He Needed Money
KNAPPMAN, EDWARD W.
He Needed Money A Personal Record. The Labour Government, 1964-1970, by Harold Wilson. Little, Brown. 836 pp. $15. Reviewed by Edward W. Knappman When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in...
...In five years he jetted abroad twenty-one times, including seven trips to Washington and three to Moscow, as if by being ubiquitous he could become influential...
...Cooper, a dove sharing Wilson's goals, in his book The Lost Crusade presents Kosygin as skeptical and lukewarm rather than optimistic and eager about the negotiations...
...Mr...
...Consequently, Wilson writes, "a historic opportunity had been missed...
...The Americans accepted a few minor British amendments, but a dejected Kosygin finally agreed only to pass the new terms on to Hanoi without comment...
...But he often let his hopes soar into fantasy, particularly in global diplomacy...
...But Wilson has an excuse for his haste...
...This daily diary approach strains a reader's concentration by snapping all the links of continuity between events and their consequences...
...Ambassador David Bruce, Wilson insists he would have scored "the biggest diplomatic coup of this century" during the Tet bombing pause in February, 1967, had not a hawkish cabal of White House advisers intervened at the very moment when success seemed assured...
...Within two pages he hops from talks in Berlin to a cabinet squabble over immigration, to the Foreign Office's attitude on Vietnam, to speculators' attacks on sterling, and finally to a meeting with de Gaulle...
...Britain's overseas commitments and influence in Rhodesia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and NATO had to shrink to fit reduced national circumstances...
...Harold Wilson didn't even have a walk-on part in Lyndon Johnson's negotiating script...
...Knappman is a free lance writer and critic who has been based in London for several years...
...When he was defeated in 1970, Wilson endowed his Tory successor with a $1.4 billion annual payments surplus and the strongest currency Britain had known in thirty years...
...Moreover, the White House regarded the London talks "primarily as a sideshow" to those which might be initiated through the more direct Washington-Moscow-Hanoi channel...
...The President and most of his advisers, according to Cooper, were still cocksure of military victory and suspicious of peace talks...
...This was Wilson's greatest service to Britain...
...Premier Kosygin was in London and, Wilson believed, eager to endorse and pass on to Hanoi any reasonable plan for extending the bombing halt and opening direct talks...
...Wilson notes that he completed A Personal Record in five months, and no one who reads the 800-page result will doubt him...
...At Wilson's request President Johnson already had sent a personal representative, Chester Cooper, to London to explain the precise American conditions...
...From his first visit to Washington in December, 1964, he began imagining himself reconvening the Geneva Conference to neutralize Indochina...
...But if Cooper's judgment is correct, Wilson's version is self-deception by a man who didn't know when he had been had...
...Taking another short cut to save time and effort, Wilson has followed a relentlessly chronological scheme of organization...
...Johnson would not repudiate his proposals for peace...
...Four, five, and six page excerpts and paraphrases of his public speeches account for nearly a quarter of the book's bulk...
...Issues bubble up to the surface for a paragraph or two only to sink out of sight for perhaps ten or even 100 pages...
...His memoirs dwell on scrambler telephones as if these security devices were the substance rather than the trinkets of power...
...Urgent reforms and programs in education, housing, social services, regional development, and technological research had to be postponed or abandoned...
...the pound was bumping against the bottom limit of its official parity...
...But it was not the sort of success which is easily understood by voters...
...Wilson was too realistic to stray beyond the limits austerity inevitably set on his actions...
...It was this inheritance," Wilson concludes, "which was to dominate almost every action of the government for five years of the five years, eight months we were in office...
...This neat tandem arrangement had two small flaws: the President had no intention of making peace until he had won the war, and the Soviet leaders had no inclination to reconvene the conference unless it excluded the Chinese...
...Wilson's readers will regret that he was too impatient to wait until retirement from active politics gave him the leisure, detachment, and safety to be more candid and thoughtful...
...Quoting a private remark by U.S...
...Britain, as one co-chairman of the 1954 conference, would act as the honest broker for the United States...
...However, it made Wilson's writing task not only easier but safer by relieving him of the embarrassing obligation of analyzing his own successes and failures...
...The annual balance of payments deficit had reached a record $2.2 billion and was still climbing...
...As he explained to a reporter, he needed the money to repay a $12,500 overdraft to his banker...
...For once Wilson's observations and conclusions about events behind the scenes can be checked against those of an equally credible witness...
...Reviewed by Edward W. Knappman When Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964, the defeated Tories had left him the worst economic crisis Britain had faced since the war...
...The banal official communiques handed out after Wilson's meetings with foreign statesmen have been republished verbatim...
...His book is a better argument than any yet heard in Parliament for giving the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition a whopping pay raise...
...Certainly it was not the achievement an ebullient socialist would choose as his only monument...
...Bringing peace to Vietnam was a typical and persistent Wilson fantasy...
...the Soviet Union, as the other co-chairman, would do the same for North Vietnam...
...To make the plan work, Wilson would not criticize President Johnson's acts of war, and he hoped that in turn Mr...
...Wilson was convinced Kosygin had accepted these terms, when a new and much harsher set of preconditions came over the teleprinter from Washington...
Vol. 36 • March 1972 • No. 3
