instrumental roles in British foreign policy from Germany to the Far East, but it was not until Balfour and the Conservative Party lost the 1906 election that he earned an ambassadorial post. In 1903, when the British Ambassador to the United States died, Roosevelt believed he could influence Balfour’s choice in a replacement and made it clear that he wanted Spring-Rice. When Henry Cabot Lodge traveled to London, Roosevelt ordered Lodge to lobby for his friend, and also wrote to Arthur Lee 48   John M.  Thompson, “Constraint and Opportunity: Theodore Roosevelt, Transatlantic Relations and Domestic Politics,” in America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the ‘Discovery’ of Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 59. 49  Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010), 357–9. 50  Richard D.  White, Roosevelt the Reformer: Theodore Roosevelt as Civil Service Commissioner, 1889–1895 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 72–3.

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on the matter. But Balfour opted for Mortimer Durand, a veteran diplomat and Conservative. Spring-Rice did not even get sent to Washington as a secretary with Durand’s delegation.51 Even so, Roosevelt managed to use his personal connection with Spring-Rice to make him an unofficial British liaison to the White House. This was most apparent when the Japanese and Russians negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth under Roosevelt’s supervision in 1905. Spring-Rice spent several hours alone with Roosevelt on a confidential mission for the Foreign Ministry to ensure the United States supported the renewed Anglo-Japanese Alliance. They also discussed the Open Door policy and the balance of power in the Far East. Indeed, Spring-Rice deserves some credit for Roosevelt’s positive impression of the British alliance with Japan, and shortly after the trip to Washington ended, Balfour wrote Henry Cabot Lodge that “the more closely we can work together, the better it will be for us and the world at large.”52 In actuality, the more closely Spring-Rice worked with Roosevelt, the more the president became convinced of Anglo-American rapprochement. For his part, Balfour also forged meaningful relationships with American statesmen and contemporaries. He developed warm affection for Joseph Choate, the American ambassador to the court of St. James (1899–1905); the prime minister even rented his house to the ambassador while living at 10 Downing Street.53 Henry Cabot Lodge, one of Roosevelt’s oldest and dearest friends, and a regular intimate on foreign relations, maintained correspondence with Balfour throughout his life, as did Roosevelt’s first secretary of state and former ambassador to Britain John Hay. Renowned artist John Singer Sargent spent time with Balfour while living in London and painted an infamous full-­ length portrait in 1908 that “hinted at the inner mind of a controversial statesman.”54 Sargent painted a similar portrait of Roosevelt in 1903. American-­ born, British-based author Henry James enjoyed rubbing shoulders with British aristocrats and often found himself in Balfour’s company. These American friends were mere acquaintances compared to Balfour’s attachment to Henry White, the first secretary to the American Embassy in London. To “Harry,” the prime minister could speak freely and with absolute candor. Not only did the two men see the world in identical ways, they belonged to the same tight-knit group of socialites known as “The Souls.” Historian R. J. Q. Adams describe the Souls as “a loosely organized group of some three dozen friends whose interests lay with … books, ideas, Conservative politics, 51  Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 132–3; William N. Tilchin, “Anglo-American Partnership: The Foundation of Theodore Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy,” in A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 319. 52  AJB to Henry Cabot Lodge, 11 April 1905, Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Reel 22, Massachusetts Historical Society. 53  Choate had previously lived at the Viceroy of India Lord Curzon’s house, but the two fell out over the arrangements. Balfour, aware of this, nevertheless rented to Choate. See Curzon to Henry White, 27 April 1899, Henry White Papers, Box 16, Folder Mar–May 1899, Library of Congress. 54  Angelique Chrisafis “Portrait of Balfour Stays in Britain,” Guardian, 23 July 2002.

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intellectually challenging games and ‘good talk’—above all things, the Souls valued talk.”55 They were aristocrats, endowed with wealth and time, circumstances that allowed them to indulge in aesthetics, philosophy, and the humanities. They also held equal respect for the sexes. Women and men sat as equals in their parlors. The group included such notables as future Viceroy of India George Curzon, and Margot Tennant (later the wife of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith), as well as the Americans Henry and Daisy White. Arthur Balfour— who the Whites endearingly called “Ah Bah”—was the epicenter of the Souls, even if the group had no leadership.56 Henry and Daisy lived in London as part of the American legation from 1883 to 1893 and 1896 to 1905, the duration of Balfour’s terms as leader of the House of Commons and prime minister. During that time, Secretary of State John Hay relied on White’s access to Balfour to communicate the American foreign policy position, and, in turn, White circulated Balfour’s foreign policy speeches through published pamphlets he sent to back to Hay.57 White brought Senator Henry Cabot Lodge into contact with Balfour, and connected the prime minister with State Department officials. The first secretary’s utility as a back channel to the White House proved most valuable in 1902 when British and Canadian diplomats “confided” in White that they would like to end the Alaskan boundary dispute. Rather than meeting with the American ambassador in London, or cabling the secretary of state in Washington, Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier and Canadian governor-­ general Lord Minto confronted White at the coronation of King Edward VII.  Establishing this relationship with White allowed the Canadians and British to begin the process of arbitration without suffering political embarrassment at home.58 Arbitration was presented as an opportunity for Canada to present its case, and White counseled Balfour on the merits of letting the issue of Alaska pass without opposition, and moderated the concerns of Roosevelt who believed the dispute could ignite a war.59 The role of Spring-Rice and White in fostering a special relationship is almost as vital as that of Roosevelt and Balfour. Indeed, the swell of goodwill and cooperation across the Atlantic was due to a number of circumstances and an innumerable amount of individuals who professed the benefits of an Anglo-­ American rapprochement.

 Adams, Balfour, 143.  Nevins, Henry White, 80. 57  John Hay to Henry White, 7 September 1900 and 13 September 1903, Box 16 and 17, Henry White Papers, Library of Congress. 58  Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 114; Nevins, Henry White, 196–200. 59  TR to Henry White, 26 September 1903, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress (http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org). 55 56

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Conclusion Roosevelt and Balfour finally met in 1910, first at a formal gathering at London’s Guildhall and then at a weekend party hosted by Arthur and Ruth Lee at Chequers Court, a venue that would become the country retreat of prime ministers when the Lees donated it in 1921. Roosevelt’s visit with Balfour at Chequers seemed prescient; so many American presidents would visit the estate when calling to the United Kingdom. At the Guildhall Roosevelt made a stirring speech on imperial responsibility that drew some public ire from Liberals who opposed further entrenchment in places like Africa. Balfour, the leader of the opposition and MP for the City of London listened attentively, and when Roosevelt finished speaking “entered into animated conversation” with his friends on the dais “until Mr. Roosevelt had left the Guildhall.” Even then, Balfour could not help but discuss the speech with Foreign Minister Edward Grey as they left the hall. “The speech made a profound impression,” the London Times reported. At Chequers, Roosevelt and Balfour “talked merely on general subjects” at first, the former president said, “but I happened to make the remark that I had ‘never demanded knowledge anything except that it should be valueless,’ which for some reason or another proved the key to unlock his intimate thoughts.” Balfour opened up, Roosevelt said, “and from that time he spoke of everything of the closest possible nature.”60 Arthur Lee described the meeting as one of “almost ceaseless play of coruscating talk which illumined the week-end like summer lightning.” Each man found the other’s company beguiling, Lee observed: T.R. was so entirely different to anything that A.  J. B. had either imagined or experienced, and their two minds almost fizzled chemically when brought into contact for the first time. From the very outset the scales of pre-conceived prejudice fell from their eyes, and it was, on Balfour’s side at any rate, almost a case of love at first sight. Both were at the top of their form.61

The two met again in 1917 when Balfour, then foreign minister in the wartime unity government, traveled to the United States on a mission to coordinate Allied planning. Balfour spent much of his time in Washington, with President Woodrow Wilson and his team of advisors. As an onlooker to their cautious creep toward war, Balfour brought them up to date on secret treaties, and implored them to blockade neutral countries. Privately, Balfour very gently lobbied Wilson to give Roosevelt command of an Army division, but Wilson objected due to Roosevelt’s failing health, and the former prime minister did

 TR to David Gray, 5 October 1911, Letters: 7, 405–6.  Alan Clark (ed.), A Good Innings: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham (London: John Murray, 1974), 108–9. 60 61

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not press the matter as others like Georges Clemenceau had.62 Instead, Balfour contented himself with a four-hour visit to Oyster Bay, Long Island where he met Roosevelt for dinner at his Sagamore Hill estate. One observer said, “Seldom have I seen two men enjoy each other’s company so much, or touch and adorn so many subjects in so short a time. The war and politics, philosophy and religion, farming and forestry, each had their turn with … innumerable reminiscences to illustrate and enliven the conversation.”63 Balfour told his traveling companion as they drove away from Oyster Bay that the fatigue of the mission to the United States “had entirely left him” after meeting Roosevelt.64 Winston Churchill said of Arthur Balfour that his “root-conviction, perhaps his strongest conviction, was that the English-speaking peoples of the world must stand together.”65 In every practical way, Roosevelt shared Balfour’s conviction. The president and prime minister’s commitment to an ever-closer Anglo-American alliance endured long after their leadership came to an end, although their success convincing British and American people to put aside bygone animosities went only so far. Their ambition for a lasting rapprochement and a better securitized English-speaking world required more than government cooperation; it needed public buy-in and an organic transatlantic camaraderie developed through protracted cultural campaigns that spanned generations. Working alongside a corps of transatlantic activists, Roosevelt and Balfour often found that they led a crusade toward rapprochement. In 1898, they supported the Anglo-American League, a club of British and American friends that sought cooperation between the American and British governments. They supported educational ties. In 1902, Rhodes scholarships were established to strengthen the bonds of English-speaking peoples by bringing them together in Oxford to study; the same year, elite businessmen and politicians formed the Pilgrim’s Society, a dining group that aimed to promote Anglo-American goodwill. These organizations adhered to the racial and ideological opinions that put English-speaking people atop the civilizational pyramid, and enlisted business leaders, elected officials, and celebrities to spread that gospel. Balfour and Roosevelt embraced these groups and surrounded themselves with those who believed in Anglo-American comity as a product of an English-speaking heritage. Balfour and Roosevelt did as much as any leadership duo of their age to nurture the great rapprochement, but better relations also came about because the circumstances allowed it. The Great War brought the United States and Great Britain closer than ever before, as literal brothers in arms, although the peace settlement at Versailles exposed the rift between their interests. War debt 62  TR to Cecil Spring-Rice, 16 April 1917 in Letters (1954): 8, 1175; Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Theodore Roosevelt in the Eyes of the Allies,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15, no. 1 (January 2016): 80–101. 63  Ian Malcolm, Lord Balfour, A Memory (London: Macmillan and Co., 1930), 53–4. 64  Ibid. 65  Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries (1937; ISI Books, 2012), 245.

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drove a wedge between the two nations in the 1920s and showed how rapprochement could swing back to resentment, especially as the United States overtook the British as global creditor. Before losing his Parliamentary seat in the 1906 general election, Balfour wrote the American ambassador and founder of the Pilgrim Society Joseph Choate on the future of the Anglo-American relationship: I have spoken, not infrequently in public upon Anglo-American relations, and have never concealed the strength of the convictions which have all my life animated me … But I have always been careful to make my words, strong though they have been, less strong than my convictions, for (as it seems to me) the feeling that the two great co-heirs of Anglo-Saxon freedom and civilization have a common mission, has more quickly developed on this side of the Atlantic than on the other—at least among the general mass of the population, and that there is therefore some danger lest phrases which are suitable enough in Great Britain may seem excessive in America, and may excite, not sympathy, but suspicion or ridicule. There is, in truth, an element of sentiment in the views which I, and many others, hold on this subject which supplies an easy mark for criticism. But I console myself by remembering that easy criticism is usually bad criticism.66

It is possible to read Balfour’s message in two ways. The obvious implication is that fine words of political speeches, and even those from a British prime minister, could not hold sway over the American general public and the national interest. A degree of Anglophobia always existed in the United States, and throughout his life Balfour carefully chose words to suit this audience. In fact, when he visited the United States in 1917, Balfour wondered if an end to the Irish Question could bring about a more lasting rapprochement. But another reading of this provokes thoughts about the changing nature of the Anglo-American relationship. By 1905, rapprochement, imperfect though it was, had been achieved. The task after 1905, it seemed to Balfour, was less about fostering cooperation in global affairs and more geared to overcome “easy criticism.” Always committed to a common identity for English-speaking people, Balfour believed that like-minded activists on either side of the Atlantic would need to redouble their efforts in times of strife to ensure the rapport never ebbed. Roosevelt shared that conviction and after his presidency made a concerted effort to work with British diplomats, transatlantic heritage groups, and to argue against hyphenated Americanism which put those most opposed to Anglo-American rapprochement on the back foot. What was clear to Balfour and Roosevelt, but perhaps less so to those who did not wield political power in the Edwardian era, was that ideas—and the strenuous commitment to them—led directly to policy. As president and prime minister, they saw historic divides bridged, and a permanent rapprochement, as it was to become, take shape. “You need not ever be troubled by the nightmare 66  AJB to Joseph Choate, 12 June 1905, Joseph Hodges Choate Papers, Box 11, Folder: Balfour, Library of Congress.

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of a possible contest between the two great English-speaking peoples,” Roosevelt told Arthur Lee in 1905, “I believe that is practically impossible now.”67 And the credit for fostering this international accord comes in spite of their tepid personal relationship while in office, indicating that shared ideas about civilization and collective mission could overcome the singular ties between a president and a prime minister.

 TR to Arthur Lee, 6 June 1905, Letters: 4, 1207.

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Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George: Uncongenial Allies John A. Thompson

Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George leaving Palace of Versailles after Signing Peace Treaty. Keystone View Company, 1923. [gelatin silver print], Library of Congress © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_5

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The “special relationship” between Britain and the United States is generally seen as a product of the Second World War, and of the bond then established between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But those who date the Anglo-American alliance from that time tend to overlook the fact that the two nations had cooperated in a joint war effort twenty-plus years earlier. Not only did British and American soldiers fight side by side on the western front in 1917–1918, but machinery was developed for coordinated action over military strategy and such problems as the allocation of shipping in response to the manifold demands upon it, balancing the transportation of troops against the maintenance of supplies of food and raw materials.1 As in the Second World War, this cooperation arose from a shared commitment to the defeat of Germany. Yet, despite these parallels, the relationship between the two heads of government, President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, had none of the closeness and warmth of that between FDR and Churchill. To some extent, this can be attributed to the very different personalities and political styles of the two men, but the fundamental reason was the greater salience of policy differences between the two countries. Policy differences were more pronounced before American entry into the war in April 1917, and it was during this earlier period of American neutrality that Wilson and Lloyd George formed the impressions of each other that did much to shape their subsequent personal relationship. After the United States entered the war, however, the two leaders were united by a common commitment to victory in war and to a successful peace settlement. In 1917–1919, despite their mutual disparagement and irritation with each other, Wilson and Lloyd George did more to foster Anglo-American cooperation than to impede it.

The Setting At the outbreak of the First World War, there was a great discrepancy between Great Britain and the United States in the extent of the two countries’ experience of world politics, and in their possession of instrumentalities and institutions for engaging in international relations. The British Empire covered almost

1  David F. Trask, The United States in the Supreme War Council: American War Aims and Inter-­ Allied Strategy, 1917–1918 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961); David F. Trask, Captains and Cabinets: Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917–1918 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1972); David R.  Woodward, Trial by Friendship: Anglo-American Relations 1917–1918 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).

J. A. Thompson (*) St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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a quarter of the earth’s land surface. British naval stations, army camps and colonial officials were to be found across the globe while British diplomats were significant figures in the capitals of every power. In Whitehall, the great departments of state, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Admiralty and the War Office were staffed by hundreds of officials, many of whom were well informed about foreign countries and proficient in foreign languages. British Naval Intelligence at this time has been described as “incomparably the best in the world.”2 Economically, however, Britain had been overtaken by the United States, which by 1914 was producing 32 percent of the world’s manufactured goods and 20 percent of its total output.3 This economic might had induced among influential Americans a new sense of the nation’s status as a great power, particularly after the easy and quick victory over Spain in 1898. Following that war, the United States acquired the Philippines and established hegemonic authority over the Caribbean and Central America. Yet it remained committed to its long established policy of avoiding involvement in the politics of Europe.4 A concomitant of this stance was that the nation had not developed the instrumentalities for effective participation in great power politics. Although its navy ranked third in the world in 1913, its army, with just over 90,000 men, was less than a fifth the size of Bulgaria’s. Internally, the relationship of the Navy and Army was more competitive than cooperative, with each department related at least as closely to the congressional committees that controlled their budgets as to the administration. Nonmilitary means of achieving foreign policy objectives were even less well developed. There was no professional foreign service, let alone an organization for gathering and analyzing intelligence. In 1913, the State Department employed only 213 people in Washington (including clerks, messengers and manual workers) and fewer than 450  in all the overseas diplomatic and consular offices combined.5 In the White House, Wilson had the assistance only of his political secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, his personal stenographer and a few clerks. His chief adviser was “Colonel” Edward House,

 Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (London, 1974), 649.  Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (Fall 1982): 296, 304. 4  Reporting to Congress on the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, both of which can be seen as precursors of the 1914 conflict, President W. H. Taft observed that “the United States has happily been involved neither directly nor indirectly with the causes or questions incident to any of these hostilities and has maintained in regard to them an attitude of absolute neutrality and of complete political disinterestedness.” Taft, Annual Message, 3 December 1912 in Foreign Relations of the United States [henceforth FRUS], 1906 I (Washington, DC, 1909), LI; 1912 (Washington, DC, 1919), xix–xx. On the relation of these earlier conflicts to the outbreak of a Europe-wide war in 1914, see Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012), chapter 5. 5  Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America Revised and Expanded. (New York, 1994), 320; Rachel West, The Department of State on the Eve of the First World War (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 4. 2 3

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a private citizen with no prior experience in government or diplomacy who was only in Washington on brief visits. When the European war broke out, Americans took it for granted that their country would follow the traditional policy of noninvolvement. It was, Wilson told Congress in December 1914, “a war with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us.”6 In reality, however, the European conflict affected the United States profoundly in various ways. To begin with, there was the emotional involvement and the divided sympathies felt by a people, in Wilson’s words, “drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war.”7 Among the social and economic elite of the eastern seaboard, there was a strong pro-British disposition. Most of those who felt this way were Republicans; the most prominent public spokesperson for this pro-allied viewpoint was Theodore Roosevelt. But, Wilson’s chief advisers House and the Counselor of the State Department Robert Lansing (who became secretary of state in 1915), also believed in a more moderate way that the United States would suffer if Germany won the war and that, at least to some degree, the allies represented the cause of liberalism and democracy. In the first eighteen months of the war, Wilson seems to have shared this perspective in private. As a Democrat, however, he was reliant on the support of groups who did not share the pro-allied commitment of the eastern elite, particularly agrarian antagonists of Wall Street in the West and South. The war also had a major impact on the United States’ economy. The initial effect was disruptive, but soon the scale of Allied purchases stimulated a boom. Exports to Britain increased more than threefold between 1914 and 1917; in October 1916, the Treasury calculated that almost 40 percent of British war expenditures were in North America.8 American productivity, and the terms on which it was made available to belligerents, thus became a major factor in the European conflict. This aggravated the difficulty of defining and defending the nation’s neutral rights. The steady tightening of the British blockade impinged on American interests, but this was regarded as negotiable, whereas the German use of submarines against commercial shipping was not. Wilson’s demand, following the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, that Germany abandon this method of warfare raised the possibility that the United States might itself become a belligerent. It was this unwelcome prospect that led Wilson to an unprecedented degree of involvement in European affairs as he sought to bring the war to an early end. He first attempted to do so through the relationship that House had established with British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, and to aid House’s efforts to persuade the allies to accept an early peace conference that Wilson 6  Annual Message to Congress, 8 December 1914 in Arthur S. Link et al. (eds.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson [henceforth PWW] (Princeton, NJ, 1966–94), 31, 421–4. 7  Appeal to the American People, 18 August 1914, PWW, 30, 393–4. 8  U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 903; Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1965), 178–84.

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agreed to U.S. participation in a postwar league of nations. If the United States were to guarantee the settlement, however, its terms would have to be acceptable to American opinion. A lasting peace, Wilson now insisted, must recognize the principle of popular sovereignty and the rights of small nations and safeguard freedom of the seas. After the British government had made it clear that the Allies had no interest in early negotiations, Wilson on his own account made a public appeal in January 1917 for “a peace without victory” and a settlement based on liberal principles.9 This plea was swiftly overtaken by Germany’s announcement of a renewed submarine campaign that, unlike earlier ones, would target the merchant ships of neutral nations as well as those of its enemies. As he faced the situation that his diplomacy had been designed to avoid, Wilson remained highly conscious of the divided nature of American public opinion. Pro-allied partisans on the East coast fiercely demanded war in response to this direct threat to American ships and lives. But it had been the West, together with the solidly Democratic South, that had given Wilson his narrow victory in the recent presidential election as “the man who kept us out of war.” Once the Germans starting actually sinking U.S. ships, Wilson decided there was “no alternative” to belligerency, even if there remained the problem of uniting the country behind this course of action.10 Tumulty, after reviewing press and congressional opinion, concluded that “if we take up arms against Germany, it should be on an issue exclusively between that Empire and this Republic” and “the United States must retain control of that issue from beginning to end.”11 In his war address, Wilson followed this advice. Stressing the ruthlessness of the German submarine campaign, he called on Congress to “formally accept the status of belligerent which has been thrust upon it,” and that it enable the country “to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms.”12 This would “involve the utmost practicable cooperation in counsel and action with the governments now at war with Germany.” However Wilson made no suggestion of an alliance.13 Instead, he insisted on the continuity and independence of his policy. His objective remained as it had been when he had called for a “peace without victory” ten weeks earlier: “Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.”14

9  Address to the League to Enforce Peace, 27 May 1916; Address to the Senate, 22 January 1917, PWW 37, 115–16; 40, 533–9. 10  For Wilson’s statements that there was “no alternative,” see Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 676. 11  Tumulty to Wilson, 24 March 1917, PWW, 41, 462–4. 12  Address to Congress, 2 April 1917, PWW, 41, pp. 519–27. 13  Ibid. 14  Ibid.

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It was thus on the basis of military collaboration and determined political independence that the United States entered this first wartime partnership with Great Britain. In the following months, Wilson stressed its semi-detached nature, both privately and publicly. In July, he emphasized to House that “England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means.”15 A little later, he sent a sharp note to Herbert Hoover when the term “our allies” appeared on posters of the Food Administration that Hoover headed: “we have no allies and I think I am right in believing that the people of the country are very jealous of any intimation that there are formal alliances.”16

The Men This was the context in which the relationship of Wilson and Lloyd George took shape. In education, upbringing, personality, and methods of working, the two men were very different. Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had been an academic until he entered politics at the age of fifty-three; it was as a reforming president of Princeton University that he had made a national reputation. Lloyd George, a Welshman from a much humbler background than most British politicians of the time, had never been to university. After qualifying as a solicitor, he had won election to the House of Commons when he was twenty-seven years old. Wilson carried over from his academic life the habit of working largely through reading and writing. On the portable typewriter he took with him into the White House, he composed everything from notes to cabinet officers and letters to members of Congress to drafts of his more considered speeches and even some diplomatic notes (dispatched for protocol reasons over the signature of the secretary of state). Having suffered from various health problems and advised by doctors not to overdo it, his working day generally ended at around 4 p.m. after which he would go for a drive or play a round of golf. As it happened, a liking for golf was something Wilson had in common with Lloyd George (as was an enjoyment of singing). But for Lloyd George golf, like other activities such as meals, was commonly used as a means of politicking. He welcomed all opportunities for face-to-face encounters in which he could employ his quick-witted eloquence, charm and force of personality to persuade, cajole, or bully people into doing as he wished. Enjoying robust health, he worked long hours and astonished colleagues and officials with his energy and stamina.17

 Wilson to House, 21 July 1917 (emphasis in original), PWW, 43, 237–8.  Wilson to Herbert Hoover, 10 December 1917, PWW, 45, 256–7. 17  John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 10, 200–1; Michael G.  Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy: The Education of a Statesman, 1890–1916 (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), 10; Michael G. Fry, And Fortune Fled: David Lloyd George, the First Democratic Statesman, 1916–1922 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 8–15. 15 16

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Despite these differences, the two leaders were alike in certain respects. Interestingly, William Gladstone had been a hero for both in their youth. Wilson had hung over his boyhood desk a picture of the great man, whom Lloyd George lauded on his death as a saint and the greatest leader of men since Napoleon.18 For both men, it was Gladstone’s ability to move men through an oratory heavily reliant on appeals to the moral values of Protestant Christianity that seems to have really captured their imagination. In terms of political ideology, each in the course of their careers moved away from the laissez-faire orthodoxies of Gladstonian liberalism toward the greater role for the state promoted in the early twentieth century by both the new liberalism in Britain and progressivism in the United States.19 The ease with which they made this transition reflected the pragmatic attitude with which both approached political issues. Indeed, a shared understanding of the nature of politics, and of the importance within it of personal relationships, was a kind of bond between the two that, although never explicitly acknowledged, rendered them sensitive to each other’s political interests and willing on occasion to accommodate them. There was, however, an imbalance in the knowledge and understanding each had of the other’s country and its political culture. Wilson had visited Britain five times before he became president and had a particular fondness for the Lake District. More to the point, he was steeped in English literature and political thought. In his early writings he had held up the British system of government as a model that the United States should follow, revealing a detailed knowledge of its working. Such familiarity was the basis of a broad allegiance to the English liberal tradition that was more discriminating and partial than generalized Anglophilia. By contrast, Lloyd George had never visited the United States. From his youth, he had regarded the country favorably as a great and energetic democracy, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer he had argued that the United States should be discounted in assessing the navy’s needs as war with it was inconceivable. Always inclined to weigh racial factors above economic ones as the cause of conflict, he saw Americans as “blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, the same people.” Although certainly conscious of the influence of non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups in electoral politics, Lloyd George never wavered in his confidence that Americans were basically committed to the allied cause notwithstanding the attitude of the administration and sections of public opinion.20 On first meeting Lloyd George in June 1914, House “found him peculiarly ill informed regarding America and its institutions.”21  Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 30; Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, 32n.  For a comparison of these two movements that highlights the similarities, see Peter F. Clarke, “The Progressive Movement in England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 24 (1974), 159–81. 20  Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, 216, 162, 117; Fry, And Fortune Fled, 79–80, 90. 21  House to Wilson, June 26, 1914, PWW, 30, 215. 18 19

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First Impressions Wilson and Lloyd George did not meet in person until December 1918. Before that, their relationship had been by written communications and through intermediaries. House was by far the most important of these intermediaries, and it was during and after the Colonel’s 1916 European mission that Lloyd George first played a significant role in Anglo-American relations. Following some initial hesitation about entering the war, Lloyd George had, as minister of munitions, thrown his energies into mobilizing the nation’s resources for the fight against Germany.22 He was one of the British ministers to whom House put his somewhat ambiguous proposal for a collaborative effort to end the war, and he seems to have shared the general skepticism about the likelihood, or even desirability, of the promised American “intervention.”23 But as House’s pleas for early action were evaded or rejected, fears arose in London that, in an election year, Wilson would be tempted to make an independent call for peace negotiations. In the late summer, the British became aware that the Germans were urging him to do this, at a time when they held the stronger position. As war minister while the Somme offensive was under way, Lloyd George sought to head off this danger by giving an interview to an American correspondent in which he declared that “the fight must be to the finish—to a knock-out … Neutrals of the highest purposes and humanitarians with the best motives must know that there can be no outside interference at this stage.”24 Grey, who had not been consulted beforehand, wrote a pained letter expressing fears of the effect on Anglo-American relations. “I know the American politician,” Lloyd George responded; “He has no international conscience. He thinks of nothing but the ticket, and he has not given the least thought to the effect upon European affairs.”25 Unlike Grey and others in the cabinet, Lloyd George did not fear the effects of alienating Wilson. He discounted suggestions that the president might restrict access to supplies and credits, insisting that the purchase of American goods increased British influence and the stake of the United States in an allied victory.26 Lloyd George’s widely publicized interview was doubtless motivated in part by a desire to present himself as a more decisive and committed war leader than Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. In early December, with the support of conservative leaders and the press baron Lord Northcliffe, he supplanted Asquith. 22  On Lloyd George’s initial hesitation, see Peter Clarke, The Locomotive of War: Money, Empire, Power and Guilt (London, 2017), chapter 4. 23  Lloyd George later suggested that he had been in favor of an American peace move but had wanted it postponed, but there is nothing in the contemporary record to support this claim. War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (London: Odhams Press, 1938): I, 412–3; Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 223. 24  New York Times, 29 September 1916. 25  Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 546–7; Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, 232–6; Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 22–3; Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London: Fontana Books, 1964), 416. 26  Fry, Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, 230–40; Fry, And Fortune Fled, 90.

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Wilson deplored this development, and not only because the change of ministry involved the departure of Grey. In advocating a settlement embodying disarmament, recognition of the rights of small nations and an international organization to keep the peace, the president had echoed the program of the Union for Democratic Control (UDC), which had been formed in 1914 by radical liberal critics of British foreign policy. Not surprisingly, the speech in which he did this had been welcomed by such journals as the Nation, the Daily News and Manchester Guardian, whereas Northcliffe’s Times had been openly hostile and the Daily Chronicle, which was close to Lloyd George, scarcely less chilling. This response confirmed the view of the British scene that Wilson and House held in common with most American progressives.27 “American opinion,” H. W. Massingham of the Nation observed, “draws a sharp distinction between the England of Gladstone and an England that might look more like the England of Castlereagh.”28 House kept in close touch with sympathetic editors such as Massingham, and also with radical liberal MPs like J. Howard Whitehouse. As Asquith was tottering, house warned Wilson that “if the Lloyd George-Northcliffe-Carson combination succeed in overthrowing the Government and gaining control … England will then be under the military dictatorship that Whitehouse spoke about.” Yet, like their English allies, House and Wilson did not see Lloyd George himself as a tory but rather as a “complete opportunist” whose “views may change absolutely at any moment.”29 Contrary to Lloyd George’s suspicion, Wilson refrained from making a move for peace before the election, but after his narrow victory he made a determined attempt to bring about an early end to the war. His sense of urgency derived from the combination of signals from Berlin that pressure was mounting for an all-out submarine campaign on the one hand and on the other the recent election’s evidence that, as the British ambassador reported, “the great mass of the Americans desire nothing so much as to keep out of the war.”30 In December, the president sent a note to all the countries at war requesting that they clarify their peace terms, observing that “the objects which the statesmen of the belligerents on both sides have in mind are virtually the same, as stated in general terms to their own people and to the world.”31 This equating of the two sides caused great offence to the allies and their supporters in the United States. Yet it reflected the view of the European conflict that Wilson had come to by the latter part of 1916. In the early weeks of the war, he had privately 27  Laurence W.  Martin, Peace without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the British Liberals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 69, 72–9, 80n; House to Wilson, 30 July 1916, PWW, 37, 502. 28  “Wayfarer,” The Nation, 16 August 1916. 29  House to Wilson, 3, 5, 9 December 1916; Norman Hapgood to House, enclosed in House to Wilson, 16 January 1917, PWW, 40, 133, 172, 201, 497. 30  C.  Spring Rice to E.  Grey, 24 November 1916  in Arthur S.  Link, Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace 1916–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 1965), 162. 31  Note to Belligerent Governments, 18 December 1916, FRUS, 1916, Supplement: The World War, 98–9.

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expressed sympathy for the Allies whom, like most Americans, he saw as fighting a defensive war against German aggression.32 But the rejection of House’s initiative, together with the ruthlessness of the British war effort and the evident territorial ambitions of many of the countries fighting the Central Powers, had led him to see the war as essentially a contest of imperialisms. When one correspondent accused Wilson of lacking any “real conception of the moral issues involved in this great war,” Wilson retorted that if the man “had lived with the English statesmen for the past two years and seen the real inside of their minds I think he would feel differently.”33 After the replies to his peace note failed to produce the basis for a conference, Wilson made an address to the Senate outlining “the only sort of peace that the peoples of America could join in guaranteeing”–one condition of which was that “it must be a peace without victory.”34 With this address, Wilson won the enduring allegiance of idealistic liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. The London Nation hailed it as a “great speech, rich and sane in thought as it is generous in motive.”35 Most British opinion was hostile, however. Although public criticism was restrained by officialdom, the general feeling was expressed by the observation of the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law that “what Mr. Wilson is longing for, we are fighting for.” Sir George Otto Trevelyan, father of one of the leaders of the UDC, saw the president as “the quintessence of a prig.”36 Lloyd George shared this opinion and, according to one of his biographers, “found little high purpose in Wilson and much political calculation … a dread of belligerency.”37 This view of Wilson accorded with that of his bitter domestic opponents Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, both passionate supporters of the allied cause. In his War Memoirs, published two decades later, Lloyd George expressed the gratitude of “the Allied democracies of France and the British Commonwealth” to “the great American (Theodore Roosevelt) whose vision was so undimmed and whose sympathies were so sure from the onset of this grim struggle for international right.” For his part, TR was a great admirer of Lloyd George, whose conduct in the war he attributed not to opportunism but to patriotism. Writing of Lloyd George to an English friend in early 1916, Roosevelt observed that “it is often true that the only way to render great service on the part of the statesman is to lose his future, or, at any rate, his present

32  Sir Cecil Spring Rice to Sir Edward Grey, 8 September 1914; House diary, 30 August 1914, PWW, 31, 13–4; 30, 462–3. 33  Wilson to Newton D. Baker, 26 December 1916, PWW, 40, 330–1. In his election speeches, Wilson attributed the war to the European system as a whole rather than to Germany in particular. PWW, 38, 364–5, 531. 34  Address to the Senate, 22 January 1917, PWW, 40, 533–9. 35  The [London] Nation, 27 January 1917, 574. 36  George Otto Trevelyan to Lord Bryce, 26 January 1917 in Bryce Papers, University of Oxford. 37  Fry, And Fortune Fled, 91–6.

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position in political life, just exactly as the soldier may have to pay with his physical life in order to render service in battle.”38 Wilson’s peace offensive of 1916–1917, then, saw both leaders aligned with the other’s domestic opponents. This was the nadir of their relationship as the situation changed dramatically at the beginning of February with the unleashing of the German submarine campaign. But the negative impressions formed at this time persisted during the course of their subsequent cooperation.

Partners in War Both leaders had a motive for embarking on such cooperation in the weeks during which Wilson wrestled with the problem of responding to the German challenge. Deeply reluctant to lead a divided country into war, the president sought ways to avoid doing so. Seizing on evidence that Austria-Hungary was eager for peace, he asked Lloyd George for an assurance that the Allies were not committed to dismembering that empire. Lloyd George replied that it was impossible to give the blanket assurance to Vienna that Wilson had asked for because “we must stand by the nationals of our allies … Their just demands must be met by the principle of nationality.” At the same time, he urged American entry into the war in a flattering manner that he evidently believed would appeal to the egoistic element in the president’s idealism: We want him to come into the war not so much for help with the war as for help with the peace … The President’s presence at the peace conference is necessary for the proper organization of the world which must follow peace. I mean that he himself must be there in person. If he sits in the conference that makes peace he will exert the greatest influence that any man has ever exerted in expressing the moral value of free government.39

The prospect of having a more direct influence over the peace settlement no doubt helped to reconcile Wilson to belligerency but it was German actions that drove him to it.40 Despite Wilson’s determination to maintain diplomatic independence, the American war effort necessarily involved a cooperative relationship with the Allies, especially Britain. Establishing such a relationship was made no easier by the fact that the president respected neither the British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring Rice nor (by this point) his own ambassador in London Walter H. Page.41  Lloyd George, War Memoirs: I, 992, 445–6.  W.  H. Page to the president and secretary of state, 6, 11 February 1917, PWW, 41, 136–7, 211–4. 40  For an analysis of the process by which Wilson came to his decision for war, and of the reasons for it, see John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, UP, 2015), 79–87. 41  From well before his appointment, Spring Rice had enjoyed close friendships with prominent Republicans—indeed, he had been best man at Theodore Roosevelt’s wedding in 1886. His passionate defence of British blockade practices and of the arming of merchantmen in the face of 38 39

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As a consequence, Anglo-American relations at the highest levels had become dependent on House’s intermediary role. Yet, with Grey’s departure from the Cabinet, House no longer had an established connection with a sympathetic British interlocutor. This opened the way for a thirty-two-year old baronet who was head of MI6’s intelligence operations in the United States to achieve an extraordinary position. After first meeting the Colonel in December 1916, Sir William Wiseman quickly established a close relationship with him, partly by hinting at his high contacts in the Foreign Office and partly by expressing views on the issues of the war and British politics that accorded with House’s. Gaining House’s confidence in this way greatly enhanced Wiseman’s status in London and he was soon centrally involved in the management of Anglo-American relations. His frequently hostile interpretations of Lloyd George’s motives, however, served to deepen House’s and Wilson’s distrust of the prime minister. Concerned to remedy what Wiseman saw as the ignorance and misunderstanding of the American situation prevalent in London, Wiseman submitted a lengthy memorandum on the subject that was circulated to the war cabinet. In this, he stressed Wilson’s dominance of U.S. policymaking, and that, while “the present Administration” was “pro-Ally and even pro-English,” it was “bitterly antagonistic to what they imagine to be ‘Tory England’; and in nine questions out of ten they would be in complete agreement with our advanced Radical party.”42 House and Wiseman cooperated in easing friction in Anglo-American relations, much of which arose from Wilson’s desire to maintain the appearance of an independent American war and Lloyd George’s attempts to enlist the United States in support not only of a coordinated strategy, but of one that accorded with his own views rather than that of the generals. Thus, Wilson was initially reluctant to accept the Balfour mission, led by Foreign Secretary Arthur J, Balfour, that came to Washington in late April to explain the war situation and the allies’ needs, fearing that “a great many” would see it “as an attempt to in some degree take charge of us as an assistant to Great Britain.” The allied missions (Balfour’s was accompanied by one from France) secured a commitment to the early dispatch of an American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under General John J. Pershing, but initially this was small and attached to the French rather than British army. Following military setbacks on both the western and eastern fronts in the early summer of 1917, Lloyd George told colleagues he wanted Wilson to come to Britain “and swear to support us.” Amazed that it should be thought that the president of the United States could be summoned to London like a dominion prime minister, Wiseman pointed out that “Americans American protests had caused Wilson to dismiss him as “a highly excitable invalid.” Page was regarded as having “gone native,” and by early 1917 Wilson seldom read his dispatches. W. B. Fowler, British-American Relations 1917–1918: The Role of Sir William Wiseman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 9–11. 42  Fowler, British-American Relations, 12–25, 61–2, 246–54; Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 609–13; Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 112.

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consider that Washington has become the diplomatic centre of the world.”43 Evidently anxious to exert his persuasive powers on Wilson, Lloyd George then raised the possibility of going to America himself—which no serving head of a British government had ever done. Tactfully, House suggested that the prime minister’s visit should be “reserved for an occasion when he would be very much needed.”44 Thwarted in his desire for a face-to-face meeting, Lloyd George sought to achieve his purposes through Lord Reading, a long-time ally now serving as Lord Chief Justice. The primary and ostensible purpose of Reading’s mission was to bring coherence and order to supply, and particularly financial, arrangements as Britain, on behalf of the allies, was making huge demands on the U.S. Treasury, but Lloyd George charged him also with the unannounced task of instigating a revision of Allied military strategy. At his first meeting with the president, Reading presented a long (and much rewritten) “private and personal” letter in which Lloyd George stressed how little had been achieved by three years of costly fighting on the western front. He argued that this pointed the need both for an allied body to “prepare a single coordinated plan” and for consideration of “an alternative plan of campaign” directed against Germany’s allies, Austria and Turkey.45 House had already been briefed on this proposal by Wiseman, who had passed on Lloyd George’s request that an American representative should “father the idea” as “he could not do this himself without risking his influence at home and in the Allied countries.” This devious approach caused House to regret again that “such men as Grey, Balfour and Cecil” were not in command, and he conveyed to Wilson the suspicion that Lloyd George was seeking American help in getting “the road to Egypt and India blocked.”46 Nevertheless, Wilson, fearing that “the American people would not be willing to continue an indefinite trench warfare,” requested that the War Department review the choice of France as “the theatre of operations of our army.” But, when this review emphatically reaffirmed that the AEF had to be deployed on the western front for both strategic and logistical reasons, Wilson, much more deferential to professional opinion than Lloyd George, accepted the judgment unquestioningly. The president’s response to Lloyd George’s plea for a joint body to determine strategy reflected his determination to retain unfettered control of U.S. policy. He did send House, together with a large staff, to an Inter-Allied conference in November-December 1917, but he insisted that the newly established Supreme War Council confine itself to strictly military matters,

 Wiseman, “Memorandum on Anglo-American Relations,” August 1917 in Wiseman papers.  Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 50, 77–8; Fowler, British-American Relations, 25–6, 66, 32; House to Wilson, 13 August 1917, PWW, 43, 451. 45  Lloyd George to Wilson, 3 September 1917 (handed to the president by Reading on 20 September), PWW, 44, 125–30. 46  House Diary, 16 September 1917; House to Wilson, 18 September 1917, PWW, 44, 200–3, 213. 43 44

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appointing a general (Tasker Bliss) as the U.S. representative.47 This, together with Wilson’s support of General Pershing’s firm determination to maintain the AEF as a separate command, kept alive fears in London that the United States might make a separate peace. In reality, however, Wilson had as great a political stake in victory as did Lloyd George. Consequently, times of crisis in the war effort fostered greater cooperation and convergence. The first of these occurred in late 1917 with the disastrous Italian defeat at Caporetto, the failure of the British Flanders offensive and, above all, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia and appeal for a general peace. This evoked both a political and a military response. The political response was embodied in the major speeches on war aims delivered by the two leaders within three days of each other in January 1918. There had been no coordination but the two statements were so similar that Wilson briefly considered abandoning his own until House assured him (rightly) that it “would so smother the Lloyd George speech that the latter would be forgotten and that he, the President, would once more become the spokesman for the liberals of the world.”48 There remained some significant differences between the two programs but in endorsing disarmament, a league of nations, and settlements based on the wishes of the inhabitants, the prime minister had come closer to the president’s position just as Wilson had implicitly accepted many of the Allies’ territorial claims in his Fourteen Points. The convergence was the product not only of the desire for unity between the cobelligerents but also of the common aim of rallying domestic support for the war by countering the Bolsheviks’ propaganda that it was being fought for imperialistic purposes and, if possible, weakening morale in the enemy countries by holding out the prospect of a moderate settlement.49 The crisis led the Supreme War Council to call for massive American reinforcement of the western front, amounting to twenty-four divisions by the end of June. Wilson’s commitment to victory was shown by his willing response to this request, though he did ask the secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, “Is such a programme possible?”50 This skeptical tone was understandable, given that at this point there were only about 150,000 American troops in France. The slow buildup was one of the aspects of the administration’s management of the war that was coming under severe criticism not only from Roosevelt and his allies  Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 91–7; Fowler, British-American Relations, 71–5, 81–2.  House diary, 9 January 1918, PWW, 45, 556–7. 49  For a detailed comparison of the two statements, see Sterling J. Kernek, “Distractions of Peace During War: The Lloyd George Government’s Reactions to Woodrow Wilson,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 65, (Philadelphia, 1975), 72–7. The greatest difference between the two speeches was with regard to Russia. Whereas Wilson called for the evacuation of all Russian territory, Lloyd George, willing to contemplate giving Germany a free hand in the east in return for a satisfactory settlement in the west, warned that “if the present rulers of Russia take action which is independent of their Allies we have no means of intervening to arrest the catastrophe which is assuredly befalling their country.” 50  Wilson to N. D. Baker, 4 December 1917 (emphasis in original), PWW, 45, 208. 47 48

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but also from both sides of the aisle in Congress. But this only increased Wilson’s reluctance to accede to the strong pressure from the Allies that the American troops should be incorporated as brigades or smaller units into their armies since such an affront to patriotic sentiment (unacceptable even to the Dominions) would, as he observed to Wiseman, “be taken as proof that the recent criticism of the War Department was justified.”51 Wilson’s sensitivity on this score was revealed when the Ludendorff offensive in March 1918 led Lloyd George to send an urgent public plea for American reinforcements that was included by Reading in a speech to the Lotus Club in New York. This apparent attempt to appeal over his head to the American people, via a largely Republican audience, so annoyed Wilson that he talked of recalling the recently appointed ambassador. He was mollified, however, when House secured a press statement from the prime minister that Wilson had done “everything possible to assist the Allies” and had “left nothing undone which would contribute thereto.”52 As the German offensives continued, the president agreed to the temporary allocation of U.S. units to the allied armies, and the War Department accelerated the flow of troops in a manner that surpassed all expectations; 1.8 million arrived in France between April and November. In June, the Supreme War Council called for a hundred U.S. divisions in 1919, a force of over four million men. House thought the target “stupid” but Wilson accepted it in good faith, which only increased his disgust when Lloyd George threatened to use the leverage provided by the British control of shipping to secure more of the American reinforcements for the British rather than the French front. “This is serious and—how characteristic after urging the 100 division programme!” Wilson wrote to Baker; “Would that we were dealing with responsible persons.”53 The specter of defeat had led to cooperation and the harmonization of policies but not to any perceptible enhancement of mutual esteem on the part of the two heads of government. As the tide of battle turned in September 1918, tensions over military matters faded away but were replaced by concern over how, and by whom, the peace would be shaped. Both Wilson and Lloyd George approached the question in a combative spirit. Retaining the progressive perspective, Wilson anticipated conflict with the governments of his cobelligerents over their imperialistic ambitions but expressed confidence that his call for a new world order had the support of “the plain people” in all countries. Lloyd George, like his Conservative colleagues, was concerned above all with Britain’s geopolitical interests. Oblivious of America’s different traditions and position in the world, 51  Sir William Wiseman to A. J. Balfour, 3 February 1918, PWW, 46, 231; Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 57–9, 115–24, 134–5; Fowler, British-American Relations, 127–36. 52  “That pockets Mr. Lloyd George for the moment,” Wilson remarked with satisfaction. House diary, 28 March 1918, 9 April 1918, PWW, 47, 185–6, 308. 53  Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 158–68,191–8; Fowler, British-American Relations, 144–54; David Lloyd George to Lord Reading, 14 April 1918; also 28 March, 29 March, 2 April, 9 April, 1918, PWW, 47, 338–41, 181–3, 203–5, 229–30, 307; Wilson to N. D. Baker, 9 August 1918, PWW, 49, 224.

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he floated the idea of “offering” Wilson trusteeships over Palestine and a German African colony in return for British control of oil-rich Mesopotamia and Persia. The prime minister particularly resented Wilson’s claim to shape the outcome of a victory to which the United States had contributed much less than Britain. As the president unilaterally responded to Germany’s request for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points, Lloyd George contemplated fighting on to “crush” Germany. After the War Cabinet (with the support of the military) rejected this course, attention turned to detailed consideration of where, if at all, the Fourteen Points impinged on British interests. The call for “an absolutely impartial adjustment of colonial claims” disturbed dominion prime ministers who felt entitled to captured German colonies, but it was Point 2 on freedom of the seas that caused most concern. On this, both leaders were initially intransigent with Wilson threatening to use America’s superior resources to out-build the Royal Navy and Lloyd George maintaining that he would be out of office in a week if he ceded Britain’s right to use the blockade weapon in time of war. But, after further heated exchanges at pre-armistice negotiations in Paris (which did nothing to improve House’s opinion of Lloyd George), an agreement was reached that the issue would be discussed at the peace conference “in light of the new conditions which have arisen in the course of the present war.”54 Once a reservation on this subject, and one on Germany’s liability for damage done to the civilian populations of the allies, had been agreed, Lloyd George led the way in persuading his colleagues and the French to accept the Fourteen Points as the basis of the armistice.55

Face-to-Face Over the Peace Between December 1918 and June 1919, Wilson and Lloyd George spent much more time in each other’s company than any other president and prime minister in history. That was because, in an unprecedented and unparalleled way, Wilson spent this whole period away from the United States (apart from two weeks in February–March) as he led the American delegation to the Paris peace conference. During these months of close contact, the relationship of the two men went through various phases. The initial phase was marked by cooperation and even a degree of amicability. When they first met in London prior to the conference, the acclaim Wilson had received from huge crowds everywhere he went in Europe had enhanced his political authority and enabled him to brush aside the Republican victory in 54  Lloyd George to House, 3 November 1918  in The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, IV (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), 190. 55  John A. Thompson, Woodrow Wilson (London: Longman, 2002), 190–1; David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 260–96; Fry, And Fortune Fled, 154–5, 159–61, 718; Woodward, Trial by Friendship, 208–15; Fowler, British-­ American Relations, 209–10, 222–7; Wilson to House, 4 November 1918. PWW, 51, 575; Arthur Walworth, America’s Moment: 1918: American Diplomacy at the End of World War I (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 54–65.

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the congressional elections. For his part, Lloyd George had recently won a lopsided majority for his conservative-dominated coalition after an election campaign in which he promised to demand an indemnity covering the whole cost of the war. This was contrary to the terms of the armistice—as Wilson evidently made clear when he met the prime minister and foreign secretary. Nevertheless, Lloyd George reported reassuringly to the cabinet about this first meeting. The president had given the impression that the League of Nations “was the only thing that he really cared much about,” and that if the British acceded to his wish that this was the first subject discussed at the conference, the settlement of other questions would be eased.56 The League of Nations thus became a joint project for the two governments, although this overlay somewhat different conceptions of its role and nature. As with Grey when he first pressed the idea on House, the attraction of the League to Lloyd George and most of the cabinet was that it would commit the United States to upholding the European settlement. Wilson, however, envisaged the League as transformative of the whole system of power politics and was anxious to avoid its appearing to be an instrument for Anglo-American hegemony. In conversation at a formal dinner, the president stressed that the British “must not speak of us who come over here as cousins … Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the United States”; the two countries could be brought together only by “community of ideals and of interests.”57 The same desire to keep a certain distance may explain Wilson’s failure to pay the tribute that the prime minister felt was due to “the appalling sacrifices which had been sustained by the youth of [the] Empire in the cause of international right” or to express comradeship with “men who had been partners in a common enterprise and had so narrowly escaped a common danger.”58 This helped to form the impression among British leaders that Wilson was a cold fish. None ever established with him the emotional rapport that several felt with House. Even Lord Robert Cecil, who came closest to sharing his vision for the League of Nations (and had been the principal author of Lloyd George’s liberal war aims statement), concluded after working closely with the president in drawing up the Covenant that “he supports idealistic causes without being in the least an idealist himself.”59

 Draft Minutes of Meeting of Imperial War Cabinet, 30 December 1918, PWW, 53, 558–69.  Memo by Frank Worthington, Deputy Chief Censor, 28 December 1918, PWW, 53, 574. 58  David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties (London, 1938): I, 181–2. For another interpretation of Wilson’s reluctance to pay such tributes or visit battlefields, see T.  Christopher Jespersen, “Pride, Prejudice and Transatlantic Relations: The Case of Woodrow Wilson Reconsidered,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 8, no. 3 (October 2010): 213–23. For the much warmer allied feelings towards Theodore Roosevelt, see Michael Patrick Cullinane, “Theodore Roosevelt in the Eyes of the Allies,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 15 no. 1 (January 2016), 80–101. 59  Cecil diary, 6 February 1919, PWW, 54, 514. 56 57

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Nevertheless, the first encounter between the two leaders appears to have gone well according to the accounts they each gave of it. The president told a confidant that Lloyd George and Balfour had been “pleasant and seemingly willing to aid him in bringing about a program for the Peace Conference that would make for a minimum of friction.”60 Likewise, Lloyd George recollected finding Wilson “genial and friendly,” and without “the professorial condescension towards young learners that I had been led to expect.”61 This affability continued in Paris, and, by the end of January, Wilson is reported as having succumbed a little to Lloyd George’s charm, “chatting away cheerfully as they went in and out of meetings and even going out to the occasional lunch or dinner.”62 Such relations were eased by the absence of serious conflict at this stage. Lloyd George joined Wilson in opposing the military intervention against the Bolsheviks advocated by Winston Churchill and the French. Over the opposition of the French, they cooperated in setting up the mandates system under the League of Nations, and they reached a solution acceptable to them both for the terms on which particular ex-German colonies and former Ottoman territories were to be governed. On the League of Nations commission, British and American representatives united both in resisting the pressure from France and Belgium for the League to have a standing military organization and in sidestepping the Japanese request for a clause affirming racial equality. Thus, Wilson was able to take an agreed Covenant with him when he left the conference in midFebruary to attend to legislative business in Washington. On the president’s return a month later, the two leaders were brought into even more intensive contact by the establishment of the Council of Four (which included French premier Georges Clemenceau and the Italian prime minister). Wilson’s position had been weakened by strong Senate opposition to the League, which compelled him to seek amendments to the Covenant including one specifically recognizing the Monroe Doctrine. Lloyd George sought to exploit this need by making acceptance of such an amendment conditional on an Anglo-American naval agreement that recognized the preeminent position of the Royal Navy—something to which he was more committed than were many of his colleagues (though not than his admirals). At the same time, the Fourteen Points were being challenged by French demands that Germany should lose territory in the west and by the claims of both Britain and France for reparations that went beyond compensation for damage. Lloyd George was at least as firm as Wilson in resisting French attempts to detach the Rhineland from Germany but less so over the sovereignty of the Saar. In a row over this latter issue, both Clemenceau and Wilson lost their tempers. At lunch afterward, Lloyd George told House that Wilson’s unexpected display of anger had given him “a wholesome respect for the President.” Beleaguered and also  Diary of Dr. Cary Grayson, 27 December 1918, PWW, 53, 520.  Lloyd George, Truth about the Peace Treaties, 179–80. 62  Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), 153, 40. 60 61

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suffering from influenza, Wilson implicitly threatened to withdraw from the conference a week later by ordering that his ship be made ready. But this gesture was poorly received at home, and Wilson had too large a stake in a successful peace to carry out the threat. To the consternation of his fellow Commissioners, he agreed to Lloyd George’s proposal that Britain and the United States should make a bilateral treaty commitment (outside the framework of the League) to aid France in the event of attack. He followed this up by making major concessions on the reparations issue that were contrary to the advice of his financial experts—accepting war pensions as a legitimate claim and then abandoning the demand for a fixed sum and/or a time limit for payments. The president was aware that the issue aroused little political interest in the United States, whereas Lloyd George made no secret of the fact that for him (and Clemenceau) it was politically imperative to secure recognition of the Allies’ large claims for compensation, even though he realized that Germany would not be able to pay the sums demanded.63 It was in the final phase of the conference that Lloyd George and Wilson became most irritated with each other. This was firstly over Italy’s demands for the Dalmatian coast and Fiume, both of which went well beyond the “clearly recognizable lines of nationality” called for in Point 9. But the Dalmatian claims (though not Fiume) had been promised to Italy in the secret treaty by which the allies had secured her entry into the war. With his territorial experts warning that yielding to such “old-world diplomacy” would discredit the League of Nations, Wilson adamantly opposed the Italian demands. Observing that “President Wilson has in the course of these negotiations gone much further in our direction than we had at first thought possible,” Lloyd George joined Clemenceau in attempting to persuade the Italians to give way. When they proved obdurate, Wilson issued a public appeal to the Italian people. This rekindled the enthusiasm of his liberal supporters in Britain and America but aroused a storm of protest in Italy and was condemned by conservatives as a shocking breach of diplomatic decorum. In face of this criticism, Wilson appealed to Clemenceau and Lloyd George to make public their support of his position, warning that if American public opinion saw the United States as isolated, it would undermine support for the League of Nations. In response, Lloyd George, who was more sympathetic than Wilson to the idea that losses in war created a legitimate claim for compensation, spoke of “a growing feeling that Europe was being bullied by the United States of America.” Insisting that Britain was bound to honour the Treaty of London, he refused to question its terms in public. Wilson saw this as the breaking of an earlier understanding and confirmation that Lloyd George was “as slippery as an eel.”64 63  House diary, 24 and 28 March 1919, PWW, 56, 208, 349–50; J. P. Tumulty to C. T. Grayson, 9 April 1919, PWW, 57, 177; conversation, March 28, 1919, conference, 5 April 1919; Paul Mantoux, The Deliberations of the Council of Four (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 51–2, 146–53. 64  Isaiah Bowman and others to Wilson, 17 April 1919; British-French-Italian meeting, 21 April 1919; Clemenceau and Lloyd George to Italian government, 23 April 1919; Wilson statement on

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During this dispute over the terms of the treaty with Austria, preparations were being made for presentation of a draft treaty to Germany. Publication of the terms dismayed British and American liberals in Paris as well as at home, while the indignant response of the German delegates aroused fears that further military action would be needed to secure their signature. Lloyd George, who had expressed anxieties that too severe a peace would breed future wars in his Fontainebleau Memorandum of 25 March, obtained the unanimous support of an enlarged British Empire delegation for revision of the terms regarding the German-Polish border, occupation of the Rhineland, admission of Germany to the League of Nations, and reparations. Predictably, Clemenceau firmly opposed all these concessions (and observed pointedly that none of them impinged on the interests of the British Empire). But Wilson, too, was reluctant to make changes. With his attention focused on his forthcoming battle for Senate approval of the League of Nations, he was conscious that the treaty had been well received by American opinion and was impatient of further delay. Although he was persuaded to accept a plebiscite in Upper Silesia (which had been given to Poland) and made another attempt to secure a fixed sum for reparations, he stood with Clemenceau in resisting more substantial concessions. To the American delegation, he made no secret of his irritation with Lloyd George and the British: the time to consider all these questions was when we were writing the treaty, and it makes me a little tired for people to come and say now that they are afraid the Germans won’t sign, and their fear is based upon things that they insisted upon at the time of the writing of the treaty; that makes me very sick … They ought to have been rational to begin with and then they would not have needed to have funked at the end.65

Despite the ill feeling generated by Lloyd George’s attempt to meet some of the German objections to the treaty, the three leaders came together in facing the prospective need for further military action to force its acceptance. And, after the signing ceremony at Versailles, they parted with expressions of mutual congratulation and goodwill. As Wilson became engaged in his battle to secure Senate approval of the Treaty, the Lloyd George government quietly endorsed

the Adriatic question, 23 April 1919; Ambassador T. N. Page to American mission in Paris, 24 April 1919; Tumulty, George Lansbury, Bernard Baruch, Margot Asquith to Wilson, 24 April, 1919; Council of Four, May 3, 1919; Grayson diary, April 23, 25, 1919; Cecil diary, May 2. 1919, PWW, 57, 432–3, 536–42; PWW, 58. 86–90, 5–8, 91–5, 368–78, 3, 113, 360. For discussion of whether there was such an understanding, see Seth P. Tillman, Anglo-American Relations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 326–7. 65  Discussion with the American delegation, 3 June 1919, PWW, 60, 71. Tumulty had informed Wilson of how well received the treaty had been by American opinion and warned him against yielding to Germany’s pleas for “a softer peace.” Tumulty to Wilson, 8 May 1919, 22 May 1919, PWW, 58, 561, 59, 419.

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his refusal to accept the Lodge reservations.66 In the end, the common goal of a meaningful American commitment to European security submerged all personal differences and mutual irritations.

Conclusion Although there is no historical study that focuses directly on it, the relationship between Wilson and Lloyd George naturally figures in many of the enormous number of works on the First World War and its aftermath. That the two leaders were partners in making both war and peace and had values as well as objectives in common is generally recognized, but at the personal level the emphasis has been on the differences of temperament and the friction between them. The question is how significant these were. In his magisterial study of Anglo-­ American relations at the peace conference, Seth P. Tillman observes that such relations were most harmonious “at the level just below the summit”—that is, between House and Cecil or among the expert advisors attached to both delegations.67 But it would be wrong to see the personalities of the leaders as a significant source of friction and conflict in itself. Both men saw continuing partnership as essential for the achievement of their purposes and made concessions in order to sustain it. Indeed, Wilson overrode the advice of his delegation not only over the security treaty with France and the inclusion of war pensions in the reparations bill, but also in eventually agreeing that the Kaiser should be put on trial. The limitations on the degree of cooperation arose from differences of national interest as these were interpreted by the dominant political forces in the two countries. Agreement would have been easier on one basis if Theodore Roosevelt had persuaded his countrymen to back the allies unequivocally and on another if a Liberal government had retained power in London. But the victory in 1916 of progressive liberalism in the United States and of conservative nationalism in Britain was bound to produce friction. On the whole, both Wilson and Lloyd George did more to mitigate this than to exacerbate it. In any event, they presided over the most effective working relationship between the two governments until the Second World War.

66  Grey’s letter to The Times in January 1920 arguing that acceptance of the Lodge reservations was a price worth paying for American membership of the League of Nations has sometimes been seen as evidence that the reservations were seen as acceptable by the British government. As Tillman shows, this was not the view taken in 1919. Tillman, Anglo-American Relations, 396–9. 67  Tillman, Anglo-American Relations, 69.

CHAPTER 6

Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt and Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain: Amelioration of Rivalry in the 1930s B. J. C. McKercher

Macdonald and Hoover. National Photo Company, 1929. [glass negative], Library of Congress © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_6

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Whereas the 1920s saw Anglo-American relations suffused by naval rivalry, the dichotomy of reparations imposed on Germany versus British war debts, and trade and financial competition, the 1930s differed. The first years saw increasing co-operation over naval policy, and trade policies overtook debt as the primary concern. The reason lay with the Great Depression. By 1933, in Europe and East Asia, different constellations of power were forming. American governments—first, Herbert Hoover’s administration and then Franklin Roosevelt’s—had maintained isolationism by avoiding political or security arrangements with other powers. Successive British prime ministers—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain—were increasingly concerned about European and East Asian security. Largely for Britain and America, their relationship with the other was of secondary importance. After seeking to work with Washington in fits and starts since 1930, London by 1937 had accepted the United States for what it was: a regional power whose international economic and financial advantages in the 1920s had melted in the heat of the Depression and whose leaders lacked the will and military resources to meet emerging threats to international security. On their side, Hoover and Roosevelt concentrated on overcoming the domestic crises of social insecurity and high unemployment. They limited their forays into international politics. Nonetheless, the roots of Anglo-American rivalry disappeared by 1939 and a basis for the special relationship developed. Importantly, despite what American historians and others argue, the United States had not replaced Britain as the world’s leading power by 1918.1 It acquired decided wealth because of the war, augmented by American bondholders who received vast debt payments from the Allied powers throughout the 1920s.2 New York emerged as a major money market relative to 1914, and American industrial-agricultural production was profound.3 Yet, crude economic strength did not translate into international power or its 1  Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michael H.  Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8, 23–102; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), xix, 274–343. For a more nuanced but still economic determinist assessment, see Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916–1931 (London: Penguin, 2014). 2  Robert Self, Britain, America and the War Debt Controversy: The Economic Diplomacy of an Unspecial Relationship, 1917–1941 (London: Routledge, 2006), 15–59. 3  Charles R. Geisst, Wall Street. A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 146–89; Taylor Jaworski and Price V. Fishback, “Two World Wars in American Economic History” in Louis P. Cain, Price V. Fishback, and Paul W. Rhode (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, Volume II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 391–417.

B. J. C. McKercher (*) Department of History, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

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handmaiden, an effective foreign policy. Certainly, compared to its 1760 highpoint as the first industrial nation, Britain’s economic and financial strength had diminished by 1919 relative to the United States that, in the 1920s, possessed the world’s leading industrial economy.4 Nonetheless, British economic strength devolved more from its financial assets and City of London entrepreneurial skills than manufacturing. With the Royal Navy girding its Empire and a worldwide network of bases, Britain was the world’s leading and only global power in 1914.5 Four years later, still the only global power with overseas bases, Britain stood economically and financially stronger than it had in 1850— its gross domestic product eight and one-half times larger.6 These economic, financial, and military sinews underscored Britain’s great power status. Concerning the British and Imperial economy’s indispensable factor—trade and free trade since 1846—the United States only drew even by the 1920s. The Depression prevented it from overtaking Britain in this important indicator of economic strength.7 Consequently, the argument that pre-eminence is pinned to economic hegemony is ill-conceived. Economic waning does not necessarily produce political and strategic decline. Granted, Britain’s economy was smaller than its American counterpart when the Great War ended, but it remained decidedly influential, stronger than 70  years before. The issue was not simply the possession of wealth but its use. In the 1920s, British leaders willingly involved themselves in international politics, especially in the League of Nations. Most did not share its universalist nostrums to maintain international peace and security, but public opinion did. British governments accordingly genuflected to League ideals in policy but, in reality, treated the organisation as another diplomatic tool. Along with League involvement, British leaders undertook regional security agreements, for instance the 1925 Locarno treaty where Britain jointly guaranteed the Franco-­ German border determined by the Versailles treaty.8 They maintained Royal Navy supremacy for national, Imperial, and trade defence; the air force and 4  Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1994), 1–233. See also, Table 2 in Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History 11, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 275; B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750–1970 (London: Palgrave, 1975), 353–483. 5  P.  J. Cain and A.  G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 2016). 6  Mitchell, Historical Statistics, 828–9. See also A.  G. Hopkins, American Empire. A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 443–93. 7  Circa 25 percent of Britain’s national wealth by the late 1920s derived from external sources, including exports, re-exports, and gold and silver bullion sales—approximately $6.5  billion. America’s total was in the order of 5 percent to 6 percent, circa $6.4 billion. See B. J. C. McKercher, “Wealth, Power, and the New International Order: Britain and the American Challenge in the 1920s,” Diplomatic History 12, no. 4 (October 1988): 433. 8  Jon Jacobson, “Locarno, Britain and the Security of Europe” in Gaynor Johnson (ed.), Locarno Revisited: European Diplomacy, 1920–1929 (London: Routledge, 2004), 8–22.

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army had sufficient funds to carry out the government’s mandate in foreign and Imperial policy. Importantly, London had the will to employ Britain’s power resources to protect its manifold interests. The Americans did not. In China, in 1927, for instance, when anti-imperial rioting erupted in Hankow, Baldwin’s second government despatched 10,000 marines to restore order.9

Naval Rivalry Naval rivalry proved the most emotive issue in Anglo-American relations in the 1920s. In 1921, post-war problems in  China—its central political authority appeared weak—tied to American apprehension on expanding Japanese power saw Warren Harding’s administration seek to tie naval arms control to East Asian security. Little selflessness existed. Washington could better safeguard the Philippines, America’s Western Pacific colony, and East Asian stability would improve American trade and commercial expansion while reducing defence spending.10 Harding and his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, could also outshine the League with an arms limitation agreement. The major naval powers with Chinese interests—Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—received invitations to meet at Washington for a multilateral conference. China would attend, along with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal—smaller powers with interests in China. From 12 November 1921 to 6 February 1922, the Washington Naval Conference fashioned three treaties: a ten-year five-power agreement limiting the largest naval battle fleets to capital ships over 10,000-tons; a four-power Pacific pact; and a nine-power guarantee of Chinese sovereignty. The naval treaty restricted American, British, Japanese, French, and Italian capital ships in a ratio of, respectively, 5:5:3:1.75:1.75. The United States and Britain agreed to 500,000 tons each; Japan would be limited to 300,000 tons; and France and Italy to 175,000 tons each. With US Navy commitments in the western hemisphere and Pacific, and the Royal Navy guarding Britain’s global trade and Imperial defence sea lanes, America and Britain received a total higher than Japan. Reducing fleet size by retiring some vessels, each power would discontinue new capital ship construction for ten years. The other treaties offered apparent stability for China and the Pacific. The nine-power treaty, signed by China and the other eight participants, assured Chinese territorial integrity with two stipulations: Japan’s ascendency in Manchuria, and Peking could not discriminate against foreign powers pursuing economic interests in China. This second condition constituted an American gain, sanctioning the “Open Door” policy, an 1899 agreement that all powers would allow equal access to trade ports and investment within their spheres of 9  William Roger Louis, British Strategy in the Far East 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 131–3. 10  Lawrence Lenz, Power and Policy: America’s First Steps to Superpower, 1889–1922 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 225–44.

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influence in China. The four-power pact—Britain, America, Japan, and France with its Pacific colonies—accepted the 1921 strategic status quo in the Pacific; no new naval bases constructed or existing ones fortified; thus, no British bases east of Singapore or American ones west of Pearl Harbor. It embodied a compromise for Japan’s smaller naval building ratio, giving the Imperial Japanese Navy an advantage in the Western Pacific. Critical in the negotiations were British and American aims. Although both powers wanted to augment East Asian and Western Pacific stability, Secretary of State Hughes secured a domestic political victory and reduced naval expenditure. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s David Lloyd George saw financial savings from a “one-Power standard” for capital ships—Royal Navy strength equalling the next greatest navy, that of  the United States.11 And as London saw the usefulness of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance fading through Tokyo’s policies after 1914, a new regional political structure was needed.12 Whilst the Washington treaties seemed a decided advance, unanswered problems remained. Hughes pursued American naval limitation ignoring his naval advisors who saw a disadvantage for the U.S. Navy in East Asia. American and Japanese interpretations of the “Open Door” varied. Reacting to a civilian-­ led Japanese delegation, elements in the Imperial Japanese Navy wanted a larger building ratio. Yet, economically unable to meet American or British naval construction and reflecting British views, Japan could not rely on the Anglo-Japanese alliance to enhance its East Asian interests.13 Importantly, a building ratio for warships below 10,000  tons proved impossible, primarily cruisers crucial for Royal Navy defence of sea lanes and imposing blockade. The treaty simply limited cruiser  displacement and armament: 10,000-tons, 8-inch guns. The cruiser question poisoned Anglo-American relations in the late 1920s, and its resolution set in train the slow amelioration of the relationship by 1939. In March 1926, the League established a commission to prepare for a World Disarmament Conference. Locarno and the Washington treaties provided systems of security in both Europe and East Asia that could facilitate arms limitation, and, under Section V of the Versailles treaty, the victor powers promised to disarm to Germany’s level once the international situation calmed. Washington participated, although Harding’s vice president and successor Calvin Coolidge genuflected to American isolationists and navalists by remarking, “Participation in the work of the preparatory commission involves no

11  G.  H. Bennett, The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity 1919–22: Naval and Foreign Policy Under Lloyd George (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 125–44. 12  I.  H. Nish, Alliance in Decline: A Study in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1908–1923 (London: Bloomsbury, 1972), 391–7. 13   Sadao Asada, “Japan’s ‘Special Interests’ and the Washington Conference, 1921–22,” American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (October 1961): 62–71.

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commitment with respect to attendance upon any further conference and conferences on reduction and limitation of armaments.”14 The Preparatory Commission met first in May 1926 but, by March 1927, accomplished little.15 Terrene and maritime powers divided: France and its European allies were apprehensive about German revanchism; Britain, America, and Japan sought to protect their naval strength. The terrene powers wanted reserve forces excluded when determining their armies’ numbers—Versailles denied reserves to Germany. The maritime powers sought limiting all warships, even those disregarded in the Washington treaty, by tonnage per class—capital ships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliary vessels. With the smaller naval powers, France pursued an overall tonnage for each navy; they could then concentrate building specific vessels, probably submarines.16 To outmanoeuvre the League and increase government cost-cutting, Coolidge called for separate naval talks to extend Washington treaty ratios to warships below 10,000 tons.17 With the forthcoming 1928 presidential elections, his reputation with American electors would be burnished by securing international arms control outside the League.18 London and Tokyo attended, but, given mutual naval fears in the Mediterranean, Paris and Rome declined. Nevertheless, the major naval powers calculated that a separate agreement would find favour with the Preparatory Commission. The Coolidge naval conference convened at Geneva in June-August 1927. Whilst approving destroyer, submarine, and auxiliary warship restrictions, cruiser limitation proved impossible and impassioned.19 Baldwin’s government required 70 cruisers: 15 heavy (10,000 tons with 8-inch guns, Washington 14  Calvin Coolidge, Message to Congress, 4 January 1926  in U.S.  State Department, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States [hereafter FRUS], 1926 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1941), 42–4. 15  Except where noted, this paragraph is based on Report to the Council on the Work of the First Session of the Commission held at Geneva from May 8th to 26th 1926 (May 1926), League of Nations Document [hereafter LND, League of Nations Archives, Palais des Nations, Geneva], C.30. 1926. IX; Report of the Sub-Commission A (December 1926), LND C.739.M.278.1926. IX; SubCommission B, Report No.1 (30 November 1926), LND C.P.D.29; Sub-Committee B, Report No. II (17 March 1927), LND C.P.D.39; Sub-Committee B, Report No. III (March 17, 1927), LND C.P.D.40. 16  Carolyn J. Kitching, Britain and the Geneva Disarmament Conference. A Study in International History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 26–50; B. J. C. McKercher, “Of Horns and Teeth: The Preparatory Commission and the World Disarmament Conference, 1926–1934” in B.  J. C.  McKercher (ed.), Arms Limitation and Disarmament: Restraints on War (Westport: Praeger, 1992), 177–8. 17  B.  J. C.  McKercher, The Second Baldwin Government and the United States, 1924–1929: Attitudes and Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 56–7. 18  On Coolidge and domestic issues, see Richard W. Fanning, Peace and Disarmament. Naval Rivalry & Arms Control 1922–1933 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 1–25. 19  Carolyn J. Kitching, “Sunk Before We Started? Anglo-American Rivalry at the Coolidge Naval Conference, 1927” in Keith Hamilton and Edward Johnson (eds.), Arms and Disarmament in Diplomacy (Portland OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 91–111; McKercher, Second Baldwin Government, 59–84.

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treaty limits) and 55 light (7500 tons maximum with 6-inch guns).20 Coolidge’s administration desired 25 heavy and 20 light.21 The Japanese looked to increase their Washington treaty building ratio for this vessel to 350,000 tons. Failure came from Anglo-American stalemate. First, the British championed the doctrine of “absolute need,” protecting trade and Imperial sea lanes determining their total; the Americans asserted a doctrine of “relative need,” a malleable limit determined by Britain’s requirements.22 But Washington’s ceiling was 45 vessels. The difference involved the Royal Navy’s ability to enforce future maritime belligerent rights—blockade—whilst the U.S. Navy safeguarded the freedom of the seas. Second, despite Coolidge’s invitation, Washington did not pursue preliminary consultations. A third problem lay in Anglo-American naval advisors having greater latitude in discussions that, unlike civilian dominance at the Washington Conference, exacerbated opinion. Finally, seeing the conference as an important one, London and Tokyo despatched high-ranking political leaders: Britain, Lord Cecil, a senior Cabinet minister, and William Bridgeman, the first lord of the Admiralty; Japan sent Admiral Saito Makatō, a former colonial governor, and Ishii Kikujirō, a former foreign minister and the ambassador at Paris. As Coolidge’s secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, declined to go, American Preparatory Commission diplomats were led instead by Hugh Gibson, the ambassador at Brussels. Whilst authorities in London and Washington attempted to stymie post-­ conference public disfavour, Coolidge reacted by suddenly declaring his decision not to seek the presidency in 1928. The Americans remained in Geneva, the Preparatory Commission resumed, and the terrene-maritime power deadlock continued, but in summer 1928, an Anglo-French disarmament initiative aggravated Anglo-American relations. In private conversations, Austen Chamberlain, Baldwin’s foreign secretary, and the French foreign minister Aristide Briand produced a proposal to overcome the Commission stalemate: The powers would not count trained reserves as part of the French Army; France would acquiesce in naval limitation by tonnage per class.23 Before getting the other powers’ views—this compromise constituted a negotiating tactic—the Quai d’Orsay disclosed it to journalists. Not alone, Berlin and Washington bitterly opposed it. On 11 November, with Hoover just elected

20  Egerton [Director of Plans, Admiralty] memorandum, 27 March 1927, ADM [Admiralty Records, The National Archives, Kew], 116/3371/2807. 21  USN General Board, “General Board Report for Delegates to Geneva,” 1 June 1927, U.S.  Navy General Board [Massey Library, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston]  RG 80.7.3, Series 5, Box 12. 22  McKercher, Second Baldwin Government, 71–2. 23  Gaynor Johnson, “Austen Chamberlain and Britain’s Relations with France” in Glyn Stone and Thomas G. Otte (eds.), Anglo-French Relations since the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2008), 127–8; McKercher, Second Baldwin Government, 150–8.

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president, Coolidge publicly advocated new building to ensure U.S.  Navy supremacy.24 Even so, Baldwin’s government endorsed strategic fealty to belligerent rights over the winter of 1928–1929, and the premier readied to travel to Washington for discussions with Hoover.25 Not wanting naval competition, Hoover had Gibson propose a naval “yardstick” in Geneva: harmonising Britain’s demand for more light cruisers with America’s relative demand for heavy ones.26 Anglo-American compromise appeared promising, especially as the Washington naval treaty needed renewal by 1931. However, Baldwin’s Conservatives lost the June 1929 election; Labour’s Ramsay  MacDonald entered Downing Street, and, throughout summer 1929, naval negotiations continued through telegram and despatch. MacDonald went to Washington in September. Avoiding obstinate naval experts, he and Hoover produced the foundation for a settlement: full Anglo-American parity, 50 Royal Navy cruisers, and American acknowledgement of more Royal Navy light cruisers than allowed the U.S. Navy. Sir Esme Howard, the ambassador at Washington, and Foreign Office experts persuaded MacDonald to accept parity; their assessment pointed to Washington never building to its agreed level.27 American amour-­ propre demanded only paper parity. Invitations to the other Washington naval treaty powers came with MacDonald still in America: the London naval conference would begin in January 1930. After MacDonald left, communications between the two leaders continued.28 Hoover and Secretary of State Henry Stimson frequently consulted each other and restricted Navy Department participation.29 Anglo-­ American co-operation underlay the naval conference—21 January to 22 April 1930.30 Learning from 1927, Hoover sent Stimson as delegation head, Charles Francis Adams III, the navy secretary, and two senior Republican and Democratic senators to guarantee bi-partisan backing for treaty approval; and

24  Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Observance of the Tenth Anniversary of the Armistice under the Auspices of the American Legion, 11 November 1928, American Presidency Project (http:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu). 25  B.J.C. McKercher, “From Enmity to Cooperation: The Second Baldwin Government and the Improvement of Anglo-American Relations, November 1928–June 1929,” Albion 24, no. 1 (1992): 64–87. 26  Atherton telegrams (98, 99) to secretary of state, both 24 April 1929, both HHPP [Herbert Hoover Presidential Papers, West Branch, IA] Box 998. 27  B.J.C.  McKercher, Transition of Power. Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33, 38, 48–50. 28  For example, MacDonald to Hoover, 19 November 1929, Hoover to MacDonald, 3 December 1929, HHPP 999. 29  USN General Board memoranda, 10 June, 23 August, 28 September 1929, Hoover to Stimson, 17 September 1929, Hoover to Buchanan, 24 September 1929, with enclosures, HHPP 998. 30  John Maurer and Christopher Bell (eds.), At the Crossroads between Peace and War: The London Naval Conference of 1930 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 2014).

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both powers’ naval advisors remained marginalised.31 At London, MacDonald and Stimson conferred frequently to eliminate problems: Franco-Italian rivalry, Japan’s cruiser demands, and limiting capital ships.32 The London naval treaty allowed Anglo-American naval parity, more Royal Navy light cruisers, U.S. advantage in heavy ones, and a Japanese cruiser ratio of 5:3.5. The Washington treaty now went to 1936, and, with the MacDonald-Stimson partnership, Anglo-American naval rivalry disappeared. Britain’s American experts had accurately gauged the Americans: they would be satisfied with paper equality and not build to their allocated levels.33 Here Hoover is crucial. He learnt that with better shipyards and cheaper labour, Britain could construct cruisers for far less than the United States: “We cannot get parity by naval building; the UK can build for ½ our cost and will continue to build as long as we do.”34 Still, conference success hid wider problems. Japanese hardliners reckoned their smaller ratio strategically unfavourable—they determined to expand the Imperial Navy.35 The lack of American will, seen with Hoover wanting to limit naval spending, started the U.S. Navy’s gradual strategic wane relative to the British and Japanese. Moreover, U.S. and British limitations did not allow for confronting emerging rivals, the situation after March 1935 when German rearmament began.

War Debts and Reparations The dichotomy of reparations versus British war debts to America actually had a smooth beginning. At the Paris Peace Conference, the major powers failed to determine the total reparations that Germany and its allies  owed; an Allied Reparations Commission was thus set up. Regardless, at Paris, President Woodrow Wilson denied the importance of reparations to Washington and rejected any connection between reparations and Allied war debts.36 Whilst his Treasury had distributed Allied war loans, the monies arose from war bonds sold to private American investors; Washington could not abandon them.

31  See Jones “Comment on the Treaty of London, nd,” Jones [Admiral Hilary Jones Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC] 4. 32  For example, Stimson diary, with memorandum, “Conversation with the Prime Minister of Great Britain,” both 17 January 1930, Stimson [Henry Stimson Papers, Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT] 12; MacDonald diary, 17 January 1930, MacDonald [J.R. MacDonald Papers, The National Archives, Kew] PRO 30/69/1753. 33  For instance, the London treaty allowed the U.S. Navy 25 heavy cruisers, the RN 15. In 1936, Britain had 14 built and two building; the United States, 15 and two. The same American deficiency is true for other classes of warship. See Francis E.  McMurtrie (ed.), Janes’ Fighting Ships (1936). 34  Unsigned memorandum [in Hoover’s hand], nd [likely summer 1929], HHPP 998. 35  Sadao Asada, “The London Conference and the Tragedy of the Imperial Japanese Navy” in Maurer and Bell, London Naval Conference, 89–134. 36  Wilson to Lloyd George, 5 May 1919, Arthur S. Link (ed.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, 1987): 58, 446–8.

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American unwillingness to tie together war debts and reparations persisted into Hoover’s administration. London proposed cancelling Allied debts owed Britain in August 1922 to convince Harding’s administration about overall cancellation. It did not work. Hence, the Allies negotiated debt arrangements with Washington, began paying, and used some reparations proceeds to fund these expenditures. Baldwin, the chancellor of the Exchequer and an iron and steel industrialist, led a British delegation to the United States in early 1923 to negotiate a settlement. In difficult but not rancorous discussions with Washington’s World War Foreign Debt Commission and respecting the debts as private loans, he said his approach was “as businessmen seeking a business solution of what is fundamentally a business problem.”37 Overcoming Cabinet opposition, Baldwin saw agreement where Britain would repay $4.6  billion, including interest, by 1986. Payment would be gold. Although discomfiture existed in Britain about American rapacity, Baldwin and other leaders recognised the British obligation to pay.38 In the first years of peace, Germany suffered rising inflation and high unemployment that Weimar politicians contended came from large reparation payments—132 billion gold marks including commodities like timber and coal.39 When Berlin did not meet its December 1922 payment, French and Belgian forces immediately occupied the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial core, taking commodities and  its manufactures to compensate for payments and deliberately weaken Germany. Britain and America joined to force out the FrancoBelgians and save Germany’s economy.40 An argument exists that this co-operation produced a Pax Anglo-Americana that rather than the unworkable Versailles treaty constituted the “real” peace settlement. Under Anglo-­ American hegemony, this “unfinished transatlantic peace order” functioned equitably into the late 1920s.41 This view is wide of the mark. Each English-­ speaking power sought its own interests. London required an economically and politically stable Germany in Europe for trade and reducing British unemployment: pre-war Germany was Britain’s foremost European customer. For Washington, European economic and political stability would guarantee war debt outflows and increase trade and investment. Under Anglo-American pressure and as Coolidge’s isolationist administration eschewed an intergovernmental approach, an international group of 37  World War Foreign Debt Commission, Minutes of the World War Foreign Debt Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927), 90–2. Also see Combined Annual Reports, With Additional Information Regarding Foreign Debts Due the United States, Fiscal Years, 1922, 1923, 1924 1925 and 1926 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927), 30–47. 38  Self, War Debt Controversy, 34–59; Tooze, Deluge, 442–7. 39  Gerald D. Feldman, Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Part IV; Winfried Lampe, Bankbetrieb in Krieg und Inflation: Deutsche Grossbanken in den Jahren 1914 bis 1923 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), chaps. 4 and 5. 40  C.  Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); E. Y. O’Riordan, Britain and the Ruhr Crisis (Houndmills, NY: Palgrave, 2001). 41  Cohrs, Unfinished Peace, 154–84, 259–79, 281–571.

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bankers headed by American Charles Dawes met to resolve the Franco-German crisis; it began work early in 1924. By November, the Dawes Committee recommended Franco-Belgian withdrawal from the Ruhr; Allied supervision of a restructured German national bank and other state corporations; a new German currency; and beginning at 1 billion marks, yearly reparations payments increasing to 2.5 billion by 1929 in payments from new sources like excise taxes. It also recommended Anglo-American backing for an 800-million-mark German loan. Although the Franco-Belgian occupation ended with Locarno, approval of the Dawes Plan ended German economic and political flux and, importantly, Germany began receiving Wall Street loans.42 In 1929, because Berlin  complained about the undecided end of Dawes disbursements and the ongoing Allied Rhineland occupation—the latter to guarantee that Germany honoured its Versailles restrictions—another bankers group emerged. Headed by Owen Young, a Coolidge confidant and Dawes Committee veteran, this body proposed to lessen German reparations to 121 billion gold marks payable by 1988—circa 2 billion annually.43 It was tied to terminating Allied involvement in German finances and created a new $300  million loan; all Allied occupation troops would leave—the Americans had already done so in 1923. The Allied powers endorsed Young’s Plan at the two-part Hague conference in late 1929-early 1930 with some adjustments— Britain’s reparations increased.44 British and other war debt outflows continued, although the British increasingly saw the Americans as grasping and lacking understanding of the huge cost of blood and treasure that the Allies had expended in 1914–1918. Epithets like “dirty swine” pepper government documents and the “US” converted into “Uncle Shylock” was more public.45 When Coolidge’s administration sought to recover American private claims after 1924 stemming from Britain’s wartime blockade—which the Foreign Office successfully resisted—official views hardened.46 The onset of the Great Depression destabilised the reparations agreements. First, with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, despite a favourable trade balance,

42  Harold James, The Reichsbank and Public Finance in Germany, 1924–1933: A Study of the Politics of Economics during the Great Depression (Frankfurt: F. Knapp, 1985); A.  Ritschl, Deutschlands Krise und Konjunktur 1924–1934: Binnenkonjunktur, Auslandsverschuldung und Reparationsproblem zwischen Dawes-Plan und Transfersperre (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), 107–41. 43  Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2005), 64–5; Z. S. Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 470–80. 44  McKercher, Transition, 69–73. 45  Hurst minute, 28 October 1925, FO 371/10646/5376/1490; Robert Calder, Beware the British Serpent: The Role of Writers in British Propaganda in the United States, 1939–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 29; Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, 21 February 1946. 46  B. J. C. McKercher, “A British View of American Foreign Policy: The Settlement of Blockade Claims, 1924–1927,” International History Review 3, no. 3 (1981): 358–84.

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Washington instituted high tariffs to shield America’s economy.47 This legislation proved disastrous: reducing debtor power trade with America and access to dollars to enable payment. Jettisoning the gold standard, most countries established countervailing duties that further impeded trade and finance.48 War debts now intersected with reparations. In 1932, as Germany’s ability to pay reparations was collapsing, its loans called in, unemployment soaring, and Adolph Hitler and the National Socialists gaining popular support, the Allies acted. In June, they reluctantly terminated reparations—Britain fruitlessly hoped Washington would reciprocate over war debts.49 Hoover and Stimson understood Germany’s dilemma and the other powers’ financial concerns.50 The previous June, the president looked to alleviate debt payments via a one-­ year suspension; they would recommence in December 1932.51 But Hoover lost the November 1932 presidential election, Roosevelt rejected cancellation given domestic pressures, and payments resumed in December.52 Facing a cash flow problem, MacDonald’s ministry proposed substituting Britain’s scheduled biannual $60 million in gold with $10 million in silver. To ensure continuing payments, Roosevelt agreed; other debtor powers followed Britain’s lead. Nevertheless, with other isolationist and Anglophobic politicians, Republican Senator Hiram Johnson engineered legislation in June 1934 “to prohibit financial transactions with any foreign government in default on its obligations to the United States.”53 Prohibiting loans and securities for powers not meeting their American debts—silver payments constituted default—Johnson’s initiative plainly demonstrated weak US economic diplomacy. When the debtor powers then repudiated payments, America could not collect. The war debt problem suddenly ended. A concurrent matter captured American economic weakness. The World Economic Conference in  1933 sought multilateral talks to ameliorate the Depression, primarily easing trade restrictions and steadying exchange rates. Although Hoover’s Administration  participated  in conference preparations, 47  Douglas A. Irwin, Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 48  Joanne Gowa, and Raymond Hicks, “Politics, Institutions, and Trade: Lessons of the Interwar Era,” International Organization 67, no. 3 (2013): 439–67; Jakob B. Madsen, “Trade Barriers and the Collapse of World Trade during the Great Depression,” Southern Economic Journal 67, no. 4 (2001): 848–68. 49  See MacDonald comments in Cabinet Conclusion [CC] 26(32)1, 4 May 1932, CAB [Cabinet Records, The National Archives, Kew] 23/71; Simon memorandum, “Note on Reparations Policy,” Point (e), CP191(32), 6 June 1932, CAB 24/230. 50  Diary, 28 December 1930, Stimson Papers. 51  Hoover moratorium diary, 5 June 1931, HHPP 1015; Stimson to Hoover, 13 June 1931, HHPP 1006; diary, 5 June 1931, Stimson 16; Feis minute for Stimson, 13 June 1931, Stimson to Hoover, 14 June 1931, Feis telephone report [conversation with Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills], 15 June 1931, all Stimson [Henry Stimson Papers, Microfilm] Reel 81. 52  Self, War Debt Controversy, 161–77. 53  John Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail. American Anglophobia between the World Wars (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 87–8.

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Roosevelt  removed the dollar from the gold standard before the conference met at London. Currency discussions thus focused on the dollar: keeping it artificially high or allowing it to weaken. For most Powers, a weaker dollar remained central to trade with America damaged by Smoot-Hawley. And when a deal appeared likely, Roosevelt balked publicly at any exchange arrangement, his justification understandable.54 The possibility of currency stabilisation saw Wall Street prices drop and the dollar appreciate; both could injure American trade and employment. Roosevelt sought American economic gains at British expense, a less-than-fruitful ploy given Britain’s war debt policy.55 Domestic considerations animated the White House; Roosevelt dismayed Britain and the Europeans; Cordell Hull, the secretary of state and American delegation leader, felt deceived; and the conference proved barren.56 Roosevelt had abandoned internationalism and further demonstrated the attenuation of American economic diplomacy. Accordingly, Anglo-American trade and financial competition in the 1930s differed from the 1920s. The Dawes and Young plans, including the war debt settlement, demonstrated financial co-operation—an “informal entente.”57 Yet, competition remained in trade, investment, air routes, cables, oil, and more.58 In both the 1920s and economically debilitating 1930s, U.S. businesses, agricultural interests, bankers, and industrialists engaged in vigorous economic diplomacy beyond the western hemisphere.59 In petroleum, American-based companies became multinational corporations that by 1939 controlled nearly 28 percent of world supplies.60 Yet, American accomplishments diminished after 1929–1930. With strength not omnipotence, American economic advantages did not always translate into success. Even before 1929, American economic diplomacy had limits. After the Great War, for example, American bankers with the State Department 54  Cf. P. Clavin, The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Britain, Germany, France and the United States, 1931–36 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1996), 117–42; McKercher, Transition, 159–60, 169–72. 55  Moley telegram to Bullitt, 14 June 1933, SDDF [State Department Decimal Files, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park] 550.1 Monetary Stabilization/16-1, 16-2. 56  C. Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948): 1, 260–6. 57  Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918–1928 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1977). 58  M. G. Blackford, The Rise of Modern Business: Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Third Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 139–68; Cain and Hopkins, Innovation and Expansion, 479–500; Fiona Venn, “A Struggle for Supremacy? Great Britain, the United States and Kuwaiti Oil in the 1930s,” Colchester: University of Essex, Department of History, Research Paper No. 2 (2012); M. Wilkins and F. E. Hill, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 59  Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); J. H. Wilson, American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 6–100. 60   For example, Øystein Noreng, Crude Power: Politics and the Oil Market (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002), 52–102; Stephen Randall, United States Foreign Oil Policy since World War I: For Profits and Security (Montreal: McGill, Queen’s University Press, 2005); Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), Part II.

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endeavoured to displace the British in China. They failed through the preeminence of British East Asian banking houses with long participation in the Chinese market, contacts with China’s commercial elite, and regional expertise. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank headed by Sir Charles Addis successfully blunted American-banking interests to supplant British financial interests.61 The Americans lacked the experience and political advantages that Addis and his bank possessed, as well as those of other financial houses like Hong Kong’s Jardine Matheson.62 Through American dominance of international petroleum, Standard Oil of New York did well; but in a range of other industries like tobacco, British-controlled companies dominated.63 Such rivalry remained until 1939, but the continuing global economic crisis exposed flagging American bargaining power.64 By November 1938, for instance, after four years of discussions, Britain, Canada, and the United States reached a tripartite trading agreement.65 Whilst each Power looked to augment its trade, Roosevelt’s administration modified tariffs and allowed greater Anglo-Canadian access to the American market. Whilst the Second World War and its economic demands ended the agreements, American hard-line economic policies seen after 1919 receded after 1935.

The New International Order The Depression’s impact saw the international order created at the Paris Peace Conference decline and the advent of a new one where three major revisionist powers—Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militaristic Japan—looked to aggrandise their states territorially and economically.66 Espousing pan-Germanism after taking power in January 1933, Hitler seemed determined to overthrow the strictures of Versailles and recover territories lost in Eastern Europe—and, by mid-March 1939, extended his gaze to non-German lands in the region.67 Led by Benito Mussolini, Italian ambitions lay in the Balkans and, after autumn 61  Roberta Allbert Dayer, Bankers and Diplomats in China, 1917–1925: The Anglo-American Relationship (London: Routledge, 1981). 62  Jürgen Osterhammel, “British business in China, 1860s–1950s” in R. P. T. Davenport (ed.), British Business in China since the 1860s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 203. 63  Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 22–69. 64  On cables, see R. Boyce, “The Origins of Cable and Wireless Limited, 1918–1939: Capitalism, Imperialism, and Technical Change” in B. Finn and D. Yang (eds.), Communications Under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 81–114; L.  B. Tribolet, The International Aspects of Electrical Communications in the Pacific Area (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929). 65  Ian Drummond and N. G. Hillmer, Negotiating Freer Trade: The United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and the Trade Agreements of 1938 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989). 66  On 1930–1933 as the “Hinge Years” where the achievements of the 1920s collapsed, see Steiner, Lights that Failed, Part II. 67  Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: W. W. Norton, 2001), chap. 2; Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, 1937–1939 (Chicago:

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1935, Abyssinia to rebuild the Roman Empire.68 By the early 1930s, seeing continental East Asia, especially China, as lands that could be taken to extend Japan’s civilisation and augment its economy, Japanese leaders were not averse to using armed force to achieve their ambitions.69 Accordingly, Germany and Italy came to threaten British strategic interests in Europe and the Mediterranean and, with Germany, disrupt the continental balance of power that endangered British national security and led to the outbreak of war in 1939. In the Far East, beginning with its conquest of Manchuria in 1931–1933 and then efforts to control all of northern China after July 1937, Japan menaced both British—and American—strategic and economic interests in East Asia. For both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, unlike its economic and financial dimension, American foreign policy looked to avoid military or security arrangements outside the western hemisphere. Part of the reason devolved from a lack of will to co-operate with other powers, and the other from the strength of isolationism. Both White Houses did try to bolster international security by multilateral arms control—with no security obligations—but achieved little. With the Disarmament Conference deadlocked by spring 1932, despite Stimson working with MacDonald at Geneva, Hoover attempted to seize the initiative. On 22 June, he proposed substantial quantitative and qualitative reductions for all armed forces based on numbers permitted Germany and the defeated powers in 1919–1920: armies reduced by one-third; Washington treaty numbers and tonnages of battleships and submarines by one-third; aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers by one-quarter; and no chemical and bacteriological weapons, bombers, armour, or large mobile guns.70 Seeing his plan as an opportunity for America’s international “moral leadership,” Hoover also eyed domestic America.71 Voters could see that arms limitation remained possible, and his administration could steal a march on the other powers, including Britain. With elections set for November and a still-weak economy, success at Geneva could help the Republicans—the Hoover plan came days University of Chicago Press, 1980). Then see J.E. Casteel, Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905–1941 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2016). 68  F. A. Bianco, Mussolini e il “Nuovo Ordine”:I Fascisti, l’asse e lo “Spazio Vitale” (1939–1943) (Milano: Luni Editrice, 2018); Gerhard Feldbauer, Mussolinis Überfall auf Äthiopien: eine Aggression am Vorabend des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Bonn: Pahl Rugenstein, 2006); G. B. Strang, On the Fiery March: Mussolini Prepares for War (Westport, Praeger, 2003). 69  John W.  Dower, “The Structures and Ideologies of Conquest” in Stephen R.  MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra F.  Vogel (eds.), China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 17–21; Masato Kimura and Tosh Minohara (eds.), Tumultuous Decade: Empire, Society, and Diplomacy in 1930’s Japan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); S. C. M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 77–142. 70  Declaration by Mr. Gibson concerning President Hoover’s Proposal (20 June 1932), LND Conf.D.126. 71  On moral leadership, see Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 330.

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after the party renominated him as their presidential candidate.72 Should the other Powers accept the plan—debt repayments would recommence in December—the prospect of American creditors getting their money would improve and Hoover’s reputation enhanced.73 The MacDonald Cabinet’s focus differed. Admittedly, in early May, Baldwin, then lord president, proposed abolishing submarines and military and naval aircraft, decreasing  capital ship size, shrinking coastal defence expenditures, and more; but his suggestions had not become policy by the next month.74 Then, on 10 June, as the Geneva discussions entered “a critical stage,” Sir John Simon, the foreign secretary, suggested in Cabinet that the great powers meet privately, agree conditionally on qualitative and quantitative limitation, and provide the Conference with a firm front.75 The Cabinet also wanted to maintain the prevailing security system centred by Locarno and the Covenant.76 In comparison, Hoover’s plan lacked consultation and overlooked the powers’ strategic aims.77 Predictably, it was rejected. With MacDonald wanting untarnished Anglo-American relations, London’s response proved firm but appeasing. In word-for-word speeches on 7 July in London and Geneva, Baldwin and Simon dispassionately reiterated Britain’s case: any agreement needed to meet the powers’ strategic desiderata. With across-the-board cuts problematic and deferring to Simon’s 10 June proposals, each advised that “detailed discussions” begin and “set out under the necessary heads of land, sea, and air the manner in which … these principles could be applied.”78 At Geneva, with Hoover’s plan now dead, Simon vainly urged private talks to find arms limitation formulae;79 but the Conference adjourned without result on 23 July. Importantly, the Baldwin-Simon speeches about Hoover’s plan contributing “to an agreed general programme” did not really reflect attitudes in MacDonald’s government.80 Britain needed greater reliance

72  Lindsay despatch (986) to Simon, 17 June 1932, FO 371/15875/3933/268; diary, 13–16 June 1932, Stimson 22. 73  Hoover holograph drafts of the speech, plus Stimson-Gibson telephone conversation, 20 June 1932 (3:00 pm), both HHPP 1002; diary, 18–22 June 1932, Stimson 22. 74  CC26(32)2, 4 May 1932, CAB 23/71. 75  Simon memorandum, “The Future proceedings of the Disarmament Conference,” 10 June 1932, FO 800/287. 76  Simon memorandum, “The Disarmament Conference” [CP78(32)], 20 February 1932, CAB 24/228. 77  American negotiators earlier complained that Washington’s directives ignored strategic issues; see Marriner to Moffat, 9 April 1932, Moffat [J. Pierrepont Moffat Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA] 11. 78  Simon to MacDonald, 29 June 1932, with enclosure, CAB 21/357; Statement of Views of His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom regarding President Hoover’s Proposal (7 July 1932), LND Conf.D.133; Statement by Mr. Baldwin in the House of Commons on July 7, 1932, BDFA, II, J4, 27–31. 79  Simon [draft] to Cecil, nd [but late June 1932], Simon FO 800/287. 80  MacDonald to Baldwin, 24 June 1932, Baldwin [Stanley Baldwin Papers, University Library, Cambridge] 119.

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at Geneva on its own initiative and less on trans-Atlantic co-operation. As even MacDonald understood earlier, “we must lead in Europe for some time.”81 Ultimately, it did not matter. Because of a German boycott over equal treatment, resolved by Simon in November 1932, the conference did not meet again until 31 January 1933, the day after Hitler became German chancellor. In subsequent desultory discussions at Geneva, the powers achieved little and, in October 1933, when Hitler took Germany out of both the League and the Disarmament Conference, international arms limitation died. Roosevelt’s administration took power in March 1933, but more concerned with the domestic economic crisis proved no more than an interested spectator at Geneva. Roosevelt’s victory saw Washington reluctant to take a leading role in disarmament.82 Whilst admitting it “important that we should push the disarmament conference to the fullest extent,” Roosevelt’s administration offered nothing substantive about arms control.83 Its major contribution amounted to refining British schemes, like having the main disarmament treaty end on 31 December 1936 in conformity with the extant naval treaties.84 Washington said little when the conference ended, but given presidential determination to increase spending for domestic social programmes, Roosevelt continued unilateral cuts to the American armed forces, especially the U.S. Navy. His only real foray into international arms limitation came with the second London Naval Conference that began in December 1935 to extend the 1930 agreement; and the British, now with Baldwin as prime minister, proved willing partners. But it was a partnership of convenience. Hitler announced German rearmament in March 1935 and, in twisted diplomacy, by June there emerged an Anglo-German naval agreement: Germany would have 35 percent of Britain’s surface fleet and equality in submarines.85 The issue for both sides involved preventing a naval race à la pre-1914. It meant that London formally agreed to end arms strictures on Germany imposed by Versailles. Preliminary Anglo-American talks occurred in late 1934 whereby the Foreign Office naval expert, Robert Craigie, reckoned that Roosevelt’s Navy Department accepted “our demand for 70 cruisers was in circumstances a

 MacDonald to Simon, 31 May 1932, FO 800/286.  Moffat to Gordon, 6 October 1932, Moffat to Wilson, 1 December 1932, both Moffat 3; Gibson to Davis, 3 December 1932, Davis [Norman Davis Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC]  26; MacDonald to Davis, 7, 17 November 1932, Davis to MacDonald, 15 November 1932, all Davis 40. 83  Roosevelt to Davis, 26 November 1932, Davis 51. 84  Davis memorandum, 28 November 1932, Record of a Conversation between Mr. MacDonald, Sir J. Simon, and Mr. N. Davis at Geneva, December 2, 1932, Record of a Conversation between Mr. MacDonald, Sir J. Simon, and Mr. N. Davis at Geneva, December 3, 1932, Documents on British Foreign Policy [DBFP] Series II, Volume IV (London, 1947), 306–10, 313. 85  Joseph Maiolo, The Royal Navy and Nazi Germany, 1933–39: A Study in Appeasement and the Origins of the Second World War (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1998), 11–37; “Deception and Intelligence Failure: Anglo-German Preparations for U-boat Warfare,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22, no. 4 (1999): 53–76. 81 82

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reasonable one.”86 In the next months, whilst monitoring East Asia and Europe, London surmised continuing Anglo-American naval agreement was  feasible.87 Certainly, some unanswered matters remained—Washington’s disinclination to decrease battleship size or exclude 8-inch cruiser guns among them—but, generally, British and American opinion converged.88 The British canvassed the Japanese and Americans in January 1935 about making unilateral statements about impending building programmes. Whilst some Americans like Norman Davis, Roosevelt’s personal arms negotiator, looked for increased transatlantic collaboration, Roosevelt, Hull, and Claude Swanson, the Navy secretary, hesitated outlining pre-conference American plans. Their concern lay with Japanese refusal to provide specific proposals. Nevertheless, on 7 August 1935, London requested that the Washington treaty signatories, as well as Germany and Russia, contemplate programme declarations as preliminary to another naval conference.89 Two months later, Baldwin’s government determined that sustaining quantitative ratios remained limited. Before making specific commitments, the French wanted Berlin’s guarantee about respecting the Anglo-German naval agreement; Rome’s participation devolved from each power accepting qualitative limitation.90 More important were American and Japanese attitudes. Washington initially presumed that Britain would use the Anglo-German treaty to create a combined and “unacceptable” European position.91 Whilst Craigie removed such misgivings, Washington had three fixed positions: battleship displacement maxima of 35,000  tons; 8-inch gun heavy cruisers; and rejecting Japanese demands for equality.92 Japan claimed equality, a “common upper limit.”93 On 18 October, despite Japanese disinclination to announce their building programme, the Foreign Office advised the Cabinet to convene a conference.94 In this milieu, the second London naval conference met from December 1935 to March 1936.95 Britain, America, Japan, France, and Italy sent  Craigie minute, 11 January 1935, FO 371/18731/478/22.  FO-Admiralty memorandum, “Questions of Naval Limitation, with Relation to the Possible Holding of a Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armament,” 30 March 1935, FO 371/18732/3205/22. 88  Ibid. 89  Hoare despatch (714) to Lindsay, 7 August 1935, enclosing FO memorandum, 2 August 1935, FO 371/18737/6954/22; FO-Admiralty memorandum, Future Course of Naval Negotiations, 18 July 1935, FO 371/18737/6525/22. 90  Craigie memorandum, 11 September 1935, FO 371/18739/8071/22; “Memorandum communicated by Italian Embassy,” 4 September 1935, FO 371/18739/7833/22. 91  Atherton to Broad, 19 August 1935, FO 371/18738/7286/22. 92  Record of a Meeting, 27 September 1935, FO 371/18739/8361/22. 93  Craigie memorandum, 7 September 1935, FO 371/18739/8397/22. 94   Craigie memorandum, 18 October 1935, with enclosure, FO 371/18740/9070/22; CC48(35), 23 October 1935, CAB 23/83; NCM memorandum, The Naval Conference, 1935 [CP201(35)], 11 October 1935, CAB 24/257. 95  Joseph Maiolo, “Naval Armaments Competition Between the Two World Wars” in Thomas Mahnken, Joseph Maiolo, and David Stevenson (eds.), Arms Race in International Politics. From 86 87

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delegations; Germany and Russia would be asked to sign any agreement. The Japanese straightaway demanded the common upper limit through AngloAmerican reductions; as an inducement, they supported abolishing aircraft carriers and battleships. With such concessions impossible, they withdrew on 15 January 1936, thwarting quantitative ratios; but the other powers continued negotiations. A treaty was concluded on 25 March with significant achievements: annual building programme declarations; 35,000-ton capital ships with 14-inch rather than 16-inch guns depending on Japanese—and subsequent Italian—compliance; 23,000-ton aircraft carriers; cruisers over 10,000 tons banned until the treaty ended on 31 December 1942; barring prototype warships between 10,000 and 17,500 tons; and “in case of war” or should building occur “outside the qualitative limits by non-contracting Powers,” an “escalator” clause.96 The treaty was not unblemished. The Italians withdrew in late February, protesting League actions over Abyssinia, but actually wanting to obviate impediments to their naval programme. Still, for differing motives, other powers—Russia, Germany, Poland, and the Scandinavian states— signed on.97 By December 1935, Baldwin’s Cabinet and its advisors understood Anglo-­ American political co-operation doubtful in meeting changing international circumstances. Because of isolationism, Washington did not support League oil sanctions to stymie Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. Craigie learnt from Davis in early March 1936, “the only argument that would have weight with [Japan’s] realistic statesmen was that England and the United States intended to work closely together in naval matters and to allow no misunderstandings to arise between them.”98 But at the London conference, Baldwin’s government and Roosevelt’s administration looked to shield their own national interests with dissimilar strategic objectives. Before December 1935, the British understood the impossibility of continuing quantitative limitation, unvarnished realism leading to asking for programme declarations. Whilst Craigie, Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office permanent undersecretary, Admiral Ernle Chatfield, the first sea lord, and the politicians thought some limitation possible, Japan’s hard line in October 1935 meant slower progress. When Craigie suggested ambassadorial discussions instead of a conference, Roosevelt objected: “nothing that would make it appear that we are taking this naval conference casually and less seriously than we have taken previous naval conferences and thus run the risk of being blamed for failure.”99

the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 103–6. 96  Cmd. 5136: Treaty of the Limitation of Naval Armaments, 25th March 1936 (1936). 97  For Hitler’s reasons, see A. Hillgruber, “England in Hitlers aussen politischer Konzeption,” Historische Zeitschrift 218, No. 1 (1974): 65–84; Weinberg, Foreign Policy, 271–2. 98  Craigie memorandum, 4 March 1936, FO 371/19809/2021/4. 99  FO-Admiralty memorandum, “Course of Naval Negotiations,” 11 October 1935, FO 371/18740/8758/22; Roosevelt to Bingham, 1 November 1935, Franklin D.  Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs [FDRFA], Series II, Volume 3, 45–7.

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Like before, British strategy after December 1935 sought to sidestep perceptions of an Anglo-American front that could rebound unfavourably on Anglo-Japanese relations and the Far Eastern balance of power.100 But whilst British and American delegates, including the naval experts, worked well together—the Americans adhering to Roosevelt’s desire for Anglo-American co-operation where possible—nothing like the MacDonald-Stimson partnership in 1930 existed. American isolationism remained; and good Anglo-­ Japanese relations was vital for British interests in East Asia. Accordingly, the new agreement made the situation seem better than it was for transatlantic relations. For Baldwin’s government, British voters could see a measure of practical arms limitation, although in reality, Royal Navy effectiveness remained untouched. Until 1938, Roosevelt’s administration did not begin rearmament; and, regarding declared building programmes, the Royal Navy retained a rough two-power standard against the Imperial Japanese Navy and Germany’s new navy.101 The essential problem for the  Baldwin and Chamberlain governments by 1937 were increasing threats to the European and East Asian balances of power. Between winter 1933–1934 and early 1936, the British began substantial rearmament. In 1933, the annual budget for the three services amounted to circa £100  million based on the ten-year rule adopted in 1920: if the Cabinet’s principal advisory body on foreign and defence policy, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), determined no possibility of war for ten years, defence budgets could be limited. But Manchuria suggested that Japan might not fall within the rule’s mandate; in February 1932, under pressure from the service chiefs, the Cabinet ended the rule, but did not replace it for reasons of economy.102 However under pressure from the Foreign Office, service ministries, Colonial Office, and other interested departments in 1933, the Cabinet decided in October to examine British defences—with Nazi Germany abandoning the League and World Disarmament Conference, the CID created a special body, the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee (DRC), from the Foreign Office, Treasury, and service ministries to examine the situation.103 By February 1934, the Cabinet received advice to meet the German and Japanese “menaces” through increased arms spending by 1939: £71.32  million.104 Germany was identified as the “ultimate potential enemy”—like Japan, war with Germany was possible within ten years. Macdonald’s Cabinet cut the total

100  Craigie minute, 5 November 1935, FO 371/18740/9218/22; FO telegram 9(2) to Clive, 6 January 1936, Eden telegram (6) to Lindsay, 10 January 1936, both FO 371/19803/4; diary, 8, 14 January 1936, Phillips [William Phillips Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA] 9. 101  McKercher, Transition of Power, 226, n53. 102  COS Meeting 101, 22 March 1932, CAB 2/5; CC19(32), CAB 23/70. 103  CID Meeting 261, 9 November 1933, CAB 2/6. 104  First DRC Report, 28 February 1934, CAB 16/109.

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to £55.4  million.105 The DRC looked to maintain the European and Far Eastern balances of power: in East Asia, building up the Singapore naval base; in Europe, creating an expeditionary army, the Field Force, for deployment in the Low Countries. In summer 1935, with Italo-Abyssinian relations worsening, the DRC reconvened; by December, it recommended spending of £417.5  million by the 1939 deadline; Baldwin’s new Cabinet cut it to £394.5 million.106 All the services, especially the Field Force, received substantial spending—Italy was now a potential enemy. Roosevelt’s administration was not uninterested in security questions in east and west. But as Roosevelt said to his ambassador at Rome in May 1937: “How do we make progress if England and France say we cannot help Germany and Italy to achieve economic security if they continue to arm and threaten, while simultaneously Germany and Italy say we must continue to arm and threaten because they will not give us economic security.”107 Recent work shows that after 1922, American political and financial leaders generally, and Republican or Democrat administrations specifically, did not see the rise of fascism in Italy as threatening the victor powers.108 Ideology was less important than finance—loans and war debts—for European stability; and Italy was crucial for both Wall Street and City of London loans, especially as until 1935 Mussolini was not overtly aggressive. Even afterwards, Roosevelt saw financial diplomacy and arms limitation as America’s contribution to international security. He told Mussolini in July 1937: “I have been gratified in reading of your statements in favour of the principles of reduction of armament. As you know, the Secretary of State has had my full support in his effective efforts toward the increase of international trade and the lowering of barriers against trade.”109 And after 1933, the same attitude in Washington and Wall Street animated American policy towards Nazi Germany. In reporting a conversation with a French diplomat in April 1937 who asked if “the United States would be willing to act as a mediator” in Europe, Davis provided the American line. He conveyed to the White House:

105  See Chamberlain’s remarks in DC(M)(32) meetings 41–50, CAB 16/110; “Note by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Report of the Defence Requirements Committee” [DC(M) (32) 120], CAB 27/51. 106  DRC Interim Report [DRC 25], 24 July 1935, CAB 16/136; DRC Third Report [DRC 37], 21 November 1935, CAB 16/112; DPR(DR) Report [CP26(36)], 12 February 1936, CAB 24/259. On DRC deliberations, see B.  J. C.  McKercher, “The Continental Commitment and British Foreign Policy: The Field Force and the Strategy of the National Government, 1933–1938,” English Historical Review 123, no. 500 (2008): 98–131; M. L. Roi, Alternative to Appeasement. Sir Robert Vansittart and Alliance Diplomacy, 1934–1937 (Westport: Praeger, 1997), 3–45. 107  Roosevelt to Phillips, 17 May 1937, FDRFA, II, 5, 200–1. 108  Gian Giacomo Migone, United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); J. P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Manfredi Martelli, Mussolini e l’America. Le Relazioni Italo-Statunitensi dal 1922 al 1941 (Milano: Mursia, 2006). 109  Roosevelt to Mussolini, 29 July 1937, FDRFA, II, 6, 219.

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I told him however, that my personal opinion was that notwithstanding our earnest desire for European peace, we could not undertake to settle the political problems of Europe or to compose controversies between European countries; but that if those powers can bring about a political appeasement among themselves, I felt certain the United States would be only too glad to cooperate, insofar as is practicable and feasible, in economic rehabilitation and disarmament, without which there would be no foundation for peace.

With Germany rearming and Hitler remilitarising the Rhineland a year before, this attitude demonstrated that the European powers, including Britain, would need to settle differences without the Americans. Plus, Roosevelt could not contain isolationism.110 On 31 August  1935, Congress passed neutrality legislation. Devolving from wide-ranging dislike of European rivalries, congressional investigation into war profits during the Great War, and the feelings underscoring the Johnson Act, these statutes had a six-month life.111 They were renewed in 1936, 1937, and 1939. Supporting untrammelled trade, they prohibited selling arms to warring powers and had the president instruct Americans about travelling on belligerent ships. Britain’s embassy in Washington and the Foreign Office worriedly greeted the legislation. Sir Samuel Hoare, the foreign secretary, was concerned that a neutral America could challenge League peace-making.112 After the legislation passed, Roosevelt could not get authority to define an aggressor in a conflict, and thus isolationism triumphed. Sir Ronald Lindsay, Britain’s ambassador, believed “there is every disposition to help; that help would be moral only; and that there will always be much timidity.”113 American East Asian policy was no different. When Japan invaded Manchuria, Stimson issued a doctrine of non-recognition: America would not acknowledge territorial changes brought about by armed force.114 Although desirous of exploiting Far Eastern markets, Roosevelt continued the doctrine.115 Supported by the British, he refused Japanese naval equality, but Japan then went its own way.116 Beyond this apparent hard line, Roosevelt mirrored his European  Lindsay telegram (200) to Hoare, 12 August 1935, DBFP II, XIV, 477.  Justus D.  Doenecke and John E.  Wilz, From Isolation to War, 1931–1941 (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2015), 78–82; R.  A. Kennedy, “The Ideology of American Isolationism: 1931–1939,” Cercles 5 (2002): 57–76. 112  Hoare to Drummond, 31 August 1935, FO 800/295; Osborne telegram (212) to Hoare, 22 August 1935, FO 371/18772/7421/3483/45; Lindsay telegram (203) to Hoare, 14 August 1935, Hoare telegram (235) to Lindsay, 17 August 1935, both DBFP II, XIV, 479, 498. 113  Lindsay telegram (200) to Hoare, 12 August 1935, DBFP II, XIV, 477. 114  David Turns, “The Stimson Doctrine of Non-Recognition: Its Historical Genesis and Influence on Contemporary International Law,” Chinese Journal of International Law 2, no. 1 (2003): 105–43. 115  E.  M. Clauss, “The Roosevelt Administration and Manchukuo, 1933–1941” in Walter Hixson (ed.), The American Experience in World War II, Volume 3: The United States and the Road to War in the Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2003), 65–82. 116  Sadao Asada, Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 137–73; Stephen E. Pelz, Race to Pearl Harbor; The 110 111

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policies in East Asia. The best example occurred five months after Japan invaded China south of the Great Wall. On 12 December 1937, the Panay, a U.S. Navy gunboat, suffered attack from Japanese airplanes on the Yangtse River; Japanese artillery also shelled two Royal Navy riverboats, the Ladybird and Bee. In the case of the Panay, 3 Americans died and almost 50 were wounded. Roosevelt instantly sought an apology and compensation.117 Although claiming the attack inadvertent, Tokyo offered $2  million in restitution. Roosevelt’s response prompted Chamberlain, now prime minister, to believe the Americans would demonstrate to the totalitarian powers that their actions had consequences: “It is always best & safest to count on nothing from the Americans except words but at this moment they are nearer ‘doing something’ than I have ever known them and I cant [sic] altogether repress hopes.”118 When the British approached Washington about a joint reaction to the attack, Roosevelt refused.119 Whilst suggesting Anglo-American blockade to meet future Japanese recklessness, he proved ambiguous.120 Concurrently, congressional isolationists looked to preclude him from deploying American armed strength to secure American overseas interests. Congressman Louis Ludlow introduced legislation on 14 December to guarantee that other than confronting invading forces, America would go to war only after a national plebiscite—the Ludlow War Referendum bill failed early in the New Year in a close vote following administration urging.121 Lindsay counselled, the “size of [the] minority shows that isolationist elements in Congress are impressively strong.”122 Some Foreign Office advisors presumed that “Japanese aggressiveness, intentional or uncontrolled, may break down America’s natural isolationism.”123 Nonetheless, Roosevelt’s thin legislative victory suggested that his administration “doing something” concrete to aid international security remained minimal.124

Failure of the Second London Naval Conference and the Onset of World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 7–64. 117   Roosevelt memorandum, 13 December 1937, Roosevelt [Franklin Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY] PSF Japan; Douglas Carl Peifer, Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay Incidents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), Part 3. 118  Chamberlain to Hilda [his sister], 17 December 1937, NC [Neville Chamberlain Papers, University of Birmingham, Birmingham] 18/1/1032; emphasis in original. 119  Hull memorandum, 14 December 1937, Hull [Cordell Hull Paper, Library of Congress, Washington, DC] 58; CC47(37)4 (15 December), CC48(37)5 (22 December), both CAB 23/90. 120  Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 154. 121  E.  C. Bolt, Jr., Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914–1941 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1977), chap. 20. 122  Lindsay telegram to Eden, 10 January 1938, FO 371/21525/196/64. 123  Beith minute, 19 January 1938, FO 371/21525/383/64. 124  Holman minute, 12 February 1938, FO 371/21525/1081/64.

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Anglo-American Relations, 1937–1939 Despite what American historians have argued—that Roosevelt was concerned with Nazi policies, Japan’s actions in East Asia, and more—no evidence exists that American policy provided anything of substance in meeting the revisionist powers. In fact, two months before the Panay incident, Roosevelt delivered his so-called “Quarantine speech.”125 Whilst not mentioning Germany, Italy, or Japan, he said that “peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings  of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.”126 The president doubtless looked to instruct Americans about the chimera of isolation and pacifism at a dangerous moment. When isolationists then publicly rebuked American involvement in extra-hemispheric security, Roosevelt retreated. Saying there was no censure of Japan, he defended the speech with simplistic clichés like “We seek peace, not only for our generation but also for the generation of our children.”127 The Quarantine speech came just as the Washington treaty nine-Powers met in Brussels to discuss China. Whilst Foreign Office experts thought the situation demonstrated “the usual attitude that America will talk but not act, or at least not act in a manner that can be relied on,” Vansittart emphasised that “we must see how far we can develop this change of tone in the U.S.A.”128 Chamberlain’s Cabinet agreed.129 London, therefore, saw Brussels as a venue to resolve the Chinese crisis. Still, with rearmament unfinished and convinced that Roosevelt would add nothing to stymie Japanese belligerence, the British sought to mediate between Nanking and Tokyo. Although Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, thought Anglo-American collaboration p ­ ossible, it did not materialise, and the conference ended without result on 24 November.130 There were several reasons: the Japanese stayed away; the French priority lay with protecting their Indochinese colonies; the Americans evaded future commitments; and without American backing, the British avoided economic sanctions.131 In a succinct assessment: discussions provided “little evidence of a widespread willingness on the part of the Powers to embark on a

 Speech by the President, 5 October 1937, FDRFA II, 7, 10–21.  D. Borg, “Notes on Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech,” Political Science Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1957): 405–33; Dallek, Roosevelt, 147–52. 127  Press Conference, 8 October 1937 and Radio Speech of the President, 12 October 1937, FDRFA II, 7, 53–4. 86–9. 128  Holman, Orde, Sargent minutes, 7 October 1937, FO 371/20667/7185/448; Allen minute, 7 October 1937, FO 371/20667/7236/448; Vansittart minute, 7 October 1937, FO 371/20667/7185/448. 129  CC36(37)5, CAB 23/89; Chamberlain to Hilda, 9 October 1937, NC 18/1/1023. 130  Eden to George VI, nd [?14–15 November 1937], FO 800/954/FE/37/10. 131  Peter Lowe, Great Britain and the Origins of the Pacific War: A Study of British Policy in East Asia, 1937–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 30–1. 125 126

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united policy of economic sanctions against Japan.”132 Japan’s forces remained in China; and Berlin seemed willing to intercede between Nanking and Tokyo. When Mussolini signed the German-Japanese anti-Comintern pact in early November, the apparent coalition of revisionist powers presented major problems for London. The tangled issues of British security in Europe and East Asia challenged Chamberlain and his ministers; and bound by neutrality legislation and isolationist voters, Roosevelt’s Washington would do little for international stability. In control of his Cabinet, Chamberlain now moved to meet the darkening international situation by a strategy of appeasement—America had no place in British calculations. He believed the balance of power dangerous; it produced the 1914 July crisis.133 Other alternatives—League collective security and multilateral diplomacy like the World Disarmament Conference and the London economic and naval meetings—had done little. He defined appeasement in August 1937: “I believe the double policy of rearmament and better relations with Germany and Italy will carry us safely through the danger period, if only the Foreign Office will play up.”134 The danger period was the time to complete rearmament when a more robust reaction to Hitler and Mussolini could be countenanced. Accordingly, in early December 1937, he removed Vansittart as Foreign Office permanent undersecretary and Field Marshal Sir Cyril Deverell, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, both supporters of the Field Force, putting pliant men in their place. On entering Downing Street, he had initiated a defence review by Sir Thomas Inskip, the minister of defence co-­ ordination, who reported in February 1938.135 The Cabinet accepted his proposals, influenced by Chamberlain, that Britain now spend £1.65 billion in two tranches: one by the end of 1939 and a second by the end of 1941, when it was reckoned that German rearmament would be complete. The Field Force was cancelled and the reserve Territorial Army reduced; British and Imperial defence would rely on naval and air power. Like other air advocates, Chamberlain reckoned: “I cannot believe that the next war, if it ever comes, will be like the last one and I believe our resources will be more profitably employed in the air & on the sea than in building up great armies.”136 The subsequent course of events is well-known.137 Appeasement was a realistic policy given British voters not wanting another Great War, incomplete  Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 123.  Chamberlain to Ida [his sister], 4 July, 30 October, 26 November 1937, NC 18/1/1010, 1026, 1030; Chamberlain to Hilda, 24 October, 5 December 1937, NC 18/1/1025, 1030a. 134  Chamberlain to Hilda, 1 August 1937, NC 1014/18/1. 135  Inskip, “Report on Defence Expenditure in Future Years” [CP24(38)], 8 February 1938, CAB 24/274; CC5(38)9, 16 February 1938, CAB 23/92. 136  Chamberlain to Hilda, 9 February 1936, NC 18/1/949; G. C. Peden, “Chamberlain, the British Army and the Continental Commitment” in Malcom Murfett (ed.), Shaping British Foreign and Defence Policy in the Twentieth Century: Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 86–100. 137  This paragraph is based on D. C. Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (New York: Pantheon, 1989), still the best examination. Also, Frank 132 133

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rearmament, Britain’s financial health coming out of the Great Depression, and beliefs that Hitler only wanted to bring German-speaking territories like Austria into the Reich.138 The apotheosis of appeasement occurred with the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, when Chamberlain supported by the French premier, Édouard Daladier, ceded Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland to Germany ignoring Prague. Chamberlain and Hitler even agreed to exclude armed force to solve Anglo-German disputes. Munich was a victory for Chamberlain; wanting a limited war against Czechoslovakia to test his armed forces and absorb its lands into Germany, and thinking the British premier had bested him, Hitler decided to eschew diplomatic agreements to achieve his Eastern European ambitions.139 In March 1939, after conspiring with Slovakian separatists and forcing a crisis with the Czech government that “invited” German forces into the country, he went beyond pan-Germanism. With Daladier, Chamberlain’s government guaranteed Polish sovereignty— Poland seemed the next German target—introduced peacetime conscription, moved to revive the Field Force, and began military discussions with Paris. London also looked to align with Bolshevik Russia, Hitler’s avowed adversary. The goal was deterrence, although war was not impossible. Emboldened, Hitler wanted a limited war for his armed forces and Poland’s destruction. Crucially, with cold  Realpolitik, he and the Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, buried their differences and concluded a non-aggression pact on 23 August 1939—agreeing secretly to divide Poland, with Stalin getting a free hand in the Baltic States. Eight days later, on 1 September, Hitler’s forces invaded Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September because of the guarantee, and the Second World War began. It was Hitler’s war: the British had to respond to both defend the home islands and maintain the European balance. In the same period, Japan’s threat to East Asia’s balance of power receded, which allowed the Chamberlain government to concentrate on Europe. Of course, Japanese forces still sought to subdue northern China—British, American and other interests in the south remained largely untouched, although the threat of Japanese expansionism remained. After mid-1939, two crises suggested limitations on Tokyo’s ambitions. The first was a short McDonough (ed.), Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective (London: Continuum, 2011); Richard Overy, Origins of the Second World War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Part II. 138  Watt, How War Came; B. J. C. McKercher, “Strategy and Foreign Policy in Great Britain, 1930–1938: From the Pursuit of the Balance of Power to Appeasement” in Christopher Baxter, M. L. Dockrill, and Keith Hamilton (eds.), Britain in Global Politics, Volume I: From Gladstone to Churchill, 1900–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 153–74; Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the Road to War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (London: St Martin’s Press, 1993). 139  David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 37–102.

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Russo-­Japanese war from May to August 1939 along the Manchurian border. Japan’s Army in China and its supporters in Tokyo looked to strike north to acquire the mineral and other wealth of Eastern Siberia. But the Russians severely bloodied Japanese forces and forced their retreat.140 Then, in the midst of this crisis, in June, an Anglo-Japanese dispute erupted at Tientsin, near Peking. Some anti-Japanese Chinese assassinated a Chinese collaborator—he managed a Japanese bank—and, after questioning by Japanese authorities, fled to the British concession. When the Japanese then demanded their return, the British refused.141 The Japanese blockaded the concession and escalated the crisis to demand that Britain cease providing financial and economic support to China’s nationalist government—it had been doing so since 1935. Over the summer, as the European situation precluded sending substantial naval forces to the region and Washington was disinclined to combine with London, the British relied on diplomacy to find a settlement—although Craigie, now the ambassador to Japan, implied to Tokyo that Britain might use armed force to lift the blockade. By mid-August, British failure to capitulate, division in Tokyo, and the Russo-Japanese war produced a compromise favouring Japan. For London, mounting tensions in Europe called for appeasement in East Asia: Britain agreed both that Japan had to undertake particular military operations in China and not oppose them and surrendered the Chinese escapees. With Anglo-Japanese relations now calmed, helped by Tokyo’s surprise at the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of European war, Britain continued its Chinese loans. Tied to the Chinese quagmire for Japanese forces after late 1937 to well after Tientsin, appeasement worked in East Asia. Indeed, Tokyo’s limited diplomatic success in summer 1939 lessened Japan’s immediate threat to the British position in East Asia. In relations with Europe, Roosevelt’s administration simply stood by. The year from March 1938, when Germany absorbed Austria—the Anschluss—to the Prague crisis demonstrated the distance in Anglo-American relations. The  final trade negotiations concluded in November 1938. Although the Foreign Office and Washington Embassy saw political profit from trade co-­ operation, the Treasury and Board of Trade opposed concessions giving Washington unnecessary benefits.142 Roosevelt’s administration wanted to market America’s substantial excess of commodities and restrict imports. British supplies of key American exports, however, principally meat, tobacco, and wood products, were satisfied by Imperial imports and those from other countries including the United States. London understood that the proposed 140  A.  D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, Two Volumes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Stuart D. Goldman, Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory that Shaped World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 2012). 141  Anthony Best, “The Leith-Ross Mission and British Policy towards East Asia, 1934–7,” International History Review 35, no. 4 (2013): 681–701; Watt, How War Came, 356–9. 142  Ashton-Gwatkin minute, 11 March 1937, FO 371/20659/2847/228; Treasury-BoT comments in minutes of meeting, 23 March 1937, FO 371/20659/2473/228; Simon [chancellor of the Exchequer] minute, 7 June 1937, T 172/1858.

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agreements would not diminish trade disparities with America and Canada.143 Nonetheless, after the Anschluss, Chamberlain’s government was prepared to accept a trade settlement because of its political implications. Hard bargaining occurred, but by late November given Chamberlain’s support, London reached agreements with Ottawa and Washington. For London, though imperfect, the American deal had political and strategic potential. It produced the appearance of Anglo-American co-operation to help deter Germany and Italy.144 The agreement might also improve transatlantic relations after Munich and, possibly, permit British borrowing from American sources should a crisis erupt. Still, Roosevelt focused more on Canadian trade.145 In terms of attitudes, Chamberlain and his advisers reckoned correctly that the Americans, although remaining concerned about international peace and security, would do nothing militarily to confront Germany or Italy. In early 1938, Roosevelt wanted to convene a world conference to endorse an American-defined peace plan to establish basic principles of international law, unrestricted accesses “on the part of all peoples to raw materials,” and rules for land and naval war and neutral trade.146 When Washington offered no substantive commitments, Chamberlain delayed.147 London looked to deal with Germany over colonies lost in 1914–1918 and Italy about de jure recognition of its Abyssinian conquest. Desirous of appeasing the Americans, Eden resigned—he also disagreed with the premier’s Italian policy.148 Lord Halifax replaced him. Anschluss killed Roosevelt’s initiative, and as Chamberlain told the Cabinet Foreign Policy Committee (FPC) in March, there was “no reason to suppose that the United States were prepared to intervene actively in Europe whatever Mr. Cordell Hull may say by way of general and pious aspirations.”149 Such attitudes dominated Downing Street for the next year. Some politicians like Eden from the backbenches promoted the need to find common Anglo-­ American ground; and the service chiefs admitted that American supplies in a crisis would be helpful; however, although Washington might want to help, the neutrality laws would limit aid.150 Chamberlain doubted any assistance.151 On the American side by early 1938, changes in the State Department and a new ambassador at London brought advisors sharing Roosevelt and Hull’s 143  Ian Drummond, Imperial Economic Policy, 1917–1939; Studies in Expansion and Protection (London: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 118–20. 144  CC49(38)9, CAB 23/96; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, II, 102; C. A. MacDonald, The United States, Britain, and Appeasement, 1936–1939 (London: Springer, 1980), 109–10. 145  Drummond and Hillmer, Freer Trade, 147; Feis to Bullitt, 6 September 1938 and Feis to Schuster, 7 July 1938, Feis [Herbert Feis Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC] 12, 26. 146  Welles memorandum, 6 October 1937, FDRFA II, VII, 29–32. 147  Chamberlain to Roosevelt, 21 January 1938, Hull 42; Eden minutes to Chamberlain, 10, 11 February 1938, FO 371/21625/2127/64. 148  Eden to Chamberlain, 20 February 1938, CC8(53), Appendix, CAB/23/92. 149  FPC Meeting 26, 18 March 1939, CAB 27/623. 150  Cf. Eden to Baldwin, 19 December 1938, Baldwin 124; COS memorandum, “Situation in the Event of War Against Germany” [COS 716], 26 April 1938, Annex (2)(ii), CAB 53/38. 151  See his comments in FPC Meeting 35, 23 January 1939, CAB 27/624.

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wariness about involvement in European affairs. The ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, is exemplary. Appointed in January 1938, he reached London at the time of the Anschluss. Almost his first in-depth assessment of British policy and Europe suggested, “Whether this is averting or merely deferring war, I don’t believe we, or they, can tell at this moment.”152 But little advantage would come from American participation in Europe’s problems: trade remained most important.153 In September 1938, he thought British policy leading to Munich constituted a useful answer to a precarious problem; however, Washington should remain detached.154 Like Eden and others in Britain, some American leaders wanted closer Anglo-American relations or, given a loathing of fascism, looked to help confront totalitarian aggressiveness. Davis was one, although he had moved to the fringes of power.155 In Roosevelt’s Cabinet, Henry Morgenthau, the treasury secretary, and Harold Ickes, the interior secretary, grasped the fascist danger.156 Although both secretaries thought appeasement wrong, they used their offices to aid Britain and France.157 Even so, Roosevelt’s restraint barred strong interventionist action by Washington in 1938–1939. In this setting, outside the supposed solidarity devolving from the trade agreement, British policy from the Anschluss to Prague largely ignored America. Washington was unreliable. Roosevelt’s administration looked to enhance narrow American interests centred on western hemispheric economic and political security and evading European intervention.158 Chamberlain and Roosevelt did ensure that Anglo-American relations sidestepped mutual reproaches over their divergent approaches to Europe, but without any closeness. Downing Street and the White House understood little about the other’s position. In early 1939, Roosevelt gave Lindsay’s later successor, Lord Lothian, his reason for inaction: “while he was willing to help all that he could, he would do nothing if Great Britain cringed like a coward.”159 Chamberlain remained ambiguous: “Roosevelt is saying Heaven knows what but … there is an uneasy feeling that in the case of

 Kennedy to Moffat, 14 April 1938, Moffat 13.  Kennedy to Hull, 11, 22 March 1938, Hull 42. 154  Kennedy telegram to Hull, 14 September 1938, Kennedy to Roosevelt, 19 December 1938, Roosevelt PSF GB. 155  Davis to Hull, 28 February 1938, Hull 42. Cf. Davis to Hull, 7 August 1938, Hull 43. 156  For instance, diary, 30 March, 2 April 1938, in H.L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume II (NY, 1954), 47–9, 351–2. 157  On appeasement, see diary, 2 April 1938, Ibid., 352; Morgenthau to Roosevelt, 17 October 1938, Morgenthau Diary [Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY] Reel 1. On Ickes restricting strategic raw material sales to Germany, see diary, 23 February 1938, Ickes, Diary, 324–5; on Morgenthau trying to support sterling and the franc to allow for Anglo-French defence spending, see J.M. Blum, ed., From the Morgenthau Diaries, Volume I (Boston, 1959), 514–16. 158  David Haglund, Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–1940 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). 159  Diary, 29 January 1939, Ickes, Diary, 571. 152 153

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trouble it would not do much to bring [the] U.S. in on the side of the democracies.”160 Prague ended British discounting the United States in their strategies, which involved deterring Germany and Italy. Until the Nazi-Soviet pact, London’s handling the American question had two threads: British policy could avert war; and despite Roosevelt’s reluctance concerning international security, the appearance of Anglo-American solidarity remained essential. Thus, a different British approach to the United States. Where before Chamberlain’s government supposed that an image of Anglo-American harmony might come from supposedly co-operative ventures like trade, they deliberately strove after Prague to foster this image and prepare for as much concrete co-operation as possible. Announcing his appointment in April 1939, they chose Lothian, a strong Atlanticist, as Lindsay’s successor—his duties would begin on 1 September.161 Then King George VI and his wife were to visit Canada from mid-May to mid-­ June.162 The tour was extended to the United States. Chamberlain’s government promoted the visit, the first by a reigning British monarch to America, to buttress the notion of a better relationship and augment co-operative links. With Roosevelt now desirous to demonstrate the image of Anglo-American solidarity to the three totalitarian powers, the British visit was effective.163 Lindsay observed that whilst isolationism remained entrenched, “In the event of a very grave crisis this [visit] might have decisive results.”164 More important, to preclude ill-feelings that arose in January-February 1938 concerning the peace plan, Halifax provided Roosevelt with intelligence on the comparative strengths of the RAF and the Luftwaffe.165 He also employed public speeches to enlarge on the British and American peoples’ common international morality. After Italy occupied Albania in April 1939, he told Parliament about the adverse response amongst “the overwhelming mass of opinion in this country, by most of the states of Europe, and by the United States of America.”166 Halifax told Cabinet ministers, if “we did nothing this in itself would mean a great accession to Germany’s strength and a great loss to ourselves of sympathy and support in the United States, in the Balkan countries, and in other parts of the world.”167 He, therefore, kept the White House abreast of British efforts respecting the guarantee to Poland  Chamberlain to Hilda, 5 February 1939, NC 18/1/1084.  David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 46–7. 162  Beith minute, 9 March 1939, FO 371/22800/1698/27. 163  David Reynolds, “FDR’s Foreign Policy and the British Royal Visit to the USA, 1939,” Historian 45 (1983): 461–72; Lindsay despatch (660) to Halifax, 16 June 1939, FO 371/22801/4435/27; Lindsay despatch (677) to Halifax, 20 June 1939, FO 371/22801/4441/27. 164  Lindsay despatch (679) to Halifax, 20 June 1939, FO 371/22801/4443/27. 165  Reynolds, Alliance, 48–9. 166  Kennedy telegram (479) to Hull, 14 April 1939, SDDF 711.41/441. 167  FPC Meeting 38, 27 March 1939, CAB 27/624. 160 161

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and, later, to Greece and Romania.168 The War Office and the Air Ministry shared with Kennedy and the American military attaché in London about new technologies, including radar development.169 After Prague Halifax told Kennedy: It ought, so it seemed to me, to be the object of our two Governments to bend all their efforts, as discreetly as they might, to the task of making it plain to the German people that we were animated by no hostile motives towards them, but that our attitude was dictated wholly by the extent to which the moral sense of civilisation was outraged by the present rulers of Germany.170

Outside of government, people like Eden pressed for transatlantic co-­operation. He, for instance, built friendships with Kennedy and senior diplomats at the American Embassy to strengthen ties to Washington. Letters from people sympathetic to the Britain’s European quandary reached the White House and State Department.171 Empathy did not transform into concrete support for Britain during spring-­ summer 1939. Anxious about the European situation and American security, Roosevelt proved crucial. His concern translated into American rearmament, especially the U.S. Navy and the Air Force.172 In 1938, he had endorsed the Vinson-Trammel bill to increase the Navy. Later that year, he pushed for building a force of aircraft carriers and 20,000 airplanes annually. Whilst these objectives proved impractical, American wealth began strengthening the armed forces. Roosevelt explained his attitude to another British friend: “What the British need today is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilization but the continued belief that they can do it. In such an event they will have a lot more support from their American cousins.”173 But he also informed the Senate Armed Services Committee confidentially that America could not avoid supporting Britain and France in a crisis; these remarks were then leaked.174

 Halifax to Roosevelt, 21, 23 March, 5 April 1939, Roosevelt PSF GB.  Chynoweth [military attaché] reports (13, 14, 16), 19, 28 April, 5 May 1939, all Chynoweth [Bradford Chynoweth MSS, US Army Historical Centre, Carlisle Barracks, PA]. 170  Halifax despatch to Lindsay, 17 March 1939, DBFP III, IV, 364–5. 171  For example, Johnson to Moffat, 29 December 1938, 27 April 1939, both Moffat 15; Kennedy to Roosevelt, 20 July 1939, Roosevelt PSF GB Kennedy. 172  G. W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 134–5; Dallek, Roosevelt, 172–5; J.  L. McVoy et  al., “The Roosevelt Resurgence (1933–1941)” in R.  W. King, (ed.), Naval Engineering and American Seapower (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989), 161–200; J.  D. Millett, The Army Service Forces. The Organization and Role of the Army Service Forces (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1954), 18–22. 173  Roosevelt to Merriman, 15 February 1939, Roosevelt PSF GB. 174  Conference with the Senate Military Affairs Committee, 31 January 1939, FDRFA III, XIII, 197–223. 168 169

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Whilst Roosevelt looked to harden British opposition to Hitler’s Germany after Munich, the suggestion that he did so after the Abyssinian crisis is weak.175 He failed to grasp London’s strategic predicament after late 1935—three first-­ class adversaries in Europe and East Asia; his mollifying American isolationist and commercial interests; and his inconsistent words and actions. All limited his effectiveness in London. Even after learning of Roosevelt’s declaration to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chamberlain opined, he “is saying Heaven knows what but … there is an uneasy feeling that in the case of trouble it would not do much to bring [the] U.S. in on the side of the democracies.”176 Accordingly, after Prague, outside enforcing scheduled tariffs on German imports and hectoring Mussolini’s ambassador, Roosevelt’s administration said nothing.177

Conclusion The outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 initiated a lethal chapter in British history. It also meant Roosevelt and his administration would have to choose whether America should involve itself in another European war. They would do so almost immediately to aid Britain and its allies: material support through a “cash and carry” bill in autumn 1939, the major Lend-Lease legislation in early 1941, and even providing intelligence to the Royal Navy in its anti-­ submarine campaign in the Battle of the Atlantic.178 Roosevelt would also seek an unprecedented third term to ensure an effective American response to the three totalitarian Powers and, in summer 1940, appoint strong Republican internationalists in his Cabinet like Stimson as war secretary to build bi-partisan support for increasing intervention. When Chamberlain fell from power in May 1940 and was replaced by Sir Winston Churchill, transatlantic relations transformed into a “special relationship” that girded the Allied war effort until 1945 and, when peace returned, for more than a half century afterwards. This relationship was not built on personal relations—as important as they were— rather it came from London and Washington recognising that the two English-­ speaking Powers shared common strategic interests. This course was not inevitable. But the growing international difficulties in the 1930s transformed the relationship. Whilst still economic competitors and despite some mutual misgivings in the two governments, the roots of Anglo-American rivalry had disappeared by 1939.

 Dallek, Roosevelt, 101–68.  Chamberlain to Hilda, 5 February 1939, NC 18/1/1084. 177  FP(36), Meetings 38–40, 27, 30, 31 March 1939, CAB 27/624. 178  B.  J. C.  McKercher, Britain, America, and the Special Relationship since 1941 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 23–9. 175 176

CHAPTER 7

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: Power Relations A. Warren Dockter

Roosevelt and Churchill Memorial, Bond Street Association, 2011, Lawrence Holofcener, ‘Allies’, 1995, Bond Street, London, Chris Talbot

The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_20 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_7

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There are few personal relationships which have been more scrutinized than that of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. Their approach to international relations as personal relations during the Second World War stands as a monumental moment in the history of the twentieth century, and, in the friendship, birthed the Atlantic Charter and the special relationship as we see it today.1 Indeed, they did have an important, unique, and significant relationship for a prime minster and a president. Between 1939 and 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged an estimated 2000 letters and telegrams, met with one another 11 times and spent no fewer than 113 days together during the Second World War.2 Though they met the first time in 1918, in which neither was particularly impressed with the other, their relationship began in earnest in 1939 when Roosevelt proposed to Prime Minister Chamberlain that Churchill keep him up to date on political decisions. Ultimately, Chamberlain was content to pass this connection on to Churchill at the Admiralty, who enthusiastically took up the charge as a “formal naval person.”3 Their relationship was so important to the war effort and the allied post-war strategy that successive generations have ascribed mythic portions to it. The heroic narrative of Churchill and Roosevelt, as close compatriots fighting an “unambiguous, just war against evident evil” in a so-called “Good War,” has added another layer of the mythic relationship which one can see employed and retooled through the twentieth century and even in contemporary discussions of the special relationship. This should not be a surprise. Robert Gerwarth explains the importance of myths, which are often “invented and reinvented” during times of “political unrest and disorientation.” In this way we can see how our approach of any historical topic is dominated by the political context in which they are approached. The German term for this is geschichtspolitik—the politically motivated use of historical narratives within the public discourse.4 Moreover, Gerwarth highlighted another component of political myth making which is significant for both Churchill and Roosevelt: the creation of hero figures. “The creation of hero figures in particular has been a dominant feature of myth making since ancient times and it became even more important with the emergence of the modern nation-state and the related quest for suitable historical traditions on which a national community’s identity can be founded,” Gerwarth writes, echoing nineteenth-century thinkers Thomas Carlyle, who argued that “hero worship is the A. W. Dockter (*) Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK e-mail: [email protected] 1  The first historical expression of the phrase “special relationship” was C. Allen’s study of AngloAmerican relations from 1783 to 1952 (1954). David Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-American Relations,” International Affairs 65, no. 1 (Winter 1988–1989): 89. 2  Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 674. 3  Peter Gretton, Former Naval Person: Winston Churchill and the Royal Navy (London: Cassell, 1968), xi. 4  Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3, 5.

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strongest and most reliable means for stabilizing a political and social order,” and Ernest Renan who said at the Sorbonne in 1882 that “a heroic past, great men, fame … that is the social capital on which the nation is founded.”5 So, by exploring the reality of the relationship between these two men, one is forced to grapple with mythos surrounding the reason Anglo-American relations took on a form of specialness while they were being conducted by Churchill and Roosevelt. By briefly exploring the historiography, we can see how various versions of their relationship reflects the socio-political context of the time in which it which it was written about. Though a complete historiographical evaluation of their relationship and its mythic proportions is beyond the scope of this chapter, a brief expedition into the literature around the Churchill, Roosevelt, and the special relationship will prove useful. The beginning of the myth of Churchill and Roosevelt’s relationship owes much to H. E. Morton’s book on the Atlantic Meeting (1943). Morton was a travel writer sent to Placentia Bay by Brenden Bracken to cover the secretive meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill. Morton was known for embellishment, and this is precisely why he had been chosen to come along and give an account. Morton argued that Churchill’s superb leadership came from “an older England … not as an Etonian but as an English man,” and argued that Churchill was an emotional Elizabethan, appealing to the nation from the deck of the golden hind, in a classless non-public school accent.6 This is exactly the heroic language that Churchill wanted and Bracken demanded from Morton and, although Atlantic Meeting was not published until 1943, it should be seen as wartime propaganda. The primary architect of the myth of specialness in Anglo-American relations was Churchill, first as a politician and then as a historian. The importance of the Anglo-American relationship was obvious in Churchill’s “courtship” of Roosevelt, and his ceaseless efforts to bring the United States into the war. Churchill conceded after the war that “No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.”7 This is of course echoed in his own history of the Second World War. In the beginning of his second volume of Their Finest Hour (1949), Churchill romanticizes his relationship with President Roosevelt: “My relationship with the President gradually became so close that the chief business between our two countries was virtually conducted by these personal interchanges between him and me. In this war our perfect understanding was gained.”8 However, according to historian Warren Kimball,  Ibid., 6; Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1846).  H. E. Morton, Atlantic Meeting (London: Methuen, 1943), 80; Nick Fraser, The Importance of Being Eton (London: Short Books, 2006); C.  R. Perry, “In Search of H.V.  Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy,” Twentieth Century British History 10, no. 4 (1999): 451. 7  Robin Renwick, Fighting with Allies: America and Britain in Peace and War (London: Macmillan, 1996), 271. 8  Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell and Co., 1949), 22. David Reynolds has pointed out that in an earlier unpublished draft, Churchill left in a sentence about his correspondence with Roosevelt. It read: “In another generation the whole correspondence should be put together.” David Reynolds, In Command of History (London: Basic Books, 2005), 570, n.66. See Also, Churchill Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, CHUR 4/147/177. 5 6

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this rose-coloured recollection should cause us to question Churchill’s account. Churchill’s impetus to paint his relationship with Roosevelt in the best possible terms is perhaps best explained by the Cold War context in which his history was published. Churchill was acutely aware of the importance of Anglo-­ American friendship in the new atomic age. Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, recorded that Churchill cut material from the last volume of the Second World War lest he offend the newly elected President Eisenhower.9 Kimball argues that Churchill’s narrative created “a much exaggerated portrait of himself as the wise and prescient leader who foresaw Soviet expansion, while Roosevelt comes off as a pleasant Pangloss, unwilling to accept these facts of geopolitical power.”10 This has been echoed by a host of others including historian John Ramsden, who argued that towards the end of the war, “Churchill utterly failed to get from Roosevelt any assurance of permanent American commitment to the defence of Western Europe and indeed in the last year of the war Roosevelt had shown rather that he saw himself as standing between Churchill and Stalin rather than alongside Britain against Russia.”11 Churchill knew that his heroic memoir would remain, to many, the primary account of the Second World War until the files were declassified and opened for historians. In this way, he was the author of his own myth. Nevertheless, Churchill’s heroic version of the special relationship held sway in British political and academic circles until the 1960s. In the United States, journalist Robert Sherwood had been critical of the role Churchill cast. According to Sherwood, Churchill had “created the scared tradition” that when American and British statesmen meet, “the former will be a plain, blunt down to earth, ingenious to a fault, while the later will be sly, subtle, devious, and eventually triumphant.” But Sherwood believed this was far too simplistic and self-aggrandizing from Churchill. He continued, “If either of them could be called a student of Machiavelli it was Roosevelt; if either was a bull in a China shop, it was Churchill.”12 A. J. P. Taylor joined the critical chorus; he said, “Of the great men at the top, Roosevelt was the only one who knew what he was doing.”13 Still, these interpretations have done little to dislodge Churchill’s heroic narrative in part because Roosevelt never got the opportunity to present his version of events, and partly because, since 1968, the International Churchill Society has kept the Churchillian narrative alive.14 9  Colville diary entry, 1 January 1953  in The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), 658. 10  Warren Kimball, “‘Dr New Deal’: Franklin D. Roosevelt as Commander and Chief” in Joseph Dawson (ed.), Commander and Chief: Presidential War Time Leadership from McKinley to Nixon (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 293. 11  John Ramsden, Man of the Century (London: Harper Collins, 2003), 313. 12  Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), 364; Warren Kimball, “Wheel within a Wheel: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Special Relationship” in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), Churchill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 291–294. 13  A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965). 14  Ibid., 291; Kimball, “Wheel within a Wheel,” 294, 290; Ramsden, Man of the Century, 569–572. It is worth noting that there is an academic Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation

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The inheritance of this historical focus on Churchill and Roosevelt’s personal relationship and its role in the evolution of the special relationship has created competing schools of thought. According to Steve Marsh and John Baylis, there are two primary schools of thought as it related to the special relationship.15 The “terminal” school argues that the special relationship is over and may never have existed at all, while the “Lazarus or evangelical” school argues that like Lazarus the special relationship is continually resurrected to cope with geopolitics as they evolve.16 The Lazarus school also fits with the Gerwarth theory about heroic national myths. A third school, one that Alex Danchev calls the “functionalist” model, highlights the use of the term “special relationship” to fulfil national interests of both the United Kingdom and the United States.17 Whichever school of thought one subscribes to, the importance of Churchill and Roosevelt’s personal relationship is not really up for debate. They remain the titans of Anglo-American relations.

First Impressions and “Treasured Recollections” On 4 July 1919, Churchill delivered a speech at the Central Hall in Westminster on Anglo-Saxon fellowship. He declared that on the 142nd anniversary of American independence the American troops in Europe supporting the Allied cause had left him feeling “emotions which words cannot describe” and that the true reward for aiding France and Belgium was the “supreme reconciliation” between Britain and the United States.18 Having read the speech in the Times, Archibald Sinclair wrote Churchill a resounding congratulations and noted that the “thinking men of our country” will regard “the complete understanding and cooperation of America as our highest reward.”19 Churchill responded that if all goes well “England and U.S. may act permanently based in Adams House at Harvard University, but it is largely confined to academic engagement and operates rather differently from what Kimball called “the Churchill Cult.” 15  Steve Marsh and John Baylis, “The Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’: The Lazarus of International Relations,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 17, no. 1 (2006): 173–211. 16  On “terminal” school, see Max Beloff, “The Special Relationship: An Anglo-American Myth?” in Martin Gilbert (ed.), A Century of Conflict 1850–1950 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966); John Dickie, Special No More: Anglo American Relations Rhetoric and Reality (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994); Alex Danchev, On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations (London: Macmillan, 1997). As for the “Lazarus” school, the chief architect in many ways was Winston Churchill. See also, John Baylis, Anglo-American Relations since 1939: An Enduring Alliance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 8. For other examples of the Lazarus school, see H. C. Allen, The Anglo American Predicament (London: Macmillan, 1960); H. C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo American Relations (London: Oldhams, 1955). 17  Alex Danchev, On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations (London: Macmillan, 1997); John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After (London: Macmillan, 2001); David Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-American Relations,” International Affairs 65, no. 1 (Winter, 1988–89): 89–111. 18  “Churchill’s Speech,” Times, 5 July 1919. 19  Archibald Sinclair to Churchill, early July 1919 in Martin Gilbert (ed.), Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 4 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 123–124.

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together. We are living 50 years in one at this rate.”20 Within three weeks of his speech, Churchill first met Franklin Roosevelt at Gray’s Hall Inn on 29 July 1918. Though Churchill was present at the bibulous meal and drinks after, he did not give a speech. Lord Curzon did, as did many of other leading figures like Canadian prime minister Sir Robert Borden and South African representative Jan Smuts. As the evening and speeches wore on, a final comment came from the 36-year-old U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, who said, “he marvelled at the wonderful spirit which exists between the two nations,” and finished on a note of solidarity: “We are with you to the end.”21 This should have given Churchill, who was so eager to unite the Anglo-­ Saxon nations three weeks prior, a lasting and comforting impression. Roosevelt certainly remembered Churchill. FDR told Joseph Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador, that Churchill had “acted like a stinker” and was “lording it over all us” and, finally and perhaps most damningly, that Churchill was “one of the few men in public life who was rude to him.”22 When the two met again at Placentia Bay during the August 1941 Atlantic Conference, ever the diplomat, Roosevelt told Churchill that meeting him during the First World War was a “treasured recollection” to which his guest had to admit “frankly it slipped his memory.”23 Churchill altered this for his history of the Second World War, saying he recalled Roosevelt’s “magnificent presence in all his youth and strength.”24 Despite what Churchill may lead his readers to think, it was not a very good first impression. But during the interim between Gary’s Hall Inn and the Placentia Bay meeting, Churchill worked at reaching out to Roosevelt. During one of his many visits to the United States, Churchill attempted to meet Roosevelt. In October 1929, through their mutual friend Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., Churchill reached out to Roosevelt, but to no avail. Again, when he was in the United States in 1932, Churchill tried to convince his friend Bob Boothby to join him in going to both Republican and Democratic national conventions to meet “all the politicians of both great parties.”25 But this, too, fizzled out. After Roosevelt’s election to the White House, Churchill sent a congratulatory gift, the first volume of his newly published Marlborough (1932), a history of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill inscribed it: “With earnest best wishes for the success of the greatest crusade of modern times.”26 This had a profound effect on Roosevelt’s view of Churchill and perhaps even

 Gilbert, Churchill and America, 77.  “A Break in the Clouds,” Times, 30 July 1918. 22  Warren Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: Complete Correspondence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984): 1, 355; Gilbert, Churchill and America, 77; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 350–351. 23  Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 673. 24  Churchill, Second World War, 440. 25  Gilbert, Churchill and America, 137. 26  Ibid., 149. 20 21

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rehabilitated Churchill’s memory in the mind of Roosevelt.27 Undoubtedly, this was also aided by Churchill’s invitation of James Roosevelt, Franklin’s son, to a dinner at Chartwell in October 1933. At that dinner, Churchill confided to James that he hoped to be prime minister and “in close and daily contact with the President of the United States. There is nothing we could not do if we were together.” Churchill then produced a drawing of the sterling-dollar, to which and instructed James to “to bear this to your father from me. It must be the currency of the future.”28 By 1938, Churchill had even included a chapter about Roosevelt in the second edition of his Great Contemporaries (1938), which like much of the rest of the book was essentially a love letter posing as objective analysis.29 As the geopolitical order of the old Europe began crumbling ten days after the German invasion of Poland, Churchill and Chamberlain were sent their first official correspondence from Roosevelt. He suggested that either Churchill or Chamberlain “keep me in touch.”30 Though Chamberlain eventually sent his own letter, it was Churchill’s letter which had a personal touch with Churchill signing off as “a formal naval person” and promising to try and “keep the war from American waters.”31 It was shortly after Churchill drafted this letter and while Chamberlain and the rest of the Cabinet were still grappling with etiquette of responding to the president of the United States that Churchill received a call from Roosevelt at his flat in London. Roosevelt tipped off Churchill to German propaganda saying British warships might sink an American steamship which had recently left Dublin. It was in that short period that a clear commitment to action would provide a foundation for a personal relationship which shape the Anglo-American relations thereafter. But there were still doubts in Roosevelt’s mind about Churchill. He told Joseph Kennedy that he was concerned about Churchill’s “Victorian attitudes and his excessive drinking.”32 Far more alarming was the fear that Britain would collapse in the face of German expansion. This was fuelled by the anti-British and dangerously defeatist Kennedy. When the Nazis marched into Poland, Kennedy proclaimed, “It’s the end of the world, the end of everything!”33 27  Andrew Roberts has postulated that “Marlborough might have been the reason that Franklin Roosevelt … started to warm to Churchill long before they met the second time.” Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 373. Churchill certainly thought it did. He noted in his history of the Second World War that when Roosevelt sent his first letter, he thanked him for “doing the Marlborough volumes before this thing started—and I much enjoyed reading them.” Churchill, Second World War, 355. 28  Gilbert, Churchill and America, 150. 29  Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 419. 30  According to Warren Kimball, Roosevelt unconventionally included Churchill because he wanted to establish contact with one of Chamberlain’s potential successors. Kimball, “Wheel within a Wheel,” 297. 31  Gilbert, Churchill and America, 177. 32  Kimball, “Wheel within a Wheel,” 298. 33  Robert Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 198.

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Roosevelt was to become so frustrated with Kennedy’s attitude that he would bypass him in instructions and communications.34 This is another reason Churchill jumped at crafting a personal relationship with the president. It would allow him to bypass Kennedy, who had already said to him that “war was inevitable and Britain would be beaten.”35 Any doubts about Anglo-American relations would be laid to rest at the Atlantic Conference in August 1941—Churchill and Roosevelt’s second meeting. According to Jock Colville, Churchill left Britain “as excited as a school boy” at the opportunity to meet the American president.36 On the way there, Churchill was accompanied by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s majordomo who regularly fleeced Churchill at cards. The journey was different for Roosevelt who, ever-weary of the still isolationist American public, arranged for a doppelgänger to sail the presidential yacht to confuse the press while he secretly travelled on the USS Augusta to Placentia Bay.37 The Atlantic Conference was successful, despite the awkwardness at Churchill and Roosevelt’s previous meeting. Their second, first impression of one another was extremely positive. Both men were romantics. Churchill quoted the nineteenth-century English poet Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth” as a response to Roosevelt’s message of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem “Sail on of Ship of State” from earlier that year.38 Churchill even cabled back to Clement Attlee, “I am sure I have established warm and deep personal relations with our great friend.”39 Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that they would consult one another on issues of grand strategy and made arrangements for close relations between their governments. While the establishment of their personal relation was clearly of paramount importance to Churchill, there was something perhaps more important born of the Atlantic Conference: the Atlantic Charter. More a declaration of principles than a binding agreement, the Charter embraced “basic freedoms” (such as freedom from want and fear, and the freedom of information), a commitment to post-war international order as well as a commitment to self-determination and economic liberalism. While both parties agreed on the statement, it was clear this was a “classic statement of American liberalism.”40 But it remained a success for Churchill because the immediate need for American support was his primary objective, while for Roosevelt the declaration of internationalist principles marked the success of the Charter. In this way it was clearly more shaped by Roosevelt’s idealism than Churchill’s geopolitical realism. This was to plant 34  Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War (London: William Morrow and Co., 1998), 58. 35  Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 454. 36  Colville, Fringes of Power, 423. 37  Kimball, Forged in War, 97. 38  Kimball, Forged in War, 98. 39  Churchill, Second World War, 657. 40  Kimball, Forged in War, 99.

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a seed which would grow into real difficulties for Churchill as the special relationship wore on and especially into the post-war era. Self-determination in Europe was progressive and anti-Nazi, but global self-determination undermined the British Empire in Africa and Asia which Churchill was committed to. Nevertheless, Churchill recognized the importance and necessity of the Anglo-­ American alliance and so helped to lay the foundation for a closer relationship with the United States, one which 23 years prior he had called the “supreme reconciliation.”

Great Contemporaries “There were never two less likely looking warriors,” historian Warren Kimball writes.41 Churchill, already bested at Gallipoli during the First World War, had a reputation for recklessness and was quite old for a prime minster. He had spent more than 40 years in British politics, had changed parties twice, and had developed a reputation as an eccentric, Victorian imperialist in the 1930s over the India Bill. His aristocratic tastes and Edwardian spending habits led to a Pol Roger fuelled lifestyle with bibulous meals and lavish holidays that had nearly bankrupted him on more than one occasion.42 Churchill had been exiled to his self-proclaimed political wilderness. Unable to guide the Tory party from the back benches in the 1930s, he took to writing. As a regular contributor to the Telegraph, Churchill read and wrote vociferously on current affairs, history, and the failures of the Chamberlain government as well as publishing his collection of essays called Great Contemporaries (1938), which included a short biographic piece on Roosevelt. When he was not writing, he was working. Painting, farming, and bricklaying consumed his daily routine. His country estate Chartwell consumed more and more time and energy. Churchill became a rotund, short-tempered, Napoleon trapped on his own personal Elba. It was not until the German invasion of Poland that Neville Chamberlain thought of inviting his most vocal critic into the cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, a move that would help unify the party and the country. But Chamberlain failed to appreciate how much time he had left in his position and the fact that Nazi appeasement had failed as a strategy and made his presence redundant. When Chamberlain left Downing Street, many in the Conservative Party hoped Lord Halifax would succeed to that office, but Halifax demurred before the king, and, as a result, Churchill stepped in the breach, promising action. Roosevelt’s rise to power was different. The patrician FDR suffered from a polio attack in 1921 that left him reliant on a wheel chair. His name had given him a family connection to former president Theodore Roosevelt and connected him to the right people. This further moulded him into something of a  Kimball, Forged in War, 1.  For full account of Churchill’s financial difficulties, see David Lough, No More Champagne (London: Head of Zues, 2016). 41 42

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snob. He managed to get into Columbia Law School on the back of his connections, but he was mediocre in his scholarly pursuits which led to a brief and lacklustre career as a lawyer. Though erudite and charming, Roosevelt was often described as vain, superficial, and childish.43 Like Churchill, Roosevelt was a political operator of the highest order. In his youth, he moved between the Democrats (the party of his father) and the Republicans (the party of his cousin Theodore) with ease. He once told a young woman that he ran as a Democrat prior to the First World War just because “there were too many Roosevelts in the Republican Party trying to capitalize on Theodore’s name.”44 Succumbing to polio derailed Roosevelt’s political aspirations, but with the help of his wife Eleanor and her networking abilities, combined with his charm, Roosevelt was elected to the chair of the Taconic State Park Commission. This ultimately led to his successful campaign for governor of New York in 1928, and, while President Hoover and other Republicans thought the economy was capable of recovery, Roosevelt was quick to realize the dangers of the depression and urged the creation of unemployment insurance and other state programmes. After his re-election to governor in 1932, Roosevelt set up a Temporary Emergency Relief Administration for the state of New York easing the economic downturn while, simultaneously, antagonizing the Hoover administration. By 1932, Roosevelt had gained enough traction in national politics to run for president. In this way, the United States got to choose its war leader in a way that the United Kingdom did not. Roosevelt’s pledge to combat the great depression was in his words “more than a political campaign,” it was “a call to arms.”45 The New Deal was so popular, Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936 and then for an unpreceded third term in 1940 and a fourth term in 1944. Much of Churchill’s political wilderness in the 1930s saw Roosevelt at the centre of American politics. Once their formal correspondence began, Churchill, merely First Lord of the Admiralty, was significantly outranked by Roosevelt. As such, their correspondence was mostly limited to naval matters and though cordial, the exchanges had not yet “taken on it much celebrated weight.”46 There were other imbalances in their political lives which made their relationship more dynamic and perhaps unconventional. Though Churchill was on the back benches in the 1930s, his long political career saw him hold almost every major office in government. By comparison, before he was president, Roosevelt’s only experience of federal government was as assistant secretary to the Navy and had little experience in foreign relations.47 But Churchill, who  Geoffrey Ward, A First Class Temperament (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), p. xiii.  Ibid., 93n. 45  James Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Easton Press), 139. 46  David Woolner, “Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship,’” in Richard Toye (ed.), Winston Churchill, Politics, Strategy, and Statecraft (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 154. 47  Keith Sainsbury, Churchill and Roosevelt at War: The War they fought and the Peace they Hoped to Make (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 5. 43 44

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only became prime minister after the war had begun and after Chamberlain’s government collapsed, had never had to consider public opinion in the same way Roosevelt did. This goes some way in explaining the Roosevelt’s reluctance in supporting the United Kingdom in front of the isolationist American public. Despite these imbalances, Roosevelt and Churchill made the most of their friendship politically despite the unwavering fact that increasingly Britain depended on the United States for economic assistance, resources, manpower, and post-war strategy.48

Partners in Power Unsurprisingly the earlier phase (1940–1943) of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship was what might be referred to as the halcyon stage. Both leaders were closer to approaching a lock-in-step affiliation during this period owing in part to their open correspondence while Churchill was at the Admiralty and the dire threat which Hitler’s Germany posed to the democracies of Europe. In this phase, Roosevelt and Churchill could easily set aside their differences on British colonialism, military strategy, and the post-war order and focus on what they agreed the most on, grand strategy as clearly laid out in the Atlantic Charter. In May 1940, as Churchill became prime minister, the Nazis marched into France and Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term and seeking election to an unprecedented third term. By June, the Battle of Britain was beginning and the situation for Britain was getting increasingly dire, but in the United States, domestic politics surrounding the Great Depression and the growing power of the isolationists in American politics proved a difficult hurdle for Churchill and Roosevelt to surpass. As Warren Kimball has pointed out, “Britain’s struggle for survival is curiously absent from the Roosevelt Churchill exchanges” during this period, probably because Churchill knew there was little Roosevelt could do to bypass the isolationist elements of the American public.49 Though Roosevelt’s belief that the United States would eventually have to play a more significant role in international affairs, the isolations were still a powerful force in Congress, and it was also powerful in the government machinery.50 For instance, the U.S. State Department was openly “committed to nurturing Vichy neutrality” while the increasingly frustrated president looked on as the Luftwaffe bombed London.51 So he used executive privilege to help push through the “Destroyers for bases” agreement in September 1940, which was perhaps more symbolic than being militarily efficient, though it did lay the groundwork for the Lend Lease Act in March of 1941.52 Having  Ibid., 11.  Kimball, Forged in War, 64. 50  Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (New York: Greenwood Press, 1957), 257. 51  Kimball, Forged in War, 66. 52  William Casto “Advising Presidents: Robert Jackson and the Destroyers-For-Bases Deal,” American Journal of Legal History 52, no. 1 (2012): 1–135; David Reynolds, The Creation of the 48 49

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promised the American public to avoid entering any foreign war, Roosevelt went as far as public opinion allowed, providing financial and military aid to Britain. Indeed, the correspondence between the prime minister and president grew closer. But the isolationist Americans continued to hold a powerful voice in American politics. While their correspondence illustrated a commitment to the burgeoning special relationship, it revealed an affinity before it was acceptable to the isolationists. This is all painfully clear in what has been called the Tyler Kent affair. Kent was a low-level diplomat who, while working in London, came to have at least 15 copies of some of Churchill and Roosevelt’s correspondence just before the fall of France. This was a challenge to President Roosevelt, who was still running a presidential campaign that promised aid to Britain but “not send American boys to war,” especially since Kent, who thought the American public had a right to know about the closeness of the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, sought to expose Anglo-American cooperation before the attack on Pearl Harbor.53 This was covered in the American and British press and caused some concern to FDR.  On 7 November 1940, Kent was ­convicted and forced to serve the duration of the war in a British prison. Isolationist groups in the United States claimed that he had been framed and that the trial was an attempted cover-up of an attempt to get the United States to join the war.54 Content that Kent’s findings were far away from the curious and impressionable American public, Roosevelt could continue with his strategy of bringing America slowly along in to the role of a major international actor. In a December 1940 talk, called the “Arsenal of Democracy,” Roosevelt declared, “This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk about national security.” He went on to declare the importance of the United States’ support of Britain’s war effort, reframing the conversation around American national security. This was to appease the isolationist elements and convince the American people that supporting the British would prevent the conflict from reaching American shores. The aggression of Nazi Germany was also painfully clear to the American public after the Hitler’s unprovoked invasion of Russia in June 1941 which not only violated the non-aggression pact which that Ribbentrop had signed with Molotov but also created another ally for Roosevelt and Churchill in form of Josef Stalin. This weakened American isolationists and opened the way for the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, the clearest articulation of the grand strategy which Churchill and Roosevelt agreed on. It was reported at the time that it covered eight points: no territorial gains were to be sought by the United States or the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1982). 53  Kimball, Forged in War, 68. 54  James Leutze, “The Secret of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence: Sept 1939-May 1940,” Journal of Contemporary History 10, no. 3 (July, 1975): 465–491.

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United Kingdom; territorial adjustments must be in accord with the wishes of the peoples concerned; all people had a right to self-determination; trade barriers were to be lowered; there was to be global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare; the participants would work for a world free of want and fear; the participants would work for freedom of the seas; there was to be disarmament of aggressor nations, and a common disarmament after the war.55 It also made it obvious that the United States would be allied with Britain; however, the language of self-determination made Churchill uncomfortable as there would be clear implications for the British Empire after the war. But Churchill, like some in the American public, took solace in the fact that this was not a legally binding treaty but rather a statement of purpose, a horizon of ideals to work towards. This allowed the president and the prime minister greater diplomatic space to explore operational approaches they agreed on, such as the convictions that Nazi Germany and militarist Japan would have to be utterly defeated at the Casablanca Conference in 1943. These points might best be summed up around the number one priority: keeping the Soviet Union in the war. They would adjust to that in the post-war reconstruction of Europe when the USSR would be a major player. For Roosevelt that was fine. He was happy to accommodate the Soviets and was willing to explore trading off influence in Asia or even in Europe as the strategy might demand. Roosevelt’s visions of spheres of influence was based on the notion that the United States had been relatively detached in its relationship with Europe and indeed the world.56 However, this posed a more serious issue for Churchill. After all, “the British Empire was Russia’s long standing rival for power aid position in Asia and the Near East.”57 Despite being an avowed anti-­ Bolshevik, Churchill placed a lot of effort in to publicly supporting Stalin and the Soviets under the broad concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He famously declared in the Commons that “if Hitler invaded hell he would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil.”58 Privately, Churchill was far more erratic. He would switch in the same breath from saying the Soviets would “assuredly be defeated” to promising to “go all out to help Russia.”59 Despite these differences, both leaders agreed that working with the Soviets as a common ally was the way forward even if that meant both leaders from the West took a view that they would have to “educate the Russians through their personal interactions with Stalin.”60 This was still true by the Tehran Conference in 1943, but by Yalta in 1944 the strategy of the Western bloc educating Stalin was seriously starting to fray. 55  Julius Stone, “Peace Planning and the Atlantic Charter,” Australian Quarterly 14, no. 2 (June 1942): 21. 56  David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 11–12. 57  Ibid. 58  Kimball, Forged in War, 90–1. 59  Ibid., 90. 60  Reynolds and Pechatnov, The Kremlin Letters, 13.

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On 7 December 1941, everything changed. The bombing of Pearl Harbor heralded the zenith of the special relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt. Though Roosevelt initially avoided Churchill’s request to come to Washington on the day of the attack, Churchill came over for Christmas to ensure a close relationship.61 Roosevelt’s pledge on 11 December to keep with the Germany First strategy, in part because Germany had declared war on the United States, marked a major win for Churchill. Moreover, the Anglo-American alliance was growing closer because Churchill joined his American counterpart on 22 December 1941. After a grueling naval journey, Churchill disembarked at Hampton Roads and flew to Washington, where he was greeted by Roosevelt at the airport. This three-and-a-half-week visit marked a major milestone in Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s relationship. Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins described it as “one of the most bizarre interludes in the history of relations between two heads of state and government” made even more significant because it serves as an exception to the maxim “great stars are only happy in their own unimpeded orbits.”62 Indeed, it was an eventful visit. In addition to the business of state and war and presiding over the Arcadia Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt quickly formed a solid and lasting friendship, learning to accommodate one another’s habits and fretting over the other’s drinking.63 They spoke about the Boer War, with Roosevelt “needling Churchill for having been on the wrong side.”64 The next night, the infamous bath incident occurred when the president walked in on the prime minister having emerged from the bath but continuing to dictate speeches in the nude. Upon becoming aware that the president had entered the room, Churchill turned to him and said “You see Mr. President, I have nothing to conceal from you.”65 Churchill attended church with Roosevelt for Christmas and even sang hymns, but he also suffered from a minor heart attack the following day, which his doctor Charles Moran (later Lord Moran) kept secret from him initially.66 Churchill recovered almost immediately and continued the conference, flying out to Ottawa on the 29 December and returning to Washington on New Year’s Day 1942. This conference was one of the high points in Churchill’s relationship with Roosevelt. Here Churchill was probably the “nearest to full equality with Americans.”67 Churchill and Roosevelt began laying the foundations for what would become the UN and were in lockstep on dealing with Stalin, ensuring the principles of the Atlantic Charter were carried through. Stalin tested them  Kimball, “Wheel within a Wheel,” 300.  Roy Jenkins, Churchill (Macmillan: London, 2001), 671. 63  Ibid., 672–3. 64  Percy Chubb, Recollection, 23 December 1941, Letter to Gilbert 1 March 1977 in Gilbert (ed.) Churchill Documents (Hillsdale Press: Michigan 2011): 16, 1675. 65  Patrick Kinna, Recollection, 24 December 1941, Letter to Gilbert 10 Oct 1984 in Gilbert (ed.) Churchill Documents (Hillsdale Press: Michigan 2011): 16, 1676. 66  Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (Heron: London, 1966), 15–7. 67  Jenkins, Churchill, 676. 61 62

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very early on with oblique implications that the Soviet Union should take significant parts Finland and the Baltic states while Churchill was travelling to the United States. Churchill at once wrote to Clement Attlee and explained that this would be “contrary to the second and third articles of the Atlantic charter” and “There can be no question whatever of our making such an agreement, secret or public, direct or indirect without prior agreement with the United States.”68 He also wrote to Anthony Eden to handle the situation and that “We are bound to the United States not to enter into secret or special pacts.”69 Perhaps the most significant creation from the Arcadia conference was the creation of Combined Chiefs of Staff and the extraordinary “high level of intelligence sharing,” which would lead to the creation of the atomic bomb. This illustrates the level of closeness.70 As Churchill left Washington, he reportedly said that “previously we were trying to seduce them. Now they are securely in the harem.”71 He also told King George VI upon his return that “Britain and America were now married after many months of walking out.”72 Beyond their declarations of support, friendship, and unified thinking on Stalin and the USSR, both Churchill and Roosevelt recognized there would have to be an extensive bombing campaign against Germany to bolster the war effort. This was evident when Roosevelt promised Churchill that “American bombing squadrons come over to attack Germany from the British Isles.”73 Another major joint agreement was that they would have to create a second front and there would have to be an invasion of Western Europe. Originally proposed by U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, who argued to beat Germany first by opening a second front in France as soon as possible, but owing to the necessity of U.S. build-up and preparation, any such invasion was unlikely until at least 1943 and more realistically 1944.74 Churchill and Roosevelt demurred, needing to do something to reassure Stalin. They settled on invading Northern Africa; Churchill saw this as method of “closing the ring” around Germany. Roosevelt agreed because he believed this would help focus the American public on the Atlantic side of the war rather than the Pacific. But, by May 1942, Roosevelt promised Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that a second front in Europe was in order, to build a better bilateral relationship with the increasingly angry Stalin, perhaps even at the cost of relations with Churchill, but more importantly to cement the idea that a separate peace between the USSR and Germany was off the table.75 As the war rolled on, and with Stalin being increasingly vocal about needing another front to take  Churchill to Attlee 20 December 1941 in Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Documents: 16, 1657–8.  Churchill to Eden, 20 December 1941 in Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Documents: 16, 1658. 70  Woolner, “Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship,’” 160. 71  Jenkins, Churchill, 676. 72  John Wheeler-Bennett, King George IV: His Life and Time (Macmillan: London, 1958), 535. 73  Gilbert, Churchill War Papers: 3, 1682–3. 74  Woolner, “Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship,’” 161. 75  Ibid., 161; Mark Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front: American military Planning in Coalition Warfare (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977). 68 69

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pressure of the Eastern front, the Anglo-American friendship began to fracture into self-interest and unilateral moves.

Divergences In his history of the Second World War, Churchill referred to his disagreements with President Roosevelt as “divergences of view.”76 However, these divergences increased after 1943, once it became clear that Germany and Japan would collapse and there were increased differences in post-war strategy. But there had been divergences in the relationship from the beginning. A difficult point early on was the fate of the British Navy in the event of a successful Nazi invasion. On 6 August 1940, Churchill received a telegram from Roosevelt which said in the event that Britain was overrun that the “Royal Navy would neither be surrendered nor sunk.” The solution President Roosevelt proposed was that Britain might move its fleet to the Western Hemisphere and “relinquish its warships to Canada” from where the war could be prosecuted.77 This deeply affected Churchill as he had only one month prior ordered the sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir to keep them from falling into Hitler’s hands. His fear that Roosevelt might do the same to the Royal Navy was understandable.78 Even Churchill admitted that in America “there was a storm of unfavorable criticism.”79 To the contrary, this hastened the Destroyers-for-­ Bases deal, which gave Britain a much-needed influx of war material. John Charmley has criticized that fact, pointing out that the destroyers were essentially old and outdated.80 This was also reflected in Anthony Eden’s reflection that the deal was actually “a grievous blow at our authority and ultimately at our sovereignty.”81 Another significant divergence in the early years of the relationship was over the fate of Russia. Churchill was fairly certain at points (although he did seem to go back and forth) that Russia would collapse in the face of the German onslaught. He wrote to Robert Menzies on 30 June: “I do not know how long the Russian’s will hold out.”82 This is significant because Churchill claimed in his memoirs that his position on Russia’s staying power was firm by 22 June, after he had made the comment about supporting the devil in the House of Commons. Though he claimed that he was more confident than his chiefs of staff, in reality he was far more doubtful. Even as late as October 1941 he reckoned that the chances of Moscow falling by the winter was even. Despite his in-depth knowledge of Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia, on 25 October Churchill predicted that “in a month or so the Soviet Union will have been  Churchill, Second World War, 109; Baylis, Anglo-American Relations since 1939, 30–2.  Gilbert, Churchill and America, 201. 78  Jock Colville, Diary 6 Aug 1940 in Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Documents: 15, 625. 79  Churchill, Second World War: 2, 437; 645–9. 80  John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance (London: Marnier Books, 1995), 21. 81  Ibid., 21. 82  Churchill to Menzies 30 June 1941 in Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Documents: 16, 873. 76 77

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reduced to a second rate military Power.”83 After meeting with Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, on 4 November on the seriousness of the situation facing Russia, Churchill told the Cabinet that this might even “be the final turning point of the war and that of Russia were defeated our own chance of winning might have gone forever.”84 Roosevelt had much more faith in his Soviet counterparts. He was committed to helping them even when his subordinates were not so supportive. Roosevelt ordered Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson to treat aid to Russia as of paramount importance for the safety and security of America.85 Predictably, Knox and Stimson were not enthusiastic supporters of the Soviet Union owing to “the anticapitalist, antireligion, antibourgeois rhetoric of the Bolsheviks.”86 The War Office frequently tried to buck the president’s wishes, and, as a result, Roosevelt sent his political ally Averell Harriman to Moscow to assess the situation. He was accompanied by Churchill’s friend and ally Lord Beaverbrook, who was a tried and true believer in unconditional aid to Russia. Harriman and Beaverbrook followed Roosevelt’s lead to help to aid Russia as much as possible, but Churchill was fearful that resources sent to Russia would have actually been aid to Britain. Moreover, what aid was sent would need to come from the United States because Churchill feared that Britain might be “bled white in the process.”87 The aid to Russia programme was an important opportunity for Roosevelt. It moved American-Soviet relations beyond mere military allies into the dimension of friendship. He recognized that this would also construct some level of legitimacy for the Soviet Union whom he imagined as powerful partner in the post-war world. For Churchill, always apt to think in nineteenth-century geostrategic terms, this meant arming a potential future enemy. Churchill’s fears can be seen in his pronouncements against the “Bolsheviks” as he sometimes referred to the Soviets. Churchill tried increasingly to convince Roosevelt to “get tough about soviet polices in Eastern Europe.”88 Another major difference which arose between Churchill and Roosevelt was over the Second Front. It is reasonable to assume that the president and prime minister would disagree on military strategy, but their views of how and when the second front would be realized were at serious odds. The United States, at the behest of the George Marshall, favoured a direct and overwhelming military action against German-occupied France to push through to Germany. Britain on the other hand, at the behest of Churchill, who perhaps feared a repeat of the Western front in the First World War, favoured antagonizing  Reynolds, Command of History, 254.  Churchill, 5 September 1941, Cabinet Minutes in Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Documents: 16, 1166. 85  George Herring, Aid to Russia, 1941–1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 14–7. 86  Kimball, Forged in War, 110. 87  Ibid., 111. 88  Kimball, “Wheel within a Wheel,” 302. 83 84

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Germany on the periphery of their territory and slowly closing the ring around them. This was an anathema to Roosevelt’s chief of staff Marshall, who correctly feared that Churchill would take the North African campaign and later the Mediterranean campaign against the “soft underbelly of Europe,” and turn it into a “suction pump” consuming men and material desperately needed for the attack on Germany.89 Roosevelt went some way in placating Churchill from time to time. He allowed some of the landing crafts meant for Operation Overlord to be used at Anzio despite Marshall’s warning Churchill that regardless of his Italian adventure that Overlord remain the paramount operation. In October 1943, Stalin had begun launching accusations that neither the United States nor Britain were committed to a cross-Channel invasion. Eager to create friendly relations with Stalin, Roosevelt thought the invasion needed to be pushed more than ever. Roosevelt telegraphed Churchill on 17 October outlining the dangers of the situation and said that he was “more anxious about its success than (he) was about 1941, 1942 or 1943.”90 He also feared missed opportunities elsewhere, particularly in the Mediterranean concerning Greece and the Balkans. Roosevelt was planning a bilateral meeting with Stalin prior to the Tehran Conference (1943), much to Churchill’s chagrin. Stalin insisted on a second front, and Roosevelt was receptive to the point. Churchill was beginning to notice that Britain was being relegated to junior partner in the big three. To make matters worse, Stalin dismissed the Italian campaign because “Hitler had succeeded in tying up a large number of allied forces” and the Balkan campaign because the Balkans were “far from the heart of Germany.”91 Stalin even proclaimed that he was willing to let the capture of Rome wait, if it meant an earlier Channel crossing. This clearly would have brought Stalin and Roosevelt together, pushing Churchill and his ring-closing strategy out of the conversation. Churchill was increasingly aware of Britain’s diminishing position between the “American buffalo” and “Russian bear”’ when, one evening, Roosevelt left for a private conversation with Stalin. Churchill bitterly remarked that he was “glad to obey orders.”92 A small but important thing which indicated a re-evaluation of their personal relationship occurred after the Tehran conference. Roosevelt and Churchill no longer shared a correspondence under the noms de plume of “former naval person,” opting instead for more formal language.93 Divergences between Roosevelt and Churchill became increasingly severe in the months preceding D-Day. In January 1944, after Eisenhower had become Supreme Allied Commander, Operation Transport, the bombing campaign accompanying the D-Day landings which involved destroying the French rail system to prevent German reinforcements reaching the Normandy beachhead,  Ibid., 301.  Carlo D’Este, Warlord: A Life of Churchill at War 1874–1945 (London: Harper, 2009), 746. 91  Churchill to Roosevelt 17 October 1943, Churchill Papers, 20/121 in Gilbert (ed.), Churchill Documents: 7, 531–2. 92  Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Tehran Conference, 489–94. 93  Kimball, Forged in War, 244. 89 90

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led to a high-level disagreement which pitted Churchill against Eisenhower and Roosevelt. Churchill was openly hostile to the plan. Churchill even began questioning Eisenhower’s authority, accusing him of “a gross misuse of the strategic air forces.”94 Churchill assumed that Roosevelt would support him against Eisenhower but to no avail. Roosevelt refused to intervene in what was clearly a “tacit rebuke to Churchill.”95 Owing to the deteriorating relationship between prime minister and president, Churchill sought to get the upper hand against Roosevelt with Stalin. In October 1944, Roosevelt was unable to attend the “Tolstoy” Moscow conference owing to his re-election campaign. Churchill took full advantage, and took private meetings with Stalin and got down to “serious horse trading.”96 The result was the infamous percentage agreements which Churchill would later call the “naughty document.”97 Hastily written on a napkin, this agreement divided up post-war Europe between Britain and Russia. Britain would get 90% influence of Greece, while Russia would get 90% influence over Romania. Hungary and Yugoslavia would be split 50/50. Roosevelt was not pleased. Though Harriman’s notes on the meeting created a basic record for Roosevelt on the agreements, Churchill neglected to mention anything else about the agreements in his correspondence. This forced the president to tacitly accept the agreements with Stalin without any real input into the process.98 This would lead to further problems over the British presence in Greece and for Churchill’s designs on the Mediterranean, for years to come.99 Roosevelt retaliated by pushing American interests in civil aviation. Colville recorded in his diary that “It is pure blackmail … if we do not give way to certain unreasonable American demands, their attitudes about Lend Lease would change.”100 When Churchill called for another meeting of the big three in January 1945, Roosevelt demurred and said he could only spend five or six days at any such meeting. Churchill roared to Colville that he was “disgusted” and wrote back to Roosevelt that “even the Almighty took seven.”101 By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, geopolitical realities were fast replacing any prominence of personal relations. Much like the Tehran conference, Roosevelt rushed to spend the first day alone with Stalin, in part  Woolner, “Churchill and the Birth of the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship,’” 162.  D’Este, Warlord, 738–9. 96  Ibid., 742. 97  Kimball, Forged in War, 285. 98   British prime minister’s minutes PREM 3/434, National Archives; Gilbert, Churchill Documents: 7, 991–1000. 99  Prime Minister’s Notes for TOLSTOY; PREM 3/434/7 National Archives; Kimball, “Naked Reverse Right: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eastern Europe from TOLSTOY to Yalta-and a Little Beyond,” Diplomatic History 9, no. 1 (January 1985): 6–7. 100  British support for the Greek government led to a disastrous civil war in Greece which led to accusations of unwarranted intervention in the internal affairs of an ally in the American and British Press. This led to the U.S. refusing to supply British forces in Greece much to Churchill’s anger. Kimball, “Naked Reverse Right,” 8. 101  Colville, Fringes of Power, 528. 94 95

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because Roosevelt was now turning towards the Pacific as the key theatre in the war, and he wanted to explore Soviet intentions in the Pacific, but also because it was clear that the post-war world would be dominated by the United States and Soviet Union. This left the melancholic Churchill to manage the effects of a downed plane which crashed en route from Britain, killing 13 members of the British delegation.102 According to Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Roosevelt told Stalin that “the United States would not be joining Britain in any united negotiating position” and that “he would now tell the Marshal something indiscreet, since he would not wish to say it in front of Prime Minister Churchill, namely that the British for two years had the idea of artificially building up France into a strong power.”103 Roosevelt’s frustrations with Churchill were being expressed in casual conversation, too. Once Churchill launched into a speech at Livedia Palace, Roosevelt leaned in and told the newly appointed secretary of state Ed Stettinius that “Now we’re in for a half hour of it!”104 When asked if he was tired, Roosevelt snapped, “Yes, I am tired! So would you be if you spent the last five years pushing Winston uphill in a wheelbarrow!”105 Lord Chandos noted that Roosevelt could not help but be “derogatory and ironical” about Churchill, even to one of Churchill’s most devoted lieutenants like himself.106 Even Churchill’s own daughter Mary Soames later conceded in an interview that “I supposed they became quite wearied with Papa banging on about things they didn’t think were important.”107 Churchill was aware of his deteriorating position. He told his other daughter Sarah that he experienced “a wide range of emotions at Yalta.”108 Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, recorded that Churchill was “puzzled and distressed” because “the President no longer seems to the P.M. to take an intelligent interest in the war; often he does not seem even to read the papers the P.M. gives him.”109 Beyond personal relations, Yalta was also a moment in which the larger issues surrounding the post-war order were emerging. There were considerations for Soviet Union and their designs on Germany, Eastern Europe, and especially Poland. Though Stalin vaguely committed to the Soviet’s interests in Poland being “all democratic and anti-Nazi” and to participate in “free and unfettered elections,” this promise meant very little in the realities of the post-­ war order in which the Soviets ran the elections.110 This also created problems  Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 854; Kimball (ed.), Complete Correspondence: 3, 502.  Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2003), 316. 104  Charles Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: Norton, 1973), 179–80. 105  John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), 18. 106  Ibid. 107   Oliver Lyttelton Chandos, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos (London: Bodley Head, 1962), p. 310. 108  Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 317. 109  Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), 80. 110  Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965 (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 243. 102 103

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for Churchill’s beloved British Empire, as some of its territory directly contravened the Atlantic Charter’s position on self-determination. Roosevelt remained convinced that European colonialism was responsible for the First World War. His previous jokes about Churchill being the White’s House’s resident Victorian, by 1945, had become frustrated pronouncements that Churchill “was becoming more and more mid-Victorian and slipping further and further back into last century thinking.”111 This Victorian thinking directly challenged Roosevelt’s prescription for a global structure to the UN and can be seen in Churchill’s regionalist structures for the European order of the future. The prime minister explained to Henry Stimson, U.S. secretary of war, to Vice President Henry Wallace, and others that the post-war European order should be composed of “some twelve states or Confederations, who would form the Regional European Council,” and in South Eastern Europe “there might be several Confederations.” Further illustrating his desire to base the new post-­ war order on nineteenth-century frameworks, Churchill even proposed “a Danubian Federation based on Vienna and doing something to fill the gap caused by the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”112 The anticolonial tensions were also felt in the arrangements for the Far East. Roosevelt suggested privately to Stalin that Britain ought to be excluded from the occupation of Korea owing at least partly to his position that Britain should not be the guarantor of any nation’s independence.113 Stalin retorted that “The Prime Minister would kill us” and “suggested consulting him.”114 Though this was not properly explored further at Yalta, Roosevelt did suggest the possibility of international trusteeship over colonial territories. Churchill furiously rebuked this notion and nearly shouted back, “I absolutely disagree … After we have done our best to fight in this war and have done no crime to anyone, I will have no suggestion that the British Empire is to be put in the dock and examined by everybody to see whether it is up to their standard.”115 Churchill and Roosevelt left Yalta tired, but Roosevelt never recovered his strength. He left the White House to his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he passed away on 12 April 1945 from a catastrophic haemorrhagic stroke. Though Churchill sent a heartfelt message of condolence to the family and spoke fondly of the president, he did not go to his funeral. Churchill thought that it was better that the new president, Harry Truman, come to him, perhaps in the hopes it would restore him to that of senior partner in the alliance.116 In any case, it is notable that Churchill saw this as a political

111  Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 159–83. 112  Roosevelt told this to Joe Davis, a U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Moscow. Roberts, Walking with Destiny, 854. 113  Churchill, Second World War: 4, 645. 114  Kimball, Forged in War, 314. 115  Diane Clemens, Yalta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 244–52. 116  James Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Heinemann, 1947), x.

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opportunity. This does not mean that Churchill and Roosevelt did not share personal affection or friendship, but both men put their countries’ interest first.

Conclusion The relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was characterized by Eleanor Roosevelt as a “fortunate friendship.”117 Each had great personal affection for one another. They had similar temperaments; they were both aristocratic, political operators, shrewd statesmen and led by their principles. Clearly a warm bond developed between the leaders, sparked at the Atlantic Conference at Placentia Bay and developed into a full friendship after the Arcadia Conference and Churchill’s visit to Washington. It was on this first trip when they began to broadly agree on questions grand strategy, immediate necessities, and post-war security. Together they understood that the Nazis must be defeated first, that the Soviet Union would be a powerful ally and must be kept in the war, as well as the necessity of unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. They worked to put together a bombing campaign to help lift some of the pressure off the Eastern front, and they agreed that a second front would be necessary to destroy Germany’s domination of Europe. When and where that second front might appear became a growing divergence of strategy for both Churchill and Roosevelt. From the Tehran conference, however, the relationship began to deteriorate. As it became clear that the United States and Soviet Union were fast becoming the senior players in the alliance, the strength of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s personal friendship acted as only a minor component in the larger machinery of state relations. The more Roosevelt saw Stalin as an equal partner in the post-war order, the more Churchill became embittered and desperate to keep British interests in play. While this may not have had much influence on Anglo-American relations owing to the connections built further down the diplomatic ladder of the special relationship, this undoubtedly took a toll on the affection both men shared for one another. This tended to express itself in conversations between the two. It must have been frustrating for Churchill to be undercut by Roosevelt’s anti-colonialism and willingness to concede points and even potentially territory to Russian interests in the post-war order. Though the personal and political are often intertwined, for Churchill and Roosevelt this is especially true. Their personal friendship was an enduring one even when relations were tense towards the end of Roosevelt’s life. On 18 March 1944, less than a month before Roosevelt’s death, Churchill wrote to him to ask questions about the fate of Poland and assured the president that “Our friendship is the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders.”118 Both men and their approach to diplomacy  Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 351.  Sainsbury, Churchill and Roosevelt at War, 1.

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created a tradition of summitry in Anglo-American relations which would last until the end of the century. The relationship forged between Roosevelt and Churchill have been aspired to at all levels of diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic. In that way, the romantic or perhaps mythic version of Churchill’s view of their special relationship lives on. This is surely the greatest legacy of a friendship that shaped the alliance, the post-war order, and indeed relations between the United States and the United Kingdom thereafter. It is no wonder that their relationship has taken on mythical proportions, and while this at times hinders the historical accuracy of their relations, it certainly does confirm Eleanor Roosevelt’s description. Their relationship was a fortunate friendship, indeed.

CHAPTER 8

Harry S. Truman and Clement Attlee: “Trouble Always Brings Us Together” Clive Webb

Attlee and Truman meet for the First Time at Potsdam, 1945 (National Archives and Records Administration) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_8

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By the time the Japanese surrender brought the Second World War to an end in September 1945, two of the three statesmen who had led the Allied Powers to victory were no longer in command. While Joseph Stalin retained dictatorial control of the Soviet Union, American president Franklin D.  Roosevelt lay dead from a cerebral hemorrhage and the British electorate had ousted Prime Minister Winston Churchill from office. For many, the bond shared by Roosevelt and Churchill was the archetype of the “special relationship” between their countries. With neither man leading their respective government, the future of that alliance suddenly became uncertain. The men who led Britain and the United States in the immediate aftermath of the war, Prime Minister Clement Attlee and President Harry S.  Truman, shared little, if any, of their predecessors’ personal chemistry. Compared to the considerable number of studies focused on the personal and political partnership between Churchill and Roosevelt, historians have bestowed relatively little attention on Attlee and Truman. This owes in part to the cursory nature of their relationship. While the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence fills three large published volumes, the collected letters and cables between Attlee and Truman would impose far less strain on an academic bookshelf. The two politicians met on just three occasions and corresponded only sporadically.1 Nor do their published writings cast much light on what each thought of the other. Attlee’s autobiography is infamous as the one of the least enlightening memoirs ever written by a political leader.2 Although historians apply slightly differing tones and shades, the portraits they paint of the private relationship between Attlee and Truman are always colored gray.3 In terms of their personalities, they were a study in contrasts, the impulsive and pugnacious Truman differing sharply from the shy and taciturn Attlee. Their common experience of having served during the First World War may have briefly brought them together for a singalong around a piano during their first meeting at the Potsdam conference, but thereafter they rarely struck a harmonious note. Indeed, Truman had a closer relationship with the Leader of the Opposition Winston Churchill, than he did with Prime Minister Attlee. 1  Warren Kimball (ed.), Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 2  Clement R. Attlee, As It Happened: His Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1954). 3  For specific examples of these mildly different emphases, see Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee: Labour’s Great Reformer (London: Haus, 2015), 320; Alan P. Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century: Of Friendship, Conflict and the Rise and Decline of Superpowers (London: Routledge, 1995), 92; and Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 204.

C. Webb (*) Department of Modern History, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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What bound Attlee and Truman together was their common purpose in combating the global challenge posed by the Soviet Union. That the two politicians steered the Anglo-American alliance through the turbulence of the immediate postwar years demonstrates that its strength rests as much in pragmatic self-interest as it does in the personal chemistry between the respective leaders of Britain and the United States. With hindsight, the endurance of that partnership can seem inevitable. However, its persistence after the end of the war was not predestined. Only when Britain and, more slowly, the United States abandoned hopes of reaching accommodation with the Soviet Union and reconciled themselves to the realities of the intensifying Cold War, did the transatlantic alliance become more stable. This analysis of Anglo-American relations during the crucial years that immediately followed the Second World War therefore places a particular emphasis on the importance of historical contingency. Tensions between Britain and the United States were often acute at that time. The two countries clashed over numerous issues. Nor were they equal partners, Britain being far more reliant than the United States on sustaining the alliance. As Lewis Douglas, the American ambassador to Britain, observed: “Britain has never before been in a position where her national security and economic fate are so completely dependent on and at the mercy of another country’s decisions.”4 Despite these strains within the alliance, Attlee and Truman maintained a broader understanding of the need to sustain the partnership between the two countries based on their common strategic interests. The transatlantic alliance, as conceived by Attlee and Truman, was based less on Churchill’s sentimental notions of their nations’ common history, language, and culture than on a practical recognition that only by standing together could the world withstand the threat of communist expansionism. It is indeed significant that neither politician appears to have publicly evoked the notion of a special relationship, preferring instead the more prosaic and less exceptional “Anglo-American alliance.”

From Allies to Adversaries One of the obstacles that Attlee and Truman faced in attempting to advance the Anglo-American alliance after the war was popular mistrust of each other’s country. In the case of American attitudes toward Britain, Attlee himself was seen as an impediment to the transatlantic partnership. Having stood side by side in the victorious fight against fascism, many Britons were at first favorably disposed towards the United States. The sudden death of President Roosevelt provoked shock and sadness in Britain. Although the British people knew little of the politician who succeeded him in the Oval Office, former vice president Harry S. Truman, they willingly believed that he

4

 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary, 1945–1951 (London: Heinemann, 1983), 602.

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would honor Roosevelt’s legacy. As the Daily Telegraph affirmed, “The torch of leadership has passed from one hand to another, but it shines on with a clear light.”5 With the war over, public support for sustaining the transatlantic alliance nonetheless waned. For a Labour government that regarded continued partnership with Washington as fundamental to its foreign policy, it was cause for concern that this indifference and even aversion toward the United States was most prevalent among its own party members and supporters. According to a 1949 opinion poll, 57 percent of Conservative voters believed that Britain should maintain a close attachment to the United States, compared to 49 percent of Liberals and only 40 percent of Labour followers.6 Among the British working class there was considerable affinity with the Russian people. The hard left of the Labour Party had strong sympathies with the Soviet Union and argued that the government should avoid alignment with the United States for fear of antagonizing Moscow and risking renewed global warfare. Britain, they believed, would do more to promote postwar stability by acting as a “Third Force” that mediated between the two superpowers.7 There were, therefore, potential political consequences for the Attlee government in cooperating too closely with the Truman administration. While many Britons were ambivalent about the United States, Americans reacted to the election of a Labour government with suspicion and even outright hostility. With the exception of the traditionally Anglophile East Coast, newspapers across the country responded with alarm and antipathy toward his premiership.8 Churchill retained enormous popularity and respect in the United States, leading political commentators to express deep disappointment that the British electorate had not been more loyal to their wartime leader. Worse still, the socialism of the new government was antithetical to the American credo of laissez faire capitalism. While accepting the need for social reform in Britain, the Philadelphia Inquirer warned that the Attlee administration was intent on pursuing a “revolutionary” and “radically unsound” domestic agenda to the detriment of “its imperative responsibility for continuing in full vigor the foreign policy set by its predecessor.”9 Other newspapers saw little, if any, distinction between British socialism and Soviet communism. The Wall Street Journal declared that the Attlee administration was “Bowing in the direction of Moscow.” That meant not only state control of the economy, but also a threat to individual freedom. Democracy, the newspaper proclaimed, “has only a very tenuous beachhead in Great Britain  “Keeping Faith,” Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1945.  John F. Lyons, America in the British Imagination: 1945 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 48. 7  Jonathan Schneer, “Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–49,” Journal of Modern History, 56, no. 2 (June 1984): 197–226. 8  “The Labor Victory,” New York Times, 27 July 1945; “British Policy,” Washington Post, 27 July 1945. 9  “British Laborites’ Duty to the World,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 July 1945. See also “Behind Britain’s Political Upheaval,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 27 July 1945. 5 6

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and that position is under attack.”10 This anxiety that a Labour government would turn their country into a Soviet satellite, further eroding the already-­ fragile security of Western Europe, was captured in a cartoon published in Portland’s Oregonian newspaper that showed Stalin surveying the British election results and raising a celebratory glass.11 Truman and Attlee actually met for the first time when the leaders of the “Big Three” Allied nations convened to discuss the postwar settlement at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam in July 1945. Attlee was a member of the British delegation led by Churchill. While both men represented their country abroad, they were engaged in a general election campaign against one another at home. On 25 July, the two party leaders flew back to Britain for the result. To the disbelief of the other delegates, it was Attlee who returned three days later as the new British prime minister. Truman and his secretary of state James F.  Byrnes were not impressed. Truman wrote home to his daughter Margaret that Attlee and his foreign secretary Ernest Bevin were a couple of “sourpusses.”12 While the American representatives were uncomfortable with the change of personalities in the British government, they had less cause for concern with regard to policy. Attlee and Bevin did not depart in any significant way from Churchill in their assessment of the prospects and perils of the postwar world. If anything, it was they who were more concerned that the American president, poorly versed in foreign affairs, represented the greater threat to international peace and security.13 Attlee and Bevin could not have cut more contrasting figures. The diminutive and reserved prime minister differed sharply from his burly and bluntly spoken foreign secretary. Nor did the two men always share the same strategic vision of Britain’s role in the postwar world. Whatever their private disagreements, publicly they presented a common front. Some historians have asserted that Attlee gave Bevin almost complete latitude in shaping foreign policy.14 The prime minister himself asserted that it would have been inappropriate to intervene, other than in exceptional circumstances. “‘If you have a good dog, don’t bark yourself’ is a good proverb,” Attlee remarked, “and in Mr. Bevin I had an exceptionally good dog.”15 Although Bevin may have been the mouthpiece of British foreign policy, it is nonetheless the case that he spoke only after consulting and gaining the support of the prime minister.16

10  “Socializing an Ancient Dame,” Wall Street Journal, 12 October 1945; “The British Attitude,” Wall Street Journal, 18 March 1947. 11  “I Propose a Toast,” Oregonian, 27 July 1945. 12  Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (New York: Free Press, 2005), 361. 13  Attlee, As It Happened, 147. 14  See, for example, Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 236. 15  Attlee, As It Happened, 169. 16  John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London: riverrun, 2016), digital edition, 1111–2; Beckett, Clement Attlee, 315.

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Even so, it was Bevin who acted as both architect and engineer in the building of the Anglo-American alliance during the early Cold War. He was instrumental in convincing not only his own prime minister but also U.S. State Department officials of the need for transatlantic unity to contain the global threat posed by the Soviet Union. Personalities were in this regard a crucial component in the revitalization of the alliance. Although Bevin consistently evangelized for closer ties between Britain and the United States, he struggled to convert his American counterpart James F. Byrnes. The alliance strengthened when George C. Marshall succeeded Byrnes as secretary of state in January 1947. Bevin worked in closer political and personal collaboration with Marshall and, from January 1949, his replacement Dean Acheson. Yet the cultivation of those partnerships was a slow and difficult process. In the immediate aftermath of the war, there seemed to be a possibility that the differences dividing Britain and the United States would prove more potent than the common strategic interests binding them together. The most immediate diplomatic fracas between London and Washington was over the issue of American financial support for a Britain bankrupted by six years of war. Truman’s sudden decision to terminate Lend-Lease in September 1945 incited alarm and anger in Britain. “It was a great shock,” Attlee later recollected. “The tap was turned off at a moment’s notice.”17 While some political commentators across the Atlantic decried what they regarded as a gratuitously harsh measure to take against the United States’ closest ally, most of the American press articulated the resurgent isolationism within their country by ardently supporting the decision.18 Vehemently Anglophobic editorials announced that it was time for the British to act like responsible adults rather than, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune put it, “to go on believing forever in Santa Claus.”19 Looking back on the situation, Attlee absolved Truman of personal responsibility for the decision, and the president later recanted what he had done. At the time, however, relations between their two countries rapidly turned toxic. Without further financial support from the United States, the Attlee government could not afford to implement its ambitious domestic reform program. The administration therefore dispatched economist John Maynard Keynes to Washington to negotiate a new loan. Keynes was optimistic that the Americans would recognize Britain’s wartime sacrifice with a generous interest-­ free deal. “When I listen to Keynes,” Bevin elatedly responded, “I can hear the money jingling in my pocket.”20 By the time the economist had returned 17  Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers (London: Heinemann, 1961), 129. For a typical example of British press reaction, see “Lend-Lease,” Daily Telegraph, 25 August 1945. 18  Marquis Childs, “Washington Calling: Britain’s Financial Position,” Washington Post, 17 September 1945. 19  “Britain Shocked,” Times-Picayune, 25 August 1945. This unseasonal Christmas metaphor appeared in other newspapers. See, for example, “Let’s Reason Together,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), 25 August 1945, and “Held Over by Request,” Los Angeles Examiner, 29 December 1945. 20  Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, 131–2.

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home, that optimism had turned to resentful disappointment. Rather than the $5 billion the British government hoped for, the United States offered $3.75 billion at an interest rate of 2 percent. The terms of the loan also required Britain to open access to its imperial markets, abolish exchange controls, and make pound sterling convertible to U.S. dollars within a year of the first payment. This latter condition resulted in a rapid exchange of pounds for dollars that drained the Bank of England’s limited currency reserves. Confronted by this financial crisis, the Attlee government had no choice but to enforce further austerity measures on an already-struggling British public.21 Despite its damaging impact, the terms of the loan were more generous than the financial support that the United States offered to any other country. Moreover, the Truman administration had to overcome intense domestic opposition to the agreement. Many Americans opposed the use of U.S. dollars to support the socialist agenda of the Attlee government and also suspected, despite his vocal support of decolonization, that the Labour government would divert much of the funds to prop up the ailing British Empire. Only 26 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll of November 1945 concurred that the loan was essential to recovery, compared to 52 percent who disagreed. Nor did the American public accept the argument about the loan being in the broader strategic interest of their country. A mere 31 percent of Americans believed that the loan would benefit the United States in contrast to 49 percent who thought otherwise.22 Cleveland’s Plain Dealer summed up public opinion with an editorial titled “Spend It Closer to Home.”23 The increasing intransigence of the Soviets ultimately made it possible for Truman to secure congressional support for a loan to the United States’ most important ally. However, the acrimonious opposition of many Americans to the loan, coupled with what many Britons considered its punitive terms, had a seriously damaging impact on relations between the two countries. The debate on whether to accept the loan caused harmful rifts within the Cabinet, bitter editorials in the press, and an upsurge of anti-Americanism among the broader public.24 While Mass-Observation surveys had recorded a consistent public attitude toward the United States during the war, this changed suddenly as a result of the rancorous transatlantic exchanges on the financial agreement. At the end of the war in 1945, 58 percent of respondents had expressed positive feelings about Americans. By March of the following year, that figure had collapsed to only 22 percent, and it remained low throughout the ensuing

21  Peter G. Boyle, “The British Foreign Office and American Foreign Policy, 1947–48,” Journal of American Studies, 16, no. 3 (December 1982): 380. 22  George H. Gallup, ed., The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, Vol. I, 1935–1948 (New York: Random House, 1972), 549–50. 23  “Spend It Closer to Home,” Plain Dealer, 23 May 1950. 24  Elisabeth Barker, The British between the Superpowers, 1945–50 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), 25–6. A characteristic editorial of the time is “America’s Part,” Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1945.

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months.25 As one irate respondent exclaimed, “They’re a lot of greedy buggers. They won’t help unless they can get a lot out of it.”26 The second cause of discord between Britain and the United States was atomic energy. In the wake of the Second World War, the two nations maintained an informal military alliance that included the retention of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and, in 1947, the UK-US Agreement, which provided for top secret intelligence sharing.27 On the issue of the most dramatic development in military weaponry, the atomic bomb, there were nonetheless serious divisions. Scientists from both countries had collaborated on the Manhattan Project during the war. Roosevelt and Churchill had also established the basis for longer-­ term cooperation. The Quebec Agreement of August 1943 committed Britain and the United States not to use the bomb against either one another or a third party without mutual consent. An aide-memoire signed by the two statesmen in September 1944 further agreed to “full collaboration” between their countries in the development of the bomb after the war.28 Truman, who had rarely been consulted on foreign policy matters while vice president, was unaware of either commitment. In August 1945, he took the unilateral decision to use the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attlee was appalled at the lack of consultation given that the British had provided the Americans with their atomic energy research on the understanding that the results would be shared. As he later wrote to the president, “the history of our common efforts in the past” entitled Britain to this information. To his further frustration, Truman did not have the grace to reply.29 Attlee considered the United States’ atomic supremacy as a threat to the postwar peace since it risked inciting the Soviet Union to accelerate its own developmental program and thereby a future arms race. He and Bevin believed that the solution was to place control of fissionable materials and weapons under the control of the United Nations. In November 1945, Attlee, accompanied by Sir John Anderson of the British Atomic Energy program, flew to Washington for the first time. His purpose was to attend a summit meeting with Truman and Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King. The talks were productive, the three statesmen signing a memorandum for full cooperation in the field of atomic energy.30 Even so, the agreement fell far short of endorsing Attlee’s proposal for an 25  “Anti-Americanism,” File Report 2454, 26 January 1947, 1, Mass Observation Archive, The Keep, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton. 26  Mass Observation File Report 2548, 14 December 1947, 5, Mass Observation Archive. Americans in turn recognized the strength of this nationalist reaction. See “Gossip of the Nation: Walter Winchell,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 16, 1948. 27  Ritchie Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 65–6. 28  The Hyde Park Memorandum, September 1944, CAB 126/183, National Archives, Kew. Gilbert, Churchill and America, 281, 313. 29  Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, 118. 30  Saul Kelly, “No Ordinary Foreign Office Official: Sir Roger Makins and Anglo-American Atomic Relations, 1945–55,” Contemporary British History 14, no. 4 (October 2000): 109.

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international system of control. Truman had only the previous month publicly endorsed this policy. However, he was unable to withstand pressure from politicians and the public to protect American atomic hegemony. Opinion polls of the time showed that 70 percent of Americans opposed submitting control of U.S. nuclear weapons to the UN.31 The prospect of future cooperation between Britain and the United States suffered further setback when Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act in 1946. This law, more commonly known as the McMahon Act, outlawed the exchange of atomic energy information with any foreign country, including Britain. Truman failed during the debate on the act to inform the House and Senate of the previous agreements between Britain and the United States. Attlee nonetheless blamed Congress for wanting to monopolize nuclear information, informing his biographer that its members “wanted to have everything for America.” While this was certainly the primary motivation of lawmakers in Washington, there were also legitimate anxieties about British security. This included the arrest in March 1946 of British physicist Alan Nunn May, who, while based in Canada, had supplied atomic secrets to the Soviets.32 The restrictions imposed by the McMahon Act led the Attlee government to invest at enormous expense in its own nuclear developmental program at the Harwell Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Determined nonetheless to secure renewed collaboration with the United States, the administration eventually secured a modus vivendi in January 1948 that provided for American technical cooperation in return for access to British uranium ore, an agreement more advantageous to the United States than to Britain. The future of the Middle East also strained Anglo-American relations. Under the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government promised the creation of “a national home for Jewish people” in Palestine. Five years later, the League of Nations assigned mandatory power over Palestine to Britain. While successive administrations tightly controlled Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Labour Party had raised hopes for a change of policy with a statement issued in 1944 endorsing Jews becoming the majority population.33 Events nonetheless took another course once Labour had come to power. With the Soviet Union making advances into the region, the Attlee government regarded Palestine, which served as the base for a mobile reserve of military forces, as being essential to the strategic defense of Britain’s economic and security interests. While there were long-standing differences between Britain and the United States over the Middle East, the impact of the Second World War severely deepened these ruptures. In June 1945, Truman sent Special 31  Randall B. Woods and Howard Jones, Dawning of the Cold War: The United States’ Quest for Order (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 80. As ever, the Anglophone press on the East Coast took a dissenting view. See Barnet Nover, “The Atomic Pact: A Good Step Forward,” Washington Post, 17 November 1945. 32  Four years later, the arrest of Klaus Fuchs and defection of Bruno Pontecorvo suggested that Americans still had cause for concern. 33  Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments, 1945–51 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 127.

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Envoy Earl G. Harrison to Europe to assess the needs of Jewish displaced persons in Allied-run camps. His report, produced two months later, recommended that Britain facilitate increased resettlement in Palestine by issuing 100,000 immigration certificates to Jewish refugees. Harrison’s proposal exposed a deep transatlantic divide. While Truman enthusiastically supported the report, Attlee and Bevin adamantly opposed it. The British foreign secretary contended that it was better to create conditions that enabled displaced persons to resettle in Europe. Radically increasing the number of refugees admitted to Palestine also risked antagonizing the Arab states whose support Britain needed to retain its strategic interests in the Middle East. For the same reasons, he also resolutely resisted the possibility of partitioning Palestine into separate Zionist and Arab states. In the hope of reaching consensus, Bevin proposed the establishment of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which convened in January 1946, issuing its report three months later. It recommended the admission of 100,000 displaced Jews, the annulment of restrictions on Jewish purchase of Arab land, and the retention of Palestine as a single state.34 Far from finding a solution agreeable to both Britain and the United States, the committee’s report inflamed animosities. Truman immediately endorsed the proposal to increase Jewish emigration. Personal sentiment and political calculation motivated his decision. The American public strongly supported the resettlement of Jewish refugees in Palestine. According to a Gallup poll of June 1946, 78 percent of Americans favored the proposal.35 Given the strength of popular opinion, Truman believed he must back the committee or risk electoral backlash in the forthcoming mid-term congressional elections.36 Opinion on the other side of the Atlantic could not have diverged more dramatically. A David Low cartoon in the Evening Standard ridiculed Truman’s motives for wanting to repatriate so many Jewish refugees. It depicted Attlee in Arab dress with a camel labeled “Anglo-U.S.A. Palestine Plan” arguing with the president donned in Western tourist attire (a mark of the United States’ lack of understanding of the Middle East) and accompanied by a woman whose dress bore the words “U.S.A. Jew Vote.” “Sorry,” exclaims Truman, “the girl-­friend’s changed my mind.”37 For many Britons, though, the situation in Palestine was no laughing matter. The killing of British soldiers by the Zionist terrorist group Irgun particularly inflamed anger toward Washington. With the American press simultaneously criticizing London for stalling on the recommendations of the committee it had set up in the first place, the situation was dire.38 34  Trevor Burridge, Clement Attlee: A Political Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 248–59; Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations, 69–70. 35  George Gallup, “78% of U.S. Public Favors Palestine Haven for Jews,” Washington Post, 19 June 1946. 36  Attlee was not unaware of the self-interest that motivated Truman. Clem Attlee: The Granada Historical Records Interview (London: Panther, 1967), 38–9. 37  David Low, “Sorry the Girl-friend’s Changed my Mind,” Evening Standard, 7 August 1946. 38  “Palestine Solution,” Washington Post, 15 May 1946.

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According to the British Embassy in Washington, “Criticism of Britain has risen to a furore. Even commentators usually friendly towards Britain are now finding difficulty in trying to explain her continued support of the Arabs.”39 Zionists in the United States organized a consumer boycott of British goods.40 Bevin managed to make the situation even worse with his intemperate statement at the Labour Party conference in June 1946 that Americans supported the resettlement of displaced persons in Palestine because “they do not want too many Jews in New York.” Washington Post journalist Barnet Nover wrote for many in not being able to believe what Bevin had said. “His statement stands revealed in all its nakedness,” he bellowed, “as an outright anti-Semitic outburst that would have gladdened the heart of the late Adolf Hitler.”41 Although the chiefs of staff continued to stress the strategic importance of Palestine, the political impasse eroded the Attlee administration’s resolve to retain British forces in the Middle East. In February 1947, the Cabinet agreed to submit the Palestine issue to the United Nations. The UN established a Special Committee on Palestine which produced a report recommending the establishment of a separate Zionist state. In the intervening period, Bevin had come under further fire from American political commentators after taking the decision to turn back a passenger ship renamed Exodus and return the 4500 Jewish displaced persons aboard to refugee camps in Germany. A beleaguered Attlee government believed it could not be expected to oversee a policy it did not support and decided it was time for British withdrawal. On 29 November, the UN General Assembly formally voted for partition of Palestine. Britain abstained.42 “One would have to go back a long time to find anything that has so exacerbated Anglo-American feelings,” concluded the New York Times shortly after Truman had taken the decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel on 14 May 1948.43 He did so not only over the objections of the British government but also his own State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff. With a presidential election only months away, Truman appears to have placed his own interest in securing a further term of office ahead of warnings that he would stir the hatred of Arabs, plunging the Middle East into chaos and opening the door to Soviet penetration of the region.44 As the Times editorial made 39  British Embassy, memorandum, “Survey of American Press and Radio Trends—May 21st to 27th [1948].” Another report concluded that criticism had reached “white heat.” C.  Raphael, British Information Services, to the Controller, 26 May 1948, FO 953/157C, National Archives. 40  D’Arcy Edmondson, British Information Services, to Thomas Hodge, 25 March 1948, FO 953/157C, National Archives. 41  Barnet Nover, “Bull of Bashan: Bevin Reaches A New Low Level,” Washington Post, 13 June 1946. 42  On these later events, see Avivia Halamish, The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 43  Herbert L.  Matthews, “London Ponders Problems of Anglo-American Amity,” New York Times, 30 May 1948. 44  For an insider’s account of Truman’s motivations, see Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke, Counsel to the President (New York: Random House, 1991).

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clear, the president’s actions threatened serious consequences for relations with Britain. Historically, Britain and the United States had often fought but always been willing to reconcile. Now the press on both sides of the Atlantic speculated whether irreconcilable differences over the Middle East might prove cause for separation.45

The Alliance Redux Any one of the diplomatic disputes between Britain and the United States had the potential to cause a permanent rupture. The fact that the cumulative impact of all three conflicts failed to sever the transatlantic alliance therefore raises the issue of what greater force continued to bind the two countries together. Ultimately, it was the menace of Soviet expansionism that retied the otherwise rapidly loosening knot. The process by which the Attlee and Truman administrations found common purpose in countering and balancing Soviet global influence was neither as smooth nor as swift as might be supposed. It depended on numerous factors, including persistent lobbying by Bevin and a reluctant admission on the part of American officials that appeasement with the Soviets was impossible. The outcome was a reaffirmation of the Anglo-American partnership, albeit one that would endure further tests of loyalty. The immediate tensions that arose between Britain and the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War convinced London that it would not be possible to negotiate lasting agreement with Moscow. Nor did a severely weakened and overstretched Britain have the capacity to withstand the threat of Soviet expansion in Europe and the Middle East. Attlee had at first hoped to coordinate a Commonwealth defense policy but this was dashed both by the resistance of key member states and by Foreign Office recognition that this would be insufficient to meet the task.46 The only solution was to persuade the United States to fill the vacuum. “We were holding the line in far too many places,” Attlee later reflected, “and the Americans in far too few.”47 He and Bevin agreed that Britain should therefore maintain its overseas commitments long enough to convince Washington to take over. For a while Attlee and Bevin feared that they were playing a waiting game without end. Although more confrontational than his predecessor, Truman still shared the same optimism as Roosevelt that it would be possible to secure a modus vivendi with the Soviets. This had led Attlee to feel marginalized during the Potsdam negotiations. The American delegation, he lamented, was “inclined to think of Russia and America as two big boys who could settle things amicably between them.”48 Suspicion that Britain sought partnership 45  Stewart Alsop, “Britain’s Palestine Policy,” Los Angeles Times, 8 June 1948; Raymond Daniell, “Palestine Peace Hinges on British-U.S. Accord,” New York Times, 16 January 1949. 46  Barker, Britain Between the Superpowers, 56–60. 47  Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, 172. 48  Attlee, As It Happened, 147.

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with the United States in order to sustain its empire further distanced Washington from London. With the Americans rapidly demobilizing troops stationed in Europe, it seemed as though there was little prospect that the United States would align with Britain in attempting to counter the Soviet challenge. It was only when the lines in the nascent Cold War became more clearly defined that the United States responded more positively to Bevin’s overtures. As Washington and Moscow moved further apart, so the Rooseveltian dream of détente faded. Several incidents contributed to the mounting American perception of Soviet belligerence. The first of these was the pressure placed on Turkey by the Soviets to provide access to the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas. In response, the United States and Britain supported Turkey in resisting any encroachment on its territorial integrity.49 A second confrontation occurred in Iran. Britain and the Soviet Union had agreed to end their occupation of the country six months after the end of the Second World War. While the British began evacuating their troops, however, the Russians reneged on the agreement, not only reinforcing their army units but also supporting a separatist movement in the Azerbaijan province bordering the Soviet Union. In conjunction with a series of UN Security Council resolutions, the Truman administration pressured the Soviets to announce their withdrawal in March 1946, although it took a further two months for the Red Army to honor the commitment.50 American policymakers’ attitudes toward the Soviets hardened further following the dispatch of a memorandum by George Kennan, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, to the State Department on 22 February 1946. The “Long Telegram,” as it became known, warned that the USSR, motivated by a strong sense of insecurity, sought to expand its sphere of influence throughout the world. This threat could only be contained if the United States worked with its Western European allies to resist it.51 The experience of Attlee’s predecessor nonetheless demonstrated that American political leaders had yet to mobilize public opinion in support of a more confrontational stance against the Soviets. On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he warned of an “iron curtain” that had descended across Europe and advocated the creation of “a Special Relationship between the British Commonwealth and the United States” to meet the challenge. A cartoon in the Richmond Times-Dispatch captured the popular response, depicting Churchill leading a horse labeled “USA”

49  See Jamil Hasanli, Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2011). 50  Gary R. Hess, “The Iranian Crisis of 1945–46 and the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly 89, no. 1 (March 1974): 117–46. 51  George Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” National Security Archive (https://nsarchive2. gwu.edu/).

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to a water trough but being unable to persuade it to drink.52 On the other side of the Atlantic, Labour’s hard left also rose in revolt. Although Attlee, Bevin, and Truman all privately supported the speech, the hostile reaction led each of them to distance themselves publicly.53 Churchill’s speech succeeded all the same in preparing the ground for the public reformulation of American foreign policy. The catalyst was the strategically significant fate of Greece. On 21 February, Bevin informed the Truman administration that Britain could no longer bear the cost of supporting Greek royalist forces in the civil war against communist insurgents. British aid would cease little more than a month later on 31 March. Once seen as an astute act of statesmanship that drew a reluctant United States out of its postwar isolationism, revisionist scholars have more recently interpreted Bevin’s conduct as being driven more by financial imperatives and with the limited aim of securing essential military and economic assistance to Greek royalists. Its impact, however, was to achieve the British foreign secretary’s ambition of American leadership in the global struggle against communism.54 On 12 March, Truman delivered an address to a joint session of Congress in which he announced the containment of Soviet expansion as central to U.S. foreign policy. Two months later, Congress approved $400 million in economic and military aid both to Greece and Turkey. The Truman Doctrine heralded the postwar transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana.55 The rapprochement between London and Washington also brought Britain generous financial support in the form of Marshall Aid. The European Recovery Program launched in 1948 had the aim of rebuilding the economies of Western European countries shattered by the war and thereby ensuring their ability to protect themselves against the threat of Soviet incursion. Britain was in desperate need of further financial support from the United States because the depletion of its dollar reserves meant it could not meet the condition of the postwar loan for sterling convertibility. Bevin attempted to assert Britain’s leadership in Europe by lobbying for the Attlee administration to act as a partner in the allocation of funds to other countries. The Truman administration would have none of it. Britain nonetheless became by far the largest recipient of Marshall Aid, securing $3.2 billion of the total $12.6 billion, an act of “unparalleled 52  Fred O. Seibel, “Invitation to Drink,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 March 1946. For a comprehensive analysis of the origins, content, and impact of the speech, see Alan P. Dobson (ed.), Churchill and the Anglo-American Special Relationship (London: Routledge, 2016). 53  Frank K. Roberts, “Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary” in Ritchie Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments, 1945–1951 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1951), 23; Morgan, Labour In Power, 244–5. 54  The principal revisionist interpretations are Robert Frazier, Anglo-American Relations with Greece: The Coming of the Cold War 1942–47 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 155–60; Martin H. Folly, “‘The Impression is Growing … that the United States is Hard when Dealing with Us’: Ernest Bevin and Anglo-American Relations at the Dawn of the Cold War,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (April 2012): 150–66. 55  “President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress, March 12, 1947,” The Avalon Project (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/).

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generosity and statesmanship,” as Attlee wrote personally to Truman.56 Moreover, the money came without the conditions that the Attlee government feared the United States would impose. Washington certainly hoped to persuade Britain to form part of an integrated European economic system that would not only facilitate trade but also act as a political bulwark against the Soviet Union. Labour in turn resisted greater European coordination because it would undermine their agenda for a planned economy in Britain. In the event, however, the need for British support forced the Truman administration to ease off the pressure. Britain received the aid with no strings attached.57 The Berlin crisis of 1948–1949 further dramatized the importance of British partnership with the United States. Berlin was the strategic focus of the emerging Cold War in Europe. Britain and the United States saw the city, situated 100 miles within Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany, as being at the frontline in the defense of Western Europe. Berlin had been divided after the war into four occupation zones controlled by Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. On 1 January 1947, the British and Americans attempted to strengthen their hold on the city by unifying the zones they occupied into a single political and economic unit named the Bizone. This subsequently became the Trizone with the addition of the French zone in June of the following year. When representatives of the western powers met in London to coordinate future planning, it provoked a belligerent response from the Soviets, who were determined to prevent their adversaries from forming a separate West German government. Having initially imposed a partial blockade on Berlin, on 24 June 1948, Soviet forces severed all road, rail, and canal traffic to and from the city. Britain and the United States responded with an airlift of supplies. With planes at the peak of the airlift arriving every three-and-a-half minutes, Berliners received 2.3 million tons of supplies during the course of the operation. The airlift restored ties between the British and American air forces not seen since the war. One of the most remarkable aspects of the campaign was the decision to base American B-29 bombers on British soil. Attlee consented to the dispatch of 60 aircrafts to a Strategic Air Command base in East Anglia without consulting his entire Cabinet. As controversial as the decision was, the prime minister and his foreign secretary saw it as an affirmation of American commitment to the security of Western Europe.58 56  Attlee, Personal Telegram to Truman, 4 April 1948, PREM 8/918, National Archives; Christopher Grayling and Christopher Langdon, Just Another Star? Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (London: Harrap, 1988), 6; John Dickie, “Special” No More: Anglo-American Relations: Rhetoric and Reality (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1994), 55. 57  Walter Lippmann, “Cripps Will Hear Why U.S.  Is Disappointed,” Los Angeles Times, 30 September 1948; Walter Lippmann, “Right Understanding of Britain and France Essential to U.S. Policy,” Los Angeles Times, 6 January 1949. Mass Observation still discovered that the British public, ever willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, often suspected the Americans of ulterior motives. See “Britons and the Marshall Plan” File Report-2575, Mass Observation Archive. 58  Avi Shlaim, “Britain, the Berlin Blockade and the Cold War,” International Affairs 60, no. 1 (January 1984): 1–14; Norman Moss, Picking Up the Reins: America, Britain and the Postwar World (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2008), 154–7.

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The Soviet challenge in Berlin and the success of British and American collaboration in overcoming it facilitated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Bevin had long pushed for the establishment of a transatlantic security system to defend against Soviet aggression. The proposed pact initially attracted considerable opposition within Congress, but the cumulative impact of events such as the Czechoslovakian coup of 1948 and the Berlin crisis eventually convinced detractors of the seriousness of the Soviet threat. When NATO came into being on 4 April 1949, it represented the triumph of Bevin’s tireless lobbying for the United States to take an active role in protecting the collective security of the West. As he affirmed to Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador to Washington, “My own conviction is that the North Atlantic Treaty must be the heart of our defence and that unity of effort on this basis will prove to be our salvation.”59

Renewed Tensions Having struggled for so long to establish rapprochement, the Attlee and Truman governments were plunged into further conflict over the unexpected outbreak of the Korean War. Some historians have gone so far as to claim that Korea precipitated the worst crisis in Anglo-American relations for three decades.60 The Allied Powers had agreed at the Yalta Conference to divide Korea into two occupation zones along the 38th parallel. Following the end of the war, the British and Americans called for free elections throughout Korea. Soviet opposition led in 1948 to the creation of two separate states, the communist Korean Democratic People’s Republic in the North and the democratic Republic of Korea in the South. On 25 June 1950, a border dispute between the two republics turned into all-out war when an invasion force of 90,000 North Korean troops, supported by the new communist regime in China, crossed the 38th parallel. Two days later, Truman announced his intention to intervene in defense not only of South Korea but also the island of Formosa, which he considered vulnerable to communist attack.61 The president had come under increasing fire from Republican critics who accused him of being soft on communism and held him responsible for the supposed “loss” of China to the People’s Liberation Army led by Mao Zedong in 1949. With suspicion rife in the United States that the Soviet Union was the real mastermind behind the invasion of North Korea, Truman saw the situation as a test of his mettle. He had no choice but

 Ernest Bevin, Telegram to Oliver Franks, 14 August 1950, PREM 8/1156, National Archives.  David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart: The Relationship between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (London: BBC Books, 1988), 182. 61  Statement by the president on the situation in Korea, 27 June 1950, The American Presidency Project (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/). 59 60

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to act, even if it escalated the conflict into a larger war between the United States and the Soviet Union.62 In sharp contrast to Truman, Attlee did not see Korea as a matter of immediate interest. Truman had taken a hostile ideological position toward Mao’s regime, refusing it diplomatic recognition and blocking its membership of the UN. Motivated by a concern to protect its substantial economic investments in China, Attlee had taken a much more pragmatic approach, formally recognizing the Central People’s government on 6 January 1950. Despite these considerable differences, Attlee promptly aligned his government with the United States’ position on Korea. The prime minister overcame dissent within the Cabinet by rationalizing that British backing of the Americans in East Asia was a quid pro quo for continued U.S. contribution to Western European defense.63 Britain accordingly voted with the United States in support of a UN Security Council resolution on 28 June approving the use of military force under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. The Attlee government calculated that it could symbolically demonstrate its loyalty to Washington without actually making a substantial practical commitment. This was achievable provided London maintained diplomatic pressure on Washington not to widen the conflict to Formosa.64 At first the British contribution extended only to ceding a fleet of Royal Navy vessels in the Pacific temporarily to U.S. command. However, it soon became clear that Truman expected far more. Although the U.S. military led the UN campaign, Washington was determined to secure collaboration with other countries in order to counter criticism that its intervention in East Asia was an act of imperialism. Oliver Franks, the British ambassador to Washington, responded to this pressure by recommending that London should commit ground troops. The outbreak of the war, he warned, had turned American opinion away from appreciation of British weakness back toward “the older view of a Britain from whom much should be expected and demanded.”65 Failure to fulfill that expectation could impair the transatlantic relationship, including cuts to Marshall Aid. Ten days later, the Cabinet approved a brigade group of about 9000 men. Increasing military expenditure came with potentially serious financial and electoral costs for the Labour government. It could undercut the domestic reform programs that were so integral to Attlee’s political agenda, increasing the public disaffection with Labour, which had already reduced its majority to only five seats in the general election five months earlier. However, as both Attlee and Bevin—the latter communicating from a hospital bed following treatment for his heart condition—made clear to their 62  Dennis D.  Wainstock, Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), 12. 63  Jonathan Mercer, “Emotion and Strategy in the Korean War,” International Organization 67, no. 2 (April 2013): 235. 64  Sean Greenwood, ““A War We Don’t Want”: Another Look at the British Labour Government’s Commitment in Korea, 1950–51,” Contemporary British History 17, no. 4 (May 2008): 1–5. 65  Oliver Franks, Telegram to Ernest Bevin, 16 August 1950, PREM 8/1156, National Archives.

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colleagues, the price that the government would pay for not supporting the United States in Korea was higher still.66 It was not long, however, before serious divisions emerged between London and Washington. Attlee believed that forcing the North Koreans to retreat back across the border would not be enough to resolve the conflict. Instead, it was essential to secure the unification of all Korea. To that end, the British government sponsored a UN resolution of 7 October 1950 authorizing troops to cross the 38th parallel. Concerned not to alarm the Chinese that there was any intention to attack them, the British also advocated the creation of a demilitarized buffer zone near the Sino-Korean border. However, the impetuous MacArthur spurned the proposal. When the general led UN forces toward the Yalu River on the border of Manchuria, the Chinese feared that he had his sights on the conquest of their own country.67 On 30 November, Truman held a press conference at which he informed reporters that the deployment of nuclear weapons in Korea was under “active consideration.”68 The president’s statement provoked alarm from MPs on both sides of the Commons who feared that use of the atomic bomb would escalate the Korean conflict into a global war with Britain as a direct target for Soviet retaliation. This scenario led Attlee to undertake a hurriedly arranged second trip to Washington on 3 December. It was the first time in five years that the prime minister had met the president face-to-face. Attlee sought reassurance from Truman that he would not use the bomb without consulting the British government. Although Truman verbally consented to this, the State Department omitted any reference to his commitment in its official record of the talks. British officials, concerned not to press the matter in case it antagonized their American counterparts, reluctantly decided for the sake of consistency to delete the president’s words from their own account.69 The official communiqué of the discussions only stated obliquely that the president would keep the prime minister “informed of developments” that might lead to the utilization of atomic power.70 The two leaders also failed to reach agreement on a range of pressing issues including the diplomatic recognition of China, the defense of Formosa, and American expectations that Britain increase its defense spending.71 Attlee nonetheless returned home to a relieved and appreciative

66  Geoffrey Warner, “Anglo-American Relations and the Cold War in 1950,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 22, no. 1 (March 2011): 49. 67  Morgan, Labour in Power, 426–7. 68  The President’s News Conference, 30 November 1950, The American Presidency Project (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/). 69  Oliver Franks, Telegram to Foreign Office, 16 December 1950, PREM 8/1560, National Archives. 70  “Record of Washington talks—Atomic Weapon,” n.d., PREM 8/1560, National Archives. 71  David Demarest Lloyd, “The Care and Keeping of the Great Alliance,” The Reporter, 27, December 1956, 12–13 Morgan, Labour in Power, 428–30.

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reception from the British press, which praised him for pulling the United States back from the nuclear precipice.72 Tensions between Britain and the United States recurred almost immediately. In February 1951, the British reluctantly supported a UN resolution pushed by the Americans that authorized sanctions against China on the grounds that it was the aggressor in the conflict.73 Once more Attlee found himself attempting to show support for the United States while simultaneously constraining its action for fear of precipitating a larger conflict. “Day by day the split between Britain and America grows wider,” lamented the Daily Mail. “Every human effort must be made to repair this tragic injury, and at speed.” British acquiescence came only after Washington agreed to moderate some of the resolution’s language.74 When Truman relieved MacArthur of his command in April 1951, many Americans suspected that Attlee, concerned not to antagonize China, had influenced the decision and thereby sabotaged a UN victory. As Oliver Franks asserted, Britain suffered “a quite irrational share of the blame.”75 Once more there was the threat of a retaliatory consumer boycott of British imports to the United States.76 Above all, it was American pressure on Britain’s strained finances that had the most damaging impact. The British government had calculated that the United States would, as Oliver Franks phrased it, show “an appreciation of the slender margins we have.”77 However, the limited support provided by the British in Korea led Washington to demand that London assume greater responsibility for its own defense. Responding to this pressure, the Attlee government rolled out a £3.4 million rearmament program, a figure that later rose—still to the dissatisfaction of the Americans to £4.7 million. The threatened impact to domestic social policies was too much for some members of the Cabinet, including Minister for Health Aneurin Bevan and President of the Board of Trade Harold Wilson, who resigned in protest.78

72  “Meeting between Friends,” Daily Telegraph, 9 December 1950; “Mr. Attlee’s Statement,” The Times, 13 December 1950. 73  This decision was clearly against Attlee’s better judgment. Only a month earlier, he had informed Truman that such a resolution “will, in our view, almost certainly provoke China to extend hostilities.” Attlee, Telegram to Truman, 8 January 1951, PREM 8/1438, National Archives. 74  “Stand by our Friend,” Daily Mail, 26 January 1951, 1; Dimbleby and Reynolds, An Ocean Apart, 190. 75   Oliver Franks, Memorandum, “General MacArthur’s Dismissal,” 12 April 1951, FO 371/90907, National Archives. 76  Oliver Franks, Telegrams to Foreign Office, 3 May and 4 May 1951, FO 371/90960, National Archives. 77  Oliver Franks, Telegram to Ernest Bevin, PREM 8/1156, National Archives. 78  Greenwood, “‘A War We Don’t Want,’” 8; Warner, “Anglo-American Relations and the Cold War in 1950,” 57.

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Conclusion Clement Attlee and Harry Truman do not appear among the pantheon of political leaders who have become synonymous with the special relationship. The abiding perception of the two men in each other’s countries was one of respect rather than warmth. Attlee certainly gained credibility for advancing what the revered Churchill could not countenance, the decolonization of the British Empire. His socialism nonetheless meant that American conservatives especially retained a strong suspicion of him during and after his premiership. Senator Joseph McCarthy expanded his allegations of communist sympathizers at the highest levels of government beyond Washington to London, accusing “Comrade Attlee” and fellow traveler Herbert Morrison, who became foreign secretary following Bevin’s sudden death in April 1951, of conspiring with Dean Acheson to relieve General MacArthur of his command of UN forces in Korea. When Attlee, no longer prime minister, gave a speech in the House of Commons speculating that McCarthy, rather than Eisenhower, determined U.S. foreign policy, it provoked a “Hate England” campaign.79 The former premier provoked further anger in August 1954 when he led a delegation of Labour Party officials to Moscow and Peking. The Los Angeles Times published a cartoon titled “Attlee in Wonderland” featuring the former prime minister and his associates standing before a huge smiling mask labeled “Red Friendship,” behind which was a bomb bearing the words “World Conquest.”80 Truman did not fare much better. The overwhelming popularity of his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, cast a long shadow over the Missourian’s presidency. Diplomatic officials dismissed out of hand a proposal in 1964 that the British government award Truman the Order of Merit, pointing out that Britain had already honored and commemorated the more significant figures of Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy.81 The indifference, even antagonism, toward Attlee and Truman attests to the difficult transition of the Anglo-American alliance from the Second World War to the nascent Cold War. Serious differences over a diverse range of policy issues threatened to loosen or even sever the ties between Britain and the United States. Even when the two countries collaborated, there was an absence of the personal rapport between their political leaders that had been so apparent during the fight against Axis forces. As Dean Acheson affirmed, although the countries shared a singular bond, “unique did not mean affectionate.”82 79  Jussi M. Hanhimaki, “‘The Number One Reason’: McCarthy, Eisenhower and the Decline of American Prestige in Britain, 1952–54” in Jonathan Hollowell (ed.), Twentieth Century AngloAmerican Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 107, 111–12; John P. Rossi, “The British Reaction to McCarthyism, 1950–54” in Lori Lyn Bogle (ed.), The Cold War, Volume 4: Cold War Espionage and Spying (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 204–5. 80  “Attlee in Wonderland,” Los Angeles Times, 14 August 1954. 81  Sir Harold Caccia to D. A. Greenhill, 2 September 1964, FO 372/7898, National Archives. 82  Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), 387.

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The special relationship is usually seen as being at its most productive when there is a strong personal chemistry between the American president and British prime minister. Attlee and Truman, however, shared little camaraderie. Neither man revealed much of what he thought of the other even after leaving political office. Attlee was predictably unforthcoming in his memoirs and media interviews, restricting himself to characteristically short, matter-of-fact statements about policies rather than personalities. He did at least exonerate Truman of the blame for the schisms between Britain and the United States, pointing the finger instead at isolationist Republicans in Congress.83 It is more than coincidence that the one short essay that Attlee wrote about Anglo-American relations was an attempt to resolve the “misunderstandings” between the two nations.84 What the two politicians failed to say was also in many ways as important as what they did. Truman, for example, described Churchill in his memoirs as “an old friend” but offered no similar tribute to Attlee.85 The contrast between Churchill and Roosevelt and Attlee and Truman influenced perceptions of the comparative strength and weakness of the AngloAmerican alliance both at the time and after the fact. Yet the closeness of the relationship can be overstated in the former instance and underestimated in the latter. The special relationship not only endured but also developed during the Attlee and Truman administrations. How to assess that partnership depends on whether it is measured in absolute or relative terms. From the first perspective, the alliance appears fraught and enfeebled. The two countries were far from being equal partners. Britain determined to retain its world power status by emphasizing the specialness of the relationship, while the United States saw it as part of a broader Western alliance. That asymmetry could have damaging repercussions, as was the case when the Attlee administration launched its rearmament program to demonstrate its reliability to the United States only to cause such economic strain that it became even more dependent on American largesse. Throughout Attlee’s and Truman’s terms of office, there were also numerous strategic and ideological schisms between London and Washington. For all of Churchill’s grandiloquent notions of two countries bound together by a common language, history, and culture, without the threat posed by the Soviet Union the special relationship would not have endured beyond the late 1940s. Yet from the other perspective, the ties that fastened Britain and the United States together were exceptional. The intelligence-sharing agreement between the two nations, for instance, was without parallel. Notwithstanding the unevenness of their alliance, the British and the Americans had interdependent needs that sustained them in a closer relationship than with any other nation. 83  For an illustration of Attlee’s terseness, see his answers to numerous questions about the United States in Attlee: The Granada Historical Records Interview, 49. 84  Clement R.  Attlee, “Britain and America: Common Aims, Different Opinions,” Foreign Affairs 32 (1 January 1954), 190–202. 85  Harry S.  Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–1953 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956), 275.

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The Attlee government may have relied on American financial aid to reconstruct the British economy but, as the Korean War demonstrated, the Truman administration also depended on Britain to contain communism. A cartoon by David Low perfectly captures the close but sometimes uncomfortable partnership between the political leaders of Britain and the United States. Attlee and Truman lock arms together in a tight embrace but each of them carefully keeps one leg free. Their discomfort underlines the fact that while countries were partners, it was political circumstance rather than cultural ties or personal sentiment that created and sustained the relationship.86 Attlee and Truman were not the best of friends, but, with an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union, they believed they shared the worst of enemies. The need to protect their vision of the postwar peace sustained the Anglo-American alliance despite the many challenges that endangered it. As Attlee asserted during the speech he gave in Washington in December 1950, “Trouble always brings us together more closely than ever.”87

 David Low, “United We Stand—With the Usual Leg Free,” Daily Herald, 15 December 1950.  “The Common Front,” New York Times, 5 December 1950.

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CHAPTER 9

Dwight D. Eisenhower and Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden: A Common Cause? Justin Quinn Olmstead

Mr. Anthony Eden and General Dwight D. Eisenhower confer on the progress of the campaign in France, 1944, Department of Defense [photograph], National Archives at College Park, MD

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_9

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Just a few months before the Second World War began, Winston Churchill reminded Americans to think “of something higher and more vast than their own national interests.”1 The purpose of this comment was to remind Americans that to be a great power a nation must project its values as much as protect them. It was also a subtle reminder that Americans were products of the English nation and as such, they would need to play their part in preserving the English-speaking peoples’ way of life. Seven years later, in 1946, and after being ousted as prime minister, Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri where he urged America to join with other English-speaking nations to defend “our traditions, our way of life” and thus create an “overwhelming assurance of security.”2 In 1951, Churchill returned to Downing Street. Once again, he brought Anthony Eden with him as foreign secretary. Two years later, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. This chapter will examine their strategy to get the world to share their values, but it also takes a new look at the Eisenhower-Churchill-Eden relationship. The focus here will be on the bond between these men and the resulting personal diplomacy during the Cold War period. By providing a closer, more thorough analysis that delves deeper into this relationship, we can consider how the personal relationships aided, or in some cases hindered, their ability to maneuver through the early years of the Cold War. The chapter questions whether or not the United States and Britain, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden were working toward a common goal, or if their individual goals superseded their common cause.

Laying the Groundwork In 1952, the United States was in the middle of its political campaign season and to the country’s Republicans, it was their best chance to break the twenty-­ one-­year Democratic stranglehold on the presidency. Former general and war hero Dwight Eisenhower had been drafted to run as the Republican nominee against the Democratic challenger, Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower’s popularity showed with his overwhelming victory, winning thirty-nine of forty-eight states with an electoral margin of 442 to 89. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was not excited by the prospect of a Republican victory. Having worked with the Democrats during 1  Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010), 3. 2  Winston Churchill, “Sinews of Peace,” 5 March 1946 (https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org).

J. Q. Olmstead (*) University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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the Second World War, he believed that the Republican’s two decades out of power had left them lacking in experience to deal with the realities of the Cold War. Churchill’s opinion of their election platform was that it made war with the Soviet Union much more probable. The prime minister’s attitude toward the Republicans was certainly tainted by the fact that the Republican Party platform was written by John Foster Dulles, whom both Churchill and Eden very much disliked. Churchill thought Dulles was stupid and insisted on pronouncing his name “Dullith” as if he had a lisp.3 Eden disliked Dulles so much that he told the president that he could not work with the man and sincerely hoped he would not be appointed Secretary of State.4 One should not take this as a reflection of their affection for the newly elected Eisenhower, which was complicated in its own right. It was Churchill’s belief, and indeed that of his foreign minister, that the relationship with Eisenhower that had developed during the Second World War would allow Britain, and Churchill in particular, to “act as a restraining influence on America.”5 Why the prime minister and foreign secretary believed they could be, or should be, able to influence the American president is curious. One the one hand, the thirteen-year relationship they had with Eisenhower had provided them with enough experiences that they should have known his personality and actions. But despite this familiarity and their public appearance of respect and admiration, their private feelings seem to betray an altogether different view. During the Second World War, Churchill thought Eisenhower lacked in political awareness, so he dispatched Harold Macmillan to act as the general’s political advisor and to help him deal with the intricacies of international alliances. When told of Eisenhower’s election victory Churchill is reported to have commented that he now had a “fish that [could] talk … with an American accent.”6 By the time of his second premiership, Churchill was seemingly past his prime. His glory undoubtedly set in the heroism of the Second World War where his personality alone is often given credit for having willed the British people to victory. And while his courage in the face of the enemy has found him consistently voted the greatest Briton ever, it has also tainted his legacy.7 Essentially, by 1945, the British public saw him as a wartime prime minister. 3  Evan Thomas, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World (New York: Back Bay Books, 2012), 91. 4  Ibid. See also, Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 21. 5  Peter G.  Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–1957 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. 6  Toye, Churchill’s Empire, 285. 7  In 2002, a BBC poll gave this honor to Churchill with some 410,000 votes over his nearest challenger. In 2008, he was selected as the greatest prime minister by a BBC Newsnight poll. In 2015, he took second place, again via an unscientific poll conducted as part of a charitable clothing drive. Historians such as Max Hastings have written that “Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, indeed of all time.” Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill 1940–1945 (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 3.

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This is one of the reasons for his defeat in the elections of that same year. The British people believed that with the war over, they needed a new leader who could help the country settle into the postwar life. Remaining as leader of the opposition, Churchill was seen by many as an old man clinging to power. By the end of the Second World War, Churchill had accomplished enough that he could have been forgiven for retiring. It was the shape the world had taken since 1945 that led him to believe he was still needed. Thanks to his aforementioned speech in Fulton, Missouri, he gained back his voice “as a politician and statesman.”8 Just as technological advances, such as the airplane, had worried the British people about their ability to defend the country in the 1930s, the advent of the atomic age led Churchill to believe that Britain would no longer be able to survive a modern war. He thought his final contribution would be to make world peace not only possible, but a reality. The best way to preserve Britain, therefore, was to ensure peace. Churchill desperately wanted to shake the impression that he was a warmonger. Therefore, upon returning to the prime minister’s position in 1951, he began to work tirelessly for world peace, leaving his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to run things at home. Eisenhower, new to his position, was immensely self-confident. He was known by the American people as having won the war in Europe and was drafted into running for office by a raft of supporters from both political parties. Upon his election, he was confident in his views and, while happy to partner up, he was just as happy to chart his own course. The course he chose was to provide the American people with security and peace. As Evan Thomas has noted, once Eisenhower got America out of Korea, his mission “was to avoid any war.”9 Both men being committed advocates of peace seems out of line with the classical view of Churchill and Eisenhower as military leaders and determined warriors. So much of the history written about them revolves around their experiences during war. When writing about the Cold War period, historians have been inclined to focus on the “close calls” that put the world in jeopardy of another war.10 And while these events are important, attention should be drawn to their quest for peace. Consideration should also be given to how they worked together, or against each other, in that pursuit. Similarly, Anthony Eden had initially seemed destined to be a strong prime minister when he finally took over for Churchill in 1955. He was a man of principle, a good manager, and had a determined desire to maintain Britain’s greatness. Eden had initially proven his mettle in 1938 when he resigned from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government over issues pertaining to Czechoslovakia. He later joined Churchill’s government as secretary for war 8  David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 42. 9  Thomas, Ike’s Bluff, 15. 10  For a particularly damning, and inaccurate view of Eisenhower’s diplomacy see David M. Watry, Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden in the Cold War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014).

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and soon became foreign secretary, a post he would hold during both of Churchill’s governments. Eden’s actions in this post were professional and diplomatic, in large part because he paid attention to the needs of other nations. Indeed, his work on German rearmament in 1955 is considered to have been a diplomatic masterpiece. His work rate was equaled only by Churchill, and his preparation unquestioned. His abilities, however, proved to be weaker than first thought. It is unfortunate that Eden’s health began to fail him just as Churchill continued to dither about handing him command of the Conservative Party. Eden was not as infatuated with the United States as was his predecessor. He understood the need for cooperation and support on many fronts, but throughout his career, he became increasingly frustrated by Britain’s growing reliance on the United States. In their own ways, Eisenhower and Eden had a common problem. They both had to suffer through Churchill’s failing health. According to cabinet notes, despite being fond of Churchill, the president did not look forward to meeting with the prime minister because he was deaf and could not stay awake.11 Eden’s long relationship with Churchill was certainly one of loyalty over the long haul. Churchill’s treatment of Eden became meaner as he got on in years and was, at times, downright nasty. Nevertheless, Eisenhower recognized that Churchill still had the international prestige needed for the Western powers to fulfill their geopolitical goals, and Eden knew he could not force him out of office. Churchill’s private opinion of Eisenhower’s abilities is interesting considering his wartime record. British generals had consistently commented that Eisenhower’s political instincts were almost uncanny. They were particularly impressed by his ability to be impartial toward all members of the allied coalition, especially his fellow Americans. Notwithstanding Eisenhower’s evident ability to assuage his international compatriots and the continued accolades he had built up during the war, Churchill and Eden continued to waver about his political acumen. In 1950, Churchill told the House of Commons that Eisenhower was particularly suited for the position of the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Then, shortly after Eisenhower’s election in 1952, Churchill’s private secretary, John “Jock” Colville, noted in his diary that the president struck him as “forceful but a trifle naïve” and of being “a genial and dynamic mediocrity.”12 It appears that historians and contemporaries of Eisenhower have been inclined to underrate his abilities as a politician. But there should be no doubt: Eisenhower was politically devious, almost to a fault. His ability to sooth powerful men to get his way was a proven commodity. Eisenhower quietly demonstrated his abilities during the Second World War when he convinced President Franklin Roosevelt that Charles de Gaulle was the best man for uniting France.  L. Arthur Minnich, Cabinet, 10/23/53.  John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (New York: Norton, 1985), 660–2. 11 12

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De Gaulle’s personality quirks and near inability to get along with anyone are well documented, and it is possible that this led to Roosevelt’s dislike of the Frenchman and his determination not to work with him. It was Eisenhower’s ability to get along with difficult men that served him so well in his dealings with Churchill. Like de Gaulle, he too was considered to have been grudging and overbearing.13 David Reynolds points out that from within the Roosevelt White House, it seemed as if Churchill’s support for Eisenhower was based on the future president being “neither bold nor decisive, and … neither a leader nor a general.”14 Here again, this wartime experience with Eisenhower ought to have changed the British leader’s opinion. Two early examples of Eisenhower’s decisiveness as a leader, in particular, stand out. The first occurred during the campaign in Italy, in 1943, when a propaganda script with Eisenhower’s signature of approval was broadcast to the Italian people. This broadcast proclaimed a “lull” in the fighting and the Germans took the time to solidify their position. Churchill did not like the tone of the propaganda. For two days the prime minister carried on about this issue, and at one point, when told this was merely a misunderstanding, responded by saying “There has been more than a ­misunderstanding. There has been extreme mismanagement.”15 Despite these negative comments, both Churchill and Eisenhower understood the politics of their respective positions well enough that the prime minister’s claim did not dampen Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for his job. Eisenhower responded by pointing out that in war commanders are expected to “take action rather than delay while seeking advice and instructions.”16 He went on to explain that he had full confidence in the propaganda experts that served under him to be able to follow broad directives, and that if it was felt among the two governments that he was not carrying out their directives then, “the answer seems … a simple one.”17 Eisenhower had issued a challenge to his superiors, the US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and President Roosevelt, as well as to Churchill. If they were not going to give him their trust, then remove him from the position, but “the authority and responsibility of his office should not be diminished.”18 The second example of Eisenhower’s effectiveness occurred in 1951 when Churchill and Eden visited him at his NATO headquarters in Paris. The conversation focused on the development of a European army and although Churchill agreed that the formation of a European army was instrumental to 13  William Manchester and Paul Reid, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 955. 14  Reynolds, In Command of History, 41–2. 15  Prime Minister to Resident Minister in Algiers, 4 September 1943, Prime Minister’s Office Records [hereafter PREM] 3/242/4, The National Archives [hereafter TNA]. 16   Memorandum for the President from General Eisenhower, 4 August 1943, PREM 3/242/4, TNA. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid.

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creating a politically unified Europe, and therefore fundamental to the security of Europe, it was clear that he opposed Britain’s participation in the project. Instead of arguing the point, Eisenhower stated that Britain’s recalcitrance was slowing the European army’s development and therefore he would exclude them from the process.19 Eisenhower’s decisiveness on this subject caught Churchill sufficiently off guard and convinced him that the United States was happy to go ahead with a European army without British assistance. These types of encounters with Eisenhower should have left the prime minister with no question as to Eisenhower’s leadership qualities and determination. However, Churchill’s continued assumption that Eisenhower lacked leadership qualities led him to believe that the president was being influenced by the extreme wing of the Republican Party, represented in the new administration by John Foster Dulles. As a result, Churchill decided that his position was to help the insufficiently politically astute Eisenhower to curb the more radical members of his administration and party.20 Aside from their private reservations about Eisenhower’s competency, Churchill and Eden had always been publicly supportive of him and trusted that he believed in the necessity of pursuing an Anglo-American worldview. In a number of letters and in the press both men praise Eisenhower. For Eisenhower, there appears to be no animus toward either man. Upon taking office, he made sure to tell Churchill that he hoped the two of them could continue to have a personal correspondence in addition to the formal governmental exchanges. The new president’s idea was that the two men could use their personal relationship to clarify intentions and explain their decisions without the message being muddled by diplomatic nuance, or by newspaper headlines. For a man entering his seventy-ninth year, leading a country of declining status, and hoping to influence the new American president, this was excellent news. Some historians have noted that by the time Eisenhower became president, he felt that Churchill had passed his prime and should turn power over to the younger, much-experienced Eden. This idea is often mistaken as a lack of respect by Eisenhower. While the president was frustrated by Churchill’s slower speech and inability to hear, he still confided to him in letter after letter. His respect for Churchill as a man and leader was something that never left him, even as he screamed over the phone to get the aged prime minister to hear him. Churchill’s last government was overshadowed by the continued decline of British military and imperial prestige and power, and the Cold War. Eisenhower’s first administration was characterized by the civil rights movement, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. Churchill was becoming adjusted to a new world where the United States dominated and was relatively calm about the breakup of the British Empire. That is not to say he was necessarily happy 19  Robert H.  Ferrell, (ed.), The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: W.  W. Norton & Company, 1981), 207–8. 20  Boyle, The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 4.

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about it. He believed that Britain would be able to preserve its place among the great nations by stressing Anglo-American unity. Internationally, where the two worked together, issues were pressing and provide a glimpse into the changing positions of the two nations. Here is where historians have been inclined to draw a clear divergence between Churchill and Eden, and Eisenhower. Only a few days before his inauguration, Eisenhower met with Churchill and noted in his diary that “Winston is trying to relive the days of World War II.”21 It is this quote that is often pointed to as an example of Eisenhower’s belief that Churchill was living in the past and that he should turn the reins of government over to Eden.22 But if one were to read a bit further in Eisenhower’s diary it is clear that his reference is not intended to say that the prime minister was out of touch. It was in relation to Churchill’s reluctance to help Europe and his “childlike faith … in [a] British-American partnership” like the one that led the Allies to victory.23 In addition to his opposition to an overt Anglo-American partnership, Eisenhower was certain that the West’s imperial past was a weight on democracy’s attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Third World. Anything he believed might hinder the ability to defeat communism was something he would not support. From the point of view of Churchill and Eden, the struggle to maintain the Empire in any form was part of the struggle against communism. Yet, it would appear that Churchill understood that the world had changed and that the British Empire would have to change as well. Britain’s diminishing role was not new to Churchill. His first realization of Britain’s diminishing stature came in 1943, in Tehran, at the Big Three conference between Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. Despite his best attempts to formulate a joint British– American plan to thwart Soviet territorial ambitions, Roosevelt ignored the prime minister and diligently courted the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. By the time the next Big Three conference was held in 1945 at Yalta, he was fully aware of what Peter Clarke describes as his “diminished status.”24 This would be difficult for Churchill and Eden to deal with as both men, though Eden in particular, chafed at Britain’s dependence on the United States both during and after the Second World War. Additionally, Eden’s second time serving as foreign secretary is often criticized for its focus on maintaining Britain’s world position, leading to overstretched resources and an anemic economy. Despite Britain’s shrinking global role, Eden believed that for Britain to remain a global power, it would need to “shed or share the load of one or two major

 Ferrell, (ed.), The Eisenhower Diaries, 222–3.  Chester J. Pach, Jr. and Elmo Richardson, The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 87; Robert R.  Bowie, and Richard H.  Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped the Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 52. 23  Ferrell, The Eisenhower Diaries, 223. 24  Peter Clarke, Mr. Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book that Defined the “Special Relationship” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 266–7. 21 22

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obligations.”25 The intent was understandable; the United States was the country with which to share the load.26 Churchill had also seen the necessity of Anglo-American cooperation in the postwar world. After losing the 1945 election, he wrote the new Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that Britain’s aim should be to have British and American affairs so interwoven that any ideas of war between the two nations would be absolutely inconceivable.27 To his mind, the Anglo-American alliance should not only continue but grow to the point that a written alliance would not be needed—unity would be understood. As far back as 1871 there were calls for an Anglo-American union to “enable the English-Speaking peoples to give law to the world.”28 In 1950, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called for a “defence built on a Commonwealth— U.S.A. basis—an English-speaking basis” to defend Britain from the Soviet threat.29 Throughout much of his life, Churchill was determined to create a common Anglo-American world policy. At one point, he would go so far as to suggest common citizenship for the two countries. Eisenhower, on the other hand, seems to have been ambivalent toward the British in public. He understood the importance of the shared heritage and shared values, but he felt that in Churchill’s last spell as prime minister—and Eden’s tenure as well—had seen them refusing to face reality about Britain’s place in the world.30 To Eisenhower, the British position in world politics was clear. Soon it would also be more apparent to Churchill and Eden. Britain’s reliance on American support and attempt to co-opt American power was highlighted when Churchill attempted to tie the British support for ending the Korean War to US support of British interests in Egypt. The connected issues of communist China and the Korean War were to be the cause of several early problems between Churchill and Eisenhower and how they became connected to Britain’s interests in Egypt can be frustrating to those not accustomed to the ins and outs of international politics. To understand the issue, then, it is essential to gain an understanding of how these seemingly separate international events came to be connected.

Connecting the Dots In 1949, communist Chinese forces drove nationalist Chinese troops from mainland to offshore islands including Formosa (since 1947, Taiwan). In the United States, President Harry S.  Truman was blamed for China becoming 25  Kevin Ruane and James Ellison, “Managing the Americans: Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and the Pursuit of ‘Power-by-Proxy’ in the 1950s,” in Gaynor L. Johnson (ed.), The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2005), 149. 26  Ibid., 147–67. 27  Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (New York: Free Press, 2005), 362–3. 28  Clarke, Mr. Churchill’s Profession, 88. 29  Ritchie Ovendale, The English-speaking Alliance: Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Cold War, 1945–1951 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), inset. 30  Steven Ambrose, Eisenhower: Vol. 2, The President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 146.

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communist. Despite holding mainland China, fighting had continued between the communist and nationalist forces. Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-­ shek maintained US support and continued to fight from the islands in the hope of someday regaining the Chinese mainland. Truman sent the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet to China, to keep the communists and nationalists from actively fighting. In reality, the presence of the US Navy was meant to dissuade Chiang from attempting to invade China. In late June 1950, North Korea had invaded South Korea, and again Truman was dealing with the possibility of another Asian nation becoming communist. With the help of a United Nations Security Council resolution, the United States and sixteen other nations joined the fight on 15 September 1950, to preserve the South Korean nation. Despite the UN resolution explicitly stating that the purpose of this intervention was to restore the boundary between the two Koreas, the UN (funded, supplied, and led primarily by the United States) forces proceeded to push further north. As the UN forces closed in on the Chinese border with North Korea, the Chinese government issued repeated warnings not to do so. In November 1950, the Chinese Red Army attacked UN forces in North Korea, driving them back to the 38th parallel. The front stabilized in January 1951, but the war turned into a stalemate with no one side gaining the upper hand. During the last year of the Truman administration, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had informed Churchill and Eden that the war in Korea had gone on long enough that the president was considering bombing Chinese targets, but due to the lack of suitable targets, no atomic bombs would be used. If the situation changed, Acheson would not rule out the possibility.31 The United States found itself in the contradictory position of having American forces fighting Chinese troops on the Korean peninsula while the US Navy was keeping nationalist Chinese troops from attacking the communists on the Chinese mainland from their bases on the islands of Formosa, Quemoy, and Matsu. Upon becoming president, Eisenhower, who had campaigned in part on ending the war in Korea, changed the mission of the Seventh Fleet to allow Chinese nationalists to attack mainland China if they chose to do so. He also let it be known that he was willing to consider a direct attack by US forces on China if necessary to end the war in Korea. It is likely that this bluster was all part of Eisenhower’s foreign policy. When hearing of Churchill’s misgivings, Eisenhower explained that the Seventh Fleet’s orders were not intentionally aggressive, and their new directive would give Americans at home “self-­ respect.” He added that it would make the point to the Chinese Communists that the United States and its UN allies would no longer sit idly by while they challenged Western interests in the region.32

31  John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 120. 32  Telegram of 2 February 1953, in Boyle, Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 18.

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Churchill saw it differently. In a note sent in February 1953, Churchill chastised Eisenhower for not consulting him before making a statement that he believed affected the “common destiny of the two nations.”33 The prime minister’s position that Anglo-American cooperation was paramount made him insist that part of maintaining those relations was to keep the appearance of Britain as a world power. Without prior knowledge of American actions, Churchill (and Eden) could not keep the House of Commons apprised of events and it would appear, to the British public and the international community, that Great Britain was playing a secondary role to the Americans. Churchill believed that the key to resolving the issue was that the two continued to have open conversations. As issues in Asia continued almost unabated, Churchill was also grappling with problems in Egypt. As per his, and Eden’s, stated position, he wanted to get the United States involved in guaranteeing Britain’s place in playing a great role in world events. In 1947, President Truman agreed with the Labour Cabinet about the vital position the Middle East played in defending Western Europe and for the need for the British to remain there. Regarding stability and strategic positioning, no country offered what Egypt was able to offer. It linked Britain to Australia, India, and the Far East; it was the main reserve of Britain’s oil, and it contained multiple naval bases.34 The problem was that Britain had been promising to give it back to Egypt for almost seventy years. In 1952, Egyptian King Farouk was overthrown by General Mohammed Naguib and his Revolutionary Command Council that included Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. Soon after the coup, Naguib began negotiations with the British to remove troops from their Suez base in Egypt. Churchill greeted these developments with mixed emotions. He believed the base was no longer a strategic necessity due to the independence of India in 1947. As an economic matter, the 80,000 troops stationed there would better serve the nation and its budget at home. As a matter of honor, Churchill and Eden wanted to leave on their terms. As negotiations with Naguib stagnated, Churchill turned to Eisenhower in the hope that with American pressure the Egyptian dictator would relent and agree to British terms, terms that included Egyptian membership in the anticommunist Middle East defense organization known as the Baghdad Pact. It is here that Churchill and Eden’s idea of “suck[ing] the Americans into the discussions” was to come into play.35 On 7 February 1953, Churchill asked Eisenhower for support in Britain’s fight to maintain control of the Suez Canal Zone and against Egyptian nationalism. This request for help was done in the same telegram where he chastised the new American president for his comments concerning China. Eisenhower refused, in part, because both he and the United States public would not

 Telegram of 7 February 1953, in Boyle, Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 21.  Ovendale, The English-Speaking Alliance, 95. 35  David Dutton, Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation (London: Arnold, 1997), 359. 33 34

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support what he considered to be continued British imperialism.36 It would seem that Churchill also clearly understood that Britain could not keep its empire. His post–Second World War record is one that alludes to a grudging understanding of the new realities of the postwar world.37 At first, Eisenhower seemed open to the idea of joining the Anglo-Egyptian negotiations, going so far as to appoint a military representative to assist in the negotiations. But the president and his advisors soon had second thoughts. The Eisenhower administration placed a premium on appearances as an essential aspect of its foreign policy strategy. It was the president’s view that if the United States joined Britain in negotiations without being officially invited by the Egyptians, it would give the appearance of the two English-speaking nations attempting to dominate world affairs.38 Eisenhower believed that the United States and Britain would get further with Egypt and the rest of the world if they treated all nations equally.39 Eisenhower had seen how joint Anglo-American plans were received in the Middle East when the Truman– Churchill proposition to Iran was rejected and Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh accused the United States of partnering with the British to bully smaller nations.40 Churchill expressed his concern that a lack of Anglo-American cooperation concerning international issues could signal a split between the two countries—an interest he knew Eisenhower shared. But for the president, Churchill had missed the point. The United States fully supported Britain’s position, and the president felt that by allowing Naguib to operate at the same level as that of the two world powers, he would be more willing to compromise and help Britain save face. Negotiations dragged on into 1954, in part due to Eden’s health issues. In May, Churchill changed his tactics in an attempt to persuade Eisenhower to help. The president’s desire to prevent communism a victory anywhere in the world would be something that Churchill turned to in an attempt to gain American support in Egypt. Noting issues in Asia, predominately the Formosa crisis for the United States and the rebellion in Malaya for Britain, Churchill claimed that he needed to move the 80,000 troops from Egypt to reinforce the British position in Asia. Again, only a month later, Churchill commented on his desire to remove the troops in Egypt. This time his comments focused on the problems France was having in Indochina. 36  Timothy H.  Parsons, The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 104–7; Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 292; “Open Letter from the Editors of Life to the People of England,” Life Magazine, 12 October 1942, 34. 37  Richard Toye, “Churchill and the Empire,” in Richard Toye (ed.), Winston Churchill: Politics, Strategy and Statecraft (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 105–12. 38  Eisenhower to Eden, 16 March 1953, Diary Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President (Ann Whitman File), International Series, Box 17, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS [hereafter EL]. 39  Eisenhower, Mandate for Change (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1965), 152. 40  Ibid.

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The prime minister suggested that if the French did indeed pull out of Southeast Asia, the need to reinforce the region would be even higher than before. The prime minister then alluded to the need to keep troops in Germany noting that it would “be a pity to take troops from Germany” when he could remove them from Egypt instead.41 Eisenhower agreed that it would be nice to have the British troops available, but he did not comment on Egypt other than to say that he was glad to see the two sides were talking again.42 Eden had grown exasperated with the Americans and, like his prime minister, had changed tactics. The foreign secretary decided to work directly with the Egyptians to settle the dispute over the base. As it turns out, he came to the same conclusion as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had a year earlier: that the appearance of the United States and Britain working together in Egypt might act as a deterrent to other regional aspirations.43 By July an agreement to evacuate British forces from Egypt within twenty months had been reached. The final agreement, signed on 19 October 1954, contained several of the caveats for which Britain had been hoping. Britain had the right to return to the base if Turkey or another Arab state (excepting Israel) was attacked by an outside force, and British civilians would also be permitted to maintain the base for seven years.

European Defense Community European security issues had also played a role in Anglo-American relations since the end of the Second World War. The continent had been divided between the Western democracies and the Soviet-influenced Eastern European nations. In spring 1945, Churchill had rushed to claim a position of opposition to communism in Europe. He feared that the United States was trying to make a long-term friend of Stalin and consequently was turning a blind eye to the ugly possibilities that communism offered Europe and the world.44 As Allied postwar cohesion dissolved, fear of a Soviet attack on Western Europe grew. After the events of the Berlin Blockade, the war in Korean gave the appearance to those in the West that the Soviet Union had weakened the United States and positioned itself to spread communism all the way to the Atlantic. With American forces now holding the line against communism in Europe and Asia, the need for strengthening European security took on a new urgency. It was during President Truman’s administration that NATO was formed, in 1949, and the fear of communist expansion led to the discussion of German rearmament. Knowing that Britain’s position was that the United States must remain integrated in European issues, the Truman administration intimated  Churchill to Eisenhower, 21 June 1954, PREM 11/1074, TNA.  Eisenhower to Churchill, 13 July 1954, PREM 11/1074, TNA. 43  Eden to Churchill, 21 June 1954, Papers of Julian Amery, 1985–89, AMEJ 1/10/64, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 44  Raymond A. Callahan, Churchill: Retreat from Empire (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1984), 247. 41 42

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that a rearmed Germany within a common European defense structure would go a long way to guaranteeing American commitment into Europe’s defense. The European Defense Community, or EDC as it became known, was founded in 1952. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during this time, and Churchill, leader of the opposition, saw the need for Germany to rearm and take its place as a co-protector of the West. Before the EDC treaty was signed in 1952, negotiations with member states took a year to hammer it out. The treaty went to the various parliaments for ratification. Despite the fear that led to the creation of the EDC, its ratification ran into political trouble. A year into Eisenhower’s presidency, the French had yet to ratify the treaty. The president and prime minister regularly discussed how to handle the situation. Eisenhower was intent on containing the Russians in Europe. He believed American involvement in Asia was a diversion of valuable men and resources—a diversion possibly of Soviet design.45 Just seven days after being sworn in, Eisenhower sent Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the director of the Mutual Security Administration Harold Stassen to Europe to apply pressure for what he saw as “one of the most important developments in modern history.”46 Eisenhower believed in containment, and he thought the combined strength of United States, European, and British Commonwealth countries could provide the foundations for peace. Churchill’s initial position on the EDC was that it was a “sludgy amalgam.” This was due to the use of combined forces. It is important to remember that Churchill made that comment as the leader of the opposition. By 1954, things had changed. As prime minister, Churchill confessed to Eisenhower that he had a change of heart, believing that, if nothing else, the EDC was the best way to convince the French to accept a limited German army.47 It is important to remember that in 1952 Eisenhower had pressed Churchill about the need for Britain to take an active leadership role in the EDC. He had told the prime minister that Europe’s success and the welfare of the West depended on a European Army.48 The United States and Britain had already committed to keeping troops on the continent as part of NATO forces. All that remained to be solved was the rearming of Germany and this, the French decided, could be resolved without the EDC. With the end of the war in Korea, the urgency for a defensive alliance seemed to have drifted away. Despite the work of Churchill, Eden, and Eisenhower, the French failed to ratify the treaty. Under British leadership and in particular that of Eden, a conference of EDC member nations was held where a series of decisions were made to solidify European defense. Within the

 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 121.  Telegram of 29 January 1953, in Boyle, Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 16–17. 47  Telegram, 18 September 1954, Churchill to Eisenhower, PREM 11/1074, TNA. 48  Ferrell, Eisenhower Diaries, 222. 45 46

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structure of the revised Brussels Treaty, the Federal Republic of Germany would be recognized, allowed to rearm, and integrated into NATO.49

Suez or Egypt Despite the April 1955 Bandung Conference that paved the way for the nonalignment movement, much of the world had solidified into two camps following either the United States or the Soviet Union. One exception was the Middle East, where emerging nationalism was being mistaken by the West as communism, and being used by the Soviet Union for propaganda purposes. It was at this time that Churchill finally decided to retire from public life and allow his long-waiting successor, Anthony Eden, take over as prime minister. Eden’s initial plan was for the United States to do the heavy lifting in world affairs as long as it fit British plans and kept Britain at the center of global politics. Despite the long relationship between the two, Eden’s first letters to Eisenhower were meant to ensure their personal relationship would work much the same as it had with his predecessor. The new prime minister appealed to Eisenhower’s vanity by commenting that during the Second World War and the early days of the Cold War it was the president’s leadership that was “the compelling factor in … Western defence.”50 Eden then went a step further and asked if the president would be willing to offer reflections on problems Eden needed help with.51 This was to be tested just a little over year later. All of Churchill and Eden’s work to maintain British status in the Suez Canal zone collapsed on 26 July 1956. Nasser had nationalized the canal and Eden was stuck because he had put Britain in a position of having to do something, anything, to save face. Eden’s dictum that prestige was important played a large part in his reaction to the Egyptian seizure. By nationalizing the canal, Eden believed, Nasser was once again attempting to bully Britain. With a rapidly diminishing position in the world, Britain could ill afford to have a former colony demonstrate metropole’s sudden weakness. Eden’s insistence on saving face fit quite nicely with Eisenhower’s affinity for appearances. He, therefore, developed a plan he believed would force American support of Britain’s Middle East policy. From Eden’s point of view, part of getting the United States to take the lead was to make it look like Britain was doing everything it could. On 27 July Eden cabled Eisenhower to let him know that, as a consequence of Nasser nationalizing the Suez, he wanted to put political pressure on Egypt. Eisenhower was amenable to this, as Eden had hoped. Eden then went a step further and claimed that Nasser’s actions were of such importance that force 49  Seth A.  Johnston, How NATO Adapts: Strategy and Organization in the Atlantic Alliance Since 1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 76–7. 50  Eden to Eisenhower, 11 April 1955, Diary Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Papers as President, 1953–61 (Ann Whitman File), International Series, Box 21, EL. 51  Ibid.

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should be used to “bring Nasser to his senses.”52 Britain joined France, who was worried about Egyptian meddling in Algeria, and Israel, who feared for its existence, in invading Egypt and seizing the canal. Each country had its own reasoning for what was a poorly planned sneak attack, and each had separate hopes for what would come after. Eden hoped to stop communism from settling in the Middle East, but his main concern was to stem the retreat of the British Empire. Eisenhower saw the canal as a public utility. Its purpose was different, and therefore his reaction to its nationalization was different than if Nasser had nationalized the country’s oil wells. Despite what British leadership thought, Eisenhower was a shrewd politician. Within days of reading Eden’s letter pushing for military action against Egypt, the president was wondering aloud at the possibility of a rift in British–American relations being better than allowing a war to start and not having tried to stop it.53 The drama surrounding the canal would go on for months before any military action was taken. Each step of the way Eisenhower was cautious of British feelings but adamant that military action against Egypt was not the answer. Nevertheless, Eden pressed ahead with his decision for military action against Egypt—an action that included deceiving Eisenhower. In late October, Eisenhower and his administration began discussing the possibility of inviting Eden to Washington after the election in November. Within the confines of the administration, the president was clear that if Britain were involved in military action against Egypt before November, the invitation would be withdrawn. The problem was that Britain had ceased to communicate with the United States about Egypt. Eisenhower was given an opportunity to remind the world publicly of his position on Egypt when during a televised election appearance he was asked about the Suez Canal. His response was to endorse Egyptian sovereignty and state that “no one can challenge the legal right of Egypt to nationalize the Canal.”54 Despite the warning, Eden again pressed ahead with the plan to invade Egypt. On 26 October, reports reached Washington that Israel had begun mobilizing its forces. Eisenhower and his advisors wondered if the Israelis were preparing for war with Jordan or Egypt. Four days later Eden sent a letter to Eisenhower noting that Britain had warned Israel that if it attacked Jordan, British forces would honor the defensive pact with the country. This was a clear feint on Eden’s part as he tried to set matters up so that the United States would support Britain’s actions. On 29 October Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea in eastern Egypt. After several intense meetings with his staff, the president sent a note to the prime minister. Eisenhower attempted to pressure Eden with pleasantries, 52  Eden to Eisenhower, 27 July 2956, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–57, vol. XVI, no. 5 (https://history.state.gov), 9–11 [hereafter FRUS]. 53  David A. Nichols, Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis, Suez, and the Brink of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 141. 54  Radio and Television Broadcast, 24 October 1956, no. 268, 1016–17, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States [hereafter PPP].

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reminding Eden that the two were long-time friends that believed in the necessity for Anglo-American cooperation. Eisenhower then went on to detail violations of agreements between Britain, France, and the United States on the part of the two European allies. He finished by pointing out that if Britain and France were to invade Egypt, it would give Nasser reason to ask the Soviet Union for help and that if the West wanted to avoid this, it was best for all involved to explain their intentions.55 Privately, Eisenhower fumed. He grumbled to members of his administration that Egyptian nationalization of the canal did not give Britain and France adequate cause for war. He then commented that an unworthy and unreliable ally was not worth much.56 The events around the Suez Canal turned into a crisis when Eisenhower refused to bend to Eden’s belief that the United States would support military action to reclaim the canal. The decision had many factors, but the judgment boiled down to the president’s opinion that Eden’s actions were putting the Middle East and the entire Third World at risk of falling into the Soviet sphere of influence. It was Eisenhower’s belief, as he told British Chargé d’Affaires Sir John Coulson, that if the United States had betrayed its word by not assisting a victim of aggression in the Middle East, the Soviet Union would most likely become involved in the region.57 By the evening of 30 October, Eden had sent a message to Eisenhower that he planned to quote the president in a speech to the House of Commons to “justify British action and policy.”58 According to David Nichols, Eisenhower was so fed up with Eden’s inability to understand US policy, or his willful decision to ignore it, that he replied with irony that he should use “any part you [Eden] see fit.”59 The next evening, Eisenhower gave a televised speech to the American people about the developing crisis in Egypt. He did not provide a fiery critique of British and French actions, but instead gave a tempered presentation outlining events. He made clear that the United States would not engage in hostilities toward Egypt. In an attempt to soothe allied feelings, he reiterated his belief that by keeping the United States out of the fighting in Egypt he was “in no way [trying] to minimize our friendship with these nations—nor our determination to maintain those friendships.”60 Eisenhower seems to have been as angry about Eden’s failure to notify him about the proceedings as he was about British actions. Throughout the episode, he continually commented that “they haven’t consulted with us on anything” and that he had “felt very much in the dark as to [the British] attitude and intentions.” Despite his anger, the president was clear that the United States would not fight its allies and it must convey to the world that there was no wedge between them. He would, however, make life difficult for them. He  Eisenhower to Eden, 30 October 1956, FRUS, 1955–57, vol. XVI, no. 418, 848–50.  Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 205–6. 57  Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 204. 58  Eden to Eisenhower, 30 October 1956, FRUS, 1955–57, vol. XVI, no. 440, 882–3 & footnote no. 1. 59  Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 268. 60  Eisenhower on the Suez Canal Crisis, Speeches & Audio (http://www.history.com). 55 56

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understood by this point that Eden was determined to force the United States to join in the fight or at the very least, finance the expedition. By November 1956, Eisenhower was no longer on speaking terms with Eden. Any business to be done between the old allies had to run through intermediaries such as Harold Macmillan. On 7 November, Eisenhower halfheartedly agreed to have Eden over to the United States. It did not take much convincing from his Dulles to call back and disinvite the prime minister.61 Ten days later, Eisenhower confided to Dulles that “one of the most disappointing things was to start with an exceedingly high opinion of a person and then have continually to downgrade this estimate. Eden fell into this latter category.”62 Eisenhower did not distinguish between European, Asian, or American interests when it came to containing Communism. He believed that all were equally threatened and only a firm response to the Communist threat could stem the tide. Equally, Eisenhower consistently told Churchill and Eden about his belief in the necessity for “sound and friendly Anglo-American relations.”63 In public, Eisenhower was full of praise for Churchill and Eden, but privately he was ambivalent. He wanted to maintain their friendship, and he felt that he needed Britain to help thwart communist aggression around the world and keep the peace, but he was willing to work independently if required. For their part, Churchill and Eden resented American steps during the Second World War to impose economic conditions on Britain they felt were detrimental to the country’s interests. Eden, in particular, felt as if the United States was exploiting British weakness. His response was to try and make the United States pay to keep Britain in a position of world power. Both British leaders seemed to like Eisenhower well enough, while at the same time denigrated his abilities as a politician. This was done to their detriment. At the height of his political powers Churchill might have been able to out-politic Eisenhower, but by the time the two were the leaders of their respective countries, he, like Britain, was no longer near the lofty heights of years past.

Conclusion From 1953 to 1957, these three men maneuvered their way through the initial stages of the confrontation with communism. It is tempting to focus solely on events such as Korea, Egypt, and German rearmament during this time. It is, perhaps, more important to understand how and when the president and prime ministers consulted each other, where they were willing to work together, and where, as in Egypt in 1952 and with the Suez Crisis in 1956, they diverged. 61  Alex von Tunzelman, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2016), 425–6. 62  Nichols, Eisenhower 1956, 268. 63  Boyle, Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 115.

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The importance of personalities involved in personal diplomacy offers a glimpse into how their governments attempted to deal with the new realities of the postwar world. If the common goal of the United States and Britain, of Eisenhower, Churchill and Eden, was to maintain the British Empire, it failed spectacularly. If it was to maintain the English-speaking peoples’ way of life, it must be considered a success. It would appear that Eisenhower had taken Churchill’s words to heart and began thinking of something higher than the English-speaking world’s interests as he pushed for British withdrawal from its colonial possessions in order to contain Soviet influence. By doing so, he successfully replaced the ailing Britain with the United States as the world’s leading power. Until 1956, Britain’s leaders did not completely understand how much their world had changed. The hope of restraining the United States while maintaining a role in world events was dashed. The financial and military power of 1950s America allowed Eisenhower to ignore British attempts to influence his policies and restrain British foolhardiness. As Britain tried to remain in its position at the apex of world power the United States was continuing its rise to world superpower. The relationship between Eisenhower, Eden, and Churchill, in many ways, tells the story of how the United States surpassed and then supplanted the United Kingdom as the leading Western power. It was an empire on the decline and an empire—not so labeled—still on the rise.

CHAPTER 10

John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan: Dependence and Interdependence Nigel Ashton

Cecil Stoughton. Kennedy and Macmillan on the steps of Government House in Hamilton, Bermuda [photograph], White House Photographs, 1961

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_10

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In the summer of 1968, nearly five years after John F. Kennedy’s untimely death in Dallas on 22 November 1963, the young Charles Lysaght, who was beginning work on a biography of Brendan Bracken, was invited to lunch with Harold Macmillan at his home, Birch Grove, in Sussex. As ever with Macmillan, the conversation ranged widely, over publishing, politics and people. Macmillan was “wonderfully learned, full of ideas and literary and historical allusions,” Lysaght later recollected. But he was also plainly lonely. When Lysaght got up to leave after lunch, Macmillan called him back and showed him instead into his study. Surveying the room, Lysaght noticed a photograph of Macmillan’s American mother on his desk. Casting his eye further in the otherwise sparsely furnished room, Lysaght’s gaze alighted on several prominent pictures of President Kennedy. Following his guest’s eye, Macmillan “spoke wistfully and romantically of Kennedy’s visit to him only a few months before the fatal day in Dallas.”1 It was a final encounter on which Macmillan dwelt many times during the later years of his life, capturing, in his mind’s eye, the precise moment of the president’s departure: [H]atless, with his brisk step, and combining that indescribable look of a boy on holiday with the dignity of a President and Commander-in-Chief, he walked across the garden to the machine. We stood and waved. I can see the helicopter now, sailing down the valley above the heavily laden, lush foliage of oaks and beech at the end of June. He was gone. Alas, I was never to see my friend again.2

Lysaght’s experience of a wistful, melancholic Macmillan was far from unique. His official biographer, Alistair Horne, who visited Birch Grove regularly from 1979 onwards to meet his subject, noted that it was a house of ghosts. “In a place of honour in the library, where they had worked together during that visit in 1963, there was the rocking-chair, still draped with its plaid rug, bought specially for President Kennedy.”3 The tangible symbols of the rocking-chair and the photographs at Birch Grove were complemented by an impassioned private correspondence struck up between Macmillan and the president’s widow, Jackie Kennedy, which carried on throughout the remainder of the former prime minister’s life. The bereaved First Lady wrote again and again as she later recollected, “with no restraint at all on my emotions.”  Charles Lysaght, “Dear Brendan and Master Harold” in Richard Aldous and Sabine Lee (eds.), Harold Macmillan: Aspects of a Political Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 146. 2  Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1957–1986 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 517. 3  Ibid., 606. 1

N. Ashton (*) Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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The surviving letters certainly bear witness to that testimony. On the unique quality of the Kennedy–Macmillan relationship versus other previous or prospective presidential-prime ministerial relationships, Jackie was adamant: You were the only ones who cared about other people—who could look at yourselves with humour … You worked together for the finest things in the finest years—later on when a series of disastrous Presidents of the United States and Prime Ministers who were not like you, will have botched up everything—people will say “Do you remember those days—how perfect they were?” The days of you and Jack …4

In her later testimony, Jackie Kennedy added one further factor beyond common purpose and character which she felt underpinned their relationship: the inspiration Kennedy had received in the loneliness of the presidency from having someone he could talk to almost as an equal.5 Kennedy himself had earlier offered private testimony to the same effect: “I feel at home with Macmillan,” he confided to the journalist Henry Brandon, “because I can share my loneliness with him.”6 However intangible this factor might seem, it is worth bearing in mind when we come to consider the functioning of their personal relationship during the key junctures of the Kennedy presidency, especially during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. From the moment Macmillan heard of Kennedy’s assassination he viewed it as a defining moment in international politics. “It has been a staggering blow,” he confided to his diary. “To the causes he and I worked for, it is a grievous blow. For Jack Kennedy’s acceptance—of [the] Test Ban and of [the] policy of détente with Russia were really his own—I mean were not shared by any except his most intimate advisers.”7 Macmillan amplified these thoughts in his eulogy delivered to the House of Commons: “we mourn him—and this is perhaps the greatest tribute to Jack Kennedy’s life and work—for ourselves, for what we and all the world have lost.”8 Macmillan deserves credit here for his candour. For all the emotion of his private correspondence with Jackie and his genuine sense of personal bereavement, he mourned Kennedy’s passing principally because it seemed to underline the transience of their common achievements. Throughout his premiership, the central plank of Macmillan’s policy towards the United States had been the pursuit of Anglo-American interdependence. On one level, this represented no more than practical politics and economics. Macmillan was the latest in the line of prime ministers to confront the mismatch  Ibid., 577.  Ibid., 579. 6  Henry Brandon, Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (London: Macmillan, 1989), 160. 7  Harold Macmillan, diary entry, 26 November 1963  in Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries: Volume II (London: Pan Books, 2014), 617. 8  Hansard, Vol. 685, col. 35–44, 25 November 1963 (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-­ hansard/commons/1963/nov/25/president-kennedy-tributes). 4 5

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between Britain’s global commitments and its relatively underperforming domestic economy. Anglo-American interdependence, in Macmillan’s conception, offered the prospect of redressing this balance. If Britain could more effectively share its commitments with the United States, resources devoted to defence overseas might be conserved and investment in the domestic economy boosted. The classic statement of this ethos was provided by the Declaration of Common Purpose issued by Macmillan and Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in Washington in October 1957: The arrangements which the nations of the free world have made for collective defence and mutual help are based on the recognition that the concept of national self-sufficiency is now out of date. The countries of the free world are interdependent, and only in genuine partnership, by combining their resources and sharing tasks in many fields, can progress and safety be found. For our part, we have agreed that our two countries will henceforth act in accordance with this principle.9

At the heart of Macmillan’s pursuit of interdependence was the Anglo-­ American nuclear relationship. The prohibitive cost involved in the development of the British independent nuclear deterrent made this a field ripe to his mind for burden-sharing. The Declaration of Common Purpose opened the way to the resumption of Anglo-American nuclear cooperation from 1958 onwards and to the agreement reached at the March 1960 Camp David summit for the supply by the United States to Britain of the Skybolt nuclear delivery system. Macmillan’s parallel agreement at Camp David to allow the United States to site a Polaris nuclear submarine base in Scotland seemed to honour at least the spirit of interdependence. While Britain was promised an airborne missile delivery system that might prolong the life of its V-Bomber force, the United States would gain a vital forward base for its submarine deterrent force. Each party would thus depend in some respect on the other. But even at this stage there were doubts in London as to whether this informal bargain would be honoured. Skybolt was a highly complex, air-launched ballistic missile system the development of which offered no guarantee of success. Defence Minister Harold Watkinson was warned by his US counterpart Thomas Gates in December 1960 that the technical difficulties of the project had been underestimated and that room must be left for the incoming Kennedy administration to re-evaluate it at a later date. Watkinson for his part underlined the political dangers for the British government, were the missile to be cancelled by the United States without an adequate replacement being offered.10 In his diary

9  The Declaration of Common Purpose, 25 October 1957, quoted in John Baylis (ed.), Anglo-­ American Relations since 1939: The Enduring Alliance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 92–6. 10  Record of a conversation between Watkinson and Gates, 12 December 1960, MM54/60, FO371/173548, UK National Archives [hereafter TNA].

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entry for 1 December 1960, Macmillan was candid about his fears: ‘“Skybolt”— are the Americans going to let us down and [if so] what can we do?’11 Over the coming two years as Skybolt’s development ran into increasing difficulties, the British government adopted the posture of an ostrich, refusing to contemplate the possibility of its cancellation. In the meantime, the broader pursuit of defence interdependence of which Skybolt was the core component ran into increasing difficulties. In a conversation with Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara at the British Embassy in Washington on 29 April 1962, Macmillan stressed that it would be important for British industry to win a fair share of US defence orders in order to balance the large amount of money Britain would be spending in the United States on Skybolt.12 But the Defense Secretary offered no such commitment. In fact, a Pentagon briefing paper prepared ahead of his talks with Macmillan had argued that what the British were in fact trying to arrange was a “horse trade” in which the United States would open up the broader NATO market to British equipment by withdrawing US items from sales competitions. This would represent an “arbitrary division of the market” as far as the Department of Defense was concerned. “We prefer competition as a means of selection, while the UK would prefer a negotiated division of effort,” the paper argued.13 Clearly, there was a fundamental difference between the British and American views of what interdependence meant in practice. The extent to which trust in American intentions regarding interdependence had broken down by the summer of 1962 was illustrated by two controversies. The first concerned the pressure exerted on NATO member states to purchase the US-manufactured short-range surface-to-surface missile system, Sergeant, instead of the British-designed alternative, Blue Water. Macmillan bitterly described the terms on which the Americans offered to sell Sergeant as those “more commonly arranged for vacuum-cleaners and washing-machines.” The American sales pitch to NATO members was irresistible and in mid-August 1962, Britain was forced to cancel the Blue Water programme at considerable cost. Macmillan later recorded that “Sergeant was imposed not preferred.”14 Immediately after the Sergeant controversy came a further Anglo-American crisis over the US sale of Hawk surface-to-air missiles to Israel. The Israeli government had initially expressed an interest in both the British Bloodhound 11  Harold Macmillan Diary [hereafter HMD], 1 December 1960, dep.c.21/1, p.135, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 12   Record of a Conversation at the British Embassy, Washington, 29 April 1962, PREM11/3648, TNA. 13  Prime Minister’s Visit to Washington, 27–29 April 1962, Position Paper, Weapons Research and Development, 21 April 1962, Folder UK Subjects, Macmillan Briefing Book, 4/27/62–4/29/62, Box 175, National Security File, John F.  Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass. [hereafter JFKL]. 14  Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 1961–63 (London: Macmillan, 1973), 335–6.

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and the US Hawk missile systems. At first, both countries agreed not to sell such a system to Israel for fear of fuelling tensions in the Middle East. But in August, the Kennedy administration abruptly changed its mind. While the key reason for the change appears to have been one of securing domestic political advantage for the Democrats ahead of the mid-term elections, Macmillan immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was an underhand attempt to secure commercial advantage. The extraordinary bitterness of his letter to Kennedy on the matter shows the extent to which transatlantic trust had broken down over the operation of interdependence: I cannot believe that you were privy to this disgraceful piece of trickery. For myself I must say frankly that I can hardly find words to express my sense of disgust and despair. Nor do I see how you and I are to conduct the great affairs of the world on this basis … I have instructed our officials to let me have a list of all the understandings in different parts of the world which we have entered into together. It certainly makes it necessary to reconsider our whole position on this and allied matters.15

While Macmillan’s temper subsequently cooled somewhat when he was appraised of the real reasons for Kennedy’s decision and when he was warned of the potential lasting damage to his relationship with the president if he did not moderate his tone, his conviction about US double-dealing remained. At the beginning of October, he confided to Foreign Secretary Lord Home that “I am bound to say the whole episode is a very distasteful one. It is not the importance of the matter but the complete falsity with which … the American Administration have approached it which sticks in one’s throat. How can we have any confidence again in anything they say to us?”16 In Washington, a sense of incredulity persisted at the vehemence of Macmillan’s reaction. Secretary of State Dean Rusk commented presciently that “when a married couple begin to talk about divorce, it is already too late.” If Rusk likened the crisis to a domestic dispute which had passed the point of no return, the president’s special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, preferred the language of the market: “nothing is harder for a merchant’s feelings than to have to market a second-best product against alert competition,” he told Kennedy.17 Either way, it was clear that the Hawk saga had considerably exacerbated Anglo-American tensions over defence interdependence. Ahead of the visit to the United States planned by his new Minister of Defence, Peter Thorneycroft, Macmillan delivered a candid warning about what he saw as the need for Britain to play tough:

 Telegram, Macmillan to Kennedy, 18 August 1962, T.406/62, PREM11/4933, TNA.  Telegram, Macmillan to Home, 1 October 1962, T.479/62, PREM11/4933, TNA. 17  Memorandum, Bundy to the President, 19 August 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Vol.XVIII [hereafter FRUS], 63–4. 15 16

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When I launched “interdependence” with President Eisenhower, I think he personally was sincere. But lower down the scale his wishes were ignored. So it is with President Kennedy. The disgraceful story of Sergeant and still more discreditable story of Hawks for Israel prove this. Your predecessor stood up to Macnamara [sic] well. But we still had hopes the Americans would play fair. I fear that this is beyond their capacity. I think you should make clear to them that we are not “soft” … Americans respect strength and rather admire a “tough” attitude. If only we can “get into Europe” we shall, of course, have a much stronger position.18

The stage was thus set for the drama of Skybolt’s cancellation. The suspicions engendered by the US approach to defence interdependence were compounded by the belief in London that the so-called Europeanists in the State Department were plotting to seize any opportunity to drive Britain out of the independent nuclear club. Macmillan’s suspicions ran deep of officials like Under-Secretary of State George Ball, of whom he had earlier cynically noted that “Mr Ball is of course a danger to us, but we must keep him in play.”19 But whatever Macmillan’s suspicions, when McNamara broke the bad news about Skybolt’s likely cancellation to Ambassador David Ormsby Gore on 8 November 1962, his decision was driven overwhelmingly by considerations of cost, efficiency and effectiveness. McNamara’s recollection of the problems of the Skybolt system four decades later was blunt and to the point: “it was a heap of junk,” he commented.20 In keeping with this view of the weapons system, McNamara was anxious to see the project killed off on both sides of the Atlantic. As George Ball described matters, McNamara had a “moral horror of inefficiency and waste. Skybolt offended him morally.” In keeping with this approach, according to Ball, McNamara would have been quite happy to see the British offered the Polaris delivery system as a replacement for Skybolt without any political strings attached since it was clearly the most efficient substitute.21 However, when Kennedy arrived at Nassau in the Bahamas for a summit meeting with Macmillan on 18 December 1962, his initial offer was essentially political in character. He put on record an offer to share the development costs of the Skybolt system equally with the United Kingdom even though the United States no longer wanted to purchase the missile. The offer was intended to demonstrate US good faith, but was perceived as a transparent political ploy by Macmillan, who by this stage had determined to pursue the Polaris system instead. Although it has been claimed that the ensuing summit represented little more than a choreographed confrontation, in which both sides knew that a mutually  Memorandum, Macmillan to Thorneycroft, 4 September 1962, PREM11/3779, TNA.   Memorandum, Macmillan to De Zulueta, 14 May 1961, Fol.245, dep.c.353, Harold Macmillan papers, Bodleian Library. 20  Robert McNamara, private comment to this author, London, May 2003. 21  Memcon with Under-Secretary of State George Ball, 24 May 1963, Folder Memcons U.S., Box 20A, Richard E. Neustadt Papers, JFKL. 18 19

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agreeable deal for the supply of Polaris to the United Kingdom would be reached in the end, that is not how matters appeared to Macmillan at the time.22 Faced with US proposals regarding the terms on which Polaris might be supplied, which he regarded as wholly unacceptable, Macmillan resorted to the nuclear threat of pulling down the whole structure of Anglo-American cooperation worldwide. “This was too important a matter for ambivalence and it was no good trying to paper over a disagreement that was serious,” he declared. “Much as he regretted it if agreement was impossible, the British government would have to make a reappraisal of their defence policies throughout the world.”23 That Macmillan’s words had a large impact on their American audience is confirmed by the later testimony of Assistant Secretary William Tyler, who recalled: The “chintzy” atmosphere in the room where the conference took place; the smell of roses drifting in through the window; [an] intimate British country atmosphere. And Macmillan’s dramatic statement in the midst of all of this—a drama out of scale—like being in a girl’s bedroom with something going on that shouldn’t be happening there.24

Tyler’s recollection was pregnant with symbolism. The ambience of a cosy country home had been conjured by the senses of sight and smell only for Macmillan’s dramatic statement to puncture the atmosphere, like an accusation of transgression. Whatever the drama of the moment, the prime minister’s personal appeal had the desired effect. He had managed to cast the decision both as an existential one for the Anglo-American alliance and for his own personal political survival as prime minister. Four decades later, Defense Secretary McNamara still retained one clear impression of what he had learnt at the conference. When asked about Nassau, he commented, “ah yes: that was where Harold Macmillan gave us our lesson in Cabinet government.”25 McNamara, who had been through a steep learning curve during the first two years of the Kennedy administration, coming to terms with political challenges that were novel to him such as dealing with Congress, had learned the essentials of the British system of Cabinet government. If Macmillan did not come home from Nassau with an acceptable deal on Polaris, his Cabinet colleagues would knife him. As Macmillan had earlier warned Kennedy: “I’m like a ship

22  For this view see Marc Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 362. 23  Record of a meeting held at Bali-Hai, the Bahamas, 12 noon, Thursday 20 December 1962, PREM11/4147, TNA. 24  Memcon with William Tyler, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, 1 & 14 June 1963, Folder Memcons U.S., Box 20A, Richard E. Neustadt Papers, JFKL. 25  Robert McNamara, private comment to this author, London, May 2003.

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that looks buoyant but is apt to sink. Do you want to live with the consequences of sinking me and then with what comes after?”26 To the extent that Kennedy now compromised on the escape clause governing the circumstances in which the British might use Polaris for national selfdefence in a time of emergency, he overrode the warnings of key State Department officials such as George Ball about the dangers for European cooperation of a bilateral deal to prolong the life of the British deterrent. Moreover, he did so at least in part to secure Macmillan’s political survival. For all the frustrations of Macmillan’s pursuit of defence interdependence outlined here, the outcome of the Nassau conference did at least serve as a tangible illustration of the strength of the personal relationship between the prime minister and the president. The personal relationship between Macmillan and Kennedy also played a role in furthering Anglo-American cooperation in the other key field of nuclear relations during the early 1960s: the attempt to halt atmospheric nuclear testing. While Macmillan was determined in his pursuit of at least a symbolically independent British nuclear deterrent, he was almost equally passionate about the need for a nuclear test ban. Of course, there was an element of political expediency at work here. Macmillan did not begin his pursuit of an atmospheric testing ban until after Britain had completed her own programme of nuclear tests in the middle of 1958, and also once it was clear there would be an alternative available in the shape of access to US underground testing facilities. Nevertheless, it would seem unduly cynical to deny that there was at least some measure of personal conviction at work in his consistent advocacy of a test ban during the Kennedy presidency. Macmillan’s personal abhorrence of war, born of his experiences in the trenches in the First World War, married to his conviction about the need for détente in the Cold War, and the particular dangers of escalation in the nuclear era, all conditioned his pursuit of a test ban between 1961 and 1963. As one of the two key Western leaders who would be charged with decision-making in any nuclear confrontation, Macmillan felt a particular burden of personal responsibility over the issue. In terms of personal conviction, there seems to have been a genuine meeting of minds here between Macmillan and Kennedy. It is in this field where we can see the particular applicability of Kennedy’s private observation that he felt at home with Macmillan because he could share his loneliness with him. The burden of responsibility, which Kennedy felt, can be illustrated by the account of his Science Advisor Jerome Wiesner, who recollected a discussion in the Oval Office with the president about atmospheric testing one rainy day in Washington. When Kennedy asked what happened to the radioactive fallout produced by the tests, Wiesner replied that it was washed out of the clouds and brought back down to earth by the rain. Kennedy asked, “you mean it’s in the

26  Memcons with William Tyler, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, 1 & 14 June 1963, Folder Memcons U.S., Box 20A, Richard E. Neustadt Papers, JFKL.

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rain out there?” “Yes,” replied Wiesner, after which the president sat in silence staring solemnly out of the window for some considerable time.27 If the president and prime minister’s personal convictions were the same, the political contexts in which they operated were not. Kennedy was under significant bureaucratic and domestic political pressure to resume atmospheric testing when he came to office, with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) stressing the risks to free world supremacy in the field of nuclear weapons if he did not. He had to be careful not to present opportunities for his political opponents to portray him as “soft” on the issue.28 Macmillan by contrast worked against the domestic political backdrop of a small, island nation that was particularly vulnerable to nuclear attack, and where the opposition was urging nuclear disarmament. The Soviet resumption of atmospheric testing at the end of August 1961 put Kennedy under considerable political pressure to respond in kind. In trying to persuade the president to delay, Macmillan had to tread an awkward line. On the one hand, he needed access to US underground testing facilities in Nevada to test a new warhead for the planned Skybolt missile system. On the other hand, he was reluctant to agree to the president’s request for access to British testing facilities on Christmas Island in the South Pacific for a possible resumption of US atmospheric testing. In the end, Macmillan had little choice but to accept the inherent bargain. But for the champion of interdependence this was a case of being hoist on his own petard. On 25 April 1962, the AEC announced that the United States had carried out a nuclear test detonation in the vicinity of Christmas Island. Macmillan noted in his diary that “it is very sad.”29 Nevertheless, on a visit to Washington immediately after the announcement, Macmillan did show some understanding of the pressures on the president: On future policy—nuclear tests, disarmament, détente with Russia etc, the president is in agreement with us. But he is very secretive & very suspicious of leaks, in the State Dept or Pentagon, which are intended to frustrate his policy. He is all the time conscious of this, as well as of his difficulties with Congress. He looks to us for help—and this means not going too far ahead of him.30

It was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 that helped to open the way to progress on the issue of the banning of atmospheric nuclear testing during 1963. The proximity of nuclear war pointed to the need to find ways of managing superpower relations and reducing tensions where possible. Encouraged by Ambassador Ormsby Gore, Macmillan took the initiative. In a letter to the 27  Wiesner, quoted in Glen T.  Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 32. 28  Kendrick Oliver, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1961–63 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 19–20. 29  HMD, 27 April 1962, dep.d.45, 115. 30  HMD, 6 May 1962, dep.d.45, 120.

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president sent on 16 March 1963, he appealed to their common sense of duty and responsibility, floating among other ideas the possibility of sending personal emissaries to Khrushchev as a means of restarting talks.31 While Kennedy remained cautious and mindful of the domestic political pitfalls of any fresh initiative he accepted Macmillan’s idea of a joint letter to Khrushchev. Moreover, it was Macmillan’s draft of this letter which formed the basis of final text rather than the much more cautious draft produced by the State Department.32 While Khrushchev’s reply to the letter was negative in tone, crucially he did express his willingness to receive in Moscow the high-­level British and American representatives Macmillan and Kennedy had proposed. Although the British role at the talks convened in Moscow in July 1963 was limited, the prime minister’s role in taking the initiative in March to restart the talks was important. Directly after the final Limited Test Ban Treaty was initialled on 25 July 1963, Kennedy wrote to Macmillan in glowing terms: “what no one can doubt is the importance in all of this of your own personal pursuit of a solution. You have never given up for a minute, and more than once your initiative is what has got things started again.”33 The signature of the Limited Test Ban Treaty represented one of the few tangible and lasting dividends of Macmillan’s pursuit of AngloAmerican interdependence. If the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 had provided a spur to the relaxation, or at least the management, of superpower tensions, the crisis itself had also provided an interesting laboratory as to the functioning of the AngloAmerican, and, by extension, the prime ministerial–presidential relationship at a moment of acute danger. Indeed, crises have often provided useful barometers of the state of Anglo-American relations in any particular period and of the strength of the submerged structures of cooperation that buttress the relationship between the two countries. So it was with the Cuban crisis. The backdrop to the crisis in terms of Anglo-American relations over Cuba was not promising. The US campaign against the Castro regime led the Kennedy administration to put Britain under pressure to observe a trade embargo on Cuba. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk visited London in June 1962, there was what might be diplomatically termed a forthright exchange of views on the matter. While Macmillan observed that the whole idea of refusing to trade with communist countries was “ridiculous in itself” since these countries would soon learn how to make the embargoed items themselves, Rusk’s reply was no less direct: “though the United Kingdom lived by trade its people needed security as well and must defend themselves against those who would like to cut their

 Telegram, Macmillan to Kennedy, 16 March 1963, T.130.63, PREM11/4555, TNA.  Telegram, Macmillan to Kennedy, 3 April 1963, T.162/63, PREM11/4556, TNA; Bundy to De Zulueta, 10 April 1963, Folder UK Subjects, Macmillan Correspondence, 2/1/63–4/15/63, Box 173A, NSF, JFKL; State Department to Moscow, 15 April 1963, FRUS, 1961–63, Vol. VII, 676–8. 33  Letter, Kennedy to Macmillan, 26 July 1963, PREM11/4560, TNA. 31 32

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throats.”34 The gap between London and Washington over the question of Cuban trade remained. When Foreign Secretary Lord Home visited the United States at the beginning of October, he found Kennedy personally unsympathetic on the Cuban issue. “The president said he simply couldn’t understand why we could not help America by joining in an embargo on trade,” Home reported to Macmillan.35 When the missile crisis broke, then, it might have been understandable if the president had chosen to bypass as far as possible the Anglo-American relationship and the prime minister in his handling of it. While it is true that Kennedy kept the discovery of the Soviet missile emplacements on Cuba as a closely guarded secret between 16 and 20 October, at lunchtime on 21 October, Ambassador Ormsby Gore was the first foreign official to be taken into his confidence. Thereafter, Ormsby Gore played a significant role during the crisis as a close confidant of the president and of his brother, the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. Lacking Ormsby Gore’s immediate proximity, Macmillan’s role was confined to a series of telephone calls conducted via the newly installed scrambler telephone line between London and Washington, and to exchanges via the secure teleprinter line. The extent of Macmillan’s influence during the crisis has been much debated in the historiography.36 As grist to the mill of the sceptics it would have to be admitted that nothing Macmillan said or suggested in any of these exchanges caused any significant shift in the president’s handling of the crisis. So, Macmillan’s suggestion in a phone conversation on the evening of 26 October that the president might want to consider offering to remove the United States’s Thor missiles stationed in Britain as part of a possible trade for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba was casually dismissed by Kennedy with the words: “sure, Prime Minister, let me send that over to the Department. I think we don’t want to have too many dismantlings. But it is possible that that proposal might help.”37 Nothing further came of Macmillan’s suggestion. On the other hand, it is also important to calibrate our judgement of Macmillan’s contribution during the crisis on a scale of what was possible in the circumstances. It would surely have been highly unlikely that Kennedy would have changed course in a significant way on the advice of any foreign leader. Recognising the limits of what was possible, Macmillan did not seek to exercise 34   Record of a Conversation after Dinner at 1 Carlton Gardens, 24 June 1962, PREM11/3689, TNA. 35  Telegram, Home to Macmillan, 1 October 1962, PREM11/3689, TNA. 36  For sceptical views see, L.  V. Scott, Macmillan, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Gary D. Rawnsley, “How Special is Special? The Anglo-American Alliance during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Contemporary Record, 9, no. 3 (June 1995). For a sympathetic view see, Peter Boyle, “The British Government’s View of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Contemporary Record, 10, no. 3 (June 1996). For a more recent assessment which strikes a middle position, see Christopher Hull, British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba, 1898–1964 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 37  Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1997), 482.

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influence of this nature. Instead, he concentrated his efforts, once it was clear that Kennedy had decided on a quarantine of Cuba, on reinforcing the president’s instinct to seek a negotiated way out of the crisis. Beyond this, his other key contribution was less tangible, but no less important. He repeatedly expressed his sympathy for the position in which Kennedy found himself and his personal sense of empathy. This was a crisis in which consolation on the part of the one man with whom Kennedy could truly share his loneliness was as important as consultation. So, their first phone conversation on the evening of 22 October concluded with Macmillan telling Kennedy, “you must have had a very hard time. I feel very sorry for you and all the troubles. I’ve been through them. I only want to tell you how much we feel for you.”38 In the hard-nosed world of international politics it is easy to dismiss such sentiments. But Macmillan’s steadfast personal sympathy and support for the president may have been the most significant contribution he made during the crisis. The resolution of the crisis through Khrushchev’s climb down over the stationing of missiles in Cuba did not, however, resolve the continuing Anglo-­ American differences over Cuban trade that rumbled on. In that sense, the personal connection between the prime minister and president during the crisis itself might be seen as ephemeral. Nor did the missile crisis alter the broader course of Anglo-American interdependence, which, as the earlier discussion of the Skybolt saga has shown, had reached its own point of crisis by the winter of 1962–1963. If the nuclear relationship was one of the key components of this broader crisis of Anglo-American interdependence, Britain’s relations with Europe were another. As Macmillan fumed about the US approach to defence interdependence in the autumn of 1962, he had been driven to comment that “if only we can ‘get into Europe’ we shall, of course, have a much stronger position.”39 Looking back to the final months of the Eisenhower administration, the collapse of the Paris summit of May 1960, on which Macmillan had pinned his hopes for broader Cold War détente, was a decisive moment in his premiership. Indeed, Macmillan himself went further and termed it “the most tragic moment of my life.”40 The pursuit of détente had been the key plank for Macmillan’s Cold War strategy during 1959 and 1960 and he had earlier undertaken his own “voyage of discovery” to the Soviet Union in February 1959 to try to further his goal. But Eisenhower’s refusal to apologise to Khrushchev, despite entreaties from Macmillan, for the ill-fated U-2 flight of Gary Powers, which had been shot down over the Soviet Union shortly before the summit, seemed to end all hope of further progress. It was a moment of epiphany for Macmillan. According to his Private Secretary Philip de Zulueta, “this was the moment he suddenly realised that Britain counted for nothing: he

 Ibid., 287.  Memorandum, Macmillan to Thorneycroft, 4 September 1962, PREM11/3779, TNA. 40  Horne, Macmillan, 231. 38 39

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couldn’t move Ike to make a gesture towards Khrushchev.”41 For de Zulueta, the failure at the summit was crucial in the development of Macmillan’s concept of Europe. If Macmillan wanted Britain’s voice to be heeded between the two superpowers, then he needed an alternative international power base. Macmillan’s shift in approach towards British membership of the EEC during the final months of 1960 represented in effect a hedging strategy. It did not involve the abandonment of the pursuit of Anglo-American interdependence. Rather, it recognised the difficulties that were becoming apparent with that approach, and sought to bolster Britain’s international position by developing a parallel turn towards Europe. There was no necessary contradiction in this hedging strategy to begin with, since both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations expressed their support for British entry into the EEC. But further down the line it was apparent that the main obstacle to the success of Macmillan’s approach would be the resistance of the French President Charles de Gaulle to the prospect of British entry into the EEC. Alongside his attempts to prepare the ground for the application domestically during 1961 and 1962, Macmillan also devoted considerable effort to an ultimately doomed attempt to woo de Gaulle. The key junctures from this point of view were the Macmillan–de Gaulle summits at Champs in June 1962 and Rambouillet in December 1962. At Champs, Macmillan was candid about his doubts over the future of the Anglo-American alliance: “Britain had a great friendship with the United States but in 20 years’ time Britain would be relatively weaker even than she was now by comparison with the United States,” he told de Gaulle. Confiding further the background to his change of heart regarding the EEC, he stated that “he understood and sympathised with President de Gaulle’s irritation with some aspects of United States policy… Previously he himself had been worried at the bellicosity of the Americans, particularly in the latter days of the Eisenhower regime.”42 What was needed to remedy the situation, he argued, was “a solid European organisation” so that the Atlantic alliance would become a partnership of equals. But despite Macmillan’s entreaties, de Gaulle remained unconvinced about the British change of heart. “The idea of choosing between Europe and America is not yet ripe in your heart,” he observed.43 By the time the two men met again at Rambouillet in December 1962, de Gaulle’s domestic position had been strengthened considerably with the referendum victory on the question of direct elections to the presidency, and the electoral triumph of his supporters. Macmillan’s own position, by contrast, had been weakened by the unfolding Skybolt saga. So, de Gaulle was able to be much more direct about his opposition to British membership of the EEC. “It was not possible for the United Kingdom to enter tomorrow and …  Ibid., 231.  Record of a Conversation at the Chateau de Champs at 3.15 pm on Sunday 3 June 1962, PREM11/3775, TNA. 43  The French record, quoted in N. Piers Ludlow, Dealing With Britain: The Six and the First UK Application to the EEC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 121. 41 42

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arrangements within the Six might be too rigid for the United Kingdom,” he warned Macmillan. For his part, the prime minister described himself as “astonished and deeply wounded” by de Gaulle’s words.44 Macmillan left Rambouillet convinced that de Gaulle would do whatever he could to block Britain’s entry into the EEC. The denouement for the British application came in the wake of the Nassau summit. At a press conference on 14 January 1963, de Gaulle delivered his veto of the British application, arguing that the Nassau agreement had proven his point that Britain would always choose cooperation with the United States over cooperation with Europe. While he adopted a stiff upper lip in public, Macmillan was candid about the extent of the foreign policy disaster in private. In his diary, he wrote that “the great question remains ‘what is the alternative’ to the European Community? If we are honest, we must say that there is none.”45 His words have lost none of their poignancy more than half a century later. The collapse of the government’s European strategy, coming on top of the frustrations of Anglo-American interdependence, was further compounded by the challenges evident in the third of the three circles that Churchill had identified as defining Britain’s place in the world: the Empire-Commonwealth. Anglo-American differences thrown up by the process of decolonisation formed the third key component of the crisis of interdependence, which marked the winter of 1962–1963. During the brief breaks in their discussion of the future of the British nuclear deterrent at Nassau in December 1962, Kennedy and Macmillan devoted their attention to the continuing crisis in the Congo, the chaotic decolonisation of which by Belgium had sparked civil strife, and the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga. By this stage, the British and American positions were a long way apart over the crisis, with the Kennedy administration advocating forceful action by the United Nations to reintegrate the renegade province of Katanga, led by Moise Tshombe, into the Congolese state, while the Macmillan government advocated caution. Macmillan heaped scorn on the US enthusiasm for intervention, observing bitterly that “of course if the United States would take over the Congo that would be very satisfactory. They could make Tshombe a maharaja with an American Resident.”46 When the crisis had originally erupted in June 1960 under the Eisenhower administration, the bitter Anglo-American exchanges of December 1962 would have seemed highly unlikely. Initially, both governments were suspicious of the post-independence Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and did little to oppose the Katangan secession. Rather, they worked together to try to prevent the Congo becoming an avenue for the advance of Soviet influence into Africa. 44  Record of a Meeting at the Chateau de Rambouillet at 10 am on Sunday 16 December 1962, PREM11/4230, TNA; Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 354–55. 45  HMD, 4 February 1963, dep.d.48, pp. 67–8; Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 374. 46  Memorandum of a conversation between the Prime Minister and President Kennedy, 6 pm, 19 December 1962, PREM11/3630, TNA; Memcon, 6 pm, 19 December 1962, FRUS, 1961–63, Vol. XX, 762.

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But while the US concern was predominantly with the wider Cold War context, Britain also had to consider its local interests in the shape of the possible impact of the Congo crisis on the British colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia that, together with Nyasaland, made up the Central African Federation. Northern Rhodesia bordered on the Congolese province of Katanga, and the same commercial interests that favoured the Katangan secession also carried weight with the white settler leadership of the colony of Southern Rhodesia. This, together with the significant British investments in Katanga through the firm Tanganyika Concessions, gave Britain a direct stake in what happened on the ground in Katanga. The advent of the Kennedy administration wrought a change in the dynamics of Anglo-American relations over the Congo.47 The president himself was committed to winning the battle for hearts and minds in Africa and he chose key officials, such as the Assistant-Secretary of State for African Affairs Mennen “Soapy” Williams, who were ideologically committed to the cause of anti-­ colonialism. An early high-profile mission by Williams to Africa provoked an immediate response from Macmillan who warned Kennedy’s emissary, Averell Harriman, that “if American sniping at British policy went on, bitter feelings would be aroused in the United Kingdom which would do real damage to Anglo-American relations.”48 Despite these tensions there was no immediate falling out over the Congo. When the United Nations forces in the Congo launched their first attempt to reintegrate Katanga in September 1961, both Kennedy and Macmillan agreed that the operation was ill-timed and should be halted. A second UN operation in December 1961 caused greater difficulties, with Macmillan intervening personally with Kennedy to request US support in halting the action, which threatened to cause him significant difficulties with Conservative back-benchers who were sympathetic to the Katangan regime. Kennedy acquiesced, but was evidently not best pleased to be used by the prime minister in this fashion.49 Macmillan himself felt that the only way to deal with the “half-baked liberals” in the administration on colonial issues was to appeal over their heads to the president.50 During the course of 1962, however, Anglo-American differences over the crisis widened considerably. The Kennedy administration wanted to bolster the central Congolese government now led by Cyrille Adoula, who was a 47  For further discussion, see John Kent, America, the UN and Decolonisation: Cold War Conflict in the Congo (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 32–59; Thomas J.  Noer, “New Frontiers and Old Priorities in Africa” in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–63 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Alanna O’Malley, The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960–1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 38–72. 48  Record of a conversation at dinner at Admiralty House on Monday 27 February 1961, PREM11/4590, TNA. 49  Record of a telephone conversation between the Prime Minister and President Kennedy, 7.08 pm, 13 December 1961, PREM11/3193, TNA; Ormsby Gore to Macmillan, 14 December 1961, ibid.; Lord Harlech, Oral History interview, 1964, JFKL. 50  HMD, 20 December 1961, dep.d.44, 82–3.

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sympathetic client. This would help prevent the Soviet Union expanding its influence in the Congo or more broadly in Africa. The Macmillan government, by contrast, was opposed to the use of either force or sanctions to end the Katangan secession and deeply suspicious of US motives. Macmillan fumed in his diary about the world copper market, believing that the United States wanted to impose sanctions on Katangan production to enhance the position of its own producers. Matters came to a head in December, with the United States lending its support to a further UN operation designed to end the Katangan secession. This time, Macmillan’s intervention with Kennedy at Nassau made no difference. In response to prime minister’s barbs about US neo-colonialism, the president shrugged his shoulders and indicated that he felt the discussion had “gone about as far as it could.”51 The UN began its final operation against Katanga within a week of the end of the Nassau conference with US support. This time, Katangan resistance crumbled quickly and on 15 January Tshombe announced the end of the secession. The outcome was a significant blow to British prestige in Africa and marked a clear parting of the ways in Anglo-American relations. The denouement in Katanga thus formed another component of the crisis of Anglo-American interdependence that marked the winter of 1962–1963. The Congo crisis was not the only instance where the Kennedy administration ultimately put its support for sympathetic nationalists ahead of the maintenance of a common front with Britain. The Anglo-American breach over the Suez crisis in 1956 had crystallised the conflict in the Middle East between a US strategy primarily focused on the region’s role in the global Cold War and a British strategy designed principally to protect its local interests. Despite Macmillan’s efforts to repair relations with Eisenhower during 1957–1958, these underlying tensions remained and were inherited by Kennedy. The question of how to engage with Arab nationalist leaders, especially with the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, elicited different responses in London and Washington. Kennedy struck up a correspondence with Nasser early in his administration and pursued a strategy of trying to co-opt Arab nationalism. Macmillan, meanwhile, despite his acquiescence in attempts by the Foreign Office to foster détente with Nasser between 1959 and 1961, remained fundamentally suspicious of a man whom he likened to Hitler. This Anglo-American division was crystallised by the crisis that broke out in Yemen at the end of September 1962. Nasser became heavily engaged in the conflict, backing the republican regime that had overthrown the Imam. The royalist cause, by contrast, was supported by Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The Kennedy administration sought to broker a de-escalation of the conflict through a disengagement agreement between the various parties. A key component of the proposed deal was a British commitment to recognise the republican regime. But Macmillan dragged his feet, fearing that the Nasser-­ backed regime was a threat to the British position in Aden and the Protectorates  Memcon, 6 pm, 19 December 1962, FRUS, 1961–63, Vol. XX, 762.

51

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of South Arabia. In private, Macmillan was candid about the dangers the plan posed to British interests and prestige in the region. Recognition, he wrote, might “seem to have been forced on Her Majesty’s Government by the Americans and may discourage the rulers and sheikhs in the Protectorate, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and the Gulf who (like all Arabs) will be tempted to join the stronger side.”52 Macmillan prevaricated until the Yemeni regime’s expulsion of the British consul gave the government an excuse to withhold its cooperation with the plan. Macmillan had no doubt where the blame lay for the problems in the region. “For Nasser read Hitler and it’s all very familiar,” he scribbled on one document.53 Without British cooperation the US disengagement plan slowly unravelled. The state of Anglo-American relations over the region by the conclusion of the Kennedy-Macmillan period is perhaps best summed up by the comment of Kennedy’s National Security Council adviser, Bob Komer that the United States “should beat up [the] UK to stop shafting us.”54 Of all post-war British prime ministers, then, Harold Macmillan launched the most determined and systematic pursuit of Anglo-American interdependence. While others such as Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair certainly set great store by close relations with their presidential counterparts, Macmillan put his personal relations, first with Eisenhower and then with Kennedy, at the heart of his policy. The results of this approach, however, were mixed. To be sure, there were some tangible successes. The Kennedy–Macmillan relationship was significant in overcoming the bureaucratic obstacles which lay in the way both of the Polaris deal at the Nassau summit of December 1962 and the subsequent limited Test Ban Treaty of July 1963. But it would have to be concluded that his overall pursuit of Anglo-American interdependence ended in failure. The differing interpretations in London and Washington of what interdependence meant in practice resulted in a broader crisis in relations between the two countries during the winter of 1962–1963. Nor did Macmillan’s attempt to hedge against the unreliability of Anglo-American interdependence succeed. The de Gaulle veto of the British EEC application left Macmillan’s strategy in ruins. In his diary he was candid about the extent of the disaster. “All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins,” he wrote. “Our defence plans have been radically changed from air to sea. European unity is no more … We have lost everything except our courage and determination.”55 For all Macmillan’s nostalgia in later life about his personal relationship with Kennedy, Anglo-­ American interdependence offered no answer to the fundamental question about Britain’s post-imperial place in the world, a matter that remains fraught with debate nearly six decades later. 52  Memorandum, “United Kingdom recognition of the Yemen regime,” 12 December 1962, PREM11/4356, TNA. 53  Macmillan’s annotation on letter, Beeley to Home, 25 February 1963, PREM11/4173, TNA. 54   Memorandum, Komer to the President, 20 September 1963, FRUS, 1961–63: Vol. XVIII, 710–13. 55  Harold Macmillan, diary entry, 28 January 1963, in Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries: Vol. II, 539.

CHAPTER 11

Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson: Pragmatist v. Pragmatist Sylvia Ellis

Lyndon B.  Johnson meets with Harold Wilson [photograph], White House Photo Office, 1966

S. Ellis (*) University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_11

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In April 1986, several years after Lyndon Johnson’s death, Harold Wilson attended a symposium on the former president at Hofstra University in New York. Although by this stage elderly, Wilson made the effort to travel to this conference so that he could make his observations clear. During a discussion on “Johnson and the World,” he described the Texan president as “a giant figure” and said that it was his “privilege to know him well” when they “were both in charge of our respective nations affairs and afterwards when we were both … elder statesmen” and Wilson was “a regular guest at his home.” He also acknowledged it was “a matter of pride” to have known the former president.1 These words suggest that Wilson remembered Johnson with warmth and respect. And yet, in the history of the “special relationship,” the Wilson-­ Johnson years are not noted for the strength of the bonds between the US president and the British prime minister. The period 1964–1970 is instead characterized as a period of decline in Anglo-American relations as both countries adjusted to Britain’s declining world role: decolonization was in full swing, its military was overstretched, and its economy was weakening. By May 1967, even before the devaluation of the pound in November 1967 and the East of Suez decision in January 1968, the US Embassy in London judged the special relationship to be “little more than sentimental terminology.”2 In Johnson’s memoirs, The Vantage Point, Wilson and Britain are noticeable by their absence.3 Scholars such as Sylvia Ellis, Alan Dobson, John Young, Ritchie Ovendale, Robert Hathaway, and John Dumbrell have all noted a “cool” relationship between Wilson and LBJ and deterioration and near collapse in their relations by 1968. Dobson noted the president had “no strong feelings of friendship for the Prime Minister”; Young argues LBJ was “personally resentful” toward Wilson over Vietnam; and Dumbrell concluded there was “a complex combination of respect and irritation” between the two.4 And yet in recent years there has been a growing sense that despite the lack of a close personal friendship, the two leaders managed to work well enough together on most

1  Lord Wilson of Rievaux, International Forum: Lyndon B. Johnson and the World, “Lyndon Baines Johnson: A Texan in Washington,” The Fifth Presidential Conference, 11 April1986, Hofstra University, New York. 2  Cable from David Bruce to Dean Rusk, 8 May 1967, NSF, Country File, UK, Box 211, File: UK, Vol. XI, Memos 4/67-6/67, Doc. 92a. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas [hereafter LBJL]. 3  Lyndon Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971). 4  Sylvia Ellis, “Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson and the Vietnam War: A Not So Special Relationship?” in Jonathan Hollowell (ed.), Twentieth Century Anglo-American Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 200; Alan Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1995), 131; John W. Young, “Ambassador David Bruce and ‘LBJ’s War’: Vietnam viewed from London, 1963–1968,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, 22, no. 1, (2011): 86; John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 64.

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issues and were able to deal with the strains and differences over contentious ones.5 This chapter reassesses the personal and working relationship between the two leaders by focusing on their political inclinations and behaviors, noticeably their experience, wiliness, and pragmatic approach. Was the political acumen of the two leaders, and their ability to compromise, a key strength or a weakness when it came to policy-making and the public perception of relations between London and Washington? To answer this question, an examination of the differences and similarities in the leaders’ personal styles and political beliefs will allow us to understand how they handled matters of mutual interest as well as areas of discord. Several issues occupied the agenda in the mid to late sixties including the crises in Southern Rhodesia and Nigeria, the dispute between India and Pakistan over the Rann of Kutch territory in 1965, de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw French forces from NATO, Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community (EEC), Indonesia, nuclear sharing, and United Nations affairs.6 But despite Harold Wilson’s hopes for closer relations with the United States, the special relationship suffered significant blows during the 1960s, not least due to Britain’s financial difficulties that led to a ­diminution of its world role but also due to serious disagreements over the war in Vietnam when Wilson refused to send troops to aid the American effort. The three issues that dominated—the weakness of the pound sterling, the war in Vietnam, and Britain’s world role—are the areas that illustrate most tellingly how the president and prime minister worked together. Did Wilson’s and Johnson’s skills in personal diplomacy and problem-solving help minimize dissent and thus prevent a lasting breach in relations between the United States(US) and United Kingdom (UK)?

Close But Not Special: Anglo-American Relations in the 1960s In December 1962, former secretary of state and one of the architects of the Cold War, Dean Acheson, acknowledged Britain’s declining importance, encapsulated in the statement that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” This assessment shook the Anglo-American establishment, especially Whitehall.7 Even though Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had hoped Britain could play the role of Greece to the US’ Roman Empire— providing wise counsel to the new superpower—it was still not exactly clear 5  See for example, Carl P.  Watts, “The United States, Britain, and the problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1954–1965,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 3 (2006): 7; Saki Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between European and the World? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 5–6. 6  Jonathan Colman, “Britain and the Indo-Chinese conflict: The Rann of Kutch and Kashmir, 1965,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 3 (2009), 465–82. 7  Douglas Brinkley, “Dean Acheson and the ‘Special Relationship’: the West Point Speech of December 1962,” Historical Journal 33, no. 3 (September 1990): 599–608.

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how that relationship would work. But, at the same time, Anglo-American relations had received a boost from the friendship between President John F.  Kennedy and Macmillan. “Jack and Mac” forged a warm and productive relationship in private and displayed a show of unity and congeniality in public. The Polaris deal at Nassau in December 1962 that ended the Skybolt crisis— favourable financially to the British and tied to the development of a Multilateral Force (MLF)—appeared to indicate that Kennedy’s fondness for the patrician British leader, as well as his desire to avoid a rupture in the special relationship at a time when the British were preparing their bid to enter the European Economic Community (EEC), had led him to compromise his reservations about MLF. Their successors—Lyndon Johnson and Conservative Prime Minister (1963–64) Sir Alec Douglas-Home—did not replicate this level of closeness.8 Indeed, their relationship lasted for less than a year (November 1963 to October 1964) and was characterized by transition (after Kennedy’s assassination and Macmillan’s resignation) and a subtle but noticeable shift in approach to the Anglo-American alliance, not least due to the fact that Johnson was not a natural Anglophile, unlike his predecessor. In preparation for Douglas-­ Home’s visit to Washington in February 1964, a presidential briefing paper spoke of a “close UK-US association” rather than a special relationship and the pressing issues at that time were a dispute over British sales of buses to Cuba and decolonization.9 By the time Wilson had been elected Prime Minister in October 1964, other issues had become more salient—not least Britain’s balance of payments problem and the increasing likelihood of US military intervention in Vietnam in the aftermath of the Tonkin Gulf incident a few months earlier—and ones that had the potential to fracture the Anglo-American alliance, so his relationship with LBJ would prove of vital import.

Career Politicians The relationship between Wilson and Johnson is also worthy of examination because as David Bruce, US Ambassador to Great Britain (1961–69) noted, “seldom if ever have two heads of state been such long-time master politicians in the domestic sense as those two.”10 Certainly both were extremely experienced in their own countries; indeed they were strategic, career politicians. Both had long nursed ambitions of high office (and with Wilson possibly from childhood onwards when one recalls the photograph of him as a young schoolboy outside 10 Downing Street) but both had risen to leadership in the aftermath of untimely deaths: Wilson becoming Labour leader after the sudden 8  Andrew Holt, The Foreign Policy of the Douglas-Home government: Britain, the United States and the End of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 9  C. J. Bartlett, ‘The Special Relationship’: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (Harlow: Longman, 1992), 107–8. 10  David Bruce oral history interview conducted by Thomas H.  Baker, 9 December 1971, 11, LBJL.

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death of Hugh Gaitskell in January 1963 after a bout of influenza and Johnson become president after the assassination of JFK in November 1963. With lengthy careers in public office behind them and with well-tuned political skills, both were well placed to cope with taking over in such circumstances. Johnson and Wilson came from relatively humble backgrounds. LBJ was a farmer’s son from Stonewall in rural Texas; Wilson was the son of an industrial chemist from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. Both had fathers who were active in politics and both had mothers who had been schoolteachers before marriage. Both were raised in Christian households that emphasized social justice, welfare and education, as well as practical good deeds. Lyndon Johnson attended his mother’s Baptist congregation as a child and later became a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Randall Woods argues that LBJ’s social gospel roots helped him to see social problems as moral questions.11 Wilson a non-conformist whose Baptist roots helped shape his political mindset and he too was inspired by the “social gospel,” even if for him it was based on British cultural influences such as being a Scout leader. Although coming from very different local environments and with real differences in terms of levels of higher education and political styles, they had additional points of similarity. Both “wore their roots like a badge” and refused to lose their childhood accents. Both were, in their respective political establishments, from ordinary schools (Wilson’s lower-middle-class family did not stop Wilson later emphasizing that he was a northern grammar school lad) and considered provincial. Both were highly intelligent and both enjoyed fact-­ finding as a basis for their decisiveness. But what they had most in common was their devotion to public service and political ambition. After graduating from Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and a brief spell as a teacher of poor Mexican-Americans in a small school in Cotulla, LBJ first entered the political arena in the early 1930s, serving first as a congressional secretary to Texas Representative Richard Kleberg before quickly becoming a New Deal devotee who shone as Texas state director of the National Youth Administration. In 1937 he was elected as a Democratic congressman for central Texas, became a Senator in 1948, majority whip in 1951, minority leader in 1953, majority leader in 1955, ran for the presidency in 1960 and then served as vice president to the man who defeated him at the Democratic Convention, John F. Kennedy, until he was catapulted into the highest office after the murder of the president in Johnson’s home state (ultimately for a five-year term). In sum, prior to being elected president in his own right in November 1964 with a historic mandate, Johnson had 33  years of experience in Washington politics and significant experience of foreign affairs as Senate majority leader and as vice president when he visited 33 countries.12 11  Randall B. Woods, “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 1 (January 2007): 1–18. 12  Mitchell Lerner, “‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: the Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (April 2010): 357–393, 357.

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Wilson took a slightly more circuitous route to high office. After graduating with a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University, he worked as a research assistant to Sir William Beveridge (architect of the Welfare State). He then spent a few years as a minor Oxford don (1937–40) until the Second World War changed his direction and he worked as a civil servant in the Mines Department. After a brief return to Oxford, in 1945 Wilson became a Labour MP for Ormskirk (later serving Huyton) and in 1947, at the age of 31, Prime Minister Clement Attlee made him President of the Board of Trade and, in doing so, the youngest member of the cabinet in the twentieth century. He went on to become shadow chancellor and shadow foreign secretary, leader of the opposition, and prime minister in October 1964 with a narrow majority of just four. He is remembered for having won four out of five general elections, making him one of the most successful Labour prime ministers in electoral terms. Arguably then, in their own countries, Wilson and Johnson were the leading political authorities of their generation. Political colleagues readily acknowledged their strengths. Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP and cabinet minister, described Wilson as a “masterly tactician.” Michael Foot described Wilson as a “dedicated person, dedicated to politics, to the Labour Party, to his own interpretation of Socialism.”13 Johnson’s colleagues and contemporaries invariably described him similarly as a “professional politician.” Special Assistant to President Johnson Joseph Califano, lauded “his determination to succeed” and argued his greatest quality was his courage.14 Jack Valenti, another of LBJ’s special assistants, described him as “the quintessential political being.”15 But beyond their experience and skills in politics, both were tagged as wily political pragmatists. If pragmatism in politics means the ability to seek common ground and the belief that ideas should be judged on the basis of their practical results rather than on the purity of their principles, then Johnson and Wilson were very similar. Attorney General, Nick Katzenbach, described Johnson as “the consummate political leader … the wheeler-dealer” and as “the great compromiser … It was hard to know what, if anything, he stood for, despite rhetoric reminiscent of the New Deal.”16 More recently, Dumbrell summed up that, after all the personality traits and complexities of character that Johnson is known for, what he “had in abundance was pragmatism.”17 This seeming “lack of sincerity” and “genius for manipulation and domination

 Michael Foot, Harold Wilson: A Pictorial Biography, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1964), 11.  Joseph A.  Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000), 10, 356. 15  Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), xi. 16  Nicholas deB.  Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fund: Working with RFK and LBJ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 13. 17  John Dumbrell, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 11. 13 14

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for the sake of ambition” has been emphasized by historian Robert Caro.18 For Caro, early in his political career, Johnson “displayed a pragmatism and ruthlessness striking even to Washington insiders who had thought themselves calloused to the pragmatism of politics.”19 But many of those who knew him well spoke of him inheriting his father’s “good principles.”20 And more recent historical assessments, from scholars such as Robert Dallek and Randall B. Woods, have judged his pragmatism and political abilities in a more positive way, even Caro believes Johnson “was both a pragmatist and an idealist” and his latest instalment is more sympathetic.21 Woods concluded: “Elected repeatedly from a state dominated by conservatives, LBJ had dreamed liberal dreams.”22 Johnson’s style—the force of personality that aided his political pragmatism— was legendary. The so-called Johnson treatment that enabled his effectiveness as a legislator and his success at the polls included sheer determination, persuasiveness and manipulation when necessary. Dallek argued that to Johnson, “unpredictability was a political weapon” and “Johnson was an actor, a role player who in turn could be courtly and crude, gentle and overbearing, magnanimous and vindictive. There was no trusting anything he said or did on a given day … posturing was a device for extracting information and influencing political friends and foes.”23 For Johnson, everything was a means to an end and with Wilson these traits were on display in full glory. Similar debates surround Harold Wilson’s equally fascinating, chameleon-­ esque character. Wilson’s political drive was rooted in his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, not least the depression of the 1930s. He once said that “unemployment … made me politically conscious.” His scholarly tradition of revelling in facts-based research (often statistical) remained part of his working method and often made him appear cold and aloof; and yet his pipe-­ smoking, mac-wearing, man of the people image, alongside his humour (sharp and intelligent and less earthy than Johnson’s), worked well with voters and on television. Indeed, he was labeled both an “ice-cold Puritan” and the “great commoner.”24 Writing in the mid-1960s, Ernest Kay observed that “Harold Wilson is essentially a pragmatist—and proud of being so … I do not think anyone could 18  Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1990), xvi and xxvi. 19  Caro, Master of the Senate, xv and xvi. 20  Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson’s Boy: A Close-Up of the President from Texas (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 21  Diane Coutu, “Lesson in Power: Lyndon Johnson Revealed,” Harvard Business Review, April 2006 (https://hbr.org/2006/04/lessons-in-power-lyndon-johnson-revealed); Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4: the Passage of Power (London: Bodley Head, 2012). 22  Randall B.  Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4. 23  Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 24  Anthony Howard & Richard West, The Making of the Prime Minister (London: Chaucer Press, 1965), 33, 92.

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conceive a better two-word description of Harold Wilson than Pragmatic Premier.”25 Peter Jenkins went further and described Mr. Wilson as “the great pragmatist of the day.”26 Denis Healey wrote in his memoirs that Wilson had “neither political principle” nor a “sense of direction.” Indeed, he criticized him for his “short-term opportunism, allied with a capacity for self-delusion which made Walter Mitty appear unimaginative.”27 Biographer, Philip Zeigler described him as “the compromiser, the trimmer, the politician who puts first the business of keeping government on the road and views principles with the beady eye of a pragmatist who decides what must be done and only then considers whether it can be modified to serve some long-term end.”28 One of the key features associated with political pragmatists—and what makes them suspect to many—is the question mark over where they stand ideologically. Certainly Johnson was not wedded to any particular ideology. During his time in the Senate, as he worked towards the presidency, he addressed this: I am a free man, an American, a US Senator, and a Democrat, in that order. I am also a liberal, a conservative, a Texan, a taxpayer, a rancher, a businessman, a consumer, a parent, a voter—and I am all these things in no fixed order. I bridle at the very casualness with which we have come to ask each other, “What is your political philosophy?” I resent the question most often not because I suspect it of guile and cunning, but for its innocence, the innocence that confuses dogma with philosophy and presumes that the answer can be given in a word or two. Our political philosophies, I have found, are the sum of our life’s experience … It is part of my philosophy to regard individuality of political philosophy as a cornerstone of American freedom and, more specifically, as a right expressly implied in our nation’s basic law and indispensable to the proper functioning of our system.29

His lack of willingness to be labelled did not, however, mean that he was without guiding values or a grand ambition to change America. He had, as Schulman notes, a “political vision that [was] his faith in government action, his univeralism, and his belief in national unity.”30 Lyndon Johnson’s record on aiding the impoverished and the oppressed was built up during his years as a New Deal congressman and as Senator for Texas. Coming from the Texas Hill Country, he had witnessed hardship at first hand and was determined to use political power to aid those he saw as needing a “hand up,” thus he worked tirelessly on rural electrification projects and supported the New Deal and Fair Deal programs aimed at improving the education, health and welfare of the poor, needy and racial minorities. These priorities continued when he became president  Kay, Pragmatic Premier, front cover.  Peter Jenkins, The Guardian, 30 March 1966. 27  Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Penguin, 1990), 331. 28  Philip Zeigler, Wilson: The Authorised Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), 516. 29  Johnson wrote this in an article in B. Mooney, The Johnson Story (1 June 1958), ix–x. 30  Bruce J.  Schulman, Lyndon Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), 164. 25 26

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with his ambitious anti-poverty and Great Society programs as well as the passage of three civil rights acts. Not surprisingly, Califano saw him as having “one goal: to be the greatest president doing the greatest good in the history of the nation.”31 Similarly, although a loyal member of the Labour Party who believed in the central control of the economy, Wilson was noticeably moderate in his views; always emphasizing equality of opportunity rather than public ownership, Wilson’s socialism was one of “social decency” summed up in his desire to “build a new Britain of fair shares and equal opportunity.”32 He was a pragmatic socialist and he admitted that.33 Before beginning work on his biography, Philip Ziegler told Harold that he was far from being a committed socialist, Wilson replied “with some satisfaction, ‘That’s lucky. Nor am I!’”34 Still, his government’s agenda remained focused on achieving social democracy and international peace, through low unemployment and inflation, efforts to enter the EEC and bolster the Commonwealth, as well as social and educational reforms, such as the formation of the Open University, the liberalization of the abortion and divorce laws, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and the abolition of capital punishment. Recent assessments of Wilson have stressed Wilson’s successful handling of the difficulties in dealing with deep financial and economic problems at the same time as dealing with the readjustment imposed by Britain’s declining world role.35 So, these two political giants had no ideological bonds in common but in a sense their lack of ideology and political pragmatism was something they both understood. Pragmatism for both men meant they were results-driven, problem-­solvers. The Johnson treatment was aimed at the end result and Wilson’s “eager beaver” technocratic approach similarly concerned with practical outcomes.

High Hopes for the Relationship Given the fact that both leaders were committed to social justice and both were masters of their political domains, it is not surprising that even when Wilson was still in opposition many had high hopes for the benefits that might accrue from their working relationship. Labour MP and future cabinet member Tony Benn remarked in his diaries after Wilson had returned from an unofficial visit to Washington to meet Johnson in March 1964: “He has just come back from America where has got on excellently with President Johnson. I think they are

 Joseph Califano, A Very Human President (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), x, xi.  Geoffrey Goodman, “Harold Wilson Obituary,” The Guardian, 24 May 1995; “Obituary: Lord Wilson of Rievaulx,” The Independent, 25 May 1995. 33  Kay, Pragmatic Premier, 229. 34  Zeigler, Wilson, xi. 35  Helen Parr, Britain’s Policy Towards the European Community: Harold Wilson and Britain’s world role, 1964–67 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 31 32

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both highly political animals and understand each other well.”36 In April 1964, Tommy Balogh, economic adviser to the cabinet, told Benn that after he had visited Washington he thought the White House was “passionately committed to a Labour victory in Britain” because “Johnson is old-style, folksy, warm-­ hearted New Dealer with much more in common with Wilson than Kennedy had or than he (Johnson) has with Home.”37 But Johnson’s aides felt it had not gone so well. The president told colleagues that he “liked him good” although adding he was not sure he wanted “him more than [Alex Douglas] Home.”38 Richard Neustadt, Harvard professor and special consultant to the president, noted during a trip to London in July of 1964 that if elected Wilson would have “hopes for his own personal relationship which are quite different from the perceptions of reality held by many American officials” and hoped that “a number of things” could be done “to avoid shocking his sensibilities.”39 In the lead up to the October 1964 general election, Johnson was also briefed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the two leading contenders, Douglas Home and Harold Wilson. Rusk argued that the Labour leader was “not a man of strong political convictions himself” but had “succeeded in getting the warring factions of the Party to present a public image of unity in face of the common need to win the election.” The secretary of state went on to assert that “somehow, he does not inspire a feeling of trust in many people. This is his greatest political hardship” and joked that it had “led some to say that in the next election, the British are faced with a choice between ‘smart aleck and dumb Alec.’”40 McGeorge Bundy, special assistant for National Security Affairs, thought LBJ would find Wilson “interesting,” “seemingly sincere” but a “cold man.”41 The CIA also described him as a “cold fish,” “possibly untrustworthy,” but judged him to be a “pragmatist” who was “well aware of the realities of power” and that his commitment to Anglo-American relations was not “based solely on sentiment.”42 In the event, the Johnson White House was unperturbed by the election of Wilson’s Labour government, a reflection partly of the growing sense that Britain’s importance as an ally would decline as it adjusted to its diminishing world role. But in the UK the impression that the two leaders were naturally congenial continued after Wilson became prime minister in October 1964. Certainly Wilson did his best to portray his  Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness: Diaries, 1963–1967 (London: Arrow Books, 1988), 97.  Benn, Out of the Wilderness, 106. 38  Robert David Johnson and Kent B.  Germany (eds), The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B.  Johnson: Toward the Great Society, February 1, 19674–May 31, 1964, Vol. IV (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 867. 39  Memorandum on the British Labour Party and the MLP, prepared by Richard E. Neustadt, 6 July 1964, New Left Review 51 (1968), 21. 40  Memo, Dean Rusk to the President, 28 February, 1964, File: UK Meetings with Wilson, 3/2/64, CF, UK, NSF, LBJL. 41  Memo, McGeorge Bundy to the President, 1 March 1964, File: UK, Meeting with Wilson, 3/2/64, UK Country File, NSF, LBJL. 42  CIA Biographic Statement on Harold Wilson, NSF, Country File, UK, Box 213, File: UK. Wilson Visit Briefing Book, 12/64, Doc. 9m, LBJL. 36 37

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relationship with Johnson in a positive light, so much so that Labour’s chief whip, Ted Short, later argued that: “The President and the Prime Minister were both down-to-earth politicians with much in common. The tough Texan and the homespun Yorkshireman hit it off famously.”43 Barbara Castle, Minister of Overseas Development and Transport, was adamant Wilson thought he and LBJ were “buddies.”44 Indeed, in his memoirs he stresses the cordiality and intimacy of his relations with the president and highlighted that when they met they usual started with a discussion about domestic politics: “The old professional was still enthralled by our parliamentary cliff-hanging.”45 It is clear, however, many people did not believe Wilson’s portrayal of his relationship with Johnson. As early as April 1965 (after just six months in office) Gerald Scarfe’s political cartoon depicting Wilson licking Johnson’s backside appeared in Private Eye.46 And Vicky cartoons in the New Statesman took the same line on Wilson’s stance on Vietnam. Obviously an over-simplification but it highlighted a widespread perception that Johnson was the master and Wilson the servant in their relationship. So, was Wilson deceiving himself or was there a genuine level of closeness between the two leaders and a mutual respect for each other’s political skills and approaches? The magnitude of the issues that dominated Anglo-American relations in the 1960s cast a long shadow over the working relationship between Wilson and Johnson and tested their powers of pragmatism to the limit. Both leaders had experience of maintaining relationships in trying circumstances; in holding their parties together during trying times. In the UK, this was despite the Labour Party in Britain being an ideologically divided, “institutionally fissiparous party.”47 Wilson had also learnt to master the House of Commons. Likewise, LBJ had managed to keep the US moving forward in the aftermath of the national tragedy that was the assassination of John F. Kennedy and had gained cross-party support for the July 1964 Civil Rights Act. For both leaders, their skills in alliance-management were to be sorely tested. In terms of the nature of their working relationship; it was not quite what Wilson desired. He wanted a close relationship with the Americans. But he also envisaged capitalizing on transatlantic air travel to have regular meetings with the president (and thus a more informal relationship) but Johnson was only prepared to tolerate that desire when it suited him and only let him visit more often than he would have liked because he listened to the guidance of his advisers who understood Wilson’s domestic difficulties over Vietnam. In the end, as Prime Minister, Wilson visited Johnson in Washington on six occasions; inviting himself on four of those occasions (the White House initiated only two of  Edward Short, Whip to Wilson (London: Macdonald & Co, 1989), 97.  Author’s interview with Baroness Castle of Blackburn, 28 April 1993. 45  Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–70: A Personal Record (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 81, 243. 46  Gerald Scarfe, Private Eye, No. 88, 30 April 1965, 1. 47  Peter Shore, Leading the Left (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), 111. 43 44

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Wilson’s six visits: the summit of December 1964 and that of June 1967).48 And, if summit meetings are symbolic, public diplomacy events, it did not help Wilson that these visits were one-way. Johnson, despite travelling abroad regularly (including elsewhere in Europe), did not feel the need to visit London, although would have attended the funeral of Winston Churchill, who he admired, had he not been recovering from a bad cold that had resulted in a three-day stay in Bethesda Naval Hospital.49 But they did have a regular correspondence—there were ever 300 messages between the two over the course of their six-year working relationship.50 Indeed Wilson was keen to reassure Parliament of the regularity of his communications with the US president, stating in October 1967 that he was “in close touch with President Johnson on a wide range of subjects, including Vietnam.”51 Some conversations and consultations were conducted by telephone—Johnson’s favoured method of communication. Most of these were cordial. And it’s not hard to see why Wilson—known as the Yorkshire Walter Mitty— believed his relationship with Johnson was a close one, however.52 Quite often his advisers would persuade the president to extend him special courtesies. Wilson was often treated to state receptions, lavish banquets, and warm welcoming speeches and toasts (Johnson appeared to compare him to Churchill by talking of both men’s courage and leadership qualities in one welcoming speech).53 The president also invited Wilson to the annual ceremony of switching on Washington’s Christmas lights in December 1964, allowing Wilson to boast that this was the “first invitation to a British Prime Minister since one to Mr. Churchill.” Meetings between Wilson and Johnson were often private and David Bruce observed that “they found it extremely interesting to compare notes” on domestic political issues: Wilson talking about working with a paper-thin majority; Johnson lamenting the lack of party loyalty within the American system and explaining the conflicting pressures he faced on Vietnam from the hawks and the doves in Congress. Despite outward signs of a warm relationship, evidence of a poor or strained relationship between Wilson and Johnson is extensive. A number of Johnson’s aides testify to the president’s bad feelings towards Wilson. As early as March 1965 Bruce described in his diary the president’s “antipathy” for the prime minister.54 Bruce’s Deputy at Grosvenor 48  Jonathan Colman, A ‘special relationship’? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B.  Johnson and Anglo-­ American relations ‘at the summit’, 1964–68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 176. 49  John Ramsden, Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 16. 50   Simon C.  Smith (ed.), The Wilson-Johnson Correspondence, 1964–69 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 1. 51  Hansard (Parliamentary Debates): Commons, 1966–67, Volume 751, 26 October 1967, col. 55. 52  Andrew Roth, Sir Harold Wilson: Yorkshire Walter Mitty (London: Macdonald & Jane’s, 1977). 53  Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 188. 54  David Bruce Diaries, 22 March 1965, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia.

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Square, Philip Kaiser, also noted that “Wilson and Johnson were not temperamentally congenial.” Under Secretary of State George Ball said that while “LBJ had been impressed with MacMillan” he thought Wilson “lacked Macmillan’s consummate ability to deal on a friendly but slightly condescending basis … wore no patrician armor, was too ordinary, too much like other politicians with whom LBJ had to deal with, and Johnson took an almost instant dislike to him.”55 Wilson appears therefore to have misread the potential for a close relationship based on similar political objectives. As Henry Brandon, the Sunday Times’ Washington correspondent wrote: “Like other Labour leaders, he was under the mistaken impression that there was little difference between a New Dealer and a British socialist. To him the Great Society was another way of talking about Labour’s kind of socialism when in effect Johnson’s approach to the welfare state did not prevent him being closer to business than to the labour union.”56 The nature of alliance politics in the 1960s meant that distance between the two was almost inevitable.

The Working Relationship: The Atlantic Nuclear Force, Sterling, and Vietnam Both leaders desired a continuation of the Anglo-American alliance on intelligence and security matters (relatively little changed on that front). Washington and London were also able to co-operate closely on NATO, the Middle East, and disarmament. Johnson also backed the Wilson government’s policy on economic sanctions against Rhodesia (even though he was often reminded of the dangers to US oil interests). Similarly, Wilson backed Johnson on the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, despite its unpopularity at home. But it is clear that for Johnson, the UK was one of several close allies, and that, while he acknowledged the unique nature of the Anglo-American relationship in terms of a shared language and culture, he did not see it as special in any real sense due to Britain’s decline as a great power, and he often left European policy to Dean Rusk and Under Secretary of State George Ball. So, for much of the period under study, the president wanted three main things from Wilson: support for the war in Vietnam; a stable pound sterling; and a continuation of Britain’s world role. For his part, Wilson wanted to avoid a military commitment on Vietnam; desired American support for the ailing pound so that he could avoid devaluation and could continue a world role for Britain; and he wanted support for his actions on Malaysia and Rhodesia in particular. In many ways, the first few months of the Wilson–Johnson relationship were decisive in establishing the pattern for the future. In the lead up to the first meeting between Prime Minister Wilson and President Johnson in December 1964, the chasm in understanding between them was already apparent. Wilson  George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 336.  Henry Brandon, Special Relationship: a Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan (London: Macmillan, 1988), 209. 55 56

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was excited and eager to meet the president; Johnson, reportedly, saw it as a “chore.”57 In the event, the new prime minister was accorded all necessary fanfare and ceremony to make him feel welcome. And Johnson approached the meeting in his inimitable fashion telling a reporter that handling Wilson was like approaching a girl the first time you date her—first you cuddle up a bit and then commence feeling around to test her response.58 But the issues dealt with at that first meeting were inter-related and there is evidence that a series of understandings were reached between the two leaders that set the stage for both co-operation and future conflict. The day Wilson entered 10 Downing Street, he inherited a £800 billion balance of payments deficit that shaped the Labour government’s time in office and had serious implications for the wider financial world. Plunged into a series of sterling crises (speculative attacks on the pound) that threatened devaluation (in November 1964, July 1965, July 1967 and autumn 1967), the new prime minister was forced to seek bailouts from Western banks. Initially, the US led the way, contributing over $1 billion dollars to an eleven-nation, rescue mission to prevent the collapse of the pound and to thereby preserve the international financial order.59 In addition, the Wilson government was forced to introduce a defence spending review, import surcharges, and raised the bank rate by 2%. In later years, additional defence reviews saw severe cuts in British defence spending resulting initially in cuts to its equipment programme (cancelling aircraft projects) but soon led to reassessments of the future scope of the UK’s worldwide defence role, culminating in the decision to abandon its commitments East of Suez in January 1968, much to the disappointment of the US who had been keen for a British presence in Southeast Asia.60 But as the pound continued to struggle over the coming years, Johnson (despite his own progressive inclinations) was unimpressed with the Labour government’s high public spending plans, especially as his own Great Society program budgets were cut as part of the price of supporting sterling.61 On several occasions, he insisted Wilson’s domestic budgets be curbed and, at times, was sorely tempted to link US support for the pound with a British military commitment in Vietnam. And some were convinced that in 1965 Wilson and Johnson negotiated a series of “understandings” that tied American financial support for the pound to a British commitment not to devalue and to retain a military presence East of Suez and that as early as spring of that year had a reached “a general understanding” that the UK would provide no direct military assistance to the 57  Notes of a Conversation between Professor Neustadt and D. Mitchell, Prime Minister’s Visit to Washington, PREM 13/193, National Archives. 58  Frank Cormier, The Way He Was (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1977), 181. 59  “11 Nations Raise $3 billion to Rescue British Pound in World Financial Crisis,” New York Times, 26 November 1968. 60  P.  L. Pham, Ending ‘East of Suez’: The British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore, 1964–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 238. 61  McGeorge Bundy, Memorandum for the Record, 7 December 1964, Files of McGeorge Bundy, Memos for the Record, 1964, Box 18, NSF, LBJL.

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US in Vietnam but would support American efforts diplomatically. In exchange for British verbal support, the Americans committed themselves to keeping their ally well-informed on the war and accepted that Britain would use its role as co-chair of the 1954 Geneva Conference to seek peace.62 There is much evidence to support this view. Not least is the fact that the war in Vietnam was personal to LBJ. As far as the president was concerned it was a zero-sum game; loyalty on Vietnam was equated to credibility as an ally. Indeed, two days before their first meeting, McGeorge Bundy sent a memorandum to the President advising that “the reciprocal price” of any British force in Vietnam “would be stronger support on our side for Malaya.”63 The issue of a British troop contribution—and the possibility of a joint venture between the UK and the US in Malaysia and Vietnam—was bound to be raised at the first meeting and Johnson took guidance on this from many quarters. In relation to Vietnam, the CIA judged it likely that Wilson would require “a quid pro quo with respect to Malaysia” and argued that “since we will be putting a fair amount of heat on the Prime Minister re the MLF issue … we should seek no more than to obtain Wilson’s sympathetic understanding of our problem in Vietnam.”64 Bundy disagreed and felt it was worth hitting the British hard, but felt that an affirmative answer was unlikely.65 Johnson’s approach was somewhat typical of a pragmatist. Knowing it was extremely likely that Wilson would refuse any request for British forces, he still wanted to put the prime minister in the position of declining, thus providing him with leverage in other areas. After he left office, Harold Wilson claimed he gave the US “negative support” on Vietnam. This phrase indicates his pragmatic approach (compromising to try to keep everyone happy to order keep the Atlantic Alliance strong and keep his party together at the same time) and the nature of Wilson’s balancing act on Vietnam: not sending troops but supporting the Americans diplomatically with the minimum of enthusiasm. As with Johnson, the new prime minister inherited a policy on Vietnam. In the spirit of the special relationship, and as a key NATO ally in the Cold War battle, the outgoing Conservative government had already backed presidents John F.  Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson on their policies of military escalation in Southeast Asia, providing much needed diplomatic support to the Americans and sending a five-man British advisory mission to Vietnam to help guide the American military advisors stationed there. President Johnson had a clear agenda on Vietnam where the British were concerned: to increase the level of support. His administration had launched a “more flags” campaign in April 1964 with the aim of increasing the number of countries providing non-military aid to South Vietnam but with  Clive Ponting, Breach of Promise: Labour in Power, 1964–1970 (London: Penguin, 1990), 6.  Memo to the President from McGeorge Bundy, Subject: ‘The British and Vietnam’, 5 December 1964, box 214, PM Wilson Visit (1), 12/7-8/64, CF, UK, NSF, LBJL. 64  Memo from the Assistant Deputy Director (Intelligence) to McGeorge Bundy, ‘The British and Vietnam’, 4 December 1964, PM Wilson Visit (1), 12/7-8/64, box 214, CF, UK, NSF, LBJL. 65  Memo to the President from McGeorge Bundy, Subject: ‘The British and Vietnam’, 5 December 1964, box 214, PM Wilson Visit (1), 12/7-8/64, CF, UK, NSF, LBJL. 62

63

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a covert one aim of gaining allied troop commitments. The ultimate objective, of course, was to portray the US’ effort to defend South Vietnam against communist aggression as part of an allied crusade. Britain’s open and full support was therefore an essential part of this propaganda campaign; the support of a close ally, leading “social” democracy, and key member of SEATO and the UN Security Council, was vital. The importance of this plea for additional assistance to South Vietnam was due to the paucity of pre-existing support. The only countries supplying non-military assistance were Australia, Canada, France, West Germany, Japan, Malaya, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom. So, in the case of Britain, the Johnson administration already had a “flag,” but not one that was big enough or prominent enough for its liking. A troop commitment was soon forthcoming from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand (the latter three could reasonably be termed paid mercenaries). In the event, at the December meeting, Johnson decided not to push Wilson too hard on Vietnam, instead asking “without excessive enthusiasm” for British troops in South Vietnam.66 Cabinet records also note that “there was no real United States pressure for a United Kingdom presence on the ground … apart from an initial suggestion that we should contribute a token force of 100 men.” Wilson refused Johnson’s requests on three grounds: Britain’s military was already overstretched, not least because of the help it was providing to Malaysia against the Indonesian confrontation (with 30,000 British servicemen stationed there at its peak); Britain, with the Soviet Union, was co-chair of the Geneva Conference and may be called on to help negotiate peace; and British involvement in Vietnam would be extremely unpopular with his party and with the wider public.67 Although Johnson thought Britain’s co-chairmanship of the Geneva Conference was a “fig leaf” that the prime minister was hiding behind, he did understand the other arguments and did not press the issue.68 The most infamous exchange between the two—transcribed for all to read now—came on the evening of 10 February 1965. That night Wilson received news of a Viet Cong attack on the US barracks at Qui Nhon in which 30 American servicemen lost their lives. He responded to this news with a proposal to fly to Washington to have a “personal discussion” with Johnson on the dangers of over-reacting to the present crisis, particularly the risk of nuclear war.69 As the Foreign Office later put it, neither at home nor abroad could Wilson appear to be “standing idly by while events moved dangerously in Vietnam.”70 The prime minister’s vision of an informal “closeness” with the president was about to be put to the test. Unfortunately, as David Bruce put it,  Wilson, Labour Government, 79.  Harold Wilson, The Labour Government: A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 23, 67–8. 68  Briefing Book 7/29/66, box 215/6, CF, UK, NSF, LBJL. 69  Wilson, Labour Government, 116. 70  “Vietnam”, 11 February 1965, PREM 13/692, National Archives. 66 67

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“the President made short shrift of this project.”71 Harlech informed the prime minister that the White House “was very strongly against a visit … at this time” but suggested that Wilson first contact the president by telephone before making up his mind.72 McGeorge Bundy tried to delay such a call, suggesting the prime minister should ring the following morning.73 Wilson was not willing to take this advice however as he knew he would have to face the House of Commons later in the day and then meet with his cabinet. The president agreed to receive the call, which took place on an open line between 3.15 and 3.30 am British time (11 February) and between 10.15 and 10.30 pm Washington time (10 February).74 The British transcript of this telephone call reveals how Wilson was a recipient of the Johnson treatment. Bundy made notes on the president’s side of the conversation and his record does not contradict either the official British record or Wilson’s own recollection of the conversation contained in his memoirs.75 As Califano later remarked that Johnson “wanted to control everything” and “his greatest outburst of anger was triggered by people or situations that escaped his control” and, on Vietnam, the President knew he was not fully in control of his allies.76 LBJ dominated the conversation and was easily able to put the prime minister on the defensive by letting “fly in an outburst of Texan temper” as Wilson so aptly put it.77 The president regularly cut Wilson off mid-­ sentence and had forceful and often brusque responses to the prime minister’s pleas and questions. Although Wilson often got close to offering advice, and even hinted at criticism, Johnson interrupted him before it could be delivered. Wilson began the conversation by outlining British concerns about a possible escalation in US action in Vietnam and repeated his proposal to fly to Washington to discuss matters further. Johnson thought such a visit would be “a serious mistake,” and that Wilson should “not get upset, keep a normal pulse” and in his position “would wait until I was called upon to do something and consider it on the merits.” The language here is particularly telling; already Johnson was letting Wilson know his place. Johnson nevertheless reassured Wilson that US action would ‘be very measured and very reasonable action.’ Annoyed by Wilson’s presumptuousness, the president reminded the prime minister that he was not constantly offering advice about Malaysia. “A trip, Mr. Prime Minister, on this situation would be very misunderstood and I don’t think any good would flow from it. If one of us jumps across the Atlantic every  Bruce Diaries, 11 February 1965.  Memorandum for the record, Oliver Wright, February 11, 1965, PREM 13/692, National Archives. 73  Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and Prime Minister Wilson, FRUS, 1964–68, Volume II, 229. 74  Record of a Telephone Conversation between the Prime Minister and President Johnson on 11 February 1965, PREM 13/692, National Archives; Wilson, Labour Government, 116. 75  Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and Prime Minister Wilson, FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume II, 229. 76  Califano, Triumph & Tragedy, 11. 77  Wilson, Labour Government, 116. 71 72

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time there is a critical situation, next week I shall be flying over when Sukarno jumps on you and I will be giving you advice.” When Wilson countered “We do not want to dash over. We just want to talk,” Johnson replied “We have got telephones!” The president’s suspicion that Wilson’s proposal to fly over was part of the British prime minister’s use of the special relationship for domestic political purposes also became clear during this conversation. After Johnson said he would send a classified cable that Wilson could discuss with his colleagues and cable him back about; Wilson said “I cannot show it to the House of Commons, that is my trouble.” Pointedly, Johnson replied: “You would not want to use me as an instrument to deal with the House of Commons.”78 Eventually, the president’s limited patience ran out. Wilson records in his memoirs that in relation to “an earlier reference to Clem Attlee’s visit to President Truman over the danger of Korean escalation in December 1950, he [Johnson] pointed out that we had troops in Korea, not in Vietnam.”79 Johnson evidently resented Wilson’s interference, considering the lack of British troops in Vietnam. He pointed out that “as far as my problem in Vietnam we have asked everyone to share it with us. They were willing to share advice but not responsibility.” He then delivered his most telling point. “I won’t tell you how to run Malaysia and you don’t tell us how to run Vietnam … If you want to help us some in Vietnam send us some men and send us some folks to deal with these guerillas. And announce to the press that you are going to help us. Now if you don’t feel like doing that, go on with your Malaysian problem.” Although this conversation consisted of more than a discussion of the situation in Vietnam, it is particularly noticeable that Malaysia was brought up in this context. The president clearly saw the US’ limited involvement in Malaysia as parallel to Britain’s limited involvement in Vietnam. As responsibility was not shared in these respects, advice should be sought and not forced on one another.80 By the end of the conversation Wilson had been exposed to many sides of Johnson’s character: one minute ranting at the prime minister, the next minute expressing his understanding of Wilson’s domestic difficulties; one minute playing the martyr or wounded soldier, the next bullying once more. Wilson was completely disarmed. Not only did he fail to get the president’s approval to visit Washington, he also did not manage to put over any substantive points on Vietnam. Instead he was reduced to stressing British loyalty on Vietnam and promised that this would “be the position tomorrow.”81 Johnson expressed his appreciation. This late-night conversation proved a turning point in the Wilson–Johnson relationship. The call demonstrates Johnson’s impatience with Wilson, and 78  Record of a Telephone Conversation between the Prime Minister and President Johnson, PREM 13/692, National Archives. 79  Wilson, Labour Government, 116. 80  Memorandum of Telephone Conversation Between President Johnson and Prime Minister Wilson, FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume II, 229. 81  Ibid., 5.

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there is little sign of intimacy between the two leaders. In the midst of a growing crisis in Vietnam, Johnson was extremely annoyed by Wilson’s apparent impertinence in thinking he had the right to put his views across in person. The call also provides another example of the darker side of Johnson’s psyche. George Reedy, Johnson’s Press Secretary throughout the 1950s and for much of the presidency, speaks of LBJ’s “tendency to fly into rages for reasons totally inadequate to the degree of ferocity which he would display” and of his tendency to be a bully who “would exercise merciless sarcasm on people who could not fight back but could only take it.”82 Wilson did not yet fully understand Johnson’s personality or comprehend the limits of his personal relationship with the president. The relationship between the two leaders was still in its infancy and at this stage the prime minister may have believed the glowing press and official reaction to his December visit to Washington, seriously overestimating his ability to influence the president. The phone call would not be forgotten by Johnson. When rumours about the poor state of the relationship between Wilson and Johnson surfaced the next month, including the suggestion that the prime minister was not welcome in Washington, McGeorge Bundy told the President that “none of it takes account of the very great damage which Wilson did to himself by his outrageous phone call to you.”83 At the end of their conversation Johnson agreed to send Wilson a cable outlining the situation in Vietnam and current US plans and would brief Bruce, then in Washington, who would bring a personal message from the president to Wilson on his return to London. Within hours the cable was duly sent, via McGeorge Bundy, and included advance notice of US plans to bomb an army barracks in North Vietnam. Wilson’s call may have precipitated this advance warning; it certainly explains the timing of it. In the cable the president reminded the prime minister how privileged and classified their communication was. He also repeated the request that in future Wilson’s suggestions should come via cable or telephone. The message was clear: the prime minister should stay at home.84 Wilson put the best possible gloss on this exchange when he informed the cabinet the next day that he had been “in personal touch” with the president and “had reaffirmed that we were ready, in our capacity as co-Chairman of the 1954 Geneva Conference on Vietnam, to put our good offices at the disposal of the parties.”85 Although Wilson and Johnson continued to exchange views, it was mainly by cable and letter, and very infrequently by telephone. Johnson, a president who favoured telephone communication, did not want to talk to Wilson unless it was absolutely necessary. Wilson’s subsequent visits were warm and business-like but Vietnam continued to dog the relationship.  George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson: A Memoir (New York, 1982), x, 56.  Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Johnson, 22 March 1965, FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume II, 468. 84  Telegram from McGeorge Bundy to Oliver Wright for the Prime Minister, 11 February 1965, PREM 13/692, National Archives. 85  Cabinet Minutes, 11 February 1965, CAB 128/39, National Archives. 82 83

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Despite ongoing pressure from the White House, the British government gave only limited—albeit not insignificant—support. With technical assistance, financial aid grants, police training (the British Advisory Mission), and British support for Vietnamese students, the total outlay for the British government between 1964 and 1970 reached £1,236,500. Over time, the Johnson administration had reason to become even more frustrated with this limited British commitment, especially given US support for British action in Malaysia and Rhodesia. Britain was also a leading social democracy whose example counted: any condemnation or ambivalence on its part would be seized upon by North Vietnam and its supporters as proof of the weakness of America’s cause. Assistant Secretary of State for Far East Affairs William Bundy later argued that a British troop commitment would have had an impact on the US domestic scene, believing it “would have made a considerable psychological difference … particularly in liberal circles, which was where the main criticism of the war came from.” Wilson recalled LBJ saying, in their July 1966 Washington meeting that, “a platoon of bagpipers would be sufficient, it was the British flag that was needed.” Or as Rusk put it to foreign correspondent Louis Heren: “All we needed was a regiment. The Black Watch would have done.” Much to Johnson’s annoyance, the Wilson government went on to publicly rebuke the US on its use of gas in March 1965 and dissociated from its bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in July 1966. The president also found Wilson attempts to broker a peace in Vietnam frustrating, although understood that they were often related to appeasing his domestic critics (by April 1965, 71% of the British public were opposed to US action in Vietnam). On sterling and MLF, the December 1964 meeting saw Johnson harangue Wilson so much that he “was almost on the ropes.”86 After spending several minutes outlining the impact of Britain’s monetary problems on the US, he moved onto to criticize Wilson for a recent statement in the House of Commons on Atlantic nuclear defence. The administration was keen to discuss the Multilateral Nuclear Force (MLF), the American proposal for a mixed-man nuclear fleet that had been formulated in order to deal with German interest in joining the nuclear club. Although the Conservative government had shown some interest in this plan, the Labour Party was totally opposed to it. The Americans, particularly Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara felt MLF (by this stage including a Polaris-armed surface fleet, staffed by a mixed-nationality crew) was the best way to satisfy German nuclear aspirations and to prevent the proliferation of independent nuclear deterrents in Europe. The Labour government maintained its opposition to the MLF on the grounds that a mixed-­ manned fleet would be extremely unpopular “in Europe, not least in Britain” because of “any suggestion, however indirect, of a German finger even influencing the nuclear trigger.”87 Moreover, Wilson and his Defence Secretary 86  McGeorge Bundy, Memorandum for the Record, 7 December 1964, Files of McGeorge Bundy, Memos for the Record 1964, Box 18, NSF, LBJL. 87  Wilson, Labour Government, 71.

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Denis Healey, felt the MLF would further antagonise the Soviets, who were alarmed at the prospect of further nuclear proliferation in Europe. The importance of MLF was conveyed to Wilson by the Americans as soon as he was elected but Rusk was well aware of Wilson’s small working majority and was prepared to take account of it in the coming months. “We should … not say anything at this time which might be taken as serving notice on the British that we intend to move ahead with them if they are willing, but without them if necessary. Our position should be one of calm reaffirmation of our commitment to the development of the Atlantic partnership without any overtone of pressure at this stage.”88 Any strong pressure at this time might have led Wilson to submit to backbench pressure and openly come out against MLF, so Johnson held fire until the December summit. In the meantime, Wilson and Healey had worked on an alternative to the MLF that might satisfy American objectives: an Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF). This proposal envisaged British and US nuclear submarines, as well as mixed-manned land-based Minuteman missiles in the US and V-bomber squadrons, being incorporated into a new command ­structure of participants under the umbrella of the existing NATO. For the British, ANF avoided the increased costs of establishing a new surface fleet, offering “the Allies equality of status, not by everyone trading up to British levels but by the British trading down to everyone else’s level except the American.”89 Surprising, at the December meeting, Johnson agreed to this proposal. In managing to persuade Johnson to consider abandoning the unpopular MLF, Wilson may have agreed to a quid pro quo that tied the British to the US on Vietnam.90 Labour’s Chief Whip Edward Short, endorses this theory. Short argues that Wilson “paid a price—a high price” for American acceptance of Wilson’s ANF.91 Certainly as early as July 1964, Neustadt discussed Southeast Asia as a place “where the US might be threatened or the UK rewarded in the course of bargaining over MLF.”92 It is clear, however, that Wilson’s success over MLF was not as great a personal victory as it first appeared. Prior to the December visit, McGeorge Bundy, spelt out in a memo to Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and George Ball, his reservations about the cost of success on MLF, including “a deeply reluctant and essentially unpersuaded Great Britain” and a “protracted and difficult Congressional struggle in which we would be largely deprived of one decisive argument—that this arrangement is what our major European partners really want.” Moreover, Bundy also revealed that from his own conversations with President Johnson, he was sure he did “not feel the kind of personal Presidential engagement in the MLF itself  Ibid.  Note from Oliver Wright to the Prime Minister, ‘Strategy for Washington’, 2 December 1964, PREM 13/103, National Archives. 90  See Saki Dockrill, “Forging the Anglo-American Global Defence Partnership: Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and the Washington Summit, December 1964,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 23, no. 4 (December 2000): 107–29. 91  Edward Short, Whip to Wilson (London, 1989), 96. 92  Memo on British Labour Party and the MLF, 6 July 1964. 88 89

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which would make it difficult for him to strike out on a new course if we can find one which seems better. I believe we can.”93 It would appear, therefore, that while Wilson may have felt victorious over the likely scrapping of MLF, it was a smaller sacrifice for Johnson than the prime minister realized. And, while Wilson may have received much favourable publicity over this (and historians have deemed Wilson’s nuclear non-­ proliferation policy successful), the president may have felt it was worth it if it made Wilson obliged to him, especially on Vietnam.94 Johnson certainly felt he had been good to Wilson over this. “I didn’t shove him on MLF, all my advisers said I ought to demand that he move right then and there, but he only had a three-man majority and I tried to treat him like I’d like to be treated if I was in the same situation.”95 During a later heated exchange over Vietnam, Johnson let his guard down and said: “I tried to be very co-operative on the MLF when you were here …. I tried to hold my real views until you had talked to the Germans. I had very strong views on that and I did not want to be domineering.”96

Conclusion That first meeting set the scene for a relationship between two political pragmatists. Gradually the Wilson administration began to “think the unthinkable” and sanction a devaluation, eventually occurring in November 1967 and contributing to the East of Suez decision in January 1968. In January 1969, as LBJ prepared to leave the White House, he told Wilson that although “there has been no single joint enterprise for us to conduct as Roosevelt and Churchill had to conduct during the Second World War. There are places in the world where the policies of your country and mine threatened to diverge—as in Vietnam.” But he went on to say “we have managed to understand one another, to help one another whenever it was possible, to make it as easy as possible for one another when circumstance did not permit complete accord.”97 While clearly a polite official message to mark his departure, it did contain an essential truth. Both men—even when unable to co-operate—did continue to act to safeguard the Anglo-American alliance. Their pragmatism, sense of future and fundamental belief in democracy, meant they never breached the sanctity of the whole. In many ways, Johnson met his political match in Wilson and vice versa. 93  Memo, Bundy to Rusk, McNamara, and Ball, 25 November 1964, “McGeorge Bundy, 10/1-12/31/64” folder, Box 2, Memos to the President, LBJL. See also, Paul Y. Hammond, LBJ and the Presidential Management of Foreign Relations (Austin: University of Texas, 1992). 94  David James Gill, Britain and the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy, 1964–1970 (Stanford University Press, 2014). 95  Telephone Conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Spivak, WH6504.06, Side B, 29 April 1965, 12.43 PM. 96  Ibid., 2. 97   Message from Johnson to Wilson, 19 January 1969, LBJL, NSF, Special Heads of Correspondence File, Box 56, United Kingdom, [1 of 4], no. 7.

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Seasoned politicians—with different methods of negotiating and protecting their nations’ interests—who learnt to respect each other, even as they disagreed. Wilson refused to be unduly intimidated by the macho Texan president on any of the major issues of the day but he also misread their relationship at times, often being overly optimistic about his chances of influencing the President. In retrospect, the two career politicians managed to protect the essence of the Anglo-American alliance, even though areas of mutual interest were fewer than in previous years. Despite their differences they were both willing to compromise, or at least appear to compromise, for the greater good. Wilson maintained a public show of unity with the Americans despite the high cost to his position within the Labour Party and his credibility with the British public; Johnson compromised on MLF and sterling but could never consider Wilson a close ally because of Vietnam.

CHAPTER 12

Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Harold Wilson and James Callaghan: Personal Diplomacy, Friendship and US-UK Relations in the 1970s Todd Carter

Jimmy Carter welcomes James Callaghan to the White House, 10 March 1977 [photograph], Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta, GA T. Carter (*) University College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_12

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Ruminating on the role played by people and individual statesmen in shaping global history, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once remarked, in January 1974, to journalists and colleagues aboard a shuttle bound for the Middle East that: “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.”1 Whilst Kissinger may, on this occasion, have had in mind the importance of individual leaders such as Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Golda Meir, this statement is no less true for the so-called special relationship between the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States. As the historian Robert Hathaway concludes, one cannot study US-UK  relations for any extended period of time “without being struck by the central role played by individual statesmen.”2 Reflecting upon his multiple diplomatic postings in London, former US Ambassador Raymond Seitz made a similar assertion. “I doubt any relationship between two countries has invested so heavily in the personal compatibility of its respective leaders,” he related.3 Straightforwardly, then, a case can be made that personal chemistry and friendship between President and Prime Minister, Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary, or, indeed, between individual ministers, assistant secretaries, ambassadors, or diplomats, played a significant role in seeking to preserve a close partnership and harmonious diplomatic relations between London and Washington. Nevertheless, this facet of inter-allied diplomacy and diplomatic practice remains understudied by historians and international relations theorists. Traditionally, structural (and state-centric) considerations such as power maximization, economic self-interest, or military rivalry and conflict have not only been studied more widely, but have also been deemed, by realist-­minded scholars, to be the primary determinants of behaviour and policy in what they consider to be the anarchical world of international relations.4 Only in the last decade or so have revisionist thinkers begun to take human agency and personality into consideration when studying diplomatic decision-­making—recognizing that, for instance, the development and maintenance of a close friendship between diplomatic actors can offer an unrivalled mechanism for understanding intentions, building trust, clarifying differences, broaching potentially sensitive topics or issues, and of breaking down the

 Henry A. Kissinger, “Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 58, no. 4 (1982): 575–6. 2  Robert M. Hathaway, Great Britain and the United States: Special Relations since World War II (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1990), xviii. 3  Raymond Seitz, Over Here (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 311. 4  See for instance, Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979); John L. Spanier, Games Nations Play: Analyzing International Politics (New York: Praeger, 1972); and John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). 1

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barriers of mutual suspicion which inevitably exist between two parties who are unfamiliar with one another.5 From the historian’s perspective, most scholarly accounts that emphasize the importance of close personal relations and friendship vis-à-vis the Anglo-­ American relationship have tended to focus their studies upon periods of either famously close or infamously cold relations. It is widely accepted, for example, that a great personal friendship existed between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt—and that it was Churchill who set the mould for future British statesmen in trying to harness the military, political, and economic might of the United States in support of its own objectives.6 Most historians likewise agree that warm personal relationships developed, later, between Harold Macmillan and John F.  Kennedy and between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, which translated into special influence (in one form or another) for Britain in Washington in the early 1960s and the 1980s.7 5  Marcus Holmes, Face-to-Face Diplomacy: Social Neuroscience and International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018) 12, 16–7, 37, 270; Nicholas J. Wheeler, Trusting Enemies: Interpersonal Relationships in International Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 8, 12, 59; Todd H. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015) 17–8, 26–7, 31; Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler, The Security Dilemma (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 7–10; Nicholas J.  Wheeler, “Beyond Waltz’s Nuclear World: More Trust May be Better,” International Relations 23, no. 3 (2009) 434–5. See also Simon Koschut and Andrew Oelsner (eds), Friendship in International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Felix Berneskoetter and Yuri van Hoef, “Friendship and Foreign Policy” in Cameron Thies (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For the purposes of this analysis, friendship is understood here as “a relationship satisfying cognitive and emotional needs and characterised by reciprocity, trust, openness, honesty, acceptance, and loyalty.” For more on this definition, see Felix Berenskoetter, “Friends? There Are No Friends? An Intimate Reframing of the International,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007) 648–50. 6  Klaus W. Larres, Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow, 1997); Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: A Portrait of a Friendship (London: Granta, 2004); Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Terry H.  Anderson, The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944–1947 (Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 1981) 176; Arthur Campbell Turner, The Unique Partnership: Britain and the United States (New York: Pegasus, 1971). On Churchill’s example for future British governments, see Larres, Churchill’s Cold War, 78; Geoffrey Warner, “The Anglo-American Special Relationship,” Diplomatic History 13, no. 4 (1989): 480; David Reynolds, “A ‘Special Relationship?’ America, Britain and the International Order since the Second World War,” International Affairs 62, no. 1 (1986): 2. 7  On Macmillan and Kennedy, see Richard Aldous, ‘“A Family Affair”: Macmillan and the Art of Personal Diplomacy’, in Richard Aldous & Sabine Lee (eds), Harold Macmillan and Britain’s World Role (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Nigel Ashton, Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Nigel Ashton, ‘Managing Transition: Macmillan and the Utility of Anglo-American Relations’, in Richard Aldous & Sabine Lee (eds), Harold Macmillan: Aspects of a Political Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Donald Cameron Watt, Succeeding John Bull: American in Britain’s Place 1900–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Alistair Horne, Macmillan. Vol. II: 1957–1986 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

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Traditionally, these examples have been juxtaposed against the simmering tension, diffidence, and suspicion of the Wilson-Johnson years, or the icy aloofness and awkwardness of the Nixon-Heath era, a full decade during which no strong personal bond or friendship existed between any of the leaders. Perhaps due to the lack of dominating individuals or stand-out events, after March 1974, when the Labour Party was returned to power, the state of US–UK relations in general, and the role played by personality and human relations in strengthening (or weakening) relations  in particular, have only recently attracted attention from revisionist scholars as the documentary record on both sides of the Atlantic has become open to researchers.8 What makes this oversight all the more surprising is that as Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and then, after April 1976, as Prime Minister, the UK’s international policy was under the guiding influence and watchful eye of a committed and vocal Atlanticist who believed strongly, like Churchill, Macmillan, and, crucially, Ernest Bevin before him, in the use of personal diplomacy as a means of influencing US foreign policy: James Callaghan.9 In an effort both to plug this historical gap and to analyse the role played by friendship and personality in maintaining the US–UK relationship at what can be considered the nadir of Britain’s decline as a global power, this chapter will show that the close personal relationships that Callaghan sought specifically to develop and maintain with Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were part of a deliberate strategy, over and above the institutionalized relationship that (London: André Deutsch, 1965). For a more critical perspective, see Nigel Ashton, ‘Harold Macmillan and the Golden Days of the Anglo-American Alliance Revisited, 1957–63’, Diplomatic History, 29/4 (2005) 691–723. On Thatcher and Reagan, see James Cooper, Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan: A Very Political Special Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Nicholas Wapshott, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (New York: Sentinel, 2007). For a more critical account, see Richard Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (London: Hutchinson, 2012). 8  See, for instance, Thomas Robb, Jimmy Carter and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Thomas Robb, A Strained Partnership? US-UK relations in the Era of Détente, 1969–77 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Malcolm M.  Craig, America, Britain, and the Pakistani Nuclear Weapons Programme, 1974–1980 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); James Cooper, The Politics of Diplomacy: U.S. Presidents and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1967–1998 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) Chapters 1 & 2; Nigel Ashton, “‘A Local Terrorist Made Good’: the Callaghan government and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process, 1977–79,” Contemporary British History 31, no. 1 (2017): 114–35; Suzanne Doyle, “The United States Sale of Trident to Britain, 1977–1982: Deal Making in the Anglo-American Nuclear Relationship,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 28, no. 3 (2017): 477–93; Kristan Stoddart, Facing Down the Soviet Union: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1976–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Piers N. Ludlow, “The Real Years of Europe? U.S.-West European Relations during the Ford Administration,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 3 (2013): 136–61. 9  For scholarly accounts that discuss Callaghan’s Atlanticism, see John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 81; Ann Lane, “Foreign and Defence Policy” in Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson (eds.), New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments 1974–1979 (London: Routledge, 2004), 155. See also Kissinger, “Reflections on a Partnership,” 576.

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existed between the two governments, to gain a greater foothold for Britain in the Washington policymaking process. In addition, it will also be argued that the Labour Prime Minister should be given greater credit for the successes he achieved, particularly in the context of the hugely asymmetrical power dynamic which had developed between London and Washington since the early 1940s. In doing so, the importance attributed to the roles played by personality, friendship, and personal diplomacy will be assessed. Then, the chapter will examine the origins of Callaghan’s belief in personal diplomacy, his attachment to the United States, and how he attempted to use this strategy to ensure that the voice of British interests was heard in Washington through personal diplomacy with successive US leaders and decision-makers.

The Nixon-Heath Relationship, 1970–1974 To comprehend the attitude taken towards the United States by the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan—and in particular Callaghan’s personal diplomacy with the leading figures in Washington—it is important first to understand the state of relations inherited to them by Republican US President Richard Nixon and Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath from 1970 to 1974. After their respective election victories in 1969 and 1970, hopes for a close partnership were initially high. Prior to entering Downing Street, Heath had visited the United States in May 1969, telling a National Press Club audience that the special relationship between Britain and the United States was “no artificial relationship to be created or abandoned at will.”10 Nixon, for his part, invited the Conservative Party leader to the White House for talks and dinner on 26 May—an honour that he “usually reserve[d] … for heads of Government.” “There have been a number of distinguished visitors here since President Nixon took office,” wrote Times correspondent Louis Heren, “but none has been given the attention enjoyed by Mr. Edward Heath this week.”11 Indeed, the opening months of Heath’s premiership evidenced regular consultation and what appeared to be an obvious sense of mutual admiration between the two leaders.12 Moreover, both Heath and Nixon had shared challenging upbringings, manifested in awkward personal manners; both held centre-right political ideals, and both shared a staunchly anti-communist outlook on global affairs. Beyond everyday politics, they even shared a love of sailing and playing the piano.13 Moreover, Nixon had been  Louis Heren, “Heath Tells US not to Write Britain Off,” Times, 27 May 1969.  Louis Heren, “US treats Heath as a Prime Minister,” Times, 30 May 1969. 12  A good proportion of Nixon and Heath’s correspondence during this period is contained within White House Central Files, Subject Files: CO (Countries), [EX] CO 160 1/1/70–1/26/70 through [EX] CO 160 4/1/71–5//30/71, Box 80, Richard M.  Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, CA.  For the British archival record, see in particular The National Archives, Kew [hereafter TNA] PREM 15/713–716. 13  Andrew Scott, Allies Apart: Heath, Nixon and the Anglo-American Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 2. 10 11

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keen to establish a close relationship with Prime Minister Wilson, during what proved to be the Labour government’s final year in office, and to reaffirm US– UK ties in the aftermath of Britain’s forced decisions to devalue sterling and withdraw forces from East of Suez.14 Despite the Conservative Party’s electoral triumph, it has become a truism in the historiography that US–UK relations reached their lowest ebb in this period, due primarily to Heath’s aloofness and abrasive personality. The two leaders failed to establish any meaningful rapport, with Nixon infamously describing one unscheduled car journey they took together in London as conversationally “tough going.”15 It was quite typical of their relationship that after one White House dinner, as Heath’s biographer notes, Nixon tried to persuade the British Prime Minister to play a duet with him on a nearby piano. Clearly unmoved, Heath “shrugged his shoulders, said nothing and walked on.”16 In equal measure, Heath’s perceived determination as Prime Minister to shun friendly overtures from Washington and his desperate desire to see Britain join the European Economic Community (EEC) have also been blamed by scholars for the poor state of US–UK relations during his premiership.17 The dominant proponent of this version of events—which one historian has dubbed “a Heath-centric orthodoxy”—was Nixon’s National Security advisor (and later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger.18 On an interpersonal level, he recalled that the highly intelligent and erudite Heath shared too many personality traits with Nixon for these two quintessential loners ever to establish a personal tie. Like Nixon, Heath was unfortunate in personal relations and felt more at home in carefully planned, set-piece intellectual encounters. Less suspicious than Nixon, Heath was not any more trusting. Charm would alternate with icy aloofness, and the change in his moods would be perilously unpredictable. After talking with 14  Alex Spelling, ‘“A Reputation for Parsimony to Uphold”: Harold Wilson, Richard Nixon and the Re-Valued ‘Special Relationship’ 1969–1970’, Contemporary British History, 27/2 (2013) 208–209. 15  Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1982), 140. 16  Philip Ziegler, Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography (London: Harper Press, 2010), 376. 17  Dumbrell, A Special Relationship, 73, 88–91; Alan Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1995), 139–40; David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart: The Relationship Between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (London: BBC Books/Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 264, 266, 284; Robert Holland, The Pursuit of Greatness: Britain and the World Role, 1900–1970 (London: Fontana, 1991), 327; Dickie, “Special” No More, 147; Christopher J. Bartlett, The Special Relationship: A Political History of Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992), 129–30, 133; Ovendale, Anglo-American Relations, 137. For more recent scholarship that has benefitted from the gradual release of archival evidence, yet still subscribes to this narrative, see Catherine Hynes, The Year That Never Was: Heath, the Nixon Administration, and the Year of Europe (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009) 241; Alistair Horne, Kissinger. 1973, The Crucial Year (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); and Geraint Hughes, “Britain, the Transatlantic Alliance and the ArabIsraeli War of 1973,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 3–40. 18  Scott, Allies Apart, 9.

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Heath, Nixon always felt somehow rejected and came to consider the Prime Minister’s attitude toward him as verging on condescension[.]19

In the first instalment of his memoirs, published in 1979, Kissinger claimed that Heath saw close relations with Washington as a barrier to British acceptance into the EEC.20 In an effort to prove Britain’s credentials to its putative European partners, in place of the special relationship, Heath favoured a strictly formal bilateral partnership: “a natural relationship.”21 The emphasis Heath gave to his deeply felt European convictions in his autobiography and in subsequent interviews support Kissinger’s argument.22 Revisionist scholars have examined in greater depth the archival record and have started to question the established view. Andrew Scott and Alex Spelling, for example, maintain that the primary cause of discord in the London– Washington axis in the early 1970s was due to Nixon and Kissinger’s highly secretive, “imperial” style of exercising presidential power and of orchestrating US foreign policy.23 By failing to consult with their oldest allies—including Britain and France—over major issues, including the White House’s opening to China, the termination of Bretton Woods, the ill-fated “Year of Europe”, the Indo-Pakistan War and the Yom Kippur War, for the Heath government, the Nixon administration’s unorthodox approach to foreign relations damaged what they saw as one of the integral components of the special relationship. Having been a committed Europhile for decades, these factors only served to encourage further Heath’s moves towards closer cooperation with her European partners. Of equal importance, in his analysis, Scott clarifies that Heath’s efforts to move Britain towards membership of the common market were, much like his predecessors in Downing Street, first and foremost about “renewing Britain’s status and role as a world power, especially given the increasing preponderance of the superpowers … However, … this did not necessarily dictate a rift or weakening of ties with the United States. In fact, central to Heath’s own reasoning was the need to reconfigure relations with Washington. It was only as part of a united Europe, he argued, that Britain could work in genuine partnership with the United States[.]”24  Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 602–603.  Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 933. 21  Ibid., 933; Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), 472. 22  Heath, Course of My Life, 123; Peter Hennessy and Caroline Antsey, Moneybags and Brains: The Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ Since 1945 (Glasgow: Strathclyde Analysis Papers/ BBC, 1990), 16–17. See also Brian Harrison, Finding a Role? The United Kingdom 1970–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 37. 23  Scott, Allies Apart, 12–13, 200–201; Alex Spelling, “Edward Heath and Anglo-American Relations 1970–1974: A Reappraisal,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 20, no. 4 (2009): 655. See also Nicklas H. Rossbach, Heath, Nixon and the Rebirth of the Special Relationship: Britain, the US and the EC, 1969–74 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 202–22. On the imperial presidency, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 24  Scott, Allies Apart, 11. For a similar argument, see Dave Riley, “Similar Impressions? AngloAmerican relations and South Asia, autumn 1971,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 16, no. 2 (2018), 165–80. 19 20

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Whether the Heath-Nixon years should be viewed by historians, as John Dumbrell argues, as a period of “transmogrification” for US-UK relations or not, for the purposes of this chapter, what matters is how the Heath years were perceived by the Labour shadow cabinet back in Britain.25 Whilst the day-to-­ day aspects of the institutional relationship between the United States and the UK continued to function (relatively) smoothly beneath the surface, the belief that the two governments were drifting further and further apart acted as a powerful stimulus for Wilson and Callaghan. They also found the idea that Nixon and Kissinger were formulating and implementing US foreign policy unilaterally and without their NATO allies to be far from ideal. As Wilson came increasingly to design himself as the ‘anti-Heath’ candidate, this also meant embodying not only an anti-European alternative, but also a more traditional and outwardly Atlanticist approach to British international policymaking.26 Callaghan  too concluded that, given Britain’s weakened global position and reduced status, any future government would be ill-advised to take any action that lacked full US support.27 To him, as Labour’s shadow foreign minister, this was his personal responsibility. Confident in his ability to charm, cajole, counsel, and persuade, Callaghan judged that British interests could be served best by remaining on as close a personal and friendly basis as possible with the leading policymakers in Washington. It is to the development of this strategy and mode of thinking that this chapter now turns.

The Return of the Wilson Government, 1974–1976 After Labour’s surprise re-election in March 1974, Wilson appointed Callaghan Foreign Secretary. Washington approved: Secretary of State Kissinger sang Callaghan’s praises to newly inaugurated President Gerald Ford. “I like Callaghan best,” Kissinger confessed, “He’s a very decent man.”28 Whilst Callaghan’s predecessor, Alec Douglas-Home, had acted as an important touchstone in Britain for the Nixon administration between 1970 and 1974, and had developed good working ties with the previous Secretary of State William Rogers and US Ambassador to the United Nations George H. W. Bush, he had never felt at home with Kissinger. As Home’s biographer noted, “Kissinger was never his soul-mate; there was something about the acerbic

 Dumbrell, A Special Relationship, 88.  Nicholas Henderson, Mandarin: The Diaries of an Ambassador (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 59; Luke A. Nichter, Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 164, 170; Lane, “Foreign and Defence Policy” in Seldon and Hickson (eds.), New Labour, 164; Guy Arnold, America and Britain: Was There Ever a Special Relationship? (London: Hurst & Company, 2014), 99. 27  David Allen, “James Callaghan: Foreign Secretary 1974–76,” in Kevin Theakston (ed.), British Foreign Secretaries Since 1974 (London: Routledge, 2004), 53. 28  ‘Memorandum of Conversation [hereafter Memcon] (Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft)’, 14 August 1974 (https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0314/1552749.pdf). 25 26

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directness and intellectual clarity of the American lawyer which rather discomforted Alec Home.”29 Upon entering office, Callaghan’s first major task was to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the EEC.  As Robert Saunders points out, with Wilson in 10 Downing Street and Callaghan at the helm of the FCO, the renegotiations were “in the hands of two men who had no strong emotional commitments on the subject, but who cared profoundly about its consequences for the Labour Party.”30 Hardly an instinctive “European” by nature, Callaghan set out as Foreign Secretary, firstly, to reverse what he interpreted to be the Heath government’s “excessive pandering” to Europe, and secondly to anaesthetize the question as a disruptive force within Labour Party ranks.31 Like every Labour Foreign Secretary dating back to Bevin, Callaghan accorded highest priority to repairing and maintaining the closest relations with Washington and the Commonwealth.32 Even though, in public, he occupied a position in the pro-European camp within Labour, during a discussion with a delegation from the US State Department at the FCO, Callaghan admitted to being an “agnostic, neither convinced in the Community’s favour nor against it.”33 In his first major foreign affairs statement in the House of Commons on 19 March 1974, which focused heavily upon the Labour government’s approach to the question of European integration, Callaghan made clear his preference for maintaining a strong bond with Washington by adeptly downplaying the importance of the EC without openly criticizing it: I must emphasise that we repudiate the view that Europe will emerge only out of a process of struggle against America. We do not agree that a Europe which excludes the fullest and most intimate co-operation with the United States is a desirable or attainable objective.34  D.R. Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), 431.  Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 81. 31  Allen, “James Callaghan” in Theakston (ed.), British Foreign Secretaries, 52. See also  the insights shared by the FCO’s Assistant Under-secretary for European Community Affairs between 1974–76: Sir Michael Butler, interviewed by Malcolm McBain, British Diplomatic Oral History Project (hereafter BDOHP), Churchill College, University of Cambridge, 16. 32  James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987), 295; Henderson, Mandarin, 59, 72; Bartlett, The Special Relationship, 134–5. 33  Record of a meeting between the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and the Counselor for the State Department Mr. Sonnenfeldt at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on the Morning of Friday 15 March, 1974, TNA FCO 73/192. 34  Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Foreign Affairs, 19 March 1974, Vol. 870, Cols. 858–989 [862]. For another example of Callaghan expressing similar sentiments, this time in a meeting of the European Council of Ministers, see, “Statement by James Callaghan (Luxembourg, 1 April 1974),” Bulletin of the European Communities, March 1974 (Luxembourg: Office for the Official Publications of the European Communities) 14–19. For a good overview of Callaghan’s attitude towards Europe in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, see the documents contained within TNA FCO 73/185 and TNA FCO 73/186. 29 30

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He echoed these remarks in a meeting with the eight incumbent British Ambassadors to the EEC nations the following day: [H]e could not at this stage say whether he preferred that Britain stay in the Community or not … if after renegotiation the Government felt that the Community corresponded with British interests and the realities of European relations with the United States we should stay in: otherwise we should not.35

Even after the referendum on British membership had taken place in June 1975, and the “Yes” vote had carried the day by a two-to-one majority, when Ford and Kissinger sent messages praising the British public’s decision, Callaghan’s replies still exhibited a lack of enthusiasm towards further European integration that went beyond mere diplomatic courtesy or politeness. Instead, he made a point of stressing the importance of the special relationship and Britain’s existing alliances: “More generally, I see the referendum result as strengthening those other bonds that link Britain to the Western world.”36 Whilst it may be the case that over time Callaghan’s hostility towards Europe faded, he remained pragmatic about Britain’s international position and at heart a committed Atlanticist.37 His belief in the immutability of the US-UK alliance was an article of faith, together with at a perhaps more instinctive level, “an enthusiasm for the open seas, begotten of his time in the Royal Navy.”38 Callaghan was intimately aware of the problematic hand he had been dealt and the severe limitations imposed upon British influence as a result of its declining economic and strategic power. To compensate for London’s increasingly peripheral international role—and, especially, to ensure that his government remained a factor in the diplomatic policymaking process in Washington—Callaghan believed it imperative to make use of Britain’s global reputation in combination with a resourceful, constructive, and overtly personal approach to diplomacy.39 To this end, he put considerable stock in the extensive array of personal bonds and friendships that he had built up over many years in government and, after Roy Jenkins’s resignation from the shadow Cabinet in 1972 over Labour’s stance on Europe, in his role as Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman.40 In particular, his close friendship with US Treasury 35  Quoted in Nichter, Richard Nixon and Europe, 174. See also Henderson, Mandarin, 59; Sir Brian Crowe, interviewed by Gwenda Scarlett, BDOHP, 15 October 2003, 29–30; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, interviewed by Malcolm McBain, BDOHP, 6 January 2004, 22. 36  On this, see Telegram, Ford to Wilson, 6 June 1975; Telegram, Kissinger to Callaghan, 6 June 1975; and Telegram, Callaghan to Kissinger, 6 June 1975, TNA FCO 82/615. 37  Mathias Haeussler, “A ‘Converted European’? James Callaghan and the ‘Europeanization’ of British Foreign Policy in the 1970s” in Gabrielle Clemens (ed.), The Quest for Europeanization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Multiple Process (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017), 154, 158–60, 163. 38  Ann Lane, “Foreign and Defence policy” in Seldon and Hickson (eds.), New Labour, 155; Saunders, Yes to Europe!, 381. 39  Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 622. 40  On Callaghan’s period as Shadow Foreign Secretary, see Morgan, Callaghan, 373–407.

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Secretary Henry “Joe” Fowler and other high-ranking personnel within the Johnson administration had, in Callaghan’s view, gone a long way towards helping to protect the pound in the late 1960s.41 He admired “Gentleman Joe’s” unpretentious attitude, modesty, and believed him to be sympathetic to Britain’s plight.42 He was also a prominent advocate of Fowler’s suggestion for a seminar of the five major finance ministers intended to harmonize their respective economic policies. As Callaghan’s private papers reveal, Fowler too came to look upon their association, both officially and personally, as “one of the chief rewards” of his tenure at the US Treasury.43 Much as it would occupy a central role in Callaghan’s relationships with Kissinger, Ford and, to a lesser extent Carter, later in his parliamentary career, one of the principal reasons the two men got on so well was due to a shared penchant for informality, and a fondness of gallows humour. In a message sent just days after Fowler had undergone an operation to remove his gall bladder, Callaghan joshed that “you left that bladder twelve months longer than you should have!” Fowler replied: “Apparently, it was one of the worst gall bladders on record and I have much to be thankful for in that it didn’t hit me in a Group of Ten meeting or at Rio or on some other equally inappropriate occasion.”44 Badinage aside, whilst it may be the case that Fowler’s primary motivation in labouring hard to avoid the devaluation of sterling was due to the threat of a run on the dollar, to Callaghan their friendship had yielded demonstrably beneficial results for the British government and for British interests.45 Years later, Callaghan argued that a personalized approach to diplomacy had several obvious benefits. “I think to have close personal relationships means that you have an understanding of the other man’s point of view, the way he is likely to

41  Callaghan, Time and Chance, 185–7. See also Jonathan Colman, A ‘Special Relationship’?: Harold Wilson, Lyndon B.  Johnson and Anglo-American Relations ‘at the Summit, 1964–1968 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) 78–81. For the official record of Fowler’s visits to Britain and meetings with Callaghan, see TNA PREM 13/674 and TNA PREM 13/3015. 42  Gentleman Joe was a nickname given to Fowler by his Yale classmates. See Robert D. Hershey Jr., “Henry Fowler Is Dead at 91; Former Treasury Secretary,” New York Times, 5 January 2000; Callaghan, Time & Chance, 186. 43  Fowler to Callaghan, 3 December 1968, Callaghan Papers, Box 108, B[odleian] L[ibrary], University of Oxford. 44  Callaghan to Fowler, 7 August 1968; Fowler to Callaghan, 14 August 1968, Callaghan Papers, Box 108, BL.  By mentioning ‘Rio’, Fowler was referring to the address he gave to the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund, in Brazil, in September 1967.  45  For useful overviews, see Glen O’Hara, “The Limits of US Power: Transatlantic Financial Diplomacy under the Johnson and Wilson administrations, October 1964–November 1968,” Contemporary European History 12, no. 3 (2003): 1–22; Scott Newton “The Sterling Devaluation of 1967, the International Economy and Post-War Social Democracy,” English Historical Review 125, no. 515 (2010): 912–45; Raj Roy, “The Battle for Bretton Woods: America, Britain and the International Financial Crisis of October 1967–March 1968,” Cold War History 2, no. 2 (2002): 33–60.

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think, and also a measure of his integrity, his trust; whether he is telling you the truth, [and] how far he is willing to go.”46 Much as Macmillan  had in the early 1960s, Callaghan reasoned that this approach to international diplomacy at a heads of government level could also offer an opportunity to mitigate Britain’s reduced circumstances and allow the Labour government to exert influence on the United States. He would devote even greater amounts of time and energy to cultivating close personal relationships with the leading policymakers in Washington during his time at the FCO.

Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger To commentators and contemporaries alike, Callaghan’s relationship with Republican US President Gerald Ford was remarkably close. His official biographer thought Callaghan’s relationship with Ford to have been “an excellent one from the start, marked by a good deal of personal warmth on each side.”47 Their bond was defined less by obvious ideological and political differences, and much more by generational instincts and similarities. “They got along wonderfully,” remembered Chris DeMuth, Ford’s friend and former president of the conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Looking back at their time in government, DeMuth recalled that: Their politics were very, very different. Their political viewpoints were very, very different. But they had both had very, very challenging terms in office. And they had both been retired earlier than they had wanted to … But their personal friendship and the fact that their political experiences had certain things in common, led to a genuine warmth of friendship and affection.48

Equally important for DeMuth was Callaghan’s emotional intelligence and ability to be non-partisan in his outlook: Callaghan was a man who, although he was a tough partisan when he was leading the Labor [sic] Party, he did have capacity … to really transcend partisan differences, to put himself in the shoes of the other person; to understand different points of view and to argue with a real twinkle in his eye.49

46  How to be Foreign Secretary, Pres. Michael Cockerell, Dir. Anne Tyerman, Prod. Alison Cahn, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 4 January 1998. 47  Morgan, Callaghan, 438. For others who emphasize the closeness of their friendship, see Dobson, Anglo-American Relations, 143; Dumbrell, A Special Relationship, 101–5; Mieczkowski, Challenges of the 1970s, 300–1; Ann Lane, “Foreign and Defence Policy” in Seldon and Hickson (eds.), New Labour, 162. 48  Chris DeMuth, interviewed by Richard Norton Smith, Gerald Ford Oral History Project, 16 July 2009 (https://geraldrfordfoundation.org/centennial-docs/oralhistory/wp-content/ uploads/2013/05/Chris-Demuth.pdf). 49  Ibid.

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Furthermore, Ford’s “gregarious nature,” paired with a shared love of grim and ironic humour ensured the closeness of their friendship.50 In late November and early December 1976, in the midst of Britain’s most serious economic crisis since the Second World War, Callaghan—who by this point had been elevated to the role of Prime Minister—found himself buffeted between conflicting external and internal pressures. On the one hand, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with which his government had conducted tense and prolonged negotiations, was trying to cajole Britain into further deflationary measures before they would be willing to grant a bailout loan. Meanwhile, both in parliament and within the Parliamentary Labour Party Callaghan faced determined resistance towards deflationary measures. As Tony Benn noted, one such telephone exchange with Ford, who was entering his final weeks in office after losing the 1976 Presidential election to Jimmy Carter, made plain their shared penchant for dark humour: Jim: Ford: Jim: Ford:

Sorry to bother you, Gerry. Well, don’t worry, Jim, I expect you’re busy. Well, it’s just a question of which of us remains in office longer. Well, I sincerely hope you succeed. When will the Cabinet decide [on whether or not to accept the IMF’s demands]? Jim: By 1 pm. Ford: You might be out of office first …51 According to the British Ambassador in Washington, prior to assuming the presidency, Ford had held a high opinion of Callaghan from as early as May 1974, after the UK Foreign Secretary had delivered a sentimental speech to a National Press Club breakfast in Washington, stressing the importance of the “three C’s–consultation, co-ordination and co-operation” to help revive the US-UK relationship. The UK Embassy reported back that the President found the address to be “the most reassuring statement on the Alliance and on the transatlantic partnership he had read in a long time.”52 During their first meeting in the Oval Office, on 24 September 1974, Callaghan had a wide-ranging discussion with Ford, who went out of his way to praise the Foreign Secretary’s first parliamentary speech, reassuring that it

50  Mark D.  Harmon, The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 1–2. On Ford’s sense of humour, see Gerald R. Ford, Humor and the Presidency (New York: Arbor House, 1987). My thanks to Rivers Gambrell for this reference. 51  Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–76 (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 672 [Thursday 2 December 1976]. For the official record of this meeting, see Cabinet conclusions, CM(76)36, 2 December 1976, TNA CAB 128/60/14. 52  Peter Ramsbotham to Callaghan, 27 May 1974, TNA FCO 73/196. For press coverage of this address, see “Callaghan stresses relations with the U.S.,” Irish Times, 22 May 1974; Hella Pick, “Callaghan Stresses Need for Consultation with the US,” Guardian, 22 May 1974.

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was very well received in the US capital.53 In fact, so genial was the encounter that the White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen was forced afterward to deny that Ford was biased towards a Labour victory in the upcoming general election, reminding journalists in Washington that the President had met with Conservative leader Edward Heath only two weeks before.54 As was to be expected, however, Ford recognized that Callaghan’s closest association while at the FCO would be with Kissinger. The two men struck up a good working rapport that lasted, like  so many of the bonds Callaghan made during his career, long after they had both left office.55 Certainly, there were some early teething problems as the pair clashed over how to approach the Carnation revolution in Portugal; how to grapple with Guatemalan military encroachments in the former British colony of Belize; and, most obviously, over the Cyprus crisis, from July–August 1974, where Kissinger was at least initially highly critical of Callaghan and British policy.56 Though each shared a determination to reduce tensions and to do their “utmost to keep the Soviets out of Cyprus,” they differed on methodology and tactics, and failed to develop a coordinated policy. Callaghan and the British believed that the only real deterrent to Turkish aggression was the threat of combined Anglo-American military action. Moreover, the solution forwarded by HMG was to call on the Greeks to replace (and subsequently, when it became clear that this would not placate Turkish fears, to withdraw) the National Guard officers complicit in the 53  Ford had been keen to speak with Callaghan earlier than this. In mid-August, he had commandeered a telephone conversation between Callaghan and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to let the PM know he was “darn grateful” for all that Callaghan had done to find a solution to the troublesome Cyprus question. “[W]hen the chips are down[,] it’s only the United States who can really pull the chestnuts out of the fire,” Callaghan replied, before wryly adding, “and there are times when not even you can do that. This was one of them.” Record of a Telephone Conversation between the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and Dr. Kissinger, 14 August 1974, TNA FCO 82/471. See also, Note from John Killick to Private Secretary (Anthony Acland), 28 August 1974, TNA FCO 73/194. The fact that Callaghan made a deliberate effort to stress AngloAmerican ties in his opening House of Commons speech earned him glowing praise from, among others, Chairman and Chief Executive of Chase Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller: “Your words brought warmth and cheer to many American hearts, including my own.” Rockefeller to Callaghan, 2 April 1974, Callaghan Papers, Box 108, BL. 54  ‘Statement for White House Press Secretary: President’s Meeting with UK Foreign Minister Callaghan’, 24 September 1974, 2, Ron Nessen Papers, Box 125, Gerald R.  Ford Presidential Library [hereafter GRFL], Ann Arbor, Michigan. 55  Ibid, 319–320; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1982) 933. 56  In Callaghan’s eyes, Kissinger “had something of a blind spot over Portugal.” As he confessed to the American Ambassador in London Elliot Richardson, he found the secretary of state’s view that the country was on the verge of communist takeover and, therefore, “beyond saving” to be “apocalyptic.” For the British perspective, see Record of a Meeting between the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and the U.S.  Ambassador at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at 5 pm on Monday 19 May 1975, TNA FCO 82/627; Telegram, “Talks in Washington: Portugal,” Ramsbotham to FCO, 9 May 1975, TNA PREM 16/730. For the U.S. angle, see Richardson (U.S. Embassy, London) to State Department, 20 May 1975, National Security Advisor: Presidential Country Files for Europe and Canada, Box 16, Folder 2, United Kingdom—State Department Telegrams, To Secstate—EXDIS (2), GRFL.

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coup. Kissinger judged this approach naïve, believing that the new government was primarily motivated by a desire to prove that it could “stand for action,” and that they viewed the unfolding Cyprus crisis as an opportunity for a “quick success.” They were acting, in his estimation, “a bit like a bull in a China shop.” Kissinger was unwilling to put military pressure on the Turks and believed that the withdrawal of the National Guard officers would lead to chaos rather than stability. Instead, he resorted to personal pleas to both Athens and Ankara.57 Nonetheless, in many other major foreign policy areas, from European integration, to preserving détente with the Soviet Union, to negotiating international trade policy, and in joint efforts to bring Rhodesia to settlement, there was a renewed closeness and trust in US–UK relations as Callaghan and Kissinger worked hand-in-hand.58 Over time, the Secretary of State came to view Callaghan, as did many in the Carter administration after, as an un-stuffy old hand, a “wise old bird,” and a useful source of advice, counsel, and contacts due to his vast experience in international affairs. This was an identity Callaghan had crafted for himself carefully and a role he was only too pleased to play. Moreover, he brought with him to the role of Foreign Secretary a certain kindness and emotional intelligence—a human touch—fusing the diplomatic and the personal naturally and effortlessly.59 Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau recalled finding him “a very warm personality.”60 Likewise, for Sir John Weston, who served as Assistant Private Secretary to Callaghan in the Foreign Office from 1974 to 1976, the care and affection that the Foreign Secretary showed towards his American colleague certainly strengthened their relationship: “Callaghan was very good with people at the kind of touchy-feely thing, and that’s why he got

57  Morgan, Callaghan, 448.  On this, see also  Jan Asmussen, Cyprus at War: Diplomacy and Conflict during the 1974 Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 8–9, 64–5, 195, 289–95; Kissinger to Callaghan, 16 November 1974, TNA FCO 73/364. For an overview of US–UK differences see Record of a Meeting between the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and the United States Assistant Secretary of State [Hartman] at UKMIS Geneva on Sunday 11 August at 12 Noon, TNA FCO 73/194. Callaghan (and Wilson) blamed the lack of a coordinated AngloAmerican policy on Kissinger’s preoccupation with the Watergate affair. See Note of a Conversation between the Prime Minister and King Constantine of Greece at the London home of Lord Mountbatten at 10.00 am on Wednesday 10 July 1974, TNA FCO 73/191. 58  I have argued elsewhere that Callaghan’s decision to launch a fresh Rhodesian initiative, in a House of Commons speech on 22 March 1976, was tailored specifically to encourage further involvement from Kissinger and the United States. Todd Carter, “Clinging like barnacles to the old hull of Empire”: Anglo-American Relations, the Labour Party, and the Rhodesian Crisis, 1963–1980 (DPhil Thesis: University of Oxford, forthcoming). 59  On emotions in diplomacy and international relations see Hall, Emotional Diplomacy; Emma Hutchinson and Roland Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,” International Theory 6, no. 3 (2014): 491–514; Maéva Clément and Eric Sangar (eds.), Researching Emotions in International Relations: Methodological Perspectives on the Emotional Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and  Barbara Keys and Claire Yorke, ‘Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat’, Political Psychology 40, no. 6 (2019) 1235–1249. 60  Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Memoirs (Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1993), 222.

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on well with Kissinger.”61 For instance, the British Ambassador in Washington Peter Ramsbotham reported that Kissinger was: Immensely touched and pleased when you [Callaghan] spontaneously telephoned him, on hearing of the [US] Cabinet reshuffles, simply to ask whether he was all right. I know what he has said to me, and also from close friends of his, that this gesture, at that time of especial anxiety, meant a lot to him. Indeed, being a man who personalises so much of his foreign policy, he has contrasted your response with the reactions of some of his other foreign colleagues, and speaks of you openly as “my friend.”62

Another crucial factor was Callaghan’s willingness to be creative and adaptable in his approach to diplomacy. Much to Kissinger’s approval, the British Foreign Secretary was willing to engage the Secretary of State in his favoured format of private and discreet communication—bypassing, to a large extent, the State Department. This ensured that informality remained central to US–UK international policymaking. To the delight of many FCO officials, this led to a more direct form of dialogue and exchange, via the Washington Embassy, alongside “the passage of a large number of personal messages between the two of them.”63 Callaghan and Kissinger shared humourous and playful banter that also helped cement personal relations. For instance, Kissinger wrote to Callaghan shortly after he had become Prime Minister congratulating him on his “elevation from the lowly position of Foreign Secretary,” concluding, “I hope you agree that I concealed my jealousy quite effectively.”64 Similarly, in Callaghan’s valedictory letter to Kissinger before the change of administration in the United States, in January 1977, he wrote that: “There is no doubt that history will record you as among the greatest of American Secretaries of State and I shall certainly add my own modest footnote to that judgement,” before suggesting that, but for “that act of impetuosity in 1776, I could have sent you to the House of Lords. Just brood on that.”65 The renewal of personal ties after the change of government in Britain could not undo the fundamental truth that the UK was no longer a global power.66 No matter how successful Callaghan may have been in repairing and renewing ties with his personalized approach to diplomacy, the relationships he cultivated during his tenure at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, much like the power-dynamic between the UK and the United States overall, remained necessarily one-sided and unequal. Notwithstanding this, Callaghan’s goal in  Sir John Weston, interviewed by Liz Cox, BDOHP, 13 June 2001, 29.  Ramsbotham to Callaghan, 24 November 1975, TNA FCO 73/204. 63  Ramsbotham to Acland, 24 April 1974, TNA FCO 73/196. 64  Kissinger to Callaghan, 5 June 1976, TNA PREM 16/1157. 65  Letter, Callaghan to Kissinger, 23 January 1977, TNA PREM 16/1484. 66  James E.  Cronin, Global Rules: America, Britain and a Disordered World (London: Yale University Press, 2014), 64. 61 62

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approaching Ford and Kissinger in the manner that he did was never intended to reverse this trend in US–UK relations. By making his diplomacy more personalized, Callaghan hoped to see beneficial results for British interests by listening to, advising, and convincing his US colleagues. As Allen argues out, the principal advantage Kissinger, for example, could bestow upon Callaghan was “to listen to him and to make sure that others knew that he [Kissinger] listened to him.”67 Mindful as he was of Britain’s circumstances and economic difficulties, it is difficult to conclude how Callaghan could have been more successful or achieved more in this effort.

Callaghan Becomes Prime Minister, April 1976 Callaghan’s first 100 days in office earned a glowing (if perhaps naive) performance report from the Americans: Embassy London gives Prime Minister Callaghan high marks for his initial three months in office. Cautious but confident, he has reduced inflation, stabilized unemployment, and increased economic growth; used his considerable influence within the Labor [sic]movement to keep the unions pulling with the government; defused the hatred [Harold] Wilson engendered in the parliamentary party; and skilfully dealt with the opposition in the Commons.

Nevertheless, it did caution that the Labour government’s “first major economic test” was looming on the horizon.68 The beginning of Callaghan’s premiership saw Britain engulfed in financial crisis. Due to a combination of a speculative attacks on sterling, the fiscal deficit and, eventually, worsening recession, the Prime Minister was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout loan. To lessen the likely demands placed upon his government by the IMF, and to secure a safety net loan designed to protect sterling against future currency speculation, Callaghan spent the second half of 1976 trying to secure international support from both Gerald Ford, who was known to be sympathetic, and the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, another close ally.69 Callaghan’s first major effort came at the International Economic Summit in Puerto Rico on 27 June. Prospects did not seem good, however, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey found US Treasury personnel thoroughly unsympathetic to his requests to substitute the $5.3 billion loan (which had been agreed with the major central banks earlier that month) for a more long-term stabilization plan. Nevertheless, Callaghan met  Allen, “James Callaghan” in Theakston (ed.), Foreign Secretaries, 59, 63.  The same report also stressed that Callaghan had yet to deal with the “critical issue of Scotland’s role in the United Kingdom.” Memorandum for the President from Brent Scowcroft, Presidential Daily Briefing, 7/14/76, NSC: White House Situation Room, Presidential Daily Briefings, 1974–77, Box 15, GRFL. 69  Kevin Hickson, The IMF Crisis of 1976 and British Politics (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 92, 115, 118; Harmon, IMF Crisis, 165, 169–72, 187–9; Callaghan, Time and Chance, 419–20. 67 68

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with Ford for 90 minutes to try to secure his help.70 Quite evidently willing to exploit American concerns over global stability and security, just as he had done with Henry Fowler a decade earlier, the Prime Minister hinted to the President that, without significant assistance in the economic sphere, the UK might be forced to cut back its commitment of NATO troops on the Rhine and, by implication, that the UK would no longer be able to play their traditional role as the United States’ erstwhile Cold War ally. Clearly having struck a chord with Ford, whilst no formal agreement was reached Callaghan left the summit encouraged by the verbal support he had been offered.71 According to White House economic advisor Robert Hormats, Ford was strongly committed to helping his “biggest buddy” Callaghan.72 At the annual Labour party conference, in Blackpool, Callaghan delivered a powerful address on the perils of excessive state spending.73 Afterwards, he tried via a series of telephone calls, to push the White House further to apply pressure on the US financial authorities; to guarantee that a standby-loan would be forthcoming, and to make the case for American assistance in creating a safety net for sterling balances.74 Encouraged by several colleagues, the Prime Minister also made strenuous efforts to try to use his relationship with Kissinger to cajole the IMF into providing preferential loan conditions as well. Though the British were told officially that no help would be forthcoming from the United States, they were left hopeful due to the fact that there appeared to be a division of opinion in Washington. This can be traced back to a confusing message Ford had relayed to Callaghan, after misinterpreting a brief prepared by National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, that the United States would “do whatever we can to be helpful.” Naturally, in London, this was interpreted to mean that the Americans would use their influence with the IMF.75 Permanent Under-Secretary to the Treasury Douglas Wass maintained that Callaghan was informed subsequently (and repeatedly) that the United States expected Britain to broker a deal with the IMF first, before any safety net loan would be negotiated.76 At the same time, whilst Ford and Kissinger appeared to be more willing to help the British, US Treasury Secretary William Simon, Under-Secretary Ed Yeo and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Arthur Burns were determined that the United States should not get involved and that no deal on sterling balances would be forthcoming until a settlement  Hickson, IMF Crisis, 92.  Callaghan to Ford, 22 July 1976, NSC: Kissinger-Scowcroft West Wing Office Files, 1969–1977, General Subject File: United Kingdom (21), Box 27, GRFL. 72  Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and The Call of National Security (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 190–1. 73  The speech was written by Callaghan’s son-in-law, the economics editor at the Times, Peter Jay, whom the prime minister would go on to appoint as Britain’s Ambassador in Washington in May 1977. 74  Callaghan, Time and Chance, 429–30, 499. 75  Quoted in Robb, Strained Partnership, 183. 76  Douglas Wass, Decline to Fall: The Making of British Macro-Economic Policy and the 1976 IMF Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 251–2. 70 71

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was reached with the IMF itself.77 In an effort to take advantage of these mixed signals and the division of opinion in Washington, Callaghan sent Harold Lever, the Duchy of Lancaster, to the US capital to cajole Ford and Kissinger to come to the UK’s aid. Moreover, the Prime Minister also tried to make use of his personal friendship with the President by writing to him: You have been a good friend to us, and I know that you remain so. What I am asking is that you and Henry will take a close interest in the discussions of our economic problems over the next few weeks, to ensure that the orthodoxy of the monetarists is tempered by wider political considerations that can have an effect not only on Britain's domestic scene but have repercussions in the broader world scene.78

Though Lever did not succeed in leveraging the UK’s security commitments to extract fuller US support, or in achieving Callaghan’s wish for him to persuade Kissinger to intervene personally in the UK–IMF negotiations; by appealing to his friend the Secretary of State through Lever, Callaghan was able to get the United States to agree to provide a safety net guarantee.79 Confusion aside, whether Ford was sympathetic to the British government’s cause or not he was unable to offer help to the extent that Callaghan had envisaged for two reasons. First, following a demanding and ultimately unsuccessful Presidential election campaign, Ford had become a lame duck prior to the critical stages of the IMF negotiations. As a result, both his and Secretary of State Kissinger’s political clout in Washington had all but disappeared. Second, as Burk and Cairncross have uncovered, there was deep division within  the Washington policymaking elite that lead to many a conspiracy theory—on both sides of the Atlantic—as to what, exactly, the US financial authorities were trying to accomplish by adopting such a harsh-minded approach toward Britain’s financial problems.80 For instance, Bernard Donoughue, Callaghan’s chief policy advisor, maintained that: [I]n the middle of this crisis I was privately summoned to the United States Embassy for a secret meeting with a very senior official there who said “You should be aware of something, which is that parts of the [UK] Treasury are in very deep cahoots with parts of the US Treasury and with certain others in Germany who are of very right-wing inclination and they are absolutely committed to getting the IMF here [to Britain] and if it brings about the break-up of this government, they will be very, very happy.” He actually showed me a 77  Healey would later describe Treasury Secretary Simon’s political outlook as “far to the right of Genghis Khan.” Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 419–20. 78   Callaghan to Ford, 12 November 1976 (www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0351/1555864.pdf). 79  Kathleen Burk & Alec Cairncross, Goodbye, Great Britain: the 1976 IMF Crisis (London: Yale University Press, 1992), 82; Robb, Strained Partnership, 186–7. See also Memcon, November 151,976 (www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111683). 80  Burk and Cairncross, Goodbye, Great Britain, 75–83; Hickson, IMF Crisis, 119–120.

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copy of a secret communication between London and Washington which seemed to confirm this view.81

As one memo from Scowcroft to Kissinger confirms, the State Department also speculated that there might have been some “hanky-panky going on between the Germans, Arthur Burns, and [the U.S.] Treasury, with the view to delaying the process [of developing a plan to fund sterling balances].”82 Nevertheless, as several others have argued, no conclusive evidence exists to support such allegations.83 Whilst Thomas Robb and Daniel Sargent are correct in pointing out that, during the crisis, Callaghan was unable to secure from Ford the level of support he had hoped for, during the opening months of the IMF crisis, this setback did not mean that his personal overtures were entirely unsuccessful.84 Ford’s remarks at a Republican National Committee Dinner on 12 October show that the President had genuine sympathy for his friend’s cause. In praise of Callaghan’s Blackpool speech, Ford commended the British Prime Minister as “a very courageous leader” and a “dear and respected all[y].”85 Whilst stressing that he had no desire to see his government intervene directly in the IMF negotiations, Ford did assure Callaghan on 26 November that “we are preparing ourselves to deal with sterling balances … You can, as I indicated, be assured that we intend to move sympathetically when substantial agreement has been reached with the Fund.”86 If the dashing of Callaghan’s early hopes that American financial support might avert the need for Britain to approach the IMF at all demonstrated the limits of his (and his government’s) influence in  Kathleen Burk, “Symposium: 1976 IMF Crisis,” Contemporary Record 3, no. 2 (1989): 43.  Memorandum, Brent Scowcroft to Kissinger (via Jack Covey/Peter Rodman/Hal Collins), December 8, 1976. Two days later, Scowcroft even suggested to Kissinger that he might “wish to call Schmidt to find out what is really going on with the Germans. After all, it has been Schmidt who has been the principal energizer of this whole thing and it thus seems odd for the Germans now to be hanging back.” Memorandum, Scowcroft to Kissinger, December 9, 1976, NSC: Trip Briefing Books and Cables for Henry Kissinger, 1974–1976, Kissinger Trip File, December 7–12, 1976—Brussels, London TOHAK, Box 46, GRFL. 83  Hickson, IMF Crisis, 91–92; Edmund Dell, A Hard Pounding: Politics and Economic Crisis, 1974–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 250, 272; Leo Pliatzky quoted in Burke (ed.), “IMF Crisis,” 43. See also Kiyoshi Hirowatari, Britain and European Monetary Cooperation, 1964–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 160. 84  Robb, Strained Partnership, 200, 218; Daniel J.  Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 196. 85  Later on, he did cite Britain’s economic troubles as a lesson for Americans on the danger of “too much government, too much spending on borrowed money.” Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks at a Republican National Committee Dinner in New York City,” October 121,976. The American Presidency Project (www.presidency.ucsb.edu). 86  In addition, Ford also informed the British Prime Minister that “Bill Simon and Ed Yeo … know my thinking. They will be very much aware of my support for your efforts to stabilize the British economy and of the political context in which I see the situation.” Letter, Ford to Callaghan, 26 Nov 1976, NSC: Trip Briefing Books and Cables for Henry Kissinger, 1974–1976, Kissinger Trip File: September 13–24, 1976—South Africa, London—TOSEC (9), Box 44, GRFL. 81 82

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Washington, the emergence subsequently of an American agreement to help resolve the troublesome issue of sterling balances did evidence for Callaghan that the faith he had placed in his friendships with Ford and Kissinger and his efforts at personal diplomacy could yield results for British interests.87 Certainly, his decision to heap encomia upon the retiring President during a speech on Britain’s troubled economy before the Lord Mayor’s banquet, in November 1976, would suggest that this was how he thought. 88

Jimmy Carter’s Election The election of the Democrat Jimmy Carter to the White House represented a great unknown. Whilst Ford’s electoral defeat came as no surprise,89 there was much speculation in Whitehall about its consequences for the Anglo-American relationship. “We know less about President-elect Carter and his future intentions than has been the case with any other recent incoming President,” reported one British official.90 Nevertheless, an opportunity soon arose for policymakers in London to ensure that the new administration in Washington looked upon Britain “as a natural partner for consultation.”91 Eager to strengthen diplomatic relations with America’s foremost allies—and to secure their support for a series of international economic stimulus measures—after just two days in office, Carter dispatched his Vice-President, Walter Mondale, on a fact-finding tour of Western Europe and Japan. Stopping over in London on 27 January 1977, Mondale assured the British Prime Minister personally, during a meeting in Downing St., that the Carter administration sought continuity in the US’ friendships—“especially with the United Kingdom”.92 Once more, as Bernard Donoughue observed, Callaghan’s personal diplomacy was  Dobson, Anglo-American Relations, 145; Morgan, Callaghan, 589.  See Memorandum for the President from Brent Scowcroft, “Speech by Prime Minister Callaghan,” 1, 16 November 1976, NSC: Files, Presidential Country Files for Europe and Canada, Country File: United Kingdom (8), Box 15, GRFL. 89  Despite their ideological and party differences, such was the strength of the bond between Callaghan and Ford, the Labour prime minister did at one point tell Kissinger that he ‘praise[d] you [Ford] to every American who comes through London, and he expressed confidence you [Ford] would win.” See Telegram, Kissinger to Ford/Scowcroft, August 51,976, NSC: Trip Briefing Books and Cables for Henry Kissinger, 1974–1976, Kissinger Trip Files: August 4–11, 1976—London, Tehran, Kabul, Islamabad, Deuaville, The Hague—HACTO, Box 40, GRFL. 90  Memorandum by Ramsey Melhuish (North American Department), “Future US Foreign Policy,” 14 November 1976, TNA FCO 36/1825. See also, Interview with Jeremy Greenstock, Tackley, Oxfordshire, 18 April 2019. 91  “Steering Brief: Visit of Vice-President Mondale: 27 January,” 24 January 1977, TNA FCO 82/761. 92  Note of a meeting between the prime minister and the vice-president of the United States at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 27 January 1977 at 17:20, TNA FCO 82/762. For an American summary of the meeting, see “Mondale’s Meeting with Callaghan, 27 January 1977,” US Embassy (London) to Cyrus Vance, 29 January 1977, NLC-19-29-1-15-3, Jimmy Carter Library [hereafter JCL], Atlanta, Georgia. See also, Interview with Walter F.  Mondale, Minneapolis, MN, 3 October 2018. 87 88

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in full operation, as he and Mondale were to be found singing songs and hymns together one evening at an informal dinner in Downing Street.93 Callaghan’s hopes of persuading Carter that Britain remained a valuable ally in spite of its economic and military decline were boosted considerably by the roaring success of the Prime Minister’s first visit to the White House, two months later.94 Though initially wary of the President’s “short fuse” and religiosity—Donoughue feared Carter to be “in daily communication with God”— and concerned by the Georgian’s inexperience in international affairs, Callaghan was overwhelmed by the warmth of the reception he received and the success of their business meetings.95 From their very first handshake, “all was jollity” between the two leaders, and a spirit of “uncommon jocularity” soon descended.96 As Carter explained to laughter at a dinner in Callaghan’s honour, he and the Prime Minister had much in common: both were farmers, Baptists, and erstwhile naval officers; both met their wives in a churchyard; both had deeply religious sisters also called Carter; and both had unemployment and inflation problems in their countries.97 Such emphasis upon similarity of backgrounds and experiences was encouraged by both the Foreign Office and some of Callaghan’s ministerial colleagues.98 So relaxed was the Prime Minister that in reply he told the President, “I assure you we arrive in peace and in Concorde”—a playful jibe at the noise surrounding the British-French supersonic jet’s landing rights in the United States.99 Carter concluded his remarks by stating, “I don’t 93  Bernard Donoughue, Prime Minister: The Conduct of Policy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 162; Bernard Donoughue, Downing Street Diary Volume Two: With James Callaghan in No. 10 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), 139 [27 January 1977]. As Donoughue recalls, Mondale sang the Will Fyffe music hall classic, I Belong to Glasgow, and Callaghan retorted with a rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. 94  As if to emphasize further the stock that the Carter administration held in the special relationship, Callaghan was the first foreign leader to receive such an invitation. Nonetheless, as one background paper clarifies, White House staffers did also recognize that the prime minister was intent on gaining “as much prestige and popular support as possible from his US visit.” Background Paper, “Callaghan on the Ropes?,” undated [February 1977], National Security Affairs (Brzezinski Material), VIP Visit File: United Kingdom, Prime Minister Callaghan, 3/10–11/77: Briefing Book II, Box 14, JCL. 95  Ashton, “A Local Terrorist Made Good,” 115; Donoughue, Downing Street Diary, 157 [7 March 1977]. 96  Fred Emery, “All is Jollity at First Callaghan-Carter Meeting,” Times, 11 March 1977. 97  Jimmy Carter, “Visit of Prime Minister Callaghan of Great Britain. Toasts of the President and the Prime Minister at a Dinner Honoring the Prime Minister,” March 10, 1977, The American Presidency Project (www.presidency.ucsb.edu) 98  Cledwyn Hughes Diary, 8 March 1977, 84, Lord Cledwyn Hughes Papers, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. As Berenskoetter and van Hoef tell, this method of emphasizing similarity in both leaders’ biographical narratives is a tried and tested means of building personal rapport and consensus. See, Berneskoetter and van Hoef, “Friendship and Foreign Policy,” in Thies (ed.), Oxford Encyclopaedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, 749. 99  Ibid. See also Donnie Radcliffe and Karen De Witt, “White House Dinner for British Prime Minister Callaghan,” Washington Post, 12 March 1977. As one telegram sent by Callaghan to Carter confirms, civil aviation in general, and policy towards landing rights for Concorde in particular, was felt to be the only outstanding problem in Anglo-American relations in the run-up to

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believe I have ever met anyone who was a distinguished political leader with whom I immediately felt more at home and a greater inner sense of genuine and personal friendship.” As British Foreign Secretary David Owen recalled later, Callaghan echoed these sentiments by quoting Shakespeare on friendship: “Grapple them to thy heart with hoops of steel.” The Prime Minister also gifted the President “some worsted fabric with the almost imperceptible repeat of the letters JC, forming a silver silk pinstripe, which he had already had made up for himself into a suit.”100 The March 1977 Washington visit was for Callaghan an outright success. Carter’s hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski assured British officials that, “The President really meant it (that a special relationship existed) [and] he was not saying it to please ...”101 In addition, over the coming months, Brzezinski was impressed by “how quickly Callaghan succeeded in establishing himself as Carter’s favorite, writing him friendly little notes, calling, talking like a genial older uncle, and lecturing Carter in a pleasant manner on the intricacies of inter-allied politics.”102 “Callaghan literally co-opted Carter,” he wrote in his memoirs, “in the course of a few relatively brief personal encounters.”103 Callaghan achieved another triumph of personal diplomacy in May 1977, when Carter visited the UK for the Third World Economic Summit at Downing Street. Accepting an invitation from the Prime Minister to arrive several days early, Carter had been keen to visit Laugharne, the Welsh home of the poet Dylan Thomas, whose work he adored. Callaghan, however, persuaded the US President to travel instead to the North East of England, to Newcastle, Sunderland, and Durham.104 Unsurprisingly, there was an underlying political motivation to Callaghan’s suggestion, as the Labour Party was expected to suffer heavy defeats in  local elections to be held there  the day before Carter’s intended visit. Nonetheless, on the way from the airport the two shared a car with Ernest Armstrong, the Labour MP for North West Durham, who gave Carter a few tips on how to connect immediately with the people of Newcastle.105 After the Lord Mayor Hugh White had conferred upon the President the the first Carter-Callaghan summit in Washington. Callaghan to Carter, 3 March 1977, TNA PREM 16/1485; Briefing Memorandum, “Note for a Meeting of Home, Overseas and Defence Group of Permanent Secretaries on 21 February,” Ramsbotham to Sir Michael Palliser, 16 February 1977, TNA PREM 16/1484. See also Alan P. Dobson, A History of International Civil Aviation: From its Origins through Transformative Evolution (London: Routledge, 2017), Chapter 4. 100  Owen, Time to Declare (London: Michael Joseph, 1991), 285; Interview with David Owen, London, 17 December 2018. 101  Robb, Jimmy Carter, 30. 102  Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 291. 103  Ibid. 104  Jimmy Carter, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 145; Callaghan, Time and Chance, 481–2. See also Daily Diary of President Jimmy Carter, 6 May 1977 (www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/diary/1977/d050677t.pdf). 105  Armstrong was also a Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Department for the Environment.

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honorary freedom of the city, Carter—clothed in a suit made from the JC pinstriped fabric Callaghan had given him—delighted the near 30,000 or so crowd that had gathered to hear him speak outside the Newcastle Civic Centre with the traditional Geordie cry: “Howay-tha-lads!”106 According to the New York Times, all across the region, the response was the same: “Carter is an O.K. bloke!”107 Trips to the US-owned Corning Glassworks in Sunderland—where the workforce serenaded the President with a chorus of Yankee Doodle Dandy—and to one of the ancestral homes of George Washington, where he and Callaghan participated in a tree-planting ceremony to symbolize continuing US–UK friendship. Though members of Carter’s delegation acknowledged that, upon arrival, they were treating the trip as a campaign stand, so rapturous was the reception the president received that, by its end, they joked with one British official that “they were thinking of running the 1980 re-election campaign in Britain and sending the film back to the States!”108 As Callaghan recalled, the success of this early trip was mirrored in the Downing Street economic summit itself, where Carter, Callaghan, and the leaders of Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Canada, committed themselves to specific targets on aid levels, curbing unemployment, and growth stimulation.109 The only public relations blunder of the trip occurred, much to Carter’s distress, after a banquet with the Royal Family where the British press speculated that Carter had “deeply embarrassed” the Queen Mother with “excessive familiarity.”110 At the end of Carter’s first year as President, significant US–UK cooperation had been demonstrated through NATO alliance diplomacy and in Southern Africa. Moreover, Callaghan’s personal influence on the President could be seen, most clearly, in international monetary reform and trade policy, where he argued consistently against protectionist policies and tariffs. In 1978, too, Callaghan provided counsel and support to Carter during the Camp David peace talks.111 Relations between Washington and London during this period were not free from disagreement, nor was frictionless cooperation always readily apparent. For instance, Malcolm Craig sets out the fact of, and reasons for, Washington’s resistance to the Labour government’s attempts to sell Jaguar strike aircraft to India because of the arrangement’s implications for US policy on nuclear non-proliferation.112 Likewise, UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s 106  Jimmy Carter, “Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England—Remarks at the Newcastle Civic Centre,” May 6, 1977, The American Presidency Project (www.presidency.ucsb.edu). See also, Charles Mohr, “Georgian Captivates Northeast England,” New York Times, May 7, 1977. 107  Roy Reed, “To the Geordies, Carter is an O.K. Bloke,” New York Times, 7 May 1977. 108  “President Carter’s Visit to the UK,” Sue Darling (North American Departent, FCO) to J. Davidson Esq. (British Embassy, Washington), 18 May 1977, TNA FCO 82/764. 109  Callaghan, Time and Chance, 484–5. See also Morgan, Callaghan, 573. 110  Carter, Reflections, 147. 111  Robb, Jimmy Carter, 153; Ashton, “Local Terrorist,” 130. 112  Malcolm M. Craig, “‘I Think we Cannot Refuse the Order’: Britain, America, Nuclear Nonproliferation, and the Indian-Jaguar Deal, 1974–1978,” Cold War History 16, no. 1 (2016): 61–81.

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tendency to, in David Owen’s words, “shoot from the lip” in the Rhodesian negotiations repeatedly irritated the Foreign Office and No. 10.113 Yet, Carter and Callaghan’s willingness to work closely with one another demonstrated the continuing relevance of the US–UK relationship for international relations.114 Callaghan’s personal diplomacy proved no less effective in mediating between Washington and Bonn and, in particular, Carter and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Unable to hide his thinly veiled contempt for the “very much unknown farmer governor” whom he considered unfit to be the leader of the Western world, Schmidt had offended Carter at the outset by making a series of ill-considered remarks, seemingly backing incumbent President Gerald Ford during a Newsweek interview just three weeks before the 1976 Presidential election. After he had been elected to the White House, Carter had not forgiven Schmidt for this diplomatic faux pas, and the West German  Chancellor’s “prickly manner” and tendency to lecture made their working relationship problematic.115 Schulz notes that the intensity of Schmidt’s criticism of Carter’s leadership led him to set aside his misgivings and embrace European integration with greater enthusiasm.116 Keenly aware of this rift, Callaghan seized the opportunity to play a mediating role between Europe, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other. To his biographer, in this bridge-building exercise, he was more adept than any of his successors.117 This was made possible in large part by his great experience within the Labour and trade union movements, his emotional intelligence, his well-honed negotiation skills and his aptitude for personal diplomacy. By becoming a trusted confidante to both Carter and Schmidt, he hoped to “mitigate the damaging rows between the pair,” influencing policies of concern to British interests along the way.118 For example, after a day-long meeting at the White House on 23 March 1978, Carter followed the candid advice offered to him by Callaghan by writing to Schmidt in an effort to accommodate any lingering concerns the West German had over trade measures. In the final few months of the Labour government, one of the last great achievements—particularly in British eyes—of the Carter–Callaghan  Owen, Time to Declare, 284.  Interview with Walter Mondale, Minneapolis, MN, 3 October 2018; and Interview with David Owen, London, 17 December 2018. 115  Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 25–26. On the Carter-Schmidt feud, see Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 30–2, 70–1, 91–2, 137, 115–8. For a general overview of US–German relations in this era, see Luca Ratti, The Not-So-Special Relationship: The US, The UK, and German Reunification, 1945–1990 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Chapter 2. 116  Mathias Schulz, “The Reluctant European: Helmut Schmidt, the European Community, and Transatlantic Relations” in Mathias Schulz and Thomas A. Schwartz (eds.), The Strained Alliance: US-European Relations from Nixon to Carter (Cambridge: University Press, 2010), 279–306. For a more nuanced overview, see Matthias Haeussler, “A ‘Cold War European?’: Helmut Schmidt and European Integration, c. 1945–1982,” Cold War History 15, no. 4 (2015): 427–47. 117  Kenneth O. Morgan, “Let the Sunny Shine,” Progress, 16 May 2006. 118  Robb, Jimmy Carter, 68–70. 113 114

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partnership took place at the Guadeloupe Summit.119 From 4 to 6 January 1979, Schmidt, Carter, Callaghan, and French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing—who acted as host for the meeting—convened for confidential, yet informal, talks on European defence, détente, and disarmament. With no pressure to produce a formal declaration, only one aide of non-ministerial rank from each nation was permitted.120 As their memoirs, diaries, and contemporary newspaper reports make clear, although the talks were intense, the atmosphere was relaxed: “We gossiped on the grass outside our huts,” Callaghan recalled afterward, and “ate together informally, and even when our formal discussions took place they were held in an open, round thatched hut … We all spoke English. There were no position papers, no fixed agenda ... and only one reception.”121 During the breaks between sessions, the leaders toured the island together, jogged, played tennis, and sailed.122 James Reston of the New York Times, dubbed it the “Swimming Pool Summit.”123 Swapping the growing industrial strife and civil unrest of the “winter of discontent” in Britain for the luxurious beachside Hotel Hamak in the lively market city of Pointe-à-Pitre, Callaghan could once again play honest broker between Carter and Schmidt.124 Moreover, in the blazing Caribbean sunshine, with his personal diplomacy in full swing once again, the Prime Minister was able to score what could be interpreted as a sizeable diplomatic breakthrough for British defence policy. Faced with a decision over whether to replace Britain’s outdated Polaris missile system, after a Cabinet committee discussion on 21 December 1978 made clear that no serious study of the issue could progress until the US attitude on the matter was known to the British, Callaghan decided to grasp the opportunity to raise with Carter the prospect of the UK purchasing Trident C4, the state-of-the-art American submarine-­ based ballistic missile developed by the Lockheed company.125 119  Like Ford, Carter was advised by staff to congratulate Thatcher on her victory to “help counter some of the distorted speculation … during the campaign (to the effect that we were hoping for a Labor win and ‘troubled’ by the idea of the Tories taking over).” “Mrs Thatcher,” Jim Rentschler (Director, West European Affairs, NSC) to Zbigniew Brzezinski, May 4, 1979, White House Central Files, Subject Files: Countries—United Kingdom 167 [Ex.], Box CO-64, JCL. 120  John M.  Goshko, “4 NATO Allies to Hold Information Talks,” Washington Post, 8 December 1978. 121  Callaghan, Time & Chance, 544; Sir Clive Rose, interviewed by Virginia Crowe, BDOHP, 30 August 2003, 45–6. 122  Ibid, 544; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Le pouvoir et la vie: tome. 2—L’affrontement (Paris, France: Compagnie 12, 1991) 375; Daily Diary of President Jimmy Carter, 6 January 1979 (www. jimmycarterlibrary.gov/assets/documents/diary/1979/d010679t.pdf). For far more detailed accounts of the Guadeloupe summit, see Spohr, Global Chancellor, 85, 94–7; Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, “Bonn, Guadeloupe, and Vienna, 1978–9” in Spohr and Reynolds (eds), Transcending the Cold War, 126–30. 123  James Reston, “Swimming Pool Summit,” New York Times, 29 December 1978. 124  For Callaghan’s official statement, see Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Guadeloupe Summit Meeting, 16 January 1979, Vol. 960, Cols. 1497–1506. 125  John Baylis and Kristan Stoddart, The British Nuclear Experience: The Role of Beliefs, Culture, and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 148–9.

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In the afternoon of the second day, Callaghan roused Carter from a mid-­ afternoon nap “to talk to him about something important.”126 Subsequently, at a distinctly private meeting—much to the annoyance of officials on both sides of the Atlantic—in Carter’s beach hut and, later, during the now famous walk on the beach, the Prime Minister outlined the British position and enquired directly about the prospect of Britain acquiring the system at some point in the future. Seemingly unconcerned by the potential problems any transfer might cause for SALT II, Carter responded affirmatively, according to Callaghan’s note of the conversation, assuring that he believed it important that Britain remain a nuclear power.127 It was, he agreed, in America’s best interests for there to be “a shared responsibility [for nuclear security] in Europe, rather than that America should go it alone.”128 The President also indicated a willingness to help the British as much as possible to meet the costs of acquiring the system.129 Buoyed by the news, when asked by the press what had been achieved at the summit, Callaghan remarked triumphantly (and not entirely inaccurately) that “[t]he forty-eight hours we spent together [in Guadeloupe] has been worth forty-thousand Foreign Office telegrams.”130 There remained, however, a degree of uncertainty amongst British officials over the Carter administration’s willingness to see this deal through to a conclusion.131 Consequently, in February, British Defence Secretary Fred Mulley, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Ministry of Defence Sir Ronald Mason and Deputy Secretary in the Cabinet Office Sir Clive Rose travelled to the United States for exploratory discussions with Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.132 On 27 March, Callaghan himself also sent a letter to the President seeking further assurances that he would be “willing in principle to consider the possibility” of selling Trident to the British government.133 In contrast to his positive attitude at Guadeloupe, Carter stressed caution in his reply. Indeed, as Suzanne Doyle’s research highlights, throughout 1979 to mid-1980, the

 Morgan, Callaghan, 620.  “Prime Ministers Conversation with President Carter at 3:30 pm on 5 January at Guadeloupe,” 5 January 1979, TNA PREM 16/1978; Callaghan, Time & Chance, 555. See also Robb, Jimmy Carter, 86; Dumbrell, A Special Relationship, 182; and Suzanne Doyle, “Preserving the Global Nuclear Order: The Trident Agreements and the Arms Control Debate, 1977–1982,” International History Review 40, no. 5 (2018): 1178. 128  Callaghan, Time & Chance, 556. 129  Kristan Stoddart, Facing Down the Soviet Union: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1976–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 69–70. 130  Kristina Spohr, “Helmut Schmidt and the Shaping of Western Security in the Late 1970s: The Guadeloupe Summit of 1979,” International History Review 37, no. 1 (2015): 185. 131  Sir Robert Wade-Gery, interviewed by Malcolm McBain, BDOHP, 13 February 2000, 86–88. 132  Baylis and Stoddart, British Nuclear Experience, 149–150. 133  Doyle, “Global Nuclear Order,” 1179. 126 127

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White House procrastinated in deciding whether to make Trident available to Britain or not.134 It was not until June 1980 that the deal was approved.135 According to Thomas Robb, a British request to purchase Trident from the United States government was always likely to be successful when one considers the long history of nuclear cooperation between the two powers.136 This explanation raises two clear problems. First, whilst nuclear security and intelligence-­ sharing at an institutional level have long been considered by scholars to be the cornerstone of the special relationship, US policymakers had, as Robb argues elsewhere, made ready use of threats to cancel nuclear cooperation in order to decrease the severity of proposed reductions in Britain’s defence spending.137 Despite the renewed closeness under Carter and an awareness amongst British government officials that the United States had a vested interest in continuing to collaborate with the UK in the field of nuclear security, the centrality of non-proliferation and arms reduction talks to the Carter administration’s moralistic foreign policy must have left the British keen to receive such an assurance from the President.138 Second, from the evidence examined here, it is almost impossible to assign greater influence to one contributory factor over others—including the pursuit of US interests and the importance of Callaghan’s close relations with Carter— to the former governor of Georgia’s positive attitude towards a transfer of Trident C4. To overlook the latter relationship greatly undervalues the cumulative role played by Callaghan’s personal diplomacy and assigns minimal importance to Callaghan and Carter’s ability to read one another’s intentions. As Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds argue, a belief in agency by and between diplomatic actors and the scope for interaction are essential ingredients of  Doyle, “Deal Making in the Anglo-American Nuclear Relationship,” 478–479.  Memcon, 2 June 1980 (www.margaretthatcher.org/document/142080). The election of Republican Ronald Reagan led to the abandonment of Trident C4 in the United States in favour of an up-to-date variant, Trident D5. Eventually the Thatcher government agreed. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 246–8; Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 572–3. The final arrangement, however, was not made until March 1982 because the Royal Navy decided that it wanted to acquire the D5, rather than the C4 missiles. Here began a fresh round of difficult negotiations between London and Washington. 136  Robb, Jimmy Carter, 154. 137  For an overview of nuclear cooperation, see Anthony Eames, “The Trident Sales Agreement and Cold War Diplomacy,” Journal of Military History 81 (2017): 163–5; Ian Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 77–106; Michael Kandiah & Gillian Staerck, “‘Reliable Allies’: Anglo-American Relations” in Wolfram Kaiser and Gillian Staerck (eds.), British Foreign Policy, 1955–64: Contracting Options (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 148–50. On intelligence sharing, see Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001). Of course, it should be remembered that coercion in US diplomacy was not the dominant theme in AngloAmerican relations. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case, as diplomatic cooperation on a number of issues—along with security cooperation—was far more common than coercive diplomacy was. Robb, Strained Partnership, 128–9, 160, 217. 138  Interview with David Owen, London, 17 December 2018. 134 135

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successful or productive summit discussion.139 The existence of a personal friendship between Carter and Callaghan allowed the Prime Minister to raise the matter of Britain’s nuclear deterrent informally and, as he reiterated in his memoirs, without committing his ministers to any course of action.140 In other words, it offered room for manoeuvre over what was a controversial topic for both men. For Callaghan, being seen to pursue actively the renewal or replacement of Polaris would contradict Labour’s election manifesto. Similarly, the Carter administration feared that a Trident agreement with the UK had the potential to provoke a response from the Soviet Union, thereby delaying ratification of the SALT II treaty in the US Senate.141 What made this tête-à-tête possible in the first place was the high degree of trust felt between the two leaders. After their unrecorded discussion had ended, this trust also proved sufficient for London and Washington to proceed with further technical discussions at a swift pace.142 If one were to remove this personal element from the equation, it begs the question: would the British Prime Minister have felt comfortable raising such a topic in such an informal or relaxed way with another leader with whom he did not share such a close relationship? It is highly unlikely that, given their far tenser relationship, Callaghan’s successor Margaret Thatcher would have approached Carter in such an informal manner, nor secured his agreement on such preferential and inexpensive terms. Therefore, it can be argued that this example highlights first, that strong personal relationships between statesmen can be of great advantage to them in brokering new deals, circumventing bureaucratic inertia, and broaching issues of a delicate, controversial or potentially embarrassing nature, and second, that Callaghan’s penchant for personal diplomacy could yield tangible results for Britain and British interests even if, in this instance, the Labour government would not be in power long enough to see the benefit.

Conclusion As Berenskoetter and Hoef note, personal friendships between leaders tend to be long-lasting in nature, stretching well into the period after they have left office.143 Jim Callaghan’s relationships with Presidents Ford and Carter and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were no exception. Throughout the remainder of Carter’s presidency, Callaghan continued his habit of writing to the President with advice, counsel, and candid thoughts on multiple policy issues. This was most evident vis-à-vis the Middle East peace talks and over US-UK 139  Spohr and Reynolds, “Introduction” in Spohr and Reynolds (eds.), Transcending the Cold War, 2–3. See also, Holmes, Face-To-Face Diplomacy, 15. 140  Callaghan, Time & Chance, 557–8. 141  Doyle, “Deal Making in the Anglo-American Nuclear Relationship,” 479; Wade-Gery, BDOHP, 86, 88–89. 142  Robb, Jimmy Carter, 87–8. 143  Berenskoetter and van Hoef, “Friendship and Foreign Policy” in Thies (ed.), Oxford Encyclopaedia of Foreign Policy Analysis, 761, no. 7.

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policy towards Rhodesia in late 1979 and early 1980.144 Moreover, after Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House, the four leaders who had attended the talks at Guadeloupe continued to meet annually at Gerald Ford’s $2.5 million dollar home in Vail, Colorado, under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum, a gathering of around 100 former world leaders, foreign policy experts, and businessmen to discuss the state of world affairs.145 “Health interfered and they were not regular participants by the end of the 1990s,” Chris DeMuth recalls, “but for ten years they would be there every year, and it was a wonderful thing to watch.”146 With Ford in particular, Callaghan kept up a regular correspondence long into his retirement from mainstream politics. The vast majority of these handwritten or typed messages are stored at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and give a sense of their warm-hearted, jovial and good-humoured friendship. In his last letter, sent just over a month before Callaghan’s death on 26 March 2005, Ford congratulated the then  92-year-old Callaghan on becoming the longest living British prime minister, before adding affectionately, “In my opinion you are also the very best.”147 Without venturing into the realm of counterfactual history, tracing the impact of a personal connection or friendship on policy choices and government decision making is no easy task. Equally, perhaps highlighting why personality and friendship have been overlooked or dismissed by IR theorists, it is also  challenging to ascribe greater importance to one contributory factor (human agency) over another (e.g. national interests) to a foreign policy outcome. Highlighting the importance of nuance in any analysis of the personal element in US-UK relations, Raymond Seitz contends that: A good relationship at the top works at the margins of decision-making, not at the centre. For a President and prime minister, it means a willingness to talk to each other and to listen, an instinct to pick up the telephone for a quick word, a readiness to compare notes about one thing or another. It also means access at the critical moment. Often this has to do with timing—not whether to do something but when to do it. Good allies bend just that extra inch to take account of the other’s interest. They are just that extra degree more aware of the consequences for the other, and this is more likely to happen when the relationship between the leaders is open and uncluttered.148

From the evidence examined here, personality and friendship played a significant role in Callaghan’s approach to preserving a close bond with successive 144  Callaghan to Carter, 23 October 1979, Callaghan Papers, Box 60, BL. On Rhodesia, see the see the author’s forthcoming DPhil thesis, “Clinging like Barnacles to the Old Hull of Empire.” 145  Mark K.  Updegrove, Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House (Guilford, CN: Lions Press, 2006), 140; Spohr, Global Chancellor, 138. 146  DeMuth, interview, Gerald Ford Oral History Project, 16 July 2009. 147  Ford to Callaghan, 7 February 2005, Gerald R. Ford Special Letters, Gerald and Betty Ford Special Materials, Collection: [1841, 1851] 1941–2007, Box A2, GRFL. 148  Seitz, Over Here, 324.

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US presidents and decision-makers. Influenced by his previous experience in the first (1964–66) and second (1966–70) Wilson governments, Callaghan entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office determined to renew and reinvigorate US-UK relations. To achieve this goal, he set about pursuing the closest relationships possible with the leading figures in the Ford administration. He continued with this strategy into his term as Prime Minister, where he was able to achieve some meaningful success. After Carter entered the White House, in January 1977, Callaghan became close to the new President in the course of a few short meetings. Relying upon his international experience and embodying the role of a sage and wise advisor, he quickly established a firm trust and friendly rapport with Carter. By doing so, once more, a convincing case can be made that Callaghan was able to score some notable diplomatic achievements, not only for Britain and British interests, but also for the West as a whole. Firstly, by mediating between the estranged Carter and Schmidt, the Prime Minister ensured that, for many in the United States government, the United Kingdom was seen as a distinctive force beyond Europe, rather than simply a constituent part of it. More widely, by acting as a bridge between the United States and Europe, Callaghan was also able to prevent a breakdown in the Western alliance at a crucial stage in the Cold War. Secondly, because of his close, relaxed, and informal relationship with Carter, Callaghan was able to take a major step forward for British defence and security interests by raising the prospect of purchasing Trident at some point in the future, on more affordable terms. Although the predominant impression of the Wilson-Callaghan years is so entwined with images of decline, weakness, a profound lack of confidence and of shoddy governance—encapsulated for many in the memory of Britain going begging to the IMF for a bailout loan and of industrial unrest and rubbish littering the streets during the Winter of Discontent—on the international stage, the resourceful and realistic statesmanship practised by Callaghan, between 1974 and 1979, brings this doom and gloom narrative firmly into question. Both Callaghan and, to a lesser extent Wilson before him, deserve far greater credit for restoring the traditionally ‘special’ relationship with two successive administrations—one Republican, the other Democrat—“without resurrecting the label.”149 By practising careful personal diplomacy and by developing friendships with the major political players in Washington, Callaghan and the Labour government ensured that Britain’s voice was heard in the United States. As a result, it can be concluded that in the diplomatic sphere at least, these years were far from, as Robert Skidelsky once put it, “the low points of British Government in the twentieth century.”150

 Kissinger, “Reflections on a Partnership,” 577.   Robert Skidelsky, “The Worst of Governments” in Seldon and Hickson (eds), New Labour, 316. 149 150

CHAPTER 13

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Not So “Special” Relationship? James Cooper

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the White House, 1988 [photograph], Ronald Reagan Library

J. Cooper (*) York St John University, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_13

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On 17 December 1979, President Jimmy Carter welcomed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the White House amid the Iranian hostage crisis. Standing on the White House lawn, Thatcher praised the United States as “the most powerful force for freedom and democracy the world over” and described Anglo-American relations as one of “natural affinity and affection, which stand above the buffetings of fate and fortune.”1 For Thatcher, the importance of Anglo-American relations clearly transcended any broader philosophical differences between the British Conservative Party and American Democratic Party. Furthermore, she was able to change Carter’s personal perception of her. The president concurred with his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that Thatcher was no longer the “dogmatic” leader they had met two years earlier.2 Nonetheless, a lack of personal chemistry, and Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election meant that the Carter–Thatcher relationship goes relatively overlooked in the historiography of Anglo-American relations. Certainly, it is never fêted as an example of the “special relationship,” which is typically taken to include ongoing issues related to defense, nuclear cooperation, intelligence sharing, and political cooperation.3 In contrast, Thatcher’s relationship with President Reagan has received much more attention in the “higher journalism” of Anglo-American relations, which has broadly celebrated a commonality of economic philosophy and meeting of political minds.4 However, the historiography has proven more skeptical of a political marriage wrapped in the policies and rhetoric of a reassertion of free-market and Cold Warrior principles.5 Reagan and Thatcher undoubtedly defined a decade in their own countries, but they also established a pattern and symbolism for Anglo-American relations of which subsequent relationships between presidents and prime ministers would be measured. In fact, the image of Reagan and Thatcher as an example of the special

 Margaret Thatcher, Speech at White House, 17 December 1979 (http://margaretthatcher. org/document/104194). 2  Memorandum, Zbigniew Brzezinski to Jimmy Carter, 12 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher Foundation (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110467). 3  On the Carter-Thatcher relationship see Thomas Robb, Jimmy Carter and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), chapters 4 and 5; Alan P. Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century: Of Friendship, Conflict and the Rise and Decline of Superpowers (London: Routledge, 1995), 145–51; and, John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations from the Cold War to Iraq (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 100–5. 4  For “higher journalistic” accounts of the Reagan–Thatcher relationship see Geoffrey Smith, Reagan and Thatcher (London: Bodley Head, 1990); John O’Sullivan, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2006); Nicholas Wapshott, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (London: Sentinel, 2007). 5  See, for instance, Richard Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (Hutchinson: London, 2012); James Cooper, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: A Very Political Special Relationship (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012). 1

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relationship has experienced a revival with claims by President Donald J. Trump that Prime Minister Theresa May was “my Maggie.”6 Reagan and Thatcher certainly sought to promote a commonality between their respective political missions to reverse “decline” at home and abroad.7 Thatcher sent her congratulations to Reagan after his 1980 election victory, and after Reagan’s inauguration, the prime minister told the Pilgrim’s Society at their annual dinner in London that the economic policies of her government and the incoming Reagan administration were “strikingly similar” with both seeking to remove “government out of the pockets of our people.”8 Unsurprisingly, Reagan subsequently wrote to Thatcher, anticipating “an extended period of cooperation and close consultation between your government and my administration.”9 They shared hundreds of letters during their time in power, including Reagan’s final official letter as president.10 However, this essay argues that despite common philosophical underpinnings of Reaganism and Thatcherism, coupled with mutual support in public and shared electioneering messages, the “special relationship” between Reagan and Thatcher was in the spirit of the relationships of their predecessors and successors: a relationship influenced by tensions inevitably caused by a prioritizing of their own political agendas.11 As Lord (Peter) Carrington, Thatcher’s first foreign and commonwealth secretary, candidly remarked, “It’s always been

6  Christopher Hope and Ben Riley-Smith, “Donald Trump to meet Theresa May before any other foreign leader since his inauguration as new deal planned for Britain,” Telegraph, 22 January 2017. 7  For an early comparative study of the policies of the Thatcher government and Reagan administration see Andrew Adonis and Tim Hames (eds.), A Conservative Revolution? The ThatcherReagan Decade in Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). For the intellectual origins of Thatcherism and Reaganism, and their policies’ execution and legacy, see Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York, NY: Free Press, 2008), 74–106, 338–78. 8  Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 23; Margaret Thatcher, speech at the Pilgrim’s Dinner, 29 January 1981, Savoy Hotel, London (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104557). 9  Letter from Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher, 2 February 1981, accessed via http://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/109257, 20 March 2017. 10  Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher, 268–9. (To access around a quarter of this correspondence, readers can visit: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/usa.asp). 11  Anglo-American relations frustrated even Winston Churchill, the archetypal Atlanticist. See William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War (London: HarperCollins, 1997); David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49–74, 121–36, 309–30. For Anglo-American relations generally, see Alex Danchev, “On Specialness,” International Affairs 72, no. 4 (1996): 737–50; Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America (London: Little, Brown, 2007); Alan P. Dobson and Steve Marsh (eds.), Anglo-American Relations: Contemporary Perspectives (Abington: Routledge, 2013).

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national interests. People like to bang on about the special relationship but it’s always interests.”12

The ‘New Right’ Way to Power In her memoirs, Thatcher wrote kindly about Carter on a personal level but was damning about his presidency.13 In contrast, special praise was reserved for Reagan: “I knew that I was talking to someone who instinctively felt and thought as I did; not just about policies but about a philosophy of government.”14 She claimed to have followed Reagan’s career after her husband praised a speech delivered at the Institute of Directors in November 1969 by then Governor Reagan of California. Reagan and Thatcher met twice while Thatcher was leader of the opposition: in April 1975 and November 1978. In his memoirs, Reagan recorded that their first meeting, in April 1975, was intended to last only a few minutes but went on for almost two hours. He commented that he “liked her immediately.”15 In 1990, Thatcher recalled that those early meetings took place because their political philosophies shared the “same fundamentals, absolute fundamentals.”16 Despite personal camaraderie, there was no guarantee that this would translate to a close working relationship on the international stage. Reagan’s and Thatcher’s was not the only transatlantic conservative connection. The American and British press noted that the Republican Party closely followed the Conservative Party campaign in the 1979 general election.17 Bill Brock, chair of the Republican National Committee was so impressed by the Conservative campaign that he modelled the 1980 Republican campaign on that which resulted in Thatcher becoming prime minister in 1979.18 He even arranged for Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertisers behind the Thatcher campaign, to share an 80-minute film summary of their efforts with leading Republican politicians.19 The emotive approach of the Thatcher campaign and its focus on employment—as personified by the infamous “Labour isn’t working” poster— was imported across the Atlantic with Reagan asking the American people “Are

12  David Gill, “Peter Carrington,” in Jennifer Mackby & Paul Cornish (eds.), US–UK Nuclear Cooperation after Fifty Years (Washington D.C.: CSIS Press, 2008), 267. 13  Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 68–9. 14  Ibid., 157. 15  Ronald Reagan, An American Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 204. 16  Margaret Thatcher interviewed by Geoffrey Smith about Ronald Reagan, 8 January 1990 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109324). 17  William Rees-Mogg, “How America sees Europe, Best of friends with Britain again,” Times, 6 May 1980; David S. Broder, “Reagan’s Imported Tory Tactics,” Washington Post, 16 September 1984; George Gale, “Peace through strength—Hopefully, that is what the Reagan victory will mean to the West,” Daily Express, 8 November 1980. 18  Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 20–2. 19  David Broder, “Britain Has Bad News For Our Democrats; If Reagan Can Emulate Thatcher, Even High Unemployment Won’t Beat Him,” Washington Post, 5 June 1983.

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you better off than you were four years ago?”20 The Republicans even borrowed a specific advertisement previously used by the Conservatives. It showed a young man leading a race, slowed by taxation, bureaucracy, and regulation. In the Conservative campaign, the athlete was British but the Republicans simply changed his nationality to American.21 Therefore, an interchange in ideas between the Conservative and Republican parties ensured that a superficial commonality between the policies of Reagan and Thatcher was established even before the fortieth president had been inaugurated.

A Short Honeymoon Reagan and Thatcher’s overlapping first term in office was not without its tensions. In May 1984, US Secretary of State George Shultz briefed Reagan that “bilateral economic issues constitute the most chronic irritant in the relationship.”22 British concerns over the US budgetary deficit and its alleged impact on high interest rates, unitary taxation, and a grand jury investigation into the role of British Airways and the bankruptcy of one of its rivals in transatlantic air travel, Laker Airlines, were persistent issues.23 Indeed, economic tensions were evident as early as Thatcher’s first visit to the Reagan White House in February 1981.24 Thatcher was certainly aware of the politics that surrounded her visit, telling Reagan shortly after his inauguration that the “newspapers are saying mostly that President Reagan must avoid Mrs. Thatcher’s mistakes so I must brief you on the mistakes.”25 The poor performance of the British economy at the advent of Reagan’s presidency was of concern to the American administration.26 It was anxious so that Reaganism would not be too closely connected with Thatcherism in the public consciousness that Martin Anderson, Reagan’s chief domestic policy adviser, wrote a memorandum for senior White House staff, which was “a brief description between the economic program implemented in England by Prime

20  James Cooper, “‘Superior to anything I had seen in the States’: the ‘Thatcherisation’ of Republican strategy in 1980 and 1984,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 11, no. 1 (2013): 5–9. 21  Smith, Reagan and Thatcher, 22. 22  Memorandum for the President from George P.  Shultz, Subject: Your Trip to the United Kingdom: Setting and Issues, May 14, 1984, The Presidents’ Trip to Europe: Ireland, UK and Normandy (1 of 6), 06/01/1984–06/10/1984, Box 20, Coordination, NSC, Office of Records, Reagan Library. 23  Cooper, Thatcher and Reagan, 91–3, 102–12, 159–67. 24  For a detailed account of this meeting see James Cooper, “‘I must brief you on the mistakes’: When Ronald Reagan Met Margaret Thatcher, February 25–28, 1981,” The Journal of Policy History, 25, no. 2 (2014): 274–97. 25  No. 10 telephone conversation, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, 21 January 1981 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/114254). 26  For a discussion of the British economy in Thatcher’s first term see Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 101–33.

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Minister Thatcher and the economic program proposed by President Reagan.”27 The paper, which circulated among the press, explained that although the Conservative Party entered office in 1979 “with much the same rhetoric that surrounds the Reagan Administration’s economic program,” it should be noted “the substance of these programs has been very different.”28 In addition to concerns that the apparent impact of Thatcherism on the British economy could undermine the argument for Reagan’s planned tax and spending cuts, Alexander Haig, then US secretary of state, worried about the impact on American foreign policy should Thatcher’s government fall due to economic pressure. He briefed Reagan that “Mrs. Thatcher’s political future may be tied to the economy. Elections must be held by spring 1984. The Labor [sic] opposition is embroiled in a left-right struggle over party policies and leadership. The policies being expounded by the left, which is ascendant, would seriously detract from the UK’s role in NATO.”29 Yet, as reported in the American press, the opportunity for political cover was not lost.30 Welcoming Thatcher to the White House, Reagan remarked: “You have said that we enter into a decade fraught with danger, and so we have … Britain and America will stand side by side.”31 Thatcher returned the compliment: “the natural bond of interest between our two countries is strengthened by the common approach which you and I have to our national problems … We’re both trying to set free the energies of our people.”32 However, while Reagan was offering Thatcher support for her economic struggles at home and Thatcher was endorsing her ally, Donald T. Regan, the US treasury secretary, had decided to prioritize Reagan’s domestic agenda ahead of Haig’s foreign policy concerns. Regan was critical of Thatcher’s policies in his testimony to a congressional committee and claimed that the president’s economic proposals were different from Thatcher’s economic experiment in the United Kingdom.33 27  Memorandum, Martin Anderson to senior White House staff, ‘Reaganism and Thatcherism,’ 26 February 1981 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111729). American concern about British fortunes was not a new development. For instance, in 1975 Henry Kissinger scathingly told President Gerald Ford that Britain was “a tragedy.” See Memcon, Henry Kissinger and President Ford, Wednesday 8 June 1975 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110510). 28  Ibid. 29  Memorandum, Alexander Haig to Ronald Reagan, “Visit of Prime Minister Thatcher,” Briefing Book re visit of British Prime Minister Thatcher, February 25–28, 1981, Binder 1/2, Box 91434 (RAC 1), Executive Secretariat, NSC: VIP Visits, Reagan Library. 30  Philip Geyelin, “In Thatcher’s Tracks,” Washington Post, 24 February 1981. 31  Remarks at the Welcoming Ceremony for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, February 26, 1981, Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Reagan Presidential Library. 32  Margaret Thatcher, remarks arriving at the White House, 26 February 1981 (http://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/104576). 33  Donald Regan’s criticism of Mrs Thatcher’s economic policy, Transcript attached to letter from Sir Kenneth Couzens KCB, Overseas Finance, HM Treasury, to Mr Beryl Sprinkel, Under Secretary Designate, Monetary Affairs, U.S. Treasury, 3 March 1981 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/114256).

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The White House sought to ease Thatcher’s embarrassment. Emphasizing the personal chemistry between the president and the prime minister, James Brady, the White House press secretary, briefed the American press that “It was difficult to pry them away from each other at the end.”34 Likewise, Thatcher boasted to Parliament about the success of her visit and meeting with Reagan.35 Nevertheless, Michael Foot, the Leader of the Opposition, pointed out: “In the United States the prime minister gave several homilies on our domestic affairs, but does she appreciate that the most friendly advice that she could have given to the United States was not to follow her example?”36 The British government quickly began to have concerns about the fortunes of the American economy under Reaganomics, particularly the quickly growing deficit. There was considerable cause for concern given the annual budgetary deficit grew from $128 billion to in excess of $200 billion, which resulted in a trebling of the US national debt to $2.7 billion in 1989.37 Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Geoffrey Howe was alarmed. He informed Thatcher in May 1982: it was in the UK national interest that the US Administration should settle this matter … even if they had to accept tax increases as well as expenditure cuts in order to achieve it. Cutting spending was much the best means, but it was crucial that they bring [the] deficit under control: and if this required tax increases, the President must not shirk them any more that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet had shirked them.38

Howe believed that the Reagan administration should be prepared to follow the example of his controversial 1981 budget, which raised taxation and reduced spending, much to the anger of 364 economists who criticized his plan in the Times.39 Although the prime minister agreed that Reagan had to act on the US deficit, she admitted that it would be difficult to urge the administration to increase taxation and she sympathized with the president’s “objectives on expenditure.”40 Howe was adamant that something must be done. The following month, Howe wrote to Thatcher: 34  Don Oberdorfer, “Anglo Accord; U.S.-British Accord Proclaimed ‘On All Major Strategic Issues’; U.S. Proclaims Basic Agreement ‘On All Strategic Issues,’” Washington Post, 1 March 1981. 35  Margaret Thatcher, House of Commons Statement (Prime Minister, American Visit), Monday 2 March 1981 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104585). 36  Ibid. 37  Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 46. The Reagan-Bush administrations saw a doubling of US national debt as a proportion of GDP to nearly 70 percent in 1993. The ratio of debt to GDP in 2015 was 104.17 percent. 38  No. 10 record of conversation (Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, “Versailles Summit”), 26 May 1982 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/137515). 39  Cooper, Thatcher and Reagan, 86–7. 40  No. 10 record of conversation (Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, “Versailles Summit”), 26 May 1982 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/137515).

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I am sorry to go on about this. I do so because I am convinced of its importance to our national interest and political fortunes … because of the World role of the dollar there is a limit to what we (or other like-minded countries like Germany) can do to get our own interest rates down. And only the US itself can affect its own rates. They have made striking progress in reducing their inflation rate. But markets are not yet convinced that this is permanent. There is no doubt that in this they are powerfully influenced by what they see as the prospect for the US budget deficit.41

Yet Thatcher chose not to raise this issue when she met Reagan upon his visit to the United Kingdom in June 1982. Instead, the meeting, perhaps unsurprisingly, focused on foreign policy and the Falklands War.42 But there was a clear schism between the economic outlooks of these apparent political soulmates. Similarly, despite a shared Cold Warrior outlook, Reagan and Thatcher both disagreed when they could prioritize their own foreign policy agenda and were disappointed that the other’s support was not immediately forthcoming. This was clear in the Falklands War (2 April–14 June 1982) and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. The Reagan administration was keen to see the Falklands War end as quickly as possible. The president wrote in his diary on 6 April: “Fairly quiet day except in the So. Atlantic. The Royal Navy is sailing toward to the Falklands Islands to oust Argentina. Both sides want our help. I’m leaving Al Haig home from Barbados to cope with it. We have to find some way to get them to back off.”43 Leading figures in the administration were divided on the best course of action. US Ambassador to the United Nations Jean Kirkpatrick believed that the United States should not abandon Argentina’s anti-Communist regime. Thus, Secretary of State Haig, enthusiastic about an early peace agreement, was directed by the president to broker such a settlement in London and Buenos Aires. British ambassador to the United States Nicholas Henderson diarized that Haig believed that the British should enable Argentina “to find a way out, short of total humiliation.” He believed that Haig represented an American opposition to “colonialism and their wish to get on good terms with Latin America.”44 Haig experienced a confrontational working dinner with Thatcher on 8 April in London, in which he was told firmly: “She had not sent a fleet

41  PREM 19/943: Letter, Geoffrey Howe to Margret Thatcher, “President Reagan and the US Budget Debate,” 3 June 1982. 42  White House record of conversation (“President’s meeting with UK PM Margaret Thatcher”— Bush, Haig, Clark) Wednesday 23 June 1982 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/136353); John Coles (10 Downing Street) to Brian Fall (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), No. 10 record of conversation (Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George H.  Bush, Alexander Haig, Nicholas Henderson, William P. Clark), Wednesday 23 June 1982 (http://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/145054). 43  Douglas Brinkley (ed.), Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York, 2007), 78. 44  Nicholas Henderson, Mandarin: The Diaries of Nicholas Henderson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 467–68.

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into the South Atlantic to strike a bargain with an aggressor.”45 At the end of the meeting, Thatcher thanked the American delegation, saying “that only true friends could discuss such an issue with the candour and feeling which had characterized this dinner exchange.”46 In contrast to Haig, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger supported the British effort by sharing American intelligence reports on the South Atlantic. Similarly, the British received access to the US base on Ascension Island.47 The administration’s schizophrenic approach to the Falklands War was due to competing priorities in foreign policy. Argentina was a non-communist country in a region that concerned Reagan, but Thatcher was its most reliable ally in the Cold War. Henderson observed: “We had been very lucky that they came down on our side.”48 Thatcher was keen to secure Reagan’s public support for the British war effort. She wrote to the president on 16 April 1982: “Our aim is to avoid conflict. But it is essential that America, our closest friend and ally, should share with us a common perception of the fundamental issues of democracy and freedom which are at stake, as I am sure you do.”49 Yet the Reagan administration remained undecided. Two weeks after Thatcher’s letter to Reagan, Haig told the national security council: There are growing pressures at home and abroad to support Britain. At the same time, we need to work with Argentina and keep the American community in Argentina protected. Moreover, if this pro-American government falls in Buenos Aires, it may well be replaced by a Left-wing, Peronist regime. Therefore, the Secretary said, we need to be careful in how we raise our tilt.50

Closing the meeting, the president said, “it would be nice if, after all these years, the U.N. could accomplish something as constructive as averting war between the U.K. and Argentina.”51 Despite his desire for the war to end before having to choose a side, Reagan ultimately supported Thatcher given the British cost in blood and treasure.52 Shortly before Reagan endorsed British military action in the Falklands in his speech at the Palace of Westminster on 8 June 1982, Haig advised the president, “Mrs. Thatcher will only really listen to you because, from the outset, she has sought to engage the United States in 45  Telegram From Secretary of State Haig to the Department of State, London, April 9, 1982, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XIII, Conflict in the South Atlantic, 1981–1984 (Washington: United States Government Publishing Office, 2015), Document 82. 46  Ibid. 47  Richard Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 142. 48  Henderson, Mandarin, 168. 49  Margaret Thatcher message to Ronald Reagan, 16 April 1982, (http://www.margaretthatcher. org/document/122860). 50  NSC meeting minutes, Archive (Reagan Library), 30 April 1982 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/114329). 51  Ibid. 52  Reagan, An American Life, 359–360.

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the role of guarantor for the future security of the Islands. It would be wrong, however, to assume that she would abandon her principles in order to achieve such an American guarantee.”53 The prime minister had sought American support, and not for them to demand a ceasefire before the Islands were retaken.54 Reagan ultimately supported Thatcher’s Falklands War, but that it was happening was not a fait accompli. Thatcher’s 1983 re-election campaign focused on her claims to success in domestic and foreign affairs in the context of the successful Falklands War. The Conservative campaign, again orchestrated by Saatchi & Saatchi, emphasized Thatcher’s record in contrast with Labour’s record in the 1970s and manifesto commitments.55 The Saatchies ensured that the Conservatives took ownership of difficult issues, including unemployment.56 For instance, one poster’s slogan argued: “Britain’s on the right track—don’t turn back.”57 A Conservative television broadcast focused on the Winter of Discontent, using a funeral dirge, images of industries gripped by picket lines, and gloomy newspaper headlines, with a somber narrator asking the viewer: “Do you remember …?”58 In foreign affairs, Labour was presented as the party of nuclear disarmament while Thatcher argued that peace was only possible through strong defense. In the Conservative manifesto, the prime minister observed that nuclear disarmament was not possible through unilateral British action, but instead “we must negotiate patiently from a position of strength, not abandon ours in advance.”59 The Republican Party was again interested in Thatcher’s successful campaign. Two Republican aides, Anna Kondrates and Vivienne Schneider, observed the Conservative campaign and reported to RNC Chairman Frank 53  Memorandum From Secretary of State Haig to President Reagan, Paris, Undated, “Your meeting with Prime Minister Thatcher at the Versailles Summit,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XIII, Conflict in the South Atlantic, 1981–1984, Document 322. 54  Ibid. In a speech largely dedicated to the Cold War, Reagan emphatically voiced his support for British action in the Falklands: “On distant islands in the South Atlantic young men are fighting for Britain. And, yes, voices have been raised protesting their sacrifice for lumps of rock and earth so far away. But those young men aren’t fighting for mere real estate. They fight for a cause—for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed, and the people must participate in the decisions of government—[applause]—the decisions of government under the rule of law. If there had been firmer support for that principle some 45 years ago, perhaps our generation wouldn’t have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.” Address to Members of the British Parliament, June 8, 1982, Public Papers of President Ronald W.  Reagan. Reagan Presidential Library. 55  Fendly, Commercial Break, 60. 56  Martin Burch, “The Politics of Persuasion and the Conservative Leadership’s Campaign” in Ivor Crewe and Martin Harrop (eds.), Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 70. 57  Alison Fendley, Commercial Break: The inside story of Saatchi & Saatchi (London: Hamish & Hamilton, 1995), 65. 58  Martin Harrison, “Broadcasting” in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh (eds.), The British General Election of 1983 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 150. 59  The 1983 Conservative Manifesto, Wednesday 18 May 1983 (www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110859).

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Fahrenkopf.60 Kondrates and Schneider suggested that Thatcher’s victory showed: that the incumbent must take the “high road,” emphasizing successes and turning the election into a referendum on “staying the course”. The incumbent should take the offensive on potentially negative issues like unemployment, demonstrating concern and emphasizing that anyone who claims there are satisfactory short-term solutions is lying. The long-term connection between inflation and unemployment must be pounded into public consciousness.

They argued that Reagan could enjoy similar success to Thatcher by showing that he was also a decisive leader and able to “stay the course.”61 John Grimond, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argued that Britain’s economic performance was vital to Thatcher’s victory.62 He argued that voters who managed to remain employed had enjoyed a higher standard of living—a factor that Reagan could hope to emulate. On the ‘Falklands factor’ in the 1983 general election, Grimond noted that incumbents are helped by wars, so, tongue-in-cheek, warned Nicaragua to expect a brief war effort.63 Ironically, the Falklands and Grenada would prove problematic for the Reagan–Thatcher relationship. Nicaragua would cause Reagan’s presidency almost to unravel. Buoyed by her re-election, Thatcher visited the United States in September 1983. US ambassador to Britain John Louis (1981–83) noted that the visit was a significant moment in Thatcher’s second term, “to an extent, the trip itself is the message.”64 Yet beyond the imagery of the newly re-elected prime minister returning to the United States, Shultz advised Reagan: “In her customary style, Thatcher will speak plainly about British interests and concerns, expecting us to respond in a similar fashion.”65 This would prove to be the case. In the meeting between the American and British delegations, American interest rates were discussed between Thatcher and Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan while Reagan excused himself for a telephone call. On his return, Reagan argued that his administration simply needed time to reduce interest rates:

60  David S.  Broder, “GOP Seeks Signs, Strategy In Thatcher’s Election Stakes,” Charlotte Observer, 9 June 1983. 61  Ibid. 62  John Grimond, “GOP Should Study Britons’ Reactions to Unemployment,” Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1983; Report, S. Anna Kondrates (Deputy Director of Research) and Vivianne Schneider (Issues Analyst), through William I.  Greener III (Director of Communications) and Philip Kawior (Director of Research), to Frank J.  Fahrenkopf Jr. (Chairman), June 20, 1983, 182559, C0167, WHORM: Subject File, Reagan Library. 63  Ibid. 64  US Ambassador (London) to Secretary of State (British hopes for Thatcher US visit), Thursday 15 September 1983 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109408). 65  Shultz briefing for President Reagan (Thatcher meeting), Tuesday 20 September 1983 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109389).

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The President said that certain banks were now making available large sums for home mortgages at 9.9%. He had recently seen a TV advert offering car loans for 8.8%. Another factor keeping interest rates high was the fear that artificial stimulation might be used, as in the past, to bring the economy out of recession. People were not yet quite sure that it was possible to obtain growth without inflation. But inflation had been 2.6% in the last twelve months and this was the lowest for twenty three years. The need was to convince people that the recovery was real.66

Clearly impatient, it was Howe, now the foreign secretary, and not Thatcher, who was much more direct with the president. He stated “that the size of the U.S. deficit causes Britain great anxiety.”67 However, Reagan abruptly ended the discussion, directing himself and the prime minister to “meet with the press,” and then he “thanked Mrs. Thatcher for the useful discussion.”68 Yet Thatcher did make her concerns clear, and told the subsequent press conference: “I believe that the American deficit is a factor in keeping up the interest rates. I believe that that has quite a damaging effect on Europe and our recovery and therefore I am anxious that they should come down.”69 In turn, the New York Times reported that amid the closeness of Anglo-American relations, Thatcher was worried about Reagan’s economic program, in particular its impact on the US deficit.70 Reagan’s support for Thatcher over the Falklands meant that Thatcher’s resistance to the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983 surprised him. Following a Marxist coup in Grenada on 16 October, Reagan was concerned that the Caribbean island could emulate the Moscow–Havana connection. Thus, the president was willing to respond to an appeal from the Organisation of East Caribbean States (OECS) for American intervention.71 However, despite Grenada’s membership of the Commonwealth, Reagan did not involve Thatcher in the decision to invade the island. Howe assured the House of Commons that there would not be an American military intervention.72 Nonetheless, fearing the worst, Thatcher did speak to Reagan in order to make clear her opposition to any such action. Reagan diarized on 24 October: “She was upset & doesn’t think we should do it. I couldn’t tell her it had started.”73 66  TNA: PREM 19/1153: Record of a conversation at a working lunch given by the President of the United States for the Prime Minister at the White House at 1240 hours on Thursday, 29 September 1983. 67  White House record of conversation (Thatcher-Reagan), Thursday 29 September 1983 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/133913). 68  Ibid. 69  Margaret Thatcher, Press Conference after meeting President Reagan, 29 September 1983 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105447). 70  Steven R. Weisman, “U.S. Deficit worries Mrs. Thatcher,” New York Times, 30 September 1983. 71  Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher, 144; John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher Volume Two: The Iron Lady (London: Vintage, 2008), 273. 72  Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher, 145. 73  Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, 190.

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Recalling the incident in his memoir, Shultz wrote: “President Reagan and I felt that she was just plain wrong. He had supported her in the Falklands. He felt he was absolutely right about Grenada. She didn’t share his judgment at all. He was deeply disappointed.”74 Reagan would later comment that he did not tell Thatcher about his plans to invade because he “didn’t want her to say no.”75 Reagan clearly hoped to avoid debating the issue with Thatcher. After all, such a conversation would not have influenced his decision for military action. Two days later, the president hoped to ease the resulting tension in Anglo-­ American relations. Telephoning Thatcher, Reagan was startled by a reserved and cool reception, so stumbled through his talking points in his explanation of events.76 The prime minister’s anger stemmed from not just surprise about the military action but also the political embarrassment. Neil Kinnock, the Leader of the Opposition, told the House of Commons that “the relationship that was said to exist between the right hon. Lady and the President turned out to be not so special.”77 However, Thatcher did share her criticism and did so publicly, telling the BBC world-service on 30 October 1983: We in the Western democracies use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into independent sovereign territories … If you’re going to pronounce a new law that wherever communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it’s happened internally, there the USA shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.78

Shortly after the American intervention in Grenada, Reagan’s attention turned to re-election. Richard Wirthlin, who served as Reagan’s pollster in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections, closely monitored Thatcher’s 1983 general election campaign. He told Washington Post report David S. Broder, “I’m not sure that if she wins big, it necessarily bodes well for us … But I’m watching it very closely to see how her themes play.”79 Reagan’s themes in 1984 certainly echoed those used by Thatcher with such success during the previous year. The Republican campaign presented the election as a choice between continuing Reagan’s successful tenure in office and a return to the failures of the Carter administration through Democrat’s nomination of Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, for the presidency. The Republicans’ television 74  George Shultz, Turmoil & Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 340. 75  Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher, 154. 76  Ibid., 151–53. For the full transcript, see “Reagan phone call to Thatcher,” 26 October 1983 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109426). 77   House of Commons PQs, 27 October 1983 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/105459). 78  Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher, 145. Thatcher made this statement during a phone-in program on the BBC World Service, 30 October 1983. See: (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110628). 79  David S. Broder, “Reagan’s Imported Tory Tactics,” Washington Post, 16 September 1984.

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advertisements demonstrated their approach to the election. One advertisement included images of new cars, a wedding, and a child admiringly watch as an old man raised an American flag. The narrator said: It’s morning again in America … Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history … With interest rates and inflation down, more people are buying new homes and our new families can have confidence in the future. America today is prouder, and stronger, and better. Why would we want to return to where we were less than four years ago?80

Another televised advertisement focused on economic reasons to re-­ elect Reagan: With Reaganomics you cut taxes, with Mondalenomics, you raise taxes … With Reaganomics you cut deficits through growth and less government spending, with Mondalenomics you raise taxes. With Reaganomics you create incentives that will move us forward, with Mondalenomics, you raise taxes. They both work, the difference is Reaganomics works for you, Mondalenomics works against you.81

Reagan’s campaign was deliberately similar to Thatcher’s and, just as four years previously, his victory followed. The president was re-elected by a landslide, winning 49 states and 59 percent of the popular vote. However, the Conservative Party did more than just provide the Republicans with a blueprint for Reagan’s re-election. A few months previously, Thatcher provided political cover for Reagan during the June 1984 economic (G7) summit in London. The prime minister clearly did not wish to undermine the economic message of Reagan’s re-election campaign. Thus, the G7’s conference declaration mentioned deficits just once—midway through the statement and with no allusion to the United States.82 The British Embassy in Washington reported that the administration was pleased with American press coverage, which reported that the president was much less on the defensive about the budgetary deficit and its connection with high interest rates. That omission, coupled with Reagan’s presidential images at meetings with other world leaders and at the D-Day commemorations in Normandy, pleased the president.83 Reagan simply noted in his diary: “Margaret handled the meetings brilliantly.”84 Charles Price, the American ambassador (1983–9), wrote to Thatcher on 14 June 1984, “I know

80  E.D. Dover, Images, Issues, and Attacks: Television Advertising by Incumbents and Challengers in Presidential Elections (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 30. 81  Ibid., 31. 82  “London Economic Summit Conference Declaration, June 9, 1984,” Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan. Reagan Presidential Library. 83  UKE Washington telegram to FCO (“US Public Reactions to the Summit”). Monday 11 June 1984 (http://margaretthatcher.org/document/145784). 84  Reagan, Reagan Diaries, Friday 8 June 1984, 246.

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the President appreciated fully your sensitivity to his concerns.”85 The same day, at Cabinet, Thatcher reported that it “had been a businesslike and successful occasion, although firm action had been necessary to deflect some unjustified criticisms of the United States.”86 Despite her satisfaction with the summit, Thatcher did not discuss it in her memoirs.87 Nonetheless, the impact of Reaganomics on the British economy was clearly a priority for Thatcher. On 8 November 1984, two days after Reagan’s re-election, the prime minister told Price about the continuing “concern in Britain and elsewhere in Europe about the continuing high budget deficit in the UK and the effect of this on interest rates.”88

More Than Two People in the Relationship In 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a potential Soviet leader who could “do business” to the satisfaction of the United States and its allies. Thatcher met Gorbachev at Chequers on Sunday 16 December 1984.89 Within a week of this meeting, Thatcher visited Reagan at Camp David. In their tête-à-tête, she described Gorbachev as “an unusual kind of Russian” who was “less constrained in what he said than other Soviet leaders whom she had met” and was even “prepared to have points raised with him which … would offend other Soviet leaders.”90 The prime minister had stressed to Gorbachev “that there was no point in … trying to divide Britain from the United States” and had hoped “to persuade Gorbachev that the United States was sincere in wanting arms reductions.”91 Reagan then explained the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to Thatcher.92 According to the British record, the president spoke “with notable intensity” on the topic. Not wishing to argue with him, Thatcher agreed that the United States “had been right to go ahead with research on the SDI,” adding that she “had told Gorbachev this.” Thatcher remarked that she feared “that the Russians have been doing extensive research on lasers and directed energy weapons” so the strategic balance should not “be 85  US Ambassador Charles Price letter to Margaret Thatcher, Thursday 14 June 1984 (http:// margaretthatcher.org/document/136370). 86  Minutes of Full Cabinet—CC(84) 22nd, 14 June 1984 (http://margaretthatcher.org/ document/133181). 87  Thatcher, Downing Street Years. 88  Prime Minister’s Meeting with the United States Ambassador at 10 Downing Street, 8 November 1984 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/149861). 89  No. 10 record of conversation, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev (private lunchtime conversation), 16 December 1984; No. 10 record of conversation, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev (afternoon meeting), 16 December 1984 (http://margaretthatcher.org/document/134729 and 134730). 90  No. 10 minute, Record of a meeting between the Prime Minister and President Reagan at Camp David on 22 December 1984, (http://margaretthatcher.org/document/136436). 91  Ibid. 92  For Thatcher’s cautious view of SDI and delicate approach to discussing it with Reagan, see her own account: Thatcher, Downing Street Years, 463–6.

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put at risk.” Thatcher did, briefly, allude to her philosophical disagreement with Reagan on SDI: “In practice … it would be too easy to neutralise or overwhelm such a system.” Reagan’s response was that the discussion should continue “in a wider circle.”93 During the debate between the Americans and British on SDI, Thatcher remarked how “she wanted to work out a position on the SDI which she could use publicly to make clear that suggestions of a split between the British and the Americans on the issue were unfounded.”94 Even though she was unconvinced by Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-free world, underpinned by SDI, Thatcher wanted no hint that she was not the president’s closest Cold War ally. In the subsequent press conference, Thatcher explained that she supported SDI research on four points, in which she and Reagan agreed: First, the United States and Western aim was not to achieve superiority, but to maintain balance, taking account of Soviet developments. Second, that SDI-related deployment would, in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiations. Third, the overall aim is to enhance, and not to undermine, deterrence; and Fourth, East-West negotiation should aim to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive systems on both sides.95

In the same meeting at Camp David, Thatcher’s desire for public diplomacy equaled her concern for economic policy. According to the American record, the prime minister was fiercely critical of the US budgetary deficit, albeit amid a condemnation of other countries and political parties too: Praising U.S. economic performance, Mrs. Thatcher said that the strength of the dollar is a sign of weakness in Europe. She opined that the overall political situation in Europe is not especially encouraging. There is a socialist government in France; neither Holland or Belgium seem to be able to get their act completely together; Germany is a question mark; and the Italians lack guts. There is a socialist government in Spain; Greece is a pain in the neck and certainly no friend of the U.S.; but Portugal did have the guts to fight communism. In Great Britain, the opposition Labor Party is espousing more and more socialist causes. None of this bodes especially well for Europe, but America’s huge deficit and its need for such heavy borrowing to finance the deficit is keeping interest rates up too high.96

Reagan argued that the “major deficit problem is partially inherited,” with the United States “paying for the consequences of 50 years of deficit spending” and during “all but four of those years, the Democrats controlled Congress.”  Ibid.  No. 10 record of conversation (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan), 22 December 1984 (http://margaretthatcher.org/document/149847). 95  Margaret Thatcher, Press Conference after Camp David Talks, 22 December 1984 (http:// margaretthatcher.org/document/109392). 96  Thatcher-Reagan meeting at Camp David, 22 December 1984 (http://margaretthatcher. org/document/109185). 93 94

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Similarly, he was perplexed by “talk of unemployment” as “based on what he sees in our Sunday papers there are many jobs available.” The meeting then turned to the Middle East.97 Reagan first met Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985.98 They met again in Reykjavik in October 1986, when Gorbachev offered Reagan a 50 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals and a new INF agreement, a test ban treaty, and on-site verification. In response, Reagan said that the United States and the Soviet Union should deliver the elimination of all nuclear weapons within a decade. Gorbachev agreed, subject to one caveat: SDI could never leave the laboratory research stage. Reagan refused to agree to these terms and both leaders left Reykjavik frustrated.99 But, neither leader was as frustrated as Thatcher who was concerned by the implications of Reagan’s aborted policy on both the Cold War and British domestic politics. In a telephone conversation with Reagan after he had returned from Reykjavik, Thatcher remarked that “Giving up nuclear weapons is the sort of thing that Neil Kinnock advocates. This would be tantamount to surrender, so we must be very, very careful.”100 It would be difficult for Thatcher to criticize Kinnock’s nuclear policy in the next British general election if the Labour Party was closer to Reagan on the issue. In regard to the Cold War, she argued “that if we give up all our nuclear weapons the Soviets—with their conventional superiority— could just sweep across Europe.”101 Shortly afterwards, US National Security Adviser John Poindexter (1985–86) told Reagan “that neither our military experts or our allies would support the idea of moving to the total elimination of all nuclear weapons within 10 years,” but they would “likely support a goal of the elimination of all ballistic missiles in that period.”102 Thatcher was so concerned that she visited Reagan at Camp David in November 1986. The president diarized that they “had a good one-on-one re our Iceland meetings & what we are trying to achieve in arms reductions. She had some legitimate concerns. I was able to reassure her.”103 Thatcher recalled that by securing Reagan’s reaffirmation of American support for Trident in their meeting, she “had reason to be well pleased.”104 The spectre of an angry Thatcher was utilized by Reagan’s advisers whenever he mused about a world without nuclear weapons. Frank C.  Carlucci, Reagan’s penultimate national security adviser (1986–7), recalled that he would warn Reagan about reigniting Thatcher’s  Ibid.  David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2007), 317–69. 99  Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher, 216–18. 100  White House record of conversation, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, 13 October 1986, accessed via http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/143809, 31 March 2017. 101  Ibid. 102  Memorandum, John M. Poindexter to President Ronald Reagan, Subject: Why We Can’t Commit to Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years, 16 October 1986, accessed via http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/143794, 31 March 2017. 103  Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, Saturday 15 November 1986, 451. 104  Margaret Thatcher, The Autobiography (London: HarperPress, 2013), 519. 97 98

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opposition, explaining to him: “No, no. You have to deal with Margaret on that.”105 Apparently, such a tactic “always had the desired effect.”106 Despite the clear divergence on the issue of nuclear weapons and British dissatisfaction with the American budgetary deficit, Thatcher’s political and personal significance to Reagan was evident in his meeting with Kinnock at the White House on 27 March 1987. The meeting came ahead of the UK general election. Such visits by opposition leaders are standard diplomatic endeavours designed to build relations and they allow leaders to present themselves—and hope to appear credible—as world leaders.107 The Labour leader opposed Reagan’s foreign policy and political philosophy in general. Prior to the meeting, Carlucci briefed Reagan: Kinnock will want to accentuate the positive, our objectives are different: we want to make it clear that Labor’s defense policies would adversely affect our common security interests and severely strain US-UK relations. This needs to be done firmly, but delicately, as it would strengthen Kinnock if we appeared to be intervening in the UK domestic policies.108

Shultz’s briefing underlined this advice. He explained to the president that the meeting should “show an even-handed approach to the leader of a major British party and deflect charges of favoritism and interference in the approaching British election.”109 Labour’s minutes of the meeting suggest that Reagan did follow this protocol: I have to tell you that there is a lot of concern here at the prospect of a Labour Party victory at the next election in Britain, and worry about what they would mean for NATO and for our defences …I want to make it clear that I don’t want to interfere in internal political matters in your country. But I do believe that the progress that has been made is based upon our realism and strength.110

Reagan diarized: “It was a short meeting but I managed to get in a lick or two about how counter-productive ‘Labors’ [sic] defense policy was in our dealings with the Soviets.”111 White House’s Acting Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater 105  Miller Center. “Interview with Frank Carlucci,” University of Virginia, August 28, 2001 ( h t t p s : / / m i l l e r c e n t e r. o rg / t h e - p r e s i d e n c y / i n t e r v i e w s - w i t h - t h e - a d m i n i s t r a t i o n / frank-carlucci-oral-history-assistant-president). 106  Ibid. 107  In Thatcher’s case, see James Cooper, “The Foreign Politics of Opposition: Margaret Thatcher and the Transatlantic Relationship before Power,” Contemporary British History 24, no. 1 (2010): 23–42. 108  Memorandum, Frank C.  Carlucci to Ronald Reagan, 26 March 1987, 464657, C0167, WHORM: Subject File, Reagan Library. 109  Memorandum, George P.  Shultz to Ronald Reagan, 24 March 1987, 467199, C0167, WHORM: Subject Files, Reagan Library. 110  Notes of meeting between President Reagan and Neil Kinnock, 27 March 1987, Neil Kinnock Papers, KNNK 19/2/43, Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. 111  Brinkley, The Reagan Diaries, Friday 27 March 1987, 486.

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(1987–9) was informed that the meeting was “brief” but had been “friendly and useful.” He was told to explain to the press that the president had “made clear to Mr. Kinnock the very serious concern with which the United States views the Labor Party’s proposals for unilateral nuclear disarmament.”112 Nevertheless, his press briefing should note: “The meeting represents the continuing desire of the administration to discuss these differences, as well as the broad range of issues on which the United States and Britain have important mutual interests with British political leaders.”113 Fitzwater followed this advice in his briefing.114 The Kinnock–Reagan meeting became controversial because of its coverage in the British right-wing press, in which Kinnock was reported to have received an awful reception and been subject to fierce criticism by the president.115 Kinnock’s Chief of Staff Charles Clarke wrote to the White House “following Mr Kinnock’s meeting with the President last Friday, to express our concern at the way in which this meeting was briefed by the White House Press Officer. I will not need to tell you the harm done by the misrepresentation of the meeting or of our disappointment and resentment at the misreporting.”116 Clarke reviewed the White House’s official statement line-by-line.117 Labour was clearly incensed by the press coverage, but beyond Labour Party allegations and inevitable satisfaction among Thatcher’s advisers, there is no evidence to support any collusion between the Conservative Party, the White House, and the Tory supporting press.118 The Conservatives won a third successive term on 11 June 1987. Thatcher soon took advantage of an opportunity to support Reagan in the arena of domestic politics. In her visit to the United States in July 1987, the prime minister sought to buoy the president following the revelations of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration’s illegal sale of arms to Iran, in exchange for the release of American hostages, and in turn the illegal diverting of the sale’s profits to the Nicaraguan Contras, threatened to prematurely end Reagan’s presidency.119 Thatcher told Forrest Sawyer, in an interview for CBS news on 17 July: “I have dealt with the President for many many years and I 112  Memo for Marlin Fitzwater, “Kinnock call on the President: Schedule and Press Queries,” 27 March 1987, Neil Kinnock—British Labor Leader (1 of 2) 03/27/1987, Box 90912, Coordination Office, NSC: Records, Reagan Library. 113  Ibid. 114  “Kinnock Given US Warning,” Daily Telegraph, 28 March 1987. 115  George Gordon, “Reagan Takes his Revenge on Kinnock,” Daily Mail, 28 March 1987; Robert Gibson, “Angry Reagan flays Kinnock,” Daily Express, 28 March 1987; “Kinnock Given US Warning,” Daily Telegraph, 28 March 1987. 116  Letter, Charles Clarke to Ray (surname unknown), March 31 1987, KNNK 19/2/38. 117  Ibid. 118  Based on interviews with: Lord Kinnock, 9 November 2010; Mr Charles Clarke, 6 December 2011; Sir Bernard Ingham, 28 May 2012; Lord Powell of Bayswater, 20 June 2012; and, Lord Hurd of Westwell, 20 June 2012. 119  For the Iran-Contra scandal, see Robert Busby, Reagan and the Iran-Contra Affair: The Politics of Presidential Recovery (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra:

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have absolute trust in him.”120 In a further interview with Lesley Stahl, broadcast on CBS’s Face the Nation on 19 July, Thatcher passionately defended her ally.121 The prime minister praised the work of the United States and the transatlantic alliance in the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, and the Cold War. Stahl bluntly asked Thatcher whether she was in the United States “to bolster” Reagan and “to help improve his image and to buck him up, improve his spirits.” The prime minister explained: I come because there are big issues to discuss and I come because I think Britain has a contribution to make, but I come as a staunch ally and a loyal friend at all times. Yes, that is why I came, because I want to make a contribution and I want to demonstrate our alliance and our friendship … America is a strong country with a great President, a great people and a great future!122

After watching Thatcher’s interview with Stahl, Reagan diarized that Thatcher “was absolutely magnificent & left Lady Stahl a little limp.”123 On his meeting with Thatcher on 17 July, Reagan simply recorded that they discussed the Middle East and arms control, and “we were in agreement on everything.”124 Yet Reagan and Thatcher remained divided on the issue of the US budget deficit. Still concerned by the impact of the deficit on the broader financial economy, which was the focus of the Thatcherite revolution, the prime minister wrote to the president to appeal for him to raise taxation to addresses this concern: One of the most important achievements of your Administration has been to restore the US economy to health and to create jobs, to the benefit of us all. I have a very real fear now that this achievement may be in jeopardy, because of the strains in the financial markets … I was therefore glad to see the reports that you will be willing to discuss tax increases as one of the means of reducing the budget deficit. I know how very difficult this must be for you: I share completely your view of the damage done by high taxes … The priority now has to be for sound money and sound finance.125

One famed taxed cutter was asking another tax cutter to raise taxes, albeit tax increases were something that Reagan and Thatcher had previously accepted Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014). 120  Margaret Thatcher, TV Interview for CBS News, Friday 17 July 1987 (http://margaretthatcher.org/document/106913). 121  Margaret Thatcher, TV Interview for CBS Face the Nation, Friday 17 July 1987 (http:// margaretthatcher.org/document/106915). 122  Ibid. 123  Brinkley, Reagan Diaries, Sunday 19 July 1987, 517. 124  Brinkley, Reagan Diaries, Friday 17 July 1987, 516. (Unfortunately, the minutes of the meeting are not available at the time of writing.) 125  Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan, 22 October 1987 (http://margaretthatcher.org/ document/110979).

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and implemented.126 The president’s response was polite yet firm: the US budgetary deficit was a domestic matter. He wrote: As we discussed in Venice last June, I believe that reducing the U.S. budget deficit is vital to restoring international economic equilibrium. We have made progress. The budget deficit for fiscal year 1987, which ended on September 30, was $73 billion below the 1986 deficit—a one third reduction. Recent events in financial markets have high-lighted the importance of prompt action on the 1988 budget to ensure that this trend continues. That is why I have called for urgent meetings with Congressional leaders and offered to begin with no preconditions. You correctly note that my views on the potential harm of increased taxes have not changed. However, as always your advice is valued and will be carefully considered.127

This correspondence became front-page news in The Times. After all, it was unusual for the British government to attempt to interfere in American domestic policy.128 Another Times article reported that Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson had strongly urged his counterpart US Treasury Secretary James Baker, to work for sufficient spending reductions and tax increases, as the British government feared that Reagan and Congress would not succeed in their negotiations.129 While Thatcher sought to lobby Reagan privately, Lawson was prepared to do so publicly. The chancellor used his Mansion House speech in November 1987 to express British and European anxiety that the United States did not fully understand the relationship between the fortunes of the American and global economy, and, in turn, the impact of American policy on the rest of the world.130 Thus, Lawson publicly questioned America’s political leadership and the political will of the president and Congress to address the deficit.131 Unfortunately, for the British government, its appeals were likely to fail; according to Charles Schultze, chairman of the council of economic advisers under Carter (1977–81), Reagan believed “that next to nuclear war, tax

126  There was some action to reduce the US Budgetary deficit through increased corporate taxation: the 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act and the 1984 Deficit Reduction Act. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to reverse his income tax cuts. Similarly, the Thatcher epoch marked a dramatic shift to indirect taxation in Britain while cutting high-income tax rates. For instance, Value Added Tax (VAT) almost doubled in 1979 and VAT was extended to include building repairs and take-away food in 1984. 127  Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher, 4 November 1987 (http://margaretthatcher.org/ document/110980). 128  Nicholas Wood and Richard Ford, “Thatcher Tells Reagan to Act Now on Budget,’ Times, 6 November 1987. (The article suggests that a cable was sent in early November; however, the only available message from Thatcher to Reagan about the deficit at that time is the cable dated 22 October 1987.) 129  Robin Oakley, “Thatcher Pressure Over US Deficits Stepped Up,” Times, 2 November 1987. 130  “What America Must Do,” Times, 6 November 1987. 131  Robin Oakley, “Lawson Increases Pressure for US to Reduce Deficit,” Times, 5 November 1987; “Calling the President,” Times, 5 November 1987.

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increases are the biggest danger.”132 Moreover, Lawson’s support for European interests, coupled with Howe’s support for European integration and Heseltine’s stance in the Westland Affair, are indicative of the geo-strategic differences between Thatcher and her senior colleagues. Despite their celebrated shared political philosophy, Thatcher was unable to influence Reagan on this issue. The economic growth prompted by Reaganomics did ensure that the US federal deficit declined as a proportion of GDP from 5.1 percent in FY1985 to 2.8 percent in FY1989. This figure resembled what Reagan inherited from the Carter administration and had therefore became one that was ostensibly acceptable to the Reagan administration, in contrast to one that was a source of criticism from the 1980 Reagan campaign.133

Conclusion Reagan and Thatcher undoubtedly shared a commonality in political philosophy. They both held convictions that their purpose was to roll back the influence of government at home and communism abroad. They were determined to reverse their respective countries’ alleged malaise and decline. These commonalities translated into public diplomacy, namely political cover guised in claims of a shared purpose, and electioneering themes. They inevitably praised each other publicly as their political careers closed.134 Similarly, Reagan and Thatcher maintained contact after their partnership in power. On one of those occasions, on 6 February 1993, at a private party at the Reagan Library to celebrate Reagan’s 82nd birthday, the former president foreshadowed the public announcement of his battle with Alzheimer’s disease by repeating a toast— word for word—praising Thatcher, to a confused audience which simply offered a second round of applause for the former prime minister.135 In 2004, an ailing Thatcher delivered a eulogy at Reagan’s funeral comforted with the knowledge that: “We here still move in twilight, but we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had. We have his example.”136 A personal relationship certainly existed between the president and prime minister and it was not replicated by Reagan’s successor George H.  W. Bush (1989–93).137 Lord (Nigel) Lawson recalled that following a visit by Bush to the United Kingdom, Thatcher asked him to bid farewell to the president at the airport, as

 Stephen Milligan, “World Waits for Reagan,” Sunday Times, 8 November 1987.  Iwan Morgan, Reagan: American Icon (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 248. 134   Margaret Thatcher, “Reagan’s Leadership, America’s Recovery,” National Review, 30 December 1988, 22–4; Ronald Reagan, “Margaret Thatcher and the Revival of the West,” National Review, 19 May 1989, 21–2. 135  Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher, 270–1. 136  Margaret Thatcher, Eulogy for Reagan, 11 June 2004 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110360). 137  Interview with Lord Lawson of Blaby, 27 February 2007. 132 133

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she was unable to do so. Lawson explained: “The idea of sending somebody else would never have occurred, and did never occur, during Reagan’s time.”138 However, the reality of political demands, shaped by institutional circumstances, meant that despite the rhetoric, the special relationship between Reagan and Thatcher should also be defined by its tensions and disagreements. They were prepared to downgrade Anglo-American relations and criticized each other (even occasionally in public) if their national interests were undermined. Subordinates were certainly aware of the complexities and sought to utilize the relationship to further their own agendas. Despite the personal chemistry and broad political and philosophical alignments, the relationship was based on interests. These interests included a shared agenda of lowering taxation to provide incentives in the economy, sound money, tackling inflation, and a firmer approach to Communism in the Cold War. Yet even when those interests overlapped, it is clear that there were clear disagreements between Reagan and Thatcher in the details. Theirs was a political and, at times, even testing special relationship.

138  Ibid. (President George H.W. Bush was in the United Kingdom for bilateral meetings with Thatcher and participation in summits a number of times during his presidency, and it is unknown to which occasion Lord Lawson was specifically referring.).

CHAPTER 14

George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and John Major: A Tale of Two Relationships Victoria Honeyman

Bill Clinton and John Major deliver press statement, 1995 [photograph], Clinton Presidential Library

V. Honeyman (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_14

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Sir John Major has the unfortunate distinction of being largely forgotten. That is not due to his time in office, where he racked up an impressive seven years and an unexpected general election win. Nor is it due to a lack of divisive policy or international disturbance. In that regard, the Major years were alive with activity, from the Gulf war to the genocide in Rwanda, the fallout from the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Yugoslavia plus the ratification of the Maastricht treaty and the Conservative “bastards.” The Major years are largely overlooked simply because they were sandwiched between two political titans. Major, when he is considered within more general studies of British politics, is usually written off as a political continuation of the Thatcher years before the Blair years swept aside a broken and corrupted Conservative Party. However, as so often happens, there has been a renaissance of study on Major and his whole premiership is being revisited and his reputation is perhaps being viewed more positively in the light of twenty-first-century British politics. Major is one of the British Prime Ministers who has the luck, or perhaps the curse, of working closely with two US presidents. Like others who have dealt with the same situation, he moved from initially being the “new boy,” with a clean slate to being the elder statesman, at least in terms of experience as a leader, with a record which can be difficult to escape from. Major shared his years in office with George H. W. Bush, a one-term Republican president who had served as vice president to President Reagan, and Bill Clinton, a two-term Democrat with a notably different style to Major. Like his domestic record, his relationship with the US presidents is largely overlooked. His relationship with Bush Sr. and Clinton were never as good as the Thatcher–Reagan relationship which preceded it, or the Blair–Bush Jr. which eventually followed it. This chapter will focus on those two important relationships and the key events which shaped them.

The Bush Years 1990–1992 The circumstances of John Major’s rise to the position of prime minister are well known, but not particularly auspicious. While clearly a very capable politician, with a fairly unorthodox background for any UK politician let alone a Conservative politician, he was viewed very much as a continuation of Thatcher, if the presentation was a little more palatable for some. In some ways he was the perfect politician for Thatcher to favour, not because of his skills but because he was not someone else. Major was not Michael Heseltine; he was not Geoffrey Howe; and he was not Nigel Lawson. Thatcher viewed him as a more agreeable chancellor and foreign secretary and a much more agreeable (and perhaps pliable) successor than some of the other candidates, particularly Michael Heseltine. However, this rather unfair assessment should not undermine Major’s own skills, for he was a skilled politician. He was one of the few prime ministers who had occupied two of the three key positions of state before progressing to the top job; although his time at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was memorably short (95  days). While this certainly gave Major

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experience and a certain amount of knowledge on the key issues that Britain faced, it also bound Major to Thatcher in the mind of her detractors, while failing to win over her supporters. For Thatcher, there was also some evidence that she believed Major not simply to be a suitable successor, but also a man who would allow her to keep one hand on the wheel of power, to act as a “good back-seat driver” as she put it.1 In terms of foreign affairs, the accepted policy within the Conservative Party, and perhaps the nation, was strongly pro-American and Eurosceptic. When Reagan had ended his second term as president in 1988, one of the best examples of the US–UK special relationships had also came to an end. These long-standing leaders (Reagan was president for 8 years, while Thatcher was prime minister for 11 years) had, alongside Mikhail Gorbachev, ended the Cold War. While Reagan and Thatcher were ideologically in step with each other, united by a common enemy, their relationship extended beyond that into genuine friendship, something not always associated with UK prime ministers and US presidents. As so often happens in British politics, the United States (US) and the European Community (EC) were viewed as diametrically opposed to one another. To be pro-American inevitably meant that one was anti-­European and vice versa. This bi-polarity was highlighted by Blair when he became prime minister, where he spoke of being a bridge between the US and the EU.2 In terms of the EC, Thatcher had begun her time in office as an unenthusiastic supporter of the economic benefits which the EC could bring to Britain, but ended her terms in office as a Eurosceptic, hostile to the social policies of the EC and several other European leaders, as evidenced by her famous Bruges speech.3 In turn, several European leaders were not particularly fond of her style either.4 For his part, Major was, by instinct, neither virulently opposed to the EC/EU, nor unconditionally devoted to the US. He saw benefits in both, but also huge difficulties within his party over the EC and the unbridgeable gap between the Eurosceptics and the Europhiles, particularly in a period where the EC was keen to expand its remit. While the early 1990s might have signalled change within Europe, both within the EC and within European nations as the Cold War ended, in the US there was some sense of continuity. George H. W. Bush was elected president in late 1988, succeeding Ronald Reagan, meaning not only that there was a third term where the Republican Party were in the White House but specifically that Reagan’s vice president was in charge. This meant that a change of 1  John Harris, “Why are Former Conservative Prime Ministers so Reluctant to Keep Quiet?,” Guardian, 23 October 2013. 2  The EC (or European Community) remained the official title of the European group until the Maastricht Treaty was signed, which adapted the name of the organisation to the EU (European Union) to reflect its widening actions and areas of co-operation. 3   Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to the College of Europe” (www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/107332). 4  For example, her relationship with Helmut Kohl was very difficult. Alan Watson, “Europe’s Odd Couple,” Prospect, 20 July 1996.

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policy direction was not expected. However, previous political alignment, between the Conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US, did not necessarily mean good personal chemistry. As Bruce Anderson noted in his biography of Major: President Bush respected Margaret Thatcher. During his years in the limbo of the Vice-Presidency, she had treated him well and shown him a high regard. But their relationship was still an uneasy one. George Bush found it easier to admire Margaret Thatcher from a distance than to work with her in close proximity. He had no desire to follow Ronald Reagan’s example and play leading man to her leading lady with the lady usually managing to secure top billing.5

With Bush Snr. in the White House, the legendary closeness between London and Washington began to fade, and events in Europe were, at least partially, at the heart of it. While the ideological views of Bush Sr. and Thatcher may have had much in common, their specific policy preoccupations, and their personalities, did not mesh well together. The end of the Cold War, which was an accelerating process leading  to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, shook the long-standing alliances and certainties within the international community. The common enemy of the USSR and communism was weakened and then removed as a serious threat, meaning that relationships and organisations which had had this threat at their heart (including NATO and the special relationship) were now in a state of uncertainty, with discussion focused on what the relationships and organisations should evolve into in the new post-Cold War world. German reunification was a real prospect which generated both optimism and concern among world leaders. As the unofficial leading nation in the EC, and a nation now on the edge of a new unified Europe, Germany was a key nation in Bush’s thinking on Europe. As Garnett pointed out, “the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US was under serious threat—not least because Germany so obviously enjoyed more influence in Europe than the increasingly recalcitrant Britain.”6 By the time that Major succeeded Thatcher in November 1990, the special relationship was looking a little less special than it had just two years before because the personal relationship at its heart, which adds some flexibility and affection to the often transactional nature of the relationship, was failing. It was not a spent force, with Riddell arguing that “the familiar close relationship with the United States was restored following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990,” but it certainly lacked the closeness which had existed between Reagan and Thatcher.7 Interestingly, Mark Garnett indicated that the view of the British government towards Germany was crucial to 5  Bruce Anderson, John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister (London: Fourth Estate, 1991), 297–8. 6  Mark Garnett, “Foreign and Defence Policy” in Kevin Hickson and Ben Williams (eds.), John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister? (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017), 188. 7  Peter Riddell, Hug Them Close: Blair, Clinton, Bush and the “Special Relationship” (London: Politico’s Publishing, 2003), 52.

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the special relationship in the very late 1980s, arguing that the Bush–Major relationship was much better than the Bush–Thatcher relationship partly because “the Bush administration could also feel confident of building a closer relationship with reunified Germany without alienating Britain.”8

The New ‘Special Relationship’ With the election of Major as Conservative Party leader, the external complexion of the party changed, even if internally it remained very similar. Gone was the strong leadership of Thatcher, “hand-bagging” colleagues and fellow leaders alike. Major was a more approachable  leader, less overtly forthright and someone open to discussion in an attempt to bring people with him rather than batter them into submission. For George H. W. Bush, Major was something of an unknown quantity. Because his term at the Foreign Office had been so short, Bush had only limited personal knowledge of Major before he became prime minister, having met him once during his time at the FCO.9 Riddell stated that “despite initial alarm in Washington over the ousting of Thatcher by her cabinet and parliamentary colleagues … John Major, her successor, soon developed a close relationship with George Bush.”10 The two men had much in common beyond their ideological similarities. Both had succeeded long-term “marmite-esque” leaders, who they were closely associated with. Both needed to demonstrate the key differences between them and their successors, while not being able to change policy direction. This could be problematic, and the two men were able to understand each other’s predicament. As Martin Rosenbaum reported, Bush and Major sympathised with each other in 1992 when both faced the polls, with Major winning and Bush losing.11 Both leaders were, to some degree, the victim of circumstance, although both could be accused of reaping what they had sown as members of the former administrations. For Bush, it was a crippling recession which led him to break economic promises on tax increases. For Major, it was the issue of Europe which, when combined with the economic impact of Black Wednesday following the 1992 election, was hugely damaging for party management and the appearance of economic competence. Because of the strong leaders they had succeeded, hiccups seemed like disasters, and both were considered weak leaders, indeed failures in some quarters. Even the nature of their failure was deemed weak, driven by a desire to unite their parties and appear strong. Contrast this to the failures of Clinton (sexual impropriety) and Blair (the fallout from the Iraq war), both men driven by a desire to personally dominate the political environment and the political narrative which surrounded them.  Garnett, “Foreign and Defense Policy,” 189.  John Major, The Autobiography (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 225. 10  Riddell, Hug Them Close, 52. 11  Martin Rosenbaum, “Revealed: The Bush-Major Conversations” BBC (www.bbc.co.uk/ news/uk-politics-36216768). 8 9

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Global circumstances meant that the two men had to hit the ground running. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the final months of Thatcher’s time in office had been taken up preparing for war. While Bush had had the dubious luxury of overseeing the conflict from the beginning, Major became leader at the eleventh hour before the conflict, meaning that the two men had to work together closely before any real rapport had developed between them. Luckily for them both, Major was just as committed to using military action to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and he worked closely with Bush to achieve victory. Writing contemporaneously, Wallace argued that Major: took over from his predecessor Britain’s commitment to act as the USA’s staunchest ally in reversing the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, and rapidly built up a relationship of mutual respect with President Bush. It was, however, a businesslike [sic] relationship between two managerial politicians without the historical echoes which had marked the Thatcher-Reagan partnership.12

However, Wallace’s evaluation of the two men seems to have underestimated the relationship. Instead of a business-like relationship, Major and Bush developed an excellent working relationship and a friendship to rival even that of Reagan and Thatcher. Garnett noted that: during “Operation Desert Shield” [in Kuwait], John Major provided a contrasting model of war-leadership from the one that his predecessor had presented during the Falklands conflict of 1982. Throughout he showed a marked disinclination either for sabre-rattling or triumphalism. The change of style and tone was clearly appreciated by President Bush, and initial doubts in Washington were dispelled during Major’s two-day visit to Camp David in December 1990.13

While their friendship may have been more low-key than the Reagan–Thatcher relationship, it was no less close. Writing in his autobiography, Major wrote of Bush, “sometimes you meet someone and the relationship is very easy. That was certainly true for me with George Bush, and I think it was true for him too. There was no hesitation. No unease. No holding back. No probing to find out the other’s position.”14 While not exactly a friendship forged in war in a practical sense, their friendship was the basis on which a new US–UK special relationship would be formed. In December 1990, Major visited Camp David for two days and the special relationship, while different to the early 1980s, was certainly alive and well. Operation Desert Shield officially ended in February 1991, but the end of hostilities did not mean that the conflict in the region was over. Saddam 12  William Wallace, “Foreign Policy” in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon (eds.), The Major Effect (London: Papermac, 1994), 285. 13  Garnett, “Foreign and Defence Policy,” 188–9. 14  Major, Autobiography, 225.

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Hussein had been oppressing his people long before the invasion of Kuwait and he continued, with vigour, after his forces drew back to the Iraqi border. The UK and US governments were preoccupied for much of 1991 with the fallout from the conflict and the genocide which followed in Iraq. By December 1991, Major had to turn his attention to another time-consuming foreign policy issue. Negotiations had begun over what would become the Maastricht Treaty, which would extend the reach of the European Union into areas such as foreign policy while streamlining their existing approach to other policy areas. The treaty was signed in February 1992, but for the Major government that was the beginning of a tense political period where the government attempted to get the treaty ratified in the House of Commons while facing down the Eurosceptic wing of the party. The ratification of the treaty did not begin in earnest until after the April 1992 general election, which delivered a surprising win for the Major government. After the victory, it might have been expected that the Conservative Party would pull together to deliver its programme for the next five years. Instead, in-fighting within the party over Europe and the legacy of Thatcherism burst out into the open and the party spent the next five years engaged in a bloody civil war, with Major trying his best to maintain some form of unity and leadership. The Maastricht Treaty ratification was a period of division and dispute within the party and Major was forced to focus his attention on this issue, with other pressing foreign policy concerns, such as the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, which began in 1992, being largely overlooked. Bush was also facing his own domestic issues with a presidential election due in November 1992 and an up-and-coming rival in the form of Bill Clinton. Domestically, Bush had had a difficult four years in office. Aside from the Gulf War and America’s continued presence in the Middle East, economic issues had forced Bush to break his electoral promise not to raise taxes. Faced with a media-friendly, charismatic Democratic candidate, Bush’s re-election was beginning to look less guaranteed. For the UK Conservative Party, a saxophone-­ playing Democrat looked considerably less attractive than a well-­ known Republican, particularly one who had been a member of the Reagan administration. This led to an episode which may have soured the early relationship between Clinton and Major. The problem centred on two particular issues. Firstly, in 1968 while Clinton had been a young man, he had spent some time in the UK studying as a Rhodes Scholar at University College, Oxford. There were suspicions within the Republican Party that he might have been investigated by the UK government for attending anti-Vietnam war protests. This supposedly led to a search of the Home Office records to check for historic reports of Clinton and his activities, which turned up nothing of note. This fruitless search certainly soured the attitudes of the Democratic Party, who were unimpressed by this interfering in the US election on behalf of the Republicans. The issue was compounded when it came to light that two Conservative Party staffers had begun working for the Republican Party on the Bush re-election campaign. This practice was

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not unheard of but, when combined with the Home Office incident, it certainly gave the strong impression that the Conservative government in the UK was working to frustrate Bill Clinton’s campaign and that it favoured a Bush White House. For Major, Clinton was an unknown entity while Bush was a friend and ally. As Wallace noted: Ronald Reagan had never concealed his preference for Margaret Thatcher over any Labour contender; but in terms of the unusual etiquette of the “special relationship” the Conservative backing for Bush was an example of “punching below the belt.” Clinton’s comfortable electoral colleague victory in November 1992 was thus a further blow to the Major government, while it was still reeling from Britain’s ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS).15

Clinton’s election, therefore, caused issues for the Conservative government and the continuation of the special relationship. The candidate that Downing Street had clearly preferred, had lost, and the worry was that the Clinton administration would not forgive or forget easily. This unease was compounded by the historic basis of the relationship. Conservative prime ministers have tended to have better relationships with their US counterparts than Labour prime ministers (Blair being the obvious exception to the rule). Many of the key relationships—Churchill and FDR, Macmillan and Kennedy, Thatcher and Reagan—have existed between Conservative prime ministers and US Presidents. Conversely, some of the worst relationships have also involved Conservative prime ministers, where the aims of the two individuals did not mesh well together (such as Heath and Nixon or Eden and Eisenhower). The fallout from these two, fairly minor, electoral incidents had the potential to sour relations, a particular worry when a reunified Germany was already considered to be a rival for the US’s political attention in Europe. The two men themselves both later suggested in their autobiographies that their relationship was not damaged by the Home Office records search or the Conservative staffers. Major stated that it “was a staffers feud, and never an issue between the two of us.”16 Clinton, more mischievously, wrote: After the election, the British press fretted that the special relationship between our two countries had been damaged by this unusual British involvement in American politics. I was determined that there would be no damage, but I wanted the Tories to worry about it for a while.17

It was not an auspicious beginning to the next phase of the special relationship.

 Wallace, “Foreign Policy,” 191.  Major, Autobiography, 498. 17  Bill Clinton, My Life (London: Arrow Books, 2005, paperback edition) 433. 15 16

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The Clinton Years 1992–1997 The close friendship between George H. W. Bush and John Major was a pleasant surprise for them both, but it was not always a political blessing. After his election defeat in November 1992, Bush was replaced by a very different type of president. Even without the issue of the Home Office records search, there were concerns over how the special relationship would change with Clinton in the White House. Clinton and Major were very clearly different politicians. While Clinton was viewed as charming and more modern, playing the saxophone on the campaign trail, Major was depicted, rather cruelly, by the UK television series Spitting Image as a man so boring that he was actually grey and ate peas. The Clinton family appeared to be from a different generation to the Major’s, with Hillary, a capable, astute individual in her own right, and their daughter Chelsea still a young teenager with braces. In contrast, and wholly unfairly, Norma Major appeared to be a little less modern, a little less glitzy with the slightly older Major children considered potential sources of embarrassment or scandal in Fleet Street. If the Clinton’s were a modern up-and-­ coming family for the 90s, the Major’s were viewed as being classless, but more traditional, more old-fashioned. In addition, while Major had only been prime minister for two years when Clinton was elected, he and his party had been in power for over a decade, and there was a sense that Major might be yesterday’s news, while Clinton was the new kid on the block, suggesting that the two men might simply be out of step, something which would be damaging for the special relationship. The relationship between Clinton and Major is really summed up by their opinions of each other. Major noted in his autobiography: When Bill Clinton was elected President in November 1992, many pundits forecast that my friendship with George Bush would disqualify me from forming an effective relationship with his successor. It was suggested, as if with inside knowledge, that there was some deep-seated animosity between us, and there was surprise in some quarters when our meetings went well.18

While there may have been no animosity between the two leaders, there certainly was not the closeness or abiding affection which Major had shared with Bush. Clinton was, in Major’s opinion, a political operator: Bill Clinton is the most political head of government with whom I have ever done business. When we were in discussions together, I could see, even feel, him calculating the political angle. I have seen him size up the people he is with, tune in on their wavelength and choose his approach. It is as instinctive to him as breathing. He never stops campaigning.19

 John Major, Autobiography, 497.  Ibid., 499.

18 19

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While Major’s words could be considered a compliment, when compared to his glowing assessment of Bush’s public service ethos and family values, it certainly does not read as a compliment. Clinton offered a positive assessment of Major in his autobiography, describing him as a “serious, intelligent” man who “was a better leader than his press coverage often suggested.”20 Again, a positive statement, but hardly glowing. Both men had generally positive views on the other, but they were not close, and they did not share a great deal of personal rapport. Perhaps their lack of closeness was made even more obvious when compared with the warm relationship which Clinton shared with Major’s successor, Tony Blair. While Clinton and Major were close in age (three years), they appeared to be leaders from different generations, with the younger Blair seeming to be more in tune with the more modern Clinton. While Labour leaders may not always enjoy close relationships with their American counterparts, this certainly was not the case for Blair. While he rode the wave of “cool Britannia” and his family appeared to be a younger, more modern family than those which had occupied Downing Street before, Clinton was also trying to maintain his modern credentials. Both men utilised an ideology which shared elements of the fabled “third way,” with the Blair campaign using the example of the Clinton presidential campaigns to build a winning electoral strategy. While Bush and Major had cemented their own relationship over the Gulf War, Clinton and Major would have potentially thornier and more complex issues to deal with—the Bosnian war, the genocide in Rwanda, and continuing violence and unrest in Northern Ireland.

The War in Bosnia The disintegration of Yugoslavia could hardly be ignored by the nations of Europe. Yugoslavia was on their doorstep and the civil wars which followed disintegration of the state were, at least partially, driven by the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Yugoslavia had been created after the Second World War and consisted of multiple republics. By April 1992, four of those republics had declared independence, taking advantage of the political chaos which had engulfed much of Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. War broke out across the former nation, often along ethnic lines. The Serbs, under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević, determined that they would ̵ create a greater Serbia and the Croats, led by Franjo Tudman, declared independence for their nation and began engaging in ethnic cleansing.21 After a failed peace attempt by the European Union, the two nations turned their attention to Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had been declared an independent  Bill Clinton, My Life, 583.  E.  A. Reitan, The Thatcher Revolution: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and the Transformation of Modern Britain 1979–2001 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, 2003), 123. 20 21

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nation. Both sides laid claims to parts of the nation, and ethnic cleansing began again.22 There was no question that external force was required to create peace in the region. It was also beyond doubt that there was no peace to enforce, and therefore a more direct force was required. However, the question of who was going to provide that force was deeply contentious, and the wrangling over who was responsible meant that action was slow to be taken and thousands of lives were lost while nations argued and shifted responsibility. Britain and France agreed to contribute troops and other resources for humanitarian purposes, although it was recognised that peacekeeping could not take place where there was no peace. The American view was that the European Union should accept responsibility for Bosnia, which was in its backyard. The Russians were pro-Serb, but the chaotic condition of Russia precluded them doing anything. Lacking power to impose a settlement, the United Nations’s involvement was ineffectual and the atrocities continued. Since British troops were an important part of the United Nations contingent and a British general was in command, the daily diet of unforgivable news from the former Bosnia was politically unsettling in Britain.23 Washington and London fundamentally disagreed over which organisation should take control of the conflict, and that disagreement took months to resolve. As the wrangles continued, and the deaths mounted, the Western world looked at best, ineffectual and at worst, culpable in genocide. In 1995, the situation worsened, with the massacre in Srebrenica. Approximately 8000 Bosnian men and boys were massacred, leading to revulsion in the international community. However, declassified documents suggest that even this massacre was not enough to force the Americans to immediately step in. Instead, Clinton “expressed his disillusion with the Bosnian army for failing to defend Srebrenica” and encouraged the Bosnian authorities to make extensive concessions to bring peace to the region before the US Presidential elections in 1996.24 NATO eventually stepped in, with American support, to try to end the war and the 1995 Dayton Accords, which created the framework for peace, were signed in the US. “They [the leaders of warring factions] accepted an agreement that created a united Bosnia, with separate sectors for the Croats, Muslims and Serbs. NATO ground forces, including twenty thousand American and thirteen thousand British troops, entered Bosnia to maintain order and prevent further atrocities.”25 While action had been taken in Bosnia, the charge was that it had been too little, too late. As Garner wrote: From the Major government’s perspective, however, Bosnia’s tragedy was something akin to a “perfect storm.” It seemed to the British that the Americans were  Ibid., 123.  Ibid., 124. 24  Julian Borger, “Bill Clinton Pushed ‘Appeasement’ of Serbs after Srebrenica Massacre,” Guardian, 26 July 2020. 25  Reitan, Op. Cit., 124. 22 23

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indulging in irresponsible “gesture politics” assuming that the “shock and awe” tactics displayed so successfully in the Gulf could be translated to the very different topographical and political context of the Balkans, where (it was supposed) Serb aggression could only be thwarted by a massive influx of ground forces.26

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia was one of the most shameful episodes in the Major and Clinton administrations, but it was not to be the last.

The Genocide in Rwanda In studies of the Major government, and indeed in the autobiographies of key members of his government, the genocide in Rwanda simply does not appear. You could easily assume from the accounts of Major’s time in government, that there was no conflict in Africa at all, certainly none that required international intervention. As Melvern points out “in the writings and memoirs of those concerned, there is hardly a relevant word—in John Major’s case, the genocide has completely vanished from the public version of his period in office.”27 Writing with Williams, Melvern adds a little more detail to her observation: The events surrounding the genocide in Rwanda have been virtually airbrushed from the writings and memoirs of the key British decision-makers at the time: the Prime Minister, John Major, the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, the Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, and the Minister for Overseas Development, Baroness Lynda Chalker. All of the above must share a wealth of knowledge about what happened, and all have failed to offer any detail at all about what went wrong. In John Major’s case, the Rwandan genocide has completely vanished from the public version of his period in office. There is, for instance, no reference to the Rwandan genocide in the index, chronology or the chapter on “The wider world” in his autobiography.28

It is odd that such a horrific event, and the proceeding civil war, receive virtually no coverage in the autobiographies of those who were undoubtedly aware of the situation in Rwanda. Perhaps because of this, the issue of Britain’s response to the genocide in Rwanda is also rarely covered in academic work on the period, with the focus often being the war in Bosnia. In many ways, it would be easy to argue that Rwanda was a conflict (and latterly a genocide) which Britain had no need to intervene in. In international affairs, Britain has, since the end of the Second World War, tended to focus its attention on key strategic regions, key relationships or former colonies, where it is felt that linkages exist. Rwanda fell into none of these categories. There  Mark Garnett, The Thatcher Revolution, 192.  Linda Melvern “The UK Government and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 2, no. 3 (2007): 249. 28  Linda Malvern and Paul Williams “Britannia Waived the Rules: The Major Government and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” African Affairs 103, no. 410 (January 2004): 11–12. 26 27

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were exceptions, with the war in Bosnia being one, but Rwanda was not on the edge of Europe. It had been part of the Belgian Empire before declaring independence in 1962. Located in East Africa it was geographically close to several former British colonies (which encouraged it to become a member of the Commonwealth in 2009) but in the 1990s, Britain had no special ties with the nation. In 1990, the nation slipped into civil war but by late 1993 there were peace plans (the Arusha accords) and it appeared that, with international support and intervention, the civil war might be over.29 However, international events were to intrude. Melvern and Williams argue that events in Somalia, where a botched peacekeeping operation had led to 18 US soldiers losing their lives, had made the US, and Clinton particularly, reluctant to engage in more peace-keeping operations.30 Whatever the motivation, the US was reluctant to commit troops to peacekeeping in Rwanda, and the UK was not particularly enthusiastic either. While peace accords had been agreed, there was concern over how much of a peace there was to maintain in Rwanda (which had been less of a concern in Bosnia only the year before—1992). “As a consequence, Britain, along with the US, was able to argue that under these new guidelines [a US Presidential Directive on Peacekeeping], and in order to prevent a repeat of the disaster in Somalia, the UN had little business being in Rwanda.”31 The US president and the UK prime minister may have, again, been on the same page in regard to their foreign policy objectives, supporting each other at the UN Security Council and defending each other against criticism, but their decisions were to have long-lasting consequences. Without UN peacekeepers, and with a lack of support from the US and the UK, the situation in Rwanda began to look extremely fragile, and it quickly collapsed. By early 1994 reports were being made to the UN that a large-scale genocide was occurring in Rwanda and the Belgian government even sent their foreign minister, Willy Claes, to the country to see for himself.32 What occurred in the first months of 1994 is that “an estimated one million people were killed. The killing was organized in advance; it was the direct result of a deliberate government policy and was carried out according to an explicit strategy.”33 The horror of the genocide in Rwanda cannot be overstated, and the international community, including and perhaps led by the US and the UK governments, watched. This lack of action raises a number of issues, particularly over the rule of international law. Lynda Malvern argues that the US and UK governments were very careful to label the conflict a “civil war” rather than genocide. The former would not require either unilateral or multilateral action while the latter would. As signatories of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, both the UK and the US (and a host of  Ibid., 6.  Ibid. 31  Ibid., 7. 32  Linda Malvern, “The UK Government and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,” 251. 33  Ibid., 249. 29 30

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other signatory nations) would have been required to act to prevent genocide in Rwanda. As two of the UN Security Council’s permanent members, it would perhaps have been expected that these nations would have come together to demand action. Instead, Malvern argues that these two nations, working in concert, determined to avoid taking any action in Rwanda.34 It is possible that a lack of action was driven by ignorance. Rwanda was not a key African nation, it certainly was not a nation with close ties to the US or UK, and it is possible that both nations, keen to deal with domestic issues and considerably less keen to deal with an ever-increasing number of international conflicts, simply overlooked or misunderstood the scale of the issue. Both nations recognised the civil war in Rwanda, but neither recognised the genocide. This suggestion is, however, difficult to defend. In late April 1994, three of the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council—the Czech Republic, New Zealand, and Nigeria—began to make a concerted effort for the UN Security Council to send peacekeepers to Rwanda and to do more to end the unfolding horror in the nation. Malvern notes that these efforts were powerless against the UK–US approach, which minimised the events in the nation and effectively refused to help.35 Instead, the UK attempted to bring the warring factions together, a move which the Czech Republic’s ambassador to the Security Council, Karel Kovanda, argued was like “asking the Jews to reach a ceasefire with Hitler.”36 Eventually, UN action was taken in Rwanda, but the contribution of the US and the UK was fairly minimal, with the US offering 14 armoured personnel carriers, on rental terms, and the UK offering 50 unarmoured trucks, which never arrived.37 The genocide in Rwanda was not the fault of either the UK or the US, but both nations certainly enabled the genocide to continue by their lack of action and cost many lives. They were not the only nations to share the blame in the international community, with France and Israel’s actions also raising questions. What can be seen in the sad example of Rwanda was that the two leaders, Clinton and Major, both stood shoulder-to-shoulder to deflect criticism from themselves in order to deal with other issues, both domestically and internationally. Rwanda simply was not as compelling for either leader as the civil war in Bosnia, and neither was willing to go it alone, even if that had been an option. Often in foreign policy, it is not simply the actions that a nation undertakes which shape its legacy, but also the action it does not undertake. In the case of Rwanda, Clinton and Major may have been able to work together and might have been able to understand each other’s points of view, but that does not make up for the ramifications of their actions. At this juncture, it is impossible to know effectively what either leader’s views on the genocide in Rwanda was, or what their governments knew, because the official documentation has not yet been released and the autobiographies of these two leaders tell us  Ibid., 253.  Ibid. 36  Kovanda quoted in Malvern and Williams, “Britannia Waived the Rules,” 10. 37  Ibid., 17. 34 35

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almost nothing about the issue. It is the forgotten chapter in the Major–Clinton relationship.38

Northern Ireland If the response of Major and Clinton to civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and genocide in Rwanda was typified by confusion and a desire to look elsewhere for action, the same was not true for the situation in Northern Ireland. The weeping sore of Northern Ireland was not an issue which a British government could avoid—it was very much in their backyard. Major’s predecessor, Thatcher, had taken a hard line on Northern Ireland. The activities of the IRA on the British mainland had, under Thatcher, become more prominent. These attacks had not just been on the British mainland—there had been specific attacks on the Conservative Party. Conservative MP Airey Neave, a close colleague of Thatcher who had run her party leadership campaign in 1975, had been murdered in 1979 in a car bomb. In 1984, the Grand Brighton Hotel was bombed during the Tory Party conference. Numerous Tory MPs, partners, and staff were injured and five people were killed. Several had life-altering injuries, including Margaret Tebbit, the wife of Thatcher’s cabinet colleague, Norman Tebbit. Thatcher was not known for attempting to reach consensus, or reach across any breach to achieve peace, but particularly after the Brighton bombing, her attitude to the IRA hardened and the government made no known public (or private) attempts to reach peace with the different groups in Northern Ireland. Her successor, John Major, inherited this stalemate in Northern Ireland. The situation was damaging for those in Northern Ireland as well as those on the British mainland and it was hard to see a way to peace. Major also inherited a Conservative Party, and a British public, which notionally wanted peace but only if that involved the surrender and public defeat of the IRA and other paramilitary groups or (for some Republican  supporters) the surrender of the British government, neither of which were potential solutions. According to Seldon, “Major’s interest in Northern Ireland was motivated not by a detailed knowledge of Irish affairs, but by a long-held conviction that the endless cycle of death and destruction in Northern Ireland was an unacceptable situation which demanded and deserved more attention from the British government.”39 The issue of Northern Ireland was not simply one of territory or religious dominance, as complicated as those issues were to resolve. It was also unclear as to which nations should or could be involved in any peace process, and how those nations’ different aims would fit together. Obviously, the UK and the 38  The documentation relating to this is subject to the 30-year rule in the UK, although it could potentially be classified for longer if the government demands it. 39  Chris Norton, “Renewed Hope for Peace? John Major and Northern Ireland” in Peter Dorey (ed.) Major Premiership 1990–1997: Politics and Policies under John Major (London: Palgrave, 1999), 109.

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Republic of Ireland would need to be involved in any peace process, as would politicians from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. These were all necessary to build a stable, long-lasting peace. What was less clear was the potential interference, welcome or unwelcome, of the US. The Democrats had close links with Anglo-Irish communities, some members of which had risen to prominence within the party, such as the Kennedy’s. Because of the closeness of the US, the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, and the level of immigration between the three, the intervention of the US in the peace process could be considered inevitable. Hazleton argues that the Clinton administration decided to intervene in the peace process as: intervention in Norther Ireland appeared more “do-able” and promised to be comparatively inexpensive … American intervention, when it came, caused a severe strain on ties with Britain, but the closeness and complexity of the Anglo-­ American “special relationship” allowed the US to forge ahead in ways that would have been “unthinkable” in dealing with other states.40

Because of its links to Ireland, via the Irish-American population, particularly on the east coast of the US, the IRA and other paramilitary groups had been keen to try and raise funds in America, drawing the US further into a conflict which the UK were not always keen on them joining. This meant that the Anglo-Irish question was not a domestic UK issue, or even a question for Europe to solve. Instead, it was an issue which required the US, and specifically a Democrat president, to intervene in, to ensure the “right result.” But what was that right result? For Clinton, he was keen to participate in the peace process, and help ensure its success if possible, but not engage in the detailed negotiations, or be drawn into a bloody conflict across the Atlantic. This was seen perhaps most clearly during the peace negotiations under Blair, which ended in 1998 with the Good Friday agreement. During those negotiations, Bill Clinton visited towards the end of the negotiations and attempted to push the sides towards agreement, which was ultimately successfully. William Hazleton argues that the American administration held itself apart from the negotiations to cultivate a sense of detached, and therefore even-handed, action. He argues that Clinton’s late-­ night interventions in the process demonstrated that the White House helped to “pull rather than push Unionists and nationalists into an agreement.”41 Major’s determination to bring about a change in policy towards Northern Ireland involved a carrot-and-stick approach. His government began secret talks with the IRA’s spokesmen while the public policy on non-engagement with the IRA remained unbending in public. If those talks could bear fruit and bring the IRA towards more peaceful methods and a form of disarmament, the 40  William Hazleton, “Clinton and the Good Friday Agreement,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 11 (2000): 108. 41  Ibid., 119.

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British government would be able to move towards some kind of public peace agreement. However, in order to force the hand of the IRA in those negotiations, political pressure needed to be applied to ensure that the IRA felt compelled to participate in a meaningful way. This meant that the British government needed the co-operation of the American administration, to ensure that the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, did not raise funds or court public opinion in the US, which might strengthen their resolve and discourage them from participating in talks in the UK. The culmination of these talks came in December 1993, with the signing of the Downing Street Declaration. The declaration was issued jointly between John Major and the Irish Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds. As Norton explains: The declaration did contain the concept of an “agreed Ireland” but there was no timetable for a British withdrawal and no commitment for the British government to become the “persuaders” for Irish unity. Furthermore, the right of self-­ determination for the Irish people was now inseparable from the consent principle.42

While the Downing Street Declaration was not a peace deal, it was an important step on that road, offering Ireland a future which was driven by public consent. But like all steps on the road to peace, it required continued work and, indeed, continued pressure on all parties. In early 1994, the resolve of the UK and the US was tested. The issue came to a head over Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin. Adams wanted to travel to the US in order to raise funds for his organisation and applied for a travel visa, which was granted by the US administration. The British government were deeply concerned that Adams would use the trip not only to raise funds for his political organisation (which could potentially be used to fund IRA activity) but that he would also use his trip to appeal to the Irish-American community, to apply pressure to the president. A positive response from the president might encourage Sinn Féin and terrorist organisations to pursue an increase in violence to push their perceived advantage, or it might lengthen the conflict as the Republican groups hoped for support from the US to achieve their aims. Either way, it would certainly undermine the unity (artificial or real) which both the UK and Irish governments had been seeking to achieve with the Clinton administration. While Major might have been less concerned had Bush still been in the White House, his relationship with Clinton was not that strong that he could dismiss these worries. As a Democrat, the views of the Irish-American community were important and Clinton would certainly not wish to be seen to be ignoring or side-lining them, but where did that leave the special relationship? Regardless of Clinton’s personal views, the subject of Northern Ireland and the actions of the US government were perceived as being an unwelcome interference in UK domestic politics.  Ibid., 118.

42

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Clinton seemed less concerned about these issues, certainly in retrospect. Writing in his autobiography he indicated that: Some of the press implied that I had issued the visa to appeal to the Irish vote in American and because I was still angry at Major for his attempts to help President Bush during the campaign. It wasn’t true. I had never been as upset with Major as the British believed and I admired him for sticking his neck out with the Declaration of Principles; he had a slim majority in Parliament and needed the votes of the Irish Unionists to keep it.43

While Clinton may be downplaying the episode in hindsight, it certainly had the potential to be damaging. Writing contemporaneously, Wallace described the situation was “a bitter row.”44 Riddell argued that: the Major government felt that the Clinton White House ran roughshod over British interests, taking a one-sided view, particularly over the granting of a visa to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein to visit the US in March 1994. This was in direct defiance of the wishes of Major and the advice of the State Department.45

Writing in 2019, Adams argued that the trip was pivotal for the peace process and it “was important to showing that you could build an alternative … an alternative to armed struggle.”46 The Major government certainly did not view the visit in those terms. It would not be the last time that the Major government felt undermined and overruled by the Clinton administration, and it demonstrated that the closeness which Major had enjoyed with Bush, where they had a similar outlook on both potential victories and pitfalls, was not shared with Clinton, leading to real disharmony in the special relationship. Work continued between the different groups and in 1995 the British and Irish governments released a “New Framework for Agreement.” This document, built on the Downing Street Declaration, offered up suggestions on how power-sharing in Northern Ireland might be enacted. Additionally, the framework placed the issue of decommissioning of arms “in the hands of an independent international body, under the chairmanship of the former US senator George Mitchell.”47 This was certainly welcome news in London, but the air of optimism was quickly dampened by the actions of the American administration. Adams was rewarded with a trip to Washington, meeting with President Bill Clinton in the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, 1995. The White House announced that the Adams’s visit was in recognition of his willingness to  Clinton, My Life, 580.  Wallace, “Foreign Policy,” 297. 45  Riddell, Hug Them Close, p. 54. 46  Mark Simpson, “Gerry Adams: New York in 1994 Visit ‘Pivotal to Peace,’” BBC News, 01 Feb 2019. 47  Norton, “Renewed Hope for Peace,” 124. 43 44

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discuss with the British government the reduction of IRA weaponry. Incredibly, Clinton announced that the American ban on IRA fund-raising would end, thus providing the IRA with the wherewithal to purchase more weapons.48 Following British upset over Adams’s visit to Washington in 1996, Clinton did publicly announce that any IRA funding in the US must be “for peaceful purposes and accompanied by a promise to reduce their arsenal.”49 Norton notes that by early 1996 Major was “perceived as being intransigent and obstructive, both in political negotiations and on the arms question,” but if that was the case, it was almost certainly a very unfair conclusion to reach.50 The Major government had achieved a great deal in their pursuit of peace in Northern Ireland, although the final push and agreement would be achieved by his successor, Tony Blair. What the situation in Northern Ireland demonstrated was the lack of real, deep understanding in Washington of the UK government’s views and actions. While the US administration was willing to support the government, they did not support the Major government entirely leading, on occasion to different conclusions being reached and misunderstandings between the two governments. It is hard to conclude that the Bush administration, or the Republican Party more generally, would have come to similar conclusions to the Democratic party, with its links to the Irish-American community, and the dominance of prominent Irish-American (and Catholic) politicians such as Ted Kennedy.

Conclusion The 1990s was a period of immense international upheaval. Germany was reunified after pressure from both sides led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the USSR collapsed. The Western nations, who had spent much of the latter half of the twentieth century worried about the rise of communism, and willing to tolerate vicious dictators across the world who aligned themselves with capitalism, now began to consider the atrocities committed by those leaders. Regimes fell and new political forces emerged, some good, some more dubious. New nations rose and old wounds reopened. The most powerful nations on Earth began to reassess their future commitments—what did they want the world to look like and how could they achieve that? For the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it could be argued that really, very little changed. The strongest, richest nations continued to dominate the agenda, the weakest within society still found themselves in the middle of warzones. Those nations “on the up” such as China, continued on that trajectory, while other nations looked for international organisations to enable them to grow and maintain their voice in this new world. The lessons learned may have been relatively slight, but the sense of upheaval in the 1990s was immense and the  Reitan, The Thatcher Revolution, 155.  Ibid. 50  Norton, “Renewed Hope for Peace,” 125. 48 49

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promise of a new, better world, was tangible. It was this world, this environment that John Major was prime minister in and yet, for all this change, his period in office is often overlooked and marginalised. The most likely explanation is that Major’s time in office was overshadowed by the long administrations of Thatcher and Blair, both of whom came to represent the zeitgeist in which they operated. Both these leaders, for different reasons, dominated the political landscape domestically and internationally, and without that dominance, without that almost domineering approach, Major has been somewhat forgotten. However, there is more to the situation than that. It is not merely Major’s friendly or conciliatory attitude which means he is overlooked. Major is, like George H.  W. Bush, sandwiched between epochs, although in the case of Bush, he can claim to have been at the heart of the Reagan era. For Major, despite being a member of the Thatcher government, he is not as closely associated with Thatcher’s time in office as other individuals such as Nigel Lawson or Geoffrey Howe, although when he became prime minister he was very much viewed as a continuation of Thatcherism, in a weaker and more approachable form. The resignation of Thatcher in 1990 is often seen as the end of active Thatcherism, before Blair and his brand of sofa-­ government began in 1997. Major is often written off as a poor man’s Thatcher, a weak imitation who was eventually relieved of office. Major is the whimper at the end of Thatcherism, before the roar of Blair. But that conclusion is unfair on Major and overlooks the international issues his government dealt with. It removes from them both success and failure. The 1990 Gulf War is perhaps the major success of Major’s foreign policy actions, where Britain worked closely with their allies, particularly the US, in order to remove an enemy state from a sovereign nation and fulfil a UN mandate. The actions of the British, alongside their allies, ensured the safety of Kuwait, while at the same time failing to quickly defend others against Hussain’s actions, most notably the Kurds within Iraq itself. The war would be the beginning of action in Iraq, which eventually culminated in the 2003 Iraq war, but, unlike Blair, Major’s actions in the region were broadly welcomed and considered a success story, at least, a partial success. In Bosnia, the British, alongside other EU nations and the US, can claim little success. While the actions of the British, and latterly the US, did help to end the conflict, the long periods of inactivity and the desire to force others to shoulder responsibility meant that the conflict was long and bloody. The perpetrators of that violence are, in some cases, still hiding while others have been captured and prosecuted. For the British, the conflict in Bosnia highlighted the decline in the US–UK relationship. While Bush was in the White House, Major could rely on a friend and colleague whose view of the world was very similar to his own. Neither man would try to pressure the other into action they felt unjustified, and they both appear to have trusted each other’s judgement. With Clinton’s election, the relationship entirely changed. While both men were superficially friendly, they lacked any common ground on which to build a strong relationship, and while both held the other in fairly high esteem, they

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did not seem to trust each other’s judgement a great deal. That lack of trust meant that the ease within the relationship that had existed for over a decade, first under Thatcher and Reagan and then under Major and Bush, was eroded and the relationship was damaged. Gone was the common ground and instead, each viewed the other with some caution, meaning arguments and requests needed to be justified a great deal more than previously. Inevitably, this impacted on the British more than the Americans. The war in Rwanda demonstrated perhaps the worst of this relationship, where both sides agreed the best plan of action was to do nothing. Neither Major nor Clinton felt the desire, or the ethical need, to intervene in perhaps the worst genocide seen since the Nazis, although in that they were not alone. Many signatories of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide chose to look the other way, concluding the genocide in Rwanda was not their business and not their concern. Interestingly, if the response to the war in Bosnia was one of confusion between the US and the UK, where they had different opinions, the war in Rwanda brought them together, with both sides actively working to avoid any consideration of the issue and denying any knowledge of the situation on the ground, despite evidence to the contrary. In the post-Cold War world, both Clinton and Major agreed that their nations could, and should, cherry-pick the conflicts they wished to be involved in, something which was continued under the leadership of Blair, and later George W. Bush. Even when a prime minister and president fail to see eye-to-eye, the security and military aspects of the special relationship continue; military intelligence continues to be shared, and the nations still work closely together at the UN. However, the personal relationship between the president and prime minister adds an extra dimension to the relationship, a layer of good (or ill) will. When the two individuals have good personal chemistry, they are able to work effectively together to achieve their international aims but are also more willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt when needed. Incidents that cause problems can be dismissed as ill-advised rather than suspicious or duplicitous. When the relationship is poor, the two leaders may, as happened with Nixon and Heath, not only work poorly together but may have entirely different priorities, which undermines the relationship even more. For John Major, the heyday of his own personal special relationship was undoubtedly with George H.  W. Bush between 1990 and 1992. These two men found in each other a political friend, someone who had a similar outlook, a similar political instinct and it meant the two men were able to work together well and appreciate each other’s viewpoints. That trust allowed the relationship to flourish, something which was evident during the Gulf War and the military action which followed it in the Middle East. It was also evident in the relationship which Major and Bush were able to build with the reunified Germany. Gone was the hostility to reunification and Germany as a powerful EC nation, which had been evident during the Thatcher years, and this allowed Bush and Major to sidestep a potential landmine in their relationship. The US could,

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more easily, have a close relationship with Berlin if London was agreeable. Beyond their professional friendship, was a personal friendship which lasted beyond their years in leadership.51 With Bush’s defeat in November 1992, the special relationship took a less desirable turn. While Clinton and Major are both pleasant enough about each other in their autobiographies, their comments demonstrate no warmth in the relationship. Instead, each viewed the other with some degree of scepticism, measuring each other in political terms rather than in human terms. The closeness which had dominated the relationship for over a decade, first under Thatcher and Reagan and then under Major and Bush, was gone. That did not mean the special relationship was dead, but it was far more complicated, and more vulnerable than it had been before. The Clinton-Major years were beset by conflicts—firstly Bosnia, then Rwanda and Northern Ireland—and the two nations often failed to act in sync on these issues. When they did work well together, it was to avoid responsibility and to push other nations, or the EU to act, primarily in Bosnia and Rwanda. The different attitudes of the two leaders are perhaps most clearly seen in their actions over the troubles in Northern Ireland and their attitude towards Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams. Ultimately, irrespective of their difficulties and their different attitudes, they both contributed massively to the Good Friday Agreement and the achievement of peace in Northern Ireland. Perhaps, despite their political differences, Clinton and Major were a more successful pairing than might be first concluded. More likely, two very capable, very intelligent politicians were able to work through their issues to achieve their aims. The Major years can be considered a tale of two presidents, but both periods can be considered to have some successes.

 ITV News, ‘John Major leads tributes to George Bush senior’, 01 December 2018.

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CHAPTER 15

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Tony Blair: The Search for Order James Ellison

Tony Blair and George Bush in the Blue Room at the White House, 20 September 2001 [photograph]. Eric Draper, George W. Bush Presidential Library

J. Ellison (*) School of History, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_15

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Introduction As the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Reagan-Thatcher era ended, the Anglo-­ American relationship that had been forged to defend the world against fascism and then communism had fulfilled its highest purpose. It was expected that the asymmetry in power between the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) which had existed since the 1950s, and had been offset by Thatcher’s anti-communism, neo-liberalism, and force of personality, would now be the defining feature of their relations in a new unipolar age.1 There was certainly nothing especially close or impactful about the Anglo-American alliance in the opening years of the post-Cold War period and it seemed unlikely that an American president would in the future call singularly on a British prime minister to exert global influence in pursuit of common goals. Yet as this chapter will explain, the concurrence of events, ideas, and personal relations after 1997 would once more mean that US and UK leaders would work together and have effect on international affairs. For a brief period, but with lengthy consequences, Tony Blair aligned with Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush in the search for order in a world destabilised by post-Cold War atrocities, nationalisms and sectarianism, and then by al-Qaeda. There has long been a tendency when writing about relations between American and British leaders and their governments to contemplate whether they were ‘special’ or not. The Clinton-Blair-Bush period was debated in such terms at the time.2 What the history of the Anglo-American alliance suggests, however, is that except in certain discrete areas of bilateral cooperation, expressions of a ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the US should be seen for what they mostly have been, namely political rhetoric. It is more historically valuable to examine what brought American and British leaders and governments together and how they influenced world events. That is the approach taken by one recent study which explores US–UK cooperation in post-1945 strategies of containment and economic liberalism and argues that shared visions of world order shaped global affairs in the Cold War and beyond.3 In a similar vein, this chapter calls on new evidence to consider the relationships

1  For two interesting contemporary articles, David Reynolds, ‘Rethinking Anglo-American Relations’, International Affairs, 65.1 (Winter 1988-1989), 89-111 and William Wallace, ‘Foreign Policy and the National Identity in the United Kingdom’, International Affairs, 67.1 (January 1991), 65-80. 2  For example, Peter Riddell, Hug Them Close: Blair, Clinton, Bush and the ‘Special Relationship’ (London: Politico’s, 2003). Also see Con Coughlin, American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror (London: HarperCollins, 2006) and James Naughtie, The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency (London: Macmillan, 2004). 3  James E. Cronin, Global Rules: America, Britain and a Disordered World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

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between Blair and Clinton and then Blair and Bush.4 It seeks to build on early accounts but not to criticise Blair by proposing what he should have done over Iraq in particular, as other studies have.5 Instead, the questions which will be explored are why there were unusual levels of cooperation after 1997 and what difference they made to the course of events? It will be argued that despite very close personal relations between Blair and two US presidents, and broad concurrence on ideas about post-Cold War order, ultimately the British prime minister was unable to transcend the realities of power. Personal relations did not dictate the search for order, US national interests did. The era considered here begins with conflict and ends with it. Although neither Clinton nor Bush sought to be war presidents, their presidencies were largely defined by them. Much else featured in national and international politics, but the dominant events in terms of reshaping contemporary global affairs were wars, first to halt Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, and then to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. In both instances, the US found a willing ally in the UK government and particularly in its prime minister. Blair knew little of foreign affairs on taking office and experienced his ‘awakening’ on foreign policy as he sought to end atrocities in Kosovo.6 Liberal intervention became his mission and he pursued it with the zeal of the convert. The result was the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Those wars are the focus of this chapter’s study of the personal relations between one prime minister and two presidents. It offers reflections on the partnerships to establish context and then considers how they fared during the wars in Kosovo and Iraq. In conclusion, it reaches judgements on the significance of personal relations in determining how events transpired in the post-Cold War and post-9/11 search for international order.

Clinton Meets Blair As a post-Cold War, New Democrat centrist, Bill Clinton did not share the politics of John Major, the first British prime minister with whom he worked. It was the opinion of the US Ambassador to London in the early 1990s that ‘Clinton felt he owed little to the British and nothing to the Conservatives … Equally important, the Cold War was over, and the transatlantic relationship had lost the sobering structure and rehearsed vocabulary which two

4  That evidence includes releases from the Clinton Digital Library (hereafter CDL) and from the UK Iraq Inquiry. 5  For example, John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: The Free Press, 2004). Also see biographies of Blair such as John Rentoul, Tony Blair: Prime Minister (London: Warner Books, 2001); Anthony Seldon, Blair (London: The Free Press, 2005), and Philip Stephens, Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader (London:  Viking, 2004). For critical studies, David Coates and Joel Krieger, Blair’s War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004) and Patrick Porter, Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 6  Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Hutchinson, 2010), 223.

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generations of presidents had inherited with the job’.7 Such geopolitical and generational changes unsettled established elements of Anglo-American relations as did foreign policy tensions between the UK and US governments during the first four years of Clinton’s presidency.8 So too did the Conservative Party’s post-Thatcher infighting and drift. While Major’s Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, said in January 1992 that Britain would punch above its weight in international affairs, that ambition remained unachieved by the 1997 General Election.9 For the Major government to have mattered to the Clinton administration as it directed the policies of the world’s only superpower amid the instability of the new world era, there would have had to have been a shared agenda and cooperation, leavened by personal closeness, the ingredients which had combined to produce Anglo-American effect before the Berlin Wall came down. They did not exist while the Conservatives were in Downing Street but there were signs that they could with reformers in the Labour Party who courted the Clinton administration in opposition. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown first observed the New Democrats early in office during a visit to Washington in January 1993. As they were unknowns in the US, their access was limited to leading party figures and political strategists. One of them described Blair as looking ‘like a kid to us’ and how he ‘took furious notes about everything we said’.10 That was the purpose; New Labour drew political and policy inspiration from Clinton and the New Democrats and studied their electoral strategies and tactics. Over the next four years, transatlantic networks of centre-left thinkers, party activists, and politicians evolved which mirrored those on the right during the Reagan-Thatcher era but extended their effect by actually giving New Labour a blueprint for how to gain power.11 Blair first met Clinton on 29 November 1995. The occasion was a presidential visit to London and then Northern Ireland which came as relations between US and UK governments had reached ‘rock bottom’.12 That fact did not prevent Clinton from playing up to the pageantry of the Anglo-American relationship. In a speech delivered to both houses of Parliament, he talked of shared heritage, history, and values, and also of future cooperation to overcome post-­ Cold War challenges.13 This performance followed a diplomatic script but Clinton may possibly have been looking beyond the Major government. The  Raymond Seitz, Over Here (London: Phoenix, 1998), 321-2.  John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 112-116. 9  Douglas Hurd, ‘Making the World a Safer Place: Our Five Priorities’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 January 1992. 10  Seldon, Blair, 122-3. 11  Rentoul, Blair, 194-8; Stephens, Blair, 68-71; Seldon, Blair, 119-127. 12  Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 38. 13  Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (hereafter PPP), ‘Remarks to the Parliament’, 29 November 1995; also, PPP, ‘Remarks at a Dinner Hosted by Prime Minister John Major’, 29 November 1995. 7 8

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president was now certainly aware of New Labour and made time to meet Blair as leader of the opposition while in London.14 When Blair then visited Washington on 12 April 1996, Clinton gave him an hour in the Oval Office, an unusually generous duration.15 Indeed, for observers of presidential protocol, the hour contrasted notably with the pointedly brief, awkward audience given by Reagan to the then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, in March 1987.16 The Blair visit was always going to go smoothly because it was the latest opportunity orchestrated by New Democrat and New Labour fixers for their principals to develop a relationship. The night before seeing Clinton, Blair had met the president’s wife Hillary at a private party. She too ‘instantly felt a connection’ between New Labour’s project and the political programme that her husband’s administration had used to win office.17 Personal relations thus began to blend with politics and exchanges about political strategy. Blair and other Labour reformers had seen in the New Democrats a progressive, centre-left agenda which they could share. This would become the Third Way, a concept which remained a search for ideological foundations and practical effect. Similar political attitudes and outlooks would unite Blair and Clinton to the extent that they have been described as ‘political soulmates’, a phrase Blair himself used in his memoirs.18 One of his biographers has gone so far as to suggest that the pre-1997 New Democrat–New Labour interactions were a ‘most significant historical conjunction’.19 They would certainly evolve in political purpose, personal ties, and presentation. At first, beyond campaign strategies, centrist, progressive language, and talk of a Third Way, the conjunction was not about foreign policy or international relations. Blair famously had little to say about either, travelling light on both prior to government.20 Yet these were the issues which had dominated Anglo-American relations historically and dictated their course and effect. Foreign affairs did not at first occupy the new presidential–prime ministerial relationship after May 1997 because Blair was not initially seized by them. His priorities were to run government and to pursue New Labour’s ambitious domestic policy agenda. Consequently, Blair’s initial statements about UK foreign policy were uncontroversial and traditional in their depiction of Britain’s world position and purposes. At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on 10 November 14  PPP, ‘Remarks Prior to Discussions’, 29 November 1995; Bill Clinton, My Life (London: Arrow Books, 2005), 686; Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars: An Insider’s Account of the White House Years (London: Viking, 2003), 305. 15  Blumenthal, Clinton Wars, 306; PPP, ‘Exchange with Reporters’, 12 April 1996; The New York Times, ‘In British Race, Blair Fits Bill’, 14 April 1996. 16  See Richard Aldous, Reagan & Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (London: Arrow Books, 2012), 230-7, and Chap. 14. 17  Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (New York: Scribner, 2003), 422-3. 18  Blair, Journey, 231. Also, Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour (London: Penguin, 2010), 27. 19  Seldon, Blair, 127. 20  Jonathan Powell, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World (London: Vintage, 2011), 262.

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1997, for example, he echoed previous prime ministers with his view that Britain was ‘Strong in Europe and strong with the US.  There is no choice between the two. … We are the bridge between the US and Europe’.21 Until Blair was drawn out of the domestic realm by the need to deal with foreign leaders who defied international norms, he was largely content to leave diplomacy to his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. It was also the case that until late 1998, Clinton’s foreign policy made no significant call on the Anglo-American relationship. His interactions with Blair and those of their two governments and parties continued in the attempts to create an international social democratic, Third Way movement. They also featured conspicuously in Blair’s pursuit of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. New Labour took office with a manifesto commitment to use the architecture of agreements negotiated by the Major government to continue the search for peace in Northern Ireland.22 The Clinton administration had been interventionist as the Conservatives negotiated with the Republicans and Unionists, famously at cost to cordial Anglo-American relations when the president granted the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams a visa to travel to New York in January 1994.23 Ultimately, the restoration of the Irish Republican Army ceasefire in July 1997 and the dynamism of the New Labour government’s diplomacy with all parties began another phase of negotiations. The achievement of the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998 was the historic result, much to do with the personal actions of Blair and other crucial figures such as the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, the Irish politician John Hume, the US Special Envoy, George Mitchell, and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam. Then there were the political leaders in Northern Ireland, principally Adams and David Trimble. Yet the budding relationship between president and prime minister played its role. Clinton needed no encouragement from Blair to continue his involvement in the peace process or to support him with the closest kind of personal, presidential intercessions. That is one of the dominant themes in the transcripts of their telephone conversations and those of Clinton with Irish leaders.24 The president wished to back Blair at every stage and did so by lobbying the protagonists by phone from the White House, especially in the week leading up to the Agreement. In his memoirs, he noted that 10 April 1998 ‘was one of the happiest days of my presidency’.25 No doubt there were familial, personal reasons for this avowal, as well as those directly related to the momentous beginnings of reconciliation in Ireland heralded on that day. There was also the sense 21  Quoted in Michael Harvey, ‘Perspectives on the UK’s Place in the World’, Chatham House, 2011, 7. 22  New Labour, ‘Because Britain Deserves Better’, 1997. 23  The Irish Times, ‘Major was furious with Clinton for granting Adams a visa’, 28 December 2018. 24  Clinton Digital Library, Declassified Documents Concerning Tony Blair (https://clinton. presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/48779) and Declassified Documents Concerning the Northern Ireland Peace Process (https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/101117). 25  Clinton, My Life, 784-5.

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for Clinton that his foreign policy of internationalist activism in the search for post-Cold War peace had acquired one very significant accomplishment.26 The president had of course served his nation’s interests in his diplomacy in Northern Ireland but he had also fortified Blair in his first major action as prime minister. In his triumph, Blair thanked Clinton and the other main individuals who had enabled the Agreement.27 It became one of the defining achievements of his prime ministership and emboldened him to deal with the international challenges that would now confront him.

Clinton and Blair at War: Kosovo In January 1999, atrocities carried out by Serbian units against Kosovar Albanians proved to the world that the leader of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, had no regard for the Dayton Accords which had ended the war in Bosnia in 1995.28 That war had challenged Clinton’s presidency. He had finally acted because he judged that if his administration could not resolve the situation in Bosnia, ‘We are history’.29 The conflict in the Balkans had been just one of a number of post-Cold War civil wars and ­humanitarian disasters which raised the question of how the world should respond to departures from the norms upheld by the United Nations and what role the US should play in enforcing them. These areas of instability tested American interest in international intervention and the world’s opinion of the US.30 None were prone to straightforward solutions. That was particularly true of the problem caused by Milosevic’s continued malevolence in Kosovo. However, whereas Clinton had faced the Serbian leader in the Bosnian war without active support from European allies, including the British, over Kosovo there would be a forceful Anglo-American dimension.31 With new-found zeal for foreign affairs, Blair decided to risk his personal relationship with Clinton, and his prime ministership, for morality and the Kosovars. In his memoirs, Blair described the Kosovo crisis as his ‘abrupt’ ‘awakening on foreign policy’.32 His personal participation in the diplomacy and then the military action which sought to stop Milosevic was not the first occasion that Blair had signalled his willingness to involve the UK alongside Clinton and the 26   John Dumbrell, ‘Diplomacy in Northern Ireland: Successful Pragmatic International Engagement’, in Mark White (ed.), The Presidency of Bill Clinton: The Legacy of a New Domestic and Foreign Policy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 180-205. 27  Interestingly, Blair does not emphasise Clinton’s role in his memoir account of the Good Friday Agreement. See Blair, Journey, 152-199. 28  On Dayton, Richard Holbrooke, To End a War (New York: The Modern Library, 1999). 29  Hal Brands, From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 177. 30  In general, Derek Chollett and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008). 31  On Bosnia, Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin, 2002). 32  Blair, Journey, 223-253, 223.

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US to intervene overseas militarily in defence of his ideas of international rules. While other allies criticised the eagerness of the Clinton administration to deal with the sustained resistance of Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, to the post-Gulf War UN weapons inspection regime, Blair’s position remained that ‘if diplomacy doesn’t work, the option of force is there’.33 His defence of this stance, and backing for a president under pressure from the Republicans and the neo-­ conservatives to act, strengthened his relationship with Clinton and, with it, the ties between their governments.34 So too did Blair’s conspicuous support for Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.35 It also eventually separated the UK and US from the other permanent members of the UN Security Council who, to different degrees, questioned the legitimacy and necessity of Operation Desert Fox, the four-day UK-US airstrike on Iraq in December 1998.36 While his commitment to Clinton and action against Saddam Hussein had been a bold step taken by Blair into the international arena, it was not the air campaign against Iraq which marked his ‘awakening’ on foreign policy but the one against Milosevic and the Serbs to save Kosovo. As evidence of Serbian brutality in Kosovo mounted, Clinton told Blair that ‘we are getting closer to a major humanitarian disaster’.37 From this point onwards, Milosevic featured in their telephone calls with increasing regularity as did the intent of the UK and US leaders to intensify diplomatic pressure upon him. The priority was to gain agreement among NATO allies to military engagement and to foster international support for it. At the North Atlantic Council meeting of 12 October 1998, Blair carried out Clinton’s request and secured backing for NATO activation orders for airstrikes on Milosevic’s forces issued the following day.38 This achievement, amid diverging opinions in the alliance about the use of force without authorisation from the United Nations, brought warm praise for Blair from Clinton. The president told the prime minister that he could not ‘thank you enough for the strength you showed on Kosovo’. He drew a contrast with his earlier experiences of working with allies over Bosnia when the Major government had not actively supported his diplomacy. Clinton said that while it had taken ‘two years to get everybody off the dime’ over Bosnia, ‘it happened here a lot quicker, in no small measure because we were in lockstep from the get go’.39 33  Public Papers of the President (hereafter PPP), ‘The President’s News Conference’, 6 February 1998. 34  CDL, Clinton and Blair Telephone Conversations (hereafter Telcon), 3 November 1998 and 11 December 1998. 35  BBC News, ‘Blair stands firm with Clinton on scandal’, 6 February 1998. 36  David M. Malone, The International Struggle over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council 1980-2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 160-1. On French reaction, Frédéric Bozo, A History of the Iraq Crisis: France, the United States, and Iraq, 1991-2003 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 44-63. On UN and regional reactions, UK House of Commons Library Research Paper 99/13, ‘Iraq: “Desert Fox” and Policy Developments’, 10 February 1999. 37  CDL, Telcon, 6 August 1998. 38  NATO, ‘Statement to the Press’, 13 October 1998. 39  CDL, Telcon, 14 October 1998.

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The political and diplomatic effect of Anglo-American cooperation within NATO was to hold the alliance together when Blair and Clinton called for direct military intervention after further evidence of Serbian brutality in Kosovo. Action came on 24 March 1999 when NATO began Operation Allied Force, an 11-week bombing campaign against Serbia.40 It was a moment of significance in the post-Cold War history of world order. When the UK and US had launched airstrikes against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in December 1998, they had done so in the name of pre-existing UN Security Council resolutions, albeit controversially.41 As NATO launched its airstrikes in March 1999, it had no formal UN authority; instead, it took action in the name of humanitarian intervention. Had its bombing been precise, without collateral damage, and with limiting effect upon Serbia and its leader, it might not have raised dispute internationally. Yet the air war did not show early signs of success. In fact, Milosevic accelerated ethnic cleansing while his forces were under NATO attack. Consequently, international reactions began to diverge and questions about the rights and purpose of NATO’s bombing were raised by politicians and the media.42 As the pressure on Blair and Clinton began to grow, the president told the prime minister on 5 April that ‘under no circumstances are we going to be defeated. If you tell me that, and I tell you that, and we hold hands’.43 The problem was that Clinton’s request came as Blair sensed the dangers of the NATO campaign for both his reputation and for the fortunes of the Kosovars who were now suffering sustained Serbian aggression. Blair ‘confided to one aide, “This could be the end of me”’ as he ‘reached a nadir’ over the Easter weekend.44 While he spoke with Clinton about intensification of force against Milosevic, Blair had begun to doubt whether the air war alone could halt the Serbian leader and his forces.45 Privately, he told his closest advisers that he was ‘willing to lose the job on this, but we are going to go for broke. … I would use all my chips with President Clinton to get a commitment to ground troops on the agenda’.46 Quite what that would mean in a relationship that was close but only two years old in office was unclear. Blair knew that Clinton had assured the American people on the commencement of Operation Allied Force that he did ‘not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war’.47 Yet the prime

40  PPP, ‘Remarks on the Situation in Kosovo’, 22 March 1999; New York Times, ‘Conflict in the Balkans’, 22 March 1999, PBS Frontline, Holbrooke interview, ‘War in Europe’, undated; NATO, ‘Press Release (1999)040’, 23 March 1999. 41  Malone, The International Struggle over Iraq, 160-1. 42  Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, ‘Kosovo: International Reactions to NATO Air Strikes’, 21 April 1999. 43  CDL, Telcon, 5 April 1999. 44  Seldon, Blair, 395. 45  CDL, Telcons, 10 and 14 April 1999. 46  Blair, Journey, 237. Also, Seldon, Blair, 396. 47  PPP, ‘Statement by the President to the Nation’, 24 March 1999.

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minister became willing to push the president, in private and in public, to save the Kosovars, and his own career. Less than a month after Clinton had ruled out ground troops, Blair indicated that their use was now being considered. In the House of Commons on 21 April, he told MPs that ‘All options are always kept under review’.48 It was this message that he took directly to Washington for NATO’s 50th anniversary summit held there from 23rd to 25th April. Before the summit’s start, Blair visited Clinton at the White House to discuss the situation in Kosovo, the issue of ground troops, and the need to hold the Alliance together. The president was aware that the prime minister was exercised about events from their phone call on 16 April when Blair had sent him a note which outlined his ‘thoughts, concerns, suggestions’.49 At their meeting, Clinton was ‘visibly uncomfortable’ and ‘almost silent’.50 Divisions between the president and the prime minister over how to fight the war to save Kosovo would not only be disruptive to their personal relations when Clinton had placed so much emphasis on ‘holding hands’, it would also undermine NATO’s summit at an important moment in its history. Much rested on affirmation of its purpose in the new environment of the post-Cold War world when the threat that had been the creation of NATO no longer existed. Tensions reduced after Blair and Clinton left the meeting without advisers for 30 minutes. The US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, later wrote that what ‘saved us in the end was largely the relationship between President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair’.51 There is no record of what passed between them but they reached a deal. One part of it was their agreement to lobby NATO leaders on planning for ground troops and to hold secret Anglo-American military preparations for their use.52 The other was that Blair would remain in line with Clinton in public. At the NATO summit, he ‘did not press his case for a firm commitment to a ground campaign’ and in return, Clinton agreed ‘to do “whatever was necessary” to ensure victory’.53 Blair left his meeting with Clinton to fly to Chicago on 22 April to deliver the most significant foreign policy speech of his prime ministership.54 With the war in Kosovo as his immediate inspiration and the advance of globalisation as his greater backdrop, Blair asserted that, ‘We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not’. His call was for a new ‘Doctrine of International Community’ which, in his view, would reflect the international  Hansard HC Deb, 21 April 1999, vol. 329, cc 898-905; Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 49.  CDL, Telcon, 16 April 1999. 50  Seldon, Blair, 399. 51  Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 2003), 415. 52  Seldon, Blair, 400; Rentoul, Blair, 525. 53  Albright, Madam, 416; Seldon, Blair, 400; Stephens, Tony Blair, 164-165. On NATO, ‘Statement on Kosovo, S-1(99)62’, 23 April 1999. 54  Blair’s speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, 22 April 1999. On the speech, Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 50-53; Powell, New Machiavelli, 263-5. Also, Lawrence Freedman, ‘Force and the international community, Blair’s Chicago speech and the criteria for intervention’, International Relations, 31.2 (2017), 107-124. 48 49

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interdependence that he believed to be already in existence and to formalise and focus it towards cooperation in global markets, the environment, security, and disarmament. It was a wide-ranging, liberal agenda for post-Cold War multilateralism which drew on many of the internationalist ideas of its age. Yet in the section for which it is most remembered—the ‘five major considerations’ that Blair outlined as criteria for liberal intervention—the prime minister spoke in the tradition of US doctrines for military action.55 As the Clinton administration was committed to internationalism and to cautious intervention, Blair said nothing that was problematic for the president. He did, however, end with an entreaty for the US never to ‘fall again for the doctrine of isolationism’ and to remain ‘outward-looking’ with Britain as ‘a friend and an ally’ in the pursuit of ‘a future built on peace and prosperity for all’. Clinton was aware that some on the right in his country would have preferred that the US reject internationalism while others believed that he was not doing enough as leader of the world’s only superpower. On 20 April 1999, a Republican-led bipartisan Senate Resolution had demanded that he use ground troops in Kosovo.56 In his Chicago speech, Blair had not given those behind this Resolution reason to reinforce their criticism of the president. The prime minister’s rhetoric was harmless as he adhered to his deal made with Clinton in Washington. He was happy to stick to it for the good of his relationship with the president and of the NATO summit which ended with expressions of unity and sustained purpose.57 These two elements—effective cooperation with Blair and cohesion among NATO allies—were vital if Clinton was to bring peace to Kosovo. So too was keeping the Russians aligned. That strategy got no easier as the NATO conference finished. The Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, telephoned Clinton to demand that his country be involved in the resolution of the situation in Kosovo, even raising the threat of war if not.58 Such Russian obstinacy in a part of the world that it considered to be within its sphere of influence was likely not a surprise to Clinton. Blair’s departure from the deal he had struck with him in Washington probably was. It was up close experience of the suffering of refugees from the war in Kosovo that helped return the prime minister to his earlier thinking about the necessity for ground troops. He was personally moved and politically fortified by what he saw in refugee camps on 3 May.59 Blair’s determination to find a solution to the problem of Milosevic was enhanced but he doubted whether Clinton was still in lockstep with him to achieve it. Concerned that the president might strike a deal with Milosevic without including him, Blair said to his advisers ‘very angrily, “If he does that, that’s it. I’m finished with him”’.60  Freedman, ‘Force and the international community’, 111-114.  US Senate, S.J. Res. 20, 20 April 1999. Also, Chollett and Goldgeier, America, 217-9. 57  NATO, NAC-S(99)63, ‘The Washington Declaration’, 23 April 1999. 58  CDL, Memorandum of conversation (hereafter Memcon), Clinton and Yeltsin, 25 April 1999. 59  CDL, Memcon, Blair and Clinton, 4 May 1999. 60  Diary of Deputy Communications Director, Lance Price, 7 May 1999, quoted in Seldon, Blair, 402. 55 56

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Tempers were not only strained in No. 10. National security figures in Washington doubted Blair. The State Department’s Deputy Secretary, Strobe Talbot, privately said that ‘Winston’ Blair was ‘ready to fight to the last American’ and another of Clinton’s aides thought that Blair had been ‘sprinkling too much adrenalin on his cornflakes’.61 The president himself asked the prime minister to ‘pull himself together’ and to stop ‘the domestic grandstanding’ or damage NATO’s cohesion.62 Matters were not helped when the Clinton administration suspected that Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, had briefed against the president’s leadership over Kosovo. An article in the Financial Times of 17 May which criticised Clinton and referred to his opposition to ground troops was reported in The New York Times. It led to an ‘ugly’ telephone conversation in which the president said to Blair that he ‘was sure [that] it gives you and your people a lot of pleasure to see me done down’.63 Clinton was forced to state in public that ‘we have not and will not take any option off the table’ and made the case in his own article in The New York Times on 23 May.64 In fact, Clinton’s advisers had already on 10 May reached the conclusion that the president might have to move his position on ground troops, and on 20th, he had discussed a timetable for invasion with them.65 One of Clinton’s staff later said that ‘We didn’t need Blair to tell us we had to win this thing. Their suggestion that they convinced us is fantasy land’.66 Nevertheless, intentionally or not, the prime minister and his press secretary had pressured the president into a public shift. Ultimately, Milosevic capitulated before ground troops had to be engaged in the conflict. The threat of them was likely one of the factors which led him to accept peace terms produced by American, EU, and Russian negotiators on 3 June. Others were the perseverance of the Americans, the involvement of the Russians, NATO’s unity, and its sustained strategic bombing. The Serbian leader also measured the increasing losses of his forces and no doubt considered the dangers presented to his own survival.67 On 10 June, Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo as NATO ceased bombing. As the war ended, Clinton telephoned Blair to say ‘thanks, it’s been a good run’.68 Their relationship certainly contributed to NATO’s intent, cohesion, and effect, and to the ceasefire that was brought to Kosovo. Cooperation also served both of their purposes. Clinton could not afford to lose in Kosovo, and  Rentoul, Blair, 527; Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 57.  Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 56-57. 63  Blair, Journey, 240. Seldon’s source for Clinton’s quote is a confidential interview, Blair, 403. 64  New York Times, 19 May 1999, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/ world/europe/051999kosovo-clinton.html; New York Times, 23 May 1999, https://www. nytimes.com/1999/05/23/opinion/a-just-and-necessary-war.html. 65  Ivo H.  Daalder and Michael E.  O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington: Brookings, 2000), 156. 66  Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 48. 67  Daalder and O’Hanlon, Winning, 140-2; Adam Roberts, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo’, Survival, 41.3 (1999), 102-23, 116-118. 68  CDL, Telcon, Blair and Clinton, 10 June 1999. 61 62

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neither could Blair, and until things became strained between them, they worked effectively together. For the president, defeating Milosevic was about the peace that all allied leaders sought for the Kosovars, but it was also about resisting censure of his leadership and foreign policy in the US and abroad. For the prime minister, these motives also applied, especially after he had committed himself so publicly to the war’s conclusion. However, his ‘awakening’ on foreign policy was more personal than it was for Clinton who had greater experience of dealing with the horrors of post-Cold War conflicts. Kosovo was Blair’s first war and his moral abhorrence at the degradation he witnessed was significant in his evolution as a foreign policy prime minister, as was his experience of working with Clinton. If the aims he outlined in his Chicago speech were more than rhetorical, he learned from Kosovo that he would need to maintain strong ties with his counterpart in the White House, to steer the United States away from unilateralism, and to make Britain a ‘bridge’ between America and Europe.69 These foreign policy fundamentals would become more vital for him when al-Qaeda terrorists turned the world upside down in 2001. Then, as in 1999, Blair would see the Anglo-American relationship as central to the achievement of a liberal world order and his ability to play a part in its pursuit. All rested on him being able to influence the president and his administration for purposes he thought good. Those beliefs were the theme of the final speech he gave alongside Clinton while he was president. It was delivered at Warwick University on 14 December 2000 during the president’s last overseas tour before he left office. Laudatory, and rich in Anglo-American rhetoric, and references to personal friendship, Blair’s remarks also welcomed Clinton’s successor, George W.  Bush, and pledged the continuance of ‘Britain’s special friendship with America’ and of the European–US link. ‘The world needs a strong America,’ Blair said, ‘The winners from a weak America are usually the bad guys. America is strong today. I know under President-Elect Bush it will continue to be so’.70 According to one account, the night before, at Chequers, Clinton had advised Blair to get ‘as close to Bush as you have been to me’ and not to ‘underestimate George W.’ adding that he was ‘a shrewd, tough politician and absolutely ruthless’.71 Back in April 2000, the president had said to the prime minister that ‘Bush is a skilled politician, but he is not ready to be president, maybe not ever, certainly not now.’72 They had both expected Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, to win the election but voters in Florida ensured that he did not. Blair could not have imagined that UK–US relations would be as close under the Republicans as they had been under the New Democrats. The coincidence of a congruent political agenda, an interventionist British government and personal friendship, ought to have made the Blair-Clinton era the most  Riddell, Hug, 113-5; Seldon, Blair, 407.  Text of the Prime Minister’s speech, The University of Warwick, 14 December 2000. 71  Riddell, Hug Them Close, 2. 72  CDL, Telcon, 19 April 1999. 69 70

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purposeful Anglo-American connection of Blair’s prime ministership. Yet Clinton was always more the realist about foreign relations than Blair, and less the idealist. He may also have found Blair’s interventionist impulse and personal diplomacy not consistently in line with his own thinking. Clinton’s speech at Warwick certainly referred to the ‘unusual friendship between the two of us and our families’ and ‘the deeper and more important friendship between the United States and Great Britain’. Yet that was it, quickly despatched at the beginning of a long, wide-ranging and liberal address about his vision for the future of a globalizing world.73

Blair Meets Bush George W. Bush, in contrast, was eager to endorse his relationship with Blair while in office and in retrospect. Bush’s memoirs outstrip Clinton’s in praise poured on Blair and UK–US relations. He recounts that as ‘a tribute to the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain’ he and his wife Laura gave Blair the honour of being the first foreign leader to visit them at Camp David on 23 February 2001. Unsure of what to expect from ‘a left-­ of-­center Labour Party prime minister and a close friend of Bill Clinton’s’, the president ‘quickly found’ that Blair was ‘candid, friendly, and engaging’.74 That was the impression Bush gave in a joint press conference where he also emphasised his admiration for the Anglo-American alliance, as did Blair. They discussed the US National Missile Defense system, sanctions on Iraq, European foreign and security policy, and themselves. The tone was positive and conciliatory, both men finding their feet; Bush meeting his first prime minister and Blair meeting his second US president. Bush dismissed a journalist’s question which asked how much of an obstacle his being ‘ideologically poles apart’ from the prime minister might present to UK–US relations. He did so by referring to ‘the great history of the relationship between our two countries’ and to an assurance of friendship ‘when either of us get in a bind’. Blair also played down ‘so-called ideological divides’ as barriers to alliance and emphasised mutual interests. When a reporter asked if they had found something personal in common, mentioning religion, sport, and music, the president remarked, oddly, ‘we both use Colgate toothpaste’. Blair was as surprised as the press corps.75 Whether Bush had wished to avoid mention of faith—a personal belief that he and Blair did share and which would be the focus of much attention—or to make a joke to play up friendship and play down differences is unclear.76 The prime minister had experienced his first ‘Bushism’, a peculiar remark or malapropism which would make the president the butt of satirists’ jokes. In time,  PPP, ‘Remarks at the University of Warwick’, 14 December 2000.  Bush, Decision Points (London: Virgin Books, 2010), 230-232. 75  PPP, ‘The President’s News Conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom’, 23 February 2001 and Joint Statement, 23 February 2001. 76  The memoir accounts do not help. Blair, Journey, 395; Bush, Decision Points, 23. 73 74

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Bush’s solecisms would contribute to ridicule of Blair’s relationship with him, especially as controversies grew. They fed into critics’ depictions of Bush as either vacant or vulgar, and Blair as his ‘poodle’, a lap dog representing the prime minister’s supposed shameful servitude.77 In his memoirs, Blair made more of the dissimilarities in his opening meeting with Bush: ‘We got on well, but fairly gingerly’; ‘the fact remained [that Bush] was conservative and I was progressive’, he wrote, adding that there ‘weren’t many social issues we seemed to agree on; and on climate change, we were poles apart’. If Blair’s memoirs are a reliable guide, the contrast between his descriptions of Clinton and of Bush is revealing. Clinton was his political soulmate, ‘the most formidable politician [he] had ever encountered’, a ‘brilliant thinker’ with a ‘superb intellect … often hidden by his manner’. Blair’s description of Bush also remarked on his manner, but not his hidden intellect. Instead, he dismissed ‘the most ludicrous caricatures of George’ as a ‘dumb idiot who stumbled into the presidency’. Blair portrayed Bush as ‘smart’, ‘more than clever’ and with ‘an immense simplicity in how he saw the world’ which, ‘[r]ight or wrong … led to decisive leadership’, decisiveness being a quality Blair admired.78 Simplicity in world view has also been attributed to Blair. Roy Jenkins, the former senior Labour and SDP politician who Blair ‘regarded … as a mentor’, said in September 2002 that ‘far from lacking conviction, [he] has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little too Manichean … seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white’.79 At this early stage in their relationship, the international threats which would later unite Blair and Bush in their broadly similar view of world order and submerge their differences had not done so, especially as Bush was not yet a president who had to prioritise foreign policy. Blair had been an interventionist in Iraq and in Kosovo and he had shown himself to be an Atlanticist in his outlook. He was also a prime minister who had purposefully changed the tone, and to an extent the substance, of Britain’s relationship with the European Union and leading European states. This was particularly true in defence and security policy although less so in constitutional and monetary integration.80 Blair had attempted to enact the concept he had proclaimed in his 1997 Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech of Britain as a ‘bridge’ between Europe and the 77  For instance, The Mirror, ‘Howdy, Poodle’, 8 March 2002; Washington Post, ‘Blair’s Ties to Bush: Partner, or Poodle?’, 6 April 2002; BBC News, ‘Blair battles “poodle” jibes’, 3 February 2003; Financial Times, ‘Was Blair Bush’s Poodle?’, 10 May 2007. 78  Blair, Journey, 231-234 on Clinton, and 392-395 on Bush. 79  Blair, Journey, 117 and 484; for Jenkins’ remarks, Hansard, HL Deb, 24 September 2002, vol 638, cc 893-4. 80  Patrick Holden, ‘Still “Leading from the Edge”? New Labour and the European Union’, in Oliver Daddow and Jamie Gaskarth (eds), British Foreign Policy: The New Labour Years (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 157-169; Scott James and Kai Oppermann, ‘Blair and the European Union’ in Terence Casey (ed.), The Blair Legacy: Politics, Policy, Governance, and Foreign Affairs (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 285-298; Also, Stephen Wall, A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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US. However, as those before him had done, he would find this kind of diplomacy increasingly difficult to perform as problematic international issues demanded that he place Britain on one side or the other of the bridge. Blair’s decision to support the Bush administration over Iraq would be the greatest expression of that conundrum, but it was apparent prior to 2003 and it did not always leave the UK aligned with the US. In the spring and summer of 2001, a decision taken by the Bush administration on a matter of global significance isolated the US from 180 other countries and caused particular difficulties for Blair and his government. In March, Bush indicated that the US would not proceed with the Kyoto Protocol on climate change mainly on the grounds that it would damage US economic interests.81 As EU states, with Britain high amongst them, had spearheaded the international community towards the next agreement on the Protocol due in Bonn in July 2001, the president’s decision was not only regrettable but also a distinct blow to the realisation of its aims. Bush’s visits to Europe for NATO and US-EU summits in June 2001 and then the UK and Italy for the G8 summit in July were overshadowed by divisions over Kyoto. Sometimes criticised in European circles for being too close to the Americans, Blair had to resort to evasive remarks in his joint press conference with Bush on 19 July 2001.82 He would have to continue to defend his support for Bush and his government as he sought to guide them towards his own international agenda as events two months later propelled them into action against al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In fact, Blair had already begun the work of attempting to influence Bush. At Camp David in February 2001, Iraq was discussed but Bush showed little interest in a pro-active approach to the ongoing problem of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In his memoirs, Blair wrote that in ‘the months that followed … I probably thought more about Iraq than he did’.83 By contrast, Bush’s account emphasised that his relationship with Blair was born of the War on Terror era that would define his presidency. ‘The more time we spent together,’ he wrote, ‘the more I respected Tony. Over the years he grew into my closest partner and best friend on the world stage’. Bush’s measures of this friendship were Blair’s vision and courage. ‘Unlike many politicians, Tony was a strategic thinker who could see beyond the immediate horizon’. It was the vision that Blair saw beyond the horizon which Bush shared with him: ‘As I would come to learn,’ he explained, ‘he and I were kindred spirits in our faith in the transformative power of liberty’. Apart from ‘a quick laugh and a sharp wit’—a sense of humour being one of Bush’s necessities for leadership—Blair possessed another attribute which he admired: ‘Above all, Tony Blair had courage’, he wrote, adding that ‘No issue demonstrated it more clearly than Iraq’.84

 The Guardian, ‘Bush kills global warming treaty’, 29 March 2001.  PPP, ‘Press Conference’, 19 July 2001. 83  Blair, Journey, 395. On the February 2001 meeting, Coughlin, American Ally, 118-126. 84  Bush, Decision Points, 230-232; on leadership, 108. 81 82

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Bush and Blair at War: Iraq For Bush and Blair the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Iraq War of 2003 were, in different ways, the defining moments of their political careers. They were also the reasons why Blair and his government worked so closely with a Republican administration of nationalists and neo-conservatives. Had it not been for the transformative effects of 2001, the political dissimilarity between Blair and Bush would have likely meant that their association was not as cooperative or consequential as it became. Blair’s affinity with his political soulmate Clinton would have remained the defining relationship that he had with a US president.85 Al-Qaeda’s actions changed this history. They produced in the Bush administration a muscular unilateralist foreign policy and an open-ended global war on terror which was too much for many allies but not for Blair and his government, however taut his Cabinet and Party became over his connection with Bush up to 2003. Blair responded to 9/11 with a fervour that united him with Bush in a war of choice fought to bring order to the world and, ultimately, in accusations of war guilt. The enormity of the controversy surrounding these events at the time and since, and their effect on world affairs, has already produced much informed commentary. While the uproar about absent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and poor post-war planning grew after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled and Iraq descended into insecurity, historians sought to explain the decision-making of the Bush administration and reach some degree of historical perspective to provide explanation rather than contemporary criticism.86 These works have confirmed that Blair and his government had significant influence upon the Bush administration, more so than any other allies of the US from 9/11 to the start of the Iraq War in March 2003. Studies of Blair’s decisions and his allegiance to Bush and Atlanticism, especially in his resolution to support the war in Iraq, have often been highly critical, not least because of the political furore that has dogged Blair since 2003. In the most recent account he is depicted as blundering into a war for idealistic purposes while not being solely responsible amid widespread support for it in the UK.87 Censure  Blair, Journey, 231.  For example, Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Beth Bailey and Richard H. Immerman (eds), Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro (eds), In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Melvyn P.  Leffler, ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W.  Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy’, Diplomatic History, 37.2 (April 2013), 1-27; Fredrik Logevall, ‘Anatomy of an Unnecessary War: The Iraq Invasion’ in Julian E.  Zelizer (ed.), The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 88-114. 87  For early criticism, Coates and Krieger, Blair’s War, and for the most recent account, Porter, Blunder. Less critically, Blair’s biographers focus upon these issues as do early contemporary histories such as Coughlin, American Ally. For broad historical perspective, Cronin, Global Rules, 289-316. Also, Christoph Bluth, ‘The British road to war: Blair, Bush and the decision to invade 85 86

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was given a degree of official status by the UK Iraq Inquiry’s report and especially the verdict reached by its chairman on the day of its release.88 Sir John Chilcot said that Blair had ‘overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq’ and that ‘The UK’s relationship with the US has proved strong enough over time to bear the weight of honest disagreement. It does not require unconditional support where our interests or judgements differ’.89 Chilcot’s opinion that Blair miscalculated his authority and that he gave the UK’s backing to the US too unreservedly may stand up to further historical research. The availability of evidence to date, especially from government documents and public testimony released by the Iraq Inquiry, reveals Blair’s steadfast commitment to Bush, the war in Iraq, and the greater idea of bringing order to the world through Anglo-American leadership. It also suggests unusual strength in the personal ties between a president and prime minister at the apex of relations between two governments focused on meeting the danger posed by a stateless terror organisation and states defined as hazards to international security. To understand why relations were so strong is to grasp post-9/11 threat perceptions, congruence in foreign policy aims, and a personal bond driven by Blair’s intent to involve himself and the UK alongside Bush and the US. It is also to understand the development of Blair’s thinking beyond his 1999 ‘awakening’ on foreign policy and the limits of its design. Bush was eager to evoke the importance and closeness of his relations with Blair in his own account of events after 9/11. His memoirs relate his first telephone call outside of the US on 12 September 2001 which was to Blair. It ‘helped cement the closest friendship I would form with any foreign leader’, Bush wrote, adding that ‘As the years passed and the wartime decisions grew tougher, some of our allies wavered. Tony Blair never did’.90 It was directly after this conversation that the prime minister attempted to claim his position alongside the president to forge a joint US–UK response to the 9/11 attacks. He sent a five-page personal note to Bush which outlined a three-point strategy: to target Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, to construct a new ‘political agenda against international terrorism’, and to ‘co-opt the world’s leading countries in support of action’.91 Blair called al-Qaeda a ‘new evil’, a phrase which he had used in his public address on 11 September to describe the international terrorism that it had unleashed. In this same address, he said that the UK would stand ‘shoulder to shoulder with our American Iraq’, International Affairs, 80/5 (October 2004), 871-892 and Jason Ralph, ‘After Chilcot: The “Doctrine of International Community” and the UK Decision to Invade Iraq’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 13.3 (August 2011), 304-325. 88  The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, 6 July 2016, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. uk/20171123123237/http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/. 89  Iraq Inquiry, Statement by Sir John Chilcot, 6 July 2016, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20171123123237/http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/. 90  Bush, Decision Points, 140. 91  Blair, ‘Note for the President’, 12 September 2001, Iraq Inquiry. Also, Campbell, Burden, 9, diary entry for 12 September 2001.

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friends in this hour of tragedy’, a commitment widely felt among nations at this stage.92 In neither his speech to the nation, nor his note to Bush, did Blair make mention of Saddam Hussein or Iraq. Urgency charged by fear coursed through the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as it worked to form a response to it.93 Blair’s attempt to influence Bush came as the president received diverse recommendations from his principals. At the Defense Department, the Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, believed that the US should ‘Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related, and not.’94 His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, imagined connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime, a reflection of his long-held conviction that the US needed to deal with the Iraqi leader.95 Conversely, Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell, urged the president not to complicate the US response by targeting Iraq.96 Apart from their similarity to Powell’s view, it is difficult to say how Blair’s ideas in his 12 September note to Bush featured amid this tense debate, but it is clear that the president valued the prime minister’s staunch support. On 20 September 2001, Bush gave his first major post-9/11 speech. Ahead of it, he held a meeting and dinner with Blair who had travelled to Washington for the occasion. The prime minister believed that Bush was ‘at peace with himself’ having ‘found his mission’.97 Blair felt that he had found his own, writing later that his ‘position as the world leader strongly articulating the need for comprehensive and strategic action was pretty well established’ as he flew to the US.98 Such hubris may account for the confidence with which Blair sought to counsel Bush. At their meeting, he told him not to ‘get distracted; the priorities are … Al Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban’; while Bush agreed, he added that ‘when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq’.99 The clamour among sections of Bush’s administration to expand the new war on terror that Bush would announce to Congress that night would soon trouble Blair. The prime minister was the only foreign leader present and sat next to Laura Bush in the gallery to watch the president make his historic speech on 20 September. Bush singled Blair out in the opening. After telling the American people that ‘we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom’, and announcing a war chest of $40 billion, Bush thanked ‘the world for its outpouring of support’ and noted the non-American nationals who had 92  Blair’s statement to the nation, 11 September 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1538551.stm. Also, Hansard, HC Deb, 14 September 2001, vol 372, cc 604-7. 93  Leffler, ‘The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration’, 1-27. 94  Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 70. 95  Ivo H.  Daalder and James M.  Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (New Jersey: Wiley, 2005), 127-8. 96  Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 70-71; Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 24-25. 97  Blair, Journey, 354. 98  Ibid., 353. 99  Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 76.

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died alongside American citizens on 11th September. Among all the nations that he mentioned, however, it was the UK that Bush set apart. ‘America has no truer friend than Great Britain. Once again we are joined together in a great cause’, he said, before looking up to Blair standing alongside his wife Laura, and saying that he was ‘so honored the British Prime Minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity with America’, adding ‘Thank you for coming, friend.’100 The president made no mention of any other foreign leader. Perhaps he felt the weight of war already, and its fear, and sought assurance through alliance. He certainly evoked an earlier wartime era. After his remark to Blair, his next line was about the only other occasion when Americans had been attacked on their own soil, ‘one Sunday in 1941’. His rhetoric then referred to what had changed on 9/11: ‘night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack’.101 Casting the attack in these terms was not purely oratorical and it characterised the way Bush proceeded to see his purpose, as it did Blair whose earlier descriptions of good and evil in 1999 now had new focus and found resonance with a president and administration set on defending not only American interests but also its values. The Bush Doctrine that evolved after 2001 would pursue the promotion of democracy abroad through force and other means with the aim of creating order in America’s image. Blair would become embroiled in this purpose, seeing in it the chance to enact the aims which he announced in 1999. His commitment to them would not waver, even though he would ultimately undermine them through support for the US-led war in Iraq. The immense trial that Blair faced was to guide the injured and angry Bush administration towards a grand strategy that would achieve world order while holding together the international community that he had spoken of in 1999. At this early stage after 9/11, Blair’s vision was to limit the war and to build global support from the international indignation in response to al-Qaeda’s attacks. These ideas were conveyed by him in an impassioned set-piece speech on 2 October 2001 at the annual Labour Party conference. His remarks did not depart from the essential logic of globalisation and interdependence that he had outlined in Chicago some two years before. In fact, he stated that 9/11 had made it more urgent. In reminding his audience of Kosovo, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, he spoke of the international community working together to solve problems. His rationale was that nations’ self-interests and their mutual interests were ‘today inextricably linked’. Blair’s solution to the crisis created on 11 September was ‘Not isolationism but the world coming together with America as a community’. Indeed, his closing remarks were a paean to the US, its Constitution, democracy, and freedom, and acted as a preface to his most famous line: ‘This is a moment to seize’, he declared, ‘The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do,  PPP, Address before a Joint Session of the Congress, 20 September 2001.  Ibid.

100 101

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let us re-order this world around us’.102 Journalists remarked on Blair taking the world stage; one thought ‘it was as though [he] had levitated above [his] party’.103 Blair’s ambition was outgrowing his country. Yet as in 1999, his idealism had to confront the reality that he was not president of the United States and could not direct the Bush administration which, he feared, was ‘on a slightly different track, wanting to broaden … out’ the response to 9/11.104 As early as 11 October, he was, according to Campbell, ‘worried about the Americans, worried about the military campaign, concerned the CIA were actively looking for reasons to widen and hit Iraq’.105 On the same day, Blair wrote a note to Bush to caution him against extending the war beyond al-­ Qaeda and the Taliban. He argued that ‘if we hit Iraq now, we would lose the Arab world, Russia, probably half the EU… ’. Blair also urged Bush to address the Middle East Peace Process, ‘the huge undercurrent in this situation … the context in the Arab world’.106 His idealism was vast in its ambition but more contained in its immediate steps. The problem for Blair was that the Bush administration had already moved beyond them. While the early post-9/11 attempts made by the Bush administration to find links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein produced nothing, the president’s own intent to do something about Iraq, and the eagerness of senior figures around him to move quickly, meant that from late November 2001, the US military began to review its plans for war in Iraq.107 Those who had cautioned Bush against expanding the war on terror were increasingly out of step, especially after victory against the Taliban in Afghanistan came quickly in December and hastened the need to define its next stage. Blair had been one of them but as the US government altered its sights, he altered his strategy. Obviously sensing the direction of travel, and not questioning it, Blair sought to influence Bush’s decision-making rather than attempt to dissuade him. On 4 December, in another of his personal notes to the president, he outlined the ‘second phase’ of the war on terror and listed Iraq, its WMD capability and its breach of UN resolutions as his first point. The connection made between these factors as the rationale to justify action against Saddam Hussein’s regime was no doubt genuinely held. Yet it had not previously produced a departure from the policy of containment of Iraq which had been the strategy since the first Gulf War. The changed international environment after 9/11 meant that the Bush administration was now eager to act. As at every stage, through the controversial diplomacy and politics of the next 15 months until bombs were

 Blair’s Brighton speech, 2 October 2001.  Campbell, Burden, 34. 104  Ibid., 46. 105  Ibid., Burden, 49. 106  Ibid., Burden, 46; Blair to Bush, 11 October 2001, Iraq Inquiry; also Manning testimony to the Iraq Inquiry, 30 November 2009, 9. 107  Bush, Decision Points, 234-5; Philip Zelikow, ‘U.S. Strategic Planning in 2001-02’, in Leffler and Legro (eds), In Uncertain Times, 96-116, 106-110; Woodward, Plan, 1-5, 30-31. 102 103

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dropped on Iraq in March 2003, Blair and his government would follow the Bush administration’s timetable. Blair did not set out upon major military intervention. His 4 December note to Bush advocated building a case against Saddam Hussein and achieving international backing for it while also fostering opposition groups in Iraq to cultivate an Iraqi rebellion which would then receive armed support. Blair’s closing subject, about which he was ‘Sorry to be a bore’, was the Middle East Peace Process and the need to avoid ‘catastrophe’ in the region.108 The MEPP would remain his wider concern thereafter as would his intent for the Bush administration to balance the action it took against Iraq with action towards peace in the Middle East. However, as would be the case at every stage until the outbreak of war, Blair would find his preferred approach overtaken by events in Washington DC. What remains significant is that at no point did this fact lead him to depart from Bush. Only his personal commitment to the greater cause as he defined it, and his loyalty to the president and the US as a means of achieving it, explains Blair’s resolution in the face of extraordinary political pressure at home and increasing hawkishness in the Bush administration. In his ‘axis of evil’ State of the Union address in January 2002, the president singled out Iraq as a target.109 This speech marked the first of three major statements in 2002 which clarified the priorities of the Bush administration. The second, delivered by the president at West Point in June, was the announcement of pre-emption as a legitimate act in the war on terror.110 The third was the US National Security Strategy published in September which gave the US unilateral authority to pursue its aims in its self-defined war on terror.111 While previous administrations had acted pre-emptively in international affairs, none had done so with the wider aims of democracy promotion through force that came to define the Bush administration’s post-9/11 interventions.112 The response of Blair and his government to these rapid and portentous policy developments was not to reconsider the basis of the UK’s cooperation with the US but instead to sustain its guarantee of support. The issues that would dominate relations between Blair and Bush over Iraq were already apparent during their meetings at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, from 5 to 7 April 2002. In preparation, Blair had told his Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, that a new strategy for Iraq was required, and one which included re-ordering ‘our story and message. Increasingly, I think it  Blair to Bush, 4 December 2001, Iraq Inquiry.  PPP, ‘Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union’, 29 January 2002. 110  PPP, ‘Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York’, 1 June 2002. 111  George W. Bush White House Archives, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, September 2002. 112  Melvyn P.  Leffler, ‘9/11 and American Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, 29/3 (June 2005), 395-413. 108 109

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should be about the nature of the regime. We do intervene—as per the Chicago speech’.113 That speech, of course, had a doctrine of international community and five tests for intervention at its heart. In spring 2002, Bush seemed committed at least to some degree of multilateralism as he explained to Blair that US Central Command was reviewing war plans for Iraq. David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser who was present at Crawford, noted later that ‘the President probably did want to build a coalition and that this had led him to dismiss pressure from some on the American right’.114 At the press conference after meetings on 6 April, Iraq featured prominently. The only differences between Blair and Bush came in language, with the president given to colloquialism. Otherwise, they repeated a script. Saddam Hussein was a threat; he had failed to prove over the last decade that Iraq was not developing WMD; in the process he had flouted numerous UN resolutions; the world would be better off if he was not Iraq’s leader; all options in pursuit of that aim were under consideration. 9/11 was evoked and Bush spoke of Blair’s resolve, albeit in broken language: ‘History has called us into action. The thing I admire about the Prime Minister is, he doesn’t need a poll or a focus group to convince him the difference between right and wrong. And it’s refreshing to see leaders speak with moral clarity when it comes to the defense of freedom.’115 In these brief remarks, the nature and course of the Blair–Bush relationship on the road to war in Iraq had been set. Joined in their sense that Saddam Hussein needed to be dealt with for reasons of WMD, geopolitics and morality, the prime minister urged the president to build international support for any action while also pursuing the Middle East Peace Process. The president agreed but knew that the most forceful voices in his administration would have him lead the US unilaterally into war to achieve regime change in Iraq. They would form the most powerful constituency in the administration over the summer of 2002 as it became clear that the conditions on which Blair supported Bush on Iraq were being ignored in Washington. The president was due to receive updated war plans from US Central Command in August 2002 and in anticipation of the developments that would certainly follow, Blair held a meeting with his ministerial colleagues and advisers on 23 July. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, warned the prime minister that the points that he had connected to his backing for Bush were not prominent in the US government’s thinking. These were preparation of public opinion ahead of military action, exhaustive diplomacy in the UN, and progress in the Middle East Peace Process.116 In his response, as recorded in Campbell’s diary, Blair did not place priority on them when warned of their jeopardy and instead connected Atlanticism and idealism. ‘[We] had to be with the  Blair to Powell, ‘Iraq’, 17 March 2002, Iraq Inquiry.  Manning to Iraq Inquiry, 15. 115  PPP, ‘The President’s News Conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom in Crawford, Texas’, 6 April 2002. On the Crawford meetings, see also Coughlin, American Ally, 219-225. 116  Straw to Blair, 8 July 2002, Iraq Inquiry. 113 114

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Americans’, he said, adding that ‘It’s worse than you think, I actually believe in doing this’. His justification for maintained loyalty to Bush was that any break from it ‘would be the biggest shift in foreign policy for fifty years and I’m not sure it’s very wise’.117 That judgement revealed little complex understanding of the past and an absolutist view of the choices that the UK could make in the support it could give to the US on Iraq. So too did the line that Blair used to open his note to Bush on 28 July 2002, ‘I’ll be with you, whatever’, but it was only the start of a six-page strategic restatement of the necessity of an international coalition, UN authority, evidence, the MEPP, ‘Post Saddam’, and a workable military plan.118 Blair had not made his support for Bush contingent on the president’s acceptance of his multilateralist vision but his diplomacy did achieve a major concession as the hawks sought ascendency in Washington. According to one senior State Department figure, it was in the summer of 2002 that the president and his closest advisers ‘crossed the political and psychological Rubicon’.119 While no decision had been taken for war, the Vice President, Dick Cheney, the Defense Secretary, Rumsfeld, his deputy, Wolfowitz, the president’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice and her staff were the prominent figures arguing for it as the administration awaited updated war plans. They did not share the belief in multilateralism held by the Secretary of State, Powell, or Blair. Nonetheless, Bush’s respect for Powell and the British prime minister meant that he did not circumvent the UN but instead gave a speech to its General Assembly on 12 September which allowed Iraq one last chance to prove to the UN’s Security Council that it did not possess WMD.120 Just over a month later, however, Blair had seemingly decided that there was a limit to the UN process. In a Downing Street meeting on 17 October 2002, the prime minister told colleagues and advisers that if Iraq did not confirm that it had disarmed, and if no consequent UN resolution authorising force against Saddam Hussein’s regime followed, the UK and US would act.121 Whether Blair intended at this point for such action to be a full-scale military intervention is unclear. His memoirs suggest that this own personal decision to support the Bush administration in a war against Iraq was taken during Christmas 2002 after the Iraqi report to the UN on 7 December was inconclusive about its WMD capability.122 From that point onwards, Blair was less attached to international cohesion in the UN even as controversies raged there, in the EU, and in the UK about the evidence and rationale to justify conflict, and about the legality of a  Campbell, Burden, 278-9.  Ibid. 119  Richard N. Haas, War of Choice, War of Necessity: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 216. 120  PPP, ‘President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly’, 12 September 2002. The formal request was made of Iraq in UNSCR 1441, 8 November 2002. Blair, Journey, 407-411; Bush, Decision Points, 238-242. 407-411. 121  Rycroft to Sedwill, 17 October 2002, Iraq Inquiry. 122  Blair, Journey, 412-3. 117 118

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war. When Bush told Blair in Washington on 31 January 2003 that his government would use military force regardless of whether the UN Security Council authorised it or not, the prime minister assured him, as he had done since 9/11, that he was ‘solidly with the President and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam’.123 Blair’s allegiance remained intact when Bush suggested that he might protect himself and his government from intense Parliamentary and public pressure over Iraq by forgoing UK involvement in the conflict phase of the war. Blair’s response was ‘I’m with you … I’m there to the very end’.124 He did not detract from this position even when another senior member of the Bush administration aided the prime minister’s critics. In a Pentagon press conference on 11 March, a week before the war commenced, Rumsfeld said that British military involvement in the invasion of Iraq was ‘unclear’ and not vital.125 Blair’s foreign secretary and foreign policy adviser chose this moment to urge him to accept the president’s earlier offer for the UK not to be involved in the war and instead to join the post-conflict humanitarian phase. Straw warned Blair that ‘we were dealing, however right he thought it was, with a US “war of choice” and we had to understand, as [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell told him the whole time, that some of the people around Bush could not care two fucks about us whatever, and that went for TB as much as the rest of us’.126 The prime minister was unmoved and said that ‘it was still the right thing to do’.127 In these final stages prior to the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003, Bush’s offers of support to Blair are easily explained by the political friendship they had developed since 9/11 and as responses to the unwavering loyalty and strength of purpose that the prime minister had shown the president after 9/11 and over Afghanistan and Iraq. Explanation of Blair’s constancy has to rest on personal characteristics as well, but more so on political calculations. He spelled them out as he made the case for war in the House of Commons on 18 March. ‘So: why does it matter so much? Because the outcome of this issue will now determine more than the fate of the Iraqi regime and more than the future of the Iraqi people, for so long brutalised by Saddam. It will determine the way Britain and the world confront the central security threat of the twenty-first century; the development of the UN; the relationship between Europe and the US; the relations within the EU and the way the US engages with the rest of the world. It will determine the pattern of international politics for the next

123  This statement is attributed to a record of the meeting taken by one of the participants. See Philippe Sands, Lawless World (London: Penguin, 2006), 272-3. 124  Woodward, Plan, 338. 125  The Guardian, ‘US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s comments about UK involvement in war’, 12 March 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/mar/12/usa.iraq. 126  Campbell, Burden, 491-2; Jack Straw, Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor (London: Pan Books, 2013), 371-2. 127  Campbell, Burden, 492.

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generation.’128 For Blair, the war in Iraq was not just about defeating Saddam Hussein and neutralising the supposed threat of Iraqi WMD. It had become the means by which the post-Cold War order he had sought since 1999 would be realised. For that to have been achieved—for an international community to have been forged in favour of war—Blair would have needed to have won multilateral backing, UN authority, public support, a US commitment to the MEPP and post-war planning. Those were the principles with which he had sought to guide Bush after the 9/11 attacks. They would be the basis on which Blair and Bush would be criticised thereafter as WMD were never found in Iraq and as it descended into insecurity, violence, and destruction.

Conclusion A week after the invasion of Iraq, Blair wrote one of his notes to Bush, titled ‘The Fundamental Goal’. It asked the president to look ahead, alluding to the new world order that his father had called for as an objective after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been defeated in the Gulf War of 1990–91: ‘This is the moment when you can define international politics for the next generation: the true post-cold war world order. Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around which we can unite the world; rather than dividing it into rival centres of power’.129 The history of the Clinton-Blair-Bush era is about the failure to achieve such a world order. It would take time for that to become apparent. Before the collapse of the rationale for the invasion of 2003, Iraq’s fall into bloody violence and the rise of new forms of dislocation and viciousness in the Middle East, with effects beyond, Blair and Bush believed that the action synonymous with their relationship was in the process of validation. The news that Iraq had once again become a sovereign nation was given to the president by his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, during the NATO Summit in Istanbul on 28 June 2004. Rice passed him a handwritten note and on it Bush wrote ‘Let freedom reign’ and then shook hands with Blair. Later, he recalled that in ‘a fitting twist of history, I shared the moment with a man who had never wavered in his commitment to a free Iraq, Tony Blair’.130 Bush and Blair thought their aim had been achieved. They had both enjoyed extraordinary approval ratings in the US after 9/11 but those would not last. By 2006, with WMDs still absent in Iraq and sectarian violence at a new peak, the situation there deteriorated into chaos, further undermining the rectitude of the 2003 invasion. Blair’s relationship with Bush was now widely ridiculed and his influence over the president and his administration much doubted. A private conversation between them at the July 2006 G8 Summit in St.  Hansard, HC Deb, 18 March 2003, vol 401, cc 760-858.  Iraq Inquiry, Blair to Bush, 26 March 2003. 130  Bush, Decision Points, 359. For Bush and Blair’s remarks in Istanbul, George W. Bush White House, ‘President Bush Discusses Early Transfer of Iraqi Sovereignty’, 28 June 2004. 128 129

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Petersburg captured by an open microphone added damage. Bush’s greeting, reported in the UK press as ‘Yo, Blair’, was taken as evidence of his disrespect for the British prime minister.131 It was more likely indicative of informality but that was immaterial because for Blair’s growing numbers of critics, the exchange epitomised his inferiority and his failed foreign policies.132 The prime minister’s popularity ratings now reached the lowest point since he had taken office.133 By September 2006, with his prime ministership overshadowed by Iraq, Blair announced his departure, adding ‘I would have preferred to do this in my own way’.134 Bush would leave the White House in January 2009, less personally affected by the legacy of 2003. A week before, he awarded Blair the presidential medal of freedom, the highest honour that a president can bestow on a civilian.135 Blair has still not received an honour from his own country. The Clinton-Blair-Bush era is not cohesive. It is about two presidential– prime ministerial relationships separated by a paradigm-shifting event which ended one phase of post-Cold War history and began another. Blair was a common denominator, as was the search for world order. What this period reveals— and what is of particular significance to this book—is that personal relations were consequential to events and had effects of global importance. AngloAmerican cooperation was revived under Blair’s premiership and produced a new stage of closeness and action. Critical to this development was Blair’s ‘awakening’ on foreign policy during the Kosovo war, the cooperation and conflict between him and Clinton, and his new ambition—to be achieved through his personal agency—to guide the US president, his administration, international diplomacy and the lives of the Kosovars. He also gave the greater goal a name, the ‘Doctrine of International Community’, although how advanced that concept was is debatable. In contrast, Clinton became less attached to his early foreign policy grand strategy the more he experienced the complexities of international affairs. Blair did not and that was why he responded to 9/11 with outsized zeal and resolve. His certainty and confidence coalesced with Bush’s determination to ensure that terrorists would not again attack the US and that America’s power would be reaffirmed after what he saw as the Pearl Harbor of the new age. The irony of the Clinton-Blair-Bush period is that the first partnership proved less momentous than the second. The conditions for cooperation existed more under Clinton and Blair; they were self-defined political 131  BBC News, ‘Transcript: Bush and Blair’s Unguarded Chat’, 18 July 2006. The New  York Times reported the greeting as ‘Yeah, Blair’, see ‘Amid Pomp, Bush is Pumped and Chat is Candid’, 17 July 2006. 132  For examples of criticism, The Guardian, ‘It wasn’t the “Yo” that was humiliating, it was the “No”’, 23 July 2006; The Independent, ‘Rupert Cornwell: The Yo-Yo relationship’, 23 July 2006. Also, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Yo, Blair! (London: Politico’s, 2007). 133  Financial Times, ‘Blair’s popularity hits all time low’, 30 July 2006. 134  BBC News, ‘Tony Blair: Highs and lows’, 10 May 2007. 135  George W.  Bush White House, ‘President Bush Honors Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipients’, 13 January 2009.

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soulmates, they broadly shared agendas in domestic and foreign policies and they enjoyed a personal ease which reverberated through the contacts of their governments and gave new purpose to the long-established functional UK–US links. Yet Blair’s mix of idealism, realpolitik, self-belief, and vision were too much of an awakening for Clinton. They were not for Bush after 9/11, even if Blair’s liberal world order was too liberal for the hardliners in his administration. What the Clinton-Blair-Bush era revealed was that Blair’s goal—if ever he could muster the personal influence in Washington and elsewhere required to persuade a president and his government to act as power brokers in its making—was proven to be flawed. World order could not be achieved via a UK–US design, if prosecuted by force without the kinds of principles that Blair had set out after 9/11, especially multilateral support and accepted legality. A UK prime minister, however familiar with a US president, could not transcend the realities of power or get him to defend ideas or promote policies which were not prioritised by his administration. That fact was especially true after 9/11 when the liberal intervention and liberal order that Blair had sought since 1999 became casualties of the US-led war against Iraq that he supported.

CHAPTER 16

Barack Obama and David Cameron: The Ostensible Relationship Martin Farr

Barack Obama and David Cameron on the South Lawn of the White House, 20 July 2010. Peter Souza, Official White House Photograph

M. Farr (*) School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_16

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On taking office as President in January 2009 Barack Obama was widely reported to have returned a Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy—from where Prime Minister Tony Blair had sent it in July 2001—and replaced it in the Oval Office with one of Abraham Lincoln.1 One candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination for President, Mike Huckabee, said it was ‘a great insult to the British’.2 In one of their primary debates a second, Mitt Romney, said ‘if I’m president of the United States, it’ll be there again’; a third, Rick Perry, wrote to Churchill’s daughter to ask if he could have it.3 As the eventual nominee Romney told a London audience, ‘I’m looking forward to the bust of Winston Churchill being in the Oval Office again’, prompting cheering.4 ‘One of the very first acts President Obama did upon being elected was sending Churchill’s bust back to the UK’, said Ted Cruz, the runner-up for the nomination in the following election. ‘I think that foreshadowed everything that was to come the next six years.’5 Even those sympathetic to him wondered what ‘Obama should do about his Churchill problem’.6 The prominent conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer cited its returning of the bust as emblematic of the dislocated foreign policy priorities of the Obama administration.7 The White House promptly denied Krauthammer’s ‘ridiculous claim’ which was ‘100% false’, and produced a photograph of presidential and prime ministerial posteriors as their persons bent down to inspect the bust in 2010.8 At which point the British Embassy—which had not helped matters by stating erroneously that the bust originally had been lent ‘in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship’—intervened, effectively, to say it was the White House rebuttal that was 100% false: the bust had in fact indeed been returned to the Embassy in 2009, and that the published rear-view showed Obama and David Cameron peering at another Jacob Epstein White House bust of Churchill, one which had been bequeathed in October 1965 and which had not only never left the building, but had been

 ‘Remarks by the President in Acceptance of Bust of Winston Churchill’, 16 July 2001, the Oval Office, Office of the Press Secretary. Of the change, for example: New York Daily News, 7 March 2009; Wall Street Journal, 9 June 2010; Daily Mail, 1 September 2010. The author would like to thank Tom Mills, James Ellison, Michelle D. Brock, Jessica C. Hower, and his co-editor for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2  Philip Elliott, ‘Fact Check: Huckabee claims Obama grew up in Kenya’, The Associated Press, 1 March 2011. 3  Lynn Sherr, ‘Rick Perry hates to Lose’, Parade, 23 October 2011. 4  Romney CNN-Tea Party debate, 12 September 2011, transcript, CNN.com; Romney, quoted in Emily Friedman, ‘Romney “Looking Forward” to Returning Churchill Bust to White House’, ABC News, 27 July 2012. 5  Cruz, quoted in Glenn Kessler, ‘Ted Cruz’s claim that one of Obama’s “very first acts” was returning a bust of Churchill’, Washington Post, 27 January 2015. 6  Amy Davidson Sorkin, ‘The Case of the Two Churchills’, The New Yorker, 1 August 2012. 7  Charles Krauthammer, ‘Why he’s going where he’s going’, Washington Post, 26 July 2012. 8  Dan Pfeiffer, ‘Fact Check: The Bust of Winston Churchill’, Obama White House Blog, 27 July 2012. 1

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placed by Obama ‘in pride of place’ outside his bedroom.9 Krauthammer accused the White House of ‘deliberate deception’, and received a public apology.10 In any case, the first bust had been scheduled to be returned to the British Embassy before Obama had even arrived in the Oval Office.11 The White House nevertheless urged that no inferences should be drawn in any Churchill bust as having been returned.12 But that did not mean that they were not.

Introduction No President was less, and no Prime Minister more, outwardly typical of their predecessors, than were Barack Hussein Obama and David William Donald Cameron. The 44th President of the United States was the first African-­ American, while the 70th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was the eighteenth Old Etonian. Their periods as heads of government were close to contiguous. Their overlap began on 11 May 2010, when Obama had been in office for fourteen months, and after it ended on 13 July 2016, Obama continued for six more; his two-term presidency contained Cameron’s six-year premiership. Theirs was a coincidence exceeded only by those of Reagan and Thatcher, and Bush and Blair. In Britain it was the enduring stain of the latter relationship that gave hope that the country may benefit from close association with a new and internationally popular American president.13 After years of bombing and bungled regime change, Obama’s ‘smart power’ would mitigate Arab-Israel, China, Iran, and Russia; all in British interests, and with British association. The very notion of leader of the free world suddenly sounded less tainted, and his abiding lieutenant commensurately less compromised. Obama and Cameron were born five years apart and, lacking the ideological affinity of Reagan and Thatcher, were inclined, as were Clinton and Blair— who also had it—to cite generational consanguinity. ‘Both of us came of age during the 1980s’, they wrote, ‘and we can honestly say that despite being two

9  Tim Shipman, ‘Barack Obama sends bust of Winston Churchill on its way back to Britain’, Daily Telegraph, 14 February 2009; Noah Rothman, ‘British Embassy Confirms Krauthammer Right, White House Wrong: Churchill Bust Returned in 2009’, Mediaite.com, 27 July 2012; Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York, 1970), entry for 6 October 1965, 327; David Cameron, For the Record (London, 2019), 154. 10  Charles Krauthammer, ‘Busted: Mr. Pfeiffer and the White House blog’, Washington Post, 29 July 2012; Dan Pfeiffer, ‘The Churchill Bust and Charles Krauthammer’, Obama White House Blog, 31 July 2012. 11  CBS News, ‘Obama has made the Oval Office His Own’, 5 January 2010. 12  Pfeiffer, ‘Winston Churchill’. 13  Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, Brown at 10 (London, 2011), 352; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (London, 2014), 33–34. John Dumbrell, ‘David Cameron, Barack Obama and the US-UK “Special Relationship”’, LSE Blog, 14 March 2012; Steve Marsh, ‘Global Security: US-UK relations: lessons for the special relationship’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 10:2 (June 2012), 182–199.

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leaders from two different political traditions, we see eye to eye’.14 The President and Prime Minister had in common supreme self-assurance and what may have appeared—at least after the event—to be the apparently effortless inevitability of their ascent. In particular, each could be said to owe their position to show-stopping loquacity on very public platforms, on their facing seaboards, fifteen months apart: Obama on 27 July 2004 in Boston, Cameron on 4 October 2005 in Blackpool. Those addresses to their party conventions were by any personal measure pivotal, and also indicative. Uncommon fluency could, for Obama, manifest itself in spellbinding oratory, but also didacticism; for Cameron the same gift made for a register ranging from graciousness to glibness. Not least by almost embarrassing comparison with both their immediate predecessor and immediate successor, the President and the Prime Minister were pre-eminently competent, capable, and comfortable in their office, and indeed their skin. It followed that their personal relationship was conspicuously—and beguilingly—harmonious. The contrasts were at least as great. Obama took office with an emphatic mandate and enormous expectation; Cameron was blessed, and burdened, with neither. Where there had a decade before been duty priced in blood and an intimacy denoted in toothpaste, this President’s and Prime Minister’s relationship would be reason-, not faith-, based.15 For all that this was a Democrat– Conservative pairing, their doctrinal dispositions were not greatly at odds. Nevertheless, at a time of signal differences over policy in an age of economic crisis, there followed other major policy differences, disagreements, and shared failures. There were messes—some inherited, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and others of their own patronage: Libya, Syria, and Brexit. Cameron was keen to practise joint action and to maintain Blair’s post-9/11 ‘Atlantic bridge’ policy.16 But Obama and Cameron came together amidst talk of the poor health of the special relationship, of which Presidential perspectives on the busts of other Prime Ministers were not even the most significant expressions; indeed, in the view even of the American Embassy in London, relations were at the lowest point for twenty years.17 For the British, with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gordon Brown, there was more than usually fretful appraising as to how special 14  Barack Obama and David Cameron, ‘Not Just Special, but an Essential Relationship’, The Times, 24 May 2011. They were first identified as leaders of generational change in 2006: Andreas Whittam Smith, ‘A new generation replaces “the elephants”’, The Independent, 20 November 2006. 15  T. R. Reid, ‘Bush Brushes up on Toothpaste diplomacy’, Washington Post, 13 March 2001; David Margolick, ‘Blair’s Big Gamble’, Vanity Fair, 1 June 2003. See p. 336. 16  Philip Gannon, ‘The bridge that Blair built: David Cameron and the transatlantic relationship’, British Politics, 9:2 (210–229). Justin Gibbins and Shaghayegh Rostampour, ‘Beyond Values and Interests: the Anglo-American Special Relationship during the Syrian Conflict’, Open Journal of Political Science, 9, 2019, 72–106. Aaron Winter, ‘Race, Empire, and the British-American “Special Relationship”’ in Giles Scott-Smith (ed), Obama, US Politics, and Transatlantic Relations: Change or Continuity? (Brussels, 2012), 229–246; Steve Marsh, ‘Beyond essential: Britons and the Anglo-American Special Relationship’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 18 (2020), 382–404. 17  Richard LeBaron, cable 09LONDON348_a, 9 February 2009, Wikileaks.org; Nile Gardiner, ‘Mind the Gap: Is the Relationship Still Special?’, World Affairs, 173:6, 35–46; Jacob Heilbrunn, ‘Britain’s Splendid Isolation, The National Interest’, 24 February 2009.

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relations still were; far from novel though this was, there were unusually fearful formulations.18 From the Americans there were high levels of anxiety about Britain in 2009 ‘because of a “perfect storm” of factors’: the shattering effect of the financial crash, the most extreme in Europe; frustrations with British military limitations in Iraq and Afghanistan; a lingering association with the Bush doctrine.19 And fatalistically awaiting an impending general election, a new, yet timeworn, Prime Minister. But the greatest contrast was how these differences, publicly and successfully, were apparently sublimated by the obvious personal rapport of the principals. Obama and Cameron were singularly at ease with each other; theirs was a relationship defined by an unexampled informality. That served to sharpen the sense that it was this, one of the closest relationships between a President and a Prime Minister, that was to occasion the greatest doubts hitherto expressed about the specialness of the wider relationship.20 The hope of reciprocation overlooked the expectation from some that Obama would have no emotional connection with the transatlantic alliance and prioritise Asia over Europe.21 In his 7000-word essay on foreign policy, candidate Obama did not mention Britain.22 His Anglophobia was merely further illustrated by his Churchill problem; certainly, the manhandling and misplacing of the fountainhead of Atlanticism served sharply to define a President born in, and apparently preoccupied by, the Pacific. On his inauguration, no President since the dubbing of the bilateral national relationship as being special apparently had so little invested in Britain.

A Brown Antecedence, 2008–2010 Presidential and Prime Ministerial cycles can be rapid: in 2007 a new Prime Minister was not keen to meet an outgoing and unpopular President; within two years the positions would precisely be reversed.23 The need by 2007 for any British politician to distance themselves from Iraq had meant distancing 18  Tim Shipman, ‘Will Barack Obama end Britain’s special relationship with America?’ The Telegraph, 28 February 2009; Stephen Glover, ‘Obama’s right. There is no special relationship … and the sooner we realise that the better’, Daily Mail, 2 January 2011; House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee—Sixth Report: Global Security: UK-US Relations, 8 March 2010, 2:48; Rob Reynolds, ‘Building a new special relationship’, Al Jazeera, 3 March 2009; Council on Foreign Relations, ‘U.S.-U.K: a Difficult Duet in Afghanistan’, 21 July 2010, cfr.org. 19  Le Baron, 9 February 2009. 20  David Hastings Dunn, ‘UK–US Relations after the Three Bs—Blair, Brown and Bush’, Defense & Security Analysis, 27:1 (2011), 5–18. 21  Rachel Sylvester, ‘Memo: don’t rely on the Brits during a battle’, Times, 6 January 2009; The historic rebalance, or ‘strategic pivot’: Department of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, January 2012, Barack Obama, foreword, 2. 22  Barack Obama, quoted in Washington Post, 2 March 2008. 23  The Brown–Obama transition is considered by John Dumbrell, ‘Personal Diplomacy: Relations between Prime Ministers and Presidents’, in Alan P.  Dobson and Steve Marsh (eds.), AngloAmerican Relations: Contemporary Perspectives (London, 2013), 82–104.

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themselves from a widely despised American President generally held as being personally responsible. Given the nature of Bush–Blair, in subsequent pairings there would inevitably—for some necessarily—have been a declension, but having been his only Chancellor—and co-author of his political project— Gordon Brown was less able to detach himself from Tony Blair’s legacy than he otherwise might. Pointedly, as it was seen, Brown visited Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy before he visited President Bush. As he made clear in his memoirs, Brown had wanted their first bilateral to be at the White House; preferring informality, Bush chose Camp David.24 At the 30 July 2007 press conference the Prime Minister, invariably more personally awkward than his predecessor, was much more detached in tone than the President had been used to.25 Jarringly, ‘Gordon’ and ‘Mr President’ were the chosen forms of address; ‘full and frank’ was Brown’s description of their meeting. Bush’s unforced irreverence was at odds with Brown’s similarly unforced formality. So the latter maintained a rictus grin as tight as his grip on the dashboard as the former drove his golf buggy around the press pack. Actually much more naturally and knowledgeably Atlanticist than Blair, Brown was freed only by the election of a Democrat to be more freely so still, and the very passing of Bush meant that a British party leader could once again embrace an American President. By the time Obama had replaced Bush, and partly in consequence become the most globally popular new American president in history, there was an ongoing narrative of the Brown premiership into which every development was made, more or less comfortably, to fit. The contrasting radiance of a President and Prime Minister was never starker than in the fourteen months that Obama shared with Brown. The latter’s perpetually beleaguered administration saw its vesting of hope in the new President, not least as regards the one issue where Brown had been able to exert personal authority internationally: the 2008 crash. Brown’s familiarity with the causes explained his dedication to dealing with its consequences; Obama had only the latter. As ever with the uncertainties over a choice of new president, there was a general preoccupation with the possibilities of the future. On 17 April 2008, a day before he was to give a major foreign policy speech at the Kennedy Presidential Library, Brown breakfasted with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and dined with President Bush. In between, in a highly untypical coup de théâtre, the Prime Minister received the three candidates for President, each of whom had broken off from their campaigns to visit the British Embassy in Washington DC, for a 45-minute private meeting, in alphabetical order based on first names. At 09.00 Barack Obama, at 10.00 Hillary Clinton, and at 11.00 John McCain walked with Brown along the same corridor in the same formation, sat in the same chair by the same table in front of the same flowers.  Gordon Brown, My Life, Our Times (London, 2017), 213.  Damian McBride, Power Trip: A Decade of Policy, Plots, and Spin, (London, 2013), 294.

24 25

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After they had all departed from what looked almost like a job interview, the British Ambassador could crow that ‘no other country pulled off such a coup’.26 ‘[A] bit light’, Brown said of his first guest after the last had left. ‘I don’t think he really gets what’s happening with the economy; talking about how we need to reform for the future and all this stuff, he doesn’t get how serious things are now.’27 They next met in London in July by when Obama had been confirmed as the Democrats’ nominee. Brown was stunned by the transformation. ‘He’s done some bloody homework, that guy; he’s on top of it all now, totally gets what’s happening. He’s really impressive, really impressive.’28 It was the candidate’s first European tour, and one on which he would give his keynote foreign policy speech, but, evoking Kennedy and Reagan, in Berlin rather than a more commonplace London. It was important for No 10 that the commonplace at least came first in the itinerary, and No 10 went to great lengths to prolong the time Obama spent there.29 ‘Special relationship’, however, did not cross Obama’s lips during his day in town. Having tried and failed during a November 2007 trip to Washington, the Leader of the Opposition David Cameron was more successful in London, adding a meeting to Obama’s schedule.30 ‘Obama’s staff—previously friendly and eager to build relationships with their No. 10 counterparts—now had their eyes on the future’, it was clear to at least one of Brown’s staff. ‘They’d pretty much written off Gordon, and were now focussed on building a relationship with Cameron’, not to mention demonstrating that a Democrat could work well with traditionally a Republican confrere.31 Obama’s aides revealed that of the two meetings they had found that with Cameron to be the more auspicious.32 Yet Obama also claimed to have thought ‘substance’ of Brown, but only ‘sizzle’ of Cameron; a ‘lightweight’.33 By then Barack Obama could reasonably be described as the dominant figure in British politics.34 Cameron had shifted from identification with the Republican (‘I’m a huge fan of John McCain’) and distance from the Democrat (‘I don’t see serious similarities’) to a recognition of what Obama betokened.35 Such was the desire of British politicians to be associated with Obama that they were equally keen for their opponents not to be. The choreography of the July 26  Nigel Sheinwald, in Seldon, Brown, 91. Sarah Brown, diary, 17 April 2008, Behind the Black Door (London, 2011), 126–127. In his memoirs, Brown understated the episode, Brown, My Life, 302; Obama called it a ‘summit’, Barack Obama, A Promised Land (London, 2020), 286. 27  McBride, Power Trip, 296–297. 28  McBride, Power Trip, 297. 29  Seldon, Brown, 121. 30  Times, 12 January 2008; Times, 18 July 2008. 31  McBride, Power Trip, 297. 32  Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of Barack Obama (London, 2009), 268. 33  Whilst Blair was ‘sizzle and substance’. James Macintyre, New Statesman, 6 August 2009. 34  John Rentoul, ‘Obama, the most dominant force in British politics’, Independent on Sunday, 20 July 2008. 35  Cameron, quoted [c. spring 2008], in David Cameron and Dylan Jones, Cameron on Cameron; Conversations with Dylan Jones (London, 2008).

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2008 ‘battle of the photo opportunity’ challenged the convention that a head of government ought not to appear as approving of a candidate.36 Brown’s implicit blessing of Obama in a self-penned article in September prompted the McCain campaign, possibly sarcastically, to welcome ‘The Coveted Gordon Brown Endorsement’.37 As typical as the episode was of the government’s miscommunications, it reflected expectation more widely: on the BBC the same month Cameron slipped into presentient solecism by referring to ‘President Obama’.38 ‘I want a call placed at once’, Brown said on being awoken on 5 November 2008 and informed that Obama had won. The Prime Minster was frustrated when it did not happen immediately; Downing Street was desperate to demonstrate that it had beaten the Élysée Palace for the first phone call.39 In the meantime, Brown wrote a letter. He also tried to persuade the Tate to send George Frederic Watts’ painting Hope (1886), the audacity of which had inspired Obama’s first book. However, concerned that it might remind the public of its champion, the incendiary cleric Jeramiah Wright, a former pastor Obama was keen to disclaim, Brown found his offer ‘politely declined’ in person by the President-Elect.40 But Brown achieved the minimal desired outcome of an early invitation to the Obama White House. Assailed at home, the Prime Minister had been heralded abroad by an, otherwise-complimentary, leaked memorandum to him from the British Ambassador that Obama could be ‘aloof’ and ‘insensitive’.41 An Obama aide added to the sense of occasion: ‘There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other hundred and ninety countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment’.42 Their first meeting in office was a 3 March 2009 bilateral. The British media made much of the fact that Brown—and the British media—was offered only a ‘pool spray’ rather than a joint press conference.43 In their comments to the pool both men independently raised the ‘special relationship’, Obama as ‘one that is not just important to me, it’s important to the American people. … I think this notion that somehow there is any lessening of that

 Times, 25 July 2008.  Gordon Brown, ‘Rising to the Challenge’, The Monitor, September 2008; Michael Goldfarb, ‘The Coveted Gordon Brown Endorsement’, 9 September 2008, JohnMcCain.com. 38  Cameron, quoted in ‘Next stop, Downing Street?’, BBC 1, Panorama, 29 September 2008. 39  Seldon, Brown, 190; Rawnsley, End of the Party, 617; LeBaron, Cable 09LONDON348. 40  Brown, My Life, 328. 41  Toby Harnden, ‘Exclusive: Barack Obama is “aloof” says British ambassador to US’, Telegraph, 2 October 2008. 42  Telegraph, 7 March 2009. A view reinforced subsequently by Jeremy Shapiro, senior adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs 2009–2013, who said the relationship was ‘unrequited’ and was never really anything that was very important to the United States. The Times, 11 October 2017. 43  Nick Robinson, Live from Downing Street (London, 2012), 342. 36 37

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special relationship is misguided’.44 Brown said ‘I’ve come here to renew our special relationship for new times. It’s a partnership of purpose’, a formulation that could have been coined at any time. The principal purpose in Brown’s conception was dealing with consequences of the crash, and in crafting a working relationship. Such badinage as there was was eked out. ‘An awful lot of ink is used describing the individual relationships between Prime Ministers and Presidents’, the ITN Political Editor said to Obama. ‘Could I just ask you to describe how at this point you find working with each other?’ Obama replied: ‘this is my third meeting with Prime Minister Brown, and I’d like to think that our relationship is terrific. And I’m sure he won’t dispute me, in front of me anyway’.45 As had Thatcher—whose personal imprimatur he curiously had been seeking—Brown had been the first European leader to visit a new president. The following day Brown became only the fifth Prime Minister to address a joint session of Congress, and in six years fewer than it took Blair. In the manner of his premiership, the seventeen standing ovations Brown received attracted less attention than did the lack of a press conference and the news that his gift to Obama of a penholder carved from HMS Gannet (the anti-slavery sister vessel to HMS Resolute from which the Oval Office desk, itself a gift from the British, had been constructed) had been reciprocated with a $17.99 box set of (US-region) DVDs. Brown’s gift was valued at $16,510.46 The trip was immediately and widely reported as a debacle. Apprised of the poison gleefully being penned by the British press, Obama hurriedly phoned Brown on his flight home to assure him that the siblings had been reunited: the penholder was already on his desk, where it remained, prominently.47 Bilateral disaster was followed by bilateral triumph. Fortunately for Brown his next meeting with Obama was only a month later, on what was Obama’s first foreign trip outside North America: to the United Kingdom. Brown was hosting the G20, the association they both agreed should be, as Brown put it, ‘the premier forum for economic cooperation’.48 Originally intended for finance ministers, Brown wanted to elevate its importance by inviting heads of government, and Obama’s presence was felt to be critical. After he accepted, so did others in what became in Brown’s words an ‘Obama love-fest’.49 Before the summit the two had a bilateral at 10 Downing Street on 1 April 2009. Obama received the ‘special relationship’ tradition on his first visit of the staff lining up 44  White House, Remarks by President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 3 March 2009. 45  Brown, 3 March 2009, Oval Office. 46  Federal Register, 76:1, 18 January 2011, 2956. In his memoirs Brown pointed out that it cost £260. Brown, My Life, 329. 47  Brown, My Life, 326; ‘Obama’s Oval Office’, CBS News (29 December 2009). 48  Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation (London, 2010), 116; Obama, Promised Land, 326. 49  Brown, My Life, 330.

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to applaud a new president as they would a new Prime Minister.50 There was a press conference of strained rapport, though Obama’s overheard comments about a testy Brown—‘Tell your guy to cool it’—made the news.51 Similarly Brown, almost as animated about climate change as he was about the crash, convinced Obama, one adviser reported, to attend the Copenhagen Summit in December. ‘Gordon just worked at him and worked at him, eventually persuading him not only to come but to become actively involved.’52 It helped mitigate much international coverage of the G20 which placed the European social market model against ‘Les Anglo-Saxons’. Obama and Brown were coupled as representatives of what had gone wrong, and what they—least of all— could put right, something’s Obama’s effusive praise of Brown (‘extraordinary energy and leadership’) did nothing to contradict.53 ‘He was thoughtful, responsible, and understood global finance’, Obama later reflected. ‘I was fortunate to have him as a partner during those early months of the crisis’.54 For Brown their next, and, as it was to prove, final, meeting recapitulated the dominant theme. It was, according to one aide, ‘ghastly’, ‘probably the worst foreign trip Gordon ever had’, and to another, ‘a real low point at a crucial time’.55 It had been leaked that the British had made five separate requests for a joint meeting between Brown and Obama in September 2009, without success. Incentives included 10% of the United Kingdom’s stock of swine flu vaccine, which Brown was prepared to commit to the developing world to match a similar pledge by Obama. A meeting at the UN during the General Assembly indeed took place, albeit in a kitchen, and lasting fifteen minutes. Downing Street had to reveal the detail as proof that the two had actually met, but it was so much less—a ‘brush past’, or ‘walk and talk’—than Brown’s team had promised the media that it was widely derided as the latest nadir in formerly special relations. The White House assured the BBC of Obama’s respect for Brown but did not deny that five requests had indeed been rejected.56 Obama was prioritising emerging world leaders—neither Nicholas Sarkozy nor Angela Merkel had a meeting or photograph, not that that was reported in the British press—and was in any case seeing Brown at the G20 at Pittsburgh the following day. But the by now well-established Brown narrative would not admit of such detail.57 Brown’s own neediness was to blame: rather than accept and explain the circumstances, there was a panicked effort to secure any sort of  Brown, diary, 1 April 2009, Black Door, 272.  Ted Jeory, ‘Gordon Brown ‘weak and unstable’, Sunday Express, 28 November 2010. 52  Adviser, quoted in Seldon, Brown, 354. 53  Transcript: Obama, Brown News Conference, CBS News, 1 April 2009; Obama, Promised Land, 343. 54  Obama, Promised Land, 334. 55  Simon Lewis, 10 October 2009, in Alistair Campbell, From Crash to Defeat: Diaries, Volume 7, 2007–2010, 505; McBride, Power Trip, 204. 56  Guardian, Daily Telegraph, 24 September 2009. Brown’s response was ‘Cut off all contract with Telegraph, Guardian, and BBC’, McBride, Power Trip, 204. 57  Chris Mullin, diary, 23 September 2009, Chris Mullin Decline and Fall, Diaries 2005–2010 (London, 2010), 373–374. 50 51

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meeting.58 ‘Snub’ had become both noun and verb of choice for the everattentive British media. From the outset the President had been in the ascendant as the Prime Minister had not. In addition to paintings and penholders, there were other tokens, such as Brown contemplating appointing the first black British ambassador to the United States.59 One of his foreign ministers publicly castigated the choreography as being altogether too forced when there had already been considerable contact.60 Given that Obama was a Democrat, Brown had hoped for added impetus, but over the global economy Obama was less concerned with ownership than Brown was with joint liability. What he regarded as the President’s indecisiveness frustrated the Prime Minister.61 On Afghanistan, as it appeared to one key aide, Brown ‘clearly wasn’t that plugged in to Obama’.62 The tragicomic aspects of his premiership were made manifest next to a presidency defined from the outset by seriousness. The Americans were bewildered by the fact that it was rendered so. ‘Stop reading those London tabloids’, ordered the White House Press Secretary.63 Obama referred to the British press as ‘hound dogs’.64 ‘Your press are fucking criminals’, the White House Chief of Staff told the Brown team. ‘What do we have to do to convince them of our special relationship? Do they want to have pictures of Gordon banging Michelle in the Oval Office?’65 ‘Go kick their ass’, the President had advised the Prime Minister in April 2010 before the first leaders’ television debate in British history.66 Michael Sheehan and Joel Benenson—from the Obama campaign—had been helping Brown prepare.67 As a head of government, Brown, in the words of one of his cabinet ministers, ‘saw himself as a political soulmate of Barack Obama’, but in the words of another, as a campaigner ‘Gordon is McCain, even though he wants to be Obama’.68 Brown had been claiming Obama as a progressive; Cameron claimed Obama as the change candidate, an approach endorsed by Rupert Murdoch, whose Sun devoted an election day front page to Cameron mocked-up as ‘Hope’ in the manner of Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama

 Robinson, Live from Downing Street, 354–355.  Sir Christopher Meyer, quoted in Telegraph, 31 January 2009. 60  Lord Malloch Brown, Mail, 25 September 2009. 61  Alistair Darling, Back from the Brink (London, 2011), 197. 62  Campbell, diary, 3 November 2009, Diaries, 525, and again on 24 November 2009, 551. 63  Robert Gibbs, quoted in New York Times, 21 July 2010. 64  Brown, My Life, 326. 65  Rahm Emanuel, quoted in Robinson, Live from Downing Street, 355; also, somewhat less descriptively, in Brown, My Life, 336. 66  Seldon, Brown, 435. 67  New York Times, 15 April 2010; Peter Mandelson, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour (London, 2010), 531. 68  Respectively Peter Mandelson and Douglas Alexander, in Mandelson, Third Man, 502. 58 59

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campaign meme.69 Cameron was keen to stress ‘liberal conservatism’ not ‘neo conservatism’, and to invoke Obama in multiracial Bradford, Bolton, and Birmingham, as he promoted his ‘Big Society’ programme of civic activism.70 More contentiously, Cameron invoked Obama on the irresponsibility of black fathers.71 Most of all, he stressed an affinity of hope: ‘I think he’s compelling’ Cameron said. ‘I think we need that same sense of possibility here.’72 In the first year of the Obama presidency, the BBC Political Editor referred to both the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition as wishing to ‘clothe themselves in his glory’.73 One had had his chance; it was time for the other. ‘I’m watching it on the screen as we talk’ a commiserating Obama told Brown as David Cameron entered No 10 on 11 May 2010.74 ‘David, congratulations!’, Obama told Cameron minutes later. ‘Enjoy every moment, because it’s all downhill from here’.75

Agenda, 2010 As he had much else, Tony Blair effectively recast the Conservatives’ position on the special relationship. Just as Brown had wanted to distance himself from US fealty as much as he did from Bush—and for many of the same reasons—so too did Cameron. For all the desire for personal association with a global superstar, Cameron also wished to differentiate himself from the conformity of the thirteen-year regime he had replaced. Seeking to decontaminate another brand, the new leader said to his party that ‘we must be steadfast not slavish in how we approach the special relationship’. Conscious of how desperate Brown looked, Cameron said in one pre-visit interview that he was open about being the junior partner. ‘I think that we should deal with things as they are rather than trying to be too needy.’76 Questioning the approach of the US administration and trying to learn the lessons of the past five years does not make you ‘anti-American’.77 In his keynote foreign policy speech as Leader of the Opposition, Cameron proclaimed ‘[p]assionate support for the Atlantic Alliance within a rebalanced special relationship’.78 ‘Solid not slavish’ was repeated with alliterative servility thereafter. No more Iraqs constituted both a retail offer from the Conservatives, and helped pitch their leader—unlike the Prime Minister—as one who actually led. Cameron, and the Conservative-­ supporting press, made much of the 69  The Sun, 6 May 2010; Prime Minister’s Questions, 5 November 2008, House of Commons Debates, fifth series, volume 482, columns 244–247. 70  David Cameron, ‘Our Big Society Plan’, speech, 31 March 2010. 71  Guardian, 16 July 2008. 72  David Cameron, BBC Radio 5 Live, 8 January 2008. 73  Nick Robinson, Times, 11 November 2008. 74  Seldon, Brown, 434. 75  Obama, quoted in Cameron, For the Record, 134. 76  Catherine Mayer, ‘The Pragmatic Partner’, Time, 26 July 2010. 77  David Cameron, speech to Conservative party conference, 4 October 2006. 78  David Cameron, speech on foreign policy and national security in the annual JP Morgan lecture at the British American Project, 11 September 2006.

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commonalities. Obama had voted against Iraq, and even though Cameron had not, he was distanced from the decision by having then been merely an opposition backbencher. He used Obama initiatives such as his charter schools, inviting Geoffrey Canada, President of the Harlem Children’s Zone, to address the Conservative Party conference.79 For the 2010 TV debates the Conservatives hired those who had sought to proletarianise Obama—Bill Knapp and Anita Dunn—to do the same for Cameron.80 In November 2007 Cameron had found himself afforded thirty minutes with President Bush; towards the end of his five years as Leader of the Opposition, by when his elevation to the premiership was widely anticipated, Cameron was sufficiently spooked by Brown’s disastrous March 2010 trip not to seek his own pre-election courtesy call.81 Given the inconclusive outcome of the 2010 election, Cameron fashioned a remarkably stable and functional five-year government. Keen to avoid Brown’s serial mishaps, as he recalled, ‘I knew that getting my relationship right with Barack Obama was essential.’82 Their teams meticulously co-ordinated joint appearances and statements. The American Ambassador had already told Cameron’s chief of staff that Obama wanted to be the first to speak to the new Premier.83 When they did, Obama said ‘come over and see me in the White House’, and was sure to cast the ‘special relationship’ spell.84 But then, straight from the Brown playbook, two public relations calamities not of the Prime Minister’s making threatened to overshadow their meeting, days before the June 2010 G8 and G20 summits in Canada. The first was the 2009 decision of the Scottish Government to release the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from prison on grounds of late-stage terminal illness. Americans were outraged and a year later al-Megrahi was revealed to be living freely in Libya. Cameron said he and Obama were in ‘violent agreement’ on the subject.85 (Obama was so enamoured of the phrase that he used it himself a week later in Toronto.86) The second was a BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico which blew up killing eight Americans and devastating the Texas coast. Cameron initially supported the US, then, after domestic pressure, defended BP.87 The catastrophe was the subject of the President’s first address to the nation from the Oval Office, on 15 June. Taking his own opportunity to demonstrate

 New York Times, 13 October 2010.  Wall Street Journal, 4 May 2010. 81  Conservative Home, 29 November 2007; Financial Times, 8 February 2010. 82  Cameron, For the Record, 153. 83  Ed Llewellyn, quoted in Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon, Cameron at 10 (London, 2015), 4. 84  Seldon, Cameron, 5; Times, 14 May 2010. 85  White House, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Availability, 20 July 2010. 86  White House, Remarks by President Obama at G-20 Press Conference in Toronto, 27 June 2010, Office of the Press Secretary. 87  Financial Times, 11 June 2010. 79 80

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dynamic action, Obama sought—as he did not say publicly—an ‘ass to kick’.88 The ass, by common agreement, was Tony Hayward, BP Chief Executive—‘a walking PR disaster’ Obama called him—whose manner recalled the desiccated British villain of Hollywood central casting.89 The respective medias drew on national stereotypes with the effect of ratcheting tension, abetted by Obama’s calculatedly anachronistic references to ‘British Petroleum’; the weaponizing of historical tropes went on to include invocation of the 1901 D’Arcy Concession.90 There was also a foreshadow, almost imperceptible in the smoke: an offer to the White House, in Obama’s words, to ‘put him in charge of plugging the well’, from Donald Trump.91 When they met, obvious parallels dominated. ‘Standing side by side in near identical dark blue suits and blue ties’, the New York Times observed, ‘the two fortysomethings systematically papered over the few cracks of daylight between the United States and Britain’.92 Obama mentioned the special relationship twice, Cameron once. Yet, to the American press, their first meeting was with ‘a ledger of issues to discuss’, defined by disagreement: Afghanistan withdrawal, deficit reduction, Megrahi, and BP.93 Not to be left off of a wholly uncomfortable agenda for the three-hour meeting were the contrasting cases of Gary McKinnon, accused of hacking US military and NASA computers, and Christopher Tappin, accused of breaking a defence exports ban to Iran, as well as a review of the asymmetric 2003 US–UK extradition treaty. Obama and Cameron could at least co-ordinate their public expressions of displeasure at the Israeli government.94 Economic policy constituted the greatest immediate cleavage from the preceding pairing. Obama had preferred Brown re-elected given their agreement about government spending increases.95 On taking office, Obama had immediately demonstrated unity by injecting $787bn into the US economy. But a year later Britain became the first major economy to step away from the consensus over the consequences of the crash and abandoned the stimulus; Obama was concerned about such austerity and the potential for a ‘double dip’.96 Before the Toronto G20 in an open letter to the 19, Obama urged the same solidarity as in Pittsburgh and London, and pointedly warned that they had to ‘learn  Obama, quoted in Independent, 11 June 2010.  Obama, Promised Land, 567. 90  New York Times, 16 June 2010; Stephen Kinzer, CBS News, 30 June 2010. By which William Knox D’Arcy obtained exclusive rights to prospect for oil in Persia. In 1909 the concession was taken over by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which in time mutated into British Petroleum. In his memoirs Obama added the 1953 Iranian coup to the list, Promised Land, 567. 91  Obama, Promised Land, 673. 92  Helene Cooper, ‘Leaders Take Pains to Stress What’s Still Special in the U.S.-Britain Relationship’, New York Times, 21 July 2010. 93  New York Times, 20 July 2010. 94  Statement on PM’s call with President Obama, 19 December 2012, Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street; Economist, 19 March 2011. 95  Obama, Promised Land, 527. 96  Independent on Sunday, 27 June 2010. 88 89

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from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn and resulted in renewed economic hardships and recession’.97 Nine days later Cameron published an article in the Canadian press that the stimulus came second to ‘getting our national finances under control … to live within our means again’.98 In his July 2010 US broadcast interviews Cameron was questioned about the wisdom of cutting departmental spending by 25% and his advocacy of contraction by other governments. Obama declined to support the decision, even, to the frustration of Cameron, during his state visit.99 The two elided the differences in public, but the ‘British ax’ was of concern to the Americans, then and subsequently: during Obama’s re-election campaign Cameron’s austerity Britain was cited by leading Democrats as what would be in store for America were Romney to win.100 Having ‘hewed closely to free-­ market orthodoxy’, Obama reflected, ‘predictably the British economy would fall deeper into a recession’.101 Nevertheless, the Obama team made it clear to the British ambassador that they were impressed with his boss; at Toronto the ‘Pacific President’ had six one-on-one meetings, all being with Asian leaders, except for that with David Cameron.102

Libya, 2011 Obama’s and Cameron’s first full year together brought their first full foreign policy crisis. It was one replete with foreign policy spectres—such as Bosnia and Iraq—connoting as each did action or inaction. Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Adviser, admitted ‘we definitely felt those ghosts as we made decisions’.103 On 5 February 2011 Cameron phoned Obama to say that they were not being aggressive enough in pressing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, subject of prolonged mass protests, to stand down, which he did the following week.104 Almost as if willing a moment demanding statesmanship, Cameron toured Cairo ten days after President Mubarak had fallen from power, encouraging regional reforms. Cameron had also, during the early, tabula rasa, stage of his leadership of his party, told it ‘I think that if we have learnt anything over the last five years, it’s that you cannot drop a fully formed democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet’.105 While Cameron was in the Middle East, a year of protests in Libya culminated in the attempt by the state violently to suppress 97  Barack Obama, 16 June 2010, ‘TEXT-Obama’s letter to G20 nations on forex, financial reform’, Reuters, 18 June 2010 98  David Cameron, The Globe and Mail, 24 June 2010. 99  John F. Burns, ‘Britain’s Leader Carves Identity as Slasher of Government Bloat’, New York Times, 21 July 2010. 100  New York Times, 24 October 2010; New York Times, 7 June 2012. 101  Obama, Promised Land, 527. 102  New York Times, 26 June 2010; Seldon, Cameron, 67. 103  Ben Rhodes, quoted in The Guardian, 13 January 2018. 104  Ben Rhodes, The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House (New York, 2018), 105. 105  David Cameron, 2 October 2007, speech to Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool.

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them. Cameron was vitalised by Benghazi not becoming for him what Srebrenica became for John Major in the Bosnian War. Responding to cheering crowds Cameron cried: ‘Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your democracy.’106 On 23 February Sarkozy, characteristically peremptorily, called for a no-fly zone and four days later Cameron instructed the Ministry of Defence and the National Security Council to prepare. General David Richards, Chief of the Defence Staff, thought it had to be a NATO operation: the Americans were essential.107 Despite North Africa not being a priority region for Britain, but perhaps because of Iraq, and a longstanding national aversion to seeing the French acting alone, Cameron was keen to lead in concert with Sarkozy; having decided to ‘call their bluff’, that was also Obama’s preference.108 What might have been interpreted as an example of the multilateralism candidate Obama had promised to practice was coined by a never-named White House staffer as ‘leading from behind’, which stuck as the unwanted moniker for the ‘Obama doctrine’.109 It was certainly presented as an opportunity for the British, once again, to revivify the special relationship. Thatcher had had the Soviet Union, Major Kuwait, and Blair Iraq; for Richards Libya ‘was David Cameron’s big war’.110 Obama shared little of Cameron’s enthusiasm, but the British were happy if it were thought that Cameron was having an effect on Obama similar to that which Blair had on Clinton in 1999 regarding no-fly zones over, and later the bombing of, Kosovo. Obama’s and Cameron’s common objective was defined on 8 March as ‘the departure of Qadhafi from power as quickly as possible’ and ‘planning on the full spectrum of possible responses’ including a no-fly zone, even arming the rebels.111 The British and French focused on a UN Security Council Resolution for authorisation. ‘I was irritated’, Obama recalled, ‘that Sarkozy and Cameron had jammed me on the issue, in part to solve their domestic political problems’.112 American leadership may not have been necessary but its involvement was; even a time-limited support commitment: ‘Days, not weeks’, Obama said.113 The breakthrough was the support of the Arab League, which removed any Iraq-like taint from the endeavour; UNSCR 1973 was passed by ten votes on 17 March.114 Obama phoned Cameron and Sarkozy, ‘both of whom showed barely disguised relief that we had handed them a ladder with which to get down from the limb they’d climbed out on’.115 The  Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, 15 September 2011, Gov.UK.  ‘The bombing continues until Gaddafi goes’, David Cameron, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy; David Richards, Taking Command: The Autobiography (London, 2014), 314. 108  Obama, quoted in Michael Lewis, ‘Obama’s Way’, Vanity Fair. 11 September 2012. 109  New Yorker, 27 May 2011; Foreign Policy, 21 October 2011. 110  Richards, Taking Command, 318. 111  The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 8 March 2011, Readout of the President’s call with Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom; Independent, 31 March 2011. 112  Obama, Promised Land, 658. 113  Rhodes, World, 115. 114  Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011), 17 March 2011, Un.org. 115  Obama, Promised Land, 660. 106 107

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strikes began two days later. ‘This is not another Iraq’, Cameron told the House of Commons, his Attorney General alongside him, conspicuously.116 Action ‘Necessary, legal and right’, and commensurate with Responsibility to Protect, was reaffirmed by the United Nations in 2009.117 On 14 April Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy published a jointly written newspaper article: ‘Colonel Gaddafi must go, and go for good.’118 The Prime Minister found himself caught between the capricious and the cryptic. Notwithstanding almost daily phone calls with the President, ‘I can’t really get him to focus’, Cameron complained. ‘He won’t commit. It’s unbelievably frustrating.’119 The difference of opinion was evident at Obama’s May 2011 state visit to the United Kingdom. Obama had to try to stop Cameron from scaling back the British presence in Afghanistan, while Cameron sought Obama’s commitment in Libya almost in return. The differences were plain at the 25 May press conference. Cameron clearly the keener; Obama, sceptical of no-fly zones, disputed a ‘whole bunch of secret, super effective air assets that are in a warehouse somewhere that could just be pulled out and that would somehow immediately solve the situation’.120 But where press reports suggested a distinction being drawn with the previous special relationship—Bush and Blair—it was of policy, on which both were agreed. ‘We are doing things in a different way’, Cameron said. ‘We have ruled out occupying forces, invading armies.’ They did not appear to have ruled out a victory parade, and in Tripoli on 15 September an unprotesting Cameron and Sarkozy were mobbed by ululating crowds. In March 2012 Cameron spoke privately of a ‘Libya model’ having replaced the ‘Iraq model’ as a template of the special relationship.121 Mission accomplished, as they did not say, it went on to do one thing in a familiar fashion: in part through Cameron’s disinterest in reconstruction, Libya ended up not unlike Iraq. Despite promising to do most of the heavy lifting, after the initial ten days the British and the French overestimated their military capabilities. Obama always expected that despite Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s rhetoric, the Americans ‘would end up having to carry most of the load’.122 ‘Mess is the president’s diplomatic term’, a dissentious report pronounced, ‘for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies’.123 ‘I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s  Cameron, 21 March 2011, House of Commons Debates, fifth series, volume 525, column 709.  United Nations General Assembly Resolution 63/308, 7 October 2009. 118   Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Nicholas Sarkozy, ‘Libya’s Pathway to Peace’, International Herald Tribune, 14 April 2011. 119  Cameron, quoted in Matthew D’Ancona, In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government (Viking, 2013), 170. New York Times, 3 February 2011. 120  White House, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference in London, 25 May 2011, Office of the Press Secretary; Washington Post, 30 October 2011. 121  Bagehot, Economist, 17 March 2012. 122  Obama, Promised Land, 657. 123  Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, April 2016. 116 117

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proximity, being invested in the follow-up’, Obama later said.124 Sarkozy was soon out of office, replaced by an appreciably less martially-mannered President, and Cameron, Obama felt, became ‘distracted by a range of other things’.125 Obama and Cameron at the UN General Assembly in September 2012 were seen by some as trying to ‘own’ the Arab Spring. Cameron in particular appeared headstrong in his bloody criticism of the UN and his condemnation of Gaddafi and Iran.126 In 2016, Obama described post-intervention Libya as a ‘shit show’.127 An all-­party parliamentary inquiry concluded that ‘[i]t is difficult to disagree with this pithy assessment’.128

Security Immediately after Obama watched the end of Osama Bin Laden, he made three phone calls. The first was to George W.  Bush, the second was to Bill Clinton, and the third was to David Cameron.129 The special relationship remained special in one area at least, and British Special Forces were reported to have assisted with the operation.130 So embedded was military co-operation that it generally withstood passing fashion, yet with Obama and Cameron it was the fabric that most risked fraying. The response on Cameron’s part to Libya revealed deeper issues in the United Kingdom as a security partner: free to will the ends without necessarily being able to will the means, even, as it turned out, with another P5 member. It was one area of tension which connected directly to a second: retrenchment. Defence was another area where the Cameron government cut spending, through a Strategic Defence and Security Review which received high-level attention in Washington.131 If the relationship depended on an underpinning of hard power, then defence cuts imperilled it.132 The British withdrawal from Basra in December 2008 at the same time as the American surge reinforced a growing sense of unreliability. ‘Free riders aggravate me’, Obama said in a major foreign policy profile interview. Obama warned that Britain would no longer be able to claim a ‘special relationship’ if it did not commit to spending at least 2% of GDP on defence. ‘You have to pay your fair share’, Obama told Cameron133; ‘if Britain

 Obama, quoted in Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’.  Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’; Independent, 11 March 2016. 126  David Cameron’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, 26 September 2012, Cabinet Office and Prime Minister’s Office, Gov.uk. 127  Obama, quoted in Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’. 128  House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, ‘Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options’, Third Report of Session 2016–17, HC 119, 14 September 2016. 129  Obama, Promised Land, 696; Cameron, For the Record, 293. 130  Daily Express, 14 May 2011. 131  New York Times, 24 September 2010. 132  Gary Schmitt, Financial Times, 19 July 2009; Gardiner, ‘Mind the Gap’. 133  Obama, quoted in Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’, 78. 124 125

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doesn’t spend 2 per cent on defence, then no one in Europe will’.134 The interview led to extensive coverage in the British press that Obama was blaming Cameron for Libya. Much of the embarrassment came from Britain’s increasingly straitened circumstances. Within days of publication the White House walked back Obama’s criticism, but it appeared to have worked, abetted by some creative accounting from the British.135 ‘Britain and America are two of only four NATO members to meet the target of spending 2% of our GDP on defence’, Cameron and Obama wrote in an article to coincide with the 2014 NATO summit, which Cameron was hosting, ‘and other states must urgently step up their efforts to meet this too’.136 In part to prevent another Libya, during Obama’s state visit in 2011 he and Cameron agreed to set up a Joint National Security Strategy Board, to be chaired by the respective national security advisers Tom Donion and Sir Peter Ricketts.137 (It was to meet quarterly, its effectiveness to be assessed after a year. It met once before being apparently downgraded to ‘an umbrella framework for ad hoc contacts’, as the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee put it, ‘announced over-hastily during President Obama’s State Visit to the UK in May 2011, without adequate preparation having been put in place for the Board’s effective operation’.138) On 13 March 2012 William Hague became first foreign politician to visit the National Security Agency, Fort Meade Maryland, and helped facilitate the release of Shaker Aamer, a British citizen held at Guantanamo Bay, though another, Binyam Mohamed, was found to have been tortured by US intelligence, with the collusion of that of the British.139 Lack of support over the sovereignty of the Falklands also rankled in London.140 But the British January 2015 initiative over cybersecurity deepened collaboration with joint cyber cells operating in each country.141 In the month that Cameron affirmed that he and Obama were ‘absolutely in lockstep’ about ending NATO leadership in Afghanistan by mid-2013, a senior White House aide said ‘David Cameron is the first person the President wants to talk to on any issue’.142 Security was, however, on more than one occasion challenged by commerce. Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein revealed that a British company  Obama, quoted in Telegraph, 10 February 2015.  House of Commons Defence Committee, Second Report of Session 2015–16, Shifting the Goalposts? Defence Expenditure and the 2% Pledge, London, 12 April 2016, HC 494. 136  David Cameron and Barack Obama, Times, 4 September 2014. 137  The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, ‘Fact Sheet: the U.S.-U. K Joint Strategy Board’, 25 May 2011; Economist, 28 May 2011. 138  Foreign Affairs Committee, Eighth Report of Session 2013–2014: Government foreign policy towards the United States, London, House of Commons, 3 April 2014, HC 695, 5: 91–92; James Boys, ‘Transatlantic Intelligence: the missed opportunity of the Joint Strategy Board’, The Commentator, 11 July 2012. 139  ‘Binyam Mohamed torture appeal lost by UK government, BBC News, 10 February 2010. 140  New York Times, 10 March 2013. 141   The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 16 January 2015, Fact Sheet: U.S.-U.K. Cybersecurity Cooperation. 142  Guardian, 13 March 2012; Seldon, Cameron, 195. 134 135

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had lobbied the British government for Megrahi’s release. That company was none other than BP.143 The only role for Cameron when Russia, in its latest expression of revanchism, annexed Ukraine was in contradicting Obama by opposing financial sanctions; that with the City of London being the more special relationship. A similarly mercantilist approach was adopted with China, and similarly against US wishes. Having aroused Beijing’s displeasure over his meeting the Dalai Lama in 2012, Cameron was suitably dovish over Hong Kong, and Britain was the first to join China’s new development bank, expressly against US policy, without consultation, to Obama’s irritation (‘I can’t believe you’ve broken with Western allies in doing this’144), and, precisely as Washington feared, initiating a stampede, by Germany, France, Italy, and South Korea.145 There was further disagreement over the longstanding sore that was Iran; a week after a typically frigid Binyamin Netanyahu visit to the White House, Cameron added his voice to Obama’s counselling against an Israeli strike on Iran, and with the President resisting sanctions, on his January 2015 Washington visit the Prime Minister against convention personally lobbied senators.146 Domestically, in the 2015 general election, Cameron was keen to distance himself from Obama over China and defence spending.147 There was domestic pretext in the pecuniary imperative of ‘austerity’ dovetailing with the long shadow of Iraq and the even longer one of Prime Ministerial sycophancy.

Syria, 2013–2015 Particularly after the physically nearer, apparently simpler, challenge of Libya, it was something of a surprise to the White House that Cameron wanted so bold an intervention on another collapsing Middle East dictatorship—unless it was because of Libya. Whatever else it also was, Syria was to mark the worst moment in the relationship between President and Prime Minister; of all the frustrations which Cameron experienced over the issue, Obama was ‘[p]erhaps my biggest’.148 Detailed discussion between Obama and Cameron over Syria had begun in December 2012. The lifting of the EU arms embargo was a prelude to arming the rebels against the Assad regime. Alongside Obama, at their May 2013 pre-G20 meeting Cameron again employed haematic rhetoric. ‘Syria’s history is being written in the blood of her people, and it is happening  New York Times, 16 July 2010.  Obama to Cameron, quoted in Cameron, For the Record, 587. 145  Thomas Wright, ‘A Special Argument’: The U.S, U.K., and the AIIB’, Brookings, 13 March 2015; Financial Times, 12 March 2015; Ana Swanson, ‘Is the UK “Accommodating” China by Joining Its New Investment Bank?’, Forbes, 15 March 2015. 146  White House, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference, 16 January 2015, Office of the Press Secretary; Josh Lederman, ‘Obama comes out swinging against new Iran sanctions’, Associated Press, 16 January 2015. 147  New York Times, 13 March 2015; Washington Post, 23 October 2015. 148  Cameron, For the Record, 453. 143 144

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on our watch.’149 Cameron’s statement was meant to encourage Obama towards more decisive action, but relations soured during 2013, as contact between Washington and Moscow bypassed London. Cameron hosted Obama and Putin, at the G8 in June, but without a breakthrough. Then, on 21 August 2013, the Syrian government launched a chemical weapons attack in eastern Ghouta, killing over 1000 civilians, many of whom were children. The ‘red lines’ Obama had drawn a year before could not more emphatically have been crossed. Cameron tried to speak to Obama from his ‘staycation’ in Cornwall. ‘For four days I waited for him to call back. Four days.’150 The two then spoke three times in a week. Obama informed—rather than consulted—Cameron that the United States was to strike with cruise missiles within days, and asked if Cameron would support him. Cameron would, but with four days lost, had very little time to formulate a British contribution. One White House official said ‘they were really operating in a very intimate, very detail-intensive way about what was to happen’.151 Cameron wrote to Obama that the evidential and therefore legal basis for action was clear, and that there was UN consent. But the Syrian government’s admittance of UN weapons inspectors also meant delay. The uncertainty in London as to what Washington was planning to do continued, but the expectation was of British involvement. On 27 August Obama told Cameron he did not want any action to take place while he was at the G20 in Russia, and that ‘we may need to have a difficult conversation’ about the United States acting alone.152 Despite the commitment to ‘act in lockstep’ together, as Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry put it, ‘suddenly there was a wrinkle’, as ‘without any prior notice to us’, Cameron acted on the sense that delay meant that parliamentary approval was increasingly felt to be necessary, owing, in Kerry’s words, to the ‘shadow’ of the ‘buddy routine’ that led to Iraq. ‘Cameron was confident he’d win the vote.’153 Cameron had given assurances that this time he would deliver but had given Obama little indication of Cameron’s twin constraints of the Commons and the Coalition. With a leader of the opposition keen to accommodate public scepticism, on 27 August Cameron decided to recall parliament for two days hence, spurred by Obama’s apparently decisive language: ‘The prime minister was certainly under the impression that the president would enforce the red line’, an official said.154 The pressure from Cameron was that a decision be made speedily, but Obama again caused frustration by

149  White House, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference, 13 May 2013, Office of the Press Secretary. 150  Cameron, For the Record, 460. 151  Unnamed, quoted in Unnamed White House staffer, quoted in Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron, (London Biteback, 2015), 442. 152  Anthony Seldon, ‘Ten Days that Changed the World’, Times, 12 August 2018. 153  John Kerry Every Day is Extra (New York, 2018), 531. 154  Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’.

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prevaricating.155 As regards parliamentary sanction, Obama ‘figured out how important this is’, Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, told one interlocutor. ‘He will definitely strike.’156 Cameron increasingly desperately tried to appeal to parliamentary rebels, first on the rightness of the cause, then on the effect on the government, within Obama’s timetable. The government’s motion authorising military action put to the House of Commons was defeated 285–272.157 Cameron losing the vote, ‘shockingly’, was for National Security Adviser Susan Rice ‘a major setback’, and for Ben Rhodes, ‘huge’.158 ‘Cameron had miscalculated—badly’, Kerry felt; it ‘sent shockwaves through our politics at home’, and ‘revived overnight memories of the Iraq war’.159 Within seventy-­ two hours Obama backed out. ‘We had UN inspectors on the ground who were completing their work, and we could not risk taking a shot while they were there’, the President recalled. ‘A second major factor was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament.’160 Not that Obama was especially keen in the first place; if he were, the consequences would have been more damaging; one was the risk that by not killing Assad actually strengthen him and his scope for executive power.161 But Obama’s second ambassador to the United Kingdom, Matthew Barzun, and Kerry felt the need for public affirmations about the resilience of the relationship.162 For the White House, Cameron’s fate was a warning that Obama might suffer similarly. ‘After David Cameron lost the vote in Parliament’, Kerry recalled, ‘it was harder to justify bypassing Capitol Hill’.163 Obama had decided that he needed congressional approval, as acting without would limit him for when he wanted to act, as perhaps over Iran. He had, moreover, always called for congressional buy-in for presidential military deployments, not least as a risk-averse congress might have given him a lifeline. Obama said many people have advised against taking this decision to Congress, and undoubtedly, they were impacted by what we saw happen in the United Kingdom this week when the Parliament of our closest ally failed to pass a resolution with a similar goal, even as the Prime Minister supported taking action.164  Seldon, Times, 12 August 2018.  Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’. 157  House of Commons Debates, 29 August 2013, fifth series, volume 566, columns 1426, 1552–1555. 158  Susan Rice, Tough Love (New York, 2019), 362; Rhodes, Guardian, 13 January 2018. 159  Kerry, Every Day, 531–532. 160  Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’. 161  Goldberg, ‘Obama Doctrine’. 162  Matthew Barzun, ‘The special relationship still lives on between Britain and the US’, Observer, 8 September 2013; White House, John Kerry, Remarks with United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Hague, London, 9 September 2013. 163  Kerry, Every Day, 534. New York Times, 1 September 2013. 164  Statement by the President on Syria, 31 August 2013, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary. 155 156

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Obama conceded that Cameron had handled his vote clumsily, but that it reflected public opinion in Britain: ‘We similarly have a war-weary public.’165 The issue was a tactical one, but it was also greater than that: for the first time since 1782 a Prime Minister had lost a vote on war, albeit it narrowly and as much through inattentive parliamentary management combined with incompetent whipping as through parliamentarians’ preoccupation with Iraq. The US press reported Cameron’s ‘humiliation’.166 The embarrassment was the greater for Cameron having been urging firm action on him for months. Given, as the New York Times put it, that ‘[w]ith a few exceptions in the past half-­ century, there has been a simple rule of thumb when it comes to international conflict: America does not use force without Britain at its side, so shock could be heard in the voices of senior White House officials who never saw it coming. One said it was “[b]ungled by Cameron”; another that it was “[e]mbarrassing, for Cameron, and for us”.167 A ‘shell-shocked’ Cameron privately accepted personal responsibility, and phoned Obama to apologise as his aides emailed Obama’s with worries about the damage to Britain’s role in the world.168 Obama was reported to be ‘annoyed at what he saw as Mr Cameron’s stumbles’ as he ‘mishandled the situation’.169 But to Cameron he was empathetic: Sometimes we’ve got to remind ourselves that we volunteer for these jobs. … OK, brother. All you need to do is hunker down for a while and you will be fine. … I know how morally and personally offended you are. You are not letting us down in any fashion. You have processes you have to abide by. The mood in the West is that they see Libya as still chaotic. Syria is a mess and they are war-weary.170

The bigger problem was prevarication and the absence of a strategy, and there, fault lay with Obama. Cameron later said ‘a more automatic response would have been better’; four days was ‘far too long’.171 Roger Cohen thought that the vote ‘marks a watershed moment that leaves the “special relationship” in search of meaning and Britain in search of its role in the world … there is little or nothing special left. Rather than standing shoulder-to-shoulder with its ally, Britain has turned its back’.172 Cameron’s fear that he might be the first Conservative Prime Minister who said ‘no’ when a US president—even a prevaricating one—asked for help had been realised. It was also, arguably, the 165  Mark Landler, ‘President Pulls Lawmakers into Box He Made’, New York Times, 31 August 2013. 166  Stephen Castle and Steven Erlanger, ‘With Britain haunted by Iraq, a Harsh Lesson for Cameron’, New York Times, 30 August 2013. 167  David E. Sanger, ‘After British Vote, Unusual Isolation for U.S. on Syria’, New York Times, 31 August 2013. 168  Rhodes, World, 234. 169  New York Times, 1 September 2013. 170  Seldon, Times, 12 August 2018. 171  David Cameron, The Cameron Interview, ITV 1, 16 September 2019. 172  Roger Cohen, ‘A Much Less Special Relationship’, New York Times, 30 August 2013.

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greatest strategic defeat for the Atlantic alliance since the Second World War; as he later put it, it was ‘a disaster’.173

ISIS 2014–2016 ‘Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain seems destined to cut a lesser figure’, it appeared to the New York Times, ‘weakened both at home and abroad by a self-made debacle’.174 The British had become less valuable to the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan as Obama increasingly took the lead, but exactly a year after the Syria vote, there was another, related, opportunity for Cameron to demonstrate the dangers of Prime Ministerial advocacy exceeding Presidential agency. In a US syndicated newspaper column on 17 August 2014, he warned of ‘generational struggle’: emboldened by the Syrian non-intervention, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, had taken to targeting nationals of the Western powers which had made its flourishing possible. The filmed torture and beheading of American and British hostages James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, David Haines, and Alan Henning provoked public revulsion and fury. Several had been made to read out scripts blaming Obama and Cameron for their execution, some of which Cameron watched.175 The first US airstrikes were launched on 8 August; on 15 August UN resolution 2170 was passed unanimously. On 28 August Obama admitted having no strategy for defeating ISIS.  In light of that Cameron was reluctant once again to recall parliament, but the slaughter of thirty British holidaymakers on a beach in Tunisia in July 2015 furthered his case as did a request from the Iraqi government. Pressure grew on Obama to intervene, and there was a traditional signifier of the political summer in holidays being curtailed and conference calls arranged. Obama’s and Cameron’s confabulation, to one commentator, ‘was a small echo of the old Roosevelt-Churchill two-step that helped save the world’.176 The NATO summit was dominated by ISIS and Ukraine. In a joint op-ed article Obama and Cameron called on NATO to reject ‘isolationist’ impulses and confront the rising terrorist threat posed by ISIS, saying the United States and Britain ‘will not be cowed by barbaric killers’ or ‘weaken in the face of their threats’.177 Throughout 2014, general disaffection in Washington had been expressed at the lack of British engagement over fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Cameron and Obama spoke on 4 September, with Cameron pushing for airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. On 23 September US airstrikes began. Obama did not wait for British assistance. Parliament gave emphatic support for armed  Cameron, For the Record, xiv.  New York Times, 30 August 2013. 175  Cameron, For the Record, 360. 176  Timothy Egan, ‘Roosevelts to the Rescue’, New York Times, 4 September 2014. 177  David Cameron and Barack Obama, we will not be cowed by barbaric killers, The Times, 4 September 2014; David Cameron, House of Commons Debates, fifth series, volume 585, 3 September 2014, column 274. 173 174

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involvement ‘in the international coalition to dismantle and ultimately destroy what President Obama has rightly called ‘this network of death’ on 26 September.178 Combined Joint Task Force—Operation Inherent Resolve—was established three weeks later to formalise the military response. Resolution would have to wait until after their time.

Chemistry and Choreography Looking more like a scene from the end of a movie rather than the beginning, the two protagonists strolled away from the camera, together, alone, identical jackets casually tossed across opposite shoulders, complementarily. On that, Cameron’s first visit to the White House, in July 2010, he and Obama spent longer than expected walking and talking on the South Lawn on a bright day when the green of the grass and the blue of the suits, and the white of the house, contrasted, brilliantly. Then, as at other times, Obama’s official photographer Pete Souza chronicled the casualness inherent in any ‘bromance’: at other times the two flipping burgers, watching sports, toasting each other with bottles of beer brewed in their respective constituencies to settle a bet on the USA–England World Cup match; slouching in their gym gear. Much of the behaviour was innately gendered. With or without ties, theirs were always ‘mirror-image outfits’.179 Both playing table tennis, shirt-sleeved and left-handed; even the result of the match was a draw/tie. There were the billets doux of their joint op-eds.180 The First Friend was the first foreign leader to fly in Air Force One (on which he slept—alone—in the presidential bed); Downing Street happily confirmed that the President of France—a head of state—had not been offered a trip in either.181 The President played 306 rounds of golf, and only one abroad: with Cameron in Hertfordshire in 2016.182 Obama’s all-region gifts to the Camerons on a 2011 visit included custom-made silver and White House Magnolia wood cufflinks for him and a bracelet for her, presented together on a ‘hand-carved Magnolia wood valet tray crafted especially for the occasion’ from wood from the White House garden.183 On only the second presidential state visit to the United Kingdom, Obama was the first American president to speak to both houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall. He stayed overnight, twice, at Buckingham Palace, dining at state dinners of ‘perfectly synchronised formality’.184 More commonly there was junk food diplomacy, 178  David Cameron, House of Commons Debates, fifth series, volume 585, 26 September 2014, column 1255. 179  New York Times 19 January 2015. 180  Most nakedly, Barack Obama and David Cameron, ‘The U.S. and Britain still enjoy special relationship’, Washington Post, 12 March 2012. 181  New York Times, 16 March 2012. 182  Washington Post, 23 April 2016; Telegraph, 16 January 2017. 183  Rachel Rose Hartman, ‘Obama Visit to the UK under the Microscope’, Yahoo News, 25 May 2011. 184  Rhodes, World, 148

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whether serving pre-cooked sausages at a barbecue, scoffing popcorn and hotdogs at the basketball, or feasting at a backyard party on fusion cuisine: Bison Wellington.185 Of that Cameron visit Time felt ‘the love was palpable’.186 Cameron later described the spectacle as ‘probably the closest thing a prime minister could get to a state visit’.187 This was the only President to have called a Prime Minister ‘brother’; indeed also ‘bro’, generally seen as an improvement on the similarly uninhibited ‘yo’.188 Cameron seemed naturally to elicit it. Noting his ‘studied informality’, Obama recalled someone with ‘an impressive command of the issues, a facility with language, and the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life’.189 It was hard to imagine any other President speaking at a White House press conference of any other Prime Minister: Now, as many of you know, David recently noted how comfortable the two of us are working together. This sent some commentators into a tizzy. Some explored the linguistic origins of the word ‘bro’. Others debated its definition. Several analyzed how this term has evolved over time. Some seemed confused and asked—what does Obama mean? And so, let me put this speculation to rest. Put simply, David is a great friend. He’s one of my closest and most trusted partners in the world. On many of the most pressing challenges that we face, we see the world the same way.190

A suspicion was evident to one of Cameron’s principal aides early on, ‘but over time a close bond has been formed between them’.191 A British minister said: ‘They don’t need to act; the bonhomie is real.’192 When the President offered the Prime Minister his bed on Air Force One, he also tucked him in. ‘I bet Roosevelt never did this for Churchill.’193 The bonhomie also contradicted the plan. It had been made known from the outset as President that Obama was to eschew personal diplomacy.194 Obvious comparison was made—and was found wanting—with the Clinton– Blair ‘love fest’ of 1997–2000, much less that of Bush–Blair.195 Twice-monthly

 Chicago Tribune, 14 March 2012.  Jay Newton-Small, ‘Obama’s Love Fest with David Cameron’, Time, 14 March 2012. 187  Cameron, For the Record, 340. 188  Craig Oliver, diary [3 February 2016], Unleashing Demons (London, 2016) (2017), 63. Commonly deployed though the epithet was within the White House; Stéphane Bussard, ‘La relation trop spéciale de Blair avec Bush’, Le Temps, 28 July 2006. See p. 349. 189  Obama, Promised Land, 527. 190  The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 16 January 2015, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference. 191  Oliver, Demons, 192. 192  British minister, quoted in Independent, 16 March 2012. 193  Cameron, For the Record, 341. 194  Peter Feaver, ‘The Challenges of Presidential Diplomacy’, Foreign Policy, 6 May 2009; Carrie Budhoff Brown, ‘Obama’s no-schmooze diplomacy’, Politico, 7 June 2011. 195  Helene Cooper, New York Times, 21 July 2010. 185 186

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video conferences between Bush and Blair had been halved in frequency by Bush and Brown, and discontinued entirely by Obama and Brown (Brown said at the time that he ‘could get straight through to Bush any time of day and night and he was pretty open. Obama was different’.196). Obama’s disinclination to cultivate personal rapport with foreign leaders actually was one reason for his relative intimacy with Cameron—implicit recognition that he had mishandled Brown.197 From the outset of the second term, Obama was not concerned ‘to establish some, you know, buddy-buddy relationship’, said one official.198 Yet, as Obama put it, ‘I liked him personally, even when we butted heads’.199 Cameron’s efforts to reset transatlantic relations as he attempted with domestic conservatism were embarrassed by the December 2010 Wikileaks, which revealed an approach suspiciously more slavish than solid.200 Protocol lines were bent in public. Obama made the point that dignitaries visiting the United States tended to visit the coasts and not the heartland. In the week in his re-election year that Obama’s approval ratings dropped to 40%—a dead heat with Mitt Romney—Obama took Cameron, on Air Force One, to Dayton, which happened to be in the most important swing state in his re-election, Ohio. Eating and drinking together courtside ‘is a good thing for his campaign’, the New York Times felt, ‘and probably not bad for relations with the United States’ closest ally, either’.201 It was effectively a pre-election stop where the Prime Minister ‘got to serve as a stage prop in the president’s re-election campaign’.202 At a state dinner at the White House on 14 March 2012 Obama said ‘I welcome my friend and partner’, one who ‘shares my belief that, in a time of rapid change, the leadership of the United States and the United Kingdom is more important than ever’.203 The New York Times noted the combination of ‘pomp, locker room camaraderie and gentle gibes’, including the inevitable reference to the burning down of the White House in 1814.204 As cloying as the dessert, Cameron spoke of how, with ‘strong and beautiful words’, his friend ‘has pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world’, and compared him to Theodore Roosevelt. With many donors among the 362 guests, Obama also used the dinner as a fundraiser for a re-election bid that Cameron had all but endorsed.205 196  Andrew Malcolm, ‘Obama and Cameron appear to agree on everything, down to their neckties’, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2010; Brown, quoted in Campbell, diary, 7 December 2009, Diaries, 562. 197  Economist, 28 July 2012, 35. 198  Michael A. McFaul, quoted in New York Times, 11 March 2015. 199  Obama, Promised Land, 527. 200  US Embassy London, confidential cable 08LONDON930, 1 April 2008. 201  Michael Shear, New York Times, 11 March 2012. 202  New York Times, 16 March 2012; Elspeth Reeve, ‘How David Cameron’s Date with America Is Going’, The Wire [The Atlantic], 16 March 2012. 203  White House, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in a Joint Press Conference, Rose Garden, 14 March 2012, Office of the Press Secretary. 204  New York Times, 15 March 2012. 205  New York Times, 14 March 2012.

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The previous pairing of Democrat and Conservative—Bill Clinton and John Major—was not auspicious. It was an indication of that of Obama–Cameron, and revealing of the distance between British and American conservatism as well as his attitudes to his own party, that Cameron was happier with the Democrat on offer than with either Republican. ‘David, if you were an American politician’, Obama told him, ‘I think you would be on the soft right of the Democrat Party’.206 It meant that Cameron could risk causing offence by meeting Romney at No 10 in July 2012 when Romney and Obama were as little as one point apart in the polls (Cameron had refused to meet François Hollande during the French presidential election, which Hollande went on to win). Before Romney left the United States, and without mentioning Kenya, an aide of his informed the press of the candidate’s view that ‘[w]e are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special’, adding that the ‘White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have’.207 Churchill religiously was invoked. Romney then attended the London 2012 opening ceremony, and managed to insult the hosts with his comments about their organisational abilities, as Obama was only too happy to mention.208 For his part, election night allowed Cameron to tweet ‘Warm congratulations to my friend @BarackObama. Look forward to continuing to work together’.209 As if by way of reciprocation, on 21 July 2014 Obama accorded the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, a meeting that almost recalled the disastrous one of Neil Kinnock to Ronald Reagan in 1987. The Labour leader’s tergiversations over the Syria vote a year earlier had convinced the Obama White House as to his unfitness to be Prime Minister, and their clear preference was for Cameron’s re-election, notwithstanding the traditional Democrat–Labour ties, and Cameron’s promise of an EU withdrawal referendum.210 Not unlike Eisenhower and Macmillan at Camp David in 1959, Obama invited Cameron to Washington for an official visit to highlight ‘the breadth, depth and strength’ of the ‘enduring special relationship’ with America’s ‘uniquely close friend and steadfast ally’ at the beginning of what happened to be a British general election year.211 Obama had first considered offering Cameron an address to a joint session of Congress, but Congress was not sitting in mid-January when the visit was planned, and instead provided what proved to be a jacket-less working dinner, followed the next day by an Oval Office meeting, and both heralded by a jointly written newspaper article on the catch-all theme of security and 206  Cameron, For the Record, 151. David Brooks, New York Times, 12 May 2015; Bagehot, Economist, 18 May 2013. 207  Daily Telegraph, 24 July 2012. 208  New York Times, 26 July 2012. 209  David Cameron, @David_Cameron, 6 November 2012. 210  Seldon, Cameron, 463–466. Neil A.  Lewis, ‘Reagan and Kinnock hold talk on Nuclear Weapons and Britain’, New York Times, 28 March 1987. 211  Statement by the Press Secretary on the Visit of Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom, 10 January 2015, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary.

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prosperity. Such were Obama’s coattails that his campaign team was sought after and divided up between Labour and Conservatives in 2015, respectively David Axelrod and, rather more successfully, Jim Messina.212 Of the nomenclature of national concordance there was an almost postmodern mania for elegant variation. Candidate Obama had spoken of a ‘special partnership’, reframed in advance of their first bilateral in July 2010 as a ‘realistic, sensible and practical’ relationship.213 ‘We can never say it enough’, Obama said for the first time, in his most striking coining, ‘Ours is not just a special relationship, it is an essential relationship—for us and for the world’.214 Obama called it ‘the strongest that it’s ever been’.215 The BBC North America editor mentioned the special relationship to an administration official. ‘Get out of my room’, the official ‘screamed’ towards the end of their thirty-second meeting. ‘I’m sick of that subject. You’re all mad’. ‘There is’, the journalist admitted, ‘a sense in the Obama press office that we obsess about this’.216 It was indeed a large target at which Harvey Morris took aim in the New York Times. ‘In the British media … this particular three-day meet-and-greet was followed as if it were the second coming. … British officials were spinning like nuclear centrifuges to stress the importance of this latest manifestation of the “special relationship” and of the depth and warmth of the personal ties between “Barack” and “David”.’217 The fatal lure of the affair could be seen in the insistence of Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer to join the party, his absence and distraction leading to his disastrous ‘Omnishambles’ budget the following month.218 The choreography was only found wanting when it was extemporised, as at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg in December 2013 with an, as it proved, shortlived innovation in mourning etiquette: the funeral selfie. The final bilateral for President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron began as on a Hollywood-rendered London street, soaked by April showers, the scene surveyed by a bobby. The Prime Minister having recently won a general election himself at the second attempt could confidently expect the following year to be meeting Obama’s anointed successor, the second President Clinton. In the last such demonstration of chemistry and choreography—and, as was to be proven, its limitations—Cameron walked out into the rain down Downing Street, away from the entrance to No 10, where visitors invariably were received, to greet the President, enabling them to embrace and walk up the  Jim Messina, ‘What my British Win Taught me about 2016’, Politico, 17 May 2015.  Times, 19 July 2010. 214  Barack Obama and David Cameron, ‘Not Just Special, but an Essential Relationship’, The Times, 24 May 2011. 215  New York Times, 14 March 2012. 216  Justin Webb, 2 December 2009, House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Global Security: UK-US Relations, Examination of Witnesses (Questions 90–99), Q9944; Justin Webb, Notes on Them and US (London 2011), 15. In the hearing Webb spoke of another journalist; in his memoir he admitted it was himself. 217  Harvey Morris, International Herald Tribune, 16 March 2012. 218  Asa Bennett. ‘Autumn Statement 2014: How George Osborne Prepares His Mini-Budget’, The Huffington Post UK, 2 December 2014. 212 213

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pavement/sidewalk together. Only one of them knew it was their last few months in office.

Brexit David Cameron’s propitiation of the Eurosceptic wing of his party in order to be elected as its leader in 2005—his campaign pledge to move the Conservatives from the mainstream centre-right grouping to the much smaller one of the nationalist right in the European Parliament—led to ‘concerns’ about him within the Obama team.219 As the perceived threat to the Conservatives increased through the parliament, the call for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU from within Cameron’s party grew louder. In his 23 January 2013 Bloomberg speech the Prime Minister conceded the matter. The American position—consistent since John F.  Kennedy—was that Britain was better for being in Europe, Europe was better for having Britain, and the United States was better for having both, also happened to be consistent with the Conservative Party’s position for fifty years. That neither in the end mattered was one of a number of political curiosities on either side of the Atlantic in the year 2016. The template was two years’ old. In an unusually direct intervention on another democracy’s internal politics, Obama had pronounced on the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. Though it was ‘up to the people of Scotland’ to determine their destiny, ‘we obviously have a deep interest in making sure that one of the closest allies we will ever have remains a strong, robust, united and effective partner’.220 Scottish membership of the United Kingdom, and UK membership of the EU were both more than domestic issues; the impact on the United States was obvious. The US position on the latter was even clearer (‘Brexit would be calamitous, a crucial piece of the post-World War II order drifting off into the sea.’221) and more public (‘having the United Kingdom in the European Union gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union … we want to make sure that the United Kingdom continues to have that influence’222). On 10 January Obama himself told Cameron in a phone call that the United States ‘values a strong UK in a strong European Union’.223 On 3 February, Obama asked Cameron in a phone call what he could do to help, and agreed to visit in April.224 ‘Talk to the Cameron folks’, Obama told his aides. ‘Get me the best arguments for and 219  John Podesta, ‘Europe matters in the British election’, Center for American Progress Action Fund, 22 April 2010; Rupert Cornwall, ‘Hague tells Clinton not to fear Tories’ EU allies’, Independent, 22 October 2009; New Statesman, 6 August 2009. 220  Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of in Joint Press Conference, 5 June 2014, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary. 221  Rhodes, World, 384. 222  Barack Obama, 24 July 2015, interview with Jon Sopel, BBC News. 223  Independent, 19 January 2013, 10. 224  Craig Oliver, diary, 3 February 2016, Unleashing Demons (London, 2016) (2017), 63.

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against Brexit’.225 Obama said in a British newspaper article—written in close consultation with Cameron’s staff—that ‘the European Union doesn’t moderate British influence—it magnifies it’.226 On 13 May 2013 alongside Cameron at a White House Press Conference Obama had said ‘I think the UK’s participation in the EU is an expression of its influence and role in the world. … David’s basic point, that you probably want to see if you can fix what’s broken in a very important relationship before you break it off, makes some sense to me’.227 Obama’s April 2016 trip was ‘hastily arranged’, and as his Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes observed, ‘[i]t was unusual to coordinate so closely with a foreign government, but the Brits were different’.228 After the President ‘saunters in’ to the Cabinet room, a ‘long, friendly meeting with Cameron’ unfolded. The notion of a rapid post-Brexit US–UK trade deal as mooted by the leave campaign was raised. ‘What?’ Obama said. ‘There’s no way that could happen’. One of Cameron’s team said: ‘[W]e’d be at the “back of the queue”, and Cameron told Obama “It’d be great if you could make that point publicly”.’229 At their joint press conference in Downing Street Obama did, and Cameron spoke of his pride ‘listening to this man, my friend, Barack, say that the special relationship between our countries has never been stronger. But I’ve never felt constrained in any way in strengthening this relationship by the fact that we’re in the European Union’.230 For Obama, as in 2014, [u]ltimately, this is something that the British voters have to decide for themselves. But as part of our special relationship, part of being friends is to be honest and to let you know what I think. And speaking honestly, the outcome of that decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States because it affects our prospects as well. The United States wants a strong United Kingdom as a partner. And the United Kingdom is at its best when it’s helping to lead a strong Europe. It leverages UK power to be part of the European Union.231

Cameron and Obama had both begun their comments with Winston Churchill, as a new chapter in the bust chronicles had just been opened. ‘Some said it was a snub to Britain’, the man who would shortly be Foreign Secretary, and then Prime Minister, wrote in a British tabloid newspaper on Obama’s arrival. ‘Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the

 Rhodes, World, 384.  Barack Obama, Daily Telegraph, April 2016. 227  Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference, 13 May 2013, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary. 228  Rhodes, World, 384. 229  Rhodes, World, 385; Oliver, Demons, 196–197. 230  Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron in Joint Press Conference, 10 Downing Street, 22 April 2016, the White House, Office of the Press Secretary. 231  Obama, 22 April 2016 press conference. 225 226

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British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.’232 Obama revealed that he had, after all, indeed replaced it—with a bust of Dr Martin Luther King. But, the second bust remained in his private quarters, and he saw it every day. ‘I love Winston Churchill’, Obama told the world, doing something, finally, about his Churchill problem. ‘I love the guy.’233 For all the increasing tension on the British side about the closeness of the likely referendum outcome, the trip exuded good cheer. The view from Obama’s side was that the ‘visit had accomplished everything that they [Cameron’s side] had asked’.234 Insofar as public reaction was the measure, however, it did not take long for the tone of the news conference—by turns jocular and didactic—to appear ill-judged, and of a pattern with the remain campaign more generally. For all his personal popularity in Britain, and his unmistakeable love of Winston Churchill, coverage of the President’s comments sparked an unexpected reaction. ‘With Mr. Obama perceived as coming to Mr. Cameron’s aid’, Strobe Talbot, Deputy Secretary of State under Clinton, commented, ‘the prospect of his visit raised protests from more than a hundred euroskeptic members of Parliament and pro-Brexit commentators’.235 Press and social media reaction was negative, and the intervention had a clear and damaging effect as measured in polling.236 For their relationship, it was a reverse Syria. Cameron’s greater emphasis before the election on bilateral relations with Washington rather than trilateral relations which included Brussels ought not to have misled him that, as Obama’s first ambassador to the United Kingdom Louis Susman made clear, the UK’s place in the EU was essential.237 Indeed, ironically, Europe became the measure of this diminution, even before Brexit. ‘With Tony Blair, Britain was really playing a very important role in the EU— they were at the centre of decisions. Today that is no longer the case’, José Manuel Barroso, former President of the European Commission, said. ‘The American President, if he wants to get European countries on board, I think the first call he makes is to the Chancellor of Germany, no longer to the British Prime Minister.’238 On 24 June 2016 it was clear that that was likely to be reaffirmed as the shock result of the referendum was announced. Privately Obama asked: ‘How could Cameron even ask the question without being sure of the answer he would get?’239 Publicly the President emphasised continuity: ‘[W]e respect their decision … one thing that will not change is the special 232  Boris Johnson, The Sun, 22 April 2016. This was not an original speculation, the notion having been initiated in 2010: Adam Shaw, ‘Obama’s Deadly Anti-British Agenda’, American Thinker, 20 July 2010. 233  Obama, 22 April 2016 press conference. 234  Rhodes, World, 386. 235  Strobe Talbot, ‘Brexit’s Threat to the Special Relationship’, New York Times, 22 April 2016. 236  David A. Patten, ‘US Media Ignores Obama’s Role in Brexit Disaster’, Newsmax, 24 June 2016; Edward-Isaac Dovere, ‘Why Obama couldn’t stop the Brexit’, Politico, 24 June 2016. 237  Financial Times, 22 September 2009. 238  José Manuel Barroso, World at One, BBC Radio 4, 29 December 2014. 239  Kim Darroch, Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump (London, 2020), 68.

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relationship that exists between our two nations’, he said; ‘[t]hat endure.’240 Which was more than could be said for this particular relationship. His luck finally having run out in a way that was always likely to have direct personal consequences, that morning Cameron announced his resignation.

Conclusion The night after the ill-fated Brexit press conference, Obama’s aides had a wine-­ lubricated evening relaxing with Cameron’s. They reflected on their bosses’ relationship. ‘We laughed at seven years’ of stories: Cameron and Obama playing ping-pong, and losing to some kids; Cameron flying out to Dayton, Ohio, to watch a basketball game with Obama in 2012 and having no idea what the rules of the game were’, Ben Rhodes recalled. ‘In a world that led to different outcomes, the dinner would have been a memorable valedictory, a group of people satisfied that they had done their best with the time they had occupying the leadership of the free world.’241 Inasmuch as any year can, and more than most years have, for the US and the UK 2016 appeared to some clearly as defining an age’s end. With Cameron replaced by Theresa May, Barack Obama ended his presidency as he had begun it—with the leader of ‘our closest ally’ unelected either by their party or their country.242 His own country’s new political landscape meant it mattered less than it otherwise might. David Cameron never recovered from his loss of authority over Syria, narrowly avoided an even greater mishap by the sundering of one union the following year, before doing precisely that to another two years later. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Obama–Cameron relationship was a failed one. But it was one which could reasonably be defined by difference which an undoubted personal rapport could only intermittently disguise. Even by their own terms, the tenures of each ended disappointment. The date of its termination was known for years to Obama, but for only a matter of days for Cameron. The dismantling of the President’s legacy from the day he stood down by ‘someone diametrically opposed to everything we stood for’ was hardly his personal responsibility.243 But no Prime Minister could more individually be blamed for their inadvertent loss of office. Not unlike Obama, Cameron had assumed that office centred on a domestic agenda inspired in part by the effect of the international agenda on the fate of his predecessors. The failures were domestic too; the Democrats lost the White House and Cameron lost Downing Street, and for not dissimilar reasons. Trump and Brexit were yoked as the presiding spirits of the new age. The reputational damage to Obama and Cameron, of Libya, Syria, and Brexit, ought not to distract from that to their countries too. In the realm of  New York Times, 25 June 2016.  Rhodes, World, 386. 242  Obama, Promised Land, 696. 243  Obama, Promised Land, xiii. 240 241

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their relationship, Obama and Cameron were significantly weakened by the time it ended. Libya had demonstrated some dysfunctionalities, and if the Syria vote was a humiliation for Cameron, it also impacted on Obama’s international standing—to which were added by his critics Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, and his hitherto pristine profile in Britain. As President, Obama made three recommendations to Britain: over defence spending, Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom’s place in the EU. Scotland was the only significant issue on which Obama and Cameron agreed that their agreement did not stymie. And it nearly did. Beyond those, Cameron had in 2012 and 2013 tried to get US support for military action. Moscow cited Obama’s and Cameron’s meddling in Libya as a reason for Russia not to support UK and US on Syria. The flowering of what soon became known as the Arab Spring took place amidst intervention fatigue. The two lame duck leaders sat together for the last time in Warsaw in July 2016, at a NATO summit. It was at the very least unfortunate that Obama’s animating motto for the pair had been ‘The time for our leadership is now’.244 When Obama first won, his British suitors, Brown and Cameron, conducted their own inkblot tests, immediately and thereafter. They claimed the victory as supporting, respectively, progressivism or change.245 Much of Obama’s appeal was based on the nebulous promise of ‘change’. The fatuity of the word had been exemplified by Gordon Brown on the steps of 10 Downing Street, taking over ten years after living next door, uttering it as his first public statement. But for Obama and Cameron, on that notion rested their very appeal. As it transpired, beyond economic management, in policy terms they did not differ greatly; Obama highlighted ‘a willing partner on a host of international issues’ such as climate change, marriage equality, and foreign aid.246 Obama and Brown met at different stages in their political trajectories; Obama and Cameron were at the same point. It was the Brown premiership which should have fitted with the grain of the Obama presidency, as the former clearly felt; in Brown’s memoirs, references to ‘President Bush’ and ‘Barack’ resound. That it did not was circumstantial, the principal circumstance being Brown’s rapidly diminishing authority. It was as it turned out his successor, a Prime Minister without a parliamentary majority, who was able to project confidence and establish rapport. But in other, more consequential matters, the Obama– Cameron relationship was often strained. Contrary to Obama’s initial plan, the diplomacy was indeed largely ad hominem. ‘Our success depended on our ability to coordinate and to be able to leverage our relationship to have an impact on other countries’, Obama said standing next to Cameron at the Brexit press conference. ‘Over the six years or so  Remarks by the President to Parliament in London, United Kingdom, 25 May 2011, Office of the Press Secretary. 245  Gordon Brown and David Cameron, 5 November 2008, House of Commons Debates, fifth series, volume 482, column 244; Independent, 4 December 2008; Times, 26 February 2010. 246  Obama, Promised Land, 527. 244

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that our terms have overlapped, we have met or spoken more times than I can count.’247 Cameron admitted to colleagues that he had placed too much reliance on forceful public statements for action from Obama.248 That and Cameron’s ‘expediency and intermittency’ in the conduct of foreign policy.249 For all the determination with which Cameron wanted to affirm support over Iraq and Afghanistan, the manner of the end of the latter collaboration, abortive interventions in two other failed states of the Middle East, and the denuding effects of further cuts in defence spending meant that over its course the substantive relationship was weakened, and time-honoured British anxiety over status strengthened. That may have been assuaged had the House of Commons in August 2013 followed Cameron’s lead, against its better judgement, as it had Blair’s ten years before. That it did not was in large part because Blair had overcome its better judgement. Barack Obama and David Cameron were very good at being President and Prime Minister. Obama could temporise, studiedly, and Cameron assure, blithely, sometimes with consequence, at other times with an absence of consequence. But, and it bears repetition, in sharp contrast with those of both of their immediate predecessors and immediate successors their relationship worked. But too often that was not enough. Britain’s increasing isolation from the EU was being matched with that from the United States. The Atlantic Bridge appeared more precarious, whether circumstantially or structurally. The Prime Minister was blessed with a President who was more popular in the Prime Minister’s country than he was in his own, but Cameron also mattered much less to his President than Blair had to his. That was perhaps why the amicability seemed real, the bonhomie unforced, the choreography convincing. This President originally had few shared imperatives with his Prime Minister, and then came to have some, only ultimately to be let down by them. For all their pas de deux and superficial similarities, this relationship marked a relative low, the greater for the constancy of appearance. It was an illusive—an ostensible—relationship. The undoubted personal chemistry cost nothing, and served to mask Britain’s continued broader international abatement, which in Obama’s final six months, and Cameron’s final week, accelerated apace. Before departing on a farewell tour which ended the Presidency as it began, with a pivot west and the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-Operation meeting in Peru, Obama may not have intended to offer a category insult when he said ‘I’ll visit with Chancellor Merkel who has probably been my closest international partner these last eight years’.250 Given the choice either of accepting this possibly temporary state of affairs, or of trying to force the relationship, at the risk of suffering by contrast Cameron—like Brown—chose the latter. 247  Remarks by the President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron in Joint Press Conference, Office of the Press Secretary, 22 April 2016. 248  David Laws, Coalition: The Inside Story of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government (London, 2016), 328. 249  Bagehot, ‘Running out of Gas’, Economist, 21 June 2014. 250  Press Conference by the President, 14 November 2016, Office of the Press Secretary.

CHAPTER 17

Donald Trump and Theresa May: The Incredible Relationship Martin Farr

Theresa May and Donald Trump at Chequers, 13 July 2018. Shealah Craighead, Official White House Photograph

M. Farr (*) School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_17

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Of 33,624 UK government online petitions started by members of the public between May 2015 and May 2019, hundreds were about Donald Trump. Most were rejected as they duplicated existing petitions, but two became the third and fifth most popular since the contrivance was established in 2011. In December 2015, incited by candidate Trump’s promise to prevent potentially 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the United States, and his claim that London was lawless and its police ‘afraid for their own lives’ (the Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said Trump’s comments were ‘complete and utter nonsense’) 86,930 signed to prevent Trump from entering the United Kingdom on grounds of his ‘unacceptable behaviour’ and ‘hate speech’.1 The size of the petition triggered three hours of debate in Parliament during which Conservative lawmakers described Trump as a ‘buffoon’, his policies as ‘bonkers’, and his views as ‘offensive’, ‘outrageous’, and ‘hateful’.2 The few defending his arrival tended to abstraction (‘We might not wish him here, we might not like him here, but we should not vote against his ability to speak or his right to travel’; prevention ‘would be the biggest boost we could give to his campaign’3). One Conservative MP called him ‘the orange prince of American self-publicity’; a second thanked God ‘there are not 1.6 billion Trumps’; ‘we have to be alive to the possibility that this ridiculous individual’, said a third, ‘may be elected’.4 Almost as soon as he was, President Trump signed his ‘Muslim ban’, sparking five more hours of parliamentary debate.5 The ‘ban’ also prompted the second petition, to ‘Prevent Donald Trump from making a State Visit to the United Kingdom’, because ‘it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen’ given his ‘well documented misogyny and vulgarity’. It received 1,863,708 signatures before being closed early due to the general election, and led to another three hours of parliamentary debate in which Conservative MPs described the President’s views as ‘outrageous’, ‘very distasteful’, ‘extremely offensive’, and ‘grotesque’.6 When asked in 2015, by MPs, whether Trump should be allowed into the country, the Prime Minister 1  Washington Post, 7 December 2015; Trump, ‘Morning Joe’, MSNBC, 8 December 2015. Boris Johnson, quoted in Matt Dathan, The Independent, 8 December 2015. Petition 114003: Government response 29 December 2015, petition closed 8 June 2016. The author is grateful to Michelle D. Brock, Benjamin Houston, and Jessica C. Hower for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2  Hansard 18 January 2016, vol 604, cc 437WH–484WH: Alberto Costa, 458WH; Victoria Atkins, 452WH; Steve Double, 458WH, Lucy Frazer, 460WH, Kwasi Kwarteng, 467WH. 3  Tom Tugendhat, 450WH; Kwasi Kwarteng, 469WH. 4  Marcus Fysh, 471WH; Sir Edward Leigh, 469WH; Andrew Murrison, 439WH. 5  Executive Office of the President, Executive Order 13769, 27 January 2017, Federal Register, vol. 82, no. 20, 1 February 2017. House of Commons debates, 30 January 2017, Hansard, volume 620, US Immigration Policy, cc. 675–701; Changes in US Immigration Policy, cc. 706–751. 6  Petition 171928; Government response, 13 February 2017, debated 20 February 2017. It should be pointed out that 317,542 signed a petition—178844—saying that Trump should be free to make a state visit. Hansard, President Trump: State Visit, 20 February 2017, vol 621, cc 247WH–292WH: James Berry, 263WH, Mark Pritchard, 248WH, James Cartlidge, 259WH; Simon Burns, 261WH.

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answered ‘if he came to visit our country I think he would unite us all against him.’7 When asked in 2016, by a journalist, whether Trump was a force for good in the world, the Prime Minister answered with ‘an explosive laugh’, the interviewer noted. ‘He can’t stop laughing.’8 Answers were but expressions of opinion. ‘The decision to exclude somebody from the United Kingdom is one that is made by the Home Secretary’, the Home Secretary told MPs in 2015. Trump’s comments about Muslims ‘were divisive, they were unhelpful, they were wrong’, and his views on the police were ‘completely wrong’ and ‘nonsense’. But ‘I don’t comment on individual cases’, Theresa May went on, ‘given the role I play’.9

Introduction Rather than timeless speculation about the special relationship, with the convulsions of 2016 in both the United States and the United Kingdom, legitimate questions were asked, as usual mainly by the British, as to whether there could be even a settled relationship; whether the established combination of structural alliance and individual contingency which had endured since the war could survive both Brexit and a President whose very appeal had been the impugning of convention, legacy ties, organisations, and alliances.10 With each  David Cameron, 16 December 2015, Hansard, v 603, c 1548.  Jenni Russell, ‘On the Campaign Trail with David Cameron’, The Times Magazine, 18 June 2016. 9  Theresa May, 16 December 2015, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee evidence session. 10  What there is beyond journalism tends to yoke the countries rather than the persons. Parliamentary and Congressional analysis included James Tobin, ‘US Foreign Policy and the UK’s International Relationships’ Debate on 18 January 2018, Library Briefing, House of Lords Library Briefing, Lords Library notes LLN-2018-0005; and Congressional Research Service (Derek E. Mix), ‘The United Kingdom: Background Brexit, and Relations with the United States, Report RL33105, 12 March 2018. Steve Marsh, ‘The US, BREXIT, and Anglo-American Relations’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 16:3 (2018), 272–94; Laetitia Langlois, ‘Trump, Brexit and the Special Relationship: The New Paradigms of the Trump Era’, Revue LISA, 16:2 (2018); Clive Webb, ‘Straining Vows: Britain, the Election of Donald Trump, and the Special Relationship’, in Jesús Velasco (ed.) American Presidential Elections in Comparative Perspective: The World Is Watching (Lanham, 2019) 165–201. Beyond that, those who consider the personal, with varying degrees of pertinence, include Anthony Barnett, The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump (London 2017); Andrew A. Michta, ‘The US-UK Special Relationship and the “Principled Realism” of the Trump Administration’, in Rob Johnson and Janne Haaland Matlary (eds), The United Kingdom’s Defence After Brexit: Britain’s Alliances, Coalitions, & Partnerships (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 59–74; Jeffrey H.  Michaels, ‘“You Don’t hear the Word Britain Anymore”: Anglo-American Security Relations in the Era of Brexit and Trump’, in Johnson and Matlary, 75–102; Charlie Whitham and Kevern Verney, ‘Trump’s Presidency: United Kingdom Perspectives and Responses’, in John Dixon and Max Skidmore (eds), Donald J. Trump’s Presidency: International Perspectives (Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2018), 119–39. Graham K. Wilson, ‘Brexit, Trump and the special relationship’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19:3 (2017), 543–57; Srdjan Vucetic, ‘A Faustian Special Relationship’, Oxford Research Group, 6 February 2017; Varvara Sokolova, ‘British-American relations Under the Premiership of 7 8

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and every previous pairing there existed some sort of qualitative, relative, measure of assessment. For three years there was no such gauge. No President and Prime Minister were as unlike each other, or indeed their immediate predecessors, as were Donald Trump and Theresa May. Personally, each was awkward, gauche even, if dissimilarly so: one could be characterised as behaving without restraint, the other as being bound by it. Even when there had in the past been disagreements between Presidents and Prime Ministers there were trammels: at the very least diplomatic language, due process; norms, however formally ill-­ defined. Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s personal and political desire to be associated with Barack Obama defined their relationships; by contrast, from the moment Trump won the 2016 presidential election, May had either unpopularly but strategically to embrace, or more popularly and tactically to shun, an international pariah. Of all the relationships between Presidents and Prime Ministers, that of Trump and May was the most implausible, yet the two were bound by a similarity of circumstance. As with the ‘right turn’ of the 1980s, and the ‘third way’ of the millennium, between November 2016 and July 2019 each found themselves as coterminous beneficiaries of respective national iterations of the same phenomenon. The shock results of the UK referendum on membership of the EU and the US presidential election occurred five months apart and shared many of the same characteristics and many of the same characters. But the public sentiment that Trump successfully channelled and exploited, May merely strove to. She had, after all, arrived in office by the very virtue of not having taken a stand on Britain’s great issue of the day; he had been elemental to America’s. Both countries were sharply divided: in the United Kingdom more than in any peacetime all other matters were subsumed in one all-consuming and often traumatising national debate that the Prime Minister sought to lead; in the United States the President was the debate. To lead their countries was a man elected despite losing the popular vote, and an unelected woman who squandered the parliamentary majority she had inherited by having called, and effectively lost, a snap general election she had confidently expected to win convincingly. A Prime Minister had therefore essentially set their own term limit: after that election May somewhat presumptuously promised that she would not as party leader contest the next—scheduled for June 2022—but was forced to commit to standing down long before then, before being defenestrated earlier still. Alongside such instability in London, in Washington there were widespread doubts as to whether so unpredictable a President would complete his term.11 Unstable, unloved, and undaunted they may have been, Theresa May and Presidency of Donald Trump’, European Political and Law Discourse, 4:3 (2017), 63–9; Klaus Larres, ‘The Highest Level of Special? Brexit and the UK’s “special relationship” with the United States’ (Krasno Analysis, 2018). For the Western alliance more generally. Philip H.  Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, ‘How Trump Killed the Atlantic Alliance; and How the Next President Can Restore It’, Foreign Affairs, 26 February 2019. 11  Voluntarily or involuntarily, and for a variety of reasons. For example, see Bethania Palma, Snopes, 31 March 2017; Brent Budowsky, The Hill, 18 May 2017; Mike Pearl, Vice, 30 May 2017;

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but insofar as Trump and May were beneficiaries of exceptional circumstances there was at least the possibility of mutual utility on which special relations had always depended, even if one of them apparently had never heard of the term ‘special relationship’ before standing for the presidency.12 2016 was and would forever be the year of Brexit and the year of Trump, to the point that the twins were often conjoined: ‘Brexit and Trump’. Trump had a major role in shaping Brexit and perceptions of Brexit.13 He framed his own mission in its terms: ‘They took their country back, just like we will take America back.’14 Each constituted a deliberate and voluntary act of international disassociation, at the same time as through nationalist impulses lowering the margin of tolerance for binding treaties between democracies.15 What was not clear at first but soon became so was how much Brexit was an opportunity for Trump more than it was for May. Brexit elevated trade to complement security and intelligence as the cement of the special relationship, even if mainly as a rhetorical device, and gave Trump the chance to act on avowed national self-interest and leverage another country, even if it was the United Kingdom. Trump’s sovereigntist principles coincided with the more strident turns in May’s public language; it was a trial for a Prime Minister with an even greater imperative than usual to establish the closest possible connection with a President, but a President who was avowedly ‘America First’. Uncommon challenges there were for a Prime Minister and a President—bilateral, multilateral, transnational—to be met by, and perhaps for the first time by common accord, one being unsuited, and the other unfit, for the offices they held.

Agenda, 2017 More than most, 2016 was a year of the expected and the unexpected. What had been expected in the spring was that by the autumn the United Kingdom would continue its forty-three-year membership of the EU with David Cameron in his seventh year of Downing Street residency, and with Hillary Clinton about to move into the White House. The course of 2016 shattered each expectation in turn. The first unexpected event led, after a more than usually contingent series of acts and omissions within the parliamentary Conservative Party—a hotly-contested leadership election that was concluded without a vote taking place—to the first Home Secretary since Palmerston in 1855 becoming Prime Minister. But as far as the incumbent President was Luke Graham, CNBC, 21 August 2017; Jason Le Miere, Newsweek, 21 August 2017; Mark Abadi, Business Insider, 11 October 2017; T. A. Frank, Vanity Fair, 22 December 2017. 12  Chris Ruddy, quoted in Ben Riley-Smith, ‘My Date with the Donald’, Telegraph, 29 June 2018. 13  Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Charlotte Galpin, and Ben Rosamond, ‘Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19:3, 573–91. 14  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 24 June 2016, 12:21. 15  David Hasting Dunn and Mark Webber, ‘The UK, the European Union and NATO: Brexit’s Unintended Consequences’, Global Affairs, 2:5, 471–80, 477.

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concerned there was no real May antecedence. In one of the shorter overlaps, Obama and May were President and Prime Minister together for six months. In a situation not unlike that of Gordon Brown and George Bush in 2007, a new Prime Minister was keen to differentiate themselves both from a predecessor with whom personal relations had largely disintegrated and that predecessor’s singularly close relationship with a tarnished President who would not be President for much longer. Notwithstanding, Obama attested to May’s ‘steadying influence’.16 A Prime Minister very soon to be as much defined by misfortune as Brown had been, May was especially unfortunate in the President with whom she was destined to coincide. During a presidential campaign in which, remarkably, almost no British Conservatives had wanted the Republican candidate to win, allegations were laid by Trump allies that Trump Tower had been wiretapped by the Obama administration and British intelligence, and that the candidate was being disrespected by London.17 Moreover, unlike any recent nominee, Trump had no presence in Washington DC, which was always where ­preparatory contacts could be made. The worry of damage by implication was the background to what by any other Prime Minister would have been dubbed a charm offensive. As it was she risked appearing both hasty and craven in her decision to ‘hug them close’ while Angela Merkel appeared to speak for mainstream European opinion in her decidedly qualified and consequently highly lauded public ‘congratulation’ of the President on his election.18 By contrast, even before Trump had been inaugurated, the British government not only reversed its agreement with the Obama administration’s opposition to Israel’s settlement policy, but actually criticised it—to the outgoing Secretary of State’s public irritation—and boycotted a Middle East peace conference that Trump opposed.19 A pattern of propitiation was already evident. Britain is ‘a very, very special place for me and for our country’, President-­ Elect Trump said, which the British government more than usually hoped was true. It appeared to be so insofar as appearances and kudos were concerned.20 16  White House, Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom after Bilateral Meeting at the G20 Summit, 4 September 2016. 17  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 4 March 2017, 11:35; Andrew Napolitano, quoted in ‘Judge Nap: Obama ‘Went Outside Chain of Command,’ Used British Spy Agency to Surveil Trump’, Fox & Friends, 14 March 2017; (U) Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election Volume 5, 511. 18  Anthony Faiola, ‘Angela Merkel congratulates Donald Trump—kind of’, Washington Post, 9 November 2016. 19  Alastair Jamieson, ‘Britain’s PM Theresa May Rebukes John Kerry for Israel “Attack”’ NBC News, 30 December 2016; Cnaan Liphshiz, ‘Britain again breaks ranks with Europe—this time over Israel’, The Jerusalem Post, 19 January 2017; Sir Peter Westmacott, House of Lords, Select Committee on International Relations, Corrected oral evidence: UK foreign policy in changed world conditions, 21 February 2018, Q. 28. 20  Trump, in Tara John, ‘Donald Trump and Britain’s Theresa May Affirm ‘Special Relationship”, Time, 10 November 2016.

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Trump’s Chief Strategist Steve Bannon had arranged the candidates for Cabinet roles in the incoming administration to be welcomed by Trump at Bedminster, the very name of the Trump National Golf Club reflecting cultural genuflection, its entrance modelled on that of 10 Downing Street. ‘It’ll be perfect. We’ll put the media across the street. And you’ll meet and greet like a British Prime Minister’, replete with shouted—and unanswered—questions from the media on the sidewalk opposite.21 Yet in the treatise that constituted his manifesto for the presidency in 2015, Trump made only one reference to Britain not related to golf, and that was that the British ‘should share in the costs’ of increased US military spending.22 In an earlier tract he had, however, written that ‘[w]e have been there’ for ‘England’ because it is ‘there for us’.23 After Obama’s family story had been weaponised, biographical succour of a sort was elicited in the fact that where his predecessor’s grandfather had been imprisoned by them, Trump’s mother was actually British: not that it was ever envisioned in such terms, but Mary Anne MacLeod might just be his Rosebud. Seeking to make the best of the situation, May spoke at the Republican Party ‘Congress of Tomorrow’ conference in Philadelphia in January 2017, dousing her appreciative audience with Churchill and Reagan. She claimed the tumult of 2016 as a binding agent: As we rediscover our confidence together—as you renew your nation just as we renew ours—we have the opportunity—indeed the responsibility—to renew the special relationship for this new age. … Because the world is passing through a period of change … we can take the opportunity once more to lead. And to lead together.24

The British Ambassador thought the speech ‘a triumph’, and in between repeated standing ovations, May presented Trump’s election as an opportunity, and one not available under his predecessor: ‘President Elect Trump has said that Britain is not “at the back of the queue”; for a trade deal with the United States, the world’s biggest economy, but front of the line.’25 The circumstances remained auspicious: each was the other’s leading foreign investor, on which depended a million jobs in each country. Trump’s outlook—populist, nationalist, sovereigntist—prioritised trade and security, almost as indivisible, and there 21  Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York, 2018), 51. Jeremy W. Peters, ‘At Donald Trump’s Properties, a Showcase for a Brand and a President-Elect’, New York Times, 22 November 2016. 22  Donald J.  Trump, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (New York, 2015), 47. 23  Donald Trump, The America We Deserve (New York, 2000), 132. 24  Prime Minister’s speech to the Republican Party conference 2017, Prime Minister’s Office, Downing Street, 26 January 2017. 25  Kim Darroch, Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump (London, 2020), 142.The government’s negotiating objectives for exiting the EU: PM speech, 17 January 2017, Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, Department for Exiting the European Union, and The Rt Hon Theresa May MP.

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was potential for tensions in the two programmes for national renewal implicit in their sobriquets, ‘America First’ and ‘Global Britain’, particularly when the contingent latter depended on the absolute former.

Meeting (and Not Meeting) For decades festooned with flags of preferment, the timing of the first meeting of a President and Prime Minister had (for the Prime Minister at least) been far from a mundane matter. In 2017 it became one of even greater significance. What in ordinary times would merely be a question of when the Prime Minister would meet the new President—ideally as soon as possible, and certainly before any other head of government—became a different sort of dilemma: whether the Prime Minister ought to meet the new President. No serious observer could suggest such a course—which meant, given the spirit of the age, that many did.26 Trump’s nonchalance contrasted with May’s blandishments. There were three main moments of orchestration. The first, in January 2017 as May visited the White House; the second, in July 2018 with Trump’s working visit to the United Kingdom; and the last, Trump’s return to the United Kingdom in June 2019 for a state visit. The first was regarded at the time by May’s domestic audience—its expectations having been low—as something of a strategic triumph, if a tactile disaster; the second was an experience of jaw-dropping irregularity; the third—as it proved, a coda—was a tortuous yet direct consequence of the first. Their initial interaction was suitably uncustomary. On 9 November the British Embassy told both the Trump Transition and Campaign teams that May ‘is keen to secure an early call with President-Elect Trump’.27 The following day they spoke on the telephone, 24  hours later than would reasonably have been be expected, and indeed as actually scheduled. May had been first on the list arranged with the British Embassy and confirmed by Trump’s transition team, with calls routed through the State Department Operations Center. But Trump had sacked the transition team, ignored the prepared protocols, and spoken instead with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.28 He also spoke to the heads of government of Ireland, Mexico, Israel, India, Japan, Australia, and South Korea. When Trump and May did get to speak—and indeed meet—her experience jarred: so procedurally-inclined a Prime Minister found herself discombobulated by a President disinclined to agendas, note-taking, or even conversation so much as delivering a series of 26  Griff White, ‘British Lawmakers Tell Their Prime Minister: Your Groveling in Front of Trump is Embarrassing’, Washington Post, 26 January 2017; Jean Hannah Edelstein, The Guardian, 28 January 2017; Nicholas Winning, Wall Street Journal, 30 January 2017. 27  Report on Russian Active Measures, 520–1. 28  Lauren Said-Moorhouse, ‘What’s Different about Donald Trump’s Phone Calls with World Leaders?’, CNN, 3 December 2016. Darroch, Collateral Damage, 109–10.

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often disconnected monologues.29 And where her predecessor had been told ‘come over and see me’, May was alleged to have been informed—in her invitational equivalent of a gift of region-specific DVDs—‘If you travel to the US, you should let me know’.30 Undiscouraged, to that end May’s powerful chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill did travel to the United States, over Christmas 2016 and without publicity, to reach out to the Trump transition team. The meetings inadvertently had been presaged by the discovery and republishing of tweets seven months old from Timothy (‘Urgh … as a Tory I don’t want any “reaching out” to Trump’), and twelve months old from Hill (‘Donald Trump is a chump’; Hill adding, for clarity, ‘#trumpisachump’).31 The meetings were as successful as the auguries suggested.32 For her part Theresa May sent Winston Churchill’s Christmas 1941 message to the American people, and lauded the special relationship as inspired by the ‘most famous British-American’.33 Churchill obsequy was of the few conventions Trump did observe: like Churchill, Trump told staffers of the effect he wanted as he stiffened the grimace he affected in portraits (‘he certainly wasn’t a handsome man’, Trump conceded, ‘and, yet, he was a great leader’).34 As if co-ordinated, and keen as he was, as his special assistant put it, ‘to buck any precedent set by Obama’, Trump wanted the now legendary bust back, and so it was dispatched in the boot of a British Embassy Land Rover to be in place in the Oval Office on the day of the inauguration. The President thereafter made a point of showing it to guests. ‘Churchill’s back. We brought him back. Obama had sent him away—a disgrace. He’s back now.’35 ‘This is a strange Christmas Eve’, Churchill had written seventy-six Decembers before. On 27 January 2017 the President publicly welcomed to the White House ‘our first official visit from a foreign leader’.36 As it was his ‘diplomatic debut’, there was heightened anticipation on the part of the mainstream media he so

29  ‘Senior British Diplomat’, 30 March 2017, quoted in Daalder, Throne, 64; Tim Ross and Margaret Talev, ‘Donald Trump and Theresa May’s Relationship is More Dysfunctional, Less Professional than Predecessors’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2018. 30  Lucy Fisher, @LOS_Fisher, 17 November 2016, 08:35; Mark Landler, New York Times, 1 December 2016. US-region DVDs were Barack Obama’s humiliating gift on his first meeting with Gordon Brown, see p. 359. Darroch later recorded Trump as saying visit “as soon as possible”, Darroch, Collateral Damage, 111. 31  Nick Timothy, @NickJTimothy, 6 May 2016, 09:09; Fiona Hill, @fionaMcleodHill, 8 December 2015, 10:48. 32  Darroch, Collateral Damage, 116–18; Anthony Seldon, May at 10 (London, 2020), 160. 33  Ben Hoyle, ‘Let Churchill inspire our alliance, May told Trump’, The Times, 16 January 2017. 34  Katie Rogers, ‘British Roll out Trump’s Political Idol: Winston Churchill’, New York Times, 12 July 2018; Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, ‘Why Letting Go, for Trump, Is No Small or Simple Task’, New York Times, 21 March 2017; Trump, Larry King Live, CNN, 8 October 1999. 35  Cliff Sims, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House (New York, 2019), 69; Darroch, Collateral Damage, 141. 36  Remarks, 27 January 2017.

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deprecated.37 The Prime Minister wore a red dress matching the President’s habitual red tie, in colour if not in length. She had also been sent off by MPs with a battery of warnings and demands on meeting a foreign leader who had excited near-universal dismay.38 Almost the last thing she would have wanted would have been footage and photographs of the two of them physically entwined. ‘He did hold my hand at one point’, May said to her aides, after the couple walked along a colonnade on their way to lunch. She then asked if the moment had been recorded by cameras.39 ‘Handgate’ in fact immediately became the British media’s lead story. Imbued with subjective symbolism as it may have been, the more prosaic but no less curious reason for the sudden grasping of Prime Ministerial paw was Presidential sight of Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair ramp: Trump, it was subsequently explained, was understood to suffer from bathmophobia.40 Privately, at the end of their meeting, to the surprise and irritation of the Ambassador, May invited Trump to a State Visit.41 In their earlier trip Timothy and Hill had raised the possibility of something they expected to be disarmingly effective with an even more than usually narcissistic head of state. ‘It was clear to me and others at the time that an offer of a state visit’, May’s communications director said later, ‘was over the top and unnecessary’; the preference of senior officials was to wait, to see how a highly unpredictable presidency developed before so significant an invitation was made. The concerns were overruled.42 Minutes later May announced publicly that the state visit would take place ‘later this year’.43 The only other Presidential state visits, by Bush and Obama, were each in the final year of their first terms; Trump was to visit within a few months of his inauguration. That invitation notwithstanding, the meeting turned out to be as irregular as had been feared. At the plenary session, the ambassador was surprised to see the scale of the Trump team: a neophyte administration seemingly had invited everyone, though no one made any notes. There was sprawling conversation from a person unaware of diplomatic convention, and who asked May her views on abortion.44 When her unconventional path to the Premiership was explained to him, Trump said: ‘Oh, so you were drafted in like in baseball.’45 Publicly, for all of May’s boilerplate about freedom and the bonds of kinship, Trump spent more time talking about Russia and uttering a variety of 37  Michael Crowley, ‘Nervous World Watches Trump’s Meeting with British Leader’, Politico, 27 January 2017. 38  Hansard, 25 January 2017, vol 620, cc 285–293. 39  ‘Dysfunctional Relationship’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2018. 40  Daily Telegraph, 28 January 2017. Bathmophobia is the fear of slopes or stairs, where in ancient Greek bathmós meant ‘step’. Barack Obama, A Promised Land (London, 2020), 3–4. 41  Darroch, Collateral Damage, 146. 42  Katie Perrior, quoted in ‘Dysfunctional Relationship’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2018. 43  White House, President Trump and Prime Minister May’s Opening Remarks, 27 January 2017. 44  Darroch, Collateral Damage, 144–5; Ben Riley-Smith, ‘How the “Special Relationship” was Tested’, The Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 2020. 45  Ben Hoyle, ‘Let Churchill Inspire Our Alliance, May told Trump’, The Times, 16 January 2017.

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statements, some new, some repeated, for his now-regular, full-time, fact-­ checkers to evaluate.46 But the immediate reaction was that a quite unexpected coup had been mounted, and the embarrassment over phone calls superseded. On perhaps the single most important strategic question, ‘defense and security cooperation’, May appeared to have done nothing less than bounce Trump, saying quite artfully whilst standing next to him that ‘we are united in our recognition of NATO as the bulwark of our collective defense. And today, we’ve reaffirmed our unshakeable commitment to this alliance. Mr. President, I think you said—you confirmed that you’re 100 percent behind NATO’.47 Any concerns from the British about Trump seemed allayed. At lunch Trump had told the British ‘you guys will always be the first through the door’; in front of the media the President and Prime Minister were photographed—holding hands— either side of the restored Churchill bust.48 As if to order, Trump told the media that ‘[t]he special relationship between our two countries has been one of the great forces in history for justice and for peace. And, by the way, my mother was born in Scotland’.49 Self-serving Prime Ministerial alacrity had considered the vanity, but was not to know the mutability, of its subject. Trump told May in a subsequent phone call that owing to the criticism he continually received from the British media, and from officials including the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, he would not now be visiting: ‘When I know I’m going to get a better reception, I’ll come and not before.’50 May’s aides, listening in, were astonished.51 The state visit was therefore postponed, as, in January 2018, was a trip to open the new US Embassy in London: ‘Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!’52 Trump had excoriated every aspect of what he saw essentially as a property deal, and for which he blamed Obama, even though the decision had been made by Bush.53 It meant that the President of the United States had on three occasions chosen to delay a visit to his country’s closest international partner because of concern about public protest. Fear of having insulted Trump explained the even more than usual sensitivity about ‘snubs’, this time at Davos in January 2018 when he was claimed to have found time for President Macron, but not for May.54 A 46  Linda Qiu, ‘10 Falsehoods from Trump’s News Conference with Theresa May’, Factcheck, New York Times, 13 July 2018; Georgina Lee, ‘Donald Trump’s Biggest Falsehoods of the Day’, Factcheck, Channel 4 News, 13 July 2018. 47  Remarks, 27 January 2017; Wall Street Journal, 30 January 2017. 48  Seldon, May, 166. 49  Remarks, 27 January 2017. 50  Tim Shipman, ‘May Bamboozled by Trump’s Love Talk’, The Times, 19 November 2017. 51  ‘Dysfunctional Relationship’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2018. 52  Donald J. Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 12 January 2018, 16:57. 53  Gregory Korte and Kim Hjelmgaard, ‘Trump Calls Off Trip to London, Blaming Obama for Bush Embassy Decision’, USA Today, 12 January 2018; Jill Lawless, ‘AP Fact Check: Trump Claims London Embassy is a “Bad Deal”’, AP News, 12 January 2018. 54  Jordan Bhatt, International Business Times, 19 January 2018; Emilio Casalicchio, PoliticsHome, 19 January 2018.

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meeting did go ahead, all fifteen minutes of it, with Trump making front-ofhouse reference to the special relationship. The President finally arrived in the United Kingdom, for a working rather than a state visit, in July 2018, in between—as it very much was presented by the American media—the North Atlantic Council in Brussels’ and Trump’s first meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Protestors were plentiful and conspicuous, with newspapers printing alongside his official itinerary a list of demonstrations around the country that readers could join.55 The only time Trump spent outside of a palace, a castle, or a golf course was in a helicopter transiting between them. Costing £14 million for its four days, it was a state visit in all but name. May took Trump to Sandhurst to see joint working between British and American Special Forces, then to meet the Queen and dine at Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace, with marching bands, guards of honour, and the presentation of an illustrated charter of Trump’s Scottish heritage. Lastly, they travelled to the Prime Minister’s country retreat, Chequers, for, in National Security Adviser John Bolton’s words, ‘a “special relationship” bilateral’ and press conference.56 In a high-summer English country idyll, awkwardness bloomed—on this occasion he gripped her elbow as well as her hand—mitigated only by transatlantic collective wonder at the President’s brazenness and the Prime Minister’s stoicism. At their press conference he spoke almost free-associatively, she as if scripted. May stressed the opportunities provided by her new and already rapidly unravelling Brexit plan, but was eclipsed with the recitation by journalists of Presidential comments critical of or in some way undermining the woman standing next to him. Special relationship press conferences—as distinct from fictionalisations of them—had never exhibited anything like it.57 Donald responded by thanking ‘Theresa’ and reaffirming ‘the special relationship between our two countries’ (‘My mother was born here’). Theresa accentuated continued intelligence, security, and economic cooperation, while Donald wanted ‘to strengthen a bond that is like no other’. The bond with May appeared less durable. The day before Trump had left for the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, her Foreign Secretary, had resigned over her new Brexit plan. Trump reacted to this public embarrassment of the Prime Minister by saying that ‘maybe we’ll speak to him when I get over there’. Asked whether May should remain in office he replied ‘Well, that’s up to the people’. Trump’s reason for public praise of May’s keenest and most likely usurper was that ‘He’s been saying very good things about me as President. I think he thinks I’m doing a great job’.58

 The Guardian, 11 July 2018.  John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (New York, 2020), 127. 57  The Love, Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) scene between Hugh Grant’s self-effacing Prime Minister and Billy Bob Thornton’s sexually harassing President, long a staple for British critics of an unbalanced special relationship, was more pointedly referenced still by the latest pairing. 58  White House, Remarks by President Trump Before Marine One Departure 10 July 2018; ‘A Sedate Dinner, but a Bombshell Interview, for Trump’s U.K. Visit’, New York Times, 12 July 2018. 55 56

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As it turned out, Trump’s state visit did take place in the final year of his first term, in June 2019. Formally, ‘This state visit’, the White House had announced, ‘will reaffirm the steadfast and special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom’.59 Less formally, Trump’s faint praise spoke volumes, as did his tense: ‘I have had a nice relationship with Theresa May. I have had a good relationship with her.’60 Conventions were more conspicuously observed than they had been a year before, at least. British concerns predominated that, though being offered a state visit earlier than any other President, no grounds should be found for any snub to be detected. Renovations to Buckingham Palace precluded a repeat of the Obamas’ overnight residences, and, though placated as to that, White House advisers compiled a spreadsheet of what had been offered on previous state visits. As usual the President needed to avoid crowds and the risk of seeing demonstrations.61 The visit came with an actual Bedminster moment, when the Trumps were received by the Mays outside 10 Downing Street, for once without shouted—and unanswered—questions from the media on the pavement opposite. Inside he said: ‘I very much appreciate the relationship we’ve had. It’s been outstanding. And I guess some people know that; some people don’t. But you and I know it.’62 But abetted by the extraordinary hostility of the Speaker of the House of Commons—‘an address by a foreign leader to both Houses of Parliament is not an automatic right; it is an earned honour … and my view is that he has not earned that honour’63— the British authorities had helped Trump buck another precedent set by Obama: he would not be addressing Parliament. Also unlike Obama, or indeed anyone else, Trump had difficulty filling a state banquet.64 Notwithstanding such affronts, May presented him with a gift of ‘Trump tartan’ and at the end of the visit Trump shook the hand of the UK Ambassador to the United States. ‘This was a wonderful visit, and UK-US relations are now in the best state ever’, he told Sir Kim Darroch. ‘Relations are going to be better than they have ever been.’65

59  White House, Statement on President Donald J.  Trump and First Lady Melania Trump’s Upcoming Travel to the United Kingdom and the French Republic, 23 April 2019. 60  Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Theresa Too Soft’, The Sun, 1 June 2009. Michael Wolff, Siege, 164. 61  Ben Riley-Smith, ‘Only a Place Bed Would Do When Trump Came Calling’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2020. 62  The White House, 4 June 2019, Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May Before a Business Roundtable, 10 Downing Street. 63  John Bercow, 6 February 2017, Hansard, vol. 620, c 47. 64  Adam Taylor, ‘Who attended Trump’s State Banquet at Buckingham Palace? Not Prince Harry and Meghan’, Washington Post, 4 June 2019. 65  Sir Kim Darroch, 17 June 2019, quoted in Isabel Oakeshott, ‘How Trump told British Ambassador the Special Relationship Felt “Closer And Stronger” after State Visit but Warned “Don’t Expect Any Special Favours”’, Mail on Sunday, 7 July 2019; Darroch, Collateral Damage, 256.

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Brexit There was a reason why the first meeting between this President and Prime Minister was always going to be far from routine. May was overseeing the biggest challenge to her country in peacetime. It was one during and at the end of which Britain hoped its closest bilateral relationship would arrest a sense of drift and necessarily reduced international status, as well as help broker new arrangements. There was as much expectation as hope, given that that relationship was now led by a man who had actively supported and encouraged that policy. Indeed, the President and his confreres were the only figures in American policymaking who appeared to think that Brexit was a good idea: it will ‘end up being a very great thing’, and a ‘free and independent Britain is a blessing to the world’.66 But what might otherwise have occasioned closer co-operation with the United States, and particularly so with so supportive a President, paradoxically risked being undermined by that very President. It was consistent that the only subject more popular for UK Government online petitions than Donald Trump was Brexit. As was his wont, Trump interpreted Brexit primarily in relation to himself. Over it the President-elect had, in the words of Michael Gove, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign who had just interviewed him at Trump Tower for a Rupert Murdoch–owned British newspaper, and with Murdoch in attendance, a ‘vicarious sense of ownership’.67 ‘I happened to be in Scotland … when Brexit happened’, Trump said, as he did on several occasions. ‘I said I believe it’s going to happen because people want to know who is coming into their country and they want to control their own trade and various other things, and lo and behold, the following day it happened.’68 Trump arrived in Scotland, as was also pointed out on several occasions, the day after the referendum, and indeed after the resignation of the Prime Minister.69 Notwithstanding, Trump saw his role as having been critical, announcing that ‘[t]hey will soon be calling me Mr Brexit!’70 His own election he promised would be ‘Brexit times 10’.71 The President approved, in registers both formal—‘We support the decision of the British people to realize full self-government’72—and informal: ‘Brexit’s

66  Donald Trump, quoted by ABC News, 15 January 2016; Trump, 27 January 2017, press conference with May. 67  Michael Gove, Today, BBC Radio 4, 16 January 2017; Financial Times, 9 February 2017. 68  Trump, 14 March 2019 meeting with Leo Varadkar; also at the 13 July 2018 meeting with Theresa May, and the White House, Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May in Joint Press Conference, 4 June 2019, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London. 69  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 24 June 20116, 10:21. Dario Thuburn, ‘No, Donald Trump Did Not Predict Brexit a Day before the Referendum’, Fact Check, AFP, 13 July 2018. 70  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 18 August 2016, 13:11. 71  Trump, quoted in Tracy Jan, Boston Globe, 2 November 2016. 72  Remarks, 13 July 2018.

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going to be a wonderful thing … fantastic … tremendous’.73 But approval soon became conditional. The most specific dimension which Trump could transform was trade, the principal policy implication of Brexit. Trump’s encouragement of Brexit and the proclivity of Brexiters to privilege the special relationship was a powerful dynamic. Brexit gave Trump an opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of bilateralism, thereby undermining the very notion of the European Union, as he was simultaneously the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement. No policy tool short of the deployment of the military suited such concerns more than did trade. It was central to Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of Brexit, and a caution against fears of dislocation. For both Trump and May, trade was part of broader strategic interests, indeed was a central foreign policy objective: Brexit’s appeal was the freedom to sign free trade deals. But where Trump could realistically invoke the language of belligerence in a ‘trade war’, May’s position and opportunities were circumscribed by relative weakness, even before she was weakened absolutely in June 2017. Trade also gave Trump the opportunity to buck another precedent. ‘You would certainly not be back of the queue. That I can tell you’, he said of Obama’s discouraging, if solicited, words alongside David Cameron in April 2016: ‘a terrible thing to say, frankly’.74 More than that, Trump could promise what Obama had explicitly rejected. ‘And now we are at the front of the queue?’ Gove asked. ‘I think you’re doing great. I think it’s going great.’75 Across the Atlantic a US–UK Free Trade Agreement (FTA) represented a shift in US transatlantic trade policy which under Obama had been focused on Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and which had not been bilateral; Trump was concerned with reviewing and renegotiating existing FTAs.76 There could moreover only be informal discussion about potential agreements because the United Kingdom was legally precluded from engaging in its own trade negotiations until 31 October 2019. In January 2017, in a Rupert Murdoch–owned British newspaper, Trump promised a swift arranging of an FTA: ‘I love the UK … I think we’re gonna get something done very quickly.’77 In June 2018, in another Rupert Murdoch–owned British newspaper, Trump said that an FTA was over if May’s Brexit deal—her terms for the withdrawal agreement which became known simply as ‘Chequers’—prevailed: ‘If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the UK, so it will probably kill the deal.’ The 73  Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street and The Rt Hon Theresa May MP PM press conference with US President Trump: 27 January 2017, White House. 74  Trump, Good Morning Britain, ITV, 16 July 2018; Remarks, 13 July 2018. See p. 381. 75  Michael Gove and Kai Diekmann, Full Transcript of interview with Donald Trump, The Times, 16 January 2017. 76  Congressional Research Service (Shayereah Llias Akhtar), US-UK Free Trade Agreement: Prospects and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service Report R44817, 5 September 2017. 77  Gove and Diekmann, transcript.

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explanation for the change was that ‘she didn’t listen to me’.78 Warming to his theme, I did give her a suggestion. I wouldn’t say advice. And I think that she found it maybe too brutal, and that—because I could see that. But I did give her a certain amount of—I gave her a suggestion, not advice. I wouldn’t want to give her advice. I’d give her a suggestion. I could fully understand why she thought it was a little bit tough. And maybe, some day, she’ll do that. If they don’t make the right deal, she might very well do what I suggested she might want to do.79

What he had suggested was what had become known colloquially as a ‘hard Brexit’. But an FTA would need to be compatible with a close trading relationship between the United Kingdom and the EU27. The fact was that Britain’s separation from the larger trading bloc meant that a predatory policy which was always possible became likely as State Department officials were supplanted by America First trade negotiators.80 One interpretation had it that the administration had pressured the United Kingdom to pursue a hard Brexit so that the United States could gain concessions in talks on a bilateral free trade agreement. The United States blocked a UK–EU agreement about WTO agricultural quotas, compromised UK individual involvement in the Open Skies Agreement, and attempted to impose tariffs. An FTA would be conditional on the United Kingdom accepting many US regulations—most totemically the cleansing with chlorine of chicken carcases—with adverse consequences for the United Kingdom in its efforts to agree a trade deal with the EU. At the same press conference, Trump told May ‘whatever you do is okay with me’. Four months later Trump had hardened: ‘[R]ight now, as the deal stands, she may not—they may not be able to trade with the U.S. and I don’t think they want that at all, that would be a very big negative for the deal.’81 In February 2019 Trump said ‘we’re continuing our trade, and we are going to actually be increasing it very substantially as time goes by. We expect that the UK will be very, very substantially increased’.82 A month after that, ‘I’d like to see that whole situation with Brexit work out … we can do a very big trade deal with the UK’.83 The problem remained that he had not been heeded. ‘I gave the Prime Minister my ideas on how to negotiate it. And I think you would’ve been successful. She didn’t listen to that’, he said alongside the Irish Prime  Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Trump’s Brexit Blast’, The Sun, 13 July 2018.  Remarks, 13 July 2018. 80  Thomas Wright, ‘Trump Backed Brexit, Then He Used it as Leverage’, Politico, 12 July 2018. Thomas Colson, ‘Why Trump’s “predatory” Plan to Exploit Brexit makes a US-UK Trade Deal Almost Impossible’, Business Insider, 28 March 2018. 81  Trump, quoted in the New York Times, 26 November 2018. 82  Remarks by President Trump on the National Security and Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border, White House, 15 February 2019; Office of the United States Trade Representative, Press Release, USTR Signs Mutual Recognition Agreements with the United Kingdom, 14 February 2019. 83  Trump, 14 March 2019 meeting with Leo Varadkar. 78 79

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Minister, whose own government had adopted and maintained a firm position. ‘I think it could’ve been negotiated in a different manner, frankly.’84 But Trump’s developed view was surprising from hitherto so effusive and collegial a public advocate. I’m not going to comment on Brexit. I can tell you it’s a very complex thing that’s going on right now. It’s tearing a country apart. It’s actually tearing a lot of countries apart. And it’s a shame that it has to be that way. But I think we will stay right in our lane.85

Security With Brexit and Trump the hope in London had been that somehow the special relationship would exempt Britain from growing American unilateralism with regard to security and intelligence. But it was there that Trump happened to feel most personally affronted and where Britain was centrally involved. In June 2016, Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent who had been based in Moscow, alleged the existence of highly compromising personal information on Trump held by the Russian government. MI5 and MI6 were informed, as was Trump himself in a meeting with the director of the FBI, James Comey.86 The central allegation was that the Putin government was ‘able to blackmail him if it so wished’.87 Insofar as it impacted on Trump and May, it suggested to his supporters some sort of collusion between the Obama and Cameron/ May administrations.88 During May’s visit there was no suggestion that at the time or subsequently she had been informed of the allegations, but speculation persisted as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report was prepared and then published.89 When a former CIA analyst accused British intelligence of spying on his presidential campaign, Trump responded ‘WOW!’90 On the day that May announced the date of her resignation as leader of her party, Trump said ‘there’s word and rumor that the FBI and others were involved, CIA were involved, with the UK, having to do with the Russian hoax’, as he invariably described it.91 84  Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Varadkar of Ireland before Bilateral Meeting, 14 March 2019. 85  Remarks, 14 March 2019. 86  ‘US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin’, 20 June 2016 https://www.documentcloud.org/ documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html (19 May 2019). 87  Dossier, 1, summary; detail 4. 88  William Craddick, @williamcraddick, 17 March 2019, 18.40; Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (New York, 2019), chap. 6; The Lead, ‘The British role in “Russiagate” is About to be Fully Exposed’, LaRouche PAC, 8 April 2019. 89  Daniel Chaitin, ‘Devin Nunes Gives Trump List of Questions to Ask Theresa May about Steele Dossier’, Washington Examiner, 22 May 2019. 90  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 24 April 2019, 12:04. 91  Remarks by President Trump before Marine One Departure, 24 May 2019.

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In January 2016 Trump had publicly questioned the internationally accepted British accusation that the Russian government had conducted an assassination in London ten years earlier.92 In March 2018 he did similarly over an attempted assassination in Salisbury. The chemical weapons attack which killed one person united the West rhetorically in condemnation, and practically in the expulsion of diplomats for what was generally held to be an act of the Russian state. At first Trump said nothing. When, again having to engage as if upbraiding, May told Trump that she was 95  per cent certain Russia was responsible, Trump was reported to have replied ‘Maybe we should get to 98 percent’.93 She was reported to have said ‘We really need your leadership on this’. He was reported to have replied: ‘No, I would rather follow than lead.’94 He continued to resist. ‘Why are you asking me to do this?’ He asked her in another call, believing it to be a European problem.95 Although he stressed his eventual outsize support for the expulsion (‘it was far greater than anybody else’96), the United States and the EU had expelled a similar number of diplomats. But then Trump called Putin to congratulate him on his re-election, and in June was proposing Russia rejoin the G7. Subsequently Trump said he thought his administration’s condemnation of Russia over Salisbury had been excessive.97 Nor was Russia the only locus. Trump spoke of ‘no-go areas’ in London due to Islamists.98 In May 2017 after the bombing of a teenagers’ pop concert in Manchester which killed 22 people, US networks reported on casualty numbers and the name of the bomber before official confirmation, thereby potentially compromising the investigation. May complained to Trump about the leaking of shared intelligence in person two days later at a NATO summit.99 In November 2017 Trump retweeted tweets from the far-right group Britain First, prompting another row. It is unlikely Trump knew quite what he was retweeting, or that Britain First was anything other than the British chapter of his own fraternity, but he was ‘very upset’ by May’s public reprimand, a friend who was present recalled. ‘He thought she was overly critical and overly harsh … she was over the top.’100 They did not speak for a month.

 Donald Trump, with Maria Bartiromo, Fox Business Network, 26 January 2016.  Trump, quoted in Greg Miller, The Apprentice: Trump. Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy, 2019, 343. 94  Ben Riley-Smith, Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 2020. 95  Greg Jaffe, John Hudson, and Philip Rucker, ‘Trump, a Reluctant Hawk, has Battled His Top Aides on Russia and Lost’, Washington Post, 15 April 2018. 96  Remarks, 13 July 2018. 97  Aaron Blake, ‘Trump’s Apparent Sympathy for Assassination’, Washington Post, 16 April 2019; Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, ‘Gina Haspel Relies on Spy Skills to Connect with Trump. He Doesn’t Always Listen’, New York Times, 16 April 2019. 98  ‘Dysfunctional Relationship’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2018. 99  Carole E. Lee and Jenny Gross, Wall Street Journal, 25 May 2017; Karla Adam, Washington Post, 25 May 2017. 100  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 30 November 2017, 01:02; Chris Ruddy, quoted in Riley-Smith, Telegraph, 29 June 2018. 92 93

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Such points of tension—practically unimaginable before 2017—took place within the weakening of Western security more generally by, as was widely feared, an undermining of NATO and appeasing of Russia. May and Trump spoke about NATO in their first phone call and their first press conference, and the President shifted from regarding NATO as ‘obsolete’ to ‘not obsolete’ in nine days.101 At their Chequers press conference, Trump manoeuvred May, stressing how ‘the Prime Minister was right there with me’ at the 2018 NATO summit where ‘my top priority was getting other NATO members to pay their full and fair share’.102 Conscious of, at least in relative EU terms, the United Kingdom’s pre-eminence in defence capability, May’s Article 50 letter to the EU linked trade to security ties. When, owing to Brexit, the United Kingdom withdrew from the military dimension of the EU’s Galileo satellite programme, the United States became the preferred partner.103 On the subject of security Trump offered cause for the EU to keep the United Kingdom engaged, but the closer May’s relations were with Trump, EU governments became the more exercised.104 And May resisted Trump’s declaration of a national ­emergency to ban the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei by confirming it would have a ‘non-core’ role in UK 5G, prompting Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, publicly, and wantingly, to compare May with Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.105

Foreign Policy As seen from across the Channel, the British appeared to take a ‘regency approach’ to Trump: that despite his unique peculiarities, national interests and bureaucratic networks would endure; precedents and structures and safeguards—trammels—would abide. But they would be weaker in foreign policy than in other areas.106 In contrast to his predecessor, Trump not only set store by personal diplomacy, for him arguably it was paramount. Moreover, his inclination appeared to be to laud foes—Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping—rather than friends—Malcolm Turnbull, Justin Trudeau—thus Trump’s aside that meeting Vladimir Putin may be ‘easier’ than meeting Theresa May.107 The lack of strategic deliberation reflected the lack of a prospect for strategy: foreign policy 101  Jenna Johnson, ‘Trump on NATO: “I Said it was Obsolete. It’s No Longer Obsolete”’, Washington Post, 12 April 2017; David Jackson, ‘Is NATO “Obsolete” or Not? Trump and Military Alliance Aim to Work Out Differences’, USA Today, 24 May 2017. 102  Remarks, 13 July 2018. 103  Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Guidance, ‘Satellites and space programmes if there’s no Brexit deal’, 27 March 2019. 104  Charles Grant, ‘Mrs May’s Emerging Deal on Brexit’, Centre for European Reform, February 2017, 1, 3, 12. 105  U.S.  Department of State, ‘The Special Relationship’, Remarks: Michael R.  Pompeo, Secretary of State, Lancaster House, London, 8 May 2019. 106  Jeremy Shapiro and Dina Pardijs, ‘The Transatlantic Meaning of Donald Trump: A US-EU Power Audit’, European Council on Foreign Relations, 21 September 2017. 107  Remarks, 10 July 2018.

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was directed by a capricious President.108 Facing the burgeoning domestic appeal of American strategic autonomy was a Britain which was itself in flux. Government was preoccupied by Brexit, and foreign policy diffused by the creation of two departments—International Trade, and Exiting the European Union—alongside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. If Trump had less—less, in fact, than had Obama—to say about British foreign policy than he did about security and intelligence relations it may have been because there was less British foreign policy. Yet central to the appeal of Brexit for those to whom it appealed was the restoration of the United Kingdom as a free and independent international actor, able to pursue more vigorously its natural and historical, rather than its nurtured and locational, interests. By other estimations, the nurtured and the locational did not contradict the natural and historical. Britain’s post-war foreign policy through time and circumstance became centred on the closest possible relations with the United States, as well as a leadership role in Europe. By 2018 time and circumstance meant that each had to be questioned; Britain may, effectively, have been disengaging from each, one more controversially than the other. The slippage with the United States pre-dated Trump. Co-operation had been faltering over the legacy issues of Iraq and Afghanistan and initiatives over Libya and Syria, but over the latter May did act, co-operation having been facilitated by Trump’s supportive expulsion of Russian diplomats.109 Nevertheless, she told MPs, ‘we have not done this because President Trump asked us’.110 Elsewhere in the region, and despite repeated representations on Fox and Friends by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the United States and the United Kingdom diverged on Iran, and Trump ignored May in his withdrawal from the Joint Co-Ordinated Programme of Action (JCPOA).111 That Trump decertified JCPOA did not necessarily reflect badly on May, but where in 2015 a Prime Minister had dealt directly with Congress to support a President, in 2017 a Prime Minister did so to bypass a President.112 Similarly, Trump not only disregarded British advice in moving the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, when told of May’s opposition he cancelled a call intended to inform her.113 While sharing ‘President Trump’s desire to bring an end to this conflict’, May said: ‘We disagree with the US decision.’114 108  Jake Stratton, House of Lords, Select Committee on International Relations, Corrected oral evidence: UK foreign policy in changed world conditions, 21 February 2018, Q. 33. 109  Michael C. Bender, ‘The Art of the Handshake: How Trump’s Syria Alliance Came Together’, Wall Street Journal, 16 April 2018. 110  Theresa May, 16 April 2018, House of Common Debates, sixth series, volume 39, col 42. 111  Sir Kim Darroch, quoted in Isobel Oakeshott, ‘Trump is Set upon an Act of Diplomatic Vandalism’, Mail on Sunday, 14 July 2019. 112  FCO, ‘Foreign Secretary Visiting Washington to Reaffirm UK Commitment to the Iran Nuclear Deal’, 8 November 2017. 113  Ben Riley-Smith, Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 2020. Toi staff, ‘Theresa May: UK will Not Move Its Embassy to Jerusalem’, The Times of Israel, 14 May 2018. 114  Prime Minister’s Office, PM statement on US decision to move embassy to Jerusalem, 6 December 2017.

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For many of the promulgators of Brexit, the Atlantic Alliance was central: the prospect of a Trump presidency and Trump’s encouragement of Brexit and championing of free trade had added impetus to the leave campaign.115 Where Obama had counselled against Brexit to reaffirm ties, Trump had welcomed it as presaging a fractured, sovereigntist, world order. But for all of John Bolton’s unambiguous support for Brexit, consideration of the issue was conspicuously absent from public briefings and deliberations: ‘apart from the President and myself, almost no one in the Administration seemed to care.’116 May made representations to Trump over the Muslim ‘travel ban’, and in their first meeting stressed the importance of keeping sanctions on Russia in place.117 Compared to candidate Trump, President Trump softened over NATO as he had over NAFTA. ‘Seamless cooperation between our militaries’, as the President put it, remained.118 ‘We are very much joined at the hip when it comes to the military. We have the same ideas, the same ideals, and there’s nothing that would happen to you that we won’t be there to fight for you.’119 Four acres of British territory appeared in New York harbour one morning to host the new US–UK Atlantic Future Forum: HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest British warship in history, freighted with meaning, if not aircraft.120 On 13 July 2019 White House Press Secretary Kellyanne Conway hosted a party for Sir Kim Darroch to mark the success of the state visit. The following day the most serious crisis of all began when the ambassador’s leaked secret briefings on the Trump administration were published in a newspaper. It was a crisis that was the more pointed, yet apparently less consequential, for its widely being known to coincide with the culmination—the conclusion—of the Trump and May relationship, rather really than being a part of it. That almost no observer or commentator regarded Darroch’s conclusions as remarkable added to the unreality of what ought to have been no more than an embarrassment. Rather than, as per convention (and such as when the same thing happened in 2008), declining to comment on leaked information, the President publicly eviscerated the ambassador: ‘wacky … a very stupid guy’, a ‘pompous fool’ whom ‘we will no longer deal with’.121 Trump told Bolton ‘get him out of 115  Oli Smith, ‘Time to Go: Trump Gives Brexit Blessing as He Blames “Crazy Migration” for EU Collapse’, Daily Express, 24 March 2016. 116  Bolton, Room, 148. John Bolton, @AmbJohnBolton, 29 September 2016, 15:35; Ronald O’Rourke and Michael Moodie, ‘U.S. Role in the World: Background and Issues for Congress’, Congressional Research Service report for Congress, R44891, 20 October 2017. 117  British diplomat, interviewed 30 March 2017, Daalder, Throne, 54. 118  Remarks, 13 July 2018. 119  Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom after Bilateral Meeting, Davos, 25 January 2018. 120  Davey Winder, ‘Royal Navy’s Biggest Warship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, in New York to Sink Cybersecurity Threats’, Forbes, 21 October 2018. 121  Kylie MacLellan, ‘Trump Administration “Uniquely Dysfunctional”, Says UK Ambassador to U.S.: Newspaper’, Reuters, 7 July 2019; Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 9 July 2019, 12:48; Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 8 July 2019, 19:31.

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here’, and Bolton told his British counterpart, Sir Mark Sedwill: ‘Things are going to get worse until you can figure out how to get him out.’122 One of Darroch’s leaked observations had been that the President ‘radiates insecurity’.

Chemistry and Choreography ‘I think we’re going to get along very well’, the President told the Prime Minister, and the world, when they first met. ‘I am a people person, and I think you are also Theresa, and I can often tell how I get along with somebody very early and I believe we’re going to have a fantastic relationship.’123 Notwithstanding that ‘a people person’ was the last thing anyone would describe the Prime Minister as being, it was of the age when the terms of endearment were as extreme as the terms of disapproval were to be. However serious disagreements may have been, or however little personal rapport the principals may have had, no previous President or Prime Minister had ever publicly denigrated the other, much less done so repeatedly. Trump praised May (‘We’re on the same wavelength in I think every respect’, he said. ‘I have tremendous respect for the prime minister and the job she’s doing.’124). He also disparaged her statecraft (the withdrawal agreement in which she was personally so invested ‘sounds like a great deal for the EU’125), her manner (business-like and ‘politically correct’126), and indeed her raison d’être (she had ‘wrecked’ Brexit127). He also championed her dissentients (‘I think he would be a great Prime Minister’, Trump said of her keenest and most likely usurper. ‘I think he’s got what it takes.’128). ‘Arguably,’ Darroch had written, ‘you get more respect from this President if you stand up to him occasionally—provided the public comments do not come as a surprise and are judicious, calm and avoid personalising.’129 ‘It was clear he didn’t like May’, John Bolton thought, listening in on a Trump–May telephone conversation in April 2018, ‘a feeling that struck me as reciprocal’.130 Standing next to May on his first UK visit in July 2018, Trump, when questioned about his conduct, was by turns contradictory and incoherent: ‘I said “I want to apologize, because I said such good things about you”.’131 122  Ben Riley-Smith, ‘Trump Ordered Dismissal of UK Ambassador for Leaks Remarks’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2020. 123  Remarks, 27 January 2017. 124  Jenny Gross, ‘Trump, U.K. Prime Minister Deny Strains in Ties at Davos Meeting’, Wall Street Journal, 25 January 2018. 125  Sam Meredith, ‘Trump Warns Brexit Agreement Could Threaten Future US-UK Trade Deal’, CNBC, 27 November 2018. 126  Washington Post, 6 June 2018; Telegraph, 8 June 2018, Guardian, 10 June 2018. 127  Trump, quoted in Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Trump’s Brexit Blast’, Sun, 13 July 2018. 128  Newton Dunn, 13 July 2018. 129  Sir Kim Darroch, quoted in Oakeshott, 7 July 2019. 130  Bolton, Room, 50. 131  White House, Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference, 13 July 2018.

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He described as ‘fake news’ stories of their disagreements, stories which had been based on the interview he had just given, even though the audio had been released—at Rupert Murdoch’s direction132—and he was at pains to state that their relationship was ‘very, very strong’, and that his UK visit was ‘really something’.133 That UK trip was ‘when we could say we got to know each other’, Trump said at their next bilateral in New York in September 2018. ‘And it was like meeting after meeting after meeting. And I said, “This is really good.” And every meeting became better and better.’134 He would compensatorily effuse, immoderately: ‘She’s a very, very smart and determined person’; ‘She’s a very smart, very tough, very capable person’; an ‘incredible woman … doing a fantastic job’.135 As Trump was given to hyperbole, May was not, which was why it was noteworthy that a Prime Minister, even one keen to establish greater co-operation, had cause to say of a President before they had even met: ‘Whenever there is something I find unacceptable, I won’t be afraid to say that.’136 But May refrained from saying something, even when invited, embarrassingly, during her general election campaign (‘What would Donald Trump have to say for you to criticise him publicly?’137). One of her problems in that ill-fated crusade was that Trump’s unpopularity meant that her courtship rendered him a liability. The sense of needing to flatter an egotist, even one who publicly undermined her—‘I have a lot of respect for Boris. He obviously likes me, and says very good things about me’138—was never far from British deliberations. Yet the Blenheim pageantry counted for little: President Macron had already demonstrated the fruitlessness of trying to flatter or impress President Trump.139 May had been placed in a position as had no Prime Minister before. But the greater the exaggeration from the President, the more apparent was the absence of encomia from her. Too subtle it was perhaps to be noticed, but as voluble as his praise was, it was also unreciprocated. There was an element of legerdemain in the seriousness and steeliness of the Prime Ministerial persona. Where her by-then unlamented predecessor had won three mandates, May entered her second year in office without any; unlike David Cameron she had not been elected leader of her party, and had not been ‘elected’ Prime Minister. And her effort to acquire such a mandate shattered her authority, literally, overnight. After the 2017 general election what was left  Wolff, Siege, 166.  Remarks, 13 July 2018. 134  White House, Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom Before Bilateral Meeting, 26 September 2018. 135  Remarks, 13 July 2018. 136  Theresa May, quoted in Derek E. Mix, ‘United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Visits President Trump’, Congressional Research Service Insight, 26 January 2017. 137  Unnamed questioner, BBC Newsroom Live, BBC News, 5 June 2017. 138  Tom Newton Dunn, 13 July 2018. 139   Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 13 November 2018, 11:50, and 13 November 2013, 13:17. 132 133

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was persistence and the coincidence of circumstances that meant there was no serious alternative to her as Prime Minister. Trump had his own compromised mandate, both in winning three million votes fewer than his opponent, and then, two years later, being circumscribed himself by his party’s loss of the House of Representatives, but he could and did claim both as categorical successes. It was indicative of the impediments to their hopes of chemistry: one of them was an extravagant extrovert and the other an intense introvert. The traits were manifested by one speaking and acting often without apparent rhyme, the other seemingly circumscribed by reason. When addressed by her first name the Prime Minister contorted herself in reply (‘Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you, Donald.’140). Self-associating as he often did with the fortieth President, Trump co-opted Reagan’s partner in referring to May: ‘She’ll be my Maggie.’141 Theirs was only the second choreography where an actual dancefloor might have featured, but there was never a chance of the Prime Minister wishing personally to consort rhythmically with the President as Maggie had with Ronnie. In contrast with the happily gendered relationship between Obama and Cameron, there was the likelihood of sexism. Trump disliked her ‘bossy’ ‘school mistress’ tone.142 May, an avowed feminist, had to seek a special relationship with a man widely regarded as a misogynist, the first President personally to be associated with pornography, who had boasted about sexually assaulting women, and who at that point had been accused by 24 of them of sexual misconduct.143 When asked about Trump’s claim that he could ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’, the woman who had throughout her career promoted legislation against domestic violence said ‘I think that’s unacceptable’, but felt need to add, ‘but in fact Donald Trump himself has said that and has apologised for it’.144 Trump’s public curating of their relationship was also that of the extrovert. ‘I have gotten to know Theresa May much better of the last two days than I’ve known her over the last year and a half’, he told the media during his state visit. ‘Yesterday, I had breakfast, lunch and dinner with her’, and breakfast and lunch the following day; ‘We spent a lot of time together over a year and a half. But last night, we really—I was very embarrassed for the rest of the table’.145 Trump offered comments on the special relationship which coming from any other

 Remarks, 26 September 2018.  ‘Dysfunctional Relationship’, Bloomberg, 24 January 2018. 142  Jacqueline Thomsen, ‘White House Defends UK Comments: Trump “Likes and Respects” Theresa May’, The Hill, 12 July 2018; Ben Riley-Smith, ‘Donald Trump “Tired of Theresa May’s School Mistress Tone” and will Not Hold Talks with Her at G7’, Telegraph, 8 June 2018. 143  Eliza Relman, Business Insider, 21 June 2019; Max Blau and Maegan Vazquez, CNN, 24 June 2019; Chantal Da Silva, Newsweek, 25 June 2019; Ryan W. Miller and Michael Collins, USA Today, 25 June 2019; Megham Keneally, ABC News, 25 June 2019. 144  May, in Sophy Ridge on Sunday, Sky News, 9 January 2017. 145  White House Briefing Statements, Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference, 13 July 2018. 140 141

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president asked the same hackneyed question would sound almost exasperatedly facetious. Or, given his earlier comments, conciliatory: I would say I give our relationship, in terms of grade, the highest level of special. So we start off with special. I would give our relationship with the UK—and now, especially after these two days with your Prime Minister, I would say the highest level of special. Am I allowed to go higher than that? I’m not sure. But it’s the highest level of special.146

Manner and mode in a Presidential and Prime Ministerial pairing was never so jarringly noticeable. But it was the asymmetry that was most telling. The President was erratic yet dominant, the Prime Minister progressively enfeebled. Trump’s 2019 state visit was nightmarish for May: having offered it with a haste that looked to many like desperation, she then saw it delayed through Presidential pique, only for it to take place after she had announced her involuntary resignation. The end of days aura rendered the visit less fraught than that of a year before though. Nevertheless, ‘I have a 90 percent—94 percent approval rating, as of this morning, in the Republican Party. That’s an all-time record’, the President said standing next to the Prime Minister who had just been deposed by her own party. ‘Can you believe that?’ He looked at her. She smiled weakly. ‘Isn’t that something?’147 ‘Everything to Trump is personal’, Steve Bannon said of the two. ‘For him and May there was no click, there was no chemistry. May just does not have the charisma. That’s not her fault, you’ve either got it or you don’t.’148 The extent of the interaction of a dominant personality susceptible to flattery, and a model of reticence, a stranger to small talk, was predictable. Known to relate to charismatic, or at least strong—indeed ‘masculine’—leaders (Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un, Binyamin Netanyahu, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), Trump contrasted her haughty manner with her actual authority: as a senior aide put it, ‘He wishes Britain had a stronger leader’.149 His own ambassador to the United Kingdom told the British public that the ‘UK is in need of leadership’.150 Shortly after, it was revealed that he would not see her alone at the G7 in Quebec in June 2018.151 Asked there of his relationships with other heads of government, he said, pointedly, ‘I would say that the level of relationship is a 10. We have a great relationship. Angela and Emmanuel and Justin’.152 When May called to congratulate him on the  Remarks, 13 July 2018.  Remarks, 4 June 2019. 148  Steve Bannon, quoted in Riley-Smith, 29 June 2018. 149  Senior Trump campaign figure, quoted in Riley-Smith, 29 June 2018. 150  BBC Radio 4 Today, @BBCr4today, 31 December 2018, 08:41. 151  Emre Peker, Paul Vieira, and Valentina Pop, ‘Behind the Scenes at G-7 Meetings, Allies Dismayed by Trump’s Jabs’, Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2018. 152  The White House, Press Conference by President Trump after G7 Summit, Charlevoix, Canada, 9 June 2018. 146 147

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midterms—nothing if not diplomatic given the results for the Republican Party—Trump had a ‘temper tantrum’ and berated her over Iran, Brexit, and her political abilities.153 When speaking to May, witnesses, American and British, reported Trump as being ‘near-sadistic’, ‘humiliating and bullying’, ‘mansplaining’; ‘he’d get nasty with her’. May duly became ‘flustered and nervous’. ‘He clearly intimidated her and meant to.’154 ‘She would go, “Yes, Donald, Donald, Donald”’, attempting to interrupt.155 ‘I feel badly for Theresa’, Donald said after she had announced her resignation. ‘I like her very much. She’s a good woman. She worked very hard. She’s very strong.’156 Six weeks later I have been very critical about the way the U.K. and Prime Minister Theresa May handled Brexit. What a mess she and her representatives have created. I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way. … While I thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent State Visit last month, it was the Queen who I was most impressed with!157

Aware of the reaction, the following day Trump tweeted that May should ‘not be upset with my criticism of how badly it was handled’. He went on. ‘I told @ theresa_may how to do that deal but she went her own foolish way—was unable to get it done. A disaster!’158 Coming as they did after the Darroch affair, which had made May ‘as angry as she gets’, her public parting words came over Trump’s comments about four Democrat congresswomen widely interpreted as racist: ‘Completely unacceptable.’159 Eschewing the traditional final phone call, Trump and May never spoke again as President and Prime Minister, and in all likelihood not only as President and Prime Minister. After the protracted trauma of her premiership, and her tearful departure from it, for Theresa May that might have been an analgesic.

Populism What ought to have bound Trump and May, however tenuously, was the circumstances of their improbable pairing in the post-truth year of 2016.160 It was at least in part a consequence of what was often characterised, loosely and  Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire (New York, 2019), 285.  Officials quoted by Carl Bernstein, ‘From Pandering to Putin to Abusing Allies and Ignoring His Own Advisers, Trump’s Phone Calls Alarm US Officials’, CNN, 30 June 2020. 155  Ben Riley-Smith, ‘How the “Special Relationship” was Tested’, The Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 2020. 156  Remarks, 24 May 2019. 157  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 8 July 2019, 19:31. 158  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 9 July 2019, 12:48. 159  Theresa May condemns Trump’s ‘go back’ remark to congresswomen, BBC News, 15 July 2019; May official, quoted in Seldon, May, 634. 160  Amy B.  Wang, ‘“Post-truth” Named 2016 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries’, Washington Post, 16 November 2016. 153 154

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variedly, and usually disparagingly, as ‘populism’: a cultural and political reaction against perceived elites, the administrative state, transnational institutions, and assumptive power, by a process of taking back control, to the ends of returning national greatness, or at least restoring national sovereignty. May’s first public words as Prime Minister sought to address the deeper causes of Brexit by framing herself as standing against cosmopolitan, even metropolitan, ‘citizens of nowhere’, which were taken to be the same ‘Davos men’ targeted by Trumpism.161 Her appeal as leader of her party—articulated by Nick Timothy—was that she would connect and relate to blue-collar voters patronised by their representatives and battered by globalisation. This required an idiom. But whereas the President had it naturally, temperamentally, the Prime Minister, equally naturally and temperamentally, did not. Cheered on online in ways which had significantly contributed to his election, and of which he acted as conductor, Trump dominated an environment May had given no indication she was aware existed. Where he exalted in his role and spent much of his Presidency continuing to campaign, in person and online, she found such expectations and practices to be hampering, although less hampering than the outcome of one decision in particular, the general election which cost her her majority, her mandate, and Nick Timothy. From that moment, ‘I sensed a fundamental change in US views of the Prime Minister’, Kim Darroch felt, ‘no longer Thatcher’s heir, but a politician who got big decisions wrong’.162 That was certainly Trump’s view: ‘[H]e was perfectly normal with her until she blew it with that election—and then he saw her as a dead woman walking.’163 Her carefully equivocated support for Remain, while personally advantageous in terms of negotiating the post-referendum search for a new leader within the Conservative Party, had the effect almost of requiring a compensatory series of ill-considered and synthetic virtue-signals thereafter. The Prime Minister found herself having to respond to often splenetic statements, remarks, intimations, or insinuations from a President predisposed to eschewing norms of behaviour or discourse. Populism, with its varying, often contradictory, aspects, was another reason for their lack of chemistry and made more noticeable their choreographical disarray. It offered some way of explaining a Presidential and Prime Ministerial relationship that was otherwise incredible. Populism helped explain the allure of the artifical obstacle of a wall on the United States–Mexico border, and the allure of the natural obstacle of the White Cliffs of Dover. But May’s own ‘hostile environment’ policy towards immigrants had proven to be scandalising enough without her having to defend a President who had separated child immigrants from their parents and placed them in cages. Her own administration wracked by the political ramifications 161  Frances Stead Sellers and David A.  Fahrenthold, ‘Why Even Let “em in?” Understanding Bannon’s Worldview’, The New Republic, 10 January 2018. 162  Darroch, Collateral Damage, 246. 163  US official, quoted in Julian Borger, ‘Trump Called May and Merkel “Losers” after Their Political Setbacks, Ex-officials Say’, Guardian, 1 July 2020.

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of a hitherto-notional border, May had no option but to condemn, and promised to raise the matter with Trump.164 The President reciprocated. One aspect of transnationalism that Trump observed, and one precedent of Obama’s that Trump did not buck, was the self-insertion of a President in the domestic politics of his country’s closest ally. He had, however, criticised Obama for having done so, despite Obama having been invited to. May was far from being the only foreign leader—indeed ‘friend’—Trump publicly criticised, and in so doing served to undermine. Whether through his fanning, advertent or not, of Britain First, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, or terror attacks, even conservative writers condemned Trump’s ‘obnoxious interference’.165 Much of the sentiment and the language would have been recognisable in 1967 and 1968 to Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson, but where their communications were in secret, Trump’s were usually issued directly to seventy million people, and indirectly but immediately to many millions more. This was a vector that was entirely new; Obama’s and Cameron’s then-pioneering use of social media was pallid by comparison. A far from literary President soon became the most self-­ described in history; May by contrast remained a study in inscrutability. Populism helped explain their discord over foreign policy. Conventional foreign policy as classically exercised was by and of elites and practised through permanent alliance systems.166 Trump was in conflict with his own State Department, and the appeal of unilateral withdrawing from supranational organisations and agreements—such as the UN Human Rights Council and the UN climate change agreement—created further unease for the Prime Minister, as did the undermining of others, such as NATO and the EU. This was an essentially declinist populism: generalised and impressionistic evocations of a simpler, stronger, past were adduced as lodestars for the future. The appeal of Trump for, and the connections he made with, the likes of Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, and Jair Bolsonaro was not something May sought to emulate. But whereas in their differing ways Trump and Bernie Sanders, and Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn, appealed to their respective constituencies through a combination of circumstance and a kind of charisma, May had neither charisma nor constituency, as demonstrated devastatingly in the European Elections of 23 May 2019 when her party came fifth. Hers was a political persona which was wholly domestic in essence and appeal; Trump by contrast found himself compared with Silvio Berlusconi, Marine le Pen, and the Kaczyńskis. The President’s main approach was to present a people versus

 Theresa May, HCD, 20 June 2018, volume 643, c 325.  Anne Applebaum, ‘The Backlash from Trump’s Visit to Britain will Be Felt for Years to Come’, Washington Post, 15 July 2018; Daniel Larison, ‘Trump’s Obnoxious Meddling in Britain’, The American Conservative, 12 July 2018. 166   Ben Margulies, ‘How Donald Trump’s Populism May Threaten the US-UK Special Relationship’, LSE Blog, 18 December 2017. 164 165

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politician framing, a device the Prime Minister herself decided near the end to adopt, with predictable consequences.167 Populism helped explain their tensions over security. Structurally there was the superseding of a special relationship defined by security with one defined by trade; circumstantially there were repeated ruptures. ‘It’s going to be an interesting time in the UK’, Trump said as he left on his first visit, ‘which is in somewhat turmoil [sic]’.168 Knives, London, knives in London, and London’s Mayor became repeated targets of his own strain of authoritarian populism. Where the differences between May and Trump were less great, the interactions were almost the more poisonous. When she criticised his retweeting of Britain First, ‘Theresa’, he replied publically, ‘don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom’.169 The comments—described by one parliamentarian as the most ‘insulting and destructive public communication from a US president to a British Prime Minister since the American Civil War’170—were no less stark given that he had initially tweeted the wrong Theresa May, a mother from Bognor Regis who had six followers. Most of all populism helped explain Brexit, and the President’s and Prime Minister’s attitudes to Brexit. Trump and May met for the first time after Trump and Farage had met three times. Farage, who had led the second, non-­ official, leave campaign Leave.eu, made much of his and Trump’s corresponding diagnoses and prescriptions and shared a stage with Trump in his 2016 campaign. The conservative billionaire Robert Mercer had supported Leave. eu, and some of the first visitors to the President-Elect at Trump Tower were Farage and Raheem Kassam, the editor of Breitbart UK, founded by Bannon, funded by Mercer, and active in defending Trump from critics in May’s team.171 Contact was maintained throughout the presidential term.172 Michael Gove and Boris Johnson were co-leaders of the official Vote Leave campaign, the latter of whom Trump had increasingly explicitly supported to be Prime Minister. The fact that Brexit was not a policy the current Prime Minister had ever really supported added to the general confusion.173 In a diplomatic innovation Trump had suggested who might be UK Ambassador to the United States: Farage 167  Donald Trump Jnr, ‘Theresa May Should have Taken My Father’s Advice on Brexit’, Telegraph, 19 March 2019; John Bolton, Fox News, 24 June 2016; Sky News, 19 March 2019. ‘Brexit: ‘Tired’ Public Needs a Decision, Says Theresa May’, BBC News, 20 March 2019; Jon Sharman, ‘Brexit: MPs React with Fury after Theresa May Blames Them for National ‘Crisis’ and Failing to Back Her Deal’, The Independent, 20 March 2019. 168  Remarks by President Trump, 10 July 2018. 169  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 30 November 2017. 170  Lord Adonis, @AndrewAdonis, 30 November 2017. 171  Donna Rachel Edmunds and Raheem Kassam, ‘Top Downing Street Staffers Hurled Abuse at Candidate Donald Trump with Nazi Comparisons and Pro-Islam Baiting’, Breitbart, 11 November 2016. 172  Raheem Kassam, @RaheemKassam, 23 March 2019, 00:38. 173  Christopher Hope, ‘Theresa May Hints She Would Now Vote to Stay in the EU’, Telegraph, 19 January 2018.

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‘would do a great job!’.174 The idea, in 2016, that a President would, or could, determine who would serve as British ambassador was preposterous. By the time of their last meetings—the state visit at the beginning of June 2019, and at the G20 in Osaka at the end—May had already announced that she would be resigning as Prime Minister the following month. At their loveless parting the question was asked as to whether the difficulties they had evinced were merely personal, or indicated structural, even chronic, issues. Trump had placed the outgoing British Prime Minister in the position of having publicly to defend a diplomat who inadvertently had embarrassed the President, and defend the diplomat Theresa May duly did. Trump effectively did the same to the incoming Prime Minister, but defend the diplomat Boris Johnson pointedly did not. So Sir Kim Darroch resigned.175 In 2019, an American President had determined who would serve as British ambassador.

Conclusion The instituting of UK government petitions had in part been inspired by Barack Obama, and his ‘We the People’ initiative. It was always possible that their prominence and ease of use meant that whoever was Obama’s successor might have been the first president to attract one. It was more likely that the reason was because Obama’s successor was Donald Trump. So it was that 100 years after the first President to set foot in Britain met cheering crowds, millions of people signed petitions calling for the latest to be prevented from doing so, and hundreds of thousands marched in protest after he had. ‘I am really loved in the UK’, Trump said on the eve of his state visit.176 The Trump–May years lent themselves to exaggeration, at the time and subsequently, but it is a challenge to think either historically or speculatively of a more dysfunctional relationship between a President and a Prime Minister than that between Donald Trump and Theresa May. In the past whenever hazards or misunderstandings arose, at least one of the principals was strong and stable; in the tale of two cities, 2016–2019, the governing and political circles in Washington and London were in a state of near-perpetual convulsion, and the heads of government based in each were central to the dislocation: one increasingly prone to bypassing politics and nonpartisan media in order to deal with the public both directly and through partisan media; the other denied either option, having effectively self-immolated. This President would have been a challenge for any Prime Minister, even in an age of certainty and moderation, with trammels intact. What was sui generis of him was also of the situation. It occurred at the same time as the other unprecedented challenge of  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 21 November 2016, 18:22.  Sir Kim Darroch, Newsnight, BBC2, 8 September 2020; Darroch, Collateral Damage, 12, 260–1. 176  Reuters, ‘Factbox: Donald Trump in His Own Words on Brexit, Britain and Boris’, 3 June 2019. 174 175

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modern times, and when a Prime Minister most needed a special relationship with their closest ally. It was almost as if the Trump and May relationship could not have been anything but dysfunctional. The graver problem was that it coincided with long-term decline. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump could only be expected to count for so much. It did not, in the end, matter that ‘I have a mother born in Scotland’.177 On her way to their first meeting, in Washington in January 2017, Theresa May was asked how she might get along with Donald Trump. ‘Haven’t you ever noticed’, she replied, ‘sometimes opposites attract?’178 A fine line had been drawn between coquettishness and desperation. Two years later there was not even the pretence of a relationship. Years of inchoate criticism on the part of the President had assumed a most pointed form. Each administration was reflected in the personality of the leader, the one mercurial, the other calcified. The contrast between Trump’s attitude to May and to Johnson superficially could not have been starker; it appeared entirely personality-driven. Little was structural, less was tacit. For all that describing a Presidential and Prime Ministerial partnership as unique is a truism, no other bore anything like the characteristics of Trump and May. That the only conceivably more dysfunctional relationship would have been that with the alternative Prime Minister— the leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn—added to the sense of this being an time without a paradigm. Trump and May unquestionably marked the lowest point in the history of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Sixty years after a predecessor had effectively made it possible a President did not know that his country’s closest ally was a nuclear power.179 A relationship that was from the outset incredible ended more ignominiously than any other: the two not on speaking terms. So much else in their period was incredible that this aspect was overlooked. The tendency to emphasise personal relationships between Presidents and Prime Ministers that thereby sentimentalises and simplifies bilateral relations between the United States and the United Kingdom was checked by the uniqueness of President Trump and the precariousness of Prime Minister May. From the outset it would have been an unsteady affair. The leaders of conservatism in the United States and the United Kingdom shared a generalised nationalism and nostalgia in their appeal and their ascent, but little in terms of their approach. As ever, there are the structural and the contingent, though the contingent had never been more significant. Britain’s strategic imprint, and therefore its salience to the United States, was in decline even before the coterminous sovereigntist nativist accelerators of Trumpism and Brexit, events and processes which might otherwise have been thought to be mutually supportive. Trump  Reuters, 3 June 2019.  ‘Opposites Attract: Theresa May on Donald Trump and Renewing the Special Relationship’, Newsweek, 27 January 2017. 179  Bolton, Room, 150. 177 178

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did not act to help broker agreements as had previous presidents, yet his disparaging remarks about May or his casual remarks about Britain were not inconsistent with those to other allies; what most characterised this President was how every other President in the modern era suddenly seemed defined by similarity. The state visit May offered in haste and repented at leisure took place when her Premiership had become a phantasm. But the point went wider. There was an inverse corollary between state visits and substance. There had been no state visits at all until 2006, and then every president received one. (It was typical of May’s misfortunes that she should be treated to annual visits by her President.) Much, a parliamentary report concluded, ‘will depend on whether the current approach is an enduring trend’.180 Strategic shrinkage predated Brexit, but Brexit added value. To the reduction of the United Kingdom’s influence in Europe, and therefore value to the United States, was the impact on the public finances and the means of maintaining the security and intelligence profile on which the special relationship had been built. Problems with the North Atlantic alliance in general and NATO in particular predated the Trump presidency. US withdrawal from the JCPOA was consistent with its withdrawal from TTIP and from the Paris Agreement. The emphasis became bilateralism, which may have been thought to be an advantage to the British, who happened to be in what they thought was a special relationship with the Americans, but it proved to be less so for one deeply integrated in a number of multilateral agencies in which they both were also involved. In this, May offered consistency and indeed acceleration. Almost every major decision she took after the catastrophic 2017 general election was taken from a position of weakness. The enforced passivity to trade—what would Trump offer—was a damning indictment of the asymmetry of the relationship. That was not wholly the fault of May’s, by most impartial assessments, disastrous premiership. Trump’s were not the least of the humiliations she forbore. After 2016 the lexicon of superlatives became worn through overuse, but with Trump and May reality exceeded hyperbole. In an age of new normals, there were few givens. There was a consistency, at least, in Trump’s aversion to convention, in his tendency to tergiversate; in his unseemliness. Otherwise, on the principle that hard cases make bad laws it may be unwise to extrapolate much from Trump–May. Decline was a featured narrative, certainly for Britain, and, eventually, necessarily, of the relationship itself, and its presiding pairing. From Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump and Theresa May. The devalued relations with one particular Prime Minister did fit a broader pattern: the diminution of the importance of any relationship even when, like that of their predecessors, it was a personally harmonious one. The coincidental shocks of Britain decoupling from the EU and then finding itself decoupled

180  House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations, 5th Report of Session 2017–19, ‘UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order’, 18 December 2018, HL paper 250, 98.

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from its principal security partner would have been hard for any Prime Minister to withstand. Whether or not 2016 came, if unclearly, to define the beginning of an age, the clashes of competing certainties made rational assessments rare and soothsayers commensurately treasured (‘I really predicted what was going to happen. It was a strong prediction.’181). An overt nationalism left limited scope for special relationships. That and Britain’s strategic retrenchment impaired whatever working relationship Trump and May might have had. So, as it were, the reasons for their failing were the reasons for their joining: American and British manifestations of anti-statism. Any concerns about the health and longevity of the special relationship under Obama was as nothing to those after his retirement. It was hard not to conclude that relationships between Presidents and Prime Ministers had reached their nadir. The unpredictability of the former and the progressive emasculation of the latter meant that this particular relationship was unlikely ever to be significant, or significantly effective. The effect on the status quo was the question. US–UK relations were grounded so as to withstand the peculiarities of a particular pairing. So much of what Trump said or tweeted was ungrounded, impulsive, and contradictory, that little store could be set by any of it. That was the hope. The issue raised at the end of Donald Trump’s and Theresa May’s period together was whether future relationships would be damaged more by their experience or by its context.

 Remarks, 4 June 2019.

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CHAPTER 18

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson: The Unfulfilled Relationship Martin Farr

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump at the United Nations, 24 September 2019. Shealah Craighead, Official White House Photograph

M. Farr (*) School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_18

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At the 2020 Republican National Convention, accepting his party’s nomination for President in ‘the most important election in the history of our country’, Donald Trump historicised his controversial use of the White House as the mise-en-scène for so party-political an event. ‘Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt welcomed Winston Churchill, and just inside, they set our people on a course to victory in the Second World War.’1 The President, a ‘big fan’ of the movie Darkest Hour, was known to have screened it, just inside, to members of Congress.2 Two years earlier, at ‘historic Chequers’, a place ‘I’ve heard so much about and read so much about growing up’, Trump had reclined in Churchill’s chair, a photograph of which the White House Press Secretary tweeted.3 ‘It was from right here at Chequers that Prime Minister Churchill phoned President Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor’, Trump informed the media, just outside. ‘In that horrific war, American and British service members bravely shed their blood alongside one another in defense of home and in defense of freedom. And together, we achieved a really special, magnificent victory.’4 As his opponents mobilised for the 2020 election, the President dismissed each Democrat standing to unseat him as being ‘not Winston Churchill’.5 In the year of the election, with the Churchill statue in Parliament Square in London having to be defended against incivility triggered by racial violence in the US, the President drew to the attention of his 85m Twitter followers the publication of Trump and Churchill, Defenders of Western Civilization; it was, he confessed, ‘a great honor to be compared, in any way, to Winston Churchill’.6 Five days later Trump walked amidst smouldering scenes just outside his residence. ‘Like Churchill, we saw him inspecting the bombing damage; it sent a powerful message of leadership’, the White House Press Secretary explained.7 The summer of protest constituted the second national crisis of 2020. The first had been the reason for the unconventional convention: a crisis which dwarfed those faced by any President and Prime Minister since that foundational pairing. When accused wilfully of understating  CNN Politics, ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s RNC speech’, 28 August 2020. The author is grateful to Ed Cavanagh, Cathrine Degnen, Ben Houston, and Richard Williams for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2  Jordan Fabian, ‘Trump to host lawmakers for screening of Churchill film’, The Hill, 18 December 2017; Kim Darroch, Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump (London, 2020), 251. 3  The White House, Remarks by President Trump [henceforth WHR] and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom in Joint Press Conference, 13 July 2018; Sarah Sanders, @PressSec, 13 July 2018, 16:49. 4  White House, Remarks, 13 July 2018. 5  White House, Remarks in Press Conference, Osaka, Japan, 29 June 2019; White House, Remarks at Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit 2019, 23 July 2019. 6  Donald J.  Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 27 May 2020, 03:42. Nick Adams, Trump and Churchill, Defenders of Western Civilization (Brentwood, TN, 2020), foreword by Newt Gingrich. 7  White House, Press Briefing by Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, 3 June 2020; Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller, ‘White House: Trump church visit akin to Churchill WWII role’, Associated Press, 3 June 2020. 1

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the seriousness of Coronavirus Covid-19, Trump channelled Churchill, citing his ‘calmness’.8 At the same time, and for the same reasons, Boris Johnson, who had spent his life channelling Churchill, invoked Roosevelt.9 Trump had appropriated Churchill’s character; Johnson, Roosevelt’s policies. Recall of heterodox politicians yoked by circumstance, and at great personal cost, to set their people on a course to victory was a reminder that, in a year when ‘unprecedented’ became the commentators’ word of choice, not everything actually was.

Introduction More than any pairing of President and Prime Minister, except perhaps the one that helped define the 1980s, that of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson was as much contrived as contingent. There was a permissive context. ‘Brexit and 2016 are inextricably linked’, declared Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon. ‘Victory begets victory.’10 ‘America is proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder w/a free & ind UK’, Trump tweeted as he arrived there on the day the first victory was announced. ‘We stand together as friends, as allies, & as a people w/a shared history.’11 Celebrants waved American flags in Parliament Square at the dawn of a Brexit Johnson promised would only make his free and independent people ‘even better and more valuable allies of the United States’.12 But to some Americans who had willed the victory, the spoils were not apportioned as expected. ‘Why isn’t Boris Johnson Prime Minister?’ Trump asked Theresa May at their first meeting. ‘Didn’t he want the job?’13 When Boris Johnson got the job, there was the distinct sense of a moment, an orientation, as having finally taken place. ‘I’ve been waiting for him to be Prime Minister for about six years’, Trump said, next to the President of France. ‘I told him, “What took you so long?”’14 However long it took them, Trump and Johnson were legatees of a transatlantic movement, a network—subject of myriad spidergrams—connecting Trump, Bannon, and Robert Mercer, and conservatives in the US with conservatives in the UK, by way of Cambridge 8  Tim Elfrink, ‘“Keep calm and carry on”: Trump compared himself to Brits in the Blitz’, The Washington Post, 11 September 2020; Jamie McIntyre, ‘Today, we remember’, Washington Examiner, 11 September 2020. 9  Boris Johnson, Times Radio Breakfast, Times Radio, 22 June 2020; Prime Minister’s Office [henceforth PMO], Press Release, ‘“Build build build”: Prime Minister announces New Deal for Britain’, 30 June 2020; Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, ‘A Surprising Role Model Emerges for Boris Johnson: F.D.R.’, The New York Times, 29 June 2020. 10  Alison Klayman, The Brink, (Magnolia Pictures & Ryot Films, 2019). 11  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 24 June 2016, 11:32. 12  Boris Johnson, ‘UK and America can be better friends than ever Mr Obama … if we LEAVE the EU’, The Sun, 22 April 2016. 13  Ben Riley-Smith, ‘How the “special relationship” was tested’, The Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 2020. 14  White House, Remarks and President Macron of France in Joint Press Conference, 26 August 2019.

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Analytica, Breitbart, the Leave campaign, between them Making America Great Again and Taking Back Control.15 If it was more a nexus than a conspiracy, it was no less effective for that. And it was a nexus of which Johnson was part, if, and characteristically, as much by accident as design.16 ‘Our guys in Breitbart London had a lot of contact with him during the Brexit thing’, Bannon said. Not unlike GIs and Tommies sharing a foxhole, the experience proved to be bonding ‘cause their victory was as unexpected as ours’.17 It had taken sixty years for there to be a US President who thought that the UK being free and independent of ‘Europe’ was in either country’s interests, and he happened to coincide with the first Prime Minister to think so too. ‘Right after we won Boris flew over’, Bannon recalled of the second victory. ‘I got to know him quite well in the transition period.’18 The British Ambassador had achieved his customary objective of ensuring that the Prime Minister would be the first foreign leader to meet the new President. There being a convention that heads of governments did not meet Presidents-elect, Johnson, May’s Foreign Secretary, suggested that he might instead. The Prime Minister refused.19 In New York, Johnson at least met Bannon, exchanging private phone numbers, and also Trump’s speechwriter—and more—Stephen Miller, responsible for so successfully weaponising immigration in the election campaign, as had also been done during the Brexit thing. He and Johnson got on so well, a White House official disclosed, that Miller then ‘talked him up’ to Trump.20 Bannon publicly acclaimed Dominic Cummings, usually portrayed as the Bannon to Johnson’s Trump, while Johnson cultivated personal relations with Larry Kudlow, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, and Jared Kushner, the President’s omnipresent son-in-law.21 With his significant— arguably determining—responsibility for Brexit, Johnson was, for a prominent parliamentarian, uniquely well connected to the transatlantic nexus of 15  Among many others: Peter Jukes, ‘Boris Johnson, a Plan Years in the Making’, Byline Times, 21 June 2019; Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Revealed: how US billionaire helped back Brexit’, The Observer, 26 February 2017; Jane Mayer, ‘New evidence emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit’, New Yorker, 18 November 2018; Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, Open Democracy, 17 November 2018. 16  Graeme Demianyk, ‘Boris Johnson Admits Writing Second Telegraph Column Backing “Remain”’, Huffington Post, 23 June 2016. 17  Bannon, July 2018, in Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Steve Bannon: “We went back and forth” on the themes of Johnson’s big speech’, Observer, 22 June 2019. 18  Bannon, July 2018. 19  Darroch, Collateral Damage, 116. 20  Daniel Lippman and Nahal Toosi, ‘Boris and very special relationship’, Politico, 12 December 2020; Darroch, Collateral Damage, 124. 21  Jonathan Read, ‘Donald Trump’s former strategist thinks Dominic Cummings will take Tories further to the right’, The New European, 3 August 2020; Robert Hutton and Kitty Donaldson, ‘Britain’s Steve Bannon is Tearing Boris Johnson’s Tories Apart’, Bloomberg, 6 September 2019; Libby Watson, ‘Dominic Cummings’s Very Trumpian Response to His Very English Scandal’, New Republic, 26 May 2020. Riley-Smith, ‘special relationship’; Rob Crilly, ‘Special Relationship: Will Boris Johnson make Britain great again’, Washington Examiner, 11 July 2019.

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co-­interested parties. Moreover, and much more than May ever managed, Johnson had a public profile in the US; as the British Ambassador Sir Kim Darroch put it, he ‘spoke American’.22 Johnson was also practising what Darroch had preached: a Regency approach. The key to persuading a President averse to protocol was to ‘flood the zone’ and seek to influence as many of the administration’s ‘Trump whisperers’ as possible. Blandishment—‘praising him’ and presenting events ‘as wins for him’—through personal contact—‘there is no consistently reliable substitute for the personal phone call’—was critical.23 As Trump was wont to ‘shoot the breeze’, there was little May found so consistently unmanageable as the personal phone call.24 For her successor, protocol had never been a preoccupation. ‘I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump’, Johnson admitted a year later, a minority view even in the Conservative Party. ‘I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness.’25 A month later Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary over Brexit and composed his valedictory statement to MPs in consultation with Bannon.26 Asked for his view of a resignation which gravely weakened the Prime Minister, the President, en route to see her, said ‘Boris Johnson is a friend of mine. He’s been very, very nice to me and very supportive’.27 More even than Winston Churchill and Nigel Farage—with whom Trump hoped Johnson would ‘get together’28—‘Boris’ was and remained the subject of presidential encomia. Johnson resumed his weekly Daily Telegraph column, rendering a number of controversial issues more controversial still, not least the cultural consequences of immigration, and Brexit.29 For their part, separately, Trump and Bannon had been defined in London lauding and contacting Johnson, respectively.30 Bannon informed the Telegraph: ‘Now is the moment.’31

 Darroch, Collateral Damage, 116, 241.  Darroch, in Isabel Oakeshott, ‘Britain’s man in the US says Trump’s “inept”’, The Mail on Sunday, 7 July 2019. 24  Darroch, Collateral Damage, 189; Tim Shipman, ‘May Bamboozled by Trump’s Love Talk’, The Times, 19 November 2017. 25  Boris Johnson, Conservative Way Forward, Institute of Directors, London, 6 June 2018. 26  Bannon, July 2018; Johnson, House of Commons Debates (HCD), 18 July 2018, volume 645, column 448–50. 27  White House, Remarks Before Marine One Departure 10 July 2018; ‘A Sedate Dinner, but a Bombshell Interview, for Trump’s U.K. Visit’, New York Times, 12 July 2018. 28  Nigel Farage, interview with President Donald Trump, LBC, 31 October 2019. 29  Among many others: ‘Denmark has got it wrong. Yes, the burka is oppressive and ridiculous – but that’s still no reason to ban it’, 5 August 2018; ‘We are heading for a car crash Brexit under Theresa May’s Chequers plan’, 16 September 2018; ‘Mrs May’s deal is the biggest statecraft failure since Suez’, 12 November 2018. 30  J. Lester Feder, Mark Di Stefan, Alex Spence, ‘Boris Johnson has Been Privately Talking to Steve Bannon as they Plot their Next Moves’, BuzzFeed News, 27 July 2018. 31  Christopher Hope, Julian Ingle, and Ju Zhang, ‘Revealed: the “brutal” advice Donald Trump gave to Theresa May on Brexit talks with Brussels’, Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2018; Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Trump’s Brexit Blast’, Sun, 13 July 2018. 22 23

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Although it took a year, ‘the good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister’, Trump said, while May was still in office.32 He had deviated from convention, and courtesy, in publicly damning the Prime Minister and her policy. ‘I can’t dissent from that’, Johnson said when asked about the President’s intervention. ‘I find it hard to disagree.’33 In his party’s leadership contest, against Jeremy Hunt, Johnson tacitly pitched himself as Trumpesque: as a dynamic force. ‘Look at what Trump is doing’, Johnson told voters.34 A week later, Darroch, publicly condemned by Trump and equally publicly not supported by Johnson, resigned, ‘undone’, as the Economist put it, ‘by a one-two from the West’s leading populist duo’.35 Two weeks after that the President could announce: We have a really good man who’s going to be the Prime Minister of the UK now, Boris Johnson. (Applause.) Good man. He’s tough and he’s smart. They’re saying ‘Britain Trump.’ They call him ‘Britain Trump.’ And people are saying, ‘That’s a good thing.’ They like me over there. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they need. (Applause.) That’s what they need. He’ll get it done. Boris is good. He’s going to do a good job.36

If the issue raised at the end of Trump’s and May’s period together was indeed whether future relationships would be damaged more by the experience or by its context, there was now a means of knowing.

Agenda, 2019 ‘This is the right time for Boris’, Trump said. ‘This is the right time for Boris.’37 So much seemed to be about the time being right. The President now had a Prime Minister in his image, who as a candidate had sold himself partly on the opportunities his Trumpmanship—certainly compared to his hapless predecessor—would bring. Johnson’s refusal even to question Trump’s public humiliation of a British diplomat accentuated the new primacy of the personal. Their very real differences were less, and their apparent similarities more, adduced by both supporters and opponents. It was true that Johnson had said, in the past, ‘Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind’, ‘betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of President’, and ‘I am

 Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 8 July 2019, 19:31.  Jack Blanchard, ‘Exclusive: Boris Johnson finds it “hard to disagree” with Trump’s verdict on May’, Politico, 11 July 2019. 34  Rob Crilly, ‘Boris Johnson embraces Trumpism with tax cut plan’, Washington Examiner, 3 July 2019. 35  ‘Britain Humbled after Donald Trump Pushes out its Ambassador’, The Economist, 11 July 2019. 36  Remarks, 23 July 2019. 37  Remarks, 26 August 2019. 32 33

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genuinely worried he could become President’.38 But that was before the two victories of 2016. Moreover, even with such reckless ad hominem remarks there was affinity; what Barack Obama called Trump’s ‘lack of inhibition’.39 They were both defamatorily to insinuate Obama with Africa. Johnson was fortunate that Trump could be forgiving as well as perspicacious. ‘He’s the right man for the job. I’ve been saying that for a long time’, Trump told his reformed critic. ‘It didn’t make your predecessor very happy.’40 The time was right in that transactions—dealmaking—were central to Trump’s appeal and to his practice, and with the superseding of alliances came the attraction of other self-consciously charismatic—male—leaders. Republican diplomat Richard Haass called it Trump’s ‘deinstitutionalization of foreign policy’.41 Institutions there were aplenty in the special relationship, but with Johnson came the opportunity for rapport with a like-mind. ‘The reason this is positive for Britain’, John Bolton, Trump’s third National Security Adviser in fifteen months, said of the pairing, ‘is that Trump can’t distinguish between his personal relationships with a counterpart leader and the actual state of the national relationships between two countries’.42 More even than that, Trump could only conceive of an issue or person in relation to himself. When asked about Johnson’s Iran policy, the President said, next to the Prime Minister of Pakistan: ‘Boris is a man who—number one, he’s a friend of mine.’43 The time was right given their essentialisms. Both owed their position to successfully having targeted voters and concerns traditionally of their opponents. To American conservatives Johnson’s accession, and his national election five months later, could ‘presage a consecration of the Trump movement in America’ in the name of what some called the ‘new nationalism’.44 ‘Britain can join the Trumpian entrepreneurial world of deregulation, lower taxes and advanced technology’, wrote Newt Gingrich, with whom much of what transpired in 2016 had begun. ‘The new prime minister is a natural ally for Trump, and their enthusiasm, energy and risk-taking personalities make them remarkably compatible.’45 Defending Western civilisation, united in their opposition to statue-assailing historical and cultural revisionists, and invoking as he did leftists and anarchists, the President coddled Britain Trump in nativism. ‘He

38  Boris Johnson, The Agenda, ITV, 21 March 2016; Johnson, in Paul Waugh, ‘Boris Johnson Slams Donald Trump’, Huffington Post, 9 December 2015. 39  Barack Obama, A Promised Land (London, 2020), 675. 40  White House, Remarks and Prime Minister Johnson, Biarritz, 25 August 2019. 41  Orion Rummler, ‘Trump says he gets along better with world leaders “the tougher and meaner they are”’, Axios, 14 September 2020. Hass, in Tom McTague and Peter Nicholas, ‘How to stay one step ahead of Donald Trump’, The Atlantic, 11 August 2020. 42  John Bolton, Channel 4 News, Channel 4, 25 June 2020. 43  White House, Remarks and Prime Minister Khan of Pakistan, 23 September 2019. 44  Curt Mills, ‘A Trump-Boris Axis?’, The American Conservative, 24 December 2019. 45  Newt Gingrich, ‘Boris Johnson is already helping make Britain Great Again’, Newsweek, 31 July 2019.

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loves his country, you see that.’46 As to quite which country, there was an atavistic perspective missing from that of any other foreign leader, a metaphorical whistle usually only blown by the President at home. Trump referred to ‘what some people say is Great Britain, and some people remember a word you don’t hear too much is the word, “England,” which is a piece of it.’47 He had said it before, and a month later he said it again, about that piece of it which had committed the rest of it to Brexit. ‘“England.” Right? You know, I ask Boris, “Where’s England? What’s happening with England?” They don’t use it too much anymore.’ Whatever. Trump went on, ‘He loves your country. He really loves your country. That came out, maybe, more than anything else.’48 The time was right since self-consciously charismatic leaders could, in the neology of the day, craft their own narratives. Trump and Johnson certainly had, pre-eminent as they were in their mastery of their preferred platforms, rallies and social media, and television and the op-ed page, respectively. Theirs was largely a narrative of embodying their supporters’ will against elites. Walls featured prominently, their building and breaching respectively. Each had to contend with his own Russia report, born of Moscow’s attempts to influence the results of the 2016 votes (the outcomes of which at least were as Moscow desired), that of 2019, and in all probability 2020 too. Johnson managed to suppress his report until after his position was assured; Trump asked Johnson for help with his.49 The kindling of such concerns, and their fanning by mainstream media—both men boycotted national broadcasters—reinforced the narrative of hounded tribunes. The time was right because obstruction in America and Britain—by Bannon’s ‘swamp’, and Cummings’s ‘blob’—to the outcomes of 2016 served to rally Trump and Johnson and their supporters in grievance against the deep state, judiciary, legislature, mainstream media, and cultural establishment.50 Seeming almost to mouth Johnson’s own words, Trump intoned: ‘What is paramount, I believe, is delivering on Brexit for the British people.’51 There followed an invitation from the President that the Prime Minister mark his election triumph with a victory tour of the US at the beginning of the year of Trump’s re-­ election. Johnson’s sedulously mannered allure, particularly to Americans, might make ‘Boris in America’ a brand, with associative benefits for a President 46  White House, Remarks Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, 7 April 2020. 47  White House, Remarks at Signing of Safe Third Country Agreement with Guatemala, 26 July 2019. 48  Remarks, 26 August 2019. 49  Billy Perrigo, ‘British Government Delays Report on Russian Interference in Brexit Vote Until After Election’, Time, 4 November 2019; Catherine Philp, ‘Donald Trump impeachment: President called Boris Johnson for help to discredit Mueller inquiry’, Times, 2 October 2019. 50  White House, Remarks and Prime Minister Johnson, Before Bilateral Meeting, 24 September 2019; Charlie Spiering, ‘Steve Bannon: “the Swamp” will take decades to drain’, Breitbart, 10 September 2017; Charlie Peters, ‘Dominic Cummings fights the Blob’, National Review, 26 May 2020. 51  White House, Remarks and Prime Minister May in Joint Press Conference, 4 June 2019.

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publicly grateful for ‘his close friendship’.52 The inferno that was Trump’s impeachment inclined Johnson to delay.53 Better to go when things had calmed down, later in 2020. It was the right time, because it was perhaps the first time that a President and a Prime Minister had served as proxies for each other. Johnson was seen as ‘Trumpish’, or ‘Trumpy’; his rise as ‘Trumpian’.54 Joe Biden, Trump’s eventual Democratic challenger, thought the Prime Minister a ‘kind of a physical and emotional clone of the president’.55 Foreign correspondents explaining Johnson need do no more than: ‘Britain Trump’. In Italy, ‘Johnson is Trump’s little dog’; in France, Johnson’s rise to power in London was ‘tantamount to installing a Trump’.56 And, just as the Brexit vote had been for Trump in 2016, so Johnson’s ‘terrific victory’ three years later: ‘I think that might be a harbinger for what’s to come in our country; it was last time. I’m sure people will be thrilled to hear that’, Trump said, next to the President of Paraguay. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’57

Personal With no other President and Prime Minister was there such a fetish for similarities being drawn, and no greater evidence than that one party continually drew them. After ‘spending a lot of intense time with him over the last couple of days’, Trump realised, ‘you know, we like each other’.58 All felt very centred. ‘He and I are very much aligned. We feel very good about each other.’59 Their singularity was self-reinforcing. Trump referred to his other by first name when that other was not present, or even pertinent.60 Not for the first time, Johnson  Judd Deere, @JuddPDeere45, 27 March 2020, 5:39 PM.  Kyle Smith, ‘Who is Boris Johnson?’, National Review, 19 July 2019. Glen Owen and Harry Cole, ‘Donald Trump tells Boris Johnson to celebrate his election win with a “victory tour” of the United States’, Mail on Sunday, 21 December 2019; Alexander Brown, ‘Golden Age’, Sun, 22 December 2019; Dan Bloom, ‘Boris Johnson “Victory” tour to Trump’s White House delayed until June’, Daily Mirror, 14 February 2020. 54  Redfield & Wilton, polling for Times, 18 July 2020. Kim Hjelmgaard, ‘Trump “friend” Boris Johnson, who was born in the US, is the favorite to replace British Prime Minister Theresa May’, USA Today, 24 May 2019; Michelle Goldberg, ‘With Trump as President, the World is Spiraling into Chaos’, New York Times, 16 August 2019; Bret Stephens, ‘Why I’m rooting for Boris Johnson’, New York Times, 25 July 2019. 55  Rachel Frazin, ‘Biden calls Johnson “a physical and emotional clone” of Trump’, The Hill, 13 December 2019. 56  L’analista conservatore: «Johnson mente, la sua Brexit è impossibile», Corriere Della Sera, 10 June 2019; Editorial, ‘Boris Johnson à la tête du Royaume-Uni? Non merci!’, Le Monde, 12 June 2019. 57  White House, Remarks and President Abdo Benítez, 13 December 2019. 58  Remarks, 26 August 2019. 59  White House, Remarks Before Air Force Once Departure, Morristown, NJ, 15 August 2019. 60  White House, Remarks and Prime Minister Netanyahu, 28 January 2020; White House, Remarks at Signing of Executive Orders on Transparency in Federal Guidance and Enforcement, 9 October 2019. 52 53

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benefitted from conferred peculiarity: just as there had been only one ‘Winston’ in politics and public life in the previous century, so was there only one ‘Boris’ in the next. There was equally also only one Trump. It enhanced their celebrity, for which there was a ready audience, as evinced by their featuring, at the same time and across twenty years, in primetime TV game shows.61 The ascent of each being unconventional but not uncontroversial, it followed that, as former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer put it, ‘the president and the prime minister are catnip for a very frisky press corps’.62 Trump and Johnson indeed appeared to the press corps as ‘two remarkably similar figures’, as if in a twins movie in which two siblings ‘are separated at birth and years later come to find they’re living parallel lives in different parts of the country’.63 There may have been a sliding scale of superficiality in the similarities drawn, but drawn they were. Theirs was the first time a President and a Prime Minister had both been born in New York City. No—male—predecessor ever had anything, much less a great deal, said and written about their hair, and their dress (length of tie and state of dishevelment, respectively), and general deportment. There was also their physical similarity, boon to caricaturists: two white men in dark suits yet instantly recognisable from any angle. Indeed, on at least one occasion Johnson had in person been mistaken for Trump.64 There was the unusual political and public prominence of their families, each chronicled lucratively, if contrastingly, by a female member.65 Both were libertines, and shared six marriages and, it was estimated, ten children. And both were insiders running as outsiders; demoticist sons of privilege. ‘I like Boris Johnson. I always have’, Trump revealed. ‘He’s a different kind of a guy. But they say I’m a different kind of a guy, too.’66 Trump and Johnson to an unusual extent aroused opposition and hostility from within their own parties; indeed, never could so many colleagues have attested publicly to the unfitness for office of candidates for President or Prime Minister.67 Neither would ever have been elected, or even nominated, by party  The Apprentice, NBC, 2004–15; Have I Got News For You, BBC, 1998–2006.  Mark Landler, ‘U.K. Coronavirus Briefings Offer a More Genteel Spin Than Trump’s’, New York Times, 26 April 2020. 63  Frank Langfitt, ‘The Similarities Between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’, NPR, 23 July 2019, 9:19 AM ET; Bess Levin, ‘“Do or Die”: Boris Johnson kicks off reign with pledge to murder British economy’, Vanity Fair, 23 July 2019. 64  Johnson, Agenda, 21 March 2016. 65  Mary L.  Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How my Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (New York, 2020); Rachel Johnson, Rake’s Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis (London, 2020). 66  White House, Remarks Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, 19 July 2019. 67  ‘Open Letter on Donald Trump from GOP National Security Leaders’, 2 March 2016; Tessa Berenson and Alana Albramson, ‘Revenge of the Never Trumpers’, Time, 23 July 2020; Henry Martin, ‘Chris Patten joins Sir John Major in urging voters to vote AGAINST the Conservatives’, Mail Online, 7 December 2019; Adam Payne and Adam Bienkove, ‘Moderates plan to take back control of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister’, Business Insider, 23 May 2020. 61 62

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officers. Consistent with the era which they helped define, the pair divided, and their appeal lay with the other ranks, those more susceptible to celebrity. Even those supporters might concede that both presented traces of exhibitionism; franker supporters, narcissism. Four years apart, each had appeared in long-­ running TV soap operas as themselves.68 Both had a record of deliberate public falsehoods.69 Both were accused of dilettantism.70 Both prioritised loyalty in their staffing of their administrations; loyalty, too, being the essence of bilateral relationships, certainly for Trump, which was why so many entreating foreign leaders were in time disavowed. Both had their prominent iconoclastic lightning rod of a chief strategist. And both, emphatically, were to test critics’ predictions that their genius was for campaigning rather than governing.

Political Ten minutes into Johnson’s premiership, Trump had publicly expressed his delight: ‘Congratulations to Boris.’71 Johnson claimed that Trump was becoming ‘increasingly popular’ in Britain, and privately remarked (admittedly to US diplomats) how the President was ‘making America great again’, and (to the US ambassador) that he was doing ‘fantastic stuff’.72 When the remarks were leaked, Trump publicly expressed his delight: ‘Thank you Boris.’73 But there developed on Johnson’s part a sense in public to distance. The challenge the Prime Minister faced in dealing with the President was precisely not that with which his predecessor had so gamely wrestled. Rather, that Trump was ‘your friend’, as Vice President Pence reminded Johnson and anyone who had forgotten, was the problem.74 One Trump official said ‘they’re buddies. Probably his closest relationship’, another that ‘Trump sees Johnson as a kindred spirit’.75 Seeking a mandate from a public for which Trump was less popular than

 Days of Our Lives, NBC, 24 October 2005; EastEnders, BBC, 1 October 2009.  Among many others: Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, ‘President Trump made 19,127 false or misleading claims in 1,226 days’, Washington Post, 1 June 2020; Peter Stubley, ‘Boris Johnson: the most infamous lies and untruths by the Conservative leadership candidate’, Independent, 25 May 2019. 70  Among many others: Benjamin Fearnow, ‘Trump Spends Two-Thirds of his Time as President Doing Nothing in Particular, Leaked Documents Show’, Newsweek, 3 February 2019; Adrian Goldberg, ‘Lazy, Slapdash, Badly Organised’: the Backbench Grumblings on Boris Johnson’s Future Have Begun’, Byline Times, 1 July 2020. 71  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 23 July 2019, 12:29. 72   Ben Riley-Smith, ‘PM’s fulsome praise for Trump revealed’, Sunday Telegraph, 6 September 2020. 73  Donald J. Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 8 September 2020, 12:32 PM. 74  White House, Remarks by Vice President Pence and Prime Minister Johnson of the United Kingdom Before Bilateral Meeting, 5 September 2019. 75  Daniel Lippman and Nahal Toosi, ‘Boris and very special relationship’, Politico, 12 December 2020; Tom McTague and Peter Nicholas, ‘Inside Donald Trump and Boris Johnson’s Special Relationship’, The Atlantic, 30 July 2019. John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened, (New York, 2020), 344. 68 69

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Vladimir Putin, Johnson was nevertheless keen that that should not popularly be thought to be the case.76 So the Prime Minister deflected, dismissing much of the rage at and abuse of the President as ‘visceral, juvenile anti-Americanism’.77 The Prime Minister equivocated, notably by not (unlike Jeremy Hunt), publicly supporting Sir Kim Darroch in July 2019. The Prime Minister dissimulated, as over the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, which triggered the summer of protest in both countries. The Prime Minister dissembled, as over perhaps Trump’s most egregious act, his ‘Churchillian’ brandishing of the Bible outside St. John’s Church in Washington DC on 1 June 2020, having used tear gas to disperse a peaceful protest. The Prime Minister deflected in the way that every Prime Minister paired with an unpopular President always had: ‘[A]s for the qualities of Mr Trump, let me say that, among many other things, he is President of the United States, which is our most important ally in the world today.’78 Yet, also not for the first time, but to the greatest extent, a President had made it difficult for a Prime Minister publicly to be pro-American. That Trump should so frequently proclaim their amity so warmly—‘He’s been a really good friend. … He’s been really something very special’—was a gift to Johnson’s detractors, who sought to embarrass by comparing him with his proxy, or inviting the Prime Minister to agree with the President’s latest act or utterance.79 For the leader of the Labour Party, ‘Johnson is Britain’s Trump’.80 But as important as public distance from Trump was for Johnson, it was also high risk. He pointedly made (admittedly election-year) criticisms of cabotage, American restrictions on British goods such as haggis or Scotch, and said, alongside Trump—whose mother had been born in Scotland—that ‘the NHS is not for sale’, the headline Labour allegation about the price of a post-­ Brexit Free Trade Agreement (FTA).81 The road traffic killing of a teenager by a CIA officer and her subsequent flight on grounds of diplomatic immunity prompted Johnson to describe extradition arrangements as ‘unbalanced’ (although Trump, smarting from his Russia report, called for that of Christopher Steele, equally fruitlessly).82 Although Johnson supported Trump’s contentious Middle East peace plan, the Prime Minister objected to the President’s incendiary relocation of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and his recognition of the city as the capital.83 US withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement similarly were deprecated.  Donald Trump popularity & fame, YouGov, August 2020.  Johnson, HCD, 3 September 2019, vol 664, col 24. 78  Johnson, HCD, 10 June 2020, vol 677, col 288. 79  Remarks, 7 April 2020. 80  The Labour Party, ‘Jeremy Corbyn speech in Corby today’, 19 August 2019, 10:16. 81  Remarks 5 September 2019, 24 September 2019; PMO Press release: PM call with President Trump, 5 November 2019. 82  Johnson, HCD, 12 February 2020, vol 671, col 846. Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 11 July 2020, 1:00 PM; 11 July 2020, 1:27 PM. 83  Johnson, HCD, 29 January 2020, vol 670, col 770; 11 December 2017, vol 633 col 66. 76 77

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The closer Johnson was to Trump, the further Johnson found himself from others. The fear of the President’s many foreign critics was that Johnson would ‘give Trump a comrade in mischief’; a nationalist rather than an internationalist at multilateral meetings; a disruptor.84 In Italy, Johnson was, like Trump, ‘a liar who doesn’t care about the details of reality, who tells people what he wants to hear and ends up depending on their ignorance’; in France, it gave Trump ‘a foot across the Channel dedicated to sabotaging’ the EU.85 Global Britain was at least rhetorically the obverse of America First, yet both countries appeared to be retreating from multilateralism. The US remained the UK’s single biggest trade and investment partner, and its principal political and cultural reference point. Thus the disproportionate weight placed on an FTA. The first public commitment from the pair had been ‘to immediately deepen and expand the bilateral economic relationship’.86 After two years of quarrel without parallel, overnight—12–13 December 2019—Brexit had ceased to be a parliamentary issue. FTA negotiations began on 5 May 2020. But the concern remained the likely weighting of any deal to US agricultural interests that would have made it difficult to sell in the UK: the chlorinated chicken having become the avian metaphor for the imposition of lower standards of hygiene and husbandry. And it was a trade deal that would have to pass through a Congress incensed about the implications of Brexit on Ireland.87 Whatever presidential imprimatur there was to hasten an FTA, Johnson needed a deal actually offered, rather than an idea merely, if repeatedly, advanced, and Trump had made discouraging comments about Johnson’s deal in an interview with Nigel Farage in October, though the President did not ‘want to tell’ this Prime Minister what to do.88 Biden’s team had mooted UK participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, effectively a surrogate FTA which Trump did not support. It was not the only reason that preference for a Biden presidency over a second Trump term was widely held, including by some of Johnson’s colleagues.89 How Biden viewed Johnson was the bigger question. Biden’s concerns were widely and repeatedly transmitted about the implications of Brexit on Ireland.90 There was also the 84  Josh Dawsey, Laura Hughes, and Karla Adam, ‘Trump and Johnson look to use G7 summit to fortify their relationship amid skepticism of both leaders’, Washington Post, 24 August 2019. 85  Corriere Della Sera, 10 June 2019; Le Monde, 12 June 2019. 86  White House, Statement from the Press Secretary, 29 July 2019; Remarks, 26 July 2019. 87   Speaker.Gov, Press Release, Transcript of Pelosi Weekly Press Conference Today, 10 September 2020. 88  Nigel Farage, interview with President Donald Trump, 31 October 2019. 89  James Forsyth, ‘Why Biden might be better for Brexit Britain’, Spectator, 27 June 2020. Anthony Blinken, Chatham House, May/June 2020. Department for International Trade, An update on the UK’s position on accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), 17 June 2020; Patrick Wintour, ‘UK diplomats fear end of special relationship if Trump re-elected’, The Guardian, 8 June 2020; Ipsos MORI, ‘Britons prefer Biden to Trump in US race’, 7 August 2020. 90  Joe Biden, @JoeBiden, 16 September 2020, 9:48 PM; Tim Ross, Biden Warns Johnson of Brexit Risk to Northern Ireland Peace, Bloomberg, 10 November 2020.

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origin myth, the archetypal reckless ad hominem remark. ‘Biden’s got a long memory and Boris is not in his good books. Biden and Obama are like family’, a member of Biden’s campaign team said. ‘The Kenyan remark has never gone away.’91 The broader question—whether the UK’s primary trading focus should be the US or the EU, after decades of compliance with the latter—was unanswered. It was a central paradox that leaving the EU was both a means of the UK moving closer to the US while at the same time contradicting what had been a central tenet of US foreign policy for fifty years; overnight the American ‘plug socket’ into European transnationalism had been disconnected.92 Trump and Johnson separately, and contradictingly, suggested some transnational innovation: Johnson with his D-10 of the G7 plus India, Australia, and South Korea, putatively outdone by Trump’s G11: the D-10 plus Russia.93 Foreign Secretary at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, Russian participation Johnson flatly rejected.94 Iran and China were also most taxing issues, over which, with their mutable possibilities for a post-Brexit foreign policy, Johnson himself wavered. With the former, he shifted from a European-led mission to protect shipping in the Persian Gulf to participating in a US one. Johnson maintained British support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), despite US pressure, but then hedged: ‘let’s replace it’, he said, ‘with the Trump deal’.95 The President approved.96 But by the end of a year which began with Trump ordering the killing of Major-General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard without consulting or forewarning Johnson, over the JCPOA the UK sided with France and Germany and on the Security Council effectively aligned with Russia and China.97 As to the growing challenge of the latter, Johnson initially sought to sustain the ‘golden era’ for Sino-British relations, David Cameron’s initiative to demonstrate strategic independence from the US. But the government reaffirmed Huawei as providing for the UK’s 5G network, occasioning ‘honeymoon is over’ headlines, and what should have been the easiest post-EU relationship as already having soured.98 When they spoke on the phone in February 2020 to discuss the matter, Trump accused Johnson of betrayal. A conversation during which the President became ‘apoplectic’, and 91  Official quoted in Tim Shipman, ‘Mr President, I have a Mr Johnson on the line … will you accept the call?’, Sunday Times, 8 November 2020. 92  David Banks and Joseph O’Mahoney, Independent, 22 July 2016. 93  Erik Brattberg, Ben Judah, ‘Forget the G-7, Build the D-10’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 10 June 2020. 94  ‘Britain would not support readmittance of Russia to G7, says PM’s spokesman’, Reuters, 1 June 2020. 95  ‘Boris Johnson: Replace Iran nuclear plan with “Trump deal”, says PM’, BBC News, 14 January 2020. 96  Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump, 15 January 2020, 4:32 AM. 97  Dominic Green, ‘Leaked letter: Boris Johnson rejects Trump on Iran sanctions’, The Spectator, 28 August 2020. 98  Adam Taylor, ‘The Trump-Boris honeymoon is over’, Washington Post, 30 January 2020.

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which he ended abruptly, was described as ‘difficult’.99 The Prime Minister postponed a visit to the White House.100 Within weeks Johnson reversed his policy and thereby effectively joined Trump’s international coalition against China.101 But by then a visit was not possible. A new front with China had broken out.

Meeting (and Not Meeting) The dichotomy of distanced association—a unique President and Prime Minister push-pull dynamic—was most acutely noticed bilaterally. The alacrity with which Theresa May had sought out Trump was not the approach Johnson followed, not least as the transatlantic nexus meant he had no need to ingratiate. With Johnson’s election as party leader—and so Prime Minister—all but inevitable, he and Trump spoke almost daily; John Bolton, in London a few days after that election, in August 2019, confirmed that the relationship was ‘off to a roaring start’.102 Their first meeting as President and Prime Minister was at the G7 in Biarritz four weeks later. The White House briefed that it was the rendezvous Trump was most looking forward to.103 The pair had dinner, and the following morning came their first, Tennielesque, public appearance. Where Trump and May holding hands walked along a colonnade, Trump and Johnson shoulder to shoulder descended a staircase. ‘Do you know who this is?’, Trump asked the media at the bottom. ‘Does everybody know?’ Pool photographs had them mirrored, either side of their breakfast table, guffawing and pointing at each other. ‘We had a great two and a half days’, the President said.104 Their second meeting was in New York four weeks after that. Both had delivered typically ideational and idiomatic addresses to the UN General Assembly, Trump spending a morning monotonously propounding exceptionalism and nationalism, Johnson in the middle of the night excitedly discoursing on chickens and robots.105 Trump mentioned Johnson and the UK, and

99  Bolton, Room, 307; Tim Shipman, Sunday Times, 26 July 2020; Sebastian Payne and Katrina Manson, ‘Donald Trump “apoplectic” in call with Boris Johnson’, The Financial Times, 6 February 2020. Adam Bienkov, ‘Trump is losing the support of the United States’ closest ally’, Business Insider, 8 February 2020, 1:00 PM. 100  Rob Crilly, ‘Boris Johnson postpones White House visit after nasty phone spat with Trump over Huawei’, Washington Examiner, 14 February 2020. 101  Benjamin Mueller, ‘Pompeo Praises Britain for Getting Tough on China’, New York Times, 21 July 2020. 102  Carol E. Lee, ‘Bolton’s message to the U.K. on Brexit: “We’re with you”’, NBC News, 12 August 2019. 103  Washington Post, 24 August 2019. 104  Global News pool footage, 25 August 2019; White House, Remarks 25 August 2019; Remarks, 26 August 2019. 105  White House, Remarks to the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 25 September 2019; PMO, PM speech to the UN General Assembly, 24 September 2019.

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promised a ‘magnificent new trade deal’.106 The two held a bilateral and met the media. ‘It’s great to be with my friend’, Trump announced. ‘I know him very well.’ They sat abreast. Prospects were great. Humour was heavy. Presidential hand alighted upon prime ministerial knee. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’107 With a by now almost comforting predictability there was Trump’s third—at least—public misstatement over his presence, and prescience, regarding the Brexit thing.108 And, to ‘develop market-oriented principles for economic growth and increase bilateral cooperation on issues related to the modern 21st century economy’, they announced a Special Relationship Economic Working Group.109 With this President the British neurosis over nomenclature, at least, for once could be assuaged. Their third meeting few saw. With a parliamentary majority that had all but disappeared through dissension over Brexit, Johnson called a general election for 12 December 2019. The London NATO summit happened to be taking place the week before. And with it a visit from Trump. That nearly threequarters of British voters had a negative opinion of the Prime Minister’s friend meant that other than the official routine summit handshake of welcome, the two were neither seen nor photographed together. For good measure Johnson prevailed on Trump to cancel a television interview.110 Johnson did have the Trumps to dinner, privately, at 10 Downing Street, but avoided the President at a Buckingham Palace reception where it did him no harm to be filmed standing near Justin Trudeau as the Canadian Prime Minister made audibly injudicious remarks about Trump.111 When informed of them, the President cut short the summit.112 That no meeting between NATO’s dominant partner and the summit host had been scheduled was a diplomatic curiosity given that Trump had had meetings with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, amongst others. At his press conference, it was noted that Johnson avoided referring to Trump by name, despite mentioning Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, amongst others. Pressed on the point, the Prime Minister cut short the conference.113  Remarks, 25 September 2019.  Remarks, 24 September 2019. 108  Trump claimed to have been in the UK before the vote and to have predicted the result; he arrived the day after, and after Cameron’s resignation. White House, Remarks and Prime Minister Varadkar, 14 March 2019; White House, Remarks and NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, 3 December 2019. Jon Sopel, @BBCJonSopel, 13 July 2018, 2:38 PM; 14 March 2019, 17:49. 109  PMO, Joint Statement Following the Meeting of President Donald J.  Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, 25 August 2019. 110  ‘During the NATO summit Johnson prevailed on Trump to cancel a television interview’, Mail on Sunday, 8 December 2019. 111  Mark MacKinnon, and Steven Chase, ‘Trump calls Trudeau “two-faced,” overshadowing NATO summit’, Globe and Mail, 4 December 2019. 112  Tom Howell Jnr, ‘Trump Scraps NATO news conference, leaves London early after leaders mock him’, Washington Times, 4 December 2019. 113  Robert Hutton, ‘President Who?’, Bloomberg, 4 December 2019; David Brennan, ‘NATO snub shows Trump is too toxic to be Boris Johnson’s ‘friend’, Newsweek, 5 December 2019. 106 107

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Pandemic With the general election triumphantly won, three months into Johnson’s greatly empowered premiership, any development of the relationship was suspended by the first global pandemic for a century, one which, as Trump put it, ‘came out of China’.114 Initially, each, characteristically, publicly made light of his own engagement with Covid-19, as both an issue and an infection. In March 2020 the President told one of his press conferences ‘it’s going to disappear. It’s like a miracle. It will disappear’, while the Prime Minister told one of his that, on a visit to a hospital treating infected patients, ‘I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands’.115 On 27 March the Prime Minister announced that he had tested positive. Ten days later he was hospitalised. Trump called and wished Johnson ‘a speedy recovery’.116 When they spoke, Trump revealed that, ‘before I even was able to get a word out of him, he said—I said, ‘How are you doing?’ He said: ‘We need ventilators.’117 It was a piece of reportage the President re-broadcast several times, highlighting as it did both natural solicitousness and national supplicancy. Johnson’s condition deteriorated. ‘I also want to send best wishes to a very good friend of mine and a friend to our nation’, the President said. ‘We’re very saddened to hear that he was taken into intensive care. … Americans are all praying for his recovery.’ The personal, as ever, was at least also transactional. The President spoke to two leading American drug companies. ‘Their London office has whatever they need, and we’ll see if we can be of help. We’ve contacted all of Boris’s doctors.’118 Consequently or not, Johnson recovered. Three months later, four months into the pandemic, and after prolonged pressure, within twenty-four hours of each other Trump and Johnson for the first time wore face coverings in public.119 Trump’s impulses were consistent with his UN General Assembly address, although he appeared symbolically, initially, to exempt the UK from a European travel ban.120 Coalition member against it as he may have been, neither before nor after his incapacitation did Johnson join Trump in condemning ‘the nation

114  White House, Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, 25 March 2020. 115  White House, Remarks and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, 30 March 2020; ‘UK PM Johnson: Coronavirus will not stop me shaking hands’, Reuters, 3 March 2020. 116  @JuddPDeere45, 27 March 2020. 117  White House, Remarks at Naval Station Norfolk, 28 March 2020. 118  Remarks, 7 April 2020. 119  Jane Merrick, Hugo Gye, ‘Boris Johnson wears face mask in public for the first time’, 10 July 2020; ‘Trump Wears Mask in Public for First Time During Walter Reed Visit’, NPR, 11 July 2020. 120  White House, Remarks Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, 15 April 2020, and 14 March 2020; White House, Remarks in Address to the Nation, 11 March 2020.

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which unleashed this plague onto the world: China’.121 Though the pair differed publicly over incrimination and Trump’s statements about treatments, which could tend to the capricious, they were as one in having a disaffected public increasingly dissatisfied with their management of the crisis. It was compounded by what their advisers warned were counterproductive daily briefings; as H. R. McMaster, Trump’s second National Security Adviser in one month, described policy more broadly, ‘the audio doesn’t match the video’.122 Trump told the world ‘we launched the most aggressive mobilization since the Second World War’, and, like the Second World War, it grounded the special relationship: the UK and the US were the worst performing G7 countries.123 Nevertheless, by 1 October the President, who had long since stopped wearing a face covering, felt able to declare that ‘the end of the pandemic is in sight’.124 On 2 October the President announced that he had tested positive. Later that day he was hospitalised. Johnson called and wished Trump ‘a speedy recovery’.125 Having been pulled apart the pair again had been pushed together: the Prime Minister, through his own experience, suddenly became a medical proxy for the President, with physiological similarities ascribed to them by commentators and politicians as auguries were sought.126 During the prolonged hiatus of 2020, with the pair at different times infected by the virus, and throughout distracted by the pandemic, the usual choreography of the relationship ceased; the boosterism—they were ‘working great together!’—implausible.127 Apparently having recovered within days, Trump channelled Roosevelt: ‘Don’t be afraid of Covid.’128 It became central to his re-energised re-election campaign, which included the now traditional appearance of Nigel Farage. That Trump’s presidency should have ended in sight of victory—a vaccine being announced a week after he lost the election, and with mass vaccinations to begin early in the

121  White House, Remarks to the 75th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 22 September 2020. 122  Jonathan Swan, ‘Trump plans to cut daily coronavirus briefings’, Axios, 24 April 2020; Greg Heffer, ‘Government scraps COVID-19 briefings at weekends due to low viewing figures’, Sky News, 2 June 2020. H. R. McMaster, The Situation Room, CNN, 24 September 2020. 123  Remarks, 22 September 2020. Measured by deaths per million population. Worldometer, ‘Reported Cases and Deaths by Country’, Territory, or Conveyance, 2 October 2020, 13:19. Among many others: AP/NORC, ‘Dissatisfaction with the Federal COVID-19 Response Remains High’, 24 August 2020. Richard Wike, Janell Fetterolf, and Mara Mordecai, ‘U.S. Image Plummets Internationally’, Pew Research Center, 15 September 2020; Kat Devlin and Aidan Connaughton, ‘Most Approve of National Response to COVID-19 in 14 Advanced Economies’, Pew Research Center, 27August 2020. 124  White House, Remarks to Guests at the Al Smith Dinner, 1 October 2020. 125  Boris Johnson, @BorisJohnson, 2 October 2020, 08:56. 126  Among many others: Kim Hjelmgaard, ‘Boris Johnson: UK leader’s Covid-19 Fight may be Blueprint for Trump’, USA Today, 3 October 2020; Therese Raphael, ‘Boris Johnson’s Covid Case Has Echoes for Trump’, Bloomberg, 3 October 2020. 127  @realDonaldTrump, 8 September 2020. 128  Donald Trump, @RealDonaldTrump, 5 October 2020, 19:37.

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new year—was indeed Rooseveltian; less so his behaviour; his refusal to concede, to facilitate the transition to his successor, or even to accept the result. It was unusual for presidential and prime ministerial terms to be known so precisely to coincide: the next US and UK elections would be in 2024. But there was in any case more than usual speculation as to with which President the Prime Minister would rather spend the next four years.129 Routine exploratory contacts between the British and the challenger’s teams were harder given the pandemic, the determination of either campaign to avoid connections with foreign powers, the personal and political association with the outgoing administration, and the antipathy of the candidate to the Prime Minister. The latter sentiment was derived from the anti-Obama past as well as the pro-­ Trump present of the ‘shapeshifting creep’ of fond recall.130 A member of the Biden team said his colleagues ‘see Boris and Cummings like Trump and Bannon’.131 The week after Biden won, Johnson made significant personnel changes at 10 Downing Street. They included the headline departure of Cummings. Two days before, in welcoming the ‘incoming Biden-Harris Administration’, the Prime Minister spoke of ‘the previous President’.132 Without naming him.

Conclusion Severely foreshortened though it turned out to be, the most trumpeted of any relationship between a President and Prime Minister ended up being less substantial than most. It was the more so for the distance between appearance and reality, as much a matter of what was thought would be—and certainly what at least one party continually presented it as being—as what it actually was; or, as they both might say, what might have been. For all that the relationship was, more than most, intimate, it was also, more than most, circumstantial. And the circumstances of 2020 were unpropitious generally. As it went on, the Prime Minister’s first full year in office increasingly looked like being the President’s last. The presentational always having been central for each man, to the extent that the pandemic had any benefits for Johnson, not being able to be seen with Trump was probably one, particularly given Trump’s conduct in the weeks after the election. Nothing in his presidency betrayed him like the leaving it.

129  Tim Shipman, ‘You won’t even hear it whispered in No 10, but they’re desperate for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump’, Sunday Times, 26 July 2020; Jonathan Freedland, ‘One person hoping Donald Trump wins: Boris Johnson’, Guardian, 16 October 2020; Tim Shipman, ‘Panicking No 10 Dumps Donald Trump and woos Joe Biden’, Sunday Times, 11 October 2020. 130  Tommy Vietor, @TVietor08, 7 November 2020, 6.06 PM. Vietor had been National Security Spokesman for Obama. 131  Official quoted in Shipman, Sunday Times, 8 November 2020. 132  Boris Johnson, HCD, 11 November 2020, vol 683, col 905.

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Of all the relationships since Grover Cleveland and Lord Salisbury, that of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson was an inversion: a President infatuated with a Prime Minister. But while that was a dynamic any number of Prime Ministers would have appreciated, this was the President from whom such attention was least welcome. Of no other candidate for the Presidency could Johnson’s reckless ad hominem remarks from before the two victories of 2016 reasonably have been said (and from no other candidate for Prime Minister would they have been uttered). As was the case for many American conservatives, Johnson’s attitude to Trump was transformed by Trump’s election. It did not, however, make life any easier thereafter. Equally uniquely, the President was much happier talking about their special relationship than was the Prime Minister: one continually mentioned the other, and the other never used the one’s name if he could possibly help it. For all the striking similarities, the differences, personal and political, were indeed as significant, if not as apparent. Johnson’s commitment seemed less than deeply felt; to that extent it was at one with his premiership. Insofar as either could be said to exist as a mode of governing, Trumpism and Johnsonism were definable as expressions of will. For each, charismatic populist impulse was stronger than ideology. But as a mode of governing it was particularly tested in a pandemic, when competence, or at least the appearance of competence, counted for so much. The ambivalence these least veracious of leaders felt towards experts was controversial enough even before their own survival, and that of their publics, depended on them. There was a symmetry in the coincidental international damage wrought to their—and their countries’—reputations by Covid, in how 2020 recalled 2016. One of the things Brexit and Trump had in common was that however reputationally damaging they may have been held to be abroad, that was immaterial—indeed may well have appealed—to their supporters at home. But the virus would not admit of a narrative being crafted, however charismatic the populist. Trump’s and Johnson’s handling of the pandemic rebounded and estranged. The death toll in their countries exceeded a quarter of a million, a quarter of all those in the world to have died. So it was that the pandemic reinforced a sense that at no other time than that consequent to 2016 could two such individuals have attained the highest office. Victory did indeed beget victory. Individual personal scandals or controversies that before would assuredly have ended a political career appeared only to embolden. Though their coterminous period in office was only seventeen months, given the prologue it felt longer. With one circumstance—his position—secure, it was likely that Johnson would have to have made more of the relationship but for two further circumstances: his management of the pandemic and the cumulative damage to Trump during 2020. Even after his election, Johnson chose not to associate before being freed by circumstances from having to. It could only mean a relationship unfulfilled, perhaps unfulfillable. A Biden presidency gave cause to reflect on the apparent renaissance in presidential and prime ministerial relations. With Obama and Cameron, and Trump

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and May, chemistry and choreography was only an aspect of the relationship, its presence in the former and its absence in the latter nevertheless helping to define each. Neither having much in the way of fixed beliefs—something else that made the natural allies remarkably compatible—Trump and Johnson had little else. Trump’s effusions were frequent but verbal. Having led his country into geopolitical uncertainty, no Prime Minister was so in need of material presidential support, yet as far as the stronger party was concerned, in policy terms it was a relationship without concession. The personal had more than primacy;, it was closer to totality. This vaunting of a Prime Minister by a President was not normal. It was also not reciprocated. Johnson, voluble domestically, was taciturn as regards his champion. If Johnson could not have expected so apparently close a relationship with Biden as he had had with Trump, he might also have wondered, given how superficial that had proven to be, how much it might matter. Thus the hope of the Regency approach: interests and institutions to endure; structures and safeguards to abide. Thus was the most unconventional president replaced by a most conventional, underpinned by alliances, co-operation, and the promised renewal of American leadership, irrelevant as that may have sounded at large in two increasingly inward-looking polities in the year of the pandemic. Though they almost did, neither President nor Prime Minister found themselves with the period in office they had expected; their moment, for all the anticipation, looked like being one consumed by global catastrophe. One thing to persist was the long shadow of the foundational pairing, able as they were at least to set their people on a course to victory. The Prime Minister had been, as per convention, assiduous in neither publicly nor privately leaning towards either candidate in the 2020 presidential election. For those inclined to see them, the optics told one story, although Biden’s record foretold another. In November 2020, foreign policy began to be re-institutionalised. With the fortuitous coincidence of forthcoming UK leadership of the UN Security Council, the G7, and COP26, an opportunity presented itself, Brexit and Covid notwithstanding. The Prime Minister was the first leader outside of North America to whom the President-elect spoke. And Biden spoke the words ‘special relationship’, just as he had been embracing Johnson’s bromide about the impending post-pandemic reconstruction: ‘Build Back Better.’ A week later Johnson announced the biggest increase in defence spending since the Cold War, which ensured that the UK was second to the US in contributions to NATO. It all may or may not have been a coincidence, but in London, as 2020 drew to a close, the commentators’ word of choice was ‘reset’.

CHAPTER 19

Conclusion Gill Bennett

For nearly half a century, I have been involved in the editing and publication of volumes of the official documentary history of British foreign policy.1 In the majority of those publications, the core of the documentation concerns relations between Great Britain and the United States of America. At editorial meetings where volume titles were discussed, the inclusion of Anglo-American relations was nearly always ruled out, on the grounds that the core of all British foreign policy lay in its relations with the United States. Though that is too sweeping a generalisation, it is undeniable that whether in close collaboration or at times of heightened tension and serious disagreement, the health of the transatlantic relationship has tended to dominate senior counsels within the Foreign Office (FO), as well as in Downing Street. Throughout the period covered by this study of presidents and prime ministers, an enormous number of words, spoken and written, have been devoted to analysing, predicting or 1  There have been historians in the Foreign Office for over a century, producing publications on British foreign policy, from the Peace Handbooks produced in 1917–1919 for use at the Paris Peace Conference, to the most recent volumes of Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO): Series III, Vol. XI: the Unwinding of Apartheid: UK-South African Relations, 1986–1990 and Vol. XII, Britain and the Revolutions in Eastern Europe, 1989 (Whitehall History Publishing, London: Routledge, 2019 and 2020). All the FCO Historians’ publications are available in digitised form at www.proquest.com; apart from DBPO volumes. They are online at www.issuu. com/fcohistorians. For a complete list, see FCO History Note No. 22: History at the Heart of Diplomacy: Historians in the Foreign Office, 1918–2018 (https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/ docs/history_at_the_heart_of_diplomacy-w).

G. Bennett (*) London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_19

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reacting to American policies and actions, and especially to assessing what view Presidents and other key American players—including U.S. public opinion— take of Britain. There is no other country in the world whose view of Britain has preoccupied ministers and officials, whether in London or overseas, to such an extent. Potentially hostile powers, such as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, did of course receive plenty of attention; but the documentation is heavily weighted in favour of analysis of what the U.S. government thinks about Britain—and about itself. In wrapping up this fascinating and important collection in which more than a century of Anglo-American relations is refracted through the prism of the personalities and policies of the political leaders of Great Britain and the United States of America, I offer some reflections from a different, though related, perspective: that of the British Foreign Office (FO).2 For although the White House and 10 Downing Street are crucial, and frequently dominant elements in the transatlantic relationship, its detail, day-to-day management and first-line problem-solving fall to those officials and diplomats charged with implementing as well as formulating policy, and reporting on developments. It is, of course, government ministers who make policy. But it is the responsibility of the FO, through diplomatic reporting and policy advice, to provide foreign secretaries, and through them prime ministers, with what they need to inform decision-making. Though there can be problems when prime ministers and foreign secretaries disagree strongly on policy, this is generally less disruptive to the foreign policy process than media comment would suggest. The FO has seconded many foreign policy advisers to 10 Downing Street, some of them very influential, while the role of British ambassadors in Washington (and U.S. ambassadors in London) may also be significant. Overall, therefore, the FO perspective on the transatlantic relationship, and on the interaction between presidents and prime ministers, can offer some insights relevant to the preceding chapters.3 In that context, there is an element that has not been explored in detail in the preceding chapters, but is relevant to all of them. That is the question of intelligence—the “missing dimension” in political history.4 It is a subject on which all prime ministers and presidents are briefed regularly, though their interest in, and engagement with intelligence-related issues varies with both circumstance and personality. The principal British domestic and foreign 2  The Foreign Office was renamed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 1968, when it merged with the Commonwealth Office, itself the result of a merger in 1966 between the Commonwealth Relations and Colonial Offices. In September 2020 it became the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), on merging with the Department for International Development (DFID). In the interests of simplicity, FO is used here throughout. 3  All this is to some extent true of the State Department, of course, but systemic differences mean that the process does not operate in quite the same way. These differences are explored further later. 4  This phrase has been in widespread use since the publication of Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984).

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i­ntelligence agencies, the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (later known as MI6), had their origins in a bureau established in 1909, in the early months of the Taft presidency. The Government Code and Cypher School (precursor of today’s Government Communications Headquarters, (GCHQ), was formed in 1919 during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, merging the War Office and Naval Intelligence codebreaking sections that had scored outstanding successes during the First World War. As far as American equivalents are concerned, the FBI originated in 1908, while Theodore Roosevelt was in office, and although the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) were established after the Second World War under Truman, the collection and analysis of intelligence by a range of U.S. organisations, as well as cryptological operations, had been in progress since during the First World War, their activities expanded greatly during World War II.5 Throughout the period covered by this collection, intelligence has contributed to policy-making, and to the transatlantic relationship. Intelligence is only one factor in policy-making, and rarely decisive, though it clearly assumes greater importance at times of crisis: during the 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 wars, for example, but also during the Vietnam War, the Falklands conflict, both Gulf Wars and operations in Afghanistan, all discussed in this collection. Presidents and prime ministers in office during such conflicts must take intelligence into account, whether they decide to act on it or not. As the preceding chapters have shown, a key bond between those holding the highest political office is the unique understanding each has of the other’s position and the pressure they face, when “problems are coming at them like darts approach a dartboard.”6 They appreciate that “sometimes things are just not possible because the political cost to the other would be too high,” and may find relief in talking to someone who appreciates the loneliness, and ultimate responsibility of office.7 Every president and prime minister also knows that the other is privy to secret sources that may inform their policy and attitudes. They may share intelligence for mutual benefit as with UK-U.S. collaboration on signals intelligence (SIGINT) during the Second World War. It may also be a source of friction, if security has been compromised—for example, the unmasking of British atomic spies, discovery of Soviet agents in official positions in both countries during the Cold War, or the leakage of information online. The exchange of intelligence and its impact are not aired publicly. But although 5  On this, see Mark Stout, “World War I and the Birth of American Intelligence Culture,” Intelligence and National Security 32, no. 3 (2017): 378–94. There is a vast literature on Second World War U.S. intelligence and the origins of the modern community. An early but useful account is Bradley F.  Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA (London: Andre Deutsch, 1983). 6  Sir Oliver Wright, British Ambassador in Washington 1982–1986, interviewed in 1996 for the British Diplomatic Oral History Project (https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/ Wright_Oliver.pdf). This programme is a rich source for the Anglo-American relationship through the recollections of British diplomats who served in Washington or at the UN. 7  See Burk and Ashton chapters in this book.

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evidence may not be available until many years later, its potential significance to the interaction of presidents and prime ministers must not be overlooked. Since 1945, intelligence and security cooperation has formed the strongest and most interdependent strand of the Anglo-U.S. relationship, both in a bilateral context and in other groupings such as the “Five Eyes” (with Australia, New Zealand and Canada) and of course within NATO. This is not to say that the “hidden hand,” as Richard Aldrich put it, should be looked for in all aspects of the Anglo-American relationship. But it is important to both governments.8 The intelligence dimension is of particular relevance to the FO, since it is the “parent” department to both SIS and GCHQ. While the prime minister has overall responsibility for intelligence and security matters, day to day ministerial responsibility for both agencies rests with the foreign secretary. MI5 is under the statutory authority of the home secretary, while the director-general is also directly responsible to the prime minister. Yet until the Second World War, requests for operational authorisation from all parts of the intelligence establishment, including MI5, were funnelled through the FO, which dispensed Treasury funds from the Secret Vote. These processes evolved in peacetime, with separate arrangements made for MI5, and have been refined further with the placing of the agencies on a statutory basis through legislation between 1988 and 1996.9 Today, the blurred distinction between domestic and global threats and prevalence of transnational crime mean all parts of the intelligence community work closely together.10 The nature of FO business means that intelligence always has a key role to play. Only certain officers, in certain departments, will have routine contact with secret material. But information based on intelligence sources will be fed through to all those who need to be aware of it to do their job. In a broader context, the relationship between Britain and the United States has, for both countries, been the most significant relationship with a foreign power throughout the period covered by this collection. Of course, each has other close partners, key relationships that may assume a higher priority at times and different hemispheric focus. There are certain issues, such as Northern Ireland, Middle Eastern policy, the role of the United Nations, and Britain’s relations with Europe, which historically have proved to be points of friction in transatlantic relations. Yet as the preceding chapters have shown, the strong thread of continuity, regardless of the personal chemistry—or lack of 8  Richard J.  Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001). 9  Relevant legislation includes the Security Service Act 1989, Intelligence Services Act 1994 and Security Service Act 1996. Details can be found on the websites of the agencies. Further detail on the history can be found in Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2009); Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber Intelligence Agency (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 10  In the United States, there is a multiplicity of agencies in the intelligence community, although their coordination may be more constrained.

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it—between political leaders is striking. Personal interaction between presidents and prime ministers has been significant, but not decisive in determining how well the United Kingdom and the United States have cooperated, in foreign affairs and on a range of related issues including security and intelligence, nuclear policy and trade. The strongest glue sticking together Britain and the United States is that whatever their relative strengths and capabilities, both nations place high importance on acting in defence of their national interests: and in times of crisis, these interests have usually coincided. Despite disagreements and disparities, each has been and remains the other’s closest ally. As one former British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Anthony Acland, remarked, even though presidents and U.S. officials are prone to forget it, deep down they know that “when the chips are down there is only one wholly reliable ally in the world, and that is the United Kingdom.”11 Sir Oliver Franks, in 1950, expressed it succinctly when recommending that Britain agree to send troops to Korea: the Americans would, he said, be “in a tough spot for a long time. They look round for their partner.”12 From a British perspective, at any point between 1895 and the present day one could find documentation emphasising the importance of keeping as close to the United States as possible, and ensuring that British and American policies are pursued, if not in tandem, at least in close coordination. Britain and the United States have a shared history, traditions, language and culture that may in themselves be sources of friction. In his Introduction, Michael Cullinane writes that the reason for starting this collection with Cleveland and Salisbury was that before that period, anti-British sentiment in the United States “emanated from a postcolonial history not far from living memory.” It is a reasonable decision, but the break is not so clear-cut. Clearly, it is fanciful to imagine the spectre of 1776 haunting the FO more than a hundred, or two hundred years later, as the United States became a major hemispheric, then global, power on whom Britain grew steadily more dependent. Yet that original relationship, between colonial power and new Republic, bequeathed a remarkably durable legacy of powerful prejudice to presidents and prime ministers, and to those charged with servicing their relationship. Successive presidents and their administrations continued to regard the British as arrogant imperialists long after their empire had ceased to exist. They were thought to be superior in manner, though inferior to the United States in terms of morality, and with diminished democratic credentials because of their colonial past. As American power, and the willingness to exercise it, grew ever greater, particularly after 1945, there was a tendency to distrust British motives on the grounds that they had not moved with the times. They should be 11  Transcript of 2001 interview with Sir A. Acland, HMA Washington 1986–1991, for the British Diplomatic Oral History programme (https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/ Acland.pdf). 12  Washington telegram 2036, 23 July 1950, TNA FO 371/84091, FK 1022/222, printed in DBPO, Series II, Vol. IV, No. 25.

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encouraged—forcefully—to do so, if necessary by the use of American economic leverage. Britain could be treated roughly, and with less consideration than other countries, precisely because the relationship was so close—like a family member. From a British perspective, accusations of being wedded to an outdated imperial mindset did not sit well with what seemed suspiciously like American imperialism, albeit economic rather than territorial, as U.S. commercial interests shouldered aside British companies in the Middle East, for example. However, it was always understood that the imperative of keeping as close to the Americans as possible meant accepting, at times, a certain amount of familial rough treatment. Ernest Bevin, as foreign secretary, accepted that Britain had to comply with sometimes unwelcome demands in order to secure the U.S. commitment essential to the future of Western security. But even he grumbled that “we always seem to have greater difficulty than other countries that have to deal with America.” Problems caused by American high-­handedness might be surmountable, but they were, as Bevin put it in 1947, “burning deep.”13 Despite the excellent relations many FO officials or diplomats had with their U.S. contacts and counterparts, it is not unusual throughout the twentieth century to find Americans described as brash, overemotional or gauche, with a tendency to bully their allies. There may also be detected a degree of surprise, even incomprehension, that Americans did not seem to appreciate—still less accept—the advice offered to them by their transatlantic partners. Britain was, after all, so much older, its experience in policy (particularly dealing with foreigners) so much more extensive: surely the Americans could see that? The following quotation from a despatch sent from Washington in August 1945 by John Balfour, number two in the Embassy, provides an example representative of a certain mindset: Americans may be counted upon to display the virtues and defects inherent in a people which, throughout the comparative short span of its history, has seen itself as dedicated to the advancement of human freedoms and blessed beyond the inhabitants of other lands with a moral and democratic way of life. … Faith in the magic of large words; an enthusiastic belief that the mere enunciation of an abstract principle is equivalent to its concrete fulfilment; a tendency to overlook the practical difficulties that obstruct the easy solution of current problems; above all a constant disposition to prefer the emotional to the rational approach—these are amongst the salient traits that are likely in the future, no less than in the past, to provoke Americans to impatience with the more stolid, disillusioned and pragmatic British.14

13  Letter from Bevin to Lord Inverchapel, HM Ambassador in Washington, 17 March 1947, FO 115/4335, printed in DBPO, Series I, Vol. XI, No. 63. 14  Washington despatch 1038 of 9 August 1945, TNA FO 371/44557, AN 2560/45; printed in DBPO, Series I, Vol. III, No. 3.

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“Jock” Balfour was an experienced diplomat with many close American friends, including George Kennan. Yet he, like some of his colleagues, did not seem to understand how provocative such attitudes might be, encouraging the suspicion that the British were trying to “pull a fast one” and exercise undue influence over U.S. policies.15 Some differences of perception originated with the deep-rooted traditions of the FO, established in 1782, only six years after the American Revolution. As John Thompson points out in his chapter on Wilson and Lloyd George, in 1913 the United States had no professional foreign service, employing 213 people in the State Department, with 450 more overseas. The FO had over 120 years of a head start in developing a bureaucratic culture, and civil service training tended towards formality and conservatism. Yet beneath the formal carapace, informal relations and productive collaboration between American and British officials proceeded unhindered. There were, indeed, many Americans, particularly those parachuted abruptly into complex policy areas on a change of presidency, who welcomed the advice of those who had had time to acquire more expertise. Cultural differences diminished during the second half of the twentieth century, as swifter communication and more frequent travel rendered diplomacy more immediate and less formulaic. But disagreements on policy, compounded by an increasing imbalance in relative power and influence between Britain and the United States, meant that British diplomatic discourse tended, nevertheless, to retain the tone of sentiments like those expressed by Balfour in 1945. British Ambassador to the United States Nigel Sheinwald (2007–2012) noted that during the financial crisis, the Obama White House felt they were being lectured to, “handed a British script which they were expected to observe,” a perception that raised hackles despite their appreciation of Gordon Brown’s expert handling.16 This shows the persistence of the suspicion, at all levels from the president through to Congress and even American public opinion, that the British are “talking down” to Americans. On the British side, the most persistent complaint has been that the Americans will always stress the importance of working together, yet take decisions without consultation and expect their closest allies to fall into line. The critical comment of British Ambassador to the United States Sir Nicholas Henderson (1979–1982) was not unusual: I am sure there is no need for me to spell out the untidy and uncoordinated method by which the US arrives at its foreign policy, except to say that they are probably worse now than ever before, but that really we can do absolutely nothing about it. … They see the need to do something and they see certain pieces 15  Given that senior FO official Sir Orme Sargent wrote in July 1945 “We must have a policy of our own and try to persuade the United States to make it their own,” this was not perhaps unreasonable. Stocktaking after VE-Day, 11 July 1945, TNA FO 371/50912, U 5471/5471/70; printed in DBPO, Series I, Vol. I. No. 102. 16  Sir Nigel Sheinwald, interviewed in 2016 for the British Diplomatic Oral History Project (https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Sheinwald.pdf).

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that must be put into place but they have no overall concept, which partly I think explains why there is all this talk of inadequate consultations; because they are not really clear what exactly it is they want to consult about, except of course to get the rest of their Allies into line.17

Generally, however, at the level of president and prime minister, personal style and the mutual understanding of the pressures of high office modulate any awkwardness rooted in stereotypical perceptions. The tone might be sweetened, as by the flattery employed by Churchill with Roosevelt; it might be sharpened, as when Thatcher warned Reagan against taking a decision she opposed. When the relationship was more distant, whether deliberately or through force of circumstance (as in the case of Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, for example), there was less opportunity for the development of a personal “tone,” and more for the fostering of suspicion. Martin Farr’s account of the different relationship between President Obama and Gordon Brown, and that with David Cameron, is a good illustration of this. Nevertheless, as Victoria Honeyman shows in her account of the relationship between John Major and Bill Clinton, the perception of distance, or friction, may be more apparent than real. Differences between the two systems of government compound the tendency to perpetuate unhelpful stereotypes. The position of the president of the United States is entirely different to that of the prime minister, even though both are subject to regular elections. There is far greater deference to the office, and person of the president, and to other senior administration figures (deference is not a Whitehall tradition). Presidents are not subject to a weekly grilling by their political opponents, as prime ministers are in the House of Commons. The separation of powers, and the role of Congress, is not mirrored in the British Parliamentary system; Cabinet government, with collective ministerial responsibility, has no parallel in Washington. There is, generally speaking, far greater interdepartmental collaboration in Whitehall than there is in Washington, and less internal competition (except for Treasury funds). In terms of foreign policy, the White House, Pentagon, Treasury, and other departments (including the Supreme Court) all have a role to play. Each may be pursuing its own agenda, without reference to the rest of the administration, although for an important policy issue, it is vital to ensure that those at the top of the policy chain—the National Security Council—are on board with the detail. In the British governmental system, departments other than the FO are, of course, concerned closely with foreign policy, and important issues will be discussed in Cabinet. But it is the FO, together with the Cabinet Office and No. 10 that takes the lead. Another key difference, of course, is the U.S. system whereby the majority of officials leave their jobs at the end of an administration. This disrupts continuity, particularly if many posts remain unfilled after 17  Letter from Sir N.  Henderson (Washington) to Sir Donald Maitland, 3 April 1980, FCO 46/2179, DPN 061/18, printed in DBPO, Series III, Vol. VIII, No. 59.

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the transition or, as during the Trump presidency, there is a rapid turnover of staff. In Whitehall, the civil service code means that officials continue in post when a government changes and will serve whomever comes into power. The constraints of the U.S. electoral timetable have a profound effect on the Anglo-American relationship, not least because, as Robin Renwick observed, every time the presidency changes, American pundits declare that the special relationship is at an end.18 This includes both presidential and congressional elections. In a presidential election year, whether or not the incumbent is seeking re-election, the imperative has always been to avoid as far as possible uncertain initiatives or decisions with unpredictable consequences, and to seek easy wins and foreign policy successes. No president can be expected to agree to a joint initiative, or support a British policy during an election year unless there is some electoral advantage to be derived. In 1956, Anthony Eden forgot or ignored this golden rule over Suez, although FO officials were certainly aware of it, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan wrote many months before the crisis that “the Americans are now only thinking about the Presidential election and whether ‘Ike’ will run again or not.”19 Of course, presidents may also find that events overtake their best-laid plans; as the preceding chapters show, this was certainly the case for Johnson in 1968, and Carter in 1980, and indeed for Trump in 2020. The process for the selection of presidential candidates is also important. In the run-up to the 1948 election, for example, the Attlee government found that relations with the United States over the Berlin blockade, as well as Palestine, became embroiled in the debate between potential Republican candidates running against Truman, requiring considerable diplomatic flexibility. As U.S. electoral campaigns became increasingly professionally run (and well-­ funded), it became more common for British diplomats and advisers to engage in depth with both party campaigns, particularly if the outcome of an election seemed likely to be close. During the 1992 campaign, for example, despite close ties between Major’s government and President George H. W. Bush, the British Ambassador Robin Renwick, suspecting Bill Clinton might win, initiated a programme of talks with Clinton advisers and assigned an embassy official to the Clinton campaign.20 In reality, contacts between British diplomats and presidential candidates have always taken place, even if they are less well-­ documented than normal embassy business. Following an election, the transition period presents its own problems. It is difficult to get much Anglo-American business done since many jobs will be unfilled and the new presidential team are under a lot of pressure. But it is an 18  Lord (Robin) Renwick, Ambassador in Washington 1991–1995, interviewed in 1998 for the British Diplomatic Oral History (https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/ Renwick.pdf). 19  Peter Catterall (ed), The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years, 1950–57 (London: Macmillan, 2004), 526. See also Gill Bennett, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chapter 2. 20  Lord Renwick, interview for British Diplomatic Oral History Project.

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important period for British diplomats and officials to develop contacts with the new administration, and to try to ensure that British interests are brought to the front of the policy queue, if possible. Once the new term starts, a president will wish to make maximum use of their first 100 days to drive through policies on which it may be difficult to secure congressional agreement later on. It is during this period that the “rough treatment” of British interests mentioned earlier can come into play. An example of this can be seen in 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt began his first term in the midst of the Great Depression, determined to drive through a raft of radical measures as soon as possible. Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British ambassador, was in no doubt that in order to “sell” his programme to Congress and to the American public, the president would need to demonstrate that he was taking a tough line with Britain on the settlement of war debts and trade issues. Even before taking office, Roosevelt told Lindsay that he knew Anglo-American attitudes on debt issues were “in irreconcilable opposition to each other,” but appealed for British help in order to “gild the pill for Congress.” Lindsay reported to London that Roosevelt knew “no other place to turn” and was hoping to capitalise on the strength of AngloAmerican relations to help him out. This posed a familiar dilemma to British policymakers: whether to accept an unpalatable settlement on American terms, or risk damaging Anglo-American relations.21 It is in circumstances like these that personal interaction between president and prime minister is particularly important. In April 1933, Ramsay MacDonald travelled to Washington and spoke to Roosevelt alone. Each acknowledged the other’s position: MacDonald observed that “it would be impossible to add to burdens of British taxpayer[s].” Roosevelt assured him that “his proposals were based purely on considerations of internal policy.” A press statement emphasised the friendly spirit in which the talks took place. Both men knew that reaching agreement would be tough, but that their priority was how to present unpalatable but necessary measures to their legislative bodies, and to the public. The face-to-face meeting provided a platform from which discussions could proceed, based on that shared understanding.22 For both Britain and the United States, every important policy decision must take into account the domestic imperative. Presidents and prime ministers always have an eye to the unity of their political parties, to public opinion and to future elections. They represent their national interests first, and must seek ways in which the Anglo-American relationship can help them achieve their objectives. The story of how American power has grown, British power has declined, and how this has affected the transatlantic relationship, is laid out clearly in the chapters of this book. As another former senior British diplomat puts it, Washington became the world capital of foreign policy, and whereas in 21  Coverage of these discussions can be found in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (DBFP), Second Series, Vol. V, Chapter IX. 22  Record of discussions in Washington telegram 238 to the FO, 22 April 1933, C 6351/1/62, printed in DBFP, Vol. V, No. 545.

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Britain or in Europe the first question in response to an unwelcome international development would be “what shall we say about this?” in Washington it would be “what shall we do about it?”23 The U.S. government would expect that “we” to include Britain, while expecting to call the shots; the British government also hoped to be part of that “we” and to influence American policymaking as best it could; even when the decision may be to do nothing. Today, as global dynamics are altering in unpredictable ways, the central dynamic of that relationship remains. Finally, it is worth recalling when considering the interaction of a century of presidents and prime ministers that, like all political leaders, they create a persona for themselves when in office. They present this persona to their Cabinet, to their armed forces, to the media and to the public (their advisers and officials may get a glimpse from the inside). It is a part of their office, and they use it as a protective carapace, an instrument of persuasion and as an electioneering tool. The image they project to their foreign counterparts may or may not be the same, and it runs the risk of being permeated with the ingrained prejudices and assumptions discussed earlier. Some presidents have taken more care about their projection than others. Sir Nigel Sheinwald, for example, considered that the reason that President Obama and his team appeared to be “casual and dismissive” with Prime Minister Gordon Brown was that they had not paid enough attention to the importance of this presentational aspect. They learnt from their mistakes with David Cameron, although, as Martin Farr notes, the easy relationship between Obama and Cameron—both skilled at projecting a persona—masked serious disagreement and a sticky patch in the transatlantic relationship.24 Some prime ministers have given considerable thought to their image when encountering a new president. Harold Macmillan became prime minister in January 1957, when President Eisenhower was an old friend sharing the “link of memories and long friendship.” When the youthful John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, by contrast, he was an unknown entity, described to Macmillan by a gossipy friend as “obstinate, sensitive, ruthless and highly sexed.” Nevertheless, the prime minister spent a good deal of time “trying to work out a method of influencing him and working with him.” For their first meeting, he also spruced up his appearance: Anthony Acland recalled how Macmillan got rid of his “woolly waistcoats” and “stopped shuffling,” deciding that “the old man act wasn’t one that would appeal to the young new frontier President.” On meeting the President, Macmillan’s verdict was that he was “a curious mixture of qualities—courteous, quiet, quick, decisive—and tough.”25 The two men were to forge a mutually beneficial relationship, despite difficulties and 23  Sir Stephen Wright, Minister in Washington 1997–99, interviewed in 2015 for the British Diplomatic Oral History Project (https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Wright_ Stephen.pdf). 24  Sheinwald interview with British Diplomatic Oral History Project. 25  Interview with Acland, ibid. Peter Catterall (ed), The Macmillan Diaries, Vol. II, Prime Minister and After, 1957–1966 (London: Macmillan, 2011), 338, 368.

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disagreement. As Sylvia Ellis describes, there was quite a contrast between Macmillan and the image projected by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, whom President Johnson found disappointing, lacking in Macmillan’s “patrician armor … too ordinary, too much like other politicians.” Yet Johnson surely understood that Wilson’s persona was intended to appeal to those members of his Cabinet and a large part of the wider Labour Party who were innately suspicious of the Americans and would have detected immediately any change in Wilson’s demeanour that implied subservience. Both president and prime minister were, after all, political animals of long experience. Questions of image and public persona have always been important, but they have assumed even greater significance, globally as well as in a transatlantic context, in the age of social media. This has been particularly true, as Martin Farr shows, for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Yet while it may appear that the presidency of Donald Trump and the premiership of Boris Johnson represent a break from tradition, underlain by sharp and sometimes extreme political divisions in both countries, many elements in their relationship reflect continuities described in all chapters of this book. It is true that the first twenty years of the twenty-first century have seen accelerated patterns of change, whether in technological advances, in challenges faced by all nations in the face of worsening climate emergency, or through shifts in the balance of global power brought about by international terrorism, regional insecurity or a pandemic. Yet throughout, questions concerning the United States’ position as a hegemonic power, including its Middle Eastern policies; Britain’s relations with the European Union, including the future of Northern Ireland; the regional ambitions of Russia and the increasing global dominance of China; and above all, the health of the global economy, remain central and compelling to the UK and U.S. governments, whoever is prime minister or president, respectively. The Anglo-American relationship continues to evolve, certainly, but it remains central to Washington’s and Whitehall’s global positioning, and to the way they approach common threats, even when their policies diverge. Therefore, the study of presidents and prime ministers, and of their interaction, remains instructive. History increases its value in turbulent times.

Correction to: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: Power Relations A. Warren Dockter

Correction to: Chapter 7 in: M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­72276-­0_7 Chapter 7 was previously published with wrong title. The spelling of ‘Power’ was incorrect. The title has been changed to “Franklin D.  Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: Power Relations”.

The updated version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­72276-­0_7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0_20

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Appendix: Biographies and Timeline

Presidents Grover Cleveland b. 18 March 1837–d. 24 June 1908 Democrat Edu. Clinton Liberal Academy Sheriff of Erie County, NY, 1871–1873 Mayor of Buffalo, NY, 1882 Governor of New York, 1883–1885 President: 4 March 1885–4 March 1889 4 March 1893–4 March 1897 Select Bibliography: Robert McElroy. Grover Cleveland, the Man and the Statesman. New  York: Harper Brothers, 1923. Allan Nevins. Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1932. Henry F. Graff. Grover Cleveland. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. William McKinley b. 29 January 1843–d. 14 September 1901 Republican Edu. Albany Law School Member of the House of Representatives from Ohio, 1885–1891 Governor of Ohio, 1892–1896 President: 4 March 1897–14 September 1901 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0

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APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Select Bibliography: Margaret Leech. In the Days of McKinley. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. Lewis L. Gould. The Presidency of William McKinley. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1980. Robert W. Merry. President McKinley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. Theodore Roosevelt b. 26 October 1858–d. 6 January 1919 Republican Edu. Harvard University Member of the NY State Assembly, 1882–1884 President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, 1895–1897 Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1897–1898 Governor of New York, 1899–1900 Vice President, 1901 President: 14 September 1901–4 March 1909 Select Bibliography: Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography. New  York: Macmillan, 1913. Edmund Morris. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New  York: Random House, 1979. Kathleen Dalton. Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. New York: Vintage, 2001.  illiam Howard Taft W b. 15 September 1857–d. 8 March 1930 Republican Edu. Yale University Solicitor General, 1890–1892 Appellate Justice, Sixth Circuit, 1892–1900 Governor-General of the Philippines, 1901–1903 Governor of Cuba, 1906 Secretary of War, 1904–1908 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1921–1930 President: 4 March 1909–4 March 1913 Select Bibliography: Henry F.  Pringle. The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (2 volumes). New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1939. Donald F. Anderson. William Howard Taft: A Conservative’s Conception of the Presidency. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Lewis L. Gould. Chief Executive to Chief Justice: Taft Betwixt the White House and Supreme Court. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014.

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

453

Woodrow Wilson b. 28 December 1856–d. 3 February 1924 Democrat Edu. Princeton University Governor of New Jersey, 1902–1910 President: 4 March 1913–4 March 1921 Select Bibliography: Arthur S. Link. Wilson (5 volumes). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947–1965. Scott Berg. Wilson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. O’Toole, Patricia. The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Warren G. Harding b. 2 November 1865–d. 2 August 1923 Republican Edu. Ohio Central College Ohio State Senator, 1900–1904 Ohio Lieutenant Governor, 1904–1906 U.S. Senator, Ohio, 1915–1921 President: 4 March 1921–2 August 1923 Select Bibliography: Andrew Sinclair. The Available Man: The Life Behind the Masks of Warren Gamaliel Harding. New York: Quadrangle, 1969. Robert Murray. The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and his Administration. Newton, CT: American Political Biography Press, 2000. John W. Dean. Warren G. Harding. New York: Times Books, 2004. Calvin Coolidge b. 4 July 1872–d. 5 January 1933 Republican Edu. Amherst College Member Massachusetts House of Representatives, 1907–1908 Mayor, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1910–1911 Massachusetts State Senator, 1912–1915 Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, 1916–1919 Governor of Massachusetts, 1919–1921 Vice President, 1921–1923 President: 2 August 1923–4 March 1929

454 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Select Bibliography: Calvin Coolidge, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. New  York: Cosmopolitan, 1929. Donald R.  McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President. New  York: Macmillan, 1967. Robert H. Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Amity Shales, Coolidge. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Herbert Hoover b. 10 August 1874–d. 20 October 1964 Republican Edu. Stanford University Director U.S. Food Administration, 1917–1918 Secretary of Commerce, 1921–1928 President: 4 March 1929–4 March 1933 Select Bibliography: Herbert Hoover. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover (3 volumes). New  York, Macmillan, 1951. Gary Dean Best. Herbert Hoover (2 volumes). Hoover Institution Press, 1983. Glen Jeansonne. Herbert Hoover: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2016.  ranklin Delano Roosevelt F b. 30 January 1882–d. 12 April 1945 Democrat Edu. Harvard University New York State Senator, 1911–1913 Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913–1920 Governor of New York, 1929–1932 President: 4 March 1933–12 April 1945 Select Bibliography: Geoffrey C.  Ward. A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Nigel Hamilton. The Mantle of Command: FDR at War. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. David Reynolds. From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

455

Harry S. Truman b. 8 May 1884–d. 26 December 1972 Democrat Edu. Spalding’s Commercial College U.S. Senator, Missouri, 1935–1945 Vice President, 1945 President: 12 April 1945–20 January 1953 Select Bibliography: Harry S. Truman Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Year of Decisions. New York: Doubleday, 1955. Memoirs of Harry S.  Truman: Years of Trial and Hope. New  York: Doubleday, 1956. David McCullough, Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Robert Ferrell, Harry S.  Truman: a Life. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1994.  wight. D Eisenhower D b. 14 October 1890–d. 28 March 1969 Democrat Edu. United States Military Academy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, 1951–1952 President: 20 January 1953–20 January 1961 Select Bibliography: Dwight D. Eisenhower, White House Years: Mandate for Change New York: Doubleday, 1963. White House Years: Waging Peace New York: Doubleday, 1965. Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President. New  York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Jean Edward Smith: Eisenhower in War and Peace. New  York: Random House, 2012. John F. Kennedy b. 29 May 1917–d. 22 November 1963 Democrat Edu. Harvard University Member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, 1947–1953 U.S. Senator, Massachusetts, 1953–1960 President: 20 January 1961–22 November 1963

456 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Select Bibliography: Arthur Schlesinger Jr, A Thousand Days: JFK In the White House. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Herbert Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F.  Kennedy. New  York: Doubleday, 1983. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: JFK 1917–1963. New  York: Little, Brown, 2003. L yndon B. Johnson b. 27 August 1908–d. 22 January 1973 Democrat Edu. Southwest Texas State Teachers College; Georgetown University Member of the House of Representatives from Texas, 1947–1953 U.S. Senator, Texas, 1949–1961 Senate Majority Leader, 1955–1961 Vice President 1961–1963 President: 22 November 1963–20 January 1969 Select Bibliography: Lyndon B.  Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency 1963–1969. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972. Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President, 2004. Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, volume 4), 2012. Richard M. Nixon b. 9 January 1913–d. 22 April 1994 Republican Edu. Whittier College, Duke University Member of the House of Representatives from California, 1947–1950 U.S. Senator, California, 1950–1953 Vice President 1953–1961 President: 20 January 1969–9 August 1974 Select Bibliography: Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1978. Stephen Ambrose Nixon: the Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972. New  York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Nixon: Ruin & Recovery, 1973–1990. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1991. John Farrell, Richard Nixon: the Life. New York: Doubleday, 2017.

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

457

Gerald Ford b. 14 July 1913–d. 26 December 2006 Republican Edu. University of Michigan, Yale University Member of the House of Representatives from Michigan, 1949–1973 Leader of the House Republican Conference and House Minority Leader, 1965–1973 Vice President 1973–1974 President: 9 August 1974–20 January 1977 Select Bibliography: Gerald Ford, A Time to Heal New York, Harper & Row, 1979. James Cannon, Gerald R. Ford: an Honorable Life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Scott Kaufman, Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: a Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford. Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 2017. Jimmy Carter b. 1 October 1924– Democrat Edu. United States Naval Academy Governor of Georgia, 1971–1975 President: 20 January 1977–20 January 1981 Select Bibliography: Jimmy Carter, Keeping Face: Memoirs of a President. New  York, Bantam Books, 1982. Stuart Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2018. Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Waterville: Thorndike Press, 2020. Ronald Reagan b. 6 February 1911–d. 5 June 2004 Republican Edu. Eureka College Governor of California, 1967–1975 President: 20 January 1981–20 January 1989 Select Bibliography: Ronald Reagan, An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Lou Cannon, Ronald Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime. New  York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Bob Spitz, Reagan: an American Journey. New York: Penguin, 2018.

458 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

 eorge H. W. Bush G b. 12 June 1924–d. 30 November 2018 Republican Edu. Yale Member of the House of Representatives from Texas, 1967–1971 Ambassador to the United Nations, 1971–1973 CIA Director, 1976–1977 Vice President, 1981–1989 President: 20 January 1988–20 January 1993 Select Bibliography: George H. W. Bush, A World Transformed, New York, Knopf, 1998. Herbert Parmet, George Bush: Life of a Lone Star Yankee. New  York: Scribner, 1997. John Meacham, Destiny and Power: the American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. New York: Random House, 2015. Bill Clinton b. 19 August 1946– Democrat Edu. Georgetown University, Oxford University, Yale University Governor of Arkansas, 1979–1981, 1983–1992 President: 20 January 1993–20 January 2001 Select Bibliography: Bill Clinton, My Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. John F. Harris, Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. New York: Random House, 2005. Patrick J.  Maney, Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016. George W. Bush b. 6 July 1946– Republican Edu. Yale University, Harvard University Governor of Texas, 1995–2000 President: 20 January 2001–20 January 2009 Select Bibliography: George Bush, Decision Points. New York: Crown, 2010. Jean Edward Smith. Bush. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Julian E. Zelizer (ed), The Presidency of George W. Bush. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

459

Barack Obama b. 4 August 1961– Democrat Edu. Columbia University, Harvard University Illinois State Senator, 1997–2004 U.S. Senator, Illinois, 2005–2008 President: 20 January 2009–20 January 2017 Select Bibliography: Barack Obama, A Promised Land. New York: Crown, 2020. David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. New York: Vintage. 2011. Julian E. Zelizer (ed), The Presidency of Barack Obama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Donald Trump b. 14 June 1946– Republican Edu. Wharton School Presenter, The Apprentice, NBC, 2004–2015 President: 20 January 2017–20 January 2021 Select Bibliography: Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury. New York: Henry Holt, 2018. Siege. New York: Henry Holt, 2019. Landslide. New York: Henry Holt, 2021. Bob Woodward. Fear. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Rage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. Peril. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021 (and Robert Costa)

Prime Ministers Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury b. 3 February 1830–d. 22 August 1903 Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament Stamford, 1853–1868 Secretary for India, 1866–1867; 1874–1878

460 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Foreign Secretary, 1878–1880; 1885–1886; 1887–1892; 1895–1900 Leader of the Opposition, 1881–1885; 1886; 1892–1895 Lord Privy Seal, 1900–1902 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1885–1902 Prime Minister: 23 June 1885–28 January 1886 25 July 1886–11 August 1892 25 June 1895–11 July 1902 Select bibliography: Gwendolen Cecil. Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury (4 volumes). London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921–1932. Andrew Roberts. Salisbury: Victorian Titan. London: Orion, 1999. David Steele. Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography. London: Routledge, 1999.  rthur James Balfour A b. 25 July 1848–d. 19 March 1930 Conservative Edu. Cambridge University Member of Parliament Hertford, 1874–1885 Manchester East, 1885–1906 City of London, 1906–1922 Secretary for Scotland, 1886–1887 Secretary for Ireland, 1887–1891 Lord Privy Seal, 1902–1903 Leader of the Opposition, 1905–1911 First Lord of the Admiralty, 1915–1916 Foreign Secretary, 1916–1919 Lord President of the Council, 1925–1929 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1902–1911 Prime Minister: 12 July 1902–4 December 1905 Select Bibliography: Robert Cecil and Arthur J. Balfour. Salisbury-Balfour Correspondence: Letters Exchanged Between the 3. Marquess of Salisbury and His Nephew Arthur James Balfour, 1869–1892. Hertfordshire Record Society, 1988. R. J. Q. Adams. Balfour: The Last Grandee. London: John Murray, 2007. Jason Tomes. Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Henry Campbell-Bannerman b. 7 September 1836–d. 22 April 1908

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

461

Liberal Edu. Glasgow University, Cambridge University Member of Parliament: Stirling Burghs, 1868–1908 Secretary for Ireland, 1884–1885 Secretary for War, 1892–1895 Leader of the Opposition, 1889–1905 Leader of the Liberal Party, 1899–1908 Prime Minister: 5 December 1905–3 April 1908 Select Bibliography: J. A. Spender. The Life of the Right Honourable Sir Henry Campbell-­Bannerman G.C.B. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923. Richard Wilson, CB: a Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. London: Constable, 1973. Roy Hattersley. Campbell-Bannerman. London: Haus, 2006.  erbert Henry Asquith H b. 12 September 1852–d. 15 February 1928 Liberal Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: East Fife, 1886–1918 Paisley, 1920–1924 Home Secretary, 1892–1895 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1905–1908 Secretary of War, 1914–1914 Leader of the Opposition, 1920–1922 Leader of the Liberal Party, 1908–1926 Prime Minister: 8 April 1908–5 December 1916 Select Bibliography: H.  H. Asquith. Memories and Reflections (2 volumes). London: Cassell & Co., 1928. J. A. Spender, Life of Herbert Henry Asquith Lord Oxford and Asquith (2 volumes). London: Hutchinson, 1932. Roy Jenkins. Asquith. London: Collins, 1964.

462 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

 avid Lloyd George D b. 17 January 1863–d. 26 March 1945 Liberal Edu. Llanystumdwy National School Member of Parliament: Carnarvon Boroughs, 1890–1945 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1908–1915 Minister of Munitions, 1915–1916 Secretary of War, 1916–1916 Leader of the Liberal Party, 1926–1931 Prime Minister: 6 December 1916–19 October 1922 Select Bibliography: David Lloyd George. War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 volumes). London: Odhams Press, 1938. Thomas Jones, Lloyd George. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. Travis. L Crosby. The Unknown David Lloyd George: A Statesman in Conflict. London: IB Tauris, 2014.  ndrew Bonar Law A b. 16 September 1858–d. 30 October 1923 Conservative Edu. Glasgow High School Member of Parliament: Glasgow Blackfriars, 1900–1906 Dulwich, 1906–1910 Bootle, 1911–1918 Glasgow Central, 1918–1923 Secretary for the Colonies, 1915–1916 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1916–1919 Lord Privy Seal, 1919–1921 Leader of the Commons, 1922–1923 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1922–1923 Prime Minister: 23 October 1922–20 May 1923 Select Bibliography: Robert Blake. The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955). R. J. Q. Adams. Bonar Law. London: John Murray, 1999. Andrew Taylor. Bonar Law. London: Haus Publishing, 2006.

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

463

Stanley Baldwin b. 3 August 1867–d. 14 December 1947 Conservative Edu. Cambridge University Member of Parliament: Bewdley, 1908–1937 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1922–1923 Leader of the Opposition, 1924; 1929–1931 Lord President of the Council, 1931–1935 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1923–1937 Prime Minister: 22 May 1923–22 January 1924 4 November 1924–4 June 1929 7 June 1935–28 May 1937 Select Bibliography: Arthur Windham Baldwin. My Father: the True Story. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955. Keith Middlemas, John Barnes. Baldwin: a biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969. Philip Williamson. Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ramsay MacDonald b. 12 October 1866–d. 9 November 1937 Labour Edu. Board school Member of Parliament: Leicester, 1906–1918 Aberavon, 1922–1929 Seaham, 1929–1935 Combined Scottish Universities, 1936–1937 Foreign Secretary, 1924 Leader of the Commons, 1929–1935 Lord President of the Council, 1935–1937 Leader of the Opposition, 1922–1924; 1924–1929 Leader of the Labour Party, 1922–1931 Prime Minister: 22 January 1924–4 November 1924 5 June 1929–7 June 1935

464 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Select Bibliography: L. MacNeill Weir. The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald: A Political Biography. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938. David Marquand. Ramsay MacDonald. London: Jonathan Cape 1977. Kevin Morgan. Ramsay MacDonald. London: Haus, 2006. Neville Chamberlain b. 18 March 1869–d. 9 November 1940 Conservative Edu. Mason College Birmingham Member of Parliament: Birmingham Ladywood, 1918–1929 Birmingham Edgbaston, 1929–1940 Minister for Health, 1923; 1924–1929; 1931 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1923–1924; 1931–1937 Lord President of the Council, 1940 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1937–1940 Prime Minister: 28 May 1937–10 May 1940 Select Bibliography: Neville Chamberlain. In Search of Peace. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1939. David Dutton. Neville Chamberlain. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Robert Self. Neville Chamberlain: A Biography. London: Routledge, 2006. Winston Churchill b. 30 November 1874–d. 24 January 1965 Conservative/Liberal/Conservative Edu. Harrow School Member of Parliament (Conservative) Oldham, 1900–1904 (Liberal) Oldham, 1904–1906 (Liberal) Manchester North West, 1906–1908 (Liberal) Dundee, 1908–1922 (Liberal) Epping, 1922–1924 (Conservative) Epping, 1924–1945 (Conservative) Woodford, 1945–1964 First Lord of the Admiralty, 1911–1915; 1939–1940 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1915 Secretary of War, 1919–1921 Secretary of the Colonies, 1921–1922

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

465

Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1924–1929 Minister of Defence, 1951–1954 Leader of the Opposition, 1945–1951 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1940–1955 Prime Minister: 10 May 1940–26 July 1945 26 October 1951–5 April 1955 Select Bibliography: Winston Churchill. My Early Life. London: T. Butterworth, 1930. Martin Gilbert. Churchill: A Life. London: Heinemann, 1991. Andrew Roberts. Churchill: Walking with Destiny. London: Penguin, 2018. Clement Attlee b. 3 January 1883–d. 8 October 1967 Edu. Oxford University Labour Member of Parliament: Limehouse 1922–1950 Walthamstow West, 1950–1955 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1930–1931 Lord Privy Seal, 1940–1942 Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, 1942–1943 Lord President of the Council, 1943–1945 Minister of Defence, 1945–46 Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, 1931–1935 Leader of the Opposition, 1935–1940 Deputy Prime Minister, 1942–1945 Leader of the Opposition, 1951–1955 Leader of the Labour Party, 1935–1955 Prime Minister: 26 July 1945–26 October 1951 Select Bibliography: Clement Attlee. As it Happened. London: William Heinemann, 1954. Kenneth Harris. Attlee. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982. John Bew. Citizen Clem: a Biography of Attlee. London: Riverrun, 2016. Anthony Eden b. 12 June 1897–d. 14 January 1977 Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament:

466 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Warwick and Leamington, 1923–1957 Lord Privy Seal, 1934–35 Minister without Portfolio for League of Nations Affairs, 1935 Foreign Secretary, 1935–1938 Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, 1939–1940 Secretary of State for War, 1940 Foreign Secretary, 1940–1945, 1951–1955 Deputy Prime Minister, 1951–1955 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1955–1957 Prime Minister: 6 April 1955–9 January 1957 Select Bibliography: Anthony Eden, The Memoirs of the Rt Hon. Sir Anthony Eden: Full Circle. London: Cassell, 1960. Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986. D. R. Thorpe, Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897–1977. London: Vintage Digital, 2011. Harold Macmillan b. 10 February 1894–d. 29 December 1986 Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Stockton-on-Tees, 1924–29, 1931–45 Bromley, 1945–1964 Parliamentary Under-Sec. of State, Colonies, 1942 Minister Resident at Allied HQ in North-West Africa, 1942–1945 Minister of Housing and Local Government, 1951–1954 Minister of Defence, 1954–1955 Foreign Secretary, 1955 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1955–1957 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1957–1963 Prime Minister: 10 January 1957–18 October 1963 Select Bibliography: Harold Macmillan, Riding the Storm 1956–1959. London: Macmillan, 1971. Pointing the Way, 1959–1961. London: Macmillan, 1972. At the End of the Day, 1961–1963. London: Macmillan, 1973. Nigel Fisher. Harold Macmillan. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982.

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

467

Alistair Horne, Macmillan: 1894–1956. London: Macmillan, 1988. Macmillan: 1957–1986. London: Macmillan, 1988. Alec Douglas-Home 2 July 1903–d. 9 October 1995 Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: South Lanarkshire, 1931–45 Lanark Div. of Lanarkshire, 1950–51 Kinross and W Perthshire, 1963–1974 Minister of State, Scottish Office, 1951–1955 Sec. of State for Commonwealth Relations, 1955–1960 Leader of the House of Lords, and Lord President of the Council, 1959–1960 Foreign Secretary, 1960–1963 Leader of the Opposition, 1964–1965 Foreign Secretary, 1970–74 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1963–1965 Prime Minister: 19 October 1963–16 October 1964 Select Bibliography: Lord Home, The Way the Wind Blows. London: Collins, 1976. D. R. Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home. London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1996. Andrew Holt, The Foreign Policy of the Douglas-Home Government. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Harold Wilson b. 11 March 1916–d. 24 May 1995 Labour Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Ormskirk, 1945–1950 Huyton, 1950–1983 President Board of Trade, 1947–1951 Leader of the Opposition, 1963–1964, 1970–1974 Leader of the Labour Party, 1963–1976 Prime Minister: 16 October 1964–19 June 19704 March 1974–5 April 1976

468 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Select Bibliography: Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–1970. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. Final Term: the Labour Government, 1974–1976. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. Ben Pimlott, Wilson. London: HarperCollins, 1992. John W.  Young, The Labour Government 1964–70: International Policy. Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003. Edward Heath b. 9 July 1916–d. 17 July 2005 Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Bexley, 1950–1974 Bexley, Sidcup, 1974–83 Old Bexley and Sidcup, 1983–2001 Government Chief Whip, Dec. 1955–1959 Minister of Labour, 1959–1960 Lord Privy Seal, with Foreign Office responsibilities, 1960–1963 Sec. of State for Industry, Trade, Regional Development and President of the Board of Trade, 1963–1964 Leader of the Opposition, 1965–1970, 1974–1975 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1965–1975 Prime Minister: 19 June 1970–4 March 1974 Select Bibliography: Edward Heath, The Course of My Life. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998. Stuart Ball and Anthony Seldon (eds), The Heath Government. London: Longman, 1996. Philip Ziegler, Edward Heath. London: HarperPress, 2010. James Callaghan b. 27 March 1912–d. 26 March 2005 Labour Edu. Portsmouth Northern Secondary School Member of Parliament: Cardiff South, 1945–1950 Cardiff South East, 1950–1983 Cardiff South and Penarth, 1983–1987

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

469

Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1964–1967 Home Secretary, 1967–1970 Foreign Secretary, 1974–1976 Leader of the Opposition, 1979–1980 Leader of the Labour Party, 1976–1980 Prime Minister: 5 April 1976–4 May 1979 Select Bibliography: James Callaghan, Time and Chance. London: Collins, 1987. Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: a Life. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997. Jasper Miles and Kevin Hickson (eds), James Callaghan: An Underrated Prime Minister? London: Biteback, 2020. Margaret Thatcher b. 13 October 1925–d. 8 April 2013 Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Finchley, 1959–1992 Secretary of State for Education, 1970–1974 Leader of the Conservative Party, 1975–1990 Prime Minister: 4 May 1979–28 November 1990 Select Bibliography: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years. London: HarperCollins 1993. Statecraft. London: HarperCollins, 2002. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher the Authorized Biography Volume One: Not for Turning. London: Allen Lane 2014. Volume Two: Everything She Wants. London: Allen Lane, 2015. Volume Three: Herself Alone. London: Allen Lane, 2019. John Major b. 29 March 1943– Conservative Edu. Rutlish Grammar School Member of Parliament: Huntingdonshire, 1979–83 Huntingdon, 1983–2001

470 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Chief Secretary to HM Treasury, 1987–89 Foreign Secretary, 1989 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1989–90 Leader of the Conservative Party 1990–1997 Prime Minister: 28 November 1990–2 May 1997 Select bibliography: John Major, The Autobiography. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Anthony Seldon, John Major: a Political Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. Kevin Hickson and Ben Williams (ed), John Major: an Unsuccessful Prime Minister? London: Biteback, 2017. Tony Blair b. 6 May 1953– Labour Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Sedgefield, 1983–2007 Leader of the Labour Party 1994–2007 Prime Minister: 2 May 1997–27 June 2007 Select Bibliography: Tony Blair, A Journey. London: Random House, 2010. Anthony Seldon, Blair Unbound. London: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Oliver Daddow, British Foreign Policy: the New Labour Years. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gordon Brown b. 20 February 1951– Labour Edu. Edinburgh University Member of Parliament: Dunfermline East, 1983–2005 Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath, 2005–2015 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1997–2007 Leader of the Labour Party, 2007–2010 Prime Minister: 27 June 2007–11 May 2010

  APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE 

471

Select Bibliography: Gordon Brown, My Life, Our Times. London: Vintage Digital, 2017. Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, Brown at 10. London: Biteback, 2011. Steve Richards, Whatever It Takes: the Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. London: Fourth Estate, 2010. David Cameron b. 9 October 1966– Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Whitney 2001–2016 Leader of the Conservative Party, 2005–2016 Prime Minister: 11 May 2010–13 July 2016 Select Bibliography: David Cameron, For the Record. London: William Collins, 2019. Anthony Seldon, Cameron at 10. London: William Colins, 2015. Peter Dorey and Mark Garnett (eds), The British Coalition Government, 2010–2016. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Theresa May b. 1 October 1956– Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Maidenhead, 1997– Home Secretary 2010–2016 Leader of the Conservative Party 2016–2019 Prime Minister: 13 July 2016–24 July 2019 Select Bibliography: Rosa Prince, Theresa May: the Enigmatic Prime Minister. London: Biteback, 2017. Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2017. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Anthony Seldon, May at 10. London: Biteback, 2020.

472 

APPENDIX: BIOGRAPHIES AND TIMELINE

Boris Johnson b. 19 June 1964– Conservative Edu. Oxford University Member of Parliament: Henley, 2001–2008 Uxbridge and South Ruislip, 2015– Foreign Secretary 2016–2018 Leader of the Conservative Party, 2019– Prime Minister: 24 July 2019– Select Bibliography: Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015. Andrew Gimson, Boris: the Adventures of Boris Johnson. London: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Tom Bower, Boris Johnson: the Gambler. London, W. H. Allen, 2020.

Rapprochement to World War I

1896

Grover Cleveland

1893

William McKinley

Marquess of Salisbury

1899

Theodore Roosevelt

1905

Campbell-Bannerman

Arthur Balfour

1902

1908

William Howard Taft

H. H. Asquith

1911

1914

1920

David Lloyd George

Woodrow Wilson

1917

  Appendix: Biographies and Timeline 

473

Interwar Years

1923

Ramsay MacDonald

Stanley Baldwin

Bonar Law

Warren G. Harding

1921

1927

Stanley Baldwin

Calvin Coolidge

1925

1929

1935

1937

Stanley Baldwin

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1st term)

1933

Ramsay MacDonald

Herbert Hoover

1931

474  Appendix: Biographies and Timeline

The Special Relationship Years

1940

1943

Winston Churchill

Franklin D. Roosevelt

N. Chamberlain

1937

1946

Clement Alee

Harry S. Truman

1949

Winston Churchill

1952 1958

A. Eden

Dwight D. Eisenhower

1955

John F. Kennedy

Harold Macmillan

1961

  Appendix: Biographies and Timeline 

475

The Special Relationship Years

1963

1967

Harold Wilson

Lyndon B. Johnson

Alec Douglas-Home

1965

1969

1973

Edward Heath

Richard M. Nixon

1971

Gerald Ford

Harold Wilson

1975

1979

Jimmy Carter

James Callaghan

1977

1981

476  Appendix: Biographies and Timeline

The Special Relationship Years

1979

1987

Ronald Reagan

Margaret Thatcher

1983

Bill Clinton

1995

John Major

Geo. H. W. Bush

1991

1999

George W. Bush

Tony Blair

2003

G. Brown

2007

2015

David Cameron

Barack Obama

2011

  Appendix: Biographies and Timeline 

477

The Special Relationship Years

2017

Theresa May

2018

*presuming they serve a full term in office

2016

Donald Trump

2019

2020 Today

2021

Boris Johnson*

2022

Joe Biden*

2023

2024

2025

478  Appendix: Biographies and Timeline

Index1

A Aamer, Shaker, 365 Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, 390 Abyssinia, 115, 119 Acheson, Dean, 25, 162, 176, 188, 219 Acland, Antony, 254n53, 443, 449 Adams, Charles Francis, 108 Adams, Gerry, 2, 313, 314, 318, 324 Adams, R. J. Q., 63, 72 Addis, Charles, 114 Aden, 215 Admiralty, 15, 81, 107, 134, 141–143 Adoula, Cyrille, 214 Afghanistan, 16, 31, 334, 336, 337, 339, 343, 350, 351, 357, 360, 363, 365, 370, 381, 402, 441 Africa, 15, 16, 18, 40, 50, 74, 141, 213–215, 308, 423 African American, 349 Ahern, Bertie, 324 Aircraft, 115, 116, 119, 131, 171, 230, 264, 403 Air Force UK, 103, 151, 171 US, 151, 153, 176 Air Force One, 371–373 Air Ministry, 131 Alaska, 42, 43n27, 67

Albania, 130 Albright, Madeleine, 328 Aldrich, Richard, 442 Alexander II, Tsar, 38 Alexander Archipelago, 67 Algeria, 194 Allied Reparations Commission, 109 Al Qaida, 337 Alverstone, Alexander, 67 Ambassador UK, Washington DC, 71, 172, 173, 256, 258n73, 280, 357, 395, 411, 440, 443, 445 US, London, 8, 49, 70, 73, 159, 220, 248, 254n56, 283, 283n64, 321, 421, 440 America First, 387, 390, 398, 429 American Civil War, 42n25, 411 American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 252, 270 American Expeditionary Force (AEF), 90–92 American Revolution, 42, 70, 445 Anderson, Bruce, 300 Anderson, John, 164 Anderson, Martin, 277, 278n27 Angell, James B., 46n42

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. P. Cullinane, M. Farr (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers From Cleveland and Salisbury to Trump and Johnson, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72276-0

479

480 

INDEX

Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946), 166 Anglo-American League (1898), 75 Anglo-French Entente (1904), 16 Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935), 117, 118 Anglo-Japanese Treaty (1902), 15 Anglophilia, 65n32, 85 Anglophobia, 59, 63, 76, 351 Anglo-Russian Agreement (1907), 16 Anglo-Saxon, 76, 95, 137, 138, 356, 374 Anti-Americanism, 163, 428 Anti-British, 44, 59, 139, 443 Anti-imperialism, 41 Apprentice, The, 426n61 Arab League, 362 Arcadia Conference (1941–42), 146, 147, 154 Argentina, 28, 280, 281 Armed Services Committee, 131, 132 Armstrong, Ernest, 263, 263n105 Army UK, 11, 81, 90, 104, 121, 125 US, 12, 21, 75, 81, 91, 147, 184, 235 Arusha Accords (1993), 309 Ascension Island, 281 Asia, 40, 141, 145, 189–192, 351 Asia-Pacific, 381 Asquith, H. H., 73, 86, 87 Atlantic, 6, 9, 39, 41, 44, 49, 56n81, 59, 71, 73, 76, 88, 105, 132, 147, 155, 162, 166, 168, 170, 191, 205, 244, 259, 267, 276, 280, 312, 350, 376, 381, 397 Atlantic Alliance, 212, 231, 358, 370, 403 Atlantic Charter (1941), 134, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 153 Atlantic Conference (1941), 138, 140, 154 Atlantic Future Forum (2018), 403 Atlanticism, 335, 341, 351 Atlantic Meeting (1943), 135 Atlantic Nuclear Force (1964–67), 229–238 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, 1946), 208

Attlee, Clement, 22, 23, 140, 147, 158–178, 166n36, 222, 447 Auden, W. H., 10 Austria-Hungary, 37, 89 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 12, 153 Axelrod, David, 375 B Baker, James, 293 Baker, Newton D., 92, 93 Baldwin, Stanley, 4, 20, 21, 102–132 Balfour, Arthur, 5, 16, 58–77, 72n53, 90, 91, 96 Balfour Declaration (1917), 165 Balfour, John, 15n30, 18, 444, 445 Balkans, 29, 114, 150, 308, 325 Ball, George, 25, 32, 205, 207, 229, 237 Balogh, Tommy, 226 Bandung Conference (1955), 193 Banks/banking, 111, 114, 127, 163, 230, 254n53, 257, 284, 366 Bannon, Steve, 389, 407, 411, 419–421, 435 Barroso, José Manuel, 378 Barzun, Matthew, 368 Bashir al-Assad, 366, 368 Battle of Britain (1940), 143 Battle of Caporetto (1917), 92 Bayard, Thomas, 41n22, 42, 43, 43n30, 44n31, 44n32, 44n33, 45–49, 49n55, 52, 53, 55, 64n27 Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty (1888), 46 Baylis, John, 137, 202n9 Beach, Michael Hicks, 13, 15, 36 Beaverbrook, Lord, 149 Bedminster, 389, 395 Belgium, 18, 96, 104, 137, 213, 288 Belize, 254 Belloc, Hilaire, 30 Benenson, Joel, 357 Benn, Tony, 225, 226, 253 Bering Sea, 42, 51 Berlin, 12, 87, 107, 118, 125, 161, 171, 172, 318, 353 Berlin Blockade (1948–49), 23, 191, 447 Berlusconi, Silvio, 410 Bevan, Aneurin, 175 Beveridge, William, 222

 INDEX 

Bevin, Ernest, 161, 162, 164, 166–173, 176, 244, 444 Biarritz, 431 Biden, Joe, 425, 429, 430, 435–437, 435n129 Big Society (2010–14), 358 Bin Laden, Osama, 336, 364 bin Salman, Mohammed, 407 Binyam Mohamed, 365 Birch Grove, 200 Bismarck, Herbert, 39, 39n14 Bismarck, Otto von, 8, 11, 39n14 Black Wednesday (1992), 301 Blaine, James G., 40, 41 Blair, Tony, 5, 28–32, 216, 298, 299, 301, 304, 306, 312, 315–317, 320–346, 362, 363, 372, 378, 381 Blenheim Palace, 394 Bliss, Tasker, 92 Bloodhound (missile), 203 Blue Water (missile), 203 Boer War, 146 Bohlen, Charles, 152 Bolsheviks, 92, 96, 149 Bolsonaro, Jair, 407, 410 Bolton, John, 358, 394, 403, 404, 423, 431 Borden, Robert, 138 Bosnia, 29, 306–311, 316–318, 325, 326, 361 Boston, 350 Boxer, Barbara, 365 Bracken, Brenden, 135, 200 Brandon, Henry, 201, 229 Brazil, 49 Breitbart, 411, 420 Breitbart London, 420 Brexit, 3, 31, 350, 376–380, 385, 387, 394, 396–399, 401–404, 408, 409, 411, 413, 414, 419–421, 424, 425, 429, 432 Briande, Aristide, 107 British Advisory Mission (1961–65), 231, 236 British Airways, 277 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 181n7, 285, 354, 356, 358, 375 (British) Commonwealth, 6, 23, 88, 169, 192

481

British Empire, 4, 15, 18, 56, 60n9, 64, 68, 70, 80, 98, 141, 145, 153, 176, 185, 186, 194, 197, 378 British Guinea, 13n23 British Petroleum (BP), 360, 366 Brock, Bill, 276 Broder, David S., 285 Brown, Gordon, 5, 9, 31, 322, 350–358, 360, 373, 380, 381, 388, 446, 449 Brown, Harold, 267 Bruce, David, 220, 228, 232, 235 Brussels Treaty (1948), 193 Bryce, James, 70 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 263, 274 Buckingham Palace, 371, 395, 432 Bulgaria, 81 Bundy, McGeorge, 204, 226, 231, 233, 235, 237 Bundy, William, 236 Burns, Arthur, 258, 260 Bush, George H. W., 4, 5, 28, 248, 294, 295n138, 297–318, 447 Bush, George W., 2, 28–32, 302–306, 313–315, 317, 320–346, 349, 351, 352, 358, 359, 363, 364, 372, 373, 380, 388, 392, 393 Byrnes, James F., 161, 162 C Cabinet Office, 267, 364n126, 446 Cairncross, Alec, 259 Califano, Joseph, 222, 225, 233 California, 276 Callaghan, James, 27, 32, 241–271 Cambridge Analytica, 419 Cameron, David, 9, 31, 347–381, 386, 387, 397, 399, 405, 406, 410, 430, 432n108, 436, 446, 449 Campbell, Alastair, 330, 339, 341 Camp David, 202, 264, 287–289, 287n90, 302, 332, 334, 352, 374 summit (1960), 202 Canada, Geoffrey, 359 Canada, 9, 17, 25, 30, 43n30, 44, 44n33, 45, 45n37, 46n43, 47n46, 51, 67, 73, 114, 128, 130, 148, 165, 232, 264, 442 Canning, George, 65

482 

INDEX

Caribbean, 17, 81, 266 Carlucci, Frank C., 289, 290 Carlyle, Thomas, 134 Carnegie, Andrew, 66 Carow, Edith, 71 Carrington, Lord, 275 Carson, Edward, 87 Carter, Jimmy, 4, 27, 32, 241–271, 274, 276, 285, 293, 294, 447 Casablanca Conference (1943), 145 Castle, Barbara, 227 Castlereagh, Lord, 87 Castro, Fidel, 209 Cecil, Lord Robert, 95, 99, 107 Central America, 17, 81 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 23, 226, 231, 339, 399, 428, 441 Central Powers, 37, 88 Chamberlain, Austen, 107 Chamberlain, Joseph, 46, 52, 55, 56, 56n81, 58, 65 Chamberlain, Neville, 21, 102–132, 134, 139, 139n30, 141, 143, 182 Chandos, Lord, 152 Charmley, John, 148 Chartwell, 139, 141 Château de Champs Summit (1962), 212n42 Chatfield, Ernle, 119 Cheney, Dick, 342 Chequers, 74, 287, 331, 394, 397, 401, 418 Chicago, 7, 328, 329, 331, 338, 341 Chilcot, John, 336 China, 12, 15, 17, 52, 68, 69, 104, 105, 114, 115, 123–127, 136, 172–175, 175n73, 187–189, 247, 255, 315, 349, 366, 380, 430, 431, 433, 434, 450 Choate, Joseph, 72, 72n53, 76 Christianity, 85 Churchill, Winston S., 2, 3, 3n3, 5, 9, 22–24, 32, 58, 58n2, 75, 80, 96, 132, 134–155, 158–161, 164, 169, 170, 176, 177, 180–197, 213, 228, 238, 243, 244, 275n11, 304, 348, 349, 351, 372, 374, 377, 378, 389, 391, 393, 394, 414, 418, 419, 421, 446

Clarke, Charles, 291 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850), 41, 41n22, 67 Clemenceau, Georges, 75, 80–99 Cleveland, Grover, 5, 12, 13, 36–56, 64, 163, 436, 443 Clinton, Bill, 2, 5, 8, 9, 28–30, 297–318, 320–346, 349, 362, 364, 374, 375, 378, 446, 447 Clinton, Chelsea, 305 Clinton, Hillary, 352, 387 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 140 Cohen, Roger, 369 Cold War, 23, 28, 136, 159, 162, 169, 171, 176, 180–182, 185, 193, 207, 211, 214, 215, 219, 231, 258, 271, 281, 282n54, 288, 289, 292, 295, 298–300, 320, 321, 437, 440, 441 Colonial Office, 44, 81, 120, 440n2 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 291, 292 Columbia Law School, 142 Colville, Jock, 136, 140, 151, 183 Comey, James, 399 Comintern, 125 Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), 120 Commonwealth, 23, 25, 168, 187, 192, 225, 244, 249, 275, 284, 309 Communism, 160, 170, 172, 178, 186, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 285, 288, 294, 295, 300, 315, 320 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) (2020), 429, 429n89 Concorde (airliner), 262, 262n99 Confederacy, 38, 38n9 Congo, 213–215 Congress of Tomorrow, 389 Congress, US, 12, 13, 14n27, 28, 36, 42, 42n25, 44, 45, 46n42, 47n46, 51, 53, 56, 64, 82–84, 93, 122, 123, 143, 165, 170, 172, 177, 206, 208, 228, 289, 293, 337, 355, 368, 374, 402, 418, 429, 445, 446, 448 Conservatism, 358, 373, 374, 413, 445 Conservative Party, 63, 65, 67, 71, 141, 183, 245, 246, 274, 276, 278, 286,

 INDEX 

291, 298, 299, 301, 303, 311, 322, 359, 376, 387, 409, 421 Cook, Robin, 324 Coolidge, Calvin, 5, 105–108, 110, 111 Copenhagen Summit (2009), 356 Corbyn, Jeremy, 410, 413 Coronavirus Covid-19, 31, 419, 433, 434, 436, 437 Coulson, John, 195 Craigie, Robert, 117–119, 127 Crawford TX, 340, 341 Cromwell, Oliver, 63 Crossman, Richard, 27 Cruise (missile), 367 Cruz, Ted, 348 Cuba, 59, 68, 70, 209–211, 220, 284 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 25, 201, 208, 209 Cummings, Dominic, 420, 420n21, 424, 435 Curzon, George, 72n53, 73, 138 Cyber, 365 Cyprus, 254, 254n53, 255 Czechoslovakia, 126, 182 D Daily Chronicle, The, 87 Daily Mail, 175 Daily News, The, 87 Daily Telegraph, The, 160, 421 Dalai Lama, 366 Danchev, Alex, 137 Darkest Hour (2017), 418 Darroch, Kim, 395, 403, 404, 408, 409, 412, 421, 422, 428 Darwin, Charles, 61 Davis, Norman, 118, 119, 121, 129 Davos, 393, 409 Dawes, Charles, 111 Dawes Committee, 111 Dawes Plan (1924), 111, 113 Days of Our Lives, 427n68 Dayton Accords (1995), 307, 325 Dayton OH, 373, 379 Debt, 21, 26, 66, 75, 102, 109–114, 116, 121, 279, 279n37, 448

483

Declaration of Common Purpose (1957), 202 Decline, 2, 39n14, 63, 69, 103, 114, 185, 197, 218, 226, 229, 244, 262, 271, 275, 294, 316, 413, 414 de Gaulle, Charles, 183, 184, 212, 213, 216, 219 Democratic Party, 274, 303, 315 DeMuth, Chris, 252, 270 Department for Exiting the European Community (DExEU), 389n25 Department for International Trade (DIT), 429n89, 440n2 Department of Defense, 179, 203 Destroyers for Bases agreement (1942), 143 Détente, 169, 201, 207, 208, 211, 215, 255, 266 Devaluation, 218, 229, 230, 238, 251 de Zulueta, Philip, 211, 212 Dickinson, Donald M., 50 Diefenbaker, John, 25 Diplomacy, 27, 33, 37, 44, 48, 52, 60, 70, 82, 83, 97, 112, 113, 117, 121, 125, 127, 154, 155, 180, 182n10, 197, 219, 228, 242–271, 288, 294, 324–326, 332, 334, 339, 341, 342, 345, 371, 372, 380, 401, 445 Disraeli, Benjamin, 37 Donion, Tom, 365 Donoughue, Bernard, 259, 261, 262, 262n93 Douglas, Lewis, 159 Downing Street Declaration (1993), 313, 314 D-10, 430 Dual Alliance (1879), 15 Dulles, John Foster, 24n54, 181, 185, 191, 192, 196 Dunn, Anita, 359 Durand, Mortimer, 70, 72 Duterte, Rodrigo, 407 E EastEnders, 427n68 East of Suez (1967), 27, 218, 230, 238, 246 Economic Club of Chicago, 328n54

484 

INDEX

Economists, 68, 162, 279 Economist, The, 422 Economy UK, 11, 30, 31, 103, 159, 160, 171, 178, 186, 201, 202, 218, 225, 250, 251, 257–259, 261, 277–280, 287, 288, 292–294, 301, 360, 361, 429 US, 9–11, 17, 18, 20, 26, 81, 82, 103, 112–114, 142, 250, 251, 277–280, 284, 286, 288, 292–294, 360, 361, 389, 429, 444 Eden, Anthony, 23, 24, 124, 128, 129, 131, 147, 148, 179–197, 304, 447 Edward VII, King, 73 Egypt, 91, 187, 189–191, 193–196, 242, 361, 390 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 5, 23, 24, 136, 150, 151, 176, 179–197, 202, 205, 211–213, 215, 216, 304, 374, 449 Elections UK; 1906, 71, 76; 1918, 86, 87, 94; 1929, 21, 108; 1945, 181, 187; 1950, 174; 1964, 222, 226; 1970, 245; 1974, 245; 1979, 276; 1983, 282; 1987, 290; 1992, 303; 1997, 322; 2010, 31; 2019, 432 US; 1884, 39–40; 1886, 43; 1888, 47, 49; 1912, 39n15; 1916, 18; 1918, 94; 1928, 106, 142; 1932, 138, 142; 1948, 221; 1950, 174; 1952, 180–183; 1962, 203; 1969, 245; 1976, 253, 265; 1980, 270, 274, 275, 285, 294; 1984, 285, 287; 1992, 2, 303–305, 447; 1996, 307; 2016, 3, 386; 2020, 418, 437 Elizabeth II, Queen, 384, 394, 408 Elizabeth, Queen Mother, 264 Emanuel, Rahm, 357n65 Embassy UK, Washington DC, 32, 33, 71, 122, 127, 167, 203, 253, 256, 286, 348, 349, 352, 390, 391 US, London, 26, 64, 72, 131, 218, 257, 259, 350, 393 Epstein, Jacob, 348

Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 390 Europe, 11, 15, 17, 25, 28, 37, 81, 94, 97, 102, 105, 110, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125–130, 132, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 150, 151, 154, 166, 168–171, 182, 183, 185, 186, 191, 192, 205, 211–213, 228, 236, 237, 247, 249, 249n34, 250, 265, 267, 271, 284, 287–289, 299–301, 303, 304, 306, 309, 312, 324, 331, 333, 334, 343, 351, 365, 376–378, 402, 414, 420, 442, 449 European Defense Community (EDC) (1952), 192 European Economic Community (Common Market) (EEC)/ European Community (EC), 212, 213, 216, 219, 220, 225, 246, 247, 249, 250, 299, 299n2, 300, 317 European Monetary System (EMS), 304 European Union (EU), 299, 299n2, 303, 306, 307, 316, 318, 330, 333, 334, 339, 342, 343, 366, 374, 376–378, 380, 381, 386, 387, 397, 398, 400–402, 404, 410, 414, 429, 430, 450 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), 304 Extradition treaty (2003), 360

F Face the Nation, 292 Fahrenkopf, Frank, 282–283 Fairey, Shepard, 357 Falklands conflict (1982), 28, 32, 280–285, 302, 441 Farage, Nigel, 410, 411, 421, 429, 434 Farouk, King, 189 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 399, 441 Federal Reserve Board (FRB), 258 Feinstein, Dianne, 365 Feminism, 406 Financial Times, The, 330 First Lady, 200 First World War, 5, 18, 19, 80, 99, 138, 141, 142, 149, 153, 158, 207, 441 Fishing, 16, 42, 43, 45, 46n43

 INDEX 

Fitzwater, Marlin, 290, 291 5G, 401, 430 Fleischer, Ari, 426 Floyd, George, 428 Foley, James, 370 Fontainebleau Memorandum (1919), 98 Food Administration, 84 Foot, Michael, 222, 279 Ford, Gerald, 27, 242–271, 260n86, 261n89, 266n119, 278n27 Foreign Affairs Committee, 365 Foreign (and Commonwealth) Office (FO), 6, 9, 14, 20, 21, 23, 30, 33, 64, 67, 81, 90, 108, 111, 117–120, 122–125, 127, 168, 232, 255, 256, 262, 265, 267, 271, 298, 301, 402, 439, 439n1, 440, 440n2, 442–446 Foreign policy, 5, 11, 14, 23, 27, 29, 30, 37, 40, 44, 44n33, 48, 49, 53, 64, 69, 71, 73, 81, 87, 160, 161, 164, 170, 176, 188, 190, 213, 244, 247, 248, 255, 256, 268, 270, 278, 280, 281, 290, 303, 309, 310, 316, 321–326, 328, 331, 333, 335, 336, 341–343, 345, 346, 348, 351–353, 358, 358n78, 361, 364, 381, 397, 401–404, 410, 430, 437, 439, 439n1, 440, 445–448 Foreign Policy Committee, 128 Foreign secretary, 13, 29, 37, 37n5, 39, 58, 65, 82, 95, 107, 116, 122, 124, 166, 170, 171, 176, 180–183, 186, 187, 191, 204, 210, 222, 242, 248, 249, 253, 255, 256, 263, 284, 298, 308, 322, 324, 341, 343, 377, 394, 402, 420, 421, 430, 442, 444 Fowler, Henry, 251, 258 France, 14–16, 18, 24, 26, 37, 39n14, 84, 88, 90–93, 96, 97, 99, 104–107, 118, 121, 126, 129, 131, 137, 143, 144, 147, 149, 152, 171, 179, 232, 247, 264, 288, 307, 310, 362, 366, 371, 419, 425, 429, 430 Franks, Oliver, 172, 173, 175, 443 Free Trade Agreement (FTA), 397, 398, 428, 429 Frelinghuysen, Frederick, 41 Frelinghuysen-Zavala Treaty (1884), 41 Fulton MO, 169, 180, 182

485

G Gaddafi, Muammar, 364 Gaining House, 90 Gaitskell, Hugh, 221 Galileo (satellite), 401 Garfield, James A., 40 Gates, Thomas, 202 Geneva, 106–108, 115–117, 289 Geneva Conference (1954), 231, 232, 235 Genocide, 29, 62, 298, 303, 306–311, 317 George, David Lloyd, 4, 5, 18, 19, 80–99, 105, 445, 446 George VI, King, 130, 147 German empire, 18, 83 Germany, 11, 15, 26, 37, 39, 66, 66n36, 69–71, 80, 82, 83, 86, 88n33, 91, 92n49, 94, 96–98, 98n65, 102, 105, 106, 110–112, 115, 117–122, 124–128, 130–132, 143, 146–150, 152, 154, 167, 191–193, 259, 264, 280, 288, 300, 301, 304, 315, 317, 366, 378, 430 Gerwarth, Robert, 134 Gibbs, Robert, 357n63 Gilded Age, 40 Gingrich, Newt, 423 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 266 Gladstone, William Ewart, 85 Global Britain (2018–), 390, 429 Good Friday Agreement (1998), 312, 318, 324, 325n27 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 28, 287, 289, 299 Gove, Michael, 396, 397, 411 Government Code and Cypher School, 441 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 441, 442 Grant, Ulysses S., 40, 46 Great Contemporaries, 139, 141–143 Great Depression, 102, 111, 126, 142, 143, 448 Great rapprochement, 4, 56, 64, 75 Great Society (1964–69), 26, 225, 229, 230 Greece, 18, 131, 150, 151, 151n100, 170, 219, 288 Greenspan, Alan, 352

486 

INDEX

Grenada invasion (1983), 280, 284 Grenville, John A. S., 67 Grey, Edward, 15, 70, 74, 82, 86, 87, 90, 91, 95, 99n66 Grimond, John, 283 Group of Eight (G8), 334, 344, 367 Group of Seven (G7), 286, 400, 407, 429n84, 430, 431, 434, 437 Group of Twenty (G20), 355, 356, 360, 367, 412 Guadeloupe Summit (1979), 266 Guantanamo Bay, 365 Guatemalan, 254 Gulf War (1990–91), 8, 29, 298, 303, 306, 316, 317, 339, 344, 441 H Haas, Richard, 423 Hague, William, 365 Haines, David, 370 Halifax, Lord, 128, 130, 141 Harding, Warren G., 4, 5, 104, 105, 110 Harriman, Averell, 149, 151, 214 Harrison, Earl G., 166 Have I Got News for You, 426n61 Hawaii, 49 Hawk (missile), 203, 204 Hawthorne, Nathanial, 19 Hay, John, 65n32, 67–69, 72, 73 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty (1891), 67 Healey, Denis, 224, 237, 257, 259n77 Heath, Edward, 242–271, 304, 317 Helsinki, 394 Henderson, Nicholas, 280, 281, 445 Henning, Alan, 370 Heren, Louis, 236, 245 Hill, Fiona, 391, 392 Hitler, Adolf, 112, 114, 117, 122, 125, 126, 132, 143–145, 148, 150, 167, 215, 216, 310 HMS Gannet, 355 HMS Queen Elizabeth, 403 HMS Resolute, 355 Hoare, Samuel, 122 Hollande, François, 374 Home, Lord, 204, 210, 226, 248 Hong Kong, 114, 366 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, 114

Hoover, Herbert, 5, 21, 84, 102–132 Hopkins, Harry, 140 Hormats, Robert, 258 Horne, Alistair, 200 House, E. M., 81, 82, 84–87, 90–93, 95, 96, 99, 165 House of Commons, 73, 84, 148, 176, 183, 189, 195, 201, 227, 233, 234, 236, 249, 254n53, 255n58, 285, 303, 328, 343, 363, 368, 381, 395, 446 Howard, Esme, 108 Howe, Geoffrey, 279, 284, 298, 316 Huawei, 401, 430 Huckabee, Mike, 348 Hughes, Charles Evans, 104, 105 Hull, Cordell, 113, 118, 128 Hungary, 151 Hume, John, 324 Hunt, Jeremy, 422, 428 Hurd, Douglas, 29, 308, 322 I Ickes, Harold, 129 India, 16, 19, 37, 91, 189, 219, 264, 390, 430 INF, see Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987) Inskip, Thomas, 125 Intelligence, 2, 32, 33, 81, 90, 130, 132, 164, 229, 252, 255, 265, 274, 281, 317, 365, 387, 388, 394, 399, 400, 402, 414, 440–443, 442n10 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) (1987), 289 International Churchill Society, 136 International Economic Summit (1976), 257 International Monetary Fund (IMF) (1945), 27, 253, 257–260, 271 Iran, 169, 190, 291, 349, 360, 364, 366, 368, 380, 402, 408, 423, 430 Iran-Contra scandal, 291 Iraq invasion (2003), 321, 343, 344 war, 30, 301, 316, 335, 368

 INDEX 

Ireland Northern, 306, 311–315, 318, 322, 324, 325, 442, 450 Republic, 312 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 311–313, 315, 324 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 370–371 Israel, 191, 194, 203–205, 242, 310, 388, 390, 402, 428 Istanbul, 344 Italy, 15n28, 18, 97, 104, 114, 115, 118, 119, 121, 124, 125, 128, 130, 184, 264, 334, 366, 425, 429 J James, Henry, 10, 72 Jameson raid, 14 Japan, 15, 16n31, 20, 52, 69, 72, 104–107, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122–125, 127, 145, 148, 232, 261, 264, 390 Jenkins, Peter, 224 Jenkins, Roy, 146, 250, 333 Jerusalem, 262n93, 402, 428 Jews, 61, 165–167, 310 Johnson, Boris, 384, 394, 402, 405, 410–412, 417–437, 450 Johnson, Hiram, 112 Johnson, Lyndon B., 26, 27, 31, 217–239, 410 Johnson, Rachel, 426n65 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 167 Joint commission (1887), 42, 44n33, 45, 46, 46n43 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) (2015), 430 Joint National Security Strategy Board (2011), 365 Jordan, 194, 215, 216 al-Jubeir, Adel, 368 K Kaiser, Philip, 54, 66, 66n36, 99, 229 Kassam, Raheem, 411 Kassig, Peter, 370 Katzenbach, Nick, 222 Kaufman, Gerald, 222

487

Kellogg, Frank, 107 Kennan, George, 169, 445 Kennedy, Jacqueline (Jackie), 200–202 Kennedy, John F., 24–26, 25n57, 32, 199–216, 376, 449 Kennedy, Joseph, 129, 131, 138–140, 176 Kennedy, Robert, 210 Kennedy, Ted, 315 Kent, Tyler, 144 Kenya, 374 Kerry, John, 367, 368, 368n162 Keynes, John Maynard, 162 Khrushchev, Nikita, 209, 211, 212 Kimball, Warren, 135, 136, 136n10, 136n12, 136n14, 138n22, 139n30, 137n14, 141, 143, 151n99, 151n100, 275n11 Kim Jong-un, 401, 407 King, Mackenzie, 164 King, Martin Luther, 378 Kinnock, Neil, 285, 289–291, 290n110, 291n112, 291n115, 323, 374 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 280 Kissinger, Henry, 33, 242, 246–248, 250–261, 260n82, 261n89, 269, 278n27 Kleberg, Richard M., 221 Knapp, Bill, 111n42, 359 Knox, Frank, 149 Komer, John, 216 Kondrates, Anna, 282, 283, 283n62 Korean War, 23, 172, 178, 187 Kosovo, 29, 321, 325–333, 338, 345, 362 Krauthammer, Charles, 348, 349, 349n10 Kudlow, Larry, 420 Kushner, Jared, 420 Kuwait, 29, 300, 302, 303, 316, 362 L Labour Party, 160, 165, 167, 176, 222, 225, 227, 236, 239, 244, 249, 253, 258, 263, 289–291, 322, 323, 332, 338, 374, 428, 450 Laker Airlines, 277 Lansdowne, Lord, 15, 15n30, 58

488 

INDEX

Lansing, Robert, 82 Latin America, 13, 14, 32, 67, 69, 280 Laurier, Wilfred, 73 Law, Andrew Bonar, 4, 88 Lawson, Nigel, 293–295, 293n131, 295n138, 298, 316 League of Nations, 83, 92, 95–98, 99n66, 103, 165 Lee, Arthur, 70, 71, 74, 77 Lend Lease Act (1941), 143 Le Pen, Marine, 410 Lever, Harold, 259 Lewinsky, Monica, 326 Liberalism, 19, 82, 85, 99, 140, 320 Libya, 350, 361–366, 364n128, 369, 379, 380, 402 Liliuokalani, Queen, 49 Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), 209, 216 Lincoln, Abraham, 38, 38n10, 348 Lindsay, Ronald, 120n100, 122, 122n112, 123, 129, 130, 130n163, 130n164, 448 Liverpool, 67 Locarno Treaty (1925), 103 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 51, 53, 54, 58n2, 71–73, 88, 99, 99n66 London, 3, 8–12, 20, 25, 26, 44, 45, 48–53, 55, 64, 71–74, 81n4, 86, 86n23, 88–90, 92, 94, 99, 102–107, 109, 109n33, 110, 113, 116–119, 121, 124–132, 139, 143, 144, 162, 166, 168–171, 173–177, 202, 205, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 219, 226, 228, 229, 235, 242, 245, 246, 250, 254n56, 255n57, 257, 258, 260, 261, 261n89, 264, 268n135, 269, 274n3, 274n4, 275, 275n11, 280, 281n45, 286, 300, 307, 314, 318, 321–323, 348, 349n9, 350, 353, 353n26, 357, 360, 365–367, 374, 375, 384, 386, 388, 393, 399, 400, 411, 412, 418, 420, 421, 425, 431–433, 437, 440, 448 London Naval Conference (1930), 108, 117, 118 London Stock Exchange, 11 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 140

Los Angeles Times, 171n57, 176, 283, 283n62, 373n196 Lothian, Lord, 129, 130 Lotus Club, 93 Louis, John, 283 Low, David, 166, 178 Ludlow, Louis, 123 Luftwaffe, 130, 143 Lumumba, Patrice, 213 Lusitania, 82 Lysaght, Charles, 200 M Maastricht Treaty (1992), 298, 299n2, 303 MacArthur, Douglas, 173–176 MacDonald, Ramsay, 4, 21, 102–132, 448 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 136 Macmillan, Harold, 24–26, 32, 181, 196, 199–216, 219, 220, 229, 243, 244, 252, 304, 374, 447, 449 Macron, Emmanuel, 393, 405, 432 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 12, 12n17 Maisky, Ivan, 149 Major, John, 2, 5, 8, 28, 29, 297–318, 321, 322, 324, 326, 362, 374, 446, 447 Malaysia, 229, 231–234, 236 Malloch-Brown, Lord, 357n60 Manchester Guardian, The, 87 Manchuria, 104, 115, 120, 122, 174 Mandela, Nelson, 375 Manhattan Project, 164 Marine One, 394n58, 399n91, 421n27 Marlborough, 138 Marsh, Steve, 137 Marshall Aid, 170, 173 Marshall, George C., 147, 149, 150, 152, 162, 184 Mason, Ronald, 267 Massingham, H. W., 87 Mass Observation, 163, 171n57 May, Alan Nunn, 165 May, Theresa, 3, 5, 31, 116, 190, 275, 275n6, 379, 384–415, 419, 421, 422, 431, 437 McCain, John, 352–354, 357

 INDEX 

McCarthy, Joseph, 176 McEnany, Kayleigh, 418n7 McKinley, William, 58, 59, 68 McKinnon, Gary, 360 McMahon Act (1946), 165 McMaster, H. R., 434 McNamara, Robert, 25, 32, 203, 205, 206, 236, 237 Meir, Golda, 242 Mercer, Robert, 411, 419 Merkel, Angela, 352, 356, 381, 388, 432 Mers-el-Kébir (1940), 148 Messina, Jim, 375 Mexico, 65, 390 Meyer, Christopher, 357n59 Middle East, 15, 18, 24, 165–168, 189, 190, 193–195, 204, 215, 229, 242, 269, 289, 292, 303, 317, 340, 344, 361, 366, 381, 388, 428, 444 Middle East Peace Process (MEPP), 339–342, 344 Miliband, Ed, 374 Miller, Stephen, 420 Milosevic, Slobodan, 29, 306, 321, 325–327, 329–331 Mines Department, 222 Ministry of Defence, 267, 362 Minto, Lord, 73 Mitchell, James, 324 Mohamed, Binyam, 365 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 144, 147 Mondale, Walter, 261, 262, 285 Monroe Doctrine, 12–14, 14n27, 36, 50–53, 55, 64–66, 70, 96 Monroe, James, 65 Moran, Charles, 146, 152 Morgenthau, Henry, 129, 129n157, 138 Morocco, 69 Morris, Harvey, 375 Morrison, Herbert, 176 Morton, H. E., 135 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 190 Moscow, 148, 149, 151, 160, 168, 169, 176, 209, 367, 380, 399, 424 Mountbatten, Lord, 255n57 Mubarak, Hosni, 361 Mueller, Robert, 399 Mulley, Fred, 267

489

Multilateral Force (MLF), 220, 231, 237–239 Munich agreement (1938), 126 Murchison, Charles F., 47 Murdoch, Rupert, 357, 396, 405 Mussolini, Benito, 114, 121, 125, 132 N Naguib, Mohammed, 189, 190 Napoleon, Louis, 38, 85, 141, 148 Napoleonic War, 9 Naguib, Mohammed, 189, 190 NASA, 360 Nassau Summit (1962), 213, 216 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 189, 193–195, 215, 216 National debt, 279, 279n37 National Economic Council, 420 National Golf Club, 389 National Guard, 254, 255 National Health Service (NHS), 428 National Press Club, 245, 253 National Security Adviser, 246, 289, 342, 361, 365, 368, 377, 394, 423, 434 National Security Agency (NSA), 365, 441 National Security Council, 24, 216, 281, 362, 446 Nation, The, 87, 88 Native Americans, 40, 62 Navy UK, 11, 15–17, 85, 94, 96, 103–109, 120, 122, 123, 132, 148, 173, 250, 268n135, 280, 403n120 US, 11, 17, 21, 39, 65, 66, 81, 104–109, 109n33, 117, 123, 131, 138, 142, 148, 188 Navy department, 108, 117 Nazis, 143, 154, 317 Neave, Airey, 311 Nessen, Ron, 254 Netanyahu, Binyamin, 366, 407, 425n60 Netherlands, 104 Neustadt, Richard, 226, 237 Newcastle, 263 New Deal, 142, 221, 222, 224, 269, 275n6 New Orleans, 9

490 

INDEX

New Orleans Times-Picayune, 162 New Statesman, 227 Newsweek, 265 New York City, 30, 40n19, 47, 71, 93, 102, 114, 142, 167, 218, 324, 403, 405, 420, 426, 431 New York Police Commission, 64 New York Times, The, 48n53, 167, 264, 266, 284, 330, 360, 369, 370, 373, 375 New Zealand, 232, 310, 442 Nicaragua, 41n21, 49, 283 Nichols, David, 195 Nigeria, 219, 310 9/11, 335–339, 341, 343–346, 348 Nine-power treaty (1922), 104 Nineteenth century, 4, 5, 9, 10, 22, 38, 56, 60, 64, 134, 140, 149, 153 Nixon, Richard, 242–271, 245n12, 304, 317 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1994), 403 North American Review, 51 North Atlantic Council, 326, 394 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) (1949), 24, 28, 30, 32, 172, 184, 191–193, 203, 219, 229, 231, 237, 248, 258, 264, 278, 290, 300, 307, 326–330, 334, 344, 362, 365, 370, 380, 393, 400, 401, 403, 410, 414, 432, 437, 442 Northcliffe, Lord, 86, 87 Northern Ireland, 306, 311–315, 318, 322, 324, 325, 442, 450 North Korea, 172, 188, 380 Nover, Barnet, 167 Nuclear weapons, 165, 174, 208, 289, 290 Nyasaland, 214 O Obama, Barack, 5, 9, 31, 347–381, 386, 388, 389, 391–393, 391n30, 395, 397, 399, 402, 403, 406, 410, 412, 415, 423, 430, 436, 445, 446, 449 Obama, Michelle, 357 Oil, 29, 94, 113, 114, 119, 189, 194, 229, 359, 360

Olney, Richard, 12–14, 36, 50–53, 55, 56, 56n81, 64, 64n27, 65 Open Door policy (1899), 68, 69, 69n45, 72, 104 Open Skies Agreement (2007), 398 Operation Allied Force (1999), 327 Operation Desert Fox (1998), 326 Operation Desert Shield (1990–91), 302 Operation Inherent Resolve (2014–16), 371 Operation Overlord (1944), 150 Operation Transport, 150 Opinion polls, 160, 165 Orbán, Viktor, 410 Oregonian, 161 Organisation of East Caribbean States (OECS), 284 Orinoco River, 50, 55 Ormsby-Gore, David (Lord Harlech), 25, 25n57 Ottawa, 128, 146 Ottoman Empire, 11, 14, 18, 52 Owen, David, 263, 265 Oxford University, 222 Oyster Bay, 75 P Pacific, 16n31, 17, 39, 104, 105, 147, 152, 173, 351 Page, Walter H., 89, 89n39, 90n41, 98n64 Pakistan, 219, 423, 423n43 Palestine, 94, 165–167, 447 Palmerston, Lord, 387 Panama, 67 Pandemic, 31, 433–437, 450 Paraguay, 425 Paris Agreement (2016), 414 Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), 94, 109, 114, 439n1 Paris Summit (1960), 211 Parliamentary petitions, 384 Pauncefote, Julian, 13n23, 53–55, 67 Pearl Harbor, 105, 144, 146, 345, 418 Pence, Mike, 424n46, 427, 427n74, 433n114, 433n120 Penjdeh Pass, 37 Pentagon, 33, 203, 208, 343, 446

 INDEX 

People’s Liberation Army, 172 Perkins, Bradford, 4, 58, 59n4 Pershing, John J., 90, 92 Persia, 16, 94 Peru, 381 Petitions, 54, 384, 384n1, 384n6, 396, 412 Phelps, Edward John, 44n32, 45, 45n37, 45n38, 46, 48, 49n55 Philadelphia Inquirer, 160, 160n9, 164n26 Philby, Kim, 23 Philippines, 68, 81, 104, 232 Pilgrim’s Society, 75, 275 Placentia Bay, 135, 138, 140, 154 Plain Dealer, 162n19, 163, 163n23 Playfair, Lord, 55 Poindexter, John, 289, 289n102 Poland, 38, 98, 119, 126, 130, 139, 141, 152, 154 Polaris (missile), 25–27, 32, 202, 205–207, 216, 220, 266, 269 Political parties Conservative, 14, 28, 37, 52, 59, 63, 65, 67, 71, 72, 86, 88, 93, 108, 141, 160, 183, 214, 220, 231, 236, 245, 246, 254, 274, 276–278, 282, 286, 291, 298–301, 303, 304, 311, 321, 322, 324, 350, 358, 359, 369, 374–376, 384, 387, 388, 409, 421 Democratic, 5, 12, 39, 47, 82, 83, 108, 121, 138, 142, 180, 204, 221, 224, 261, 271, 274, 285, 288, 298, 303, 312, 313, 315, 321–323, 331, 350, 352, 353, 357, 361, 374, 379, 408, 418, 425 Labour, 21, 108, 109, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176, 189, 220, 222, 225–227, 229, 230, 236, 237, 239, 244, 245, 248–250, 252–254, 257, 258, 263–265, 269, 271, 276, 282, 289–291, 304, 306, 322–324, 333, 338, 374, 375, 428, 450 Republican, 5, 12, 43, 47, 49, 51, 82, 93, 94, 108, 112, 115, 121, 132,

491

138, 142, 172, 177, 180, 181, 185, 245, 252, 260, 271, 276, 277, 282, 285, 286, 298–300, 303, 315, 324, 326, 329, 331, 335, 348, 353, 374, 388, 389, 407, 408, 418, 423, 447 Pompeo, Mike, 401 Populism, 408–412 Portsmouth, 72 Portugal, 104, 254, 254n56, 288 Pound, Ezra, 10 Powell, Colin, 337, 342, 343 Powell, Johnathan, 340, 342, 343 Powers, Gary, 211 Preparatory Commission, 105–107 Price, Charles, 286, 287, 287n85 Protest, 48, 90n41, 97, 175, 303, 361, 378, 393, 412, 418, 428 Public opinion, 8, 16, 83, 85, 97, 103, 143, 144, 163, 169, 313, 341, 369, 440, 445, 448 Putin, Vladimir, 367, 394, 399–401, 407, 428 Putnam, William L., 46n42 Q Quebec Agreement (1943), 164 R Race, racism, 60–64, 60n9, 61n10, 62n15, 117, 164, 277 Rambouillet Summit (1962), 212, 213 Ramsbotham, Peter, 256 Ramsden, John, 136, 136n14 Reading, Lord, 91, 91n45, 93, 93n53 Reaganomics, 279, 286, 287, 294 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 5, 24, 27, 28, 32, 243, 268n135, 270, 274–295, 298–300, 302–304, 316–318, 323, 349, 353, 374, 389, 406, 446 Realpolitik, 3n3, 60, 126, 346 Reedy, George, 235 Referenda, 249n34, 250, 396 Regan, Donald T., 278, 278n33, 283 Religion, 62, 63, 75, 332 Renan, Ernest, 134

492 

INDEX

Renwick, Robin, 447 Republican National Committee, 260, 276 Republican Party, 51, 142, 181, 185, 276, 282, 299, 303, 315, 389, 389n24, 407, 408 Reston, James, 266 Retaliation Act (1887), 44 Reykjavik, 289 Rhode Island Radical Peace Union, 40n19 Rhodes, Ben, 361, 368, 377, 379 Rhodesia, 229, 236, 255, 270 Rhodes scholarship, 75 Rice, Condoleezza, 342, 344 Richards, David, 362 Richardson, Elliot, 254n56 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 169, 170n52 Ricketts, Peter, 365 Rifkind, Malcolm, 308 Robb, Thomas, 260, 268 Rogers, William, 248 Romania, 131, 151 Romney, Mitt, 348, 361, 373, 374 Roosevelt Corollary, 14, 14n27, 66 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 142, 154, 155 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 2, 19, 21, 80, 102–132, 134–155, 139n27, 158, 176, 183, 243, 392, 414, 418, 448 Roosevelt, James, 139 Roosevelt, Theodore, 5, 14, 14n27, 17, 18, 57–77, 58n2, 82, 88, 89n41, 95n58, 99, 141, 142, 373, 441 Rose, Clive, 267 Rough Riders, 59, 68 Royal Air Force (RAF), 130 Ruhr, 111 Rumsfeld, Donald, 337, 342, 343, 343n125 Rusk, Dean, 26, 204, 209, 218n2, 226, 229, 236, 237 Russo-Japanese War, 16, 16n31, 69, 127 Rwanda, 29, 298, 306, 308–311, 317, 318, 338 S Saatchi & Saatchi, 276, 282 Sackville-West, Lionel, 42, 47–49, 51, 52

Sadat, Anwar, 242 Saddam Hussein, 29, 302–303, 321, 326, 327, 334, 335, 337, 339–344 Sagamore Hill, 75 Salisbury, Lord, 5, 12–14, 36–56, 58, 64, 65, 400, 436, 443 Salisbury poisoning (2018), 430 SALT II (1972–79), 267, 269 Salvini, Matteo, 410 Sanders, Bernie, 410 Sanders, Sarah Huckerbee, 418n3 Sandhurst, 394 San Francisco, 68 Santo Domingo, 66 Sargent, Daniel, 260 Sargent, John Singer, 72 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 352, 356, 362–364 Saturday Review, 38n10 Saudi Arabia, 215, 216 Sawyer, Forrest, 291 Scarfe, Gerald, 227 Schmidt, Helmut, 257, 260n82, 265, 266, 271 Schneider, Vivienne, 282, 283 Schultz, George, 277n22, 285, 294n109 Schultze, Charles, 293 Schurz, Carl, 53 Scotland, 202, 376, 380, 393, 396, 413, 428 Scowcroft, Brent, 258, 260, 260n82 Second Industrial Revolution, 10 Second World War, 4, 19, 22, 24, 32, 69, 80, 99, 114, 126, 134–136, 138, 139n27, 148, 158, 159, 164, 165, 168, 169, 176, 180–183, 186, 190, 191, 193, 196, 222, 238, 253, 282n54, 292, 306, 308, 370, 418, 434, 441, 441n5, 442 Secretary of State, 12, 25, 26, 28, 33, 36, 40, 41n22, 42, 49, 50, 64, 67, 68, 72, 73, 82, 84, 104, 105, 107, 108, 113, 121, 152, 161, 162, 181, 188, 191, 192, 204, 209, 219, 226, 229, 242, 246, 248, 254n53, 254n56, 255, 255n57, 256, 259, 269, 277, 278, 280, 324, 328, 337, 342, 343, 354n42, 367, 388, 401 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 441, 442

 INDEX 

The Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), 90, 399, 441 The Security Service (MI5), 399, 441, 442 Seitz, Raymond, 8, 33, 242, 270 Selborne, Lord, 15, 17 Senate, US, 13, 36, 41n22, 43, 44n33, 46n42, 47, 47n46, 56, 88, 96, 98, 165, 221, 224, 269 Serbia, 29, 306, 327 Sergeant, 203, 205 Shakespeare, William, 263 Sheehan, Michael, 357 Sheinwald, Nigel, 445, 449 Sherwood, Robert, 136 Short, Ted, 227 Signals intelligence (SIGINT), 441 Simon, John (Viscount), 116, 117 Simon, William, 258, 259n77 Sinclair, Archibald, 137 Singapore, 17, 105, 121 Sinn Féin, 2, 313, 314, 318, 324 Skybolt (missile), 202, 203, 205, 208, 211, 212, 220 Slavery, 38, 38n7 Smalley, George W., 55 Smith, Sydney, 9 Smoot-Hawley Act (1930), 111 Smuts, Jan, 138 Soames, Mary, 152 Social Democratic Party (SDP), 333 Soleimani, Qassem, 430 Somalia, 309 Sotloff, Steven, 370 Souls, The, 72, 73 South Africa, 14, 53 South America, 17, 28, 49, 50, 67 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, 1954), 232 South Korea, 172, 188, 232, 366, 390, 430 Souza, Pete, 371 Soviet Union (USSR), 22–24, 28, 145, 147–149, 152, 154, 158–160, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171–173, 177, 178, 181, 191, 193, 195, 211, 215, 232, 255, 269, 289, 300, 306, 315, 362, 440 Spain, 81, 288

493

Spanish-American War (1898), 11, 12, 68, 70 Special Committee on Palestine (1947), 167 Special relationship, 2–4, 6, 8, 9, 22, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 64, 70, 73, 80, 102, 132, 134–137, 134n1, 141, 144, 146, 154, 155, 158, 159, 176, 177, 218–220, 231, 234, 242, 245, 247, 250, 262n94, 263, 268, 271, 274–295, 299–305, 312–314, 317, 318, 320, 332, 350, 353–355, 357, 358, 360, 362–364, 366, 369, 374, 375, 377, 379, 385, 387, 389, 391, 393–395, 394n57, 397, 399, 406, 411, 413–415, 423, 434, 436, 437, 447 Special Relationship Economic Working Group (2019), 432 Spectator, The, 70 Spring-Rice, Cecil, 71–73, 89, 89n41 Stahl, Lesley, 292 Stalin, Joseph, 3, 22, 32, 126, 136, 144–147, 150–154, 158, 161, 186, 191 Standard Oil, 114 Stassen, Harold, 192 State Department, 23, 28, 30, 32, 33, 51, 73, 81, 82, 113, 128, 131, 143, 162, 167, 169, 174, 205, 207, 209, 249, 256, 260, 314, 330, 342, 398, 410, 440n3, 445 State Visit, 361, 363, 365, 371, 372, 384, 384n6, 390, 392–395, 403, 406–408, 412, 414 Steele, Christopher, 399, 428 Sterling crises, 230 Sternberg, Speck von, 66n33 Stettinius, Ed, 152 Stevenson, Adlai, 180 Stimson, Henry, 108, 109, 112, 115, 122, 132, 149, 153 Strachey, John St. Loe, 70 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), 364 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 287–289, 287n92 Straw, Jack, 341, 343

494 

INDEX

Submarines, 82, 83, 87, 89, 106, 115–117, 202, 237 Suez Crisis (1956), 24, 196, 215 Sun, The, 357 Supreme Court, 446 Supreme War Council (1917–20), 91–93 Susman, Louis, 378 Swanson, Claude, 118 Syria, 350, 366–370, 374, 378–380, 402 T Taft, William Howard, 81n4, 441 Talbot, Strobe, 330, 378 Taliban, 336, 337, 339 Tappin, Christopher, 360 Taylor, A. J. P., 136 Tebbit, Norman, 311 Tehran Conference (1943), 22, 145, 150, 151, 154 Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (1931), 142 Tennant, Margot, 73 Test Ban Treaty (1963), 216 Thatcherism, 275, 275n7, 277, 278, 303, 316 Thatcher, Margaret, 4, 5, 24, 27–29, 32, 216, 243, 266n119, 268n135, 269, 274–295, 298–302, 304, 311, 316–318, 320, 349, 355, 362, 409, 446 Their Finest Hour, 135, 135n8 Third World, 186, 195 Third World Economic Summit (1977), 263 Thomas, Dylan, 263 Thor (missile), 210 Thorneycroft, Peter, 204 Tillman, Seth P., 99, 99n66 Times, The, 87, 99n66, 137, 167, 245, 258n73, 279, 293, 293n128 Timothy, Nick, 391, 392, 409 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), 397, 414 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 397, 429 Treasury UK, 30, 82, 259 US, 82, 91, 109, 250, 251, 257, 259, 260, 278, 278n33

Treaty of Arbitration (1873), 36, 56 Treaty of 1818, 43, 43n29 Treaty of London (1915), 97 Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), 72 Treaty of Washington (1871), 42n24, 42n25, 45 Trevelyan, G. O., 58n2, 88, 88n36 Trident (missile), 27, 32, 266–269, 268n135, 271, 289 Trinidad, 49 Trudeau, Justin, 401, 432 Trudeau, Pierre, 255 Truman, Harry S., 22, 23, 153, 157, 187–189, 191, 234, 441, 447 Truman, Margaret, 161 Trump, Donald, 3–5, 31, 32, 275, 275n6, 379, 384–415, 417–437, 447, 450 Trump, Mary Anne MacLeod, 389, 413 Trump, Mary L., 426n65 Tshombe, Moïse, 213, 215 Tumulty, Joseph Patrick, 81, 83, 98n65 Tunisia, 370 Tupper, Charles, 46n42 Turkey, 91, 169, 170, 191, 390 Turnbull, Malcolm, 401 Twain, Mark, 10 Twitter, 31, 418 Tyler, William, 144, 206 U Ukraine, 366, 370 UK-US Agreement (1946), 164 Union for Democratic Control (UDC), 87, 88 United Kingdom (UK), 3, 9, 42, 59, 109, 137, 197, 203, 219, 242, 278, 298, 320, 348, 384, 419, 443 United Nations General Assembly, 167, 342, 356, 364, 431, 433 Security Council, 169, 173, 188, 232, 309, 310, 326, 327, 342, 343, 437 United States (U.S), 6, 8, 36, 37, 83, 105, 137, 162, 183, 202, 218, 242, 277, 298, 379, 440 University, 84 USS Augusta, 140

 INDEX 

V Vansittart, Robert, 20, 119, 124, 125 Vantage Point, The (1971), 218 Venezuela, 12, 14, 36, 50–56, 64–67, 66n36 Venezuela crisis (1895), 11n15, 12 Versailles treaty (1919), 103, 105, 110 Vice president, 105, 153, 159, 164, 221, 261, 261n92, 285, 298, 299, 331, 342, 427 Victoria, Queen, 54 Vietnam War, 26, 441 W Wallace, Henry A., 153, 302, 304, 314 War Department, 91, 93 War of 1812, 9, 42n24 War Office, 81, 131, 149, 441 Washington DC, 340, 352, 388, 428 Washington, George, 264 Washington Naval Conference (1921–22), 104 Washington Post, The, 53, 167, 285 Washington Treaty (1922), 105–107, 109, 115, 118, 124 Wass, Douglas, 258 Watkinson, Harold, 202 Watts, George Frederic, 354 Westland Affair (1985–6), 294 Weston, John, 255 West Wing, 3 White, Andrew D., 53 White, Daisy, 73 White, Henry, 59, 64, 72, 73 White, Hugh, 263 Whitehouse, J. Howard, 87 White House, 3, 6, 9, 27, 32, 39, 40, 72, 73, 81, 84, 113, 115, 121, 129–131, 138, 153, 199, 226, 227, 233, 236, 238, 241, 245–247, 245n12, 258, 261, 262, 262n94, 265, 268, 270, 271, 274–295, 299, 300, 304, 305, 312–314, 316, 324, 328, 331, 345, 348, 349, 352, 356, 362, 365, 366, 368, 369, 371–373, 379, 387, 390, 391, 395, 418, 420, 431, 440, 445, 446 Whitman, Walt, 10

495

Wiesner, Jerome, 207, 208 Wikileaks, 373 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 54 Williams, Mennen, 214 Wilson, Harold, 26, 27, 217–239, 245, 246, 248–257, 255n57, 271, 410, 445, 450 Wilson, Woodrow, 5, 18, 39n15, 74, 80–99, 109, 441, 446 Wirthlin, Richard, 285 Wiseman, William, 90, 91, 93 Wisner, Frank, 23 Wolf, Michael, 395n60, 405n132, 408n153 Woodward, Bob, 389n21 World Disarmament Conference (1932–34), 120 World Economic Conference (1929–32), 112 World Economic Summit (1977), 263 World Health Organization (WHO), 428 World order, 31, 93, 320, 327, 331, 333, 338, 344–346, 403 World Trade Organization (WTO), 398 Wright, Jeramiah, 354 X Xi Jinping, 401 Y Yalta Conference (1945), 22, 151 Yeltsin, Boris, 329 Yeo, Ed, 258, 260n86 Yom Kippur War (1973), 247 Young, Andrew, 264 Young, Owen, 111, 218 Young plan, 113 Yugoslavia, 151, 298, 303, 306, 308, 321, 325 Z Zedong, Mao, 172 Zionism, 166–167 Zulficar Pass, 37 Zulueta, Philip de, 211, 212