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Harold and Jack

The Remarkable Friendship of Prime Minister MacMillan and President Kennedy

Prometheus Books

MENDING FENCES

The weather in southern England was warming up; the sky above rural Sussex was cloudless. The British and American flags fluttered over the prime minister's country house, Birch Grove, which had seen a riot of activity over the previous days. Rooms had been hurriedly painted, the lawn re-turfed, and banks of flowers laid out in mutually patriotic shades of red, white, and blue. Workmen had descended from London to assemble a huge canopied bed built to the visiting president's specifications and to help ease his chronic back pain, a special rocking chair was found for his use during the talks. Caterers had followed, bearing trays of cakes with colored sugar, and a butler was commandeered from Government Hospitality in Whitehall. Upstairs in his childhood bedroom, the sixty-nine-year-old premier, Harold Macmillan, awoke each morning that week to the sound of hammers and saws, the shouted orders and grumbles of builders, and all the animation that marked the refurbishment of his family home into the setting of a great transatlantic summit. It was a peculiarly British affair, with many last-minute improvisations. On the morning of the visit, the butler—already in full regalia—and a party of gardeners, chauffeurs, and junior civil servants were still hard at work erecting a marquee on the back lawn. Restaurants and pubs in the neighboring villages had been requisitioned to house and feed the president's 120-strong retinue, while large crowds of the curious or the obsessed began to form outside the estate's front gates, some with flags, others with banners protesting the visit. Macmillan himself wrote of the "fantastic, even romantic atmosphere that prevailed during these thrilling hours.... Inside the house it seemed more like a play or rather the mad rehearsal for a play, than a grave international conference." Shortly before six on a then-overcast Saturday evening, amid new frenzies of excitement, an enormous olive-green helicopter descended onto the nearby park. Macmillan's memory of the event was rhapsodic:

I can see [the president] now, stepping from the machine, this splendid, young, gay figure, followed by his team of devoted adherents. Never has a man been so well or so loyally served. Until he left, the whole of our little world was dominated by the sudden arrival and equally sudden departure of leading figures in the drama.

It was June 29, 1963, and the seventh meeting between Macmillan and his American counterpart, forty-six-year-old John F. Kennedy, since the president's inauguration twenty-nine months earlier. Between them they had rescued the transatlantic Special Relationship after the rupture of the Suez Crisis, and done so at a time of uniquely high tensions around the world. Among other political or military challenges, their brief shared time in office had seen the coming of the Berlin Wall, the apparent risk to world peace posed by the Soviet Union and its territorial ambitions everywhere from Laos to British Guiana, the very real threat of the Cuban missile crisis, and a bitter internecine dispute about Britain's possession of an independent nuclear deterrent. These were just the set-piece dramas. Through it all, the two leaders had exchanged not only formal messages but also a steady flow of handwritten notes, Christmas and birthday cards, personal gifts, congratulations, and, on occasion, condolences—Macmillan felt a "genuine personal warmth" for his younger colleague and sent what the First Lady later wrote back to and described as "the most tender of letters" when the president and his wife lost their newborn son in August 1963. The premier's decision to address his boyish-looking counterpart as "Friend" or "Dear Friend" seems to have been a conscious step in the gradual assumption of a more human "special relationship," something like that between an Oxford don and an exceptionally gifted undergraduate. At Birch Grove, Macmillan wrote, "There was none of the solemnity which usually characterises such meetings. After all, we were all friends; and the whole atmosphere was that of a country house party, to which had been added a garden party and a dance.... The President seemed in the highest spirits and was particularly charming to [my wife] and the children. None of [his] disabilities seemed to have the slightest effect upon his temperament. Of our party, as doubtless of many others, he was what is called 'the life and soul.'"

Just twenty-four hours later, the Secret Service having reconnoitered, the president left as he came, by helicopter. "Before he said goodbye," wrote Macmillan, "we discussed once more our plans for frequent communication, by telegram or telephone; with another meeting before Christmas or, at the latest, in the New Year. Hatless, with his brisk step, and combining that indescribable look of a boy on a 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 across the valley above the heavily laden, lush foliage of oaks and beech at the end of June."

After more than six years in office, Macmillan found himself just then governing Britain in as turbulent a period as the nation had known outside of wartime. The early part of 1963 had seen a series of security scandals, culminating in the defection to Moscow of Kim Philby, formerly the head of the branch of MI6 specifically charged with investigating communist activity. Meanwhile, Britain's long-running application for membership of the European Economic Community had been summarily vetoed by President de Gaulle of France. At around the same time, some seventy thousand antinuclear protesters had taken to the streets of London, demanding a change of government. To cap it all, thick, Dickensian fog had regularly settled on southern England, leaving spectacular time deposits on streets and houses, followed by the coldest, and certainly most protracted, winter in two hundred years. There was no desolation more complete than Britain in the grip of repeated winter storms prior to the arrival of widespread domestic central heating. One way or another, these were trying times for the apparently decrepit prime minister known for his shuffling gait and capacious plus-four trousers. Speaking in the House of Commons earlier in the week of Kennedy's visit, Macmillan had been asked by the Labour MP Marcus Lipton whether "he does not feel that the President should be given the opportunity of exchanging views with a new Prime Minister, and not one who is under notice to quit, and whose political status at home and abroad is inevitably impaired?" Macmillan replied that no, he didn't think so. In the wake of the sex scandal involving John Profumo, the British war minister, and certain other difficulties that summer, much of the country as a whole had begun to wonder if the PM might not finally resign or at least test his popularity in a general election. A Gallup poll brought to Kennedy's notice shortly before he arrived for his meeting at Birch Grove showed 71 percent of the British public favoring a change of leadership. To no avail: A month after the president's visit, Macmillan faced a meeting of his party parliamentary colleagues where "I was received with great applause and banging of desks. I spoke for 40 minutes, on broad policy, home and abroad.... When I sat down, after simply saying about myself that my sole purpose was to serve the Party and the Nation and to secure a victory at the Election, there was great applause.... Altogether it was a triumphant vote of confidence." From a public approval rating of minus seventeen in July, Macmillan rebounded to the relative prosperity of minus five in August. The worst of the Profumo business was already behind him, he told Kennedy, and he once again "confidently looked forward" to their next meeting, and to many more after that.

For once, the subtle Macmillan touch failed him. The Western worlds two most powerful leaders would not meet again. Well before Christmas, the prime minister had left office, and the president had been cut down by an assassin's bullet.

* * *

In what Macmillan called "my responsible and rather lonely position," he was sustained by a particularly close—if not untested—friendship with two successive American presidents. There is almost always a human factor in a politician's relations with other politicians. In Macmillan's case, this was especially true. What often seems to have been overlooked in the analysis of policy, economics, and shared cultural values that constituted the Atlantic alliance of the day was that the strongest and most enduring link between the two countries was a warmly personal one. For each leader, appearing on the other's home stage was a badge of honor, a pilgrimage back to the scene of his most character-forming family history. For Kennedy, there was the seminal year he spent at the age of eighteen studying under Harold Laski, the firebrand political theorist at the London School of Economics, where he developed not only a taste for high-born British society, and more particularly for her young women, but also a clearer understanding of the part played in a public figure's life by social and religious inequality. "In speaking of Boston, he [Laski] said, 'Boston is a state of mind'—and as a Jew, he could understand what it is to be an Irishman in Boston," Kennedy wrote in his diary. "That last remark reveals the fundamental, activating force of Mr. Laski's life—a powerful spirit doomed to an inferior position because of race—a position that all of his economic and intellectual superiority cannot raise him out of." These words would resonate a generation later, when Kennedy sought to be the first Roman Catholic to occupy the White House. In May 1959, a quarter of all respondents said that they would not vote for a Catholic as US president, no matter how well qualified he might otherwise be for the job.

Two years after leaving Harold Laski's tutelage, Kennedy was back in London to spend the summer working at the US embassy. He returned once more in the spring of 1939, "having a great time," he wrote, as Europe drifted into war. Although notionally researching a thesis about international law and diplomacy, he admitted he was not "doing much work, but have been sporting around in my morning coat, my 'Anthony Eden' black Homburg and white gardenia." Kennedy was thrilled to have met the king "at a Court Levee. It takes place in the morning and you wear tails. The King stands and you go up and bow. Met Queen Mary and was at tea with the Princess Elizabeth with whom I made a great deal of time. Thursday night—am going to Court in my new silk breeches, which are cut to my crotch tightly, and in which I look mighty attractive." Six months after he wrote this, the twenty-two-year-old Kennedy was with his parents and his sister Kathleen in the strangers' gallery of the House of Commons to hear the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain explain his country's decision to declare war on Nazi Germany. Immediately following this, he had his first taste of practical diplomacy when he was sent to Scotland to help console the distressed American survivors of the SS Athenia, which had been sunk by a German submarine while on her way from Glasgow to Montreal, with the loss of 117 lives. These were not, perhaps, the standard experiences of a young man who was yet to graduate from Harvard. The twin results of Kennedy's early adventures in Britain were a lifelong fascination with that country's social and cultural elite and, more immediately, his publication of a thesis on Chamberlain's appeasement policy, titled Why England Slept. The author Paul Johnson suggests in his book A History of the American People that "Old Joe [Kennedy's father] and his men turned Why England Slept into a bestseller, partly by using influence with publishers, [and] partly by buying 30,000—40,000 copies, which were secretly stored at the family compound at Hyannis Port." Adding to this intellectual and emotional connection, there was also a personal Kennedy connection to the old country. In May 1944, John's younger sister Kathleen, or "Kick," married William Cavendish, heir apparent to the tenth Duke of Devonshire, who as a captain in the British army died in action in Belgium only three months later. Since Harold Macmillan's wife was herself the daughter of the ninth duke, this made him Kathleen's uncle by marriage. The living relationship was to be tragically short-lived. Just four years after her husbands death, Kathleen was killed in a plane crash while on her way from Paris to the French Riviera. She was twenty-eight. In the perhaps fanciful pop-psychological account of one Kennedy biographer, Macmillan thus became "the alternate father whom in death Kick had bestowed on her brother Jack."

Macmillan also had profound personal links underpinning the political Special Relationship. He was very proud of his ancestry, which he could trace back for dozens of generations and frequently did. Although often portrayed as the model of an English gentleman, not least by himself, Macmillan was actually part of a colorful Scots-Canadian tapestry. American blood, too, flowed in his veins. His mother, Helen Artemisia Tarleton Belles, was born in Indianapolis in the middle of 1856 (precise local records weren't kept at the time), and Nellie, as she preferred to call herself, grew up there and in the nearby hamlet of Spencer, a community of some 1,500 souls nestled on the banks of the White River. In January 1876, at the age of nineteen, she sailed to France in order to study music and pursue an understandable wish to see something of the world beyond rural southern Indiana. On November 22, 1884, Nellie married a thirty-one-year-old publisher named Maurice Macmillan, whose people came from the remote regions of Kintyre in Argyle, an area settled almost entirely by sheep. Their third son, Harold, born in February 1894, was later to skillfully portray himself for public consumption as the product of generations of simple Scottish crofters. In fact, Maurice had led a slightly more cosmopolitan life than the legend of a bonneted, claymore-wielding highland laddy insists: after taking a first-class degree in Classics at Cambridge, he had taught at St. Paul's School in London and then joined the family publishing firm, for whom he traveled on extended book-buying tours of Europe. It was while on a visit to Paris that he met Nellie Belles, whom he described in a note to his brother as "a dark-eyed beauty who wore exquisitely made shoes on her tiny feet, and spoke exuberant French in a gay American accent."

There was to be a moving scene in September 1956, when the sixty-two-year-old British chancellor of the exchequer traveled to Spencer to read the lesson in his mother's Methodist church and talk about her life. "I owe her everything," Harold Macmillan said, in a stirring speech that was full of family pathos. "I found it rather difficult to get through, without breaking down," the normally unflappable politician later wrote in his diary. "I really felt that my mother was there watching us and enjoying the satisfaction of so many of her hopes and ambitions for me. When I remember all that I owe to her, it's difficult to express what she did for me." It did not go unnoticed that Macmillan selected as his text Matthew 25:14—30, the Parable of the Talents, traditionally seen as an exhortation to Christians to use their God-given gifts wisely. Accompanied by the British ambassador, Macmillan later attended a number of local events to celebrate the centenary year of Nellie's birth. She had passed onto her children a "rudimentary culture," he went on to tell a political colleague, and, far more than the diffident Maurice, she had been "the motivating force ... the dynamo whose ambition [for] me never stopped ticking" in his early life. The dictum that "a man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps forever the feeling of a conqueror" was undoubtedly true here. Following the church service in Spencer, Macmillan laid a wreath on the grave of his grandfather, Dr. Joshua Belles, "an overwhelming rite" during which he wept openly.

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Excerpted from Harold and Jack by Christopher Sandford. Copyright © 2014 Christopher Sandford. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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