A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  McNamara expressed sympathy but tried to steer the talk back to technical alternatives. After a rejection of other possibilities Thorneycroft brought up Polaris. When McNamara pointed out legal problems, Thorneycroft, recalling the association of Skybolt and the Holy Loch Polaris base in 1960, claimed that the United States lay under a moral obligation, if it announced the demise of Skybolt, to announce at the same time some other means of sustaining Britain’s deterrent. McNamara asked whether, if Britain received Polaris, it would make it part of a multilateral force. Thorneycroft declined this as a condition; Britain would decide this as an independent power. That evening the London newspapers, presumably stimulated by the Defense Ministry, portrayed Thorneycroft in sensational stories as the lion-hearted champion of Skybolt against the American Secretary of Defense.

  By now in Washington the battle lines were forming. When McNamara returned, George Ball, a late arrival on the scene, set forth the Europeanists’ case in a debate before the President. Kennedy listened with care, mentioned the British sense of our moral obligation and Macmillan’s shaky political position and finally suggested the possibility of relating an offer of Polaris to eventual commitment by the British of their Polaris force to NATO.

  And in the December drizzle at Rambouillet the Prime Minister met the General. De Gaulle’s mood had changed since their conference in June. The Algerian war was now behind him, the Assembly elections at the end of November had refreshed his mandate, and he spoke with towering and placid self-confidence. He no longer saw how Britain could possibly join the Common Market: better let it apply for association rather than membership. Macmillan valiantly argued the case for Britain in Europe. The Prime Minister also brought up Skybolt and told the General that he planned to maintain the British deterrent, hopefully on the basis of Polaris. This was a point with which de Gaulle, cherishing his own deterrent, would presumably sympathize. But the talks were not a success, and the parting was as chilly as the weather: now on to the sunlight of the Caribbean.

  6. NASSAU AND AFTER

  As for the President, he was preoccupied in November with the removal of the missiles and the IL-28s from Cuba. No one, except David Ormsby Gore, had told him that Skybolt might cause an Anglo-American crisis: neither Macmillan (Kennedy later said, “He should have warned me of the dangers to him—we would have come up with a solution before publicity—he should have had Gore come in”), nor McNamara, who continued to regard it as a technical problem, nor Rusk.

  Shortly before leaving for Nassau the President was asked about Skybolt in a television interview. He said briefly he saw no point in spending $2.5 billion for development when “we don’t think that we are going to get $2.5 billion worth of national security.” Then he prepared for the Caribbean trip. To the President’s surprise, Rusk, claiming an annual ceremonial engagement with the diplomatic corps, said he thought it better to stay in Washington. Ball went in his place, along with McNamara, Nitze, Bruce, William R. Tyler and Bundy. David Ormsby Gore joined them on the presidential plane.

  On the plane Kennedy settled down for a long talk with Ormsby Gore. The Ambassador lost no time in bringing up Skybolt. While recognizing that preferential relations with Britain on nuclear matters made difficulties for the United States with its European allies, Ormsby Gore warned Kennedy that these troubles would not compare with the storm of anti-Americanism which would sweep England if the British believed the Americans were letting them down. Kennedy’s mind was now in full focus on the problem. Within half an hour, he and Ormsby Gore worked out a proposal based on the assumption, created by the Thorneycroft-McNamara meeting and evidently not dispelled by London’s instructions to its ambassador, that Britain still wanted Skybolt. The United States, by this new idea, would abandon the missile for itself but agree to split future development charges evenly with the British. This was a wise and generous offer. Had it come a month earlier, it would have changed the whole atmosphere. The British, faced by the spiraling development cost, might have decided to give up Skybolt anyway, but it would have been their own decision. Only now it was too late; Kennedy’s television comment had destroyed any lingering interest Macmillan might have had in Skybolt.

  When the presidential plane landed in Nassau, the atmosphere was tense. Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times reported in the British delegation a “resentment and suspicion of American intentions such as I have never experienced in all the Anglo-American conferences I have covered over the past twenty years.” Thorneycroft wished to lead a fight against the Americans even at the risk of breaking up the meeting. That evening Macmillan told Kennedy that he wanted Polaris, and it was clear that he felt he had to have it under conditions which would preserve the British claim to a national deterrent.

  When the formal talks began the next morning, Macmillan with weary eloquence invoked past glories of the Anglo-American relationship and suggested that a straight switch of Polaris for Skybolt would keep that relationship alive. He dismissed the thought that this would harm Britain’s application for the Common Market; agriculture was the stumbling block here; Europe would understand that Britain and the United States had built the bomb together; de Gaulle had seemed sympathetic on the point at Rambouillet. In response Kennedy first brought up the 50–50 offer, but Macmillan made it clear that he had no further interest in Skybolt; the lady had already been violated in public. Then the President mentioned the American commitment to multilateral policies in the nuclear field. More eloquent than ever, Macmillan insisted that Britain was determined to stay in the nuclear dub. His nation had a great history and would not give up now. If the United States would not help, Britain would continue on its own at whatever cost, including the inevitable rift with the United States. Instead of pleading that his government would fall, he seemed to be saying that his party would accept anti-Americanism to keep itself in power. But this was not a threat; it was a lamentation. It was evidently a bravura performance.

  By now the President had very likely made up his own mind that the British had to have Polaris. The only question was how to reconcile this with the claims of multilateralization and European partnership. Macmillan had suggested at one point a willingness to put his Polaris force in NATO if he retained the right to draw it back in case of an emergency. This formula offered a possibility of harmonizing independence and NATO. The drafters now set to work and outdid themselves in masterly ambiguity. Article 6 of the Statement on Nuclear Defense Systems contemplated a NATO multinational force—that is, allocations from national forces to the NATO command. Article 7 pledged both nations to use their “best endeavors’’ toward a multilateral force—that is, a mixed-manned force from which national withdrawals would be impossible. Article 8 agreed that the United States would make Polaris missiles (minus warheads) available to the British and that the resulting British force might be included in either the multinational or the multilateral system. “The Prime Minister made clear that, except where H. M. Government may decide that supreme national interests are at stake, these British forces will be used for the purposes of international defence of the Western Alliance in all circumstances.” The communiqué concluded by expressing the joint Anglo-American conviction that “the nuclear defense” of the western alliance was “indivisible.”

  For Macmillan it was a great victory, marred only by the extent to which the Conservative party and the London press had identified the British deterrent with Skybolt. For Kennedy it was a reasonable adjustment to a thorny problem, leaving policy free to move in a number of directions. For our own Europeanists, it was a missed opportunity and bitter defeat: instead of forcing the British to an MLF commitment, we had saved their deterrent, thrust an issue into the hands of de Gaulle and set back the cause of European integration.

  For France it might, despite Macmillan’s mention of Polaris at Rambouillet, have devastating effect; so it was decided at Nassau to offer de Gaulle Polaris on the same terms as to Macmillan—i.e., assignment to NATO but with the escape clause of emergency withdraw
al. This was an entirely genuine proposal, though made publicly, formally and without the ceremony the General might have expected. The President himself and others—Bundy and Tyler especially—hoped that it might throw the French a bridge back to NATO. Though the French Minister of Information promptly pointed out that France had “neither the submarines required for the Polaris missiles nor the warheads,” Kennedy and Macmillan did not exclude the thought of a British offer of Polaris warheads to Paris in exchange for French nuclear cooperation. The President called Charles E. Bohlen to Palm Beach directly after Nassau to give him a full briefing on what to say to the General; Hervé Alphand, the French Ambassador to Washington, also talked to Kennedy at Palm Beach and early in January 1963 called at the State Department for further exegesis of the Nassau communiqué. On January 5 in Paris Bohlen told de Gaulle as clearly as he could that all possibilities were open for discussion. While the General showed no passion for Nassau, he showed no acrimony against it; and the Ambassador left thinking that he would want to explore its negotiating implications in due course. During December and the first two weeks of the new year those in Washington who based themselves on Nassau’s Article 6 remained quite optimistic about the chance of the French joining a NATO multinational force. The MLF, they hoped, was dead.

  But the Europeanists were meanwhile rallying from their post-Nassau gloom to mount a new campaign, based on Nassau’s Article 7, to retrieve the MLF and defend the Grand Design against both de Gaulle and Macmillan. Kennedy, impressed by their contention that Nassau had given Bonn a dangerous sense of exclusion, agreed that a modest refloating of the MLF might pull West Germany back toward the alliance and offset Adenauer’s growing fascination with de Gaulle. Accordingly, early in January 1963 George Ball was sent to Europe to reassure the Germans. On his way, he stopped in Paris to discuss Nassau with Couve de Murville, the French Foreign Minister.

  Four days later in Washington Kennedy in his State of the Union address hailed the alliance: “Free Europe is entering into a new phase of its long and brilliant history . . . moving toward a unity of purpose and power and policy in every sphere of activity.” In Paris the same day de Gaulle held his press conference and declared war against the Grand Design.

  XXXIII

  Two Europes: De Gaulle and Kennedy

  THE BRUTALITY OF DE GAULLE’S ATTACK left an impression that he was overcome by sudden anger and caused much speculation over possible irritants: if only Ball had not laid such stress on the integrationist side of Nassau when he talked to Couve, if only the Polaris offer to France had been pressed harder in December, or (from the other view) if only the Polaris offer had never been made to Britain and Nassau had never taken place—then Britain might be in the Common Market, and the Grand Design would be in business. One day the President pushed this back further: could it have been the decision not to give France nuclear information in 1962? or the refusal to establish de Gaulle’s tripartite NATO directorship in 1958? or the treatment of de Gaulle by Roosevelt and Churchill during the Second World War?

  My own impression was that de Gaulle, like Andrew Jackson, deliberately used anger as an instrument of authority.* It seemed unlikely that the policy of January 14 was the product of passing annoyance. Its roots, as I endeavored to persuade the President, lay deep in the view of Europe and the world de Gaulle had stated and restated throughout his career. Kennedy asked for a memorandum on this point. My report to him concluded: “There is very little we could have done to divert him from what has plainly been the cherished objective of his life.”

  1. DE GAULLE’S EUROPE

  He had set forth as recently as 1959 in Le Salut, the third volume of his magnificent memoirs, what he called “the great plan I have conceived for my country.” The elements were clearly stated.

  a) Britain and the United States wanted “to relegate us to a secondary place among nations responsible for constructing the peace. But I had no intention of letting this happen.”

  b) “I intended to assure France primacy in Western Europe.”

  c) I intended “to prevent the rise of a new Reich that might again threaten the safety” of France;

  d) I intended “to co-operate with East and West and, if need be, contract the necessary alliances on one side or the other without ever accepting any kind of dependency”;

  e) I intended “to persuade the states along the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic, and strategic bloc; to establish this bloc as one of the three world powers and, should it become necessary, as the arbiter between the Soviet and Anglo-American camps.”

  De Gaulle could hardly have made his purpose more solemn or emphatic. “Since 1940,” he wrote, “my every word and act have been dedicated to establishing these possibilities; now that France was on her feet again, I would try to realize them.”

  For the longer run, he supposed that Europe could find equilibrium and peace only by an association among “Slavs, Germans, Gauls and Latins.” Charlemagne might have drawn up this list; he too would have omitted the Anglo-Saxons for having turned their backs on Europe and crossed the water to Britain in the fifth century. Memories from the war haunted de Gaulle and confirmed his mistrust of islanders: Churchill saying to him in June 1944, “Here is something you should know: whenever we have to choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Whenever I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt”; Harold Macmillan crying at Algiers, “If General de Gaulle refuses the hand stretched out towards him, let him know that Britain and the United States will abandon him completely—and he will be nothing any more.” De Gaulle noted in his memoirs that he had tried and failed to win Churchill to Europe in 1945—“perhaps the last possible occasion to bring him to a change of heart.” The Englishman and the Frenchman had agreed, de Gaulle remembered, that in final analysis “England is an island; France the edge of a continent; America another world.” Macmillan might still have demonstrated the required change of heart by accepting the Treaty of Rome without conditions, but under pressure he had shown himself unregenerate. NATO was all right as a coalition of national states; but if the United States and Britain tried to use it as an instrument for the Anglo-Saxon domination of Europe, they must be resisted.

  No one had predicted his own course more lucidly than de Gaulle himself. Why then had January 14 astonished so many people? One reason, I discovered to my dismay, was that few people in the State Department appeared to have read de Gaulle. Another surely was that de Gaulle liked to put about an impression of himself as a lonely, unyielding, messianic figure, set in his views, oblivious of tactics, prepared to wait in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises until the great world came round to him. No impression could be more misleading. Actually he was one of the consummate political tacticians of the twentieth century. Only such a man could have so audaciously pressed Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, yet always stopping short of the unforgivable provocation; only such a man, brought to power to keep Algeria French, could purposefully and coldly move to make Algeria independent. Similarly in the case of the Common Market he had concealed his goal for a time behind a screen of cryptic phrases and courtly attitudes, like those which in June had lulled not only Macmillan but our Paris Embassy into reporting that the French were resigned to British entry. They all underestimated the old strategist. As John Randolph said of Van Buren, he “rowed to his object with muffled oars.”

  De Gaulle, who had perceived for a long time the fatal contradiction within the Grand Design between interdependence and partnership, now was moving to exploit it. But why had he chosen this moment to come into the open? Probably the Cuban missile crisis was a precipitating factor. On the one hand, it showed that the United States in emergencies would act on its own, without NATO consultation or ‘integration,’ on matters affecting not only American security but world peace. This undoubtedly reinforced the General’s old belief that America did not regard Europe as a primary interest; no nation could ever be expecte
d to look out for anything but itself (he liked to quote Nietzsche’s description of the state as “the coldest of all the cold monsters”). So de Gaulle said in January 14, “No one in the world . . . can say whether, where, when, how, or to what extent American nuclear arms would be used to defend Europe.” At the same time the outcome of Cuba renewed his faith in the broad efficacy of the American deterrent. So he added, “This does not of course prevent American nuclear arms, which are the most powerful of all, from remaining the essential guarantee of world peace.” And the outcome also reconfirmed his view that there was no danger of war over Berlin. All this left him free to pursue his own ends in Europe.

  In addition, if Cuba were to be followed by a détente, de Gaulle wanted to be in on the peacemaking; he could never forget Yalta when in his absence non-Europeans (by his definition) imposed what he considered a wicked settlement on Europe. Moreover, if Western Europe were irrevocably tied to the Atlantic, the division of Europe would become permanent, and de Gaulle’s dream of rebuilding “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” would be forever frustrated. And within the Common Market Britain was steadily acquiring the votes for admission—a result which, if achieved, would end French primacy in the Economic Community and consolidate Atlantic influence on the continent. Europe must be for the Europeans; action was necessary: Nassau provided the pretext. The explanation for his air of moderation between December 21 and January 14 must await volume four of his memoirs.