A ‘special relationship’? prelims.p65 1 08/06/2004, 14:37 To Karin prelims.p65 2 08/06/2004, 14:37 A ‘special relationship’? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Anglo- American relations ‘at the summit’, 1964–68 Jonathan Colman Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave prelims.p65 3 08/06/2004, 14:37 Copyright © Jonathan Colman 2004 The right of Jonathan Colman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 7010 4 hardback EAN 978 0 7190 7010 5 First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall www.freelancepublishingservices.co.uk Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn prelims.p65 4 08/06/2004, 14:37 Contents Acknowledgements page vi Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 1 The approach to the summit 20 2 The Washington summit, 7–9 December 1964 37 3 From discord to cordiality, January–April 1965 53 4 ‘A battalion would be worth a billion’? May–December 1965 75 5 Dissociation, January–July 1966 100 6 A declining relationship, August 1966–September 1967 121 7 One ally among many, October 1967–December 1968 147 Conclusion: Harold Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson: a ‘special relationship’? 167 Select bibliography 182 Index 188 prelims.p65 5 08/06/2004, 14:37 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Michael Hopkins of Liverpool Hope University College for supervising the PhD dissertation upon which this book is based and for commenting on some of the draft manuscript chapters. Professor John Young of Nottingham University suggested the original idea for the research. He and Dr Matthew Stibbe of Liverpool Hope were respectively the external and internal examiners of the dissertation and both made invaluable comments. Mr Michael O’Grady provided further constructive criticism of the PhD thesis and of the draft manuscript and has been a kind and encouraging mentor for a long time. Thanks are due to the departments of History and American Studies at Liverpool Hope for their help and encouragement over the years, especially to Dr Janet Hollinshead in the former department. At the University of Liverpool Dr Nigel Ashton and Dr Michael Hughes provided useful comments on the early stages of the PhD project. Dr Clive Jones and Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe were both very helpful and supportive when I was an MA student at the University of Leeds some years ago. More recently, the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth has provided a wonderfully congenial and stimulating environment in which I could revise the draft manuscript. Professor Len Scott of this department kindly read and commented upon some of the early chapters. The anonymous reviewers for Manchester University Press were meticulous and constructive in their evaluations of the book proposal and of the draft manuscript. Professor John Dumbrell’s expressions of support for the book have been much appreciated. I am also grateful to Liverpool Hope University College, the University of Liverpool and the Richard Stapeley Educational Trust for help with university fees and the cost of the research. The archivists at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; US National Archives at College Park, Maryland; the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia; the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) at Kew; and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, were all efficient and helpful. Mrs Frieda Warman-Brown kindly granted me permission to examine the private papers of her father, George Brown, at the Bodleian. Thanks also to the interlibrary loans service at Burnley Central Library, of which I made extensive use over the years. My parents have from the beginning provided essential support for my academic career. Any limitations of this work are entirely my own responsibility. prelims.p65 6 08/06/2004, 14:37 Abbreviations ANF Atlantic Nuclear Force BAOR British Army of the Rhine CIA Central Intelligence Agency EEC European Economic Community EFTA European Free Trade Association FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office FO Foreign Office GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters GNP Gross National Product HMG Her Majesty’s Government IMF International Monetary Fund MLF Multilateral Force NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NHS National Health Service NORAD North American Air Defence Command NSA National Security Agency (US) NSC National Security Council NSF National Security File SEATO South East Asia Treaty Organisation UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence UN United Nations prelims.p65 7 08/06/2004, 14:37 prelims.p65 8 08/06/2004, 14:37 Introduction In the years 1964–68, the Labour government of Harold Wilson coincided with the Democratic presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. David Bruce, US Ambassador to London 1961–69, regarded the relationship between Wilson and Johnson as an especially interesting one, because ‘seldom if ever have two heads of state been such long-time master politicians in the domestic sense as those two’.1 Many writers have commented on the Wilson–Johnson relationship, usually highlighting the undoubted strains therein. Ritchie Ovendale, for example, ar- gues that although they were ‘initially effusive in their reciprocal praise’, the two leaders soon ‘viewed each other with some suspicion’. The President ‘thought that Wilson was too keen to cross the Atlantic to bolster his domestic position’, and believed ‘that the British Prime Minister was too clever by half’.2 British Ambassador to Washington in the 1980s, Robin Renwick, states that ‘no per- sonal rapport developed between Johnson and Wilson, hard as Wilson tried to cultivate the impression that there was one’.3 According to Raymond Seitz, US Ambassador to London during the 1990s, Johnson ‘could barely conceal his disdain for Harold Wilson. He once referred to him as “a little creep”.’ Yet Wilson ‘thought his friendship with Johnson was harmony itself’.4 John Dickie maintains that ‘Even the most ardent Atlanticists were surprised at the sudden cooling of the Special Relationship so soon after the end of the Kennedy– Macmillan era’. In particular, Wilson’s prime ministership ‘set the scene for a decline which continued for fifteen years until Margaret Thatcher rekindled the special warmth of the partnership with Ronald Reagan’.5 The literature of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ For the purpose of this work the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ is de- fined as unusually close institutional bonds, frequent consultation and concerted policies between the governments of Britain and the United States, and, in the most rarefied sense, to regular, cordial and productive mutual dealings between prime ministers and presidents. The field of Anglo-American relations has at- tracted much attention from academics, among whom it is accepted that the world wars, especially the second, enabled the United States to displace Britain intro.p65 1 08/06/2004, 14:38 2 A ‘special relationship’? as the leading ‘great power’. David Dimbleby and David Reynolds note that in both conflicts Britain was among the first to become involved, and both times ‘at the point of exhaustion she [was] saved by the United States … although undefeated, Britain’s power [was] diminished and her economy weakened’.6 There is some uncertainty about the precise origin of the term ‘special relationship’ as a reference to Anglo-American bonds, but Winston Churchill certainly used the expression in February 1944 when he wrote that it was his ‘deepest conviction that unless Britain and the United States are joined in a Special Relationship including Combined Staff Organisation and a wide measure of reciprocity in the use of bases – all within the ambit of a world organisation – another destruc- tive war will come to pass’.7 The expression entered the public domain as a result of Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of March 1946, when it was used as a ‘prescriptive’ reference to close cooperation between Britain and the United States.8 In their coverage of the relationship over first two post-war decades, most writ- ers do tend to regard the adjective ‘special’ as at least partially warranted. The American academic and foreign policy practitioner Henry Kissinger, for ex- ample, notes how effectively British diplomats brought their influence to bear upon American policymakers. There were ‘meetings so regular that autono- mous American action somehow came to violate club rules’.9 John Baylis argues that the US–UK ‘partnership became so close, intimate and informal in such a wide spectrum of political, economic and especially military fields that terms like “exceptional”, “unique”, or “different from the ordinary” can be applied’. The relationship was exceptional ‘because of the degree of intimacy and infor- mality which was developed during the war’ and endured well beyond 1945.10 Anglo-American ties had a number of distinctive features. Firstly, notes Reynolds, there were the consultative ties between the two bureaucracies, which expressed themselves in regular and informal consultations between Washington and Lon- don. Secondly, there was the intelligence axis created during the Second World War and revived under the UKUSA agreements of 1947–48. There was a global division of labour in signals intelligence between the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.