Catching the 10:58
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Catching the 10:58 Harold Macmillan Volume II: 1957-1986 By A lis fair Home Viking. 544pp. $27.50. Reviewed by John ? Roche When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that "American lives have no...
...To recapitulate the historical background briefly: Macmillan's major task as he saw it when he became Prime Minister, in the wake of the 1956 Suez crisis, was to put Britain back on the map...
...Also, as a scholar who has had some problems with the "Thirty Year Rule," which holds classified materials secure for that period, I am startled by the way Home—or Robert Rhodes James in his biography of Anthony Eden —seems to ignore the restrictions...
...Are the restraints there to keep out nosy peasants (Peter Wright), but not to hinder gentlemen...
...This second volume of Alistair Home's comprehensive biography of Harold Macmillan demonstrates that neither do English lives...
...Home has read everything, talked to everybody, and held long jovial interviews with his octogenarian subject...
...Finally he rose, limped unsteadily past the podium as all eyes watched to see if he would drop, and informed the chairman in a stage whisper that could be heard in the back of the hall, "I'm so sorry___It's the 10:58 from Victoria [station...
...Many of these, notably concerning John F. Kennedy's sexual modus operandi, have been widely quoted, yet I suspect most reviewers did not make it through the 544 pages to a couple of the best...
...a "pride of lions," a "coven of witches," etc...
...Macmillan was furious at Dean Acheson's December 1962 West Point speech, in which that master of the acerbic phrase declared "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role," then went on to suggest that Macmillan's favorite game, "The Commonwealth," was a childish charade—as a "Great Power" Britain was over the hill...
...It is enlivened by excerpts from his diary and the world-class one-liners he stored in his arsenal...
...Macmillan shot back, "ALackof Principles...
...I know secondhand from some of my Washington friends that JFK and senior State Department figures considered him a genial, windy nuisance—they had yet to meet Harold Wilson, who was windy and obnoxious...
...Home says that Henry never noticed, and I believe him...
...But he did not regard his role as presiding over the liquidation of the British ego...
...A first priority was entry into the newly created European Economic Community, predictably blocked by Charles de Gaulle...
...Reviewed by John ? Roche When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that "American lives have no second acts," he was being too parochial...
...I never cease to be amazed at the range of sources British biographers seem to have available...
...As a historian I welcome the habit, though it does have a certain onanistic quality...
...At a VIP dinner party that Kissinger was addressing with his customary thoroughness, Macmillan—then in his late 80s—began to behave as though he were ill, slowly pushing his chair back from the head table and appearing quite distressed...
...Ask me questions...
...Indeed, in his effort to be an international fixer—an interlocuteur valable—he reminds me of the student who ran down a Brooklyn street crying, "I got answers...
...Then there was the classic put-down of Prince Henry the Navigator...
...And after reading about Macmillan's dignified behavior in his tormenting family situation, everyone with a sense of compassion will realize that he was, with all his kinks, a towering mensch...
...I have perhaps overdosed on Macmillan, but I want to make it clear that any student of British politics will find Home's two volumes invaluable...
...From Macmillan's diary entries, however, even allowing for his worst-case penchant, it seems that the wily old rascal agreed completely with Acheson's diagnosis...
...The present volume encompasses Macmillan's years as Prime Minister, his trials and tribulations with spies and raunchy ministers, his mental and physical meltdown in October 1963—when he resigned his leadership—and his final days in retirement...
...Does everyone in British elite culture keep a diary...
...But the result is that we find the same intriguing character we met in the previous installment, ambling along in the same way through the subsequent 30 years of his life...
...For instance, in December 1985 an unprecedented meeting was held at 10 Downing Street attended by six Prime Ministers, leading James Callaghan to ask what would be an appropriate collective term for the gathering (e.g...
...a second was for Britain to develop its own nuclear deterrent, an idiotic waste of minds...
...Are all letters saved...
...It has left me suffering from a surfeit of Macmillan—and with very little to say beyond what I said in my review of Volume I in these pages (NL, June 12-26,1989...
...For example, I now know a great deal more about Harold Macmillan than I do about my own father, to say nothing of my grandfathers...
...Hence he rushed around trying to put together summits with Nikita S. Khrushchev, Kennedy, de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and virtually anyone who would come...
Vol. 73 • February 1990 • No. 3
