Macmillan Vol.2: 1957-86 [2] 0333496213

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Also by Alistair Horne

Back Into Power The Land is Bright Canada and the Canadians The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 ~o Lose a Battle: France 1940 The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune 1871 Death of a Generation Small Earthquake in Chile Napoleon: Master of Europe 1805-1807 The French Army and Politics 1870-1970 A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 Macmillan I 894- I 956: Yolume I of the Official Biography

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Ali stai r Horn e

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MACMILLAN

LONDON

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Copyright © Alistair Horne 1g89 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1989 by MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED 4 Little Essex Street, London WC2R 3LF and Basingstoke Associated companies in Auckland, Delhi, Dublin, Gaborone, Hamburg, Harare, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Manzini, Melbourne, Mexico City, Nairobi, New York, Singapore and Tokyo

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Horne, Alistair, 1925Macmillan: 195 7-1986 Vol. 2 1. Great Britain. Macmillan, Harold, 1894-1986 I. Title 941.085'092' 4 ISBN

0-333-49621-3

Photoset in Great Britain by Rowland Phototypesetting Limited Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed by Butler and Tanner Limited Frame, Somerset

Cort tents List of Illustrations IX Preface xi 'It's Macmillan', January-March 1957 2 Mending the Fences, March-December 1957 3 'Little Local Difficulties', 1957-1958 4 I 958: The Year of International Crisis 91 ~ 5 No Mr Chamberlain, 1958-1959 Il5 _ 6 Electoral Triumph, 1958-1959 137 7 Winds of Change, r959-196oi73 ~ 8 Eruption at the Summit, r959-196o _/J 'Stagflation': The English Disease, 1960-end of 1961 \i~A Very Special Relationship', 1960-1961 V-Facing Up to Khrushchev and De Gaulle, 6c~9610ctober 1962 V 309 • )a__Jl:ight of Long Knives, July 1962 _ ~ 331 • ~'!Trial of Wills': Cuba, October-November 1962 V 361 0 T h e Continuing Burdens of Empire, 1961 - 1963 . ~ v'-?/Skybolt Falls and De Gaulle Says No, May 1962-january 1963~• \!)f/ 'Everybody's Darling, Anyway', January-June 1963 453 . Y{ A Last Triumph,jum;-September 1963 499 • ~rS 'The Hand of Fate', sf:ptemher-October ;.gQ3 527 .. r 9 'Life After Death' ,...1g6a-r979 567 603 20 ~e Style, C'est L'Homme,' 1979-1986

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Notes Select Bibliography Index

633 695

Picture Acknowledgemmls

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List of Illustrations

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Between pages 222- 223 The new PM, 1957. Birch, Powell, Thorneycroft. The Commonwealth Tour, 1958. Down Under, 1958. Back from the Commonwealth. With President Eisenhower, 1958. Makarios. Journey to Muscovy, 1959· General Election, 1959; canvassing at Oldham. General Election, 1959; President and PM. General Election, 1959; utilising all the media. General Election, 1959; Hailsham and Butler: Birch Grove, 1958. At home in No. 10. Moving out - temporarily. Roy Welensky, 1960. Winds of Change; Basutoland. Winds of Change; 'S outh Africa. Rab, 1960. The UN, 1960. Khrushchev. Negotiating with de Gaulle, 1960. Adenauer visits London, 1958. . Welcoming de Gaulle, London, 1960. De Gaulle says, 'No', 1963. Chancellor of Oxford, 1960.

Macmillan

Between pages 462-463 The new President, 1962. President Kennedy with Ambassador Ormsby-Gore. Bermuda, 1961. Admiralty House, 1961. Washington, 1962. Labour Party Conference, Brighton, 1962. Frank Cousins. Selwyn Lloyd, 1g62. Tory Party Conference, 1962. The cartoonists' delight. 'Supermac" takes off, 1959. Election, 1959. Grappling with Europe, 1g60. A holiday on the grouse-moors, 1963. The succession as seen by Cummings, 1963. The succession, Act II. At odds with Margaret Thatcher, 1985. The Derby, 1957. A luncheon visit, 1959. John Profumo MP, 1963. The height of the Profumo scandal, 1g63. Tory Party Conference, 1961. The Queen leaves King Edward VII Hospital, 1g63. Retired and recuperating, 1963. The publisher returns; the author begins, 1964. Shooting with Maurice, 1963. Dorothy's funeral, 1966. On Firing Line, I g8o. Biographer greets subject, Washington, 1g8o. Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy at Birch Grove, 1965. Bestowing a degree on Prince Charles, Oxford, 1g83. Eighty-fifth birthday respects from Margaret Thatcher, 1979· China, with Deng Xiao Ping, 1979. . · In the House of Lords on the first day of public television, 1985.

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Preface For a week and more after his death in December 1986, the British media overflowed with tributes to Harold Macmillan, first Earl of Stockton - obituaries, recollections, anecdotes about the man. No Briton had received such top billing on his death since Winston Churchill; and, with rare exceptions, almost all of it was favourable, kindly and nostalgic. It even spilled over into the US and Europe. In the effusiveness of its eulogies, it was almost as if Fleet Street were endeavouring to atone for all the harsh (and largely forgotten) judgements it had made about the man during his premiership, now so -many years past. The word 'giant' proliferated: 'Giant of post-war politics', proclaimed the Independent's headline of the day Macmillan's death was announced; 'Many would regard him as Britain's most successful postwar Prime Minister... .' 1 '"Supermac", one of the giants of 20th century British politics', the Daily Mail called him, declaring in one of its headlines that he had 'BROUGHT GREAT BRITAIN YEARS OF PROSPERITY, PEACE AND PRO2

and rating him 'Supermac ... the Super Statesman'. ·Few. British newspapers during Macmillan's term of office would have dared even to use the word 'statesman' - let. alone 'giant'. Among his successors, Mrs Thatcher, though often fiercely criticised by him in his later years, declared in a long and generous tribute - with a magnanimity that was manifestly not contrived that his death 'leaves a place which no one else can fill'; he was 'an idealist, !. shre.wd politician', and a man of outstanding bravery, fortitude, wit, erudition and compassion. In America, John F. Kennedy's former Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, praised him for the almost paternal influen~ that he had had upon the young GRESS',

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President, as 'one of the greatest Prime Ministers in my judgement'; he and Kennedy both looked on him 'as a sort of uncle and advisor'. Ex-President Nixon, whom Macmillan himself had never highly rated, wrote his own special tribute in The T imes, lauding him as a 'consummate realist' in his dealings with the Russians and expressed enduring gratitude and 'affection' fo:t: the 'message of sympathy and good will' Macmillan had sent at the time of Watergate.3 Out of all the tributes, there emerged agreement on two scores; first, that Harold Macmillan was a greater and more considerable figure than had been the view at the end of his premiership; secondly, it might still be too early to assess his precise place in British, and world, history. Perhaps the most outstanding attribute of Harold Macmillan as a statesman and political thinker was his remarkable capacity to think forwards, and to relate issues to the lessons of the past, of which he was such an adept student. If he could not furnish all the answers, he certainly saw - and comprehended - most of the questions. As his colleague, Lord Carrington, saw it, on 'the big views he was always consistent, and never seemed to deviate at all .. .'. He was generally right about the things that really mattered.4 Whatever the considered verdict of future historians about his exact location in the constellation of British Prime Ministers, there could be no disputing that, as a personality, Har9ld Macmillan had s.tar quality. He remains one of the mst intriguing figures in British political history, her best:·read and perhaps most intelligent Prime Minister, certainly "o f this century - and one of the most complex ever. It is this very complexity that makes him so difficult to evaluate, on almost every single issue in which he was involved. Some of Harold Macmillan's chief characteristics were unambiguous, and uncompromising; his religious faith and patriotism, his humanity and sense of humour, his intelligence and mental toughness, the courage which he so much admired in others and which in him, on occasions, amounted to recklessness. But few men could have been more composed of paradoxes than he; it was what gave him his charm {and mischief) as a conversationalist, and made him a fascinating (but elusive) subject for a biographer. There were things that did not fit. Every element in him seemed to have its counterpoise; every uttered view its antithesis. Friend and foe alike dubbed him the 'actor-manager' (his own wife, Dorothy, once xii

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remarked, 'Perhaps my hl!-sband should have been an actor!'), 5 and they often wondered which was the actor, and which was the manager; which was the mask, and which was the real man. Harold Wils~n, with so~e small performing experience himself, possibly put his finger on it when he observed that his 'role as a poseur was itself a pose'. 6 Perhaps even Macmillan himself was not always quite clear about his own identity; perhaps it was all a game to tease and baffle the pedestrian mind - if not future biographers. Proteus incarnate, he was by turns crofter and duke manque, scholar and . swordsman; he was compassionate and ruthless, pessimist and optimist, fatalist and devout Christian. He never missed the absurdities of life; though deeply sceptical, and given to cynical remarks, he was never at heart a cynic. And there were strains of Celtic romanticism. Though he showed it to few, he was a man haunted by ghosts and buffeted by tragedy. Family and friends, he had either seen them die in the trenches, or had outlived them all. The scars of the 1930s were indelible, and perhaps made him what he was - a great human being. If he did not achieve true historical greatness, then it eluded him by a few hairsbreadths. Back in September 1979, when he was eighty-seven, in what he called his 'Declaration', he spoke about 'the strongest element in my life': · ... I don't think a nation can live without religion. I don't find a man who could ... if you don't pray every night, and if you don't believe in God, and if you don't think you can serve God eventually, you can't solve these problems and you can't even then survive them, I don't think. And so that's my philosophy of life - there are neither successes or failures, you do your best, and that's my life.... 7 Typically, Faith, Hope and Charity was the note on which he ended . his emotive maiden speech in the H ouse of Lords, and it was faith that brought him through it all, and through all the adversities of old age, th~ pain of ancient wounds, the loss of a wife, of family and colleagues, and loneliness. When in New York in 1g8o, he remarked on television to William F. Buckley Jr: 'If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency ... decency is very good. Xlll

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Better decent than indecent. But I don't think it's .enough.' 8 He fundamentally believed both in God and decency. Volume I of Macmillan took the subject through the first sixty-two years of his life, culminating with the Suez debacle of 1956, and the beginning of the 'Macmillan era', which was to comprise seven of the most eventful years in contemporary British history. From the diffident, unhappy young man plagued by self-doubts and bouts of the Black Dog, and the pre-Second World War idealist, battered by a broken marriage that brought much misery and years in the political wilderness, to the 'Supermac' of the late 1950s shows an extraordinary progression by any yardstick. But when an individual ascends to the role of Prime Minister, or President, his private existence virtually ceases and he becomes public property. Thus here, in a biography, a change ~f gear inevitably takes place. The functions of office, and epic events associated with it, at home and abroad, take precedence over personal thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, his personality remains at the heart of all his judgements, successes and failures. In the case of Harold Macmillan, his public life as Prime Minister (and the three out of the sjx volumes of his memoirs that he wrote about it) was also illuminated by hundreds of pages of diary that he wrote, night after night, in a spidery longhand (made arduous by a German bullet through his hand in r915) in the small hours after work. I have already drawn-attention re-this valuable source of archive ma~rialTn V~lume I; but~ ~he pn:..mie.rs.hlE__f~~~sln~~~~-Ijgli.~rto unptil5Ilslied-dtaries - unrestrained, outspoken, acnd and occasionally~~':~~~- ~E:easure _t.i:_qY.!::. JQ!"__~1_1y_l?i~her. His comments there .on betes noirestik:e'"Diefenbaker of Canada, or.Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany - sometimes even of John F. Kennedy (for whom he had great esteem and personal affection) are forthright, sometimes blistering. ~--himself always warned that his 9.iaries should be treated. mitb cag~!l@b~it!mJE .!!:tc;..h.r,~t.Qf t~~- moment~ _t~(!Y ~!~~-~always factually acc~~ ..!l-2!.fair, i.~_th~t_tli:ey gay_e yen.! t..Q __p_~~.s_i_~g-p1ques;-wmc1rire·would often ...!!!.9dify or expunge the --------. -......_ f