To Dare Even More Boldly: The Butterfly Effect in Political Risk; Macmillan Salvages Britain's Place in the World
All through his life he had been haunted by unwanted ghosts, both of his own experience and also that of his country. Now, in December 1962, Harold Macmillan found himself in the Bahamas, attempting to save what could be saved—to salvage the reputation of Great Britain as one of the world’s great powers.
The broader context of the Nassau Conference was that of Britain’s place in a post-Suez world. The Suez Crisis—initiated by President Gamal Abdel Nasser when he nationalised the Suez Canal in Egypt on July 26, 1956, a butterfly effect event that had come seemingly out of nowhere—had been the acknowledged swan song of European imperialism and of Britain and France as superpowers.
Macmillan had not personally covered himself in glory during the debacle. Serving at the time as chancellor of the exchequer, the number two in the British government, he told Prime Minister Anthony Eden (whom he disliked) that he would resign if force was not used against Nasser. This threat bolstered Eden’s bellicosity, and Britain—along with France and Israel—subsequently invaded the Canal Zone, as European imperial countries habitually had done for centuries to put a little local difficulty right.
But times had changed. Most damaging, both Macmillan and the Eden government had entirely misread the anti-colonial position of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Serving as a protege of Winston Churchill during World War II, Macmillan had achieved cabinet rank and real power as Britain’s minster resident for the Mediterranean. From 1942-1945, Macmillan had worked hand in glove with Ike, and a mutual admiration followed. Eisenhower said of Macmillan later that he was ‘a straight, fine man, and so far as he (Ike) is concerned, the outstanding one of the British he served with during the war.’ Macmillan and the Eden cabinet blithely thought that wartime camaraderie would sway American opinion.
Instead, Suez proved to be the bolt from the blue that signalled the definitive end of the British Empire. Macmillan met with his old friend Eisenhower privately on September 25, 1956, coming away again misjudging the US response to Nasser. In November 1956, Britain invaded Egypt, in collusion with France and Israel, only to be shocked by America’s vehement anti-colonial response.
The run on sterling—a financial crisis caused directly by American pressure on London in the wake of the invasion—caused Macmillan, serving as Britain’s chief financial officer, to dramatically change his mind about the incursion. As was bitterly noted by Eden’s dwindling band of supporters, Macmillan was the first one in and the first one out of the crisis.
With his political position utterly untenable, Eden resigned as prime minister on January 9, 1957, and Macmillan took over the next day. Following the Suez shambles, the new prime minister told the queen that he could not guarantee his government would last six weeks. In the end, it lasted six years.
But Suez was not the first bolt from the blue to dramatically alter Macmillan’s life. As was true for so many of his generation, the Great War of 1914-1918 changed everything. The scion of the famous publishing house, Macmillan was at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1912-1914, the halcyon days of his life. With the dramatic advent of European-wide war in August 1914, he did not hesitate to immediately volunteer for service. Little did Macmillan—or the millions of others who followed his brave example—realise it, but the world and the life that he had known was coming to an end.
Serving with distinction in the Grenadier Guards, Captain Macmillan was wounded three times in the war, most severely in September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Badly shot through the hip, Macmillan lay in a trench for 10 hours, sometimes feigning death as German troops passed over him, sometimes reading the Greek playwright Aeschylus for comfort, in the original Greek.
Macmillan spent the final two years of the war in various hospitals, undergoing a seemingly endless series of operations; his hip would take four years to finally heal, and the pain from the wound would never entirely leave him.
But if Macmillan’s physical pain from the war was considerable, the psychological cost was even greater. Of the 28 students who were in his year at Balliol, only one other classmate survived the Great War. Hearing that his university class-mates had been butchered to a man, Macmillan, sorrowfully noting that Oxford would never be the same, chose not to finish his studies. This was a man with a high regard for how unthought-of events can determine the future.
Greatly regretting the damage he had personally done, which had led to the diminution of Britain’s standing in the world over Suez, Macmillan used his premiership to make a grand effort to repair British foreign policy. First, realising the Empire was on its last legs, Macmillan set about the process of decolonisation, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, in as painless a way as possible.
Second, when forced to choose between France/Europe and the United States, Macmillan came down strongly on the side of Washington, setting about rebuilding the ‘special relationship.’ One of the many ways he did this was to jointly work with the American nuclear programme. In fact, his staunch unwillingness to disclose US nuclear secrets to France contributed to Paris’s veto of Britain’s proposed entry into the European Economic Community.
Shorn of its empire and cut off (by France) from Europe, Macmillan had put all of his strategic eggs in the American basket. As he somewhat arrogantly went around saying, in this new post-Suez era, Britain would function as the wily Greeks had done for the young thrusting Romans—serving as the wise, world-weary interpreters for their powerful but naive patrons regarding how running the world actually worked.
But for a third time in his life, unforeseen events hurtled down on him, threatening Macmillan’s celebrated equanimity. Once again, the ‘special relationship’—the buttress that was now all that was sustaining Britain’s post-Suez standing in the world—was in danger of collapsing, and all over the inadvertent cancellation of an obscure missile programme.
Skybolt, a ballistic missile jointly developed by the UK and the US during the early 1960s, had run well over projected costs. Without giving any thought to the broader geopolitical symbolism of Skybolt—the fact that it served as a concrete illustration of the enduring US-UK strategic partnership—President Kennedy unilaterally cancelled the programme because it had become enormously expensive, and also because it was so far behind schedule that it would have been obsolete even before it was deployed.
However, utterly unexpectedly, the cancellation of Skybolt provoked a crisis of confidence between the United States and Britain. The optics of the cancellation caused unthought-of tensions in US-UK relations, as it looked as if the United States was yet again unilaterally cutting Britain down to size, this time high-handedly divesting London of its independent nuclear deterrent. Given that Macmillan had staked everything on the centrality of the ‘special relationship,’ the Skybolt crisis came to be seen as a litmus test of the true post-Suez value of the US-UK alliance.
Throughout the summer of 1962 and especially after the cancellation of Skybolt in November 1962, the British minister of defence, Peter Thorneycroft, and the US secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, had constant talks on Skybolt and the implications of its cancellation. Addressing Parliament on December 17, 1962, just ahead of the Nassau Conference, Thorneycroft said ‘I have stressed throughout my talks with Mr. McNamara the serious consequences for the United Kingdom of a cancellation of this project, and I can assure the House that the United States Government can be in no doubt on that aspect of the matter.’
Macmillan was left to walk a very fine diplomatic line at the Nassau Conference. He was eager not to alienate the Americans, but also absolutely needed to ensure Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. Failure to do so would call the value—from the British point of view—of the whole ‘special relationship’ into question, and along with it, Macmillan’s government itself. The prime minister either had to convince Kennedy to countermand his original order and retain Skybolt, or to secure a viable replacement. Britain’s perceived status as a great power hung in the balance.
At the beginning of the conference, Kennedy, still not understanding the strategic and political implications for Britain, appeared reluctant to provide London with the Polaris missiles which the British government regarded as the only realistic substitute for Skybolt.
Fortunately for the prime minister, he was just the sort of man Kennedy instinctively liked: brave, stylish, witty, and unflappable. They were evenly distantly related by marriage to the aristocratic Cavendish family, which included Macmillan’s wife Dorothy and Kennedy’s favourite sister, Kathleen.
It was at this pivotal moment, with Kennedy wavering, that Macmillan successfully managed to save his world this third time it was threatened by unforeseen events. Standing to speak, Macmillan invoked his own horrendous experiences in the Great War and eloquently detailed what Britain had sacrificed for the world in its storied past in the greater cause of preserving Western civilisation.
After tugging at the president’s heartstrings by rightfully reminding him of what Britain had given and meant to the ‘special relationship,’ the prime minister dropped the hammer. As Trachtenberg relates, ‘Macmillan…demanded Polaris and threatened an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of British policy if he did not get it.’
In a conversation with the British ambassador to Washington, Kennedy at last realised how devastating the Skybolt controversy was for Macmillan in particular, and for the ‘special relationship’ in general.
So, at the Nassau Conference, Macmillan managed to save face. In the end, an agreement was reached, with the United States providing Britain with Polaris missiles on extremely favourable terms. The post-Suez ‘special relationship’ looked like it delivered the goods for Britain after all, and London’s status as a great power was salvaged. Harold Macmillan had (just) managed to stop random events from upsetting his world yet another time.
Macmillan had a parting political risk warning for the dashing young American president. Since their first encounter back in 1961, Macmillan had been somewhat taken aback by Kennedy’s reliance on his vast, and ever-present, team of advisers. In Nassau in December 1962, on the evening they arrived in the Bahamas, Kennedy and Macmillan—at the prime minister’s urging—walked alone together for a long time.
They immediately hit it off, talking not only about the Skybolt crisis and domestic politics but also about their shared interest in history and the things in their lives that both found ridiculous, funny, or deadly serious.
It was during this intimate walk that Macmillan queried Kennedy as to what he feared most. Kennedy, ever the literal rationalist, admitted that nuclear weapons and the American balance-of-payments deficit were the two issues that most frightened him. Kennedy was scared of the known.
However, when the president asked Macmillan what frightened him the most, the prime minister (perhaps mythically) replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Macmillan, unlike the modern, cerebral president, knew from bitter experience that it is the unknown that is most to be feared by analysts of all stripes, as it can—at a stroke—upend the best-laid plans of mice and men.