Supermac on the Way Up

...Churchill had a habit of overwhelming his young associates and Macmillan was not whelmable...

...The problem with this last script is that—contrary to what a number of commentators in the '50s, including me, wrote— Ike was not out to lunch at the golf club...

...J.P.R.] wearing a coal-scuttle helmet cannot be understated...

...In '54 Churchill moved him to Defense...

...Roger Makins, who had taken notes of the conversation, was "astounded" by its banality ("I was expecting Harold...

...He was a loyal Churchill ally in the struggle against appeasement, but for temperamental reasons they were never close...

...Dulles' activities throughout the whole Suez sequence were bizarre, but a reasonable person could infer from his statements that, although the highly moral United States would never overtly support military action, it would welcome the departure of Nasser...

...Our reconnaissance planes from Turkey and Cyprus surely photographed the whole operation from start to finish, and there were NATO sources...

...As this volume ends, Macmillan has replaced Eden as Prime Minister, and the question remains: Was he Eden's heir, or assassin...

...Did Mac set Eden up for the chop by failing to convey to his Cabinet colleagues the extent to which Ike opposed forceful action...

...Still, as wartime documents have been declassified, there has been a violent reaction to his "sell out" of the innocents...

...there was nothing beyond the successful reorganization of the Tories that he could do except wait for Winston...

...He built his inner fortress instead and became "unflappable Mac, " publicly ignoring nasty gossip and privately agonizing over the somber fates of his children...

...He had to learn the hard way...

...Home has provided a mass of invaluable detail with respect to Macmillan, who was on a visit to the United States as Chancellor during the final countdown and met his old friend President Eisenhower...

...After his 35-minute talk with Macmillan, Ike merely told Dulles that he had a "nice chat...

...He knew about as much about housing as quantum mechanics, but he performed brilliantly, at least in quantitative terms...

...Thus, when Winston became Prime Minister in 1940 Mac was two or three drawers down from a top appointment: Anthony Eden, whom he considered a bit of a phony, was the Crown Prince...

...Alistair Home, a master of military history, was asked by Macmillan to write the authorized biography...

...I also made it clear that we must win...

...Another half million refugees were en route to Austria from the Balkans, including a contingent of Yugoslav collaborators with Hitler...

...He defended on military grounds the initial efforts to get the Vichy authorities to permit an unopposed landing in Algeria and Morocco, but said that once this failed no political guidance from Washington was forthcoming...

...group 2, the camp followers and Russians who had emigrated before World War II, e.g...

...on the other, he could behave in a ruthless fashion, as he showed by being "first in, first out" in the 1956 Suez debacle...

...I asked him about what in my view had been our idiotic policy toward Vichy France, Charles de Gaulle, and the whole effort to set up a coalition between Frenchmen who considered each other traitors...

...It didn't matter to those who considered him a crypto-Laborite that this originated from very different sources than British Socialism (Adam Smith, after all, coined the term " Great Society" and set out its obligations...

...As he put it in his memoirs, among the Germans there "were about 40,000 Cossacks and White Russians, with their wives and children, [who were] naturally claimed by the Russian commander, and we had no alternative but to surrender them...

...With elegant understatement the biographer makes it clear that "Macmillan's Complaint" would have made Portnoy's even more infantile than it was—no mean trick...

...If so, the fact that the President made some blistering comments about Nasser could have been taken as tacit concurrence...

...Perhaps the one time in his life when he lowered his guard was in pursuit of Dorothy, and her betrayal almost killed him: He went into deep depression and was rumored to have attempted suicide...

...to say something on Suez—but in fact he said nothing...

...Moreover, food and housing was in very short supply...

...But there seems to have been a play within a play...

...True, he let Dulles run around and cobble together Mickey Mouse schemes like CENTO, SEATO and the Suez Canal Users Association, but as he demonstrated at the time of Dienbienphu, when shove came to punch, he got the children off the streets...

...I wonder if he ever did...

...Macmillan was named Minister of State for the Western Mediterranean, reporting directly to the Prime Minister...

...Although Boothby and Macmillan were said to be close friends, Home infers throughout that Macmillan was afraid of real friendship...

...While a number of the American documents have yet to be published, one can obtain from Eden's memoirs, and from Robert Rhodes James' fine biography ofthat strange figure, an accurate large-scale map...

...It simply sets out the facts in such a dispassionate fashion that the reader is suddenly stunned to find himself face to face with a tortured human being...

...Curiously, I suspect he asked himself the same question and, like me, could not figure outthe correct reply...

...Winston was Prime Minister and Defense Secretary (as he had been during the War), Eden was Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House, "Rab" Butler became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and three days after the high cards had been distributed Macmillan pulled...

...Unfortunately for my Labor friends, but fortunately for Macmillan, Clement Attlee's government was trapped in a world it never made: British Socialism in practice amounted to the nationalization of bankruptcy...

...Since in contrast to his American counterpart, Robert Murphy, a senior Foreign Service professional, Macmillan was plugged into the highest level of authority in his country, he had access to the top military men—i.e...

...Home goes into the situation in great detail and I believe quite fairly...

...By now one of those on the second rung of the party, he was nevertheless mistrusted by the Right for his persistent allegiance to "the Socialism of the trenches," the obligation of the élite to see that the masses received adequate care...

...2) What role did the brothers Dulles—the Secretary of State and CIA Director Allen—play in encouraging London and Paris to sock Nasser...

...group 3, the Germans and East Europeans who had been shanghaied into the Wehrmacht...

...On its face this looks like a classic setup, particularly in the light of Mac's subsequent behavior as leader of the movement to make up with the Americans and cut British losses...

...When the Tories managed to get theold warrior off to pasture, his successor, Eden, shifted Macmillan to the Foreign Office...

...The loose cannon on the Macmillan deck was Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire...

...This was a trouble zone, for Eden wanted to be his own Foreign Minister and Macmillan was not about to play Eden to Eden's Churchill...

...Home has brought Macmillan to hf e, has removed the masks he seemed wont to don, and in doing so has written a superb book...

...the Cossacks and other Tsarist remnants...

...But the world was not tidy and Macmillan found this horrendous mess on his agenda...

...Tito was threatening to seize Trieste, and the friendly neighborhood Soviet Army, which vastly outnumbered the Anglo-Americans, was making ugly noises and refusing to turn over released Allied POWs...

...He threw his energy into his political and administrative career so totally that he was celibate for the last half-century of his life...

...His mother thought the match was ideally upwardly mobile, and initially it seemed happy...

...For reasons I explored in these pages in my review of the final volume of Martin Gilbert's Winston S. Churchill ("Clinging to Power," NL, December 26,1988), Macmillan became a "Tory radical" and may have been saved from excommunication several times in the 1930s by his wife's connection with the Carlton Club grandees (she seemed to be related to half the peerage...

...General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Field Marshal Harold Alexander...

...Some 20 years ago I had a long luncheon conversation with General Omar N. Bradley, who was a junior player in the Mediterranean invasion...

...The combination was bound to create problems, particularly when he meekly agreed to their living at "home" with his widowed mother...

...When Eden got this bulletin from the anti-Nasser hard-liner, he must have felt the loop with Washington was closed...

...Britain, as Macmillan was one of the first to realize, was living beyondits means, was attempting to be a world power with smoke, mirrors and American money...

...Ever since the Anglo-French-Israeli (or, more correctly, Anglo and French-Israeli) effort to topple Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser—using as justification his nationalization of the Suez Canal—I have kept an open file on the operation...

...Housing...

...Macmillan, he indicated, could and did act on his own initiative in crises because Churchill had dispatched him to use his judgment first and send cables later...

...But Dorothy was a woman of enthusiasm with no sense of limits, while Harold was an introverted intellectual perpetually, I suspect, distrusting himself and concerned about losing self-control...

...Macmillan later said that he accepted responsibility, but the legal situation was extremely murky, there was chaos on the ground, the pictures of liberated concentration camps were just being shown, and "the bitterness that prevailed in 1945 toward the Germans or anybody [Home's emphasis...

...It would have taken years and detailed historical records from the Balkans and Eastern Europe to sort everyone out...

...Great-grandson of a Scot crofter, Harold, whose father married a driving American (and probably spent the rest of his years hiding from her at the family publishing business), was "Momma's Boy...

...Off he flew to see the commanders, culminating in a meeting with Keightley...

...He became a bit of a doomsday prophet in Commons and devoted much time to the publishing business...

...Indeed, Churchill's adage was, "Trust them or bust them...

...In 1946-47, the most severe winter in memory led to food and fuel shortages and to rationing tighter than that imposed in wartime...

...On the one hand, he often presented himself in the guise of Plato's ideal ruler, who held power in contempt...

...Divorce, Harold's mother convinced him, would destroy his promising political future...

...Not that Home's Harold Macmillan— Volume 1:1894-1956 (Viking, 535 pp., $24.95) is insensitive to the nuances of "Supermac's" private life, especially his wife's conspicuous infidelity for a period of more than 35 years...

...It was an inspired choice: Home carries none of the baleful ballast of a psychobiographer, who would have had an oedipal field day exploring Macmillan's relationships with his mother and wife, and transports of gaiety over his gushing, youthful correspondence with other men, notably Ronald Knox...

...In brief, General Charles Keightley's forces were in the middle of a human hurricane: The Soviets wanted every East European immediately in their custody, Tito was pursuing all his opponents whether pro-Nazi or not, and Carinthia was the focal point...

...probably his biggest pluses were his friendship with President Eisenhower and the warm relationship he developed with, of all people, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles...

...the Cavendishes inhabited the upper reaches of the aristocracy, and Harold's successful courtship of Dorothy led to some snide comments at country houses: "After all, y'know, the Macmillans are in trade...

...Macmillan thought his demotion was outrageous...

...Perhaps Macmillan assumed at his meeting with Ike that the General/ President was fully cognizant of the planned amphibious invasion...

...Luckily, as it would turn out, in December 1955 Eden shifted him to the Treasury...

...Yet all the evidence indicates that the President was blindsided—and the CIA later quietly deep-sixed an inquiry, triggered by my New Republic article, into how this could have occurred...

...Prime Minister Eden, unlike Macmillan, never hit it off with Ike, and from James' biography I drew the distinct impression that he felt John Foster Dulles was de facto President for Foreign Affairs...

...Macmillan reported to Eden in a "Top Secret" cable: "the next feeling I had was that Ike is really determined, somehow or other, to bring Nasser down...

...After returning home, Macmillan to his great surprise lost his Commons seat in the sweeping Labor Party victory of July 1945, but within four months won a by-election...

...Dorothy looked for an exit—and found it in the exciting company of a rising young Conservative libertine, Robert Boothby, with whom she began an affair in 1929 that lasted until her death in 1966...

...Those who have read Macmillan's War Diaries will not find much new in Home on the wartime career, except for the May 13, 1945 Klagenfurt Conference that led to the forced repatriation to the Soviet Union not only of Soviet citizens (as had been stipulated at Yalta) but also of some 40,000 Poles, Baits and émigré White Russians...

...Finally, in 1951 the Labor government essentially died of exhaustion and Churchill was back with a slim majority...

...For the first time in his public life he was acclaimed a success, and, like it or not, the Tory nabobs had to take him seriously: He was on the escalator...

...As I noted in the New Republic in November 1956 ("The Case of the Vacationing Spies"), there was an eerie quality about the whole business and three main questions needed to be answered: (1) When a furious President Eisenhower went on TV to denounce the Suez invasion, was he ignorant of the military build-up and the "Musketeer" scenario...

...His childhood, recurring attacks of depression, and his experience in Flanders—where he was wounded five times—generated a kind of stoic fatalism, the loner's syndrome...

...The military situation at the time of the German surrender in Austria and the Balkans was a shambles: The British Fifth Corps found itself with 400,000 POWs and their camp followers, among them a number of Russians, Baits, Ukrainians, and Poles who had served with the Nazi forces...

...Eden obviously forgot how fast Eisenhower had on that occasion sandbagged the Vice President, Secretary Dulles and the Joint Chiefs...

...In a nice tidy world Keightley would have organized a merciful triage: Group 1 would be Soviet deserters and other East Europeans who had voluntarily entered Nazi service...

...He then set to work on two fronts: the modernization of the Conservative Party, and the creation of a European community...

...3) Was there a realistic understanding in Anthony Eden's inner circle of the Eisenhower-Dulles relationship...

...He left a mixed reputation at the Foreign Office...

...indeed, his smoldering resentment against Eden seems to have helped set the stage for the Suez fiasco...

...Allen Dulles' CIA must have been aware of the Anglo-French concentration of landing craft at Malta and paratroops on Cyprus, to say nothing of the Israeli mobilization near Gaza...

...In fairness, she was a very shrewd woman...

...As long as she lived she coldly figured the odds, perhaps most significantly on what impact a divorce would have on her son's political career...

...He held the post for the rest of the European war and, given his combination of ambition and talent, converted it into a virtual viceroyalty...

...Equality became share the misery...

...To someone of my generation, he seems to have walked out of a John Buchan novel...

...Soon his precarious physical and mental health deteriorated and he resigned...

...The Macmillans were upper-middle class...

...In addition to providing entrée to the world of the magnates, the young wife turned out to be a first-rate political trooper, far better equipped than her essentially aloof husband for the give and take of constituency rallies and other holy days of parliamentary obligation...

...That is a tough one...

...However, his lucky break came when Churchill, who nursed an elemental distrust of the Foreign Office mandarins, decided he wanted a personal envoy to the Anglo-American forces that invaded French North Africain 1942...

...One line I recall vividly: "If you asked poor Bob Murphy how to handle de Gaulle, he would give you a mashed-potato sandwich and go send another cable to the White House...

...And waiting for Winston, as the years 1951-55 would demonstrate, was enervating: Even in opposition the old bulldog tried to run everything—he never named a Shadow Cabinet, for example—and got sadistic amusement from the squabbling among his heirs presumptive...