Warsaw Concerto, page 52
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Pragmatically, back in Oxford the preoccupation of Nicko Henderson’s principals had been focused exclusively on how this latest crisis in DC might influence the forthcoming Anglo-US summit in Maryland, a thing which Margaret Thatcher’s closest confidents knew was going to be a somewhat fraught event.
‘Honestly,’ Nicko Henderson had observed, ‘I suspect the President looks forward to these meetings. They are a blessed relief to the whole Administration. Not least because it gives everybody in the White House an excuse to shut out the press corps for thirty-six or forty-eight hours. Obviously, we don’t see eye to eye over everything with the President but he knows that whatever our disagreements, that we are not actually out to get him.’
Henderson had been warned that ‘the lady is in a funny mood’ some hours in advance of joining the Prime Minister in Marine One. He quickly surmised that ‘a funny mood’ did not really do it justice. Superficially, the Prime Minister had seemed to be her normal self on the tarmac at Andrews Field; but the moment she was alone again, surrounded by her small circle of intimates – a member of which Nicko had been for over a year now – it was readily apparent that she was noticeably out of sorts and uncharacteristically distracted.
Airey Neave, who had travelled the Washington two days ago to confer with Richard Helms at Langley, and been a guest of the Embassy, had touched his nose with his right index finger after dinner drinks last night, and marked Henderson’s card.
‘She misses Frank already. She knows the Colonel is bound to do something brave or reckless, or perhaps both. She was reconciled to letting him put a little lead in Alain de Boissieu’s pencil, so to speak, but we were all hoping she’d be cheered up no end by the prospect of bumping into the Christophers and her latest godson on the San Francisco leg of her visit…’
Given the present public mood in the Antipodes, Peter Christopher had done the sensible thing – that was the sort of chap he was – and announced, without complicating matters by consulting with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, simply wiring his recommendation to Her Majesty, that he was staying in Canberra during the forthcoming United Nations bash, respectfully suggesting that the Australian delegation, led by Prime Minister Menzies, should include opposition leader Arthur Calwell, and various other ‘Australian-born’ luminaries.
Thus, there would be no reunion with her young friends, with her goddaughter, or with her prospective godson in the near future, events which would have been bound to lift her spirits whatever the outcome of the forthcoming Camp David Summit.
Not unnaturally, the Lady was also worried sick about the forthcoming ‘big push’ in France. In order to break the stalemate before the United Kingdom started to bleed itself white – well, even whiter - supporting the Free French, the available armed forces were going for broke in the next few weeks. If anything went wrong, or no more than another, bloodier and more expensive entrenchment resulted somewhere south of the Loire Line, that was it, the locker would be, for the moment and the foreseeable future, bare. Worse still, domestic opinion polls were beginning to trend away, if not from the person of the Prime Minister, then from support from what her Labour opponents were calling the ‘French War’.
The new Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Peter Shore, had used Prime Ministers Questions last week to castigate the ‘profligate waste’ of ‘scarce national resources’ in a conflict that is ‘not of our doing, or properly within our remit to prosecute!’
Of course, he had to say that, if only to curry favour with the still fragmented splinters of the left who had only been drawn, kicking, shrieking and not a little humiliated back into the ‘Labour fold’, by Shore’s adroit divide and rule election campaign. When Denis Healey, the last bastion of the old centre-right of his Party had stepped aside and, gritting his teeth, suggested that a younger, more robust man than he ought to be the next leader, even such an eternal optimist as Michael Foot, supposedly the darling of the left, had seen the writing on the wall. In the end it had not been so much a leadership ‘race’, as an anointment and oddly, for the first time, possibly since the 1940s, the Labour Party had been almost but not quite, united.
So, the Prime Minister had come to the United States sorely missing the unlikely man who had become her stout, irrepressible right arm, discovered she was not, as she had eagerly anticipated and looked forward to, going to get better acquainted with her godchildren and the Christophers, both these days among her closest friends, and things were threatening to sour at home at the same time her troops – her brave soldiers, sailors and airmen – were about to go into thrummed steadily into the foothills of the Catoctin Mountains sheltering Camp David.
“The last time we were here we all had to walk through a quagmire to get back onto dry land!” Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson recollected, virtually having to yell in her friend’s ear above the churning of the Sea King’s rotors as the helicopter tracked low across the snowy hills fifty miles north of Washington DC.
The Prime Minister was well aware that her friend, who had not been in the best of health that winter, had only come along to try to cheer her up. Nonetheless, she was glad she had ‘come along’, not the least of the down sides of being her nation’s first female premier was the reality of being surrounded by men, practically all the time. It was so nice to be able, occasionally, to step out of things and speak to, be with, another woman!
She knew she was incredibly lucky to have a friend as wise and staunch as Pat to support her at times like this.
“Dick,” Margaret Thatcher assured the Foreign Secretary’s wife, “promised to do something about the landing ground after that!”
Today, the snow-cleared lawns were likely to be frosty.
Anticipating this the head of the Prime Minister’s personal protection detail, Major Sir Steuart Pringle had made so bold as to suggest that, upon landing, she take his arm at the foot of the three steps down from the cabin of Marine One. He and the other AWPs – everybody still called her faithful Royal Marines the Angry Widow’s Protection squad – were all shod in meticulously bulled boots, and therefore much better equipped for the wintery conditions underfoot.
Normally, her husband would be the first to grab her elbow if he thought she was on tricky ground.
But he was in France…
Where he was bound to sniff out God only knew what perils, if only because he knew no other way!
Apparently, the French loved him; in exactly the same way he adored them. Presumably because of, rather than in spite of, their idiosyncrasies, bloody-mindedness and…passion.
In retrospect it was odd that she had married a man with a surfeit of passion; passion was just not her ‘thing’ and she had never made any pretence otherwise. To be in control, that was ‘the thing’ that mattered. If she had not been so entranced by Frank; had he not been the one man she had ever met in her whole life who could make her laugh at the drop of a hat, her decision to marry him would have been as big a mystery to her as it probably was to everybody else.
Perhaps, it was proof positive that despite what her detractors might say about her she was as red-blooded a woman as most, for how else could she have entrapped a man like Frank St John Waters, VC.
Oddly, they had never really been apart other than the last few days.
It ought not to be this unsettling so soon; it really ought not!
What is happening to me?
People had the impression that she had a knack of turning strong men’s knees to jelly with a single glare. That was nonsense. True, she had little time or patience for weak men, or women either. She was never happier than when she was in the company of clever, strong men who had the moral fibre to stand up to her, to argue their corner or their case. Obviously, that did not change the fact that they were wrong and she was right, most of the time but the thought of being surrounded by lily-livered yes men scared the living daylights out of her.
Fortunately, this was not going to be an issue on this trip.
Tom Harding-Grayson, Nicko Henderson and the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative Designate to the United Nations, Sir Roy Jenkins, and her dear friend, Airey Neave, were more than capable of holding their own with her, and with the Americans.
The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff – actually, back home he tended to style himself as merely her Principle Parliamentary Private Secretary, or sometimes, modestly as her Appointments Secretary; but in the United States, nobody wanted anything to be lost in translation – sat across the cabin immaculately attired in his Hussars uniform.
Ian Gow had recently been promoted Lieutenant Colonel. It was only his devotion to his Prime Minister that kept the soldier-lawyer immovably loyal in his present post. He tended to watch over his charge much in the fashion of a wise, unflappable country solicitor ever watchful to ensure that his impetuous, flighty client did not fritter away her inheritance.
Ian Gow was not alone in not entirely approving of ‘Mister Thatcher’ as the Americans called his Prime Minister’s husband. Frank Waters was too flashy, too much of a loose cannon and his tidy mind was only too well aware that one day, sooner or later, that was going to be a problem.
The Prime Minister smiled at her friend.
Ian Gow grimaced in reply.
“Oh, dear,” Margaret Thatcher thought, “poor, Ian. He really doesn’t understand that I always knew Frank was just a little mad, bad and dangerous to know…”
But I married him, anyway!
Marine One flared out and bumped onto the bone-hard lawn.
Outside, Richard Nixon, Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were waiting in line to welcome the British delegation.
The President’s wife and daughter, and ‘Happy’ Rockefeller and her young son had remained in DC, helping to maintain the fiction that the White House was to host the visiting allies, right up until the last moment.
Security had been only a part of the motivation for the subterfuge; the main reason had more to do with none of the parties wanting, or needing right now, to have to run the gauntlet of the White House press corps. There would be plenty of time for all that malarkey in a week or so’s time in California. Presently, the allies needed to ‘talk turkey’ with an absolute minimum of distractions.
Margaret Thatcher could not recollect the first time she was aware that she had started to think, and occasionally, actually talk the way her US friends talked. When she caught herself mid-idiom, she still blushed, lowered her eyes like a schoolgirl.
It was a funny old world…
The cabin door opened and a blast of wintery air flooded the warm passenger cabin. The Prime Minister thought about the President’s newly completed swimming pool, probably iced over today, then she took a long, calming deep breath and put on her ‘game face’.
Steuart Pringle had already jumped out of the Sea King.
A good man always knew when his strong right arm could be of service to a lady.
In the event the going underfoot was firm.
Soon hands were being shaken, small talk exchanged and everybody was heading indoors where log fires roared in well-stoke hearths.
It was accepted by all the parties that his was going to be a difficult summit, a real test of the Anglo-US rapprochement of the last year.
Although transatlantic relations were repaired, and NATO re-created in skeletal form, since October 1962, British and Commonwealth policy and interests had sharply diverged from those of the United States in the Pacific and the Far East.
This meant that the Prime Minister now found herself at loggerheads with the Nixon Administration over China and the precarious position of the corrupt, albeit pro-Western regime in South Vietnam. There were also tensions over the future role of the United States in the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East, an area in which US military muscle would be a far superior long-term guarantor of the peace, and regional stability, than the weak Commonwealth naval, air and land forces presently scattered around the Gulf and the extremities of Arabia.
There was also the ‘South Atlantic Question’ which Margaret Thatcher had warned her hosts she planned to raise at the forthcoming United Nations gathering; but which was not scheduled to form any part of the discussions at Camp David.
Both parties recognised that they needed to be concentrating on areas in which they might find ‘substantial concord’, putting aside for another time matters less central to their new North Atlantic rapprochement, US-Commonwealth ‘cohesion’ and above all, their joint worries about the developing situation in Western Europe. That said, they had no choice but to focus on China and Middle East, each as thorny as each other. With so much ground to cover and known, probably irreconcilable differences already flagged, there was little scope, or enthusiasm to add the South Atlantic Question to the official agenda.
No, this was very much one of those summits at which both parties were looking to ‘firm up’ those things upon they agreed, and as far as possible, to explore ways to defuse other, perhaps, incendiary disagreements.
At least in public…
‘In the coming days,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had warned his friends, ‘it will be easy to get carried away with all the things that we and our American hosts do not agree about; however, we must not allow ourselves to forget, or in any way under-value, all those very important things we have in common with the Administration, and the countless policy areas in which we are more, or less, in complete agreement over.’
‘Forward defence’ had been the mantra of the United States post-1945. War would be fought – preferably deterred - far from US coasts by GIs based in Europe and Asia, power would be projected world-wide by the US Air Force and the Navy. However, there was no taste, no domestic consensus for that anymore. Nixon’s own GOP-dominated Congress and Senate had cavilled against proposals to re-deploy a fleet to the Mediterranean, or anything more significant than a ‘token’ commitment of a couple of fighter squadrons to Spain. The Navy already had its Polaris boats and nuclear hunter-killers patrolling the globe, and in some quarters in DC the Joint Strike Force Program with the British was considered a more than generous quid pro quo for the relatively ‘minor’ assistance the Brits had given the US in the recent war. In the same way the South Vietnamese and various Latin American tinpot dictators were US surrogates, proxies for American regional interests it was one thing to supply arms to the United Kingdom, the tools to do the job, another entirely to send American sons to bleed and to die in somebody else’s wars.
There was a fine line to be drawn.
The British Prime Minister was immensely grateful to the Nixon Administration for the financial and material humanitarian and industrial aide it had, and continued to pour into the British Isles. Set against this, the sharing of aerospace technologies and the expanding raft of Anglo-US research, development and pure science projects all boded well for the future. Similarly, in due course the ships transferred from the US Navy Reserve Fleet to British and Commonwealth service would be worth their weight in gold. Without the opening up of seemingly bottomless US Naval depots to send shiploads of munitions across the Atlantic under what amounted to the same type of open-ended Second War Lend-Lease terms as all the other, non-martial aid, there would have been no prospect whatsoever of taking the initiative in France that spring.
So, there was a very real sense in which Margaret Thatcher had come to America with a begging bowl. Yet, at the same time she was aping Oliver Twist – these days the United Kingdom was an adequately fed, somewhat feisty and sharp-toothed ragamuffin on the global stage – she knew that within a week, two at the most, she was going to be very publicly thumbing her nose at her hosts.
The question was being asked: if the United Kingdom and several of her Commonwealth allies had stood shoulder to shoulder with the Union in the recent civil war in the Midwest; where had those fair-weather friends been when an American army – the Eighth – was being driven out of the Korean Peninsula by an enemy reinforced by twenty Communist Chinese divisions?
And from that question, other questions flowed.
Where did the Brits stand on the territorial integrity of Nationalist China, beleaguered on Formosa?
The Brits had sold out US interests in the whole of South East Asia to preserve their interests in Hong Kong. Worse, they had dragged the whole goddammed Commonwealth along with them!
And for what, a peace – thus far only an uneasily lasting peace – in the Himalayas between India and the People’s Republic?
Is it not enough that we are bankrolling their economy and feeding half their people?
What more do they want, the blood of our young men?
Nobody had to tell anybody in Margaret Thatcher’s entourage how these questions might easily be the arguments playing out across America in the next fortnight. If they asked for too much the crucial aid already flowing across the North Atlantic might suddenly be endangered, and then where would they all be?
