“The Quality of the Ordinary”: Anglo American Diplomacy and the Third World 1975 1980
Andrew J. Whitford
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2015
© 2015
Andrew J. Whitford
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT
“The Quality of the Ordinary”: Anglo American Diplomacy and the Third World 1975 1980
Andrew J. Whitford
The recovery of the Anglo American relationship in the late 1970s took place in the Third World. The “Special Relationship” between the United States and Britain reached its post World War II nadir in the decade between 1964 and 1974. Simultaneous to this decline in the relationship was the growing power and influence of the Third World in international institutions. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, both the United States and Britain were suffering political and economic turmoil brought about by increased oil prices, labor unrest, and inflation. The two countries worked together to navigate a broad array of problems to include the Third World’s increasing hostility to Israel and calls for a New International Economic Order in the United Nations, a growing refugee crisis in southeast Asia, the spread of the Cold War to southern Africa, and questions about decline and disorder at home. In the United States, neoconservatives began to assert a greater role in international affairs by questioning both the future of British socialism and the wisdom of appeasing the Third World. Within these constraints, British and American statesmen acted to end white rule in Rhodesia to contain communist expansion, care for refugees while upholding international law within real fiscal constraints, and free American hostages held in Iran. Through both their actions and their improved mutual understanding, intellectually and politically diverse statesmen such as Henry Kissinger, Anthony Crosland, Andrew Young, and Peter Carrington established a balance in the Special Relationship that allowed the United States and Britain to cooperate in the Third World while respecting the other’s independence.
Table of Contents
Illustrations ii
Acknowledgements iii
Dedication iv
Chapter 1: An Alliance No More? The 1970s and the Special Relationship 1
Chapter 2: The Dialogue of Decline: American and British Perceptions Of 29 Decline Across the Atlantic in the 1970s Chapter 3: “If You Want an Audience, Start a Fight”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 72 the United Nations, and the Limits of Public Diplomacy Chapter 4: The War that Would Not End: Britain, Refugees, and the Aftermath 133 of the Vietnam War Chapter 5: From Grimsby to Lusaka: Henry Kissinger, Labour, and 175 Decolonization in Southern Africa in 1976 Chapter 6: Division and Discontent: The Limits of Anglo American Cooperation 234 on Iran and Rhodesia 1977 1980 Chapter 7: “Stubbornly Democratic”: The Aftermath of the 1970s on 299 Anglo American Politics References 317
i
Illustrations
Editorial Cartoon from the Austin American Statesman , 5 February 1976 125
Foreign Secretary James Callaghan in North Vietnam, 1973 142
Clara Maersk , circa 1975 150
Ambassador Andrew Young on the Cover of Newsweek , 28 March 1977 250
ii
Acknowledgements
This project grew out of my Masters Thesis on the role of the United Nations in British politics before and during the Falklands War. I could not have balanced my roles as a husband, father, student, teacher, and Army officer without a great deal of help, guidance, encouragement, and support. My first and most important thanks go to my family who endured three moves, four jobs, writing during holidays and weekends, and multiple odd vacations and trips. Angie and I moved to New York to start my graduate studies with about a week to prepare. Jack and Oliver joined us along the way from Columbia to West Point to Kansas to Texas. Their love, support, and patience mean the world to me. My parents David and Nancy and my in laws Jim and Shirley have also been supportive and encouraging every step of the way. The staff and faculty at Columbia University fostered an environment that was simultaneously intellectually challenging and socially welcoming. The faculty and staff were utterly committed to passing on the best traditions of the profession of history. Professor Susan Pedersen was the best adviser any student could ask for, and her generosity, professionalism, and mentorship was invaluable over the years. Professors Christopher L. Brown, Kenneth Jackson, Matt Connelly, and Anders Stephenson helped me prepare for orals and to make sure interest in the “Special Relationship” translated into a focused and interesting project. At the London School of Economics, Nigel Ashton helped me frame the project and better understand the Anglo American relationship. Classroom time with Professors Alan Brinkley, Carol Gluck, Victoria de Grazia, Mark Mazower, Caterina Pizzigoni , and Emma Winter sharpened my thinking and my writing. I owe a debt of gratitude to my fellow graduate students who were the best kind of intellectual compatriots: Carolyn Arena, Hannah Barker, Melissa Borja Westin, Sayaka Chatani, Joanna Dee Das, Claire Edington, Arunabh Ghosh, Matt Gomlak, Toby Harper, Justin Jackson, Abhishek Kaicker, Julia Del Palacio Langer, Tom Meaney, Ariel Mercik, Julia Nordmann, Omar Sarwar, Simon Stevens, Simon Taylor, and Tamara Mann Tweel The staff and faculty at the Department of History at the United States Military Academy were incredibly supportive of my endeavors. Brigadier General Lance Betros (Ret.), Colonel Gian Gentile (Ret.), and Colonel Kevin Farrell (Ret.) all fostered a culture of academic and military excellence. My fellow instructors were some of the best sounding boards imaginable for teaching, research, and writing. I would especially like to thank Colonel Greg Daddis, Major Casey Doss, Major Geoff Earnhart, Dr. David Frey, Dr. Matt Flynn, Major Josiah Grover, Dr. Jonathan Gumz, Dr. Eugenia Kiesling, Dr. Bill Leeman, Major Tom Moore, Matt Muehlbauer, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Musteen, Major Bill Nance, Major Joe Scott, Dr. John Stapleton, Dr. Charlie Thomas, Dr. Steve Waddell, Major Jay Warren, Dr. Jacqueline Whitt, and Lieutenant Colonel Gail Yoshitani. The view presented herein are mine alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or its components, including the United States Military Academy and the United States Army Command and General Staff College.
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Dedication
For Angie, Jack, and Oliver.
We ask you to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push back the future In strength, courage, hope, and love. Francis Drake
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“It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It’s a quality to be proud of. But it’s a quality that many people seem to have neglected.”
Gerald Ford, 1973
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Chapter 1: “An Alliance No More? The 1970s and the Special Relationship”
In 1975, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America were wary rivals in a global ideological and political struggle over which hung the pall of nuclear weapons. The British Empire had dissolved and in its absence Britain had fallen from the top tier of world powers into a “State of Emergency”. 1 For the liberal democratic victors of the Second World War, the post war social and economic consensus that had eased the problems of the 1930s had unraveled during the “shock” of the 1960s and early 1970s as the Keynesian balance between inflation and unemployment had morphed into “stagflation”. 2 The socialist model of politics and economics was gaining increasing international acceptance. 3 The 1970s were a period of multiple domestic and foreign crises that forced the United States and Britain to operate in an uncertain world. 4 The alliance known as the “Special Relationship” between the British
1 Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974 1979 (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 8–13 is a good recounting of the fall of the Heath government in the aftermath of the Oil Shock of 1973.
2 Niall Ferguson et al., eds., “‘Malaise’: The Crisis of Capitalism in the 1970s,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 27–38.
3 The best starting point for a comparison of the different Soviet and American approaches in the Third World during the Cold War is Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Post Stalin Soviet approaches to the Third World are covered in Alvin Z Rubinstein, Moscow’s Third World Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
4 Recent scholarship on the 1970s in general includes Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2011). Michael J Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home : POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, And Politics , Reprint (Da Capo Press, 2002); Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (University Press of Kansas, 2004). Philip Jenkins, Decade of nightmares : the end of the sixties and the making of eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) specifically identifies 1975 as a turning point in American history where fear and anxiety became the dominant drivers of behavior. The domestic economy is surveyed in Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class , First Edition (New Press, The, 2010). and Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (Yale University Press, 2010). For the British side, see Dominic Sandbrook, State of emergency: the way we were: Britain, 1970 1974 (London: Allen Lane, 1
and the United States had survived war and peace, but the accumulated crises of the past decade shook it as much as they shook both countries. 5
In 1975, the United States had an unelected President and an unelected Vice
President. 6 In Washington DC the era of the imperial presidency was over and President
Gerald R. Ford and his Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger were helpless to prevent the destruction of the Republic of Vietnam by the Soviet backed North Vietnamese Army. 7
In New York City, the year began with a deadly bombing at Fraunces Tavern on 24
January by the Puerto Rican terrorist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional
Puertorriqueña (FALN) and ended with the still unsolved 29 December LaGuardia
Airport bombing. On 27 October, the FALN bombed the United States’ Mission to the
United Nations and five New York City banks. 8 The Weather Underground staged one
2010); Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974 1979 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
5 Some of the more important works in the field of Anglo American relations are C.J. Bartlett, ‘ The Special Relationship’ A Political History of Anglo American Relations since 1945, John Baylis, Anglo American Defense Relations, 1939 1984: The Special relationship , 2nd ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984)., Hedley Bull and William Roger Louis, The Special relationship: Anglo American relations since 1945 , Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: The Demise of a Superpower, 1944 47 , John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo American Relations From the Cold War to Iraq 2 nd ed ., and Donald Cameron Watt, Succeeding John Bull: America in Britain’s Place, 1900 1975: A Study of the Anglo American Relationship and World Politics in the Context of British and American Foreign Policy Making in the Twentieth Century , 1981 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). A useful study of the links between domestic politics and the relationship between the two countries is Alan P. Dobson, “Labour or Conservative: Does It Matter in Anglo American Relations?” Journal of Contemporary History , Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), 387 407.
6 A survey of general histories of the United States in this era must begin with James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945 1974 , Reprint (Oxford University Press, USA, 1997); James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford University Press, USA, 2007). Peter N Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s , 1st ed (New York, N.Y: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982) was the first study of the era.
7 George C Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950 1975 , 3rd ed, America in Crisis (New York: McGraw Hill, 1996).
8 Reproductions of the FALN communiqués taking credit for these acts can be found at http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/faln.htm . Accessed 15 September 2012. 2
of their last bombings when they struck a Puerto Rican bank. Two days after these bombings, the Daily News accused Gerald Ford of telling New York to “drop dead” when he refused to provide a bailout for the financially ailing city. 9
It was a banner year for terrorism in Great Britain as well, and not a banner year there for much else. 10 The year before, the IRA had bombed Parliament. In London, the
Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) took hostages in December‘s 6 day
“Blacombe Street Siege” and through the fall their bombings on the streets and in the hotels of London killed 2 and wounded 70. The PIRA assassinated Ross McWhirter, a former student of Secretary of State for the Environment Anthony Crosland, on his doorstep. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was worried that elements in the Army and MI5
(Britain’s internal security service) might try to remove him from power on charges of being a Soviet agent. 11 While the worst of the industrial unrest that had plagued the
Conservative Government of Edward (Ted) Heath with over 70 million working days lost was over, the treatment of the trade unions under Labour could best be termed
“appeasement.” 12 The worst coach accident in British history killed 32 people on Dibbles
9 Sam Roberts, “Infamous ‘Drop Dead’ Was Never Said by Ford,” The New York Times , December 28, 2006, sec. New York Region, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/nyregion/28veto.html.
10 For an excellent overview of this era in Britain, see Alwyn W. Turner, Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s (London: Aurum, 2008). Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (Faber and Faber, 2009). Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Days of Paranoia , 1st ed. (PublicAffairs, 2010).
11 Peter Wright, Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York, N.Y: Viking, 1987) is the account of the British intelligence officer that accuses Wilson of being a Soviet spy as well as detailing the MI5 CIA plotting against him. Wilson’s justified suspicions, innocence, and the controversy are well covered in Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson , New edition (HarperCollins, 1993).
12 P. F Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900 1990 , Penguin History of Britain 9 (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1996), 347–348. Clarke does not use the term positively.
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Bridge in North Yorkshire. Peter Sutcliffe a.k.a. “The Yorkshire Ripper” killed the first of his 13 victims. Wilson’s Labour government spent £2.4bn to bail out Leyland Motors to save a million jobs, 13 and the consumer price index rate of inflation (CPI) was
24.9%. 14 On the bright side, “Fawlty Towers” aired on BBC2. 15
Despite the persistence of the Anglo American alliance after the Second World
War, there had always been tensions. The primary source of tension between the two powers before the 1970s was the Third World. The United States had for most of its existence been hostile to European imperialism, and the shift in global power during the
Second World War marked not just the ascent of the United States but the use of its diplomatic and economic power to begin to end the formal British Empire while expanding its own informal one. 16 While the Cold War dimmed the United States’ enthusiasm for the rapid dissolution of the British Empire, it was in the Third World where the alliance had their most dangerous disagreements. The end of the Palestinian
Mandate and the creation of the State of Israel was a clear display of the power of the
United States to overcome the opinions in the British Foreign Office. 17 Suez was
13 Brian Wheeler, “The politics of building cars” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4294709.stm , Accessed 27 July 2012.
14 http://www.global rates.com/economic indicators/inflation/1975.aspx , Accessed 27 July 2012. For the US in the same year, it was 6.9%.
15 Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun , 95–96. Sandbrook points out that Basil’s bad innkeeping would not be so funny if it were not for Britain’s reputation for poor customer service.
16 A good summary of how American imperialism differed only in conception and self regard from the European variant in the late 19 th and early 20 th century, see Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 182–245. The classic work on how the State Department dealt with the colonial question during World War II is William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
17 William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945 1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford UniversityPress, 1984); 4
shattering to the British as President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles sided with the Soviet Union over Anthony Eden’s attempt to wrest control of the Suez Canal from
Gamal Abdel Nasser. 18 The furor over Vietnam and Britain’s refusal to send troops despite Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk’s impassioned requests weakened the “Special
Relationship”, as did Harold Wilson’s decision to devalue the pound and end British military commitments east of Suez. 19 The years of Nixon and Heath were the years of
Great Power diplomacy in pursuit of détente for the United States and a move toward
Europe for Britain. 20 However, while the Anglo American relationship never truly regained the closeness of the Second World War even onto the present day, it was clearly stronger at the close of the 1970s than it had been at the beginning. 21 What made James
Callaghan and Anthony Crosland able to work so well with two distinctly non socialist
Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, 1945 1951 , 1st American ed (New York [N.Y.]: Norton, 1983).
18 Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003).
19 Jonathan Colman, A “Special Relationship”?: Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Anglo American Relations “at the Summit”, 1964 8 (Manchester University Press, 2005) , Sylvia Ellis, Britain, America, and the Vietnam War (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), P Pham, Ending “East of Suez” the British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore, 1964 1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Despite their comparative skills in winning elections and seeking to improve the lives of their citizens, Wilson and Johnson also did not have the best relationship. Wilson was polite and committed both to supporting the United States diplomatically and seeking a negotiated end to the Vietnam War. Johnson publicly called Wilson “Shakespeare.” William Roger Louis, “The Dissolution of the British Empire in the Era of Vietnam,” in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 559.
20 Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969 1977 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Alan P Dobson, Anglo American relations in the twentieth century of friendship, conflict, and the rise and decline of superpowers (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 140–143. Dobson’s term for the Anglo American relationship in the Heath years is “barren”.
21 John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship : Anglo American Relations in the Cold War and After (Basingstoke Macmillan, 2001) is good on this point. For all the perception of the strength of the relationship during the Reagan Thatcher years, the newest scholarship points out there were still significant tensions between the two countries and their leaders. See Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher : The Difficult Relationship (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012). For a more optimistic appraisal, see Nicholas Wapshott, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (New York: Sentinel, 2008).
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politicians, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford? Why was the alliance stronger in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) was able to work quite closely with James E.
“Jimmy” Carter (Democrat) when the governments of two men of the left in the 1960s and two men of the center right in the early 1970s had seen the nadir of the relationship in the 20 th century? 22
What was it that restored the “Special Relationship” in these years? It was in part the challenge of the Third World. The Third World went from being the site of the
United States’ and Britain’s quarrels to the arena where they chose to work together.
Partly out of the necessity of the changing global balance of power and partly out of a changed understanding of what mattered in the world, the years of Ford, Kissinger,
Callaghan, Crosland, Andrew Young, David Owen, and Peter (Lord) Carrington were the
“Years of Renewal” of the old alliance in the place where it had traditionally foundered.
What Kissinger, Crosland, and Callaghan began in the aftermath of Vietnam in foreign policy, Carter, Owen, and Young continued. One of the places where this cooperation manifested itself after Vietnam and the era of decolonization and during the decline of détente was the public forum, as opposed to the institution, of the United Nations.
Why the Third World? If inflation and domestic discord were the lot of two powerful Western countries, the lot of the new nations of the world in the 1970s was not that much better. The Oil Crisis of 1973 created an excess of “petrodollars” that went into loans for the countries that sought to finance their post independence economy. This spending would lead to massive debts when interest rates rose later in the decade. The
22 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 1st ed (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1993), 68–69.
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countries that had emerged from decolonization had sought to leap forward into modernity through socialism, centralized planning, and costly infrastructure construction. 23 Having numbers but not money, these countries sought a greater share of the goods and capital of the global economy by protesting what they saw as predatory practices and neocolonialism by the West. At the UN, the Non Aligned Movement challenged the United States and the British not just for their history of imperialism but also for their responsibility for the unequal nature of the global economy with calls for a
New International Economic Order that would right the balance between the developed and developing worlds and redistribute global wealth. 24
What allowed the United States and the United Kingdom to work to improve relations with each other while seeking to improve their relations and the material lot of the Third World? The alliance of the United States of America and Great Britain faced a growing number of the global challenges in the 1970s. The socialist world was growing at the expense of the democratic. Communism was triumphant in Southeast Asia, advancing in Africa, and now secure in Eastern Europe. In Angola, a Soviet and Cuban
23 Robert H Jackson, Quasi states : sovereignty, international relations, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82–138. Jackson stresses both the contested nature of decolonization that eventually occurred well before the colonial powers thought their colonies were ready, and the fact that these new countries were economically weak from the start and used that weakness to make a moral demand for aid free of constraints.
24 The explicitly redistributionist calls of the NIEO were one of the key elements that Daniel Moynihan saw as the link between the developing world of the 1970s and the Labour Party doctrines of the 1930s. See Daniel P. Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary , March 1975. For contemporary studies of the NIEO, see Jagdish N Bhagwati, The New International Economic Order : The North South Debate (Boston: MIT Press, 1977); William R Cline and Overseas Development Council, Policy Alternatives for a New International Economic Order : An Economic Analysis (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979); Ervin Laszlo, The Objectives of the New International Economic Order (New York: Pergamon Press, 1978); Robert K Olson, US Foreign Policy and the New International Economic Order: Negotiating Global Problems, 1974 1981 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1981); Edwin Pierce Reubens, The Challenge of the New International Economic Order (Boulder: Westview Press, 1981); Robert L Rothstein, Global Bargaining : UNCTAD and the Quest for a New International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
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sponsored proxy army defeated the various forces backed by China, South Africa, and the
United States. 25 The United States, Soviets, and countries of Europe codified détente at
Helsinki in 1975, but to Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership the agreement had little bearing on how the Soviets should behave in the rest of the world. 26 “Eurocommunism” was a possibility in Western Europe. Portugal’s junta had fallen and a series of increasingly left wing governments were coming to power. 27 India in 1975 was under a domestic “State of Emergency” that suspended democracy after political and judicial criticism of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi grew during the summer. 28
While the contention that the Cold War was made in the Third World was an important correction to the historical consensus, the argument about the centrality of the
Third World as the defining arena of the Cold War suffers from the focus on Europe and arms control by both the United States and the Soviets in the 1980s. 29 The 1960s and
1970s, on the other hand, were the peak of this reality. The challenge of the Third World was not one that occurred only in back rooms or in traditional negotiations, but also in
25 Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959 1976 , Envisioning Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
26 V. M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev , The New Cold War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 248–254. Zubok stresses that the Soviets tended to intervene overseas for reasons of power and prestige rather than ideology. For how the “Brezhnev Doctrine” worked in Europe, see Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy , The New Cold War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
27 Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 626–634.
28 Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy , Reprint (Harper Perennial, 2008).
29 Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005. Certainly, Third World issues mattered in the 1980s as well. For the United States, the pall of Vietnam hung over foreign policy particularly relating to Central and South America. For the Soviet Union, they were concerned about Afghanistan. These actions, however, did not replace the fact the US and Soviets were far more worried about each other than what was happening elsewhere.
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speeches and public demands. It therefore would require public diplomacy to manage and confront in turn. As a place where the new majority of nations had a voice in the
General Assembly, the UN emerged as a focal point of these debates. As the old and new faces of global power, and as allies, the British and the United States would face the brunt of the criticism. The United States in particular had taken the place of Britain as the main enemy both in the rhetoric of the Soviets and their allies as well as those that saw injustice and inequality of resources as the major threat the world faced. 30 Because the
UN mattered to the Third World, it had to matter to the Americans and the British.
The United Nations was to some the long awaited realization of a “Congress of
Nations” that would institutionalize peace and the ad hoc conference diplomacy that had emerged at the ends of other wars. 31 This hope carried with it the idea that the sufferings and upheavals of war could lead to a better peace, and embodied to President Truman the
30 William Roger Louis, “Public Enemy Number One: Britain and the United Nations,” in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York: I.B. Tauris ; Distributed in the U.S.A. by Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 689–724. One possible reason for the passing of this burden was the perception among Africans and a trans Atlantic network of young and influential activists that the United States had changed since World War II from a reluctant anti colonial power to a supporter of South African apartheid.
31 Important works on the founding of the United Nations are Stephen C Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations: A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 2003); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). Borgwardt’s work in particular stresses the links between Roosevelt’s domestic policies of the 1930s and his design for a better world with American led international organizations and norms. Studies of the United Nations relevant to this project are Jussi M Hanhimäki, The United Nations : A Very Short Introduction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Seymour Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN : People, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Making Foreign Policy (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988); David L Bosco, Five to Rule Them All : The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a good sense of how the United Nations sees itself, see Thomas George Weiss, Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey, United Nations Intellectual History Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Roger Normand, Human Rights at the UN : the Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) on governance and human rights, respectively.
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words of Tennyson’s "Locksley Hall". 32 The Congress of Vienna had allowed the conservative statesmen of Europe to rebuild the international order after the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars. The peace they designed lasted at best until 1848. 33 The Paris
Peace Conference promised to make the sacrifices of the First World War worthwhile, but the conference bogged down in details and the results pleased almost no one. 34
From the beginning, the changing nature of its membership changed the practices and purposes of the United Nations. Its founders originally conceived the United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, not just as an instrument of the peace or for the preservation of a certain notion of human rights, but as a tool of the preservation of the world order of 1945. In other words, they aimed to preserve empire. Despite this intent of its primarily Anglo American founders, the
United Nations quickly became a forum that helped bring about the end of the overseas empires of Western Europe. 35 The new countries formed out of the end of these empires also joined the United Nations, changing the composition of the
32 Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man : The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations , 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2006). Truman carried a copy of Tennyson’s poem in his wallet.
33 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy , 1st Touchstone ed (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 78–92.
34 The best recent book on Versailles is Stefan A Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
35 Susan Pedersen, “Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations,” in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2005), 113–114. This essay draws the conclusion that although the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations was formed as an attempt to maintain Western European empires through idea of trusteeship, it ultimately played a role in undermining it through exposing colonialism to outside scrutiny. For the connections between the League and the United Nations, particularly within the thinking of the Jan Smuts and Alfred Zimmern, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace : the End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Mazower assigns Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, the credit for starting the process of the transformation of the United Nations from an imperialist to an anti imperialist instrument as early as 1946.
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organization from the victors of the Second World War to an increasingly diverse group of newly formed and diversely governed nation states. 36
As the Cold War began to dominate the international arena, the United
Nations lost any ability to act quickly to shape the superpower confrontation due to the veto powers of both the United States and the Soviet Union in the Security
Council. Because of this stalemate, the United Nations lost its leading role in the relationship between the two dominant powers of the era. 37 It did, however, retain its importance as a location where the emerging Non Aligned Movement
(NAM) could raise issues relating to decolonization, development, and global inequality. The United Nations was a critical forum for the newly emerging
NAM, who formed a numeric majority in the General Assembly. This ability to control the General Assembly, as opposed to the Security Council, led to the passage of such acts as 1960’s General Assembly Resolution 1514 (xv)
(Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples). 38 Despite this shift in the behavior and composition of the United
Nations in the years after 1945 as well as their domestic difficulties, both the
United States and Britain maintained their memberships in the United Nations
36 The United Nations had 51 member states at its founding. By 1960, there were 99 members. By 1975, there were 144. Membership “is open to all peace loving States that accept the obligations contained in the United Nations Charter and, in the judgment of the Organization, are able to carry out these obligations”. United Nations Charter, Chapter II, Article IV. http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter2.shtml . Accessed 23 August 2011.
37 William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History. The major exception to this trend was the approval of the UN Security Council to use military force to repel the invasion of South Korea. This resolution was only passed due to the boycott of the Security Council by the Soviet Union. For the text of the resolution, see UNSC Resolution #83, 27 June 1950, http://www.un.org/documents/sc/res/1950/scres50.htm, Accessed 23 August 2011. 38 Louis, “Public Enemy Number One: Britain and the United Nations,” 700–702.
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General Assembly, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, and as members of many other bodies of the United Nations. 39 In the early 1960s, the
United Nations Security Council still mattered as a public forum for Cold War confrontations. The most dramatic use of this was the confrontation between
Adlai Stevenson and Valerian Zorin over the Soviet refusal to admit there were nuclear weapons in Cuba in October 1962. 40 The British had been coming under increasing scrutiny at the United Nations in the aftermath of decolonization, but the first Wilson government and the UN worked together to put pressure on
Southern Rhodesia after its Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. 41
The NIEO took its members and objectives in general for the Non Aligned
Movement. While the primary focus of the NAM in general was to steer a middle way through the Cold War – although particular members adhered fiercely to one side or another – the NIEO was the result of the G 77 and NAM working inside the United
Nations to fix the problems of “globalization” that transcended the Cold War.
The first formal call for a NIEO was in 1974 at the United Nations in the Sixth
Special Session. Emboldened by the economic power that OPEC had shown over the powers of Europe and the United States in 1973, the Algerians led a NAM and G 77 call
39 For the best study of the United States’ ambassadors to the United Nations, see Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN .
40 For more on Stevenson’s time at the UN, see John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World : The Life of Adlai E. Stevenson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977). A good example of the combination of faith and cynicism about the UN within the US at this time is the appointment of Arthur Goldberg by Lyndon Johnson to replace Stevenson. Goldberg gave up a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to try to de escalate the crisis over Vietnam, and Johnson got to attempt to put a political ally on the bench and quiet domestic criticism of the war in Vietnam.
41 Harold Wilson, A Personal Record: The Labour Government, 1964 1970, 1st American ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). Wilson refused to consider military action against Rhodesia, something some UN member states desired.
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for a NIEO based on twenty principles. 42 The United States opposed most of these measures, but the Algerians led the way in passing UNGA Resolution 3281 (XXIX),
Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. 43 These demands set the stage for the confrontations between the Third World and the United States in Turtle Bay in 1975.
The violence and disorder of the era were symptomatic of larger issues in governability at home and management (to say nothing of leadership) of the international order. 44 There emerged on both sides of the Atlantic a belief that the present disorders, particularly in Britain, were either terminal or required a fundamental change in British society. In the United States as well a growing movement decreed that the institutions of mainstream state centric liberalism, so powerful in the aftermath of the Second World
War, had ceased to work as they should. While this argument had its origins in the convulsions of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, a group of former liberals who had been
“mugged by reality” emerged in the 1970s and became the most influential spokesman for a cause of reforming the welfare state while restoring the United States’ international influence. These so called neoconservatives were also tentatively finding common
42 Olson, US Foreign Policy and the New International Economic Order , 12. These twenty principles were “sovereign equality, cooperation of all states in overcoming economic disparities, special attention to development problems, self determination in choosing economic systems, full national control over resources, rights of restitution for exploitation, regulation of transnational corporations, national liberation wherever appropriate, just prices for developing country exports, aid without strings, reform of the international monetary system, nonreciprocal trade preference, and access to achievements of science and technology.”
43 Resolution adopted by the General Assembly “3281 (XXIX). Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States” http://www.un documents.net/a29r3281.htm , Accessed 14 October 2012.
44 Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). For studies that were particular for Britain, see Cornell University, Is Britain Dying?: Perspectives on the Current Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1979); Stephen Haseler, The Death of British Democracy: A Study of Britain’s Political Present and Future (London: P. Elek, 1976). Robert Moss, “Anglocommunism,” Commentary 63, no. 2 (February 1977): 27–33.
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ground with traditional conservatives. 45 However, outside of a small segment of the right and the left, what solutions there were to the problems of inflation, industrial unrest, rising oil prices, unemployment, declining industry, and increasing social disorder were unclear.
What had held the “Special Relationship” together? The idea that democracies are natural allies has its origins as far back as the First Article of Section II of Immanuel
Kant’s Perpetual Peace .46 Preserved as a military and diplomatic alliance in the early years of the Cold War, the Special Relationship was always more important to the British than the Americans, something the British forgot at their peril. 47 Much of the dynamic of the Special Relationship can be explained by the differences between the United States and Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. The United States emerged from the Second World War at the pinnacle of its economic, military, and diplomatic power and influence relative to its allies and enemies. Britain, however, had bankrupted itself over the course of two world wars but still sought to act as an imperial power even as the center of the empire moved from India to Africa and the Middle East. 48 Unlike the US
Soviet alliance that fractured quickly after 1945, the relatively close relationship between
45 Irving Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 316–49.
46 The most common discussion of the theory that democracies are natural allies comes from the international relations theory of Democratic Peace. For a good description of this theory, see Bruce Russett et al., “The Democratic Peace,” International Security 19, no. 4 (April 1, 1995): 164–184.
47 William Roger Louis, “American Anti Colonialism, Suez, and the Special Relationship,” in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York: I.B. Tauris ; Distributed in the U.S.A. by Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 589–608. In Louis’ analysis, if forced to choose between “the ‘special relationship’, ‘anti colonialism’, and ‘anti communism’, the last always prevails. 48 Two major works on this transition are Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, 1945 1951 , 1st American ed. (New York [N.Y.]: Norton, 1983)and William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945 1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1984).
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the US and Britain endured. This was in spite of the differences in relative power and influence each country enjoyed during the Cold War. While there were significant moments of tension and disagreement, most notably during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the choice of the Wilson government not to provide military support to the US led war in
Vietnam, there was still a great deal of cooperation for the three decades after the end of the Second World War through diplomatic, military, and intelligence channels. 49
Despite this cooperation, the United States and the United Kingdom pursued different foreign policy paths during this time.
The foreign policy of the United States after 1945 followed a particular path.
From the beginning of the Cold War the United States’ overarching foreign policy objective was the containment of the Soviet Union. 50 One major area of importance to the United States’ foreign policy was its ability to work with its allies, both bi laterally with allies such as the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Canada, Japan, and the
United Kingdom and through multi lateral institutions like NATO 51 .
49 Dumbrell, A Special Relationship , 124–146. One major breaking point in the relationship in the early 1960s was the US rejection of the Skybolt aircraft despite the major cost to the British. For the classic study, see Richard E Neustadt, Alliance Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). 50 The literature on the Cold War and containment is vast. Early scholarship stressed the behavior of the Soviets for the outbreak of the Cold War, while the revisionists beginning with William A. Williams blamed the US and its search for overseas markets for provoking tensions with a defensive minded Soviet Union. Post revisionists starting in the 1980s took into account these materialist critiques as well as adding the material to their analysis that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union. For the best post revisionist account of the United States and the origins of the Cold War that takes into account the critiques of the revisionists, see Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. For a fundamental rethinking of the Cold War the shifts the focus of the conflict to the Third World, see Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005. For the idea of containment being the overall driving factor in the foreign policies of the US government during the Cold War , see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. (2 nd ed.) Gaddis discusses the shifts in the means of US strategy as switching between symmetrical (such as the Korean War) and asymmetrical (Eisenhower’s New Look) methods.
51 One of the most interesting examinations of the formation and limitations of these alliances is Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945 1952.” Journal of Peace Research , Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 263 277. Lundestad makes it clear that the supremacy over its
15
After Suez, the relationship regained some of its former closeness under
Macmillan, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, but declined as the pound weakened and the US grew more involved in the Vietnam War to the distress of the ruling Labour party under
Harold Wilson. 52 It stagnated as Nixon turned toward the wider world and Heath turned to Europe. 53 By 1975, however, Nixon and Heath were both gone and the relationship was becoming more important again, but the focus of it had changed. Instead of being bound by Anglo Saxon culture or a common enemy, it was the economic disorder and increasingly complex international system where these two countries were forced to focus their efforts. The military parts of the alliance did not fall away, but détente had reduced the possibility of war in Europe. Under the umbrella of the Nixon Doctrine,
Nixon and Kissinger sought regional allies that would enforce regional security while the
United States played China and the Soviet Union off each other. 54 Now, it seemed that regional allies were not effective in meeting the growing efforts of the call within the
NAM for a NIEO or for dealing with the crises in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Emerging from an era where Britain under the Conservatives had turned its attention to Europe and the United States under Nixon and Kissinger had played Great
allies that the US enjoyed in the immediate post WWII era was clearly gone by the mid 1960s. For an examination of how these European powers attempted to meet exercise their sovereignty in their own national interest while under US hegemony, see William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944 1954 . Overall, the United States first sought to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and communism through political and economic means in areas of vital interest. After 1950 with the loss of mainland China, the explosion of a Soviet atom bomb, and the invasion of South Korea, the US began to take a more global and militaristic approach to containment.
52 Pimlott, Harold Wilson .
53 For an excellent summary of Nixon’s foreign policy efforts, see Nixon in the World .
54 Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, “Introduction: The Adventurous Journey of Nixon in the World,” in Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations 1969 177 , ed. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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Power politics, the challenges and crises the Alliance would face for the next five years would mostly occur in the Third World. The principle architects of the renewal and refocusing of this alliance were a mixed group of men. James Callaghan 55 , Henry
Kissinger 56 , Anthony Crosland 57 , Jimmy Cater 58 , Andrew Young 59 , Ivor Richard, and
Peter Carrington 60 were a diverse array of men with radically different backgrounds.
With the United States defeated in Vietnam and Empire gone, and détente providing
55 James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987); Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
56 Jussi M Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Henry Kissinger, A World Restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812 22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) represents an early look into Kissinger’s thinking on foreign policy and how “realist” statesmen could bring order to a post war world. For his own historical justification for this approach, see Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy , 1st Touchstone ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1995). An interesting study of Kissinger’s place in 20th century American (and Jewish) history is Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) is a good overall biography. For the Nixon Kissinger relationship, see Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power , 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins Pub, 2007).
57 Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland London: J. Cape, 1982.
58 The starting place for an analysis of the course of foreign policy during the Carter administration is the writing of its principle actors. The conflict between Vance and Brzezinski is detailed in Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices : Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983) and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977 1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983). For an overall view, see Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith : Memoirs of a President (New York: Bantam Books, 1982). For an analysis of the Carter administration and how domestic issues were linked to the United States’ conduct of foreign affairs, see John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A Re evaluation. The standard study of the Carter administration’s foreign policy underpinnings is Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years , 1st ed (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). For a neoconservative view, Joshua Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Press, 1986).
59 Andrew DeRoche, Andrew Young : Civil Rights Ambassador (Wilmington (Del.): Scholarly Resources, 2003); Bartlett C. Jones, Flawed Triumphs: Andy Young at the United Nations (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1996). For a positive appraisal of Young, see H. E Newsum and Olayiwola Abegunrin, United States Foreign Policy towards Southern Africa : Andrew Young and beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987). For the neoconservative critique, see Carl Gersham, “The World According to Andrew Young,” Commentary , August 1978.
60 Peter Alexander Rupert Carington Carrington, Reflect on Things Past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington (London: Collins, 1988).
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some stabilization in Europe, they were united in the years after 1975 in determining how the alliance could solve the problems of the 1970s in the Third World.
Generally, the Special Relationship enjoyed bipartisan support on both sides of the Atlantic. Heath was the rare Prime Minister who was more attuned to Europe than the Atlantic, and political anti Americanism was strongest on the Tory right in figures like Enoch Powell and the Labour left in figures like Tony Benn, neither of whom held the balance of power in these years. 61 Across the Atlantic, it was a different story. The
Anglo American alliance was widely accepted, but the United Nations was coming under increased criticism in the United States, particularly from the political right. 62 Both the
Anglo American alliance and the United Nations had their critics, and chief among the critics in these years was the combative Harvard sociologist Daniel Patrick (Pat)
Moynihan who was at the center of an argument in 1975 as the United States and Britain clashed at the United Nations over what seems merely to be a matter of style but revealed a more fundamental disagreement about the best way to meet the challenges of the Third
World.63 Moynihan’s criticism of both Britain and the UN in these years was
61 For the anti American views of the “High” Tory right, see Simon Heffer, Like the Roman : The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). Benn told senior political officers at US embassy in London there was no point trying to compare the United States and Britain (or the UK and the Soviet Union) because they were very different. Benn considered this might be the most left wing thing they ever heard. Tony Benn, Against the Tide : Diaries, 1973 1976 (London: Hutchinson, 1989). 17 Sept 1976
62 Mark Mazower, Governing the World : The History of an Idea , 2012, 308–311. Mazower sees the United Nations as decreasing in importance in these years for the Great Powers as American backed financial entities such as the IMF and the World Bank which increasingly held sway over economies of the Third World.
63 Opposition to international organizations was generally more a position of the Republican than the Democrats in the United States. This trend is identifiable as far back as the Wilson administration and the fight over the League of Nations. For more, see Thomas J Knock, To End All Wars : Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman From New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan A Biography is an excellent starting point on Moynihan, although from the perspective of a personal friend. Another excellent source for understanding 18
representative of a stream of neoconservative thought that analyzed the problems of the welfare state and the ending of the post war social consensus. In their journals, Britain was a prime example of the problems of the welfare state. 64 This group of public intellectuals such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were “breaking ranks” with their youthful radicalism and searching for a way to solve the United States’ problems both at home and abroad. 65 For their part, British writers and thinkers also agreed something was wrong, but struggled to determine what it was and more importantly, what then was to be done? This search for answers prompted an outpouring of literature. 66
Moynihan is his own powerful writings, a selection of which has been published as Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary , ed. Steven R. Weisman.
64 The two most prominent articles are Moss, “Anglocommunism”; James Q. Wilson, “Crime and Punishment in England,” Public Interest , no. 43 (Spring 1976). An early example of questions about the survival of the welfare state can be found in Timothy Raison, “The British Debate the Welfare State,” Public Interest 1, no. Autumn 1965 (n.d.): 110–18..
65 Neoconservative is a difficult term to use with accuracy (the lowest count of “real” neoconservatives is two). The term itself came into prominence once Michael Herrington, a critic of these thinkers, used it in Dissent in 1974 to describe critics of the Welfare state. One major point of agreement in most definitions was a neoconservative accepted of the New Deal without supporting how it was implemented. One of the best ways to study neoconservatives is to read their own voluminous writings. Two important starting points are Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir , 1st Harper colophon ed, Harper Colophon Books CN816 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism : The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995). The most up to date study is Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Two other recent useful surveys are Jim Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004) and Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons , 1st ed (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Given the controversy over neoconservativism and the foreign policy of the United States, the pre 9/11 John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism : Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945 1994. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) is a balanced and useful work. For a blistering dissent from a pair of British conservatives on the rightness of the neoconservative world view, see Halper and Clarke, America Alone . Two excellent sources into the world of the New York Intellectuals which produced these thinkers are Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings : The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World : The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: Free Press, 2000).
66 Haseler, The Death of British Democracy . The longer history of British decline is covered in books such as Correlli Barnett, The Human Factor and British Industrial Decline : An Historical Perspective. (London: Working Together Campaign, 1975); Martin J Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850 1980 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). This view of decline is challenged in David Edgerton, Warfare State Britain, 1920 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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Despite the temptation to see the Reagan administration and Thatcher government as the logical outcomes of this ideological search, their elections were contingent on many factors including events in the Third World. These problems of internal discontent in each country and a diplomatic approach that was increasingly focused on the Third
World through the United Nations is the intersection that will illuminate the nature of both.
The larger aim of this project, beyond an analysis of the dealings of the Anglo
American governments with the Third World in the late 1970s, is to reexamine the importance of the 1970s in the United States and Britain. The 1970s were more than just a bridge between the disorder of the 1960s and the conservative surge of the 1980s. The
1970s matter because they represent the end of the post WWII era and the search for a way ahead. What historian Eric Hobsbawm called the Golden Age that began in 1945 came to a sudden close with the Oil Crash of 1973. 67 The 1970s offered a glimpse of what a post Cold War world might look like. The challenges of growing global inequality, a concern over the future relationship between human beings and the natural world, balancing competing claims of liberty and justice, and rising ethnic tensions were issues that transcended the East West confrontation and would remain controversial even after the Cold War. Their genesis, as well as some of the West’s first concerted attempts to deal with them in an international way, was located in this moment of transition. For the British, it was also a decade of domestic concerns such as inflation and labour unrest.
67 E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes : A History of the World, 1914 1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 8–9.
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For the Americans, it was a “post” era: Post Nixon, post Watergate, post Vietnam, post consensus. What was to come next was a mystery. 68
The best way to explore how the British and United States understood the workings and limits of the Special Relationship in confronting the crises in the Third
World through the post Vietnam 1970s is to look carefully at a variety of different crises.
These “case studies” are an examination of how the British and Americans viewed each other’s troubles in the late 1970s, the conflicts that marked Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s time as the United States’ ambassador to the UN, the small boat refugee crisis in
Southeast Asia, Henry Kissinger and Anthony Crosland’s attempt in 1976 to end white minority rule in Rhodesia, and the search for resolutions of the twin crises of Southern
Rhodesia and Iran in 1979 1980. Taken together, these events detail the struggle of the
United States and Britain to work together in a world where their economic power and diplomatic influence were on the decline.
Moynihan’s tenure at the UN was a stormy one in large part because he confronted both the British and the Third World. His selection to represent the US at the
UN was the result of an article in Commentary that blamed Britain’s Labour intellectuals for spreading socialist and anti American ideals to the Commonwealth which in turn made these ideas into the majority opinion at the UN. The beau ideal of his argument was the famous British liberal Marxist (contra Stalinist) Harold Laski whose goal for
Labour was a “revolution by Consent.” 69 Laski had a great number of friends among the
68 The question of where most if not all of American politics and foreign policy since 1975 has been “post Vietnam” is worth exploring given that as late as 2004 a US Presidential election turned in no small part on a comparison of the two candidate’s service records during the war.
69 Moynihan’s indictment of Laski was ironic given their shared affiliation with the LSE. Laski was a professor of political science at LSE from 1926 to 1950. Moynihan has pursued his PhD at LSE as a 21
political elite of the Democratic Party of his era (including FDR), but he was from the start the center of criticism from the political right for his hostility to the peculiar form of
American capitalist democracy. 70 As Moynihan was a hawkish Democrat who had served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, his views won him the notice of President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger as an instrument for the United States’ attempt to recover its international standing after Vietnam. Moynihan sought to place the
“United States in Opposition” to the world for nine months at the United Nations.
Moynihan’s tenure at the United Nations saw the passage of UN General Assembly
Resolution 3379 “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination” more commonly known as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. 71 This display of the voting power of the
Third World seemed to mark the low point of US influence in the world. Moynihan was seen by some as provoking this Resolution with his rhetoric, and it led to a row between himself and the British Ambassador Ivor Richard that strained the relationship between the two countries at the United Nations as well as between Kissinger and Moynihan. 72
In the end, Moynihan resigned and returned to Harvard, but the public nature of their dispute was evidence to some in Washington of Kissinger’s declining power and influence. Moynihan’s attempt at diplomacy had failed, and despite the attempts of the
Fulbright Scholar in the 1950s. Their times at the school did not overlap. When Moynihan arrived, Laski had been replaced by the conservative Michael Oakenshott. See Chapter 3 for more details.
70 Isaac Kramnick, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (New York: Penguin Press, 1993), 320. A fascinating study that places Laski alongside Keynes and Hayek as one of three of the most influential thinkers of the post war era is Kenneth Hoover, Economics as Ideology : Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics (Lanham Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
71 UNGA Resolution 3379 (1975) “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination” http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/761C1063530766A7052566A2005B74D1 , Accessed 22 November 2012.
72 Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN , 242–245.
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United States to deal with the demands of the Third World through improved trade agreements and increased aid, the combativeness of Moynihan had weakened the United
States by loosening its bonds with its allies. In 1976, Kissinger and the British would work together to find a way forward in the Third World. The place they selected for their attempt was Africa.
The next case study is the “small boat” refugee crisis that saw thousands of
Vietnamese fleeing the Communist takeover of Southeast Asia during and after the end of the Vietnam War. This aspect of the wider refugee crisis in the area drew together
Britain, the United States, and the United Nations in ways that were rare in the post
WWII era. The refugees who fled by sea often arrived in places either under British control (Hong Kong) or in countries where Britain had a defense relationship (Brunei,
Singapore). For the United States, this crisis forced them to continue confronting the war that so many wished to put behind them. 73 For the British, it was a challenge to reconcile their last remaining pieces of empire and influence in the Far East, their traditional commitment to humanitarianism, their alliance with the United States, their official reluctance to admit newcomers, and their desire to solve this problem by working with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. 74 British ships were among those picking up
73 Works that deal with America’s response to the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia after Vietnam include Carl J Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate : The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Gail Paradise Kelly, From Vietnam to America : A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the United States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977); Peter H Koehn, Refugees from Revolution : U.S. Policy and Third World Migration (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Judy A Mayotte, Disposable People? : The Plight of Refugees (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992). William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy : Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
74 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 64–66. Thatcher cites the problem of Vietnamese boat people as one that “directly concerned Britain” but that needed to be handled through the United Nations because “it was too big for any one country to tackle.” She also used the issue to embrass Kosygin at a meeting in Moscow on the way to the Toyko G7 summit in 1979.
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the refugees, and the excess cost for the firms of caring for these refugees while on board cut into the shippers’ already thin profit margins. Both Callaghan’s and Thatcher’s governments did not want to create economic difficulties for British firms, but they also demanded that British masters abide by the rules of the sea. This struggle for the British involved not just the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO) but also the concerns of the Home Office of where these refugees were to live if they came to Britain and the ever present question of how the Exchequer would fund these efforts. Examining how these issues interacted is a way of seeing the “Special
Relationship” as it relates to the Third World in a new light.
The third case is the turn to Africa by Henry Kissinger in 1976. After Kissinger and Ford rejected Moynihan’s more confrontational approach to the international community, the United States along with Britain turned to Africa in search of a diplomatic success. This search had started with the failed covert mission to stop Cuba from seizing control of Angola in 1975, but Kissinger saw that there was still a chance to improve the United States’ standing in Africa by bringing closure to the problem of continued white minority rule in Rhodesia. For Kissinger, the reality of the rising importance of the calls for a NIEO, the deadlock in the Middle East, the relative stability of Europe, and the weakening of the US position in Asia forced him to look for new places to practice foreign policy. With the help of James Callaghan and Anthony
Crosland he would seek to solve the problem of white majority rule in Southern Rhodesia and perhaps eventually South Africa. 75 For the British, working with Kissinger was a way of resolving the last hanging bit of empire that proved a problem at every
75 Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 913–928.
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Commonwealth meeting. Southern Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence
(UDI) in 1965 had bedeviled the first Wilson government, and the continued failure to resolve it was a nuisance to Britain at home and at the UN. 76 When Ford lost to Carter, this initiative did not abate. It was instead redoubled by David Owen at the Foreign
Office and Andrew Young at the United Nations. Both Young and Owen were men who inspired strong opinions and who were committed to improving relations with the Third
World. 77 They served similar purposes in the foreign policy apparatuses of their governments. Callaghan, Carter, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance focused on defense issues and Europe while Young and Owen dealt with the Third World. For a time it seemed to work. Although the regime of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front was nothing if not consistently truculent, it was losing both the guerilla war and the economic war at home and was slowly moving closer to accepting some form of majority rule. The United
States’ relations with the Front Line States in Southern Africa were improving thanks to the efforts of Young and Owen. Both men, however, had their critics. Neoconservatives in the United States did not like Young, and many in Labour did not like Owen. 78 Some in Britain as well were concerned about Young’s criticism of their country as well as his informal style of diplomacy. The issue of Israel, so central to the controversy of
Moynihan’s tenure at the United Nations, returned to the center stage when knowledge of
Andrew Young’s forbidden dealing with the PLO became public and he was forced to
76 Pimlott, Harold Wilson , 366–381. Pimlott emphasizes Wilson’s mistake of publicly foreswearing force in 1965 and the negative effect Rhodesia’s successful rebellion had on Britain’s international prestige.
77 Carl Gersham, “The Andrew Young Affair,” Commentary 68, no. 5 (November 1979).
78 P. F Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900 1990 , Penguin History of Britain 9 (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1996), 350.
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resign. 79 His departure worsened a growing split in the Democratic Party between
African Americans and Jews that had emerged in the 1960s. 80 His removal was also roughly coincidental with the arrival in power of Mrs. Thatcher and the marked shift in
Carter’s foreign policy to a more confrontational approach.
The beginning of Mrs. Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister and the end of Carter’s term saw a remilitarization of the United States’ approach to both the Cold War in
Europe and relations with the Third World. The invasion of Afghanistan was the death knell of détente. For Britain, these first years saw Mrs. Thatcher and her allies struggle to gain control over the British government and wrap up the last remnants of the British
Empire in Africa. The twin crises in Iran and Zimbabwe exposed the limits of the Anglo
American alliance. Margaret Thatcher’s support from the Commonwealth and the skill of Lord Carrington mattered more than the actions of Cyrus Vance or Jimmy Carter in ending minority rule in Southern Rhodesia. 81 There was little Britain could do given the determination and stubbornness of the new Iranian regime to free the diplomats the
“Students Following the Line of the Imam” had taken hostage. 82 Despite these limits,
79 Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN , 284.
80 This issue is extraordinarily controversial. For the best summary of the competing literature and a sensitive overview of the era and its issues, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black Jewish Relations in the American Century , Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2006).While this issue was not primarily one of Anglo American relations, it does illustrate the connection between domestic affairs and international relations. This split in the Jewish African American community over Israel had parallels in the domestic arena, most notably in the Brownsville Ocean Hill controversy. For more on this, see Richard D Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy , Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
81 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 72–78. Although Thatcher gives some credit to the economic pressure the US was able to bring to bear, it was the Commonwealth’s pressure and Lord Carrington’s “day to day” management of the Lancaster House talks that deserve the most credit in her view for the success of the Conference. The US contributions at the Presidential level to the Lancaster House talks are covered in Andrew DeRoche, “Standing Firm for Principles: Jimmy Carter and Zimbabwe,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 4 (n.d.): 657–85.
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when the Iran Hostage Crisis and the neo conservative defections from the Democratic
Party proved fatal to the Carter administration the Anglo American relationship was much stronger than it had been just five years previously. However, the 1980s would mark a return to the era when the Third World would again divide Britain and the United
States.
If the problems of the Third World and the Anglo American Special Relationship outlasted the Cold War, then the study of what the British and United States did together in the Third World between Vietnam and the end of the Iranian Hostage Crisis is worth examining in detail. The alignment between the two governments in the following years rested on the base rebuilt by the administrations and governments that had preceded it. 83
This odd moment is revealing to what governments can accomplish together even in the age of limits.
82 Gary Sick, All Fall down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran, 1st ed (New York: Random House, 1985); James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American Iranian Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). For an account that carries the players on the US and Iranian sides to the present, see Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah : The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). For the view of the crisis from the perspective of the Iranian students, see Massoumeh Ebtekar and Fred A Reed, Takeover in Tehran : The inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture (Burnaby, B.C.: Talonbooks, 2000).
83 As President Barack Obama stated during his recent state visit to the United Kingdom, “I come here today to reaffirm one of the oldest, one of the strongest alliances the world has ever known.” Remarks by the President to Parliament in London, United Kingdom, 25 May 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos and video/video/2011/05/25/president obama addresses british parliament#transcript . 27
Chapter 2: The Dialogue of Decline: American and British Perceptions of Decline Across the Atlantic in the 1970s
Looking for hope in the face of dire warnings about a future Third World War, the
American anti totalitarian journal’s Dissent editor Irving Howe offered up “England” and its decolonization as proof that “the ‘imperialist temptation’ of the capitalist countries” was on the wane in 1959. Harold Macmillan’s prosperous Britain, it seemed to Howe, had learned the correct lessons about the perils of intervention at Suez. 1 Britain had progressed peacefully down the road toward socialism in the 1940s, and now was losing its taste for empire without any major internal discord. These trends could only have heartened a democratic socialist about the future of Britain. Others on the anti totalitarian left were less sanguine. Daniel Bell, like Howe a product of City College and then a Professor of Sociology at Columbia, wrote in The End of Ideology a year later that
“in England today, in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim or John Osborne's Look Back in Anger , we have the flowering of what Christopher Sykes has called "redbrickism, provincialism, and all this belly aching" meaning a revolt against the cultural inbreeding of Oxford and Cambridge, and the grayness of the Welfare State.” Even if Bell saw trouble ahead, it was of a mild nature. Both of these assessments rested not just on a hope for the future but on an understanding of the past rooted in a belief in Britain’s ability to endure. Britain’s political commitment to democracy when others had faltered, its liberal notions of empire
–however imperfectly applied over a century of practice, and now its dual commitments to growth and welfare state socialism by the leaders of both major
1 Howe was reviewing C. Wright Mills’ The Causes of World War III in Dissent . Cited in Neil Jumonville, The New York Intellectuals Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007), 294. 28
parties had made Britain into both a valued partner of the United States and a shining example of the post war golden age. 2
Macmillan had indeed learned from Suez, and as he wound down the British
Empire he attempted to tie Britain more closely to the United States to repair the damage done in 1956. For a while, it seemed that Macmillan had succeeded simultaneously in restoring relations with Britain’s key ally, winding down Empire, and reversing the austerity of the post war years. 3 However by 1975, the mild revolts that Amis and Bell had foreseen out of the discontents of the bourgeois 1950s had blossomed into something far more malign. Britain’s attempt to modernize under Harold Wilson had foundered, as had Edward Heath’s attempt to tame an increasingly militant and decentralized trade union movement. The international linkage that had given Macmillan much of his credibility, that of a close relationship first with the United States and then with Europe, had foundered first on the intransigence of Charles De Gaulle and then the half hearted escalations of Lyndon B. Johnson. Heath’s European focus further widened the Atlantic gap. But what happened to this relationship was not all the fault of one only side.
Bell had a warning for the United States as well in The End of Ideology .4 He went on to state, that despite his somewhat Marxist claim about the withering away of ideology “what will happen in the United States is difficult to foresee, for all expressions
2 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes . Hobsbawn uses this term to refer to the years of 1945 1973 where a reformed capitalism balanced growth and social democracy.
3 Clarke, Hope and Glory , 1996, 263–272.
4 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology; on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960). Even in his early years, Bell had been an advocate for the British. In Alcove 1 among the Trotskyists, he advocated for a “mixed economy…based on the British system”. Irving Kristol, “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” in The New York Intellectuals Reader , ed. Neil Jumonville (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2007), 37–48. 29
of revolt, whether it be Zen, or abstract expressionism, or Jungianism, or progressive jazz, quickly become modish and fiat.” 5 The tumult of the next decade swept away this vision of a future where the passion of ideology had faded away. Indeed, as Bell warned in his conclusion, “And when… beliefs are suffused by apocalyptic fervor, ideas become weapons, and with dreadful results.” 6 This passage might mark better than any the fate of what befell the United States from 1961 1975.
By the 1970s the fruits of victory from World War II seemed to have spoiled on both sides of the Atlantic. The dreams of a post war “American century” or of a “New
Jerusalem” of full employment had foundered on inflation, disorder, and discord. Britain nominally stood alongside the United States as the architect in the international institutions that would shape the post war era, but these institutions both cemented
American primacy and did much to undermine Britain’s independent role in the world. 7
The wider western world seemed in danger of falling behind an apparently resurgent
Soviet Union and the newly assertive “Third World” that followed socialist models of government and development. 8 Despite Nixon and Kissinger’s work at building détente
5 Bell, The End of Ideology; on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/bell chap13.html , Accessed 27 Jan 15.
6 Ibid. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/bell endofi.html , Accessed 27 Jan 15.
7 The most recent work on Bretton Woods, for example, makes it clear for all his erudition Keynes could do little in the face of the economic strength of the United States. See Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press, 2013).
8 In 1975, Harvard’s Adam Ulam wrote in the New Republic that the Soviet Union had achieved achieved “the leading, if not yet dominant position in world politics.” Quoted in Daniel Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 1st ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1978), 54. For an analysis on the illusion of Soviet robustness and its effect on American politicians and diplomats in the Brezhnev era, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: a Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War , Rev. and expanded ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 356 This section deals specifically with the Reagan era. The growing importance and power of the Soviet model in the Third World as the second generation of post independence leaders took power (often by force) is detailed in Odd 30
and the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, a sense of normalcy that would replace the tensions of the Cold War failed to develop. The end of Lend Lease in 1945 and Suez a decade later brutally revealed the continued British economic dependence on American support for sterling.9 The demands of the Johnson administration over Vietnam, devaluation of the pound, and the withdrawal from “East of Suez” had further strained the relationship between the two countries in the 1960s. 10 The end of empire had limited
Britain’s overseas commitment down from East of Suez to the maintenance of a small nuclear deterrent, supporting NATO’s efforts to keep the Atlantic open in time of war, the defense of the northern German plains as part of NATO, and defending a few small overseas outposts. 11 This external retrenchment of Britain’s role in the world did not help the situation at home, where inflation and industrial discord were making Britain into the
“sick man of Europe” along with Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Of these countries, only
Britain had sustained its democracy. With the fall of Ted Heath’s government to trade union unrest in 1974 and an increasingly tense situation inside Harold Wilson’s cabinet, even this pillar of British life was possibly in danger.
With trouble came a search for a diagnosis. This concern about decline on both sides of the Atlantic was most evident in the new intellectual movement within the
United States known as neoconservatism, but civil servants, politicians, academics, and
Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For the limits of the Soviet model and the failures of Third World development on these lines, see James C Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 229–252.
9 Louis, “American Anti Colonialism, Suez, and the Special Relationship,” 603.
10 Jonathan Colman, A “Special Relationship”? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Anglo American Relations “at the Summit”, 1964 68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
11 Paul M Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Scribner, 1976), 330–335. 31
other observers shared these same concerns about decline and how to arrest or perhaps even reverse it.
In addition to this dialogue about British decline, there was the continued diplomatic effort of the British government to assess the current and potential future policies of the United States. Although Macmillan and others believed that Britain could exercise influence on the United States through advice and consultation, this had not been the pattern since 1945. 12 The doings of the United States were not the only concern of
British foreign policy after the Second World War. Britain’s foreign policy in the years after the war was triangular, with Britain attempting to maintain links to the United
States, the Commonwealth, and Europe. 13 For the British after the Second World War, their relationship with the United States, along with Europe and the Commonwealth, gave them an influence which belied their growing relative weakness. Conservative Prime
Minister Edward Heath’s European orientation (an outlier among British Prime Ministers of the post war period) along with Nixon and Kissinger’s focus on superpower détente had allowed the relationship to further atrophy. 14 Heath’s defeat in the General Election
12 The first instance of this disregard involved the United States’ support for the creation of Israel over British objections. See William Roger Louis, “The End of the Palestine Mandate,” in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 446–447.
13 Steve Marsh and John Baylis, “The Anglo American ‘Special Relationship’: The Lazarus of International Relations,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 17, no. 1 (2006): 175.
14 The traditional interpretation of these years is found in Nixon in the World ; Dobson, Anglo American Relations in the Twentieth Century of Friendship, Conflict, and the Rise and Decline of Superpowers , 140– 143. Dobson’s term for the Anglo American relationship in the Heath years is “barren”. For a view that stresses Nixon’s choices above Heath’s European orientation, see Alex Spelling, “Edward Heath and Anglo–American Relations 1970–1974: A Reappraisal,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 20, no. 4 (2009): 638–58. Spelling cites Kissinger as the major force behind this interpretation, but also notes that Heath’s government was the only major US ally to support the 1972 LINEBACKER II bombing campaign.
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of 1974 restored Labour under Harold Wilson to power. 15 The Atlantic orientation of
Wilson and especially his Foreign Secretary James Callaghan meant that the United
States assumed a greater importance in the foreign policy of Britain than it had during the preceding decade. In general Britain was looking at the United States to see what changes the tumultuous events around the Vietnam War would bring to how the United
States dealt with the rest of the world, and critics of Britain both internally and from the
United States wondered about the future of Britain specifically and social democracy in general.
Why were the concerns about British decline and American weakness both intensified and internationalized in the 1970s? What shape did this criticism of Britain and the United States take? What criticisms did Britain have of the United States? Who were the defenders of Britain, both at home and abroad? How did this dynamic play out against the backdrop of an increasingly powerful Third World and an externally confident and militarily powerful Soviet Union? The diversity of opinions about Britain, the
United States, and the threat of decline often meant that the diagnosis was more revealing about the perspective of the author than of a logical way forward for either country.
With these caveats in mind, an analysis of this dialogue will clarify the outlines of the
Anglo American relationship in the 1970s and its relation to the wider world.
The Question of “British Decline”
What was wrong with Britain and the various solutions proposed to solve its problems were a microcosm of general problems that afflicted the First World in the
15 Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun , 8–13.
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1970s. The central idea that the critics and observers of Britain grappled with was that of
“decline”. Britain’s slide from an island of social stability, political continuity, and democratic socialism into un governability, violence, and poverty was perhaps a portent for the United States. Had the creation of their welfare state doomed the British? The future of each country had a direct impact on the future of the other. More broadly, what did these trends portend for the future of the western alliance?
Britons had been worried about national decline long before the 1970s. The creation of a united and industrially powerful Germany in 1871 prompted Benjamin
Disraeli to remark that “the balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.” 16 This shift in the global balance of power predicated by a rising Germany prompted a late
Victorian call for a “Greater Britain” to maintain British power in a world of rising competitors that included not just Germany but also the United States. 17 The pre war years were later described as being the “Death of Liberal England”, a view that owed as much to the politics of the mid 1930s as it did the conduct of the Asquith government. 18
Imperial Germany’s rise forced the British to abandon “Splendid Isolation” in favor of diplomatic understandings with Japan, France, and Czarist Russia. 19
These understandings, along with Britain’s commitment to Belgium’s independence, would pull Britain into World War I. The war killed a vast number of
16 Benjamin Disraeli, HC Deb, Ser. III, vol. cciv, February 9, 1871, 81 82.
17 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860 1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=457751.
18 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England. (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961).
19 Zara Steiner, Britain and the origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977).
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Britain’s young men, drained the Treasury, and weakened the Empire. 20 It also brought forth on the world stage two men with powerful anti imperial voices. Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin’s ideas were quite different, but both of their programs seemed to auger the end of European supremacy in the world’s affairs. 21 The interwar years had their share of domestic strife and a shared belief among intellectuals about decline based on overpopulation of the wrong sort of people, the death of capitalism, and the destructive potential of future war. 22
The Second World War, so long thought of as Britain’s “finest hour”, also became the turning point in British history in the movement toward a particular form of collectivism. Generally, studies of the period point to the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the spirit of wartime collectivism as guideposts along the way to the “New Jerusalem” of the post 1945 Labour Government that featured a National Health Service and a cradle to grave welfare state. 23
In the post war years, Britain was one of the most stable societies in Europe and one whose political consensus and impartial but skilled bureaucracy had made it an oasis
20 For a general survey of World War I, Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking, 2004).
21 For one of the clearest analyses that cites the United States entry onto the world stage as the moment of “Europe’s” eclipse, see A. J. P Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). For Wilson at Versailles, see Knock, To End All Wars . For the pairing of Lenin and Wilson as inaugurating a new age, see Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking; Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918 1919 , 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967).
22 R. J Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain between the Wars (New York, N.Y.: Viking, 2009).
23 The foundational document of the post war welfare state was the 1942 Beveridge Report. The classic work on the transformations of British society that lead to the election of 1945 is Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London: Cape, 1975). The Attlee Government’s record is surveyed in Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945 1951 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993); Kenneth O Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945 51 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
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of politeness and continuity. The crisis of Suez provoked only a constitutional change of
Prime Ministers, while the Algerian War ended the French Forth Republic. After a difficult period in the post war years, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could assert that
"most of our people have never had it so good". 24 However, Britain had been overtaken in power and influence in the world by both the United States and the Soviet Union.
When Labour came into office in 1964, Harold Wilson’s promise to use the “White Heat” of technology to power the British economy foundered on inflation and a balance of payments weakness. 25
By 1975, with its colonies mostly gone and neither party able to control the nation’s destiny, Britain seemed to be on the road to become what Orwell had predicted it would be with India gone, a “cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.” 26 Perhaps part of the reason for the focus on British decline is that the British for a time in their history did seem to control the balance of power in Europe and in some ways the wider world. Not only had
Britain risen so high, it had fallen so far.
24 For the context of Macmillan’s remark, see “BBC Home On This Day 20 July” http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20/newsid_3728000/3728225.stm. Accessed 17 March 2013.
25 Clarke, Hope and Glory , 1996, 298–318.
26 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958). Orwell in his own way was anti imperialist, and illustrates his position that empire meant prosperity at least for Britons earlier in the same passage when he wrote “the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.” This statement is combines Hobson’s critique of the capitalist preference for overseas investment supporting imperialism with a stinging critique of imperialism in its own right. For J.A. Hobson’s Boer War era analysis of this problem, see John Atkinson Hobson, Imperialism : A Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938).
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Britain’s decline was a complex phenomena involving such economic questions as the relative efficiency of British industry dating back to the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution all the way into the post Second World War era, the strength of sterling as a currency versus the dollar, and whether or not the British Empire had an overall positive or negative effect on the British economy. Finding a satisfactory set of reasons for British decline was a difficult task. As one Nobel Prize winning economist wrote in 1970, ““Every discussion among economists of the relatively slow growth of the
British economy compared with the Continental economies ends up in a blaze of amateur sociology.” 27
In Britain, the idea of decline intertwines scholarship with advocacy and politics.
John Maynard Keynes is associated with the death of laissez faire and the ideas of central planning and demand management as much as for his service to the British government over two world wars. The Austrian School approach of F.A. Hayek and the monetarist theories of Milton Freidman are the rubrics by which many judge conduct of the Thatcher government. 28
27 Robert Solow, “Science in Ideology in Economics,” Public Interest , no. 21 (Fall 1970): 102–103.
28 The most recent study is Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). For a detailed study of the influence of Freidman’s economic thought in Britain in the years prior to 1979, see Edward Nelson, “Milton Friedman and U.K. Economic Policy: 1938 1979,” Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review 91, no. 5 (2009): 465– 506. Nelson argues that the politics around the British economy were shaped by a fundamentally non monetarist Keynesism and that the struggle over inflation, rather than employment, was the major driver of British politics from 1964 1979. The life, thought, and career of Maynard Keynes is detailed in P. F Clarke, Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). For an overview of the political and economic legacies of Keynes and Hayek, as well as Harold Laski and how these three men defined the boundaries of Anglo American discussions of political economy, see Hoover, Economics as Ideology .
37
Declinists often look for a moment in time when decline began. Martin Wiener’s
English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850 1980 asserts that a 19 th century aristocratic preference for wealth from land rather than industry influenced the middle classes to give up business as soon as they could and this preference remained part of British society. Alternately, Cornelli Barnett in a series of books blamed Victorian morality for destroying the hard headed profit seeking motives of the British people in the
18 th century and replacing it with a concern for fair play and good. This lack of ruthlessness made Britain concerned with alliances rather than victory and exposed it to the vagaries of the power of the United States and Soviet Union. Although it won the
Second World War, Britain’s allies took from it the Empire. Military victory also hid the inefficiencies of British industry and allowed the war’s difficulties to transform into a pleasant nostalgia. 29
Structural decline is linked to the model of imperial overstretch most famously formulated by Paul Kennedy. Under this model, the inherently escalating military commitments of empire ultimately lead to domestic economic decline. Kennedy applied this description of decline to Britain in The Decline and Fall of Naval Mastery and then more generally to the empires of the west in the post 1500 era in The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers .30 Domestically, other historians posit British post war decline was a result
29 Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power. (New York: Morrow, 1972); Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion & Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London: Macmillan, 1986); Corelli Barnett, The Lost Victory : British Dreams, British Realities, 1945 1950. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
30 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, NY: Random House, 1987); Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery . Kennedy wrote his work on this British navy at the sharpest slope of British decline in the 1970s, and his more general work when it appeared the cost of the United States’ military buildup under Reagan would allow Japan to assume the role of the world’s leading economic superpower.
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of domestic inefficiencies brought about by the pursuit of full employment and the power of trade unions to retard the “creative destruction” that is essential for a market or even mixed economy to work. 31 Another structural theory of British decline was that of
“crowding out”, where the rising public expenditures of the 1960s and 1970s crippled
Britain’s private sector. 32 P. J Cain and A. G Hopkins's argue in British Imperialism that
‘gentlemanly capitalism” was at the financial heart of the British Empire, and that much of Britain’s industrial and imperial weakness in the early part of the 20 th century was hidden thanks to the financial power of the City. 33 However, critics of the idea of decline cite Britain’s consensus politics and its robust Civil Service that managed decolonization with a skill that avoided the disruptions that plagued the French Fourth Republic as proof
Britain in these years was not as far gone as it seemed. 34
A British History of the United States’ “Malaise”
For all of these different assessments of decline, Britain still had to attempt to function in the world as a member of NATO, a new entrant to the EEC, and a member of the Commonwealth. These roles put them into contact with other major western powers
31 Paul Warwick, “Did Britain Change? An Inquiry into the Causes of National Decline,” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 1 (January 1985): 99–133. Warwick refers to the fiscal concerns that went along with this post war imperial commitment as “sterling first.” The maintenance of the pound and the maintenance of influence abroad went together, and when one went the other shortly followed.
32 An excellent summary of this theory is found in Kevin Hickson, “Economic Thought,” in New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments 1974 1979 , ed. Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson (New York: Routledge, 2004), 39. This thinking, which came to the forefront of theories of decline in the 1970s, was an influence on the course, both ideological and fiscal, of the Thatcher government.
33 Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850 1980 . P. J Cain and A. G Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914 1990 (London; New York: Longman, 1993).
34 This is the theme of several of the essays in William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization: Collected Essays (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006).
39
also undergoing to the “shock” of the 1970s with the end of the effectiveness of demand management and the sharp rise in oil prices.
With Britain’s nuclear deterrent, fiscal stability, and diplomatic initiatives dependant on American understanding and support, Wilson and Callaghan needed reliable information and reporting on the goings on not just in Washington DC but in the
United States generally. Although Cabinet ministers and other Labour politicians were frequent visitors to the United States, the most reliable and regular conduit of information about the United States back to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was the British embassy in Washington DC. The embassy’s yearly reports furnished an outsider’s view of the United States that was vital in determining how British civil servants and politicians should shape their policies. The narrative of these reports is in one of the
United States struggling to manage in the chaotic era between Vietnam and the Iran hostage crisis that included the decline of New York City, the bicentennial, the election of 1977, and the confusion surrounding the Carter administration’s internal battles. These reports for the second half of the 1970s, even for the bicentennial year of 1976, generally reflect a pessimistic view of the political and economic performance of the United States.
Across the Atlantic, the challenge of determining what the British government knows (and how its civil service and politicians think) is an enduring challenge to understanding British history. Unlike the American government, where a multitude of opinions flourish in multiple branches and bodies in and out of government, the British government’s foreign policy making apparatus is traditionally embodied in the Foreign
Secretary working in concert with the Prime Minister. A Civil Service bureaucracy
40
provides expertise that supplies both continuity and wisdom to these elected officials. 35
One term for this collective wisdom embodied in the British government is the “Official
Mind.”
The concept of the British ‘Official Mind” comes from Ronald Robinson and
John Gallagher with Alice Denny’s study of the British Empire in Africa and the
Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent. The Official Mind, in
Robinson and Gallagher’s study, was the mindset that imperial officials took with them from London in the late 19 th century that gave them a common frame of reference that allowed them to seek security for Britain’s imperial holdings in South Africa and Egypt without extensive consultations back to London. 36 In that era, the Official Mind prized economy, continuity, and security. 37 That which was the province of empire was by the
1970s the province of bureaucracy. As the British government was by tradition and structure more reliant than the American government on the civil service to provide guidance to politicians (who would come and go while the civil servants stayed on), reading their responses alongside the reports of the diplomats in the field makes for a clearer picture of what the “British government” (or more precisely the sections of the
Foreign Office that dealt with the issues relating to the internal politics of the United
States and communicated to their elected masters) thought. 38 Of Britain’s three
35 Zara Zara Steiner, “Decision Making in American and British Foreign Policy: An Open and Shut Case,” Review of International Studies 13, no. 1 (January 1987): 2–6.
36 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: the Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (New York: St. Martins Press, 1961).
37 William Roger Louis, “Robinson and Gallagher and Their Critics,” in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 909–910.
38 The conflict between the Civil Service and politicians was most memorably recorded in Richard Crossman’s diaries. Richard Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Selections, 1964–70. (London: 41
ambassadors to the United States in these years, two were professional diplomats and one was a journalist trying his hand at diplomacy.
The British ambassador to the United States in 1975 was Peter Ramsbotham.
Ramsbotham had joined the Foreign Service after his wartime experience as a counter intelligence officer in Germany, and had started out working in the economic office coordinating “dollar sterling” issues with the United States relating to international oil companies. 39 Even in the early 1950s, Ramsbotham recalled Britain’s four overseas objectives were to maintain the cohesion of the British Commonwealth and Empire, [to] keep the sterling area together …, stay close partners with the United States, [and] maintain the balance of payments.” Ramsbotham had an understanding of the role and importance of the United Nations as well, having served there as a diplomat before and during the Suez crisis. Prior to his appointment as Ambassador to the United States,
Ramsbotham had served as Ambassador to Tehran and High Commissioner to Cyprus. 40
Ramsbotham’s Annual Report at the end of 1975 emphasized the weak performance of President Gerald Ford due to his conflicts with Congress and the public discontent that remained due to his pardon of Nixon. Kissinger received credit for continuing to pursue détente, but despite the success of the Helsinki Conference it appeared that improvements in East West relations had stalled. Any progress made in
Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 1979). One of the simplest arguments for the correctness of this assessment is the fact that a British general election triggers a near instantaneous chance in elected officials, while even non Presidential US election involves a lag time of nearly two months before the new Representatives are sworn in to office.
39 Peter Ramsbotham, British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, interview by Malcolm McBain, January 9, 2001, Churchill College, https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Ramsbotham.pdf. Accessed 11 Feb 2012.
40 Ibid. 42
Europe had been undone by the Soviet backed offensive in Angola. 41 At the United
Nations, Ramsbotham felt that Kissinger’s speech dealing with the Third World during the Seventh Special Session had actually resulted in an improved performance over 1974, but that
“[AMB Daniel P.] Moynihan’s confrontational style … has aroused predictable
resentment among many third world governments and has been largely counter
productive [but] is manifestly popular in the country.” 42
This desire to fight back against the demands and defamations of the Third World was a symptom of the United States’ defeat in Vietnam and would only serve to complicate relations in the UN. Ramsbotham also noted that the US had experienced its worst post war recession over the past year, but that the British economic recovery had done a great deal to restore the confidence in Britain within the United States which had been undermined by reporting in the American press on “our future credit worthiness and our prospects as a united and democratic kingdom .” 43 The report ended by stressing the importance of the Anglo American relationship.
This was not the only account the British received of the United States in decline as the Vietnam War ended. Harold Wilson visited Washington and New York at the end of January 1975. He spent time with President Ford, gave a press conference at the
41 Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions , 376. Gleijeses argues that "idealism and pragmatism”, rather than a grand Soviet plan, “were the engines behind Cuba's acti`vism in the Third World".
42 Peter Ramsbotham to James Callaghan , “United States: Annual Review for 1975 ”, Washington, 31 December 1975, 11, FCO 82 652. For more on Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan’s tenure at the United Nations in 1975 and his conflict with both America’s allies and rivals, see Chapter 3.
43 Peter Ramsbotham to James Callaghan , “United States: Annual Review for 1975 ”, 31 December 1975, 13, FCO 82 652.
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National Press Club, and visited New York. At the National Press Club, Wilson stressed his close relationship with Ford, stated that Britain’s new North Sea Oil would strengthen its Atlantic ties, and denied the claim that “the Arabs” had recently bid on the Tower of
London. 44 The next month, Wilson followed this visit to the United States with one to the Soviet Union where he met Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev who was recovering from surgery.45
In February 1975, Anthony Crosland, the Secretary of State for Energy, visited the United States. Crosland was an influential member of the Labour Party whose 1956
The Future of Socialism moved the Labour Party away from nationalization and toward a less bureaucratic and more humane version of socialism. 46 He visited San Francisco,
Washington, New York, and Boston. He approved of the public transportation in San
Francisco and the AMTRAK line between Washington and New York. 47 He spoke with
Senator Udall about the conflict on the American left between unemployment, infrastructure, energy, and environmentalism. 48 He spoke to Senator Stevenson (D, IL) about the concern in Britain over employment versus the concern in the United States with inflation and about how the major challenge to the United States in 1975 was a lack
44 Harold Wilson, “Transcript: National Press Club Q&A,” n.d., Box 1263, Bodleian Library.
45 Christopher S. Wren Special To The New York Times, “Brezhnev, Back in Public, Meets Wilson,” The New York Times , February 14, 1975, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10C17FF3559157493C6A81789D85F418785F9.
46 Crosland’s first biographer was Crosland, Tony Crosland . For his most famous work, see Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism. (London: J. Cape, 1956). Crosland was among those who came under criticism from critics on the American right, particularly for his acceptance of inflation, his war against grammar schools, and his attempt to do away with inheritance.
47 “Washington” and “A Few Personal Impressions: San Francisco”, Part 8 Folder 9, Crosland Papers.
48 Record of Discussion, Crosland and Senator Mo Udall (D. AZ), 5 Feb 1975. Part 8 Folder 9, Crosland Papers.
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of faith in its institutions and how “he [Stevenson] could not see the solutions to the country’s various problems forthcoming”. 49 Senator McGovern made it clear that
Congress would not approve any additional funding for continued US military efforts in
South Vietnam as well as again emphasizing the difference in concern over inflation versus unemployment. 50 In New York, Crosland noted the seeming waste of the recent efforts to renovate Roosevelt Island. The conditions in the South Bronx shocked him. “It was horrifying … frequent buildings gutted by fire and abandoned … I have seen nothing comparable in the UK.” 51 The Labour left stalwart Tony Benn, then Secretary of State for Energy, had much the same opinion a year later when he visited New York. He saw the city as depressing with rubbish in the streets.52
In Boston, Crosland had dinner with a group of friends at Daniel Bell’s house.
Bell and Crosland had maintained a trans Atlantic fraternal socialist dialogue, and the year prior Crosland had sent Bell a copy of his new book Socialism, Now . Bell wrote back to Crosland that he liked the book and Crosland was perhaps the “last sensible and moderate man left (and certainly on the ‘left’)”. 53 Among the guests were Anthony Lewis of the New York Times , British historian Samuel Beer, and Daniel P. Moynihan.
Moynihan’s record of the dinner indicates that it was common for Harvard to fete visiting
49 Record of Discussion, Crosland and Senator Adlai Stevenson (D. IL), 5 Feb 1975. Part 8 Folder 9, Crosland Papers.
50 Record of Discussion, Crosland and Senator George McGovern (D. ND), 5 Feb 1975. Part 8 Folder 9, Crosland Papers. . 51 “Roosevelt Island” and “New York”, Part 8 Folder 9, Crosland Papers.
52 Benn, Against the Tide . 16 Feb 1976.
53 Letter from Daniel Bell to Crosland, 1 May 1974, Part 12, Correspondence A B, Crosland Papers. The work in question is Anthony Crosland, Socialism Now and Other Essays (London: Cape, 1974).
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members of the British Cabinet, and Crosland was in Moynihan’s opinion “about the best the British arrangement produces any longer”. Moynihan contrasted Crosland to Wilson and Callaghan, men “[weak] of heart and mind”, who had kept Crosland away from the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The guests wanted to talk about the upcoming referendum on the Common Market, but Crosland was more worried at least in
Moynihan’s reckoning about the rising ethnic nationalism in Britain. 54 Moynihan’s grasp of foreign policy, rooted at least in part in his understanding of ethnicity, allowed him to further grasp the extent of Britain’s troubles. This was in the same year as Moynihan was formulating his critique of Britain’s influence on the post war world, and Crosland’s pessimism was more fuel for the fire. If Britain’s leading public intellectuals and politicians were concerned about the very existence of the United Kingdom, then
Britain’s future was truly in jeopardy. 55
Some of the critics of Britain looked abroad for solutions. Ted Heath had at least partially had this in mind when he hoped to adopt for Britain the labour management model of shared responsibility more common in Europe. 56 Books on the decline of Britain and how to reverse it were common at this time, including by politicians. One example of this genre was The Death of British Democracy . Stephen
Haseler, who was a member of the Labour Right (he referred to himself as a Gaitskellite who was attracted to Labour as the “warm, human, idealistic, and radical” party) and who would go on to help found the Social Democratic Party in 1981, surveyed Britain in the
54 Letter from Daniel Bell to Crosland, 5 Feb 1975, Part 8 Folder 9, Crosland Papers. Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 47–48.
55 For more on Moynihan and the problems of Britain, see Chapter 3.
56 Clarke, Hope and Glory , 1996, 334.
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mid 1970s and saw the alternate to the decline of Britain’s democratic spirit embodied in
Roosevelt’s New Deal. If Britain did not reform along the lines of Roosevelt’s efforts to save capitalism Britain was condemned to either a “totalitarian” or “authoritarian” future.
Which party was nominally in control would matter far less than the reality of what would be lost. 57 The part of the New Deal that Haseler found the most appealing was the alliance of the people and the intellectuals to combat the power of business. In Britain in the 1970s, any similar alliance had to rest on a willingness of the trade unions to live under Conservative governments and intellectuals to begin to support a more American approach to politics and economics. If these factors were in place, then a “Popular Social
Democracy” could emerge that is at once respectful of individuals and populist without being redistributionist. Haseler also shared the belief with Cornelli Barnett that the roots of Britain’s decline emerged from the Second World War. The cost of victory and the reforms of the post war era meant Britons had a sense of complacency about their achievements that left them unable to compete in the 1970s. 58
This preference for American style reform as the salvation of British politics was not universal. In one of the major pro British studies coming out of the United States
(specifically, from a conference at Cornell), Ira Katznelson argued that it was the infiltration of American style politics into British life that was the cause of some of the
British dysfunction. Katznelson saw in the growing militancy of the trade unions a weakness in class identity amidst a more fragmented working class. This fragmented
British working class increasingly possessed the same general lack of working class consciousness as did most workers in the United States. American style politics had
57 Haseler, The Death of British Democracy . 58 Ibid.
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frayed the links between the working class and the Labour Party. Katznelson foresaw that this weakness would mean electoral gains for parties on the political right and the return of a “more laissez faire capitalism.” 59
Haseler believed that a failure to reform would mean the transformation of Britain into an authoritarian state. With an American president forced from office and Harold
Wilson under suspicion by his own intelligence service, this fear of losing democracy did not seem so radical at the time. 60 To many Britons, the specter of dictatorship in the mid
1970s tended to evoke the spirit of Chile and the fall of the Allende government in 1973.
For many British leftists, Chile in the early 1970s was what Spain had been in the 1930s: the focus of the struggle of socialism and collectivism against fascism. Chile had transformed from a 19 th century oligarchy into a fairly stable modern state, but the
Allende government’s social democratic reforms turned the country into a proxy Cold
War battleground that ended with Allende’s suicide and the installation of an authoritarian right wing government. If force could reverse the gains of socialism overseas, then Labour might suffer the same fate if things got too bad. 61
Many public intellectuals of the era were skeptical about Britain’s future.
Intellectuals on both the left and right looked at Britain as a test bed of social democracy
59 Ira Katznelson, “The Americanization of British Politics,” in Is Britain Dying? , ed. Isaac Kramnick (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1979), 150.
60 For more on the suspicions of Wilson by one of his chief pursuers, see Wright, Spy Catcher .
61 The passion that the events of 1973 inspired was on display three months later in a debate over diplomatic recognition in the House of Commons. Chile, HC Deb, 28 November 1973, vol 865 cc462 53 . For the United States’ involvement in the events in Chile from 1970 1973, see Jussi M Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 100–105. For the Soviet involvement in Allende’s election, see Christopher M Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way : The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
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and a window into the future of the United States. 62 However, neoconservatives took the most interest in Britain as a negative model. The future neoconservatives had begun studying Britain from the beginning of their careers. Irving Kristol had lived in Britain twice and written about British culture and politics in Encounter and The New Leader .
In the 1950s, Kristol had a more optimistic view of Britain. He rejected Richard
Crossman’s socialist warning that individual liberty in Britain was under threat from the
“various malpractices in British Civil Service, or British trade unions, or British industry”. 63 A few years later, however, the beginnings of a sustained critique of the
“welfare state” began to show in Kristol’s thinking. In 1960 in Commentary , he referred to F.A. Hayek as the “last surviving Whig” while decrying Hayek’s blindness to the concrete “inequities (and iniquities) of the world”. However, Kristol ended his review of
Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty with the observation that “his book encourages us to take another look at our welfare state, which—lacking any general idea of “welfare”—is coming more and more to resemble a monstrous pork barrel.” 64 In an echo of Bell’s observations three years prior, Kristol’s Commentary review in 1963 of three books bemoaning the state of Britain and urging it to align more closely with Europe is notable for its praise of British institutions and expresses worry only that Britain will become boring. This Swedenization of Britain would result in a more just land, according to
62 Cornell University, Is Britain Dying? . R. Emmett Tyrrell and Samuel Brittan, The Future That Doesn’t Work: Social Democracy’s Failures in Britain (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977).
63 Irving Kristol, “The Heterodox Conformist: Review of Socialism and the New Despotism by R.H.S. Crossman,” Encounter , April 1956, 77–79.
64 Irving Kristol, “Review of ‘The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek,’” Commentary , April 1960. This comment was made at the end of the Eisenhower era and before the Great Society reforms of Johnson.
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Kristol, but also one that was of no inspiration or even interest to the rest of the world. 65
The first issue of Public Interest , a journal founded by Kristol and Daniel Bell in 1965 to examine the problems of the dominant liberalism of the era, featured an article that examined the problems with the British welfare state and how critics on the right and left were trying to improve it. 66 James Q. Wilson used Public Interest a decade later to demonstrate the increase in both relative and real crime rates in Britain, particularly in terms of crimes against property. 67
The ur text of the neoconservative critique and the most virulent denunciation of
Britain in these years from a neoconservative organ was “Anglocommunism” by Robert
Moss in the February 1977 issue of Commentary . Moss believed that Britain under
Callaghan met at least 6 of the 10 conditions for a communist state laid out by Marx and
Engels in the Communist Manifesto . Moss believed that the left of the British Labour
Party was growing closer to the Soviet Union, and the British trade union movement was increasingly leftist. Moss, an early defense advisor to Margaret Thatcher as well as a writer for The Economist , called Britain a Third World country whose next trip into a
State of Emergency under either a Conservative or National government would bring about an authoritarian government. 68
65 Irving Kristol, “A View from Miami,” Encounter , November 1963, 86–90. In this same article, Kristol expressed his disappointment that George Brown did not win the leadership contest for Labour after the death of Gaitskill.
66 Raison, “The British Debate the Welfare State.”
67 Wilson, “Crime and Punishment in England.”
68 Moss, “Anglocommunism.”
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Perhaps the best known of the criticisms of the British from the neoconservative camp in the 1970s was from a fellow traveler. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1975 missive
“The United States in Opposition” essentially blamed the British left for the difficulties the United States faced with the socialist Third World in 1975. That article, however, was less about Britain’s past and more about the future of the United States’ foreign policy. Moynihan saved his hottest fire for the British for his later memoir of his time at the United Nations. 69
For Kristol, equally at home in London and New York, the contemporary issues
New York faced were a parallel manifestation to those faced in Britain. New York’s fiscal and cultural troubles of the 1970s were not the product of public sector union dominance or an excessively large welfare state, but of an idea that “all social policies are justifiable only to the degree that they benefit the poor and help them become more equal.” He went on to state that this ideology and the policies that flowed from it were a
“disaster”. This growing hostility to a bureaucratic version of the welfare state was in line with the general thrust of Kristol’s analysis of the time, but it made clear he was more bullish on the United States with its more robust capitalist culture than on the consensus politics of Britain. 70 To aid in this fight, the United States had a new generation of thinkers that could defend an anti intellectual (in terms of praising efficiency before correctness) business culture from the assault of the intellectuals and politicians of the left. 71
69 Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition”; Moynihan, A Dangerous Place .
70 Irving Kristol, “New York Is a State of Mind,” Wall Street Journal , December 10, 1975.
71 Ibid. 51
In 1976 – the year Britain was forced to accept a bailout from the International
Monetary Fund Kristol framed British decline in terms of the global problems of socialism when he offered “Socialism: An Obituary for An Idea.” Kristol, steeped as few others were in the vagaries of socialist thought, noticed a paradox. While at least three quarters of the earth was governed by nations that in some way or another declared themselves to be socialist, orthodox socialists in mostly non socialist countries judged that the self declared socialist nations were not truly socialist. Kristol further noted that most of the thinking about socialism took place in non socialist countries. For him, however, “socialism is as socialism does.” Socialist thinkers could not ignore the negative consequences of their ideas, and Britain’s adoption of socialism had left it the
“sick man of Europe.” Kristol, however, was hopeful about Britain’s future due to its love of liberty and was sure that it would re embrace capitalism after the excesses of socialism. 72
For his part for 1976, Ramsbotham presented a picture of a United States to some extent restored by the celebration of the Bicentennial. He also presented a country that was no longer dealing with the major international issues of 1975, but instead was focusing on domestic issues in deciding between two Presidential candidates. Both of these candidates were acceptable, but the election of Jimmy Carter marked a change in foreign policy from the exhausted realism of Kissinger. Kissinger had “marked time” at best, and the achievement of forcing Ian Smith to eventually accept the principle of
72 Irving Kristol, “Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea,” in Neoconservatism: An Autobiography of an Idea (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
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majority rule in Southern Rhodesia had been the major achievement of the year. 73
Ramsbotham noted, however, that the weakness of Kissinger’s approach included the fact he had no other areas where the US could make foreign policy progress. Arms control and reduction negotiations had stalled, as had the shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East.
Kissinger focused on Africa because that is where the crises were, and he still saw affairs there within the lens of superpower confrontation. Additionally, he failed to understand the “extent to which his own credibility had suffered as a result of his association with
Mr. Nixon.” 74 In foreign affairs, Ford had banned the word détente during his ultimately failed re election campaign. He faced an international environment where the United
States was seen as a supporter of “repressive regimes and unwilling to recognize the legitimate aspirations of the developing” world. However, the United States did enjoy the advantage of having ideas to contribute. The leadership role that America desired for itself contrasted with the Soviets, who for all their aggression and renewed economic vigor, had run out of ideas.
Within the United States, the Bicentennial had helped to re establish a sense of confidence and pride in Americans in their country despite “wastefulness of resources and [being] destructive of the environment”. America also had to find ways to deal with its crises in “energy, agriculture, crime, the cities and welfare.” Ramsbotham was full of restrained praise for Ford and how he had steadied the ship of state, but also was
73 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , CHPT 32. Part of the pressure Kissinger applied to Ian Smith was that a Democratic administration would look far less favorably on helping Smith and his government in the face of a “guerilla” attack.
74 Peter Ramsbotham to Anthony Crosland, “United States: Annual Review for 1976”, 3 January 1977, 7, FCO 82 725. The passage quoted was underlined in the original document. Kissinger’s efforts to block Soviet expansion into southern Africa through supporting majority rule in Rhodesia is covered in Chapter 5. 53
“encouraged” by the appointments President –Elect Carter was making. Cyrus Vance at
State, Mike Blumenthal at the Treasury, and Harold Brown at Defense were all known quantities within the Democratic Party and the traditions of the American elite and their appointment by the relatively unknown Carter was reassuring to America’s allies. Carter came into office without the majority of the white vote, but he had won the majority of the “blacks, the labour unions and the ethnic minorities.” 75
In terms of the Anglo American relations, the visit of the Royal couple had been a success, as had the first landing of the Concorde, but the UK still needed to improve its economic performance to restore the confidence of the United States. Ramsbotham described the United States as still perceiving itself as the “linchpin” of the West and ready to resume its place as the “driving force” of the western alliance. 76 Despite the calming effect of the IMF loan, the subsequent relative stability of the pound, and the close relationship between Ford and Callaghan, Ramsbotham reported that Americans were still skeptical of Britain’s future. 1976 had been the bicentennial not just of the
Declaration of Independence, but of another critical document in the political and economic history of these two powers, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations . Smith’s anti mercantilist masterpiece had exalted capitalism and free trade, and its modern apostle Milton Friedman “command[ed] a wide audience.” Friedman and his followers saw “Britain’s decline” and its mixed economy “as a lesson for America.” Friedman was perhaps the most virulent critic of Britain, but Kristol focused more on culture than
Friedman’s economic critique. In this same year, Freidman argued in Encounter that
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
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““the odds are at least 50 50 that within the next five years British freedom and democracy, as we have seen it, will be destroyed .” He also stated that “Britain is on the verge of collapse” on Meet the Press .77 For Ramsbotham, however, Britain need to show the United States it was “not just a diminished power dealing with the loss of empire, but … an influential part of a wider community.” When Britain was seen to be
“putting our house in order”, the United States and the American people would “quickly and favorably” respond. 78
The same Establishment that was uneasy about Carter but pleased with his
Cabinet choices was equally concerned about the global upheavals of the era. Centered on the power corridor of Washington, New York, and Cambridge, members of the establishment were of both parties. 79 Membership in this elite club had once been the province of the white Protestant elite, but that model was cracking thanks to powerful newcomers like Kissinger and National Security Advisor designate Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The classic “Establishment” statement of the problems of the 1970s was the 1975
Trilateral Commission Report The Crisis of Democracy .80 Political scientist Samuel
Huntington of Harvard, French sociologist Michel Crozier, and Japanese social scientist
77 Ibid . For Friedman’s quotes, see “The Line We Dare Not Cross,” Encounter , November 1976, Vol. 47(5), 8−14. These are also cited in Nelson, “Milton Friedman and U.K. Economic Policy: 1938 1979,” 94.
78 Ibid . Jay had an important part in the shift in the Labour government to a more monetarist approach. He was an advisor to James Callaghan and wrote Callaghan’s noted speech to the Labour Conference in 1976 where he stated that governments could no longer “spend your way our of a recession.” Kathleen Burk, Goodbye, Great Britain: The 1976 IMF Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 56.
79 One work on the power of the establishment in the early years of the Cold War is Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made : Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
80 Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975). .
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Joji Watanuki prepared the report. David Rockefeller founded and Zbigniew Brzezinski organized the Trilateral Commission in 1973 to foster understanding between the major industrialized democratic powers in North America, Asia, and Europe. Founded in the era of the oil shock, the foreign policy elites of these three regions sought solutions through cooperation and discussion. 81
According to the Trilateral Commission Report, part of the problem was the bureaucracies that had proven unequal to the challenges of an increasingly democratic society marked by the breakdown of trust in traditional structures of authority: government, church, and unions. 82 Inflation was destructive to all parts of society because it punished work and savings. In Europe, the disorders threatened societies built around “freedom from” and in the United States they threatened a polity built around
“freedom to”. 83 “Overload” meant that despite the increase in state power since the 19 th century, entrenched bureaucracies full of educated decision makers could not deal with the increasing complexity of problems in a polity where every person expected their voice to count. Economic weakness also threatened the stability brought about by post
World War II social democracy. Rising standards of living and growth within Europe
81 Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Gill’s study is one of the few academic analyses of the Commission, and his materialist approach argues for the primacy of the need to preserve global capitalism in the face of the assault of the Third World as the ideological basis of the Commission.
82 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post Industrial Society; a Venture in Social Forecasting. (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
83 Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission , 46–48. This difference between positive and negative liberty is examined in Isiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
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had tamed the potentially radical working class, but inflation and stagnation threatened the stable lives and consumer comforts of the post war era. 84
For the United States, the report warned that the decline in its economic and military power made it vulnerable to a future defeat that might weaken its commitment to democracy. 85 Across western Europe and the emerging economies of eastern Asia, the shift from industry to service economies, the rise of nearly universal higher education and the subsequent increase in the power of intellectuals who were disdainful of the inefficiencies and contradictions of the voting public, and the fact the economy was leaving large segments of the working class behind all presented the kind of environment similar to the decline of democracy in the 1930s. 86
Lastly, the authors stressed that they were hopeful about the future of democracy.
It aimed not just to diagnose but to offer suggestions for a better future. Even this report, however, could not disguise the reality that Britain was having serious problems. The introduction offered an opinion by a “senior British official” that Britain was in danger of falling into a “dictatorship”. 87 Britain, according to the authors, had suffered the steepest fall and was the “least able to manage the challenges of modern times”. 88
84 Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission , 22–30.
85 Ibid., 5.
86 Ibid., 20–38.
87 Ibid., 2.
88 Ibid., 10.
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The air of uncertainty of the 1970s hung over the next year’s report from
Washington, this time by Peter Jay. Jay had replaced Ramsbotham, and as he was James
Callaghan’s son in law and not a diplomat there were charges of nepotism in his selection. Jay had previously served as a reporter with The Times covering economic issues. Jay is a man of complex ideological views. He helped write Callaghan’s speech in 1976 that seemed to mark the abandonment of Keynesian economics with the right of the Labour Party, but his later economic writing indicated that he still believed in the
Keynesian philosophy. However, Jay also believed that the promise of technological advances at the turn of the millennium might be able to overcome Keynes’ insights. 89 Jay had a tumultuous time in Washington, and he and his wife both engaged in messy public affairs that led to their later divorce. 90
The change in ambassadors and the difference in their backgrounds are clear from the change in tone of the report. Where Ramsbotham was restrained in his writing, Jay is caustic. Where Ramsbottom seems to genuinely understand and convey the realities and rhythm of small town America in his reporting on the celebrations of the Bicentennial,
Jay is condescending about the “18 th century constitution” that has finally begun to provide “social and ethnic minorities” their “political and civil rights.” These same minorities according to Jay, along with farmers struggling with dropping commodity
89 Hickson, “Economic Thought,” 68–69; Peter Jay, The Wealth of Man (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 292–295.
90 These scandals were depicted in Nora Ephron, Heartburn (New York: Pocket Books, 1983).
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prices, have 19 th century economic and social grievances but live in a land where politics is “innocent of 20 th century collectivist ideas” that might point the way to a better life. 91
Jay noted that America was at peace, output was rising, inflation was dropping, and unemployment was decreasing. Jay, however, believed the United States was still dealing with the aftermath of the years of disaster from 1963 (the Kennedy assassination) to 1975 (Vietnam and the energy crisis). From Jay’s point of view, the election of Carter had proved that the United States wanted a “fresh start”, but the nearly equally strong support for Ford proved that there was “widespread longing for the eternal verities of the
Republic, in which God and the American pocket book march naturally hand in hand if only meddling politicians and malign foreigners are kept under control.” 92
In foreign affairs, Carter had negotiated the end of US control over the Panama
Canal despite considerable domestic criticism. The American preference for “a bold crusade, a visible enemy and a fast horse” was running into a multi lateral world of the energy crisis (which he claimed showed the American desire to be bold and self sufficient did not extend to making sacrifices to achieve energy self sufficiency), Third
World demands, and disarmament.
Jay’s fundamental assessment of America in 1977 was that it had structural limitations that inhibited bold executive leadership. These limitations were rooted in the
18 th century pedigree of the Constitution and a nation’s 19 th century sense of expansion.
The limits of the federal government’s actions were enhanced by the ethnic diversity of
91 Peter Jay to David Owen, “United States: Annual Review for 1977”, 5 January 1978, 2, FCO 82 872.
92 Ibid.
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the US that has not been fused into a “homogenous citizen.” The existence of pressure groups along with the pure regional and economic diversity of the country did not allow for “Burkean deliberation.” 93 Carter lacked Franklin Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s ability to pass legislation through Congress because of the weakening of trust in institutions by a skeptical population, the growth of Congressional power thanks to
Watergate and Vietnam, and Carter’s outsider status. Jay contrasted this gridlock to the
British system where the ability to pass legislation is the center of any government’s claim to the right to govern. Jay later remembered that Carter “regarded politics as a low, disreputable activity with which he wished to have nothing whatever to do.” 94
Jay’s report for 1978 repeated many of the same themes, but emphasized Carter’s growing skill at governing a country that did not fully appreciate either him or the changing dynamics of the global political and economic scenes. 95 Jay’s report was not as concerned about the systemic issues that limited Carter’s effectiveness in governing that he had highlighted in 1977. Instead, he focused on Carter’s personal political skill and his statesmanship. The first he found wanting. The second he found adequate.
Carter, Jay noted, had not yet won the confidence of Congress or his fellow world leaders. The American people, in his judgment, had accepted Carter’s presidency and enjoyed the fact they didn’t have to think about him very much. Carter in this way shared the
93 Ibid.
94 Peter Jay, British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, interview by Malcolm McBain, February 24, 2006, Churchill College, https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/bdohp/..
95 Peter Jay to David Owen, Summary of “United States: Annual Review for 1978”, 9 January 1979, 1 2, FCO 82 975.
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“reflexes of the typical citizen, who wants his government to keep off his back, to be honest and efficient at home, to be moral and strong abroad, to stand up to the Russians, to avoid foreign adventures, to keep America prosperous and the dollar strong, to resist all special interests but his own and to keep a modest profile.” 96
This apathy toward politics and impulse toward isolationism among the American people was inadequate when it came to the growing sense of crisis around the world.
From the troubles of the Shah in the “Islamic Crescent” to the various regional crises the
United States faced, the Administration (in the persons of Carter and Brzezinski, Vance is oddly absent from this section of the report) might be ready but the American people would not be. The crises of the world or even of the American economy would force the
American tax payer to get involved. Carter did have a number of signature successes such as Camp David and the formal recognition of mainland China, but crises in the
“Islamic Crescent” increasingly overshadowed these events.
The most ironic part of Jay’s report comes when he criticizes Carter for his attempts to build an energy policy and fight inflation at the same time. In Jay’s words:
“the Government of the United States is, indeed, as far as ever and even further than most other Western governments from having found the key to high employment with stable prices and continues to veer between the converging horns of that dilemma.” 97
This analysis is striking because at the time Jay was writing it Britain was dealing with the Winter of Discontent with massive public and private sector strikes, inflation, and the
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
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unburied dead in Liverpool. 98 Carter’s victories had not done much to secure his electoral base, and Jay was not sure they would not abandon him if the going got rough.
His chances for reelection seemed to rest on his ability to get the economy going again. 99
Even if Jay was extremely forthright in his judgments about President Carter and the United States as his background as a journalist for the BBC might have trained him to be, the Civil Servants in the FCO were concerned about what might happen if his judgments were made public. The point of greatest concern to the FCO’s North
American Department was Jay’s rather brief comments about the ongoing negotiations over SALT II. The experts in the FCO believed that any British comment on the treaty might harm its chances of ratification in the United States Senate. The North American
Department was also worried that Jay’s harsh judgments about Carter’s leadership, coming so soon after the Guadalupe Summit, would only hurt Carter and might harm the
Prime Minister as well. For that reason, they recommended that the report remain secret. 100
After the electoral victories of the Conservatives in 1979, Jay’s replacement in
Washington was Nicholas Henderson. 101 Henderson was a career diplomat who had ended his career in Paris just before the General Election if 1979. His final dispatch to
98 This chaos in described in Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun .
99 Peter Jay to David Owen, Summary of “United States: Annual Review for 1978”, 9 January 1979, 10 11, FCO 82 975.
100 Melhuish (North American Department) to Middleton (Research Department), “Disclosure of Information”, London, 12 February 1979, FCO 82 975. This concern that any British comment or influence could harm the chances of treaty ratification refutes any Macmillan like possibilities of behind the scenes influence by British policy makers.
101 Nicholas Henderson, Mandarin : The Diaries of an Ambassador, 1969 1982 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 266–267.
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David Owen from Paris before he retired (Thatcher recalled him after Heath refused the post of ambassador in Washington) was leaked and reprinted in the Economist .102
Henderson’s article was the cri du couer of an anguished British diplomat who saw Britain slipping behind France and Germany. Where once Britain stood apart from the Continent and its slowly integrating economy by the choices strength allowed, now it lagged behind. Henderson’s analysis of the problems of the British economy focused on problems of both capital and labor. British elites were uneager to become managers and engineers, and British workers belonged to a bewildering number of trade unions that enjoyed virtual legal immunity and had extraordinary levels of shop floor control. These problems dated from an era long before the 1970s as Britain’s economy had been in relative decline as compared to Europe’s (including and especially Germany) from the
1860s. 103 Henderson’s article stressed that even the traditional underpinning of British society such politeness, muddling through, and a preference for leisure over work would not survive in this era of decline. That a civil servant would speak out in such a dramatic way was some of the best evidence that Britain truly was in a crisis. 104
Henderson’s first report as ambassador to Washington came at the end of 1979.
Writing near the beginning of the Iran Hostage crisis, Henderson noted that the situation in the United States had changed radically since the taking of hostages in Iran and the
102 Nicholas Henderson, “Britain’s Decline: Its Causes and Consequences,” Economist , June 2, 1979, http://www.economist.com/node/13315108?story_id=13315108&source=hptextfeature.
103 Paul M. Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865 1980
104 Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest : Diaries 1977 1980 (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 509. Benn wondered why more Foreign Office reports couldn’t be leaked, so the British people could see their representatives abroad were of the “aristocratic Tory” view.
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Soviet occupation of Kabul. The crisis dealt Senator Edward Kennedy’s intra party challenge a serious blow, and the United States had been forced to simultaneously expand its defense budget and capabilities while seeking to work more closely with its allies.
Henderson made the mistake of claiming that Carter spoke about “malaise” in his famous
Oval Office speech of that year (his speech did not contain that phrase, it was simply the concept that his speechwriter articulated to the press that was the unifying theme of the speech), and noted that the Constitution as much as Carter’s own style of leadership limited Carter’s ability to exercise the powers of Presidency. 105 In contrast to Jay, who questioned these limits, Henderson accepted them as a part of the American political system.
Henderson credited Carter with achievements in foreign policy in creating a
Rapid Deployment Force to enforce the Carter Doctrine in the Middle East, in getting
NATO to accept tactical nuclear forces (TNF) in Europe, and increasing defense spending. 106 However, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan damaged détente and the
105 Daniel Horowitz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s : The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech of July 15, 1979 : A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). Although Carter did not use “malaise”, his speech was one of the most memorable and polarizing events of the Cater administration. Carter’s two major political rivals, Senator Edward Kennedy and former Governor Ronald Reagan, gave speeches where they both sought to draw a contrast between themselves and their positive visions of the future and President Carter’s apparent attempt to blame the American people for America’s problems. The book that inspired Pat Caddelll, Carter’s pollster, to introduce these themes into Carter’s thinking during his two week sojourn to Camp David was Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978). For more on the British reaction, see Henderson, Mandarin , 315–317.
105 Nicholas Henderson to Lord Carrington, “United States: Annual Review for 1980”, 31 December 1980, FCO 82 1087, 3 4.
105 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Nicholas Henderson to Lord Carrington, “United States: Annual Review for 1979”, 31 December 1979, 4, FCO 82 1022. 64
chances for the passage of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in the Senate.
Congress served as a check on Carter’s energy plan and his attempts to use conservation and domestic supplies to reduce the United States’ dependence on OPEC. Henderson’s summary indicated that the crisis in Iran had made the United States more sensitive about a need to work with its allies, and that Britain’s assistance related to the hostage crisis in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly under Chapter VII complemented the American assistance in securing the Lancaster House agreement. 107 In
Henderson’s summary, “we end the year on the best of terms.” 108
Henderson filed two reports at the end of the Carter administration. The first was the mandated annual report on 1980 and the second was his analysis of the entirety of the
Carter administration. Henderson’s first report indicated that Carter’s bad luck and indecision in an election year doomed his chances for re election, but that the scale of the
Democrat’s defeat was a surprise to almost everyone. The public viewed Carter as weak, and even his demonstrations of resolve such as boycotting the Olympic Games and creating a Rapid Deployment Force to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East were seen as insufficient. 109 Despite these displays, Americans in Henderson’s judgment were worried about their safety and concerned that West Germany and France were not doing
107 “Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” “Charter of the United Nations.” http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml, Accessed 17 March 2013.
108 Nicholas Henderson to Lord Carrington, “United States: Annual Review for 1979”, 31 December 1979, 6, FCO 82 1022. Henderson’s diary indicates that Britain’s support for the US in the UN was a product of Carrington’s determination influencing Thatcher. According to Henderson, the FCO civil servants recommended proceeding cautiously, but Carrington’s push “swept away” any reservations Thatcher had from reading the briefs. Henderson, Mandarin , 315–317.
109 Nicholas Henderson to Lord Carrington, “United States: Annual Review for 1980”, 31 December 1980, 3 4, FCO 82 1087.
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enough to stand up to the Soviets. The chaos of the past year had brought arms control negotiations to a standstill, and that standstill was making “Europeans” nervous about the deployment of TNF. Henderson judged Anglo American relations to be strong thanks to an increase in tourism brought about by the “UK/US Air Services Agreement” and an increase in British exports to the United States.110 British foreign policy, in contrast to the other members of NATO, was “forthright and helpful”, and the Reagan administration was seen as likely to pursue a continued close relationship with Britain.111
In Henderson’s final report on the Carter administration, delivered on the day of
Reagan’s inauguration and the freeing of the American hostages, he sought to look beyond the immediate reality of Carter’s political failure (which he attributed to a failure to communicate) to what was praiseworthy about the preceding four years. Carter had sought economic improvement through deregulation, but was committed to improving the “quality of this world within which we live” by questioning the need for nuclear power and empowering the Environmental Protection Agency. 112
Carter’s sincere Christian morality underlay his commitment to human rights and his attempts to lessen the tensions between East and West. “This public piety”, according to Henderson, was a net gain for the United States in Africa and Latin America, and although “Andy Youngism was a nuisance to the UK”, it was an asset for dealing with
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
112 Nicholas Henderson to Lord Carrington, “President Carter”, 20 January 1981, 1 2, FCO 82 1088. The quoted section is a direct quote from Carter cited verbatim by Henderson.
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the Third World. 113 The work of Camp David and Carter’s measured and detailed response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were to his credit, but the twin facts of the persistence of the Iranian hostage crisis and Carter’s willingness to politicize it did great damage to his reputation. 114
Henderson wrote damningly about Carter’s failures as a politician. He had been elected because he was “not a racist, nor a war monger and not a crook.” He rejected the
Washington establishment, was unable to balance the advice of those closest to him, preferred the personal to the professional, and was incapable of being both “informal and dignified.” Henderson closed with the judgment that “history will be kinder to him than the present.” 115
Conclusion
The bottom line fear of decline for Americans writing about Britain in the zero sum Cold War world was not just that Britain’s fall into Pincohet ism, Eurocommunism, or simply irrelevance would cost the United States a critical ally. If a relatively small, traditionally well governed society could not survive inflation and unrest, there might not be hope for the United States. Today, the interplay of declinists of both varieties and anti declinists appears to be nearing a synthesis. Much of the debate over decline reached the peak of its vitriol in the 1970s and the 1980s and seemed to fade in the era of
Blair and “Cool Britannia”. The downturn in 2008 has provoked debates not over British
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid. This judgment remains controversial.
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decline specifically, but more over the legacy of neo liberalism generally and the relative merits of Keynes in an era of globalized capital. 116
There were still in this era signs of hope that in retrospect appear far more prominent than they did at the time. The basic architecture of the world built in 1945 by the victorious allies was unchanged, and one of those post war institutions would prove to be Britain’s savior in 1976. These factors, despite their clarity in hindsight, were of little comfort in the face of communist triumphs in Angola, Vietnam, and the wide spread adoption of socialist planning models in the Third World. 117
Britain looked at the United States and saw hope in the conduct of its elections and the willingness of the American people and their elected officials to select good people. Most in the United States and Britain looked at Britain and saw hope in its traditions and its past. Both of these streams of analysis were clear eyed to the weaknesses of the other country. The citizens of both countries knew that the truculence of the trade unions had brought down at least one government and thrown the country into darkness and chaos in the winter of 1978 79, and that a President resigned his office at the cost of the faith of the American people in their institutions.
Despite these problems, there was still a faith in solutions. The British diplomats saw hope for the United States in its traditions and elections, while its politicians on the left saw hope if the United States became a little more like Britain. For the political
116 One of the best works so far that explains the atomization of the period between the 1970s and current era is Daniel T Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).
117 The preference in the Third World for Soviet style models of development is explained in Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005, 90–97.
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scientists at the Trilateral Commission, the problems of the 1970s were solvable if countries returned to listening to the advice of the traditional elite. The declinists saw economic or psychological reforms as the key to recovery for Britain.
So why did these mutual understandings matter in the 1970s? They mattered because they point to the fact that each side had an incentive to work with the other in its difficult time. With the British at their weakest, they could choose to try to go it alone or they could look to the United States or Europe for help. For the United States, they needed allies more than ever. Even if there were troubles within each country, there was still an increasingly assertive Third World full of problems. Those on either side who tried to solve them alone were likely doomed to failure.
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Chapter 3: “If You Want an Audience, Start a Fight”1: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the United Nations, and the Limits of Public Diplomacy
At the low point of the United States’ fortunes at the United Nations in 1975 when Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s campaign against the General Assembly
Resolution branding Zionism a form of racism was on the verge of failure, Moynihan turned to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for advice. Kissinger had little to offer for what to do, but did tell Moynihan that the former Governor of Texas John Connolly had informed Kissinger that if Connolly were to offer a piece of advice to a young politician who wanted to succeed, that advice would be to be an anti Semite. 2 The Resolution passed, and Moynihan’s tactics in confronting it and other issues involving the Third
World increased the friction not just between the United States and the Resolution’s
Third World sponsors but also exposed a rift between the United States’ and Britain’s approaches to the United Nations.
This unexpected test of the Anglo American “Special Relationship” in the mid
1970s occurred when Moynihan developed a critique of how the United States approached the UN by appeasing the Third World on economic issues and not confronting them about basic human rights and political liberty. Moynihan developed this critique near the end of his time as the United States Ambassador to India. At the heart of this critique was a linkage between the problems the United States encountered in dealing with the Third Word in the United Nations in 1975 and the 1930s era doctrines
1 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 162.
2 Undated MEMCOM (likely Oct 1975), Zionism Folder, Box 344, DPM Papers. Moynihan, A Dangerous Place . In his memoirs of his time at the United Nations, Moynihan recounts the episode, but declines to name the politician Kissinger cited. 70
of the British Left that were passed on to the future elite of the Third World through schools such as the London School of Economics and teachers such as Harold Laski.
Moynihan published his critique in Commentary, one of the main voices of the emerging neoconservative movement . His missive, which appeared nearly simultaneously with the destruction of South Vietnam, led to his appointment by Gerald Ford and Henry
Kissinger to the UN where he did his best to both test the critique and place the cure he recommended of placing the United States into the “Opposition” into practice. 3 His time at the UN brought him into close contact not only with the representatives from the newly decolonized states that now had a numerical majority at the United Nations, but also the
British Ambassador Ivor Richard who took exception to Moynihan’s approach while in the main admiring his meaning. Moynihan lasted less than a year at the UN before returning to Harvard and then winning a seat in the Senate, but his impassioned speeches and performance served as a rallying point for the emerging neoconservative critique of both détente with the Soviet Union and the growing worry that the Third World version of socialism was trending toward both the tyrannical and the ascendant while the United
States lacked the strength to oppose them.
Two major arguments will dominate this chapter. The first is that Moynihan’s approach to the United Nations was the product of his exposure to British intellectuals and institutions throughout his career. This exposure was not unique to Moynihan, but instead his reaction paralleled a similar trend in thought of the leading members of the neoconservative intellectuals based on their exposure to Britain during the previous decades. This intersection between Moynihan and the neoconservative’s assessment of
3 Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition.” 71
the British left’s political ideas and the international political struggles of the United
States in the 1970s was the dominant reason for Moynihan’s short tenure at the United
Nations.
The second and more general argument is that the kind of public diplomacy
Moynihan advocated was more advantageous in advancing the interests of Third World countries individually and collectively in the United Nations than similar efforts by the
United States and United Kingdom. For as much as Moynihan and Richard sought public forums to advance their agendas, their sometimes complimentary efforts often came up short in winning votes or in strengthening the alliance between the United States and
Britain. Even working together, the rhetorical and intellectual power of these men could not overcome the Third World’s demands for increased aid or the campaign to delegitimize Israel. Only the Third World’s internal squabbling could accomplish that. 4
New York Intellectuals in Post-War Britain
Daniel Patrick (Pat to his friends) Moynihan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in
1927 but moved with his family to New York at the age of 6. He spent time as a longshoreman and a student at City College after graduating Benjamin Franklin High
School in East Harlem. Moynihan’s exposure to New York’s labor movement had more of an impact on him than his time at City College which did so much to shape the later
4 A recent excellent work that discusses this eventual weakening of the Third World in international institutions is Mazower, Governing the World . Mazower credits the rise of the international financial capital markets and the disciplines they imposed for much of the process.
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neoconservative movement. 5 When the United States entered the Second World War,
Moynihan served in the Naval Reserve from 1944 1947 on, among other ships, the USS
Quirinus (ARL 39) an Achelous class landing craft repair ship. It was this shared naval service which, among other things, so endeared President Kennedy to Moynihan.
Moynihan would later serve with many other young men of a similar background in
Kennedy’s “Junior Officers” administration from 1961 1963. 6
After the war, Moynihan completed a BA and MA at Tufts, and then moved to
Britain to attend the London School of Economics as a Fulbright Fellow. This was a relatively new program, proposed by Senator Fulbright in 1945 and signed into law by
President Truman in 1946. Moynihan chose to attend the London School of Economics
(LSE) in order to write his dissertation on the relationship between the International
Labor Organization and the foreign policy of the United States.
Moynihan attended LSE just after the departure of Harold Laski when Michael
Oakenshott took up the position as professor of political science. Laski (about whom more will be said later) had been an avowed “democratic socialist” and frequent critical friend of the United States. 7 Oakenshott was a traditionalist and conservative in his
5 For two examples, see Irving Howe, “New York in the Thirties,” in The New York Intellectuals Reader , ed. Neil Jumonville (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2007), 25–36; Kristol, “Memoirs of a Trotskyist.”
6 This conception of the Kennedy administration was based not just on the fact that many of its members fought as junior officers in the Second World War, but also in that they succeeded a former 5 star general. For Moynihan’s most poignant recollection of his time in the Kennedy White House, see “Transcript of Radio Interview”, WTOP, 5 December 1963, Daniel P Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary , 1st ed (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 69–70.
7 The best overview of Laski’s life, works, and friendships can be found in Kramnick, Harold Laski . Kramnick and Sherman make it clear that although Laski was prone to exaggeration about his level of friendship and influence with the elite of the United States, he was extraordinarily well connected and claimed men such as Franklin D Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis
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political philosophy. 8 Moynihan spent one year studying, reading, drinking, and arguing about ideas courtesy of the Fulbright, and then another two years working on a nearby
American airbase that financed his continued stay. During his time, he made friends with intellectuals, working class trade union members, and journalists. He adopted some
British mannerisms but never, at least by his own accounting, wore a monocle. 9 Some of
Oakenshott’s preference for tradition and suspicion of utopian political orders rubbed off on Moynihan because he “left Britain dismayed by socialism and devoted to socialists.” 10
Moynihan was not the only young New York intellectual of the time to spend time in England. Several of the major figures of what was to become the neoconservative movements spent time in Europe during these years. Perhaps the two most recognizable figures of the first generation of neoconservatives, Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol both spent time in post war England. Irving Kristol had been a
Trotskyist (anti Stalinist) at City College in the late 1930s and later fought in France and
Germany as an infantryman with the 12 th Armored Division. His Division would help destroy German resistance in the Vosges Mountains and would liberate several of
as friends. For specifics on how Laski’s particular brand of socialism excited the opposition of American conservatives and complicated the Anglo American relationship at the very beginning of the Cold War, see Ibid., 496–515. 8 Oakenshott along with Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago is thought of as one of the major European intellectual influences on the American neoconservative movement. For more on Oakeshott’s philosophy, and excellent primer is Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott : An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
9 There was a slight controversy about this time at the end of Moynihan career in the Senate. A piece by Jacob Weisberg in the New York Times accused Moynihan of being an eloquent but ultimately unaccomplished legislator. The article also accused Moynihan of wearing a monocle as a student. Moynihan wrote to Arthur Sulzberger protesting both arguments. Letters from DPM to Sulzberger, 3 and 15 November 2000, Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan , 645–646.
10 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 5.
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Dachau’s satellite concentration camps. 11 After the fighting ended, Kristol spent a year in
Marseilles assigned to an Army headquarters unit where he avoided work so he could read French journals and philosophy. From 1946 to 1947 he lived in and around
Cambridge where he supported his wife Bea (Gertrude Himmelfarb) as she researched and wrote her doctoral dissertation on Lord Acton. 12 Kristol and Himmelfarb came to
Britain at the height of post war austerity and endured a winter so cold they “slept in
…overcoats.” Their room had a “toilet upstairs and a sink in the backyard.” Since rationing was still in place, they lived on “fish and chips or cheese sandwiches.” 13 Even for self admitted provincial young adults from the socially working class, politically socialist, and ethnically Jewish Brooklyn of the 1930s, these conditions were a bit shocking.
Kristol returned to Britain in early 1953 after a stint at Commentary which had plunged him into the vicious infighting on the left of the American political spectrum regarding Senator Joseph McCarthy and more broadly the place of Communism and its
“fellow travelers” in the “progressive” movement. Liberalism was at the time, according to Columbia University Professor of English and prominent liberal public intellectual
Lionel Trilling, “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition... there are
11 The story of the 12 th Armored Division’s service in the Second World War is recorded in Brendan Phibbs, The Other Side of Time: A Combat Surgeon in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987). Kristol in his autobiographical essays often skims over his time in the Army, except to say that it convinced him socialism would likely not work in the United States because his fellow Americans would “make a racket out of it.” Given the fact that many of Kristol’s Army companions were from Capone’ Cicero, this might not have been an inaccurate conclusion. See Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28–43.
12 This dissertation was the basis for Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton; a Study in Conscience and Politics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
13 Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 325–327.
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no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation.” 14 Looking at these battles, it is clear that Kristol and those he did battle with gave almost no thought to those on the political right who were opposed to communism. Those who opposed communism for the wrong reasons had no place in intellectual battle. This intellectual and social aversion was perhaps the dominant factor in keeping the future neoconservatives away from the
Republican Party and more traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley and his cohort at National Review for another generation. 15
Kristol in Commentary placed himself on the side of the anti communists and against both McCarthy, whom he regarded as a “vulgar demagogue”, and the fellow travelers of Communism. His robust anti communism and denunciation of those he regarded as dupes (including Henry Steele Commanger, Alan Barth, and Francis Biddle) while still demanding the right to dissent unleashed a “storm”. 16
Returning to Europe after life at Commentary and a short stint the American
Committee for Cultural Freedom, Kristol helped found the British magazine Encounter
14 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950), Preface.
15 Kristol was aware of both Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Buckley’s National Review , but he found their anti New Dealism ridiculous and so far from the mainstream of American thought as not worth considering. Despite the existence of conservative thought, Trilling’s students and followers believed and acted as if it were not of any real influence. One telling example of this phenomenon is Sidney Hook’s protests about a seemingly pro Stalinist conference at the Waldorf. In Hook’s own telling and in the histories of neoconservatism this has been seen as more of the major signposts along the road to a split in the Left. What went unremarked is the presence of the priests and nuns outside the hotel protesting communism who alternatively ignored and seen as the wrong group to be fighting Communism. For more on Kristol and his contemporaries’ dismissal of conservative thought, see Irving Kristol, “American Conservatism 1945 1995,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 171–79; Irving Kristol, “The Right Stuff,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 189.; Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 339. For Hook’s opinion on the nuns protesting at the Waldorf see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: New Press, 2000), 40.
16 Irving Kristol, “‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952: A Study in Confusion,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion (Basic Books, 2011), 48–60. For a discussion of the intellectual milleau that produced the article and its aftermath, see Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 330–331.
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along with Stephen Spender. Encounter was an antidote to the prevailing “anti American and often Communist fellow traveling magazines” and would be “English language cultural intellectual political” in format. 17
The magazine began publishing in 1953 and Kristol served as its editor until
1958. These five years in England were a key part of Kristol’s intellectual and political development. Encounter in those early years featured essays from Isaiah Berlin, Nancy
Mitford, and W.H. Auden. Kristol introduced Lionel Trilling to Labour politician Denis
Healey. Trilling was “transfixed” by Healey’s “knowledge of contemporary literature”, and Kristol had to explain later than not all British politicians were like Healey. 18
Kristol’s circle included Woodrow Wyatt and Anthony Crosland, as well as figures on the political right like Oakenshott and Malcom Muggeridge.
Here Kristol met intelligent, intellectually interesting conservatives and socialists like Crosland who “tried to redefine socialism in terms of simple social and economic equality”. 19 These were not simply the greedy businessmen of the Taft era Republican
Party, but people willing to argue ideas and culture with all the verve and skill of the young men back in Alcove 1 in the 1930s. Despite his Francophila (his son Bill went to a lycee rather than a public school in London despite his wife’s equally fervent
17 Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 332.
18 Ibid., 24. For more on Healey, see Denis Healey, The Time of My Life , 1st American ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). Healey’s autobiography reveals a wide range of interests and a profound commitment to Britain’s alliance with the United States. He knew many of the New York Intellectuals, and was closest to Daniel Bell. By the late 1980s, he expressed the belief that Kristol and Podhoretz had “an influence on the political thinking of modern America out of proportion to their numbers” but their rhetoric that is “shrill with hatred of the unbeliever.” Ibid., 201.
19 Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 334–335. Kristol is most likely referring to Crosland’s influential 1956 The Future of Socialism , which moved Labour away from nationalization and toward social democracy.
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Anglophila), he found their company refreshing. Kristol’s anti communism had not dimmed, and he regarded it as the wise course to choose in the Cold War while seeing
(perhaps in retrospect) the “liberal sentiments and thinking that went into the formation of the United Nations” as “deplorable.” 20
The most controversial aspect of Kristol’s time at Encounter was the revelation in the late 1960s in the New Left publication Ramparts that the CIA had provided the funding for the CCF through the Ford Foundation. Kristol has always denied that he was aware of the funding (as was Muggeridge) and claimed that his radical credentials would have disqualified his presence from CIA approval. 21
Kristol’s time in Britain at Encounter was simultaneous with Norman Podhoretz’s time at Cambridge. Podhoretz was the protégé at the time of Lionel Trilling at Columbia, and having made a name for himself in New York he sought to expand his skills as a literary critic by training in Britain. Like Moynihan, Podhoretz attended school on the
Fulbright scholarship. He also won the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship at Columbia. While at Cambridge, Podhoretz earned both his BA and MA. He also, for a self conscious
Jewish young man who when he thought of his own identity perceived it terms of the ethnic sub cultures of Brooklyn, began to feel “patriotic” at his exposure to British
20 Ibid., 336. In this same passage, Kristol notes that even thinkers on the right in Britain felt the need not be seen as too anti Communist in their thought.
21 For a far more critical take on the CCF, Encounter , and Western efforts at cultural propaganda at this time see Frances Stonor Saunders, The cultural cold war (New York: New Press, 2000) as well as the earlier Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy : The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York; London: Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1989). Kristol himself was familiar with Coleman’s work, but seemed to take it in good stead. Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” 334. Having fought these battles for most of his adult life, he seems bemused at best. Saunders’ work is enlivening even if she mostly fails in her task of portraying the CIA funding of these enterprises as malevolent.
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intellectual snobbery and distaste for American culture and the Cold War. While working on his dissertation Noel Annan, a contemporary and friend of the “Cambridge
Five”, supervised him. 22 Podhoretz returned to the United States, served in the Army, and joined Commentary where he offered cultural and social commentary that was in line with the magazine’s primarily leftist political perspective. 23
One other common thread connects Kristol, Podhoeretz, and Moynihan and their encounters with post war Britain: ethnicity. Moynihan was of Irish descent, and Kristol and Podhoretz were Jewish. Neither ethnic group had a traditionally positive relationship with Britain. Irish sentiment in the United States had worked to keep the United States out of the First World War on the side of the Entente, and Moynihan himself would examine the persistence of the influence of the Irish ethnicity on urban politics in Beyond the Melting Pot .24 Britain had accepted some Jewish refugees from the pogroms of late
Czarist Russia, but anti Semitism remained strong among large sections of the upper classes. 25 Both the Conservatives with their 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to the Mandate of Palestine and Labour with its attempt to balance Arab and
22 Thomas L Jeffers, Norman Podhoretz : A Biography (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16–35.
23 Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks .Norman Podhoretz, Ex friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York: Free Press, 1999).
24 Irish immigrant’s resistance to the US entry into the First World is discussed in William M. Leary, “Woodrow Wilson, Irish Americans, and the Election of 1916,” The Journal of American History 54, no. 1 (June 1, 1967): 57–72, doi:10.2307/1900319. Moynihan’s analyis of the Irish and the persistence of ethnicity in 1960s New York is in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1970).
25 The most recent survey of this topic is Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti Semitism in England (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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Jewish interests in post war Palestine were viewed by Zionists as anti Jewish. 26 These attitudes contrasted with the United States and its relatively more welcoming stance toward Irish and Jewish immigrants. While there is no discernable evidence of discrimination against either of these men in their time overseas, their backgrounds could not help but color their opinions.
Moynihan, Kristol, and Podhoretz were all marked by their time in the United
Kingdom. Here these New Yorkers saw what a democratic socialist government looked like in practice. To some extent they balanced their roles as outsiders in the United States and as Americans in the eyes of the rest of the world. They remained liberals while being exposed to politicians on the left and intellectuals on the right. These men, part of ethnic groups that had no great love for the British, saw in some ways the best and worst of
British life and made important friends and contacts. They saw the suffering of austerity and the reality of socialism, thrived in the combative realm of ideas, and returned to the liberal politics of the United States at the moment of its greatest ascendancy.
Formulating a Critique
Moynihan’s career after his time in Britain is well known. 27 He joined the campaign of Averrell Harriman in 1954 and served four years in the New York State
26 Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945 1951 . Louis is convincing in his argument that Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was not an anti Semite, but he was attempting a extraordinarily delicate feat of diplomatic balancing and grew frustrated in dealing with the increasing violent situation in the Palestinian Mandate.
27 The two major biographies of Moynihan are Douglas E Schoen, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography , 1st ed (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Abiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). Moynihan’s thought in various areas of the social sciences is surveyed in Robert A Katzmann, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (Washington, D.C.; Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Johns Hopkins University press, 1998). 80
government where he met his wife Elizabeth (Liz). He was a Kennedy delegate in 1960 and won a job at the Department of Labor thanks to his intellect. Moynihan, although not a “Whiz Kid” with a faith in numbers and modeling, was representative of the bright young men that Kennedy brought to Washington. He stayed after the “world broke his heart” in 1963, and it was in the Johnson administration he first came to widespread public attention. His work on the “Negro Family” shaped Johnson’s seminal civil rights address at Howard in 1965, but the rioting in Watts that summer and a backlash from civil rights leaders forced him out. 28
He returned to Washington in 1969 as a member of the Nixon administration, where he sought to make Nixon an “American Disraeli” by promoting a policy of a guaranteed income. The effort failed, and Moynihan again achieved near pariah status when a memo he wrote recommending a “benign neglect” of racial politics surfaced.
Concurrently, Nixon’s ordering of the bombing of North Vietnamese forces inside
Cambodia caused Moynihan to want to resign. He stayed on a few months longer at the
President’s urging, and Nixon thought about nominating him to the United Nations as
Ambassador. The nomination instead went to George H.W. Bush, in part because
Charles Yost, the current ambassador and a career diplomat who had spent years at the
United Nations objected to Moynihan’s nomination. 29 Moynihan also claimed that he felt
Kissinger would ignore him and that he lacked the financial resources for the job. 30
28 James T Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life : From LBJ to Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
29 Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN .
30 Stephen Hess and Brookings Institution, The Professor and the President: Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Nixon White House , 2015. 81
Moynihan returned to Harvard, but spent part of 1971 as a “public member” of the US delegation. Moynihan got his first taste of the so called “softer” side of diplomacy as he dealt with cultural, social, and economic issues and came away with a palpable distaste for the hypocrisy he found. 31
Nixon, however, called on Moynihan at the beginning of 1973 and asked him to become his ambassador to India. Two years prior, Moynihan, at the urging of Nathan
Glazer’s wife and because of his own preference for democracies, sided with India over
Pakistan in the 1971 War. Moynihan went to India as Ambassador with the mission to deal with India’s debt and to try to restore balance in the United States’ relationships in
South Asia. 32 Moynihan was able to alleviate the debt crisis, but his years in India sharpened his criticisms of how the Third World put socialism into practice. 33
In parallel with the troubled years of the United States after the assassination of
President Kennedy, the Third World had sprung into existence as a problem for the
United States and as an arena for superpower competition. While the rise of the Third
World did not seem to harm the Soviet Union, who viewed the creation of a mass of socialist states without objection, those states took on an increasingly hostile stance toward the First World. Part of the issue was economic as the states struggled to survive independently. While Third World power had been an increasing issue for the First
World since Bandung in 1955, in 1975 neither the United States nor Britain, both faced
31 William F Buckley, United Nations journal; a delegate’s odyssey (New York: Putnam, 1974) details a similar distaste for the United Nations from the same era.
32 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 14–15.
33 Guha, India After Gandhi .
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with economic weakness and internal divisions, possessed the political or economic power that they had enjoyed in 1945 or even 1960. 34
Taking advantage of this numerical advantage and the disorders of the West, the newly powerful Third World began to press for advantages in international institutions.
The delegates of newly independent countries routinely assailed the British (and as the fighting in Vietnam escalated, the United States) in the Committee of 24 at the United
Nations. The oil crisis of 1973 gave the Third World a major boost, and the Algerians led the call at the United Nations for a New International Economic Order in the Sixth
Special Session in 1974.35
Throughout this time in India, Moynihan’s particular relationship with the British and the products of their institutions continued. British institutions raised his hackles: while the Indian Parliament refused to buy American wheat in 1973 and India was falling into famine, Moynihan recorded that the “Etonians in the cabinet are traipsing around the
Soviet bloc clucking class solidarity”. 36 When Moynihan was warned by the Egyptian ambassador about a possible PLO plot against his life, he recorded in his journal that the man was “the very model of a British ambassador” who offered him either a martini or a bloody mary before passing along the warning courtesy of President Sadat. 37 In his
34 Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005.
35 For more on the oil crisis, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).Olson, US Foreign Policy and the New International Economic Order , 12. Chapter IV, Article 20 of the UN Charter allows for the General Assembly to meet in Special Session. The five special sessions prior to the Sixth (1974) and Seventh (1975) dealt with Palestine (1947), Palestine (1948), Tunisia (1961), Financial situation of the UN (1963), and Southwest Africa (1967). “Special Sessions” http://www.un.org/en/ga/sessions/special.shtml , Accessed 26 January 2013.
36 DPM Diary, 12 July 1973, Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan , 297–298.
37 DPM Diary, 15 December 1973. Ibid., 319–320.He does not make it sound like a good thing. 83
assessments of Prime Minister Gandhi, he is even more explicit in linking the problems of India to the ideas of British socialism in the 1930s.
“Mrs. Gandhi’s dinner for Brezhnev was in its own way a sincere, even touching event. They are both of them hard, survivalist politicians. Yet that is not all … they are socialists… She is, intellectually, more than any one thing a product of upper class England during the Popular Front days of the late 1930s. To read Orwell’s papers is to simply know what she thinks about such abstractions as the Soviet Union, capitalism, imperialism – peripherally on the very edge of things the United States … “. 38 In this same passage, Moynihan remarked that it was American aid that financed
Indian public sector socialism in the 1960s, but Gandhi only paid attention to the inefficient Soviet financed Bokharo steel plant.
Despite this disdain for the effects of British socialism, Moynihan retained his friendships and attachments to Britain. He was visiting British historian J.H. Plumb in his rectory in Suffolk when word came from the American embassy that India had detonated its first nuclear bomb. Moynihan reacted, both then and later, with a calm that mirrored that of the rest of the world’s reaction (Pakistan excepted) and spent the day riding in Plumb’s Jaguar around Westhorpe and drinking at least four pints of beer. 39 He kept up his domestic correspondence as well; informing Norman Podhoretz that the
Indian papers reported Mrs. Gandhi looked radiant when she threw 20,000 “trade union leaders in prison” as part of the crisis that led to the suspension of democracy known as
38 DPM Diary, 27 Nov 1973. Ibid., 317–318. 39 DPM Diary, 18 May 1974, Ibid., 334–335.
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the “Emergency”. He told Podhoretz at Commentary to burn the letter, something he himself decided not to do. 40
As his time in India ended, Moynihan wrote two pieces for Commentary that would push him from the embassy in New Delhi to the mission in New York. The first was “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” and the second was “The United States in
Opposition.” Both articles looked to the past to assess the future, and each saw the
United States as a leader in a changing world. Their prescriptions, although arrived at by different paths, were similar as well.
The first article was written and delivered in 1974. Originally a speech delivered to the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Moynihan sought to assess the legacy of Wilson 50 years after his death. 41 Wilson was perhaps the most influential
American of the 20 th century and his ideas and influence were still the dominant theme of foreign policy and as a useful guide for the future. While Wilson’s albeit limited vision of self determination came to fruition over a wider space than Wilson himself might have ever imagined, it had not brought with it a similar rise in the democratic nature of those states. 42 The continued lack of personal liberty in the world, married with the existence of the United States as an increasingly multi ethnic society with citizens who had roots all over the world meant that the future of the foreign policy of the United States had to
40 Letter from DPM to N. Podhoretz, 30 May 1974, Box 357, DPM Papers
41 Daniel Moynihan, “Was Wilson Right?,” Commentary , no. 57 (May 1974): 25–31. Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 22–24.
42 The global influence and limits of Wilson’s efforts at Versailles are described in Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment : Self Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
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be one of increasing liberty abroad everywhere to prevent conflict abroad because of the persistence of ethnic conflict.
There were several problems with this argument. Not all immigrants were likely to be as numerous or vocal in pushing for actions regarding the “Old Country” as the
Irish did. There were limits to the United States’ ability to intervene. Another underlying problem was Moynihan’s assumption about the undying or at least unchanging nature of ethnicity. Rather than looking back to the countries of origin, new immigrants or their children might instead choose to ignore them. 43
Regardless of the realties of American foreign policy in an increasingly multi ethnic era or the relative wisdom of Wilson’s vision for American foreign policy at the end of the era of Kissinger, Moynihan made it clear in his speech and subsequent article that although America remained a place where many wanted to come and many more wanted to lead, the “political elites of the world are poisonously anti American, and will remain so while the spell of Marxism and the British universities … persists.” 44 This view of Third World anti Americanism would collide with the Third World view of international institutions that would have under girded Wilson’s order in Moynihan’s next article. The world was on its second iteration of that institution, and it had seemingly become a home not of liberty but of the rawest kind of anti Americanism.
43 Moynihan’s thoughts on importance of ethnicity’s influence on international affairs only increased over time. See Nathan Glazer, “Daniel P. Moynihan on Ethnicity,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Moynihan focused more on overseas ethnic groups as his career progressed, but his fundamental reference point were the ethnic politics of New York.
44 Moynihan, “Was Wilson Right?,” 31.
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The second and more famous of the articles appeared at the tail end of
Moynihan’s tenure in India. Paul Seabury, a prize winning historian and social scientist at the University of California, Berkeley wrote to Norman Podhoretz in late 1974 and encouraged him to get Moynihan to write an article on the “so called Afro Arab Asian
Communist bloc” and how it was using various international crises to target the west through the United Nations. 45 The article was “The United States in Opposition.”46
In his article, Moynihan began by decrying the “tyranny of the majority” that had emerged during the 1974 General Assembly. 47 John Scali, Ford’s then ambassador to the
UN, had warned of that very thing a few months prior. He noted that the world was an interdependent place, and there was an emerging international society but Americans of all political stripes were unaware of its true form. For Moynihan, there had been a
“British revolution” when Britain’s colonies internationalized the British General
Election of 1945.
The Empire, so reviled by the Labour left, had been repressive but had also become a mechanism for the transmittal of ideas. These ideas were not the Anglo Saxon unity or “imperial preference” that various theorists and practitioners of empire had proposed, but instead the ideas were redistributive in nature. What Hobson had said of
45 Paul Seabury to Norman Podhoretz, 24 November 1974, Box 357, DPM Papers
46 Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition.”
47 Quoted in Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 24.
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the domestic British economy during the Boer War about the concentration of capital and underinvestment was now writ large in the world in the aftermath of decolonization. 48
If there was a unifying figure in Moynihan’s assessment of a British revolution, it was Harold Laski. Laski was a prominent British socialist thinker and political actor from the First World War until the early Cold War. He was also a close observer of the
United States, and spent a significant amount of time there writing and meeting the famous. While he had a strong tendency to exaggerate, Laski was on intimate terms with
Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and even Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Laski was a critic of American conservatism and even despaired that the New
Deal saved capitalism rather than paved the way for a socialist future via “revolution by consent.” Laski was active in Labour politics, and was one of the major figures in the election of 1945. 49
Laski was one of the reasons that the LSE had a leftist, international orientation in the 1930s despite the presence of Hayek and other economic laissez faire advocates. 50
Laski was indeed popular with many students from the Empire. There were many theories of the sources of Laski’s popularity with foreign students, especially Indians.
One notion, held by Isaiah Berlin, was that his popularity was a product of the Indians’
48 Peter Clarke, Liberals and social democrats (Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press, 1978) is an excellent book on Hobson's thought.
49 It is ironic that Laski’s role here was frought with controversy. He was the man who seemed to figure in Churchill’s mind when he claimed that a Labour victory would bring in a Gestapo. After Labour won, he was part of a failed coup against Attlee. Attlee survived, and he would later rebuke Laski in extremely strong terms when Laski’s overseas speechmaking caused Attlee trouble in the Commons. For more on Laski as a representative of one of the major strands of western political and economic thought, see Hoover, Economics as Ideology .
50 Kramnick, Harold Laski , 320.
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inability to see through Laski because they were not English. Others thought it was his ability to remember their names. Laski’s biographers, however, state the most likely source of his popularity was his students’ appreciation of his socialist doctrines. It wasn’t just students from the Empire who admired and learned from Laski. Among his students in the 1930s that were inspired by him was Joe Kennedy, much to the consternation of his father. 51
Laski had always attracted a fair amount of negative attention from the political right in the United States. Laski’s part in the Boston Police strike and his conflict with
Calvin Coolidge in 1919 made him unpopular among conservatives in the United States.
Worry about Laski’s influence was one of the factors that seemed to have driven James
Forrestal to madness and suicide. Ayn Rand made him the model for the villain
Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead . In the years since his death, however, Laski had seemingly faded from memory. 52
What was the linkage between a nearly forgotten socialist thinker of the 1930s and 1940s and the world situation in 1975? In Moynihan’s mind, the link came through the ideas that Laski preached that had been absorbed by the young colonial elites at the
LSE. This was no illusion, for one man who had taken Laski’s socialist doctrines to heart was Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru and P.N. Haksar (and the Congress Party in general) had
51 Ibid., 333.
52 Ibid., 573, 585. 89
ignored Gandhi’s economic ideas of village level self reliance and instead sought to build a newly independent India along socialist economic lines. 53
Moynihan admitted that the British Revolution was not as well known as the
American or the French (liberal) and the Russian or the Chinese (communist)
Revolutions. He also noted that there was little for the United States to fear from Soviet communism in terms of its intellectual or moral appeal, but it had the same problem with global socialism in 1975 that it had from Lenin and his apostles in 1917. In the place of the traditional communist threat, Moynihan instead proposed a Hegelian synthesis of
1917 and 1776: Minimal State and Total State would form the Welfare State with hostility to capitalism and multiparty democracy in the former British colonies that now compromised the majority of the United Nations.
In some ways, this analysis is even more pessimistic than those that would propose that communism was essentially a unitary bloc. If Moynihan’s analysis proved correct, then the United States was in a far worse place. Instead of a monolithic threat, it faced not just a resurgent Soviet Union but a hostile Third World that would abet the
Soviet Union’s aggression while weakening the West with its own independent but ideologically socialist demands.
Since 1964, the nations of the Third World that inspire the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development believed that the fundamental world problem was
53 Judith M Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Brown points out that at the moment of his death, almost all of Gandhi’s visions for what a post colonial India would look like had been thwarted. For more on Haksar’s views and how they were influenced by the LSE, see Guha, India After Gandhi , 434–435.
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one of unequal distribution of goods and capital. 54 Profit and the “invisible hand” of
Adam Smith was no longer the dominant mode of economic practice. Instead, a future built by planning would inaugurate the socialist world. The disdain was personal (at least in the case of India and Nehru, who brought a personal dislike of the United States begun at Harrow to his socialist planning) and institutional. It was the civil service and the LSE that had been the instruments of this indoctrination. The creed that the Third World elites had absorbed was moral in its British way in that it preferred “reparations” to “revenge”.
This means that the profits of the world, like the profits of the British capitalists in the era of the two world wars, needed to be redistributed. A.J.P Taylor argued in 1953 that
Laski’s “influence operated in the junior ranks of the Labour movement and in India,
Burma, and West Africa.” 55
If the American and the Russian revolutions were no longer lodestars for future nations, what was left for the US was the management of a world where the Non Aligned
Movement and the G 77 were ascendant at the United Nations. Why had the United
States failed so far to win the argument for the future? One reason was an intellectual failure to understand the forces that confronted them. By letting the Communists and then the Third World define the terms of the debate (“stability” or “social justice”) the
United States was playing a losing game from the start. Any degradation of the United
States would make the Third World look better given the poor state of their economies.
Excessive deference by the State Department to the wishes of the Third World in the
54 Thomas Meaney, “Empire States: On Pankaj Mishra,” The Nation , June 3, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/174366/empire states pankaj mishra.
55 A. J. P Taylor, “Review: Kingsley Martin’s Harold Laski,” New Statesman and Nation , January 17, 1953.
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rhetoric of conferences, where every document has to begin with the appropriate denunciations of the evils of the world, had emboldened the G77 to demand more and more. This worry about “world government” was one of the major points that Irving
Kristol later identified as a central part of the “Neoconservative Persuasion.” 56
The call for a New International Economic Order by, among others, President
Ceausescu of Romania, manifested itself in Third World assaults on US policies on commodity prices, energy prices, and family planning. By feeding its cattle grain that could be given to the Third World, the United States earned the name “cannibal” from
Professor René Dumont of France. Dumont coined this phrase not a piece of throwaway rhetoric, but as the title of an article in a UN journal. 57 The US faced a rhetorical assault at every turn and in every speech. What then was to be done?
The first step Moynihan proposed was to welcome these calls for a new order as an antidote to the spread of the Soviet Union’s influence. The second was to be reassured that the countries that had been doing the best economically were those straying from the socialist path. However, the only realistic path for the United States was to meet a British revolution with a British method. The United States would meet rhetorical assaults with demands to know why formerly revolutionaries such as Ahmed
Ben Bella who helped free Algeria from its European oppressors sat in jail. They must point to objective economic data on what creates growth and what does not. They must not be afraid to encounter dislike in international forums. Tell the truth, no matter who it
56 Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 192.
57 René Dumont, "Population and Cannibals", Development Forum, 1974, vol. 2, nr. 7, p. 1.
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offends. Vote and be heard. It would be hard, but it would be far better than the appeasement of the past decade. 58
Moynihan recalls in his memoirs that Kissinger approved of the article and recommended it to the members of the State Department at the highest levels. McGeorge
Bundy disliked the article’s idea that liberty would achieve equality rather than the reverse (Moynihan credited this dislike to Bundy’s practiced rapid dismissal of any argument and his lack of people skills), but Bundy’s brother William from his position as editor of Foreign Affairs sent Moynihan a laudatory editorial from the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin .59 Samuel Beer of Harvard wrote to agree with Moynihan’s analysis and noted a 1942 piece from Labour Party’s Committee on Post War Policy (most likely written by Laski) called “The Old World and the New Society” that blamed appeasement on “unregulated operation of our economic system” where the “failure at home” to understand the causes of poverty caused a lack of faith in democracy which led to weakness abroad. 60
Despite Bundy’s at least minimal appreciation for the article, Foreign Affairs that year published an article by Tom Farer entitled “A Basis for Accommodation” that
Moynihan took as the representative view within the United States foreign policy establishment that opposed his approach. 61 Farer treated the need for greater aid to the
58 Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” 43–44.
59 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 49–51. Editorial, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin , “Headed for UN Combat? Mr. Moynihan might help” 24 April 1975 Attached to Letter from William Bundy to DPM, 7 May 1975, Box 335, DPM Papers
60 Letter from Samuel Beer to DPM, 25 March 1975, Box 325, DPM Papers.
61 Tom J. Farer, “The United States and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs 54, no. 1 (1975). 93
Third World as unavoidable based on the power of the idea of self determination and the continued need of the West to access their raw materials. He also criticized Moynihan and others for opposing the increased aid due to their belief that decolonization was somehow a result of the West and not the efforts of the Third World itself. 62 Moynihan thought this pure defeatism. He was more troubled by the criticisms of W. Scott
Thompson from the Fletcher School who stated that Fabianism and American indifference were realities, and that no amount of American aid or leadership could make a difference in preventing the authoritarian governance and socialist economic stagnation in the Third World. If Thompson’s raw pessimism was correct, then the despair of the
1970s was non recoverable. Moynihan would proceed to the UN despite these doubts. 63
Moynihan’s article did not pass without criticism from his intellectual allies.
Kristol remarked in a letter that Moynihan’s analysis seemed certainly to apply to India and increasingly to Britain itself, but that Burma as well as France and Portugal’s former colonies and Latin America did not follow this model. Kristol’s own analysis was that the governance of the “so called Third World is a compound of British socialism, continental Marxian socialism, neo fascism, and extreme nationalism.” To Kristol mind,
“if it weren’t so open to misinterpretation, I think the term ‘national socialism’ would be a fair description.” 64 Michael Novak’s brother James responded to Moynihan with an essay of his own which echoed many of Moynihan’s points, but argued that Fabianism
62 A draft copy of the article was sent to DPM from William Rogers, Assistant Sec. for Inter American Affairs, Letter from Rogers to DPM, 10 July 1975, Box 342, DPM Papers.
63 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 56–57.
64 Letter from Irving Kristol to DPM, 2 June 1975, Box 337, DPM Papers.
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was only the public face of Third World intellectuals and their real concern was with power. 65
Moynihan was not the only figure within the emerging neoconservative movement to be critical of Britain and the legacies of the intellectual heritage of the
Labour Party. There were other rumblings of dissent within the British left as well as from the Social Democrats, USA. This group, a product of the split that occurred in the
Socialist Party earlier that decade, led to one faction headed by Michael Harrington that was farther left, and the more rightist Social Democrats. Michael Kerper, a member of the Young People’s Socialist League and an American graduate student in Germany in
1975 attended the Labour Party Conference in 1975. Disturbed by the presence of the representatives of labour groups from “totalitarian” countries, Kerper penned a letter to
Ian Mikardo, a Labour MP from the Bevanite wing of the party that he also sent to Carl
Gersham, Executive Director of the Social Democrats. In the letter, Kerper wondered why these “single party” Socialists were invited to a socialist party conference at all.
Since the Labour Party, and socialist parties in general, were to be the “tabernacle of [the] most precious political ideals”, it sullied them to mix with groups who were not true socialists. 66 Gersham passed the letter on to Moynihan and praised him for his willingness to combat the Soviets in the realm of ideas. 67
Kerper and Gersham’s judgement about British Labour were echoed in
Moynihan’s own assessments. Both the Social Democrats and Labour were members of
65 Letter from N. Podhoretz To James Novak (brother of Michael Novak), 30 Sept 75, Box 337, DPM Papers.
66 Letter from Michael Kerper to Ian Mikardo, MP, 8 Oct 1975, DPM Papers, Box 335.
67 Letter from Carl Gersham to DPM, 20 October 1975, DPM Papers, Box 335.
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the Socialist Internationale, but while the Social Democrats threw parties in New York
Richard and the members of the British mission did not attend. Moynihan, in his accounting of his time at the UN, noted Wilson and Callaghan received Boris
Ponomorov, a veteran of the purges of the 1930s and the “head of the International
Department of the Communist Party of the USSR” just a month prior. 68
Moynihan certainly was ecumenical in his friendships, and he was equally comfortable in his correspondence to conservative figures such as William F. Buckley as to Social Democrats like Gersham. In his own mind and in the struggle at the UN,
Moynihan took comfort in the intellectual support of these differently minded people. In his judgment, “these were the people …whose good opinion ... really mattered.” 69
American critics were not the only ones to respond to Moynihan’s critique. In her letter to Moynihan as he was leaving India, Prime Minister Gandhi told him that she did not know “to what extent he [Nehru] was influenced by the British approach and that
Nehru “had the greatest admiration for the vision that guided America’s founding fathers.” 70
As he left India, T.N. Kaul, India’s Ambassador to the United States wrote to
Moynihan that although he was not allowed to bring home duty free whiskey the experience of living in the Waldorf would make up for it. He also pledged to continue dialogue with Moynihan to see if something was to be gained by listening to the Third
68 Daniel Moynihan, A dangerous place , 1st ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1978), 229.
69 Ibid., 228.
70 Letter from Indira Gandhi to DPM, 23 January 1975, Box 373, DPM Papers.
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World or whether they were just unreasonable. It seemed a just warning for what was to come. 71
From Dehli to New York
Perhaps the most important reader of Moynihan’s essay was Henry Kissinger.
Gerald Ford had assumed the Presidency the year prior, and Kissinger still exercised a great deal of control over the conduct and substance of the United States’ foreign policy.
He read Moynihan’s article and offered his highest praise to Moynihan: that he wished he had written it himself. Given the article’s confrontational approach, this seems unlikely but it did give Kissinger an opening. Kissinger was facing a bevy of problems in the spring of 1975, and many of them dealt with the Third World. 72 He needed a representative at the UN who was not afraid to be confrontational if necessary but who could carry out the reconciliation that Kissinger and Ford were planning. The origins of the American reconciliation began the year prior with Ford’s pledges of increased food supplies. 73 Kissinger’s staff had been working on the reconciliation plan for the 1975
General Assembly session for several months, and Moynihan would be the one to negotiate it during the Seventh Special Session focusing on the calls for a New
International Economic Order. Given Moynihan’s leading role in resolving India’s debt in his last assignment, as well as his clear articulation of desiring dialogue with the Third
World on terms that both recognized their numbers and the importance of liberal values,
71 Letter from T.N. Kaul to DPM, 30 April 1975, Box 373, DPM Papers.
72 A short list should suffice: Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Angola, Congressional inquiries, and the breakdown of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. See Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect , 382–426.
73 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , Chapter 22.
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Moynihan could allow Kissinger to continue to focus on diplomacy with China and the
USSR while making sure the United States was well represented at these negotiations with the Third World.
This renewed emphasis on the UN marked a shift in American foreign policy.
Richard Nixon had pursued what one American diplomat has called a policy of benign neglect toward the United Nations. The same diplomat, Seymour Finger – who was also a major critic of Moynihan’s believed that Secretary of State William Rogers was so disinterested in the speeches at the General Assembly that he would turn the “earpiece upside down” and “think about other problems while appearing to listen.” 74 Kissinger had helped to engineer détente, open China, and extract the combat forces of the United
States from the Vietnam War, but his influence was waning and the power of the USSR was seemingly on the rise. Something had to be done, and attempting reconciliation with the Third World seemed the best way to do it.
Despite the early pleas of accord between the two men, Moynihan and Kissinger were almost certainly bound to clash. Moynihan was the epitome of the public diplomat, and Kissinger at this moment was seemingly at the height of his stature in terms of influence over US foreign policy. 75 Moynihan’s analysis in his memoir of Kissinger is remarkable in two respects. The first is that Moynihan saw Kissinger primarily as a
74 Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN , 332.
75 Jussi M Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 356. Hanhimäki points out that the spring of 1974 was only a year removed from Kissinger being declared “Super K” by Newsweek and still wielding power within the Ford Administration, but under increasing public pressure both from the political right (Senator Jackson (D, WA) and former Governor Reagan) and the political left (Senator Church and the Church Committee). Moynihan would attend a dinner for Solzhenitsyn that summer where the Russian would denounce Ford (and by extension Kissinger) for acquiescing to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe at Helsinki.
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defeatist who was simply playing for time against a hostile world. Kissinger was told the truth, in this analysis, but had given up (exactly when is not clear) and was fighting the rear guard fight as best he could. 76 The second was that Kissinger was an expert and near instinctive triangulator, who would adopt the position of whoever he was talking to and make it clear that he was the only thing that stood between the triumph of your enemies and you. In this way, civilian academics could be persuaded that a slow withdrawal from Vietnam was the only way to prevent a military coup at home, and the
Armed Forces might be persuaded that letting North Vietnam win was preferable to the extreme left seizing power in Washington. 77
Kissinger turned to the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff to provide the background and gather the information from the other parts of the government that would be necessary to implement any plan that emerged from the Special Session. Moynihan in his memoirs credits himself with helping to steer the US as it prepared, but there were many other hands as well. Tom Enders, a 6’8’’ legend within the State Department, took the lead in getting Kissinger’s speech written for the US in preparation for the Seventh
Special Session. Kissinger was a hard man to write for. Winston Lord, the head of the
Policy Planning Staff, recalled that Kissinger mostly worked on speeches on the weekends and would demand multiple drafts before he was satisfied. 78 Kissinger himself noted that his staff which was still working on the Middle East Sinai agreement was also
76 The first person to make this accusation was former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt who based it on conversation he had with Kissinger in 1970. Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 696–697.
77 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 51.
78 Winston Lord, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Charles Kennedy and Nancy Tucker, April 28, 1998, Library of Congress, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Lord,%20Winston.pdf.
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contributing to the report at the cost of a lack of sleep. 79 Winston Lord, then the head of the Policy Planning Staff at State, later recalled that Kissinger used speeches “to build domestic public opinion and Congressional support for policy, explaining and articulating that policy. Also, he wanted to explain our policies to other countries around the world.” 80 In this case, Kissinger used a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that summer to lay the groundwork for the US approach to these negotiations. Kissinger’s speech outlined the proposals for dealing with the Third World’s demands while justifying his own foreign policy achievements in triangular diplomacy and praising the United
Nations. 81
While Kissinger prepared the American public for the upcoming negotiations,
Moynihan arrived in New York and met his staff at the United States’ Mission. The first meeting did not go smoothly, and Moynihan thereafter sidelined his regular staff in favor of the like minded individuals he had brought to New York. 82 Moynihan had recruited these men and women to assist him because he suspected that the normal staff assigned to the US Mission would not be up to his exacting standards. His hand picked staff members included Suzanne Weaver from Yale to help with research, former Nixon administration lawyer Leonard Garment to sit on the Third Committee, and Clarence
Mitchell to serve as his deputy. Garment in the Third Committee would be the
79 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , 698.
80 Lord, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
81 Henry Kissinger, “The Global Challenge: International Cooperation” (Speech, Institute for World Affairs, Milwaukee, WI, July 14, 1975).
82 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 98.
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American who would do the initial fighting against the attempt to pass a General
Assembly Resolution that linked Zionism and racism.83
The regular staff at the Mission recognized that the United States was losing votes to a united Third World in those years, but felt that international cooperation in the small areas was worth the battering the US took over symbolic issues. Ambassador Tap
Bennett, a veteran of the Foreign Service who had been at the United Nations off and on since the San Francisco conference of 1945, felt that the attempt to track countries’ votes in order to see how supportive they were of the United States (and thus be worthy of aid and support themselves) was misplaced as even the US’s allies such as Canada occasionally voted the “wrong” way. 84
Preparing for the Special Session, Moynihan asked several members of his staff to consider the questions about aid, international poverty, and the State Department as an
“ideological organization” that had been raised by Irving Kristol in the Wall Street
Journal . Kristol argued that the Third World’s quest for a New International Economic
Order was at root a hostile response to “liberal capitalism” and not wealth per se, and that an approach emphasizing accommodations would hurt the United States’ standing in the world not just politically but also eventually “economically.” The reason behind State’s acquiescence, Krisol further argued, was that the State Department was a “non ideological” organization. What Kristol meant was not that State did not subscribe to a
83 Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm: My Journey from Brooklyn, Jazz, and Wall Street to Nixon’s White House, Watergate, and beyond , 1st ed (New York: Times Books, 1997).
84 William Tapley Bennett, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Horace G. Torbert, June 16, 1998, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Library of Congress, www.adst.org/.../Bennett,%20W.%20Tapley%20Jr.toc.pdf.
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set of ideas (namely, the utility of diplomacy and discussion), but that as an institution
State did not inherently favor democracies. 85 Moynihan in his memoirs dismissed the work of the staff, but an examination of the responses he received is a useful way of determining how the State Department actually saw the UN. Barbara White, who that summer had been at the UN Conference on Women in Mexico City, came under particular criticism from Moynihan for her commitment to working with all types of governments. 86 White’s paper makes it clear she valued discussion and a certain pragmatism over “ideology”, but conceded that the State Department did not pay enough attention to rhetoric and the staff in New York faced a United Nations where the system was held “hostage to the Arabs’ hostility to Israel.” 87 This division, between the traditional diplomat who despite being rebuffed in her pursuit of global solidarity based on gender would continue a commitment to diplomacy, and a public intellectual whose ideas compelled him to fight back against what he felt was slander, was almost unbridgeable.
Moynihan’s staff, despite their rebuff from the Ambassador, remained committed to successfully concluding the Special Session. As the staff prepared for the conference,
Charles Robinson reminded Moynihan in a memo that the world the U.S. faced is one of declining colonialism and regional blocs as well as increased frustration of the developing world and that confrontation will assure a loss for all. Robinson stressed the
85 Irving Kristol, The ‘New Cold War’, Wall Street Journal , 17 July 1975
86 White’s activities at the Conference are described in Jocelyn Olcott, “Globalizing Sisterhood: International Women’s Year and the Politics of Representation,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 281–93.
87 Memo from Barbara White to DPM, 22 July 1975, Box 341, DPM Papers.
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way ahead was consensus based on principles of sovereign equality and mutual respect. 88
Moynihan, for all his combative instincts, seemed to follow Robinson’s advice. The US also benefited from winning a small victory in the United Nations’ Decolonization
Committee when Kissinger, pressured by Moynihan, communicated that voting for a
Cuban sponsored resolution in Puerto Rican independence would be an unfriendly” act, and the vote went against the Cubans. 89
The United States was not alone in planning for this Special Session. Meeting just before the conference, the Non Aligned Nations met in Lima to plan their approach.
Previous conferences during 1974 and 1975 had proven to the United States that it would not be possible to split the OPEC countries from the other Less Developed Countries
(LDCs). The combination of oil wealth and resource concerns forced the West for the first time to truly deal with the Third World on its own terms. 90 Despite this show of strength, the Lima Conference adopted a massive final communiqué that detailed the
West’s failings. The text criticized the US’ presence in Puerto Rico, the government of
Israel, and demanded more power within the UN. Moynihan called the language
“totalitarian”. 91 However, the Algerian diplomat Fonmin Bouteflika, one of the most influential non aligned diplomats, struck a conciliatory tone when he stated the Non
Aligned Movmement wanted “a frank and constructive dialogue aimed at resolving the
88 Memo from Charles W. Robinson to DPM to 20 August ’75, Folder 7th Special Session 2, Box 341 DPM Papers.
89 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 110–112.
90 Olson, US Foreign Policy and the New International Economic Order , 20.
91 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 126.
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world’s pressing political and economic problems.” 92 The Commonwealth nations had met that summer as well, and had echoed the call for a New International Economic
Order in a report that stressed the desire for better terms of trade and increased power and control in international financial institutions. 93
. The US plan was to open with a speech delivered by Kissinger (in the end because of the Middle East shuttle diplomacy it was given by Moynihan) that outlined the
US policy goals. This early statement of principles was meant to give the US some advantage in the negotiations by not allowing the Third World to set the terms. The plan had five major points 1) economic security, 2) accelerated growth, 3) access to trade, 4) improved access to food, and 5) aid for the “poorest” countries. 94 The speech, delivered on September 1 at the beginning of the Special Session, was very long, even by the standards of the United Nations, and ran nearly two hours. It was, however, seemingly a success both in terms of content and in terms of setting a positive tone for the negotiations. A leftist Paris journal called it “a ‘new deal’ for the world.” 95 The US speech received favorable reviews, in contrast to the Chinese who preached “self help” and the Soviets who simply used the opportunity to criticize the United States. 96
92 AMEMBASSY LIMA TO SECSTATE WASHDC, “Non Aligned Conference: August 29 Roundup” 301050Z AUG 75, Gerald Ford Library.
93 Commonwealth Expert Group,“Toward a New International Economic Order”, Folder 2006 166 Towards a NIEO 16 Jul 30 Sep 75, Shridath Ramphal Papers, Commonwealth Secretariat.
94 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 129–130.
95 Ibid., 131. For more on the global impact of Roosevelt’s New Deal, see Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World . Borgwardt makes the argument that this was essentially what the United States did previously in setting up the United Nations, Bretton Woods, and the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II.
96 Memo from DPM to Members of US Delegation, 4 Sept 1975, Box 341, DPM Papers.
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Moynihan’s account of the negotiations stands as one of the primary records of the conference. 97 Moynihan criticized James Callaghan as part of the British delegation for his ineffectiveness, but saw the intervention of a US Congressional Delegation led by
Senator Javits (D, NY) as very useful in proving to the Third World diplomats that the
US was negotiating in good faith. The original proposal by the Third World was along the lines of what had been developed in Lima, but in response Moynihan put an
American draft on the table that was a rewrite of the Non Aligned Conference’s version with many of the substantive points the same but the language behind their meaning changed to emphasize international cooperation over conflict. Garment and Moynihan made the changes over the weekend, and by Tuesday the draft had been approved by the
State Department. The major sticking point was a .7% pledge of aid tied to GNP, and eventually it was achieved. By 7AM on Sunday 14 September, the Less Developed
Countries (LDCs) approved the draft. When word later that morning leaked that the
Algerians would oppose the draft and wreck the progress made so far, Moynihan used his appearance on Meet the Press to blame Bouteflika for wrecking the conference. The
LDCs censured Moynihan, but at the last minute on Tuesday morning the LDCs approved UN Resolution 3362 (S VII) .
The results of the Session were astounding. 98 The developed countries of the world established a development assistance goal of 0.7% of GNP and promised to work to improve market structures of raw material export to fight inflation through financing long term contracts and stabilized revenue processing of raw materials in developing
97 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 113–139. 98 State Dept Selected Documents No. 2 1 16 September 1975 “Results of the seventh special session of the U.N. general assembly” Box 341, DPM Papers.
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countries while letting lesser developed countries sell their own goods. The developed world agreed to work to prevent a “brain drain” and increase agricultural assistance, provide supplies to grow food, and distribute 10,000,000 tons of grain for the next year and a world food reserve of 500,000 tons. Developing countries were promised both participation and a voice in global financial institutions such as the IMF and the World
Bank.
Enders and Moynihan gave a press conference the next day. Enders told the press that Kissinger would work with Congress to make sure these measures were accepted and stated this session was more successful because it was a negotiation rather than simply a dictation by the majority, and represented not an American order but simply an international order. 99
The Soviets and the Chinese had little to no influence over the negotiations at the session. They used the conference mostly as an opportunity to volley back and forth at each other. The Soviets used the final plenary session of the Conference to complain about the false “North South” dichotomy of the agreement and to accuse the Chinese of acting as a “monarch superpower.” The Chinese, in response, claimed the Soviets (along with the US) had tried to “sabotage” the treaty. 100
Moynihan did try to play up the divisions between China and the USSR using their own rhetoric, but he had problems. The Chinese delegation was relatively new at the UN and was still finding its way. Moynihan had provided the Chinese Permanent
99 Transcript of Press conference with Tom Enders and DPM 16 September ’75, Box 341, DPM Papers.
100 From USMISSION USUN New York to SECSTATE WASHDC, “7 TH Special UNGA Session: Statements by Chinese and USSR” 16 Sep 75, Gerald Ford Library.
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Rep with ginseng from Delaware as a gesture of goodwill. 101 The Chinese would often abstain in the votes in the Security Council. There was little love lost between
Ambassador Malik of the USSR and the Chinese delegation. Both Richard and
Moynihan saw clearly that Malik was an “unreconstructed Bolshevik” with whom no genuine dialogue was possible. 102 Moynihan, noting that the phrase “capitulationism” had recently emerged as a favorite epithet of Mao’s toward his enemies, used the phrase to describe the Soviet Union in a Security Council debate over the ability of the PLO to speak in front of the Security Council. The vote went against the United States and the
PLO representative spoke. Afterward the Chinese delegate informed Moynihan he had misused the term. It seemed even a man as versed in intellectual debate and the intricacies of socialism as Moynihan was at a loss in the vicious game of interpreting the wisdom of Mao. 103
Elements on the political left on both sides of the Atlantic had been skeptical about the outcome of the negotiations, especially with Moynihan’s previous commentary.
An editorial in the Manchester Guardian on 20 September credited the United States’. actions with placing the USSR on the defensive within the UN. With the United States still closely tied to its Allies in Europe, China making advances in Southeast Asia, and the USSR still excluded from Middle East, the United States had started to recover its
101 2 Letters from DPM to Mr. Huang Hua,, Perm Rep of PRC, 19 Aug 75 and 2 Sept 75, Box 337, DPM Papers.
102 Soviet members of the UN staff were more loyal to their country than to the UN in contrast to civil servants such as Brian Urquhart of Britain. An exception was Arkady Shevchenko, the Under Secretary General of the United Nations who defected to the United States in 1978. See Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War , 1st ed (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow , 1st ed. (Knopf, 1985).
103 Daniel P Moynihan, United Nations Security Council 1870th Meeting (New York: UN Library, 1976), 12. Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 257.
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standing in the world. In The Nation , Anne Tuckerman noted that all sides in negotiations had acted pragmatically. The Resolution was both as a way forward and as a turning point. She had been worried that Moynihan’s rhetoric would derail the agreement but those fears were unfounded. 104 With the passage of this resolution, the General
Assembly could begin in a spirit of cooperation. It would not last.
Zionism and Conflict
For the comity and seeming success of the Seventh Special Session, the accord between the West and the rest did not last long. The reason for the conflict was long standing, but had acquired a new dimension in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of
1973. It was, simply put, the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state in control of a Palestinian population. From the time the UN took over the issue of the future of the
Palestinian Mandate from the British, the Arab world had refused to make peace with
Israel and used the issue of the Palestinians to rally their populations. 105 Condemning
Israel had become de rigueur at these gatherings, and now the Arab states, flush with oil money, were in position to continue a campaign that failed militarily with a diplomatic offensive. The Conference on the International Year of the Woman that had taken place in Mexico City that summer had witnessed the condemnation of Israel (along with South
Africa and Chile). 106 The Soviet Union also had no great love for Zionism, and was in the
104 Anne Tuckerman, “Editoral A Path Opens,” The Nation , October 4, 1975. Folder 7th Special Session 5 Public Reactions, Box 341, DPM Papers.
105 For one attempt to tell this story, see Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist Arab Conflict, 1881 1999 (New York: Knopf, 1999).
106 The previously mentioned UN Women’s Conference in Mexico City that summer condemned Zionism in its final communiqué. See Olcott, “Globalizing Sisterhood: International Women’s Year and the Politics of Representation.”.
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middle of a dispute with the United States over Jewish immigration. If they could link the idea of the unacceptability of racism that had done so much to isolate South Africa to the state of Israel, the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations (as had been done to South
Africa in 1974) and the transformation of Israel into a pariah state would be real possibilities. The American delegation chose to publicly fight back against this trend rather than simply voting or vetoing the resolutions as they had in the past. The powerfully symbolic nature of the Arab effort to use the institution that had a major role in the creation of Israel to condemn Israel and Moynihan’s determination to use his pulpit to fight it with explicitly pro liberty rhetoric was sure to cause a confrontation. The question was, would this public diplomacy be enough?
The calm after the Seventh Special Session was initially broken by a speech presented by President for Life Field Marshall Idi Amin of Uganda and read by Uganda’s
Permanent Representative Kinine. Amin through his proxy spoke before the General
Assembly on 2 October in both his role as Uganda’s President and the current head of the
Organization of African Unity (OAU).
Amin began his speech in Swahili, and then sat down bedecked in his gaudy braided uniform as his Permanent Representative spoke. As the head of the OAU, he called for an exclusively African solution to Angola (the Beylorussian Representative had the same day criticized the Chinese for “slandering” them for accusing the USSR of being involved in Angola) 107 but generally praised the general direction of the decline of colonialism in Africa. Amin had positive things to say about the United States’ proposals
107 US Mission USUN New York to SECSTATE, “GA Plenary – General Debate, Credentials, President Amin”, 020600Z OCT 75, Ford Library.
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during the Special Session, but said the United States needed to change its relations with
Panama to grant it greater independence. He also classified Japan, China, and both
Koreas as part of the Third World and called on them to be part of an organization that would work to build cooperation in Asia based on the model of the Helsinki Accords.
Switching to his role as Ugandan President, Amin’s address swung wildly in tone.
He offered up Uganda as a “breadbasket” that was attractive for foreign investment. He knew investors may be reluctant to invest in Uganda because of all the lies that been told by fascists, Zionists, and imperialists in the media. Amin urged the United States to free itself from Zionist influence and called for the “expulsion of Israel from the UN and the extinction of Israel as a state”. He called on “Black Americans” to unite and gain greater political power. After this, he reiterated his call for foreign investment in Uganda. 108
Amin’s remarks about Israel were echoed that same day in the General Assembly during the presentation of credentials and in the Third Committee. Numerous countries in both forums condemned Israel and called for its expulsion. The criticisms of Israel, which had receded during the previous month, had begun to rise.
The definitive origins of this increased anti Israel rhetoric were obscure at the time. Moynihan and his staff (especially Suzanne Weaver) debated the source of the rise, and were unable to determine if it was the Soviet Union or the newly powerful Arab oil states that were primarily responsible. Weaver in her research noted that Pravda and other Soviet journals had been condemning Zionism since 1971 by blaming the events of
108 US MISSION USUN NY TO SECSTATE, “30 TH UNGA: ADDRESS BY GENERAL AMIN” 020308Z OCT 75, Ford Library.
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Czechoslovakia in 1968 on the Zionists. 109 For all their bluster, the Soviets had very little direct leverage in the Third World outside of arms exports. In the post WWII era, the
Soviets had sent very little development aid overseas. The Soviets at this time contributed .15% of their GNP to development aid, but they did sell weapons and offer advisors without concern for a country’s human rights record. 110 It was more likely the
Soviets would simply acquiesce to the Third World’s demand to punish Israel publicly.
It cost them nothing and any criticisms of their language by the United States would endanger détente. At the center of the Arab world’s claim was the plight of the
Palestinians and Israel’s continued victories. As long as the Palestinians did not have a homeland, the fighting would continue.
Regardless of the reasons for the rise in anti Israel rhetoric, Moynihan felt compelled to respond. He did so a day later in San Francisco. Speaking before the
AFL/CIO Constitutional Convention in San Francisco, he spoke positively about the
American labor movement’s commitment to democracy, and the corresponding assault on democracy throughout the world including Prime Minister Gandhi’s assault on the trade union movement. He pointed out the paucity of democracies at the UN (around two dozen) and assailed Amin as a “racist murderer”. Echoing his earlier argument about the impact of President Wilson, Moynihan remarked the UN had done a great deal of good, but had not proven a useful instrument for the expansion of democracy. The median age of the countries of the UN was 11 years, and many of those countries sensed democracy
109 Bernard Gwertzman, “Soviet Accuses Zionism of Subverting Red Lands,” New York Times , February 19, 1971.
110 Rubinstein, Moscow’s Third World Strategy , 51–64. An example of Moscow’s non ideological alignment in weapons sales is their selling arms to Argentina during the late 1970s, during which time the Argentine government was extremely hostile to socialism. 111
weakening. For all the demands of the Third World the United States would participate not out of guilt but out of choice, and would demand that political rights stand with economic ones including the rights of independent trade unions. 111
Moynihan’s rhetorical counter offensive provoked an odd alignment of opinion between the political left and right on the pages of the New York Times . On 8 October, former Nixon speechwriter and conservative William Safire supported Moynihan for standing up in the UN to “double standards” 112 He opined that “diplomats are to be held responsible for what they say in public” and castigated Amin as an enemy of Israel. On the same page from the political left, Anthony Lewis remarked that Moynihan calling
Amin a “racist murderer” was “inspiring”. Lewis stressed the universality of human rights and the importance of the United States supporting them if though “we aren’t perfect”. 113 This convergence amused Moynihan, and he noted in a letter to Senator
Howard Baker soon after that although his actions had created a unity of opinion between
Anthony Lewis and William Safire, one or the other would eventually turn on him. 114
The Organization of African Unity (OAU) fought back with a volley of its own rhetoric. It released a press release that attacked Moynihan for his verbal assault on
Amin, claimed that the attack on him was an attack on African unity itself, and blamed the “influence of Zionism on the American mass media and especially the New York
111 Press Releases, “Address by AMB Moynihan to AFL CIO Convention, 3 Oct 1975”, Speeches Folder, Box 344, DPM Papers.
112 William Safire, “New Order of Rhetoric” 8 October 1975, New York Times.
113 Anthony Lewis, “For Which We Stand: IV” 8 October 1975, New York Times
114 Letter from DPM to Russell Baker, Box 325, DPM Papers.
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press” . The press release claimed the OAU was always ready to oppose violations of human rights, whether they occurred in Franco’s Spain, Israel, or South Africa. 115
This confrontation marked the beginning of the final stage of the campaign to secure the passage of a General Assembly Resolution that declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” After it became clear this campaign would consume the next few weeks Moynihan and his staff began to prepare for the coming Third
Committee and General Assembly votes. Their preparation took two tracks, the intellectual and the diplomatic. The first was a success. The second was not.
As the American representative on the Third Committee, Leonard Garment would lead the initial fight against the Resolution. Moynihan and Garment fought the upcoming resolution with wit, with erudition, and with flair. Moynihan, however, did not (or perhaps could not, given the resources and mentality of his enemies) lobby the votes necessary to defeat the proposition. As before, like in The Report on the Negro Family in
1965, “benign neglect”, or the attempt to work with Nixon to attain a Guaranteed Income, being consistent with his liberal principles was no guarantee of winning. 116
Their academic preparation focused, interestingly enough, not so much on the question of Zionism as that of racism. The US diplomatic efforts focused on Africa and those nations who they believed were paid to support this resolution. These intellectual and diplomatic efforts were meant to complement each other. If they showed that linking
115 “Press Release of OAU”, Folder PERM REP of US to UN 1, Box 337, DPM Papers.
116 This criticism of Moynihan would trail Moynihan for his career, including his conflicts with the Clinton administration over health care reform in the 1990s. It was these criticisms, rather than simple mistakes of fact, which drove Moynihan so hard to push back against the article in the New York Times at the end of his career.
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racism with Zionism would weaken the strength of the charge of racism, the African countries opposed to genuinely racist states such as South Africa and Rhodesia might break with the Arab states in their own interest. Despite their efforts, Moynihan and his staff could not gather enough votes. Mexico and Brazil also voted for the resolution, despite the almost complete lack of ethnic or financial reasons to do so. 117
In the midst of this turmoil, while Garment and Moynihan prepared for the worst along the East River, Lionel Trilling passed away. The juxtaposition of the perceived assault on the values of liberalism in a citadel of liberal hope and the death of the great champion of liberalism seemed to import a greater significance to both. Trilling was not a neoconservative, but his connection to the intellectuals who were supporting
Moynihan’s efforts and their belief in the power of opposition and criticism was strong.
His ascension to tenure in the English Department at Columbia was first for a Jew, and his place as a literary critic was at the forefront of American arts and letters in the middle part of the century. His expertise was in Britain, specifically in the life and writings of
Matthew Arnold. His most direct connection to the neoconservative moment and
Commentary was through his student and sometime protégé Norman Podhoretz. 118 His death seemed to capture the irony of the failure of the skilled intellectuals of the neoconservative movement to use their powerful arguments to sway politicians away from a fundamentally illiberal act.
117 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 173–199.
118 As Podhoretz began to move to the political right around 1965, he came into conflict with many of his friends. This move from the political left to rights is detailed in Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir , 1st ed, Harper Colophon Books (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) and Podhoretz, Ex Friends .
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Goronwy Rees witnessed the final vote at the United Nations General Assembly and then wrote in Encounter about the juxtaposition of Trilling’s death and the
Resolution. Rees was a Welshman with an Oxford education who had been a Soviet spy and contemporary of the Cambridge spy ring. He later turned to the right and wrote a monthly column in Encounter. 119 Rees witnessed a New York that was rapidly running out of money and “mingled horror and incredulity” at the coming resolution. What Rees saw was not a rational discussion, but rhetoric straight out of Der Stürmer . He praised
Leonard Garment for his strong words against the Resolution in the Third Committee, but noted that the need to appease the Saudis in this moment of Britain’s economic weakness might inhibit Britain’s ability to act similarly. 120
A similar response to the Resolution appeared in New Statesman . Paul Johnson wrote an essay entitled “The Resources of Civilisation”. Johnson, an erstwhile Marxist who was moving to the right politically, sought to understand the present disorder. For
Johnson, Gladstone’s campaign to oppose political violence in Ireland where the Grand
Old Man invoked “the Resources of Civilisation” during a speech in Leeds in 1881 was the model for modern day politicians who must stand up to the IRA or other overseas terrorist groups. He offered up the Zionism Resolution as an example of the West’s passivity in the growing face of the Soviet Union’s growing repression and the spread of explicitly anti Western leaders like Amin or Ghaddifi. These were countries of the
“fascist left”, and they now led the campaign against the “nearest approach to a free socialist state in the world.” Only leadership from Prime Minister Wilson on his own
119 Jenny Rees, Looking for Mr. Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees (Transaction Publishers, 1994).
120 Goronwy Rees, “Column ‘R,’” Encounter , November 1975, 29–31.
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accord or with encouragement of Margaret Thatcher could make Britain a part of the struggle to save the west. 121
The common link between these British perspectives is a sense of British weakness brought about by financial, political, or perhaps even a moral exhaustion.
Garment and Moynihan were worthy of praise for their courage and embodiment of the best sentiments of those liberals they admired, be they of the 19 th or 20 th century. Britain would vote against the resolution, but these men sensed there might be a difference between an America that was still capable of recovery and a Britain that might not be.
This split in confidence would echo in the next few months as an Anglo American misunderstanding erupted.
The resolution passed in the Third Committee on 17 October. Garment and
Chaim Herzog spoke eloquently against it. Garment called the vote a “massive attack on the moral realities of the world” and an “obscene act.” 122 Both he and Herzog claimed that this was not only an assault on Israel, but also an assault on the values of the United
Nations. The vote was ultimately 70 29 27 with 16 absent.
At a luncheon soon after the Third Committee vote, George Ball remarked that it was improbable that this vote would cause domestic political problems because recent campaign finance reforms had weakened Jewish political power. 123 Dispirited, Moynihan sought advice from Kissinger. It was at this moment when Kissinger told Moynihan that
121 Paul Johnson, "The Resources of Civilization," New Statesman (October 31, 1975), p.532
122 United States Mission to the United Nations Press Release, October 17, 1975, Statement by Leonard Garment, United States Representative, in Committee Three, on equating Zionism with racism and racial discrimination. Ford Library.
123 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 185.
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a former Texas governor had advised him about being “an anti semite” as a way to get ahead in politics. 124
It became clear that the General Assembly would follow the lead of the Third
Committee. Moynihan prepared Congress, but he knew that his preparation would have to be for the speech he would deliver in the aftermath of the vote. His attempts to show that Zionism was not racism (Zionism and Judaism are in essence beliefs that anyone can hold) or that the UN had no real definition of racism produced little in the way of votes.
When the Kuwaiti ambassador challenged him on this, he was briefly at a loss but soon realized the Ambassador did not distinguish between “racial discrimination” and
“racism”. 125 His public appearances, both in speeches and on television, had no effect in swaying the vote.
When the General Assembly voted on the resolution, the result was even more lopsided that the Third Committee vote. All that remained for the United States was condemnation. Moynihan’s speech (written with the help of Norman Podhoretz) does not rate even a mention in Kissinger’s 1079 page memoir of this time, but it is remarkable as a piece of rhetoric and his most memorable act of public diplomacy. Moynihan was honoring the parliamentary conventions of the United Nations when he started his speech with the phrase “The United States rises ...”, but could easily be read as one man’s attempt to use a global forum to prove that the United States could still exercise power, influence, and leadership in the international arena, even in a cause it was almost certain
124 Undated Memorandum, Zionism Folder, Box 344, DPM Papers.
125 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 193–194.
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to lose. 126 Since one of the missing pieces of the “Opposition” article in Commentary was a discussion of the broader Western alliance, Moynihan saw the United States (or himself, or the people that really mattered) as doing the right thing which was in fact the only thing they could do. Moynihan’s tactics had admirers including Daniel Boorstein at the Library of Congress. 127 Chaim Weizman, the Israeli Ambassador, also condemned the resolution and ripped it in half.
Moynihan and his allies were not just denouncing a particularly morally odious resolution. They were simply fighting on behalf of those that (in their minds) lacked the intellectual or moral courage to see they needed to fight for themselves. They were using rhetoric to rescue the United States (and more broadly, the “West”) from circumstance.
This stand cost nothing but popularity which was low anyway.
The aftermath of the Resolution, however, did spark another incident where
Moynihan tangled with British socialists. In a speech before the United Nations
Association of the United States, Ivor Richard seemed to attack Moynihan by implication if not by name. He stated that “Europe”, at least nine liberal states in Western Europe, had reacted less emotionally and ideologically to the events of the recent months of the
UN such as the Amin speech and the Zionism resolution. Like Moynihan’s own declarations about the role of the UN, he claimed “Britain sees the United Nations as a major instrument of its foreign policy. We regard it as a place in which and from which
126 Press Release, Statement of AMB Moynihan, 10 November 1975, Zionism Folder, Box 344, DPM Papers.
127 Daniel Boorstin to DPM, 17 Nov 1975, Box 325, DPM Papers.
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we can extend British influence and defend British interests.” It was not, however, a
“confrontational arena”.
The speech’s most famous line was Richard’s own assessment of the nature of the
UN and his ambassadorship. “Whatever else the place is it is not the OK Corral and I’m hardly Wyatt Earp.” Given the fact that the North South debate was just beginning to become more important, it was not wise to provoke the “bitterness” that Moynihan’s tactics had created. Many of the poorest countries are the most prideful, and confrontation about their very legitimacy itself would poison any of the progress made in the Seventh Special Session. Furthermore, to complain about the institution when you lose votes is to destroy faith in that institution itself. 128 This assault on the idea of the
United Nations itself was what seemed to worry Richard (and many of the people opposed to Moynihan’s tactics). As Richard later put it, the UN acted much like the
Church of England in that the “world would be a more wicked place if it did not exist.” 129
Moynihan was initially dismissive of the speech which he learned about from
Godfrey Hodgson of Sunday Times (who would eventually become Moynihan’s biographer in his twilight years in the Senate), but he became more concerned when he learned that it was not an off the cuff remark by Richard but instead represented official
British policy. Moynihan, writing later in his memoirs, reserves some of his choicest criticisms of the British for the days after this incident. Remarking on Richard’s enjoying his time serving at the UN, he wrote a few years later that “Fun was about all there was left for a Briton at this point: a certain jollity about being good losers.”
128 Richard Speech, Box 344, DPM Papers.
129 Interview with Lord Richard, June 2011.
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Moynihan then recounted Callaghan’s trip to Uganda to ask for the life of a British citizen and being subjected to all the humiliations that entailed. 130 Moynihan may have moved on later in life, but he was not given to charity at the time. At its most extreme, an unsigned note found in Moynihan’s papers dated 21 January 1976 stated “ivor Richard would have been happy in his nonideological way that the Jews had gone giggling to the gas chambers”. 131 Eamonn Kennedy, the Permanent Representative from Eire indulged in a bit of British bashing in a letter to Moynihan. He remarked “You sure corralled those redcoats okay. They never learn. “ 132 Moynihan wrote back “ Here’s to more ambushes.” 133
Moynihan’s allies on both sides of the Atlantic voiced their unhappiness with
Richard’s speech. The New Statesman’s “London Diary” compared Ivor Richard’s attack on Moynihan to poor performance of British diplomats in Germany in 1930. The author suspected that Richard thought he was doing Kissinger’s work. 134
The real culprit behind the attack, at least initially in Moynihan’s mind, was not
Richard, Harold Wilson, or James Callaghan. It was Kissinger. Moynihan, encouraged by reporting from the New York Times and columnists like William Safire, saw a plot where Kissinger (who was currently in Rambouillet) encouraged the attack on Moynihan
130 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 214.
131 Folder Ivor Richard, Box 340, DPM Papers.
132 Eamonn Kennedy to DPM, 25 Nov 75, Box 337, DPM Papers.
133 DPM to Eamonn Kennedy, 15 Dec 75, Box 337, DPM Papers.
134 “London Diary,” New Statesman , November 28, 1975.
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in order to restore his own place as the sole spokesman for American foreign policy. 135
Moynihan now suspected Kissinger was using him to build a “decent interval” for the
West so the West could survive as long as possible. He felt that like Kennedy had lied to
Stevenson, Kissinger (but not Ford) lied to him. 136 Moynihan later realized that this attack was not a grand plot by Kissinger, but did indicate a lack of support from the State
Department. When it became clear to Moynihan that Kissinger had at least not supported him after the British attack, he sought to resign. Ford, Kissinger, and Richard Cheney talked him out of it, but the damage was done. 137 This lack of a defense from Kissinger was the breaking point for Moynihan, and the lack of support from Kissinger coupled with Moynihan’s failures marked the beginning of the end of Moynihan’s time at the
United Nations. Moynihan had not swung the Third World with his embrace of the role of the “loyal opposition”, and now he had alienated many of the United States’ traditional allies. This was likely the more serious offense.
135 William Safire “Henry and Pat and Ivor” New York Times , 24 November 1975.
136 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 215–217.
137 Aldo Beckman, “Moynihan Heeds Ford Plea to Stay,” Chicago Tribune , November 25, 1975, Final edition. 121
“Dollink, dere can be only vun STAR!”
Editorial Cartoon from the Austin-American Statesman , 5 February 1976
From this distance, it does appear slightly absurd that Kissinger would take time out of his meetings in Ramboulliet to encourage Callaghan to use his UN Ambassador to attack an American diplomat, that Callaghan would go along with it, or that all the parties involved would lie about it for decades after the incident. 138 The failure to defeat the
Resolution exposed the tensions that Moynihan’s rhetoric and vigorous actions had exacerbated.
138 Letter from Callaghan to Kissinger, 3 December 1975, London, FCO 73 385.
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In the midst of these clashes, Richard echoed his points about the UN on the
“Robert MacNeil Report” on 15 December. 139 Richard reminded the American viewers that Britain was the U.N.’s bete noir for 30 years, but still maintained a faith that constructive dialogue was possible. 140 In terms of western unity, the developed countries of the world produced an acceptable and workable framework for international economic development. In a tweak to his American critics, Richard compared problems of big and small countries to the Philadelphia convention of 1782 and how the delegates there wrestled with the problem of proportional representation in the Congress.
The UN had a poor record only because it faced the most difficult problems, but the UN would become less concerned with political matters and more involved in economic matters in years to come. Thanks to UN peacekeepers, the Middle East was a safer place. Lastly, echoing an argument Moynihan would make as he was leaving the
UN, Richard claimed bloc voting was decreasing. He cited items such as Angola, East
Timor, the Spanish Sahara, and the attack on Zionism as issues where there was a diversity of votes between Asia and Africa and the Middle East.
That both Moynihan and Richard could argue that the Third World was coming apart politically was a remarkable fact. Kissinger had not just gone before the world simply to improve it, but at least Moynihan understood that part of this plan was to “keep
139 Transcript of “Robert MacNeil Report” on Channel 13 15 December 1975, Ivor Richard File, Box 340, DPM Papers.
140 Louis, “Public Enemy Number One: Britain and the United Nations.”
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[the] industrial nations together and split the third world.” 141 With this conflict,
Moynihan had failed to keep up his end of the bargain.
Richard’s report back to James Callaghan at the Foreign Office at the close of the year was pessimistic. 142 Richard claimed that although Britain had done well for itself on issues like Rhodesia, Belize, and Iceland, the damage that Moynihan had done had several unforeseen consequences. The first was to push Britain closer to the
Commonwealth and its other western allies. Moynihan had seemingly encouraged the growing American political discontent that had endangered the American ability to lead within the UN, even among its allies. Moynihan had used the UN as a “forum” in much the same way that the non aligned countries seemingly did, but his tactics only served to divide the United States from the rest of the world. It made the unity within the non aligned world that had before seemingly only held for economic issues easier to maintain for the controversial symbolic issues such as the Zionism resolution.
Moynihan’s failure at the General Assembly over the Zionism Resolution and his scuffle with Ivor Richard was not the end of his time at the United Nations. He had one more incident before his time at the UN ended, and that was a call for a global amnesty for political prisoners. Moynihan proposed the amnesty in the Third Committee two days after the Zionism vote in the General Assembly. He framed it as part of the quest for human rights that had been his chosen theme that year, but the resolution received almost no support from western allies and quickly gathered anti western amendments.
141 Notes labeled “K” 18 June ’75, Folder Seventh Special Session, DPM Papers, Box 340.
142 Richard to Callaghan, “United Nations: Annual Review for 1975” 13 Feb 1976, FCO 58 953.
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Moynihan and Garment withdrew it a week later, burned by their failure. Moynihan had sought support from Roy Hattersley, then in the Foreign Office, but it came to nothing. 143
During this time of wrestling with the shadows of Kissinger’s influence, seeking a global amnesty, and infighting with the British, Moynihan gave perhaps his most thoughtful speech to the Pacem in Teris Convention in Washington DC. Moynihan drew the conclusion that what had been possible in 1960 when meeting the communist threat in
Congo was unavailable to the United States to meet the communist threat in Angola.
Given the ability of communism to induce guilt in democracies, the only thing communists would fear is military power. Moynihan drew much of his information about the weakness of the United States at this time from the analysis of Leo Strauss, and was warmed when George Kennan argued in agreement with Moynihan after he left the stage.
Kennan had approved of Moynihan’s approach in an earlier interview that summer, stating that he approved of ending aid to the countries that were voting against the United
States. Kennan in that earlier interview had urged a general withdrawal from others’ affairs, and then increased relations again after a period of time. 144 Moynihan would not agree with this idea of withdrawal, but it is a measure of the United States’ isolation at the time that both of these men would consider the US almost alone in its conduct of foreign affairs.145
As the critics grew louder and more influential, Moynihan’s defenders at Harvard and in the press did what they could for him. David Landes, a respected Harvard
143 Letter from DPM to Roy Hattersley, 13 November 1975, Box 339, DPM Papers.
144 Interview with George Kennan by Eric Sevareid, WCBS, 27 July 1975, Box 336, DPM Papers.
145 This is the theme of George F Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). 125
economist, wrote to Kissinger to protest Moynihan’s resignation and told him that the
“boys in striped pants trembled” and dislike this “oversized leprechaun”. He urged
Kissinger to pay more attention to the UN now that Moynihan was gone and worried that campaigns to delegitimize Israel (and by extension the United States) would undermine
US morally and would negate United States’ material strength. In his spirited defense of these two countries, Moynihan was raising American spirits as much as countering the
Third World. 146 His efforts were, however, attracting a lot of attention, and Kissinger felt he could not have a competitor for influence in foreign policy so his campaign to push
Moynihan out continued. Part of the reason was Kissinger felt he could lose no more ground in terms of influence on the foreign policy process was that he had lost his position as National Security Advisor earlier in the fall and was considering resigning himself. 147
Neither Kissinger nor Moynihan is clear on the reason for Moynihan’s departure.
Moynihan, both in his memoir and in his letter of resignation to Gerald Ford, stated that he must return to Harvard. Kissinger’s memoirs on the subject are silent, but he did send along a very complimentary note a month or so after Moynihan left. Richard Cheney, then at the Ford White House, recalls that it was one last argument between the men at the end of January that triggered the resignation. 148 Moynihan did go back to Harvard to teach in the spring semester, and after that semester where he mixed teaching with
146 Letter from David Landes to HAK, 11 Feb 1976, Box 336, DPM Papers.
147 Winston Lord, Interview with Winston Lord, Oral, April 28, 1998, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Library of Congress.
148 Richard B Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011). 126
campaigning for Scoop Jackson he decided to run for Senate from New York. He did so and won, and continued his campaign for liberty from Washington. He would continue to keep a close eye on the workings of the United Nations, often to the chagrin of the
Carter administration. 149 Kissinger sent two messages to Moynihan thanking him for his service, the second of which (a telegram) relayed Kissinger’s belief that “there is only one Pat Moynihan” and that Kissinger appreciated his “creativity, dynamism, humanity, and wit.” 150
So why, ultimately, did the Moynihan moment at the United Nations matter to the
Anglo American dealing with the Third World? It mattered because it was an odd exception in the period. Britain and the United States would go on to work together in international forums and bilaterally on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Their rhetorical split and personality clashes belied a very similar voting record and a concurrent concern with the way the world seemed to be forming against them. Richard preached unity and faith, Moynihan defiance and rightness. Their dispute played out in letters and speeches, and both found defenders. But for all his fire, Moynihan had in practical terms failed. He had lost the United States votes at a moment when it was already short of allies and successes. He had, perhaps inadvertently, weakened the
British faith in their ally at a time when the two countries most needed one another.
Moynihan’s tactics made him very popular. An Opinion Research Corporation
Survey from 12 January 1976 reported that 70% of respondents thought that Moynihan
149 Daniel P. Moynihan, “‘Joining the Jackals’: The U.S. at the UN 1977 1980,” Commentary , February 1981.
150 Telegram from Kissinger to DPM, 27 Feb 1976, Box 337, DPM Papers. 127
should “continue to speak frankly and forthrightly” while only 16% thought he should
“be more diplomatic and tactful.” Among the positive results, the results broke down as
61% GOP, 71% Democrat, 80% Independents, 72% liberals, and 76% conservatives. 151
Moynihan always had more defenders than he supposed (at least outside the government).
Ultimately, the more traditional politician William Scranton replaced Moynihan.
Scranton was as conventional as Moynihan was outrageous, and the staff at the Mission was very welcoming and most likely glad to be rid of Moynihan. 152 Moynihan’s tenure would serve as a rallying point for critics of Ford and Kissinger from the political right and a counterpoint for those who would decry the more even handed approach of the
Carter administration. Richard would serve with two more American ambassadors, one perhaps even more outspoken than Moynihan in Andrew Young.
Moynihan’s quest to use the United Nations as a forum not just for the United
States but for the values of liberalism and human rights was, in the end, a glorious lost cause in the first age of neoconservativism. It gave hope and encouragement to a population that for many years had known only inglorious defeats. That the United
Nations under pressure from former United Nations Permanent Representative George
Bush would repeal the Zionism Resolution in 1991 was an event too far in the future to contemplate. Neoconservatives had learned a hard lesson about the trustworthiness of international institutions. The failure of Moynihan in the face of such intense Third
World opposition may have almost been inevitable, but it was made all the more probable
151 Folder Public Opinion, BOX 340, DPM Papers.
152 Letter from Tap Bennett to William Scranton, 25 Feb 1976, Folder: Business Correspondence 1976 (A L), William Scranton Papers, PSU. The letter was hand written by Bennett. 128
by not working closely enough with his allies. This flaw was only partially Moynihan’s fault, as every country in an international institution will almost inevitably pursue its own self interest. Moynihan’s alienation of the British in both his conception of the United
Nations and the execution of his strategy was a major part of his undoing.
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Chapter 4: The War that Would Not End: Britain, Refugees, and the Aftermath of the Vietnam War
The withdrawal from east of Suez in the early 1970s did not completely remove from Britain the burdens of empire. Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands remained constant irritants in Britain’s relationship with Spain and Argentina. Britain was also still legally responsible for Rhodesia in the eyes of much of the world, although the amount of actual control over the “rogue state” Britain had exercised since the UDI of 1965 was almost non existent. Hong Kong remained as a British territory but was under the looming shadow of Mao’s China. Hong Kong would do more than anything else to pull Britain into the refugee crisis that erupted after the communist conquest of Laos, Cambodia, and
Vietnam in 1975.
If the British Empire dissolved in the era of Vietnam, then post imperial Britain struggled on in the post Vietnam world. 1 Britain’s role in the US Vietnam War was at most diplomatic and rhetorical, and the Johnson’s administration demands for support from the British and Harold Wilson’s frustrating attempts to bring about a negotiated solution in the face of a hostile Cabinet and Labour Party put an end to the era of renewed closeness that had marked Anglo American relations from 1957 to 1963. 2 Famously, in a fit a pique Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, claimed that Labour’s refusal to send
1 Louis, “The Dissolution of the British Empire in the Era of Vietnam.”
2 The Wilson Johnson relationship is discussed in For Wilson and his attempts to end the Vietnam War, see Ellis, Britain, America, and the Vietnam War . For the hostility of some in the cabinet to Wilson’s attempt to both work with Johnson and negotiate an end to the war, see Barbara Castle, The Castle diaries, 1964 1976 (London: Papermac, 1990) in particular the entries from the spring of 1965.
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soldiers to Vietnam meant that the US would not defend Britain in the case of a Soviet invasion. 3 The Labour Government’s commitment not to devalue sterling and the British diplomatic attempts to achieve a negotiated end to the war as a signatory to the Geneva
Agreements were both lost by early 1968, and the setbacks of the Tet Offensive of 1968 marked the beginning of the end for the Johnson administration. Likewise, the British military withdrawal from the east of Suez marked one of the last steps in the unwinding of the empire that had begun in 1947. 4 Despite Nixon and Kissinger’s best efforts at diplomacy and “Vietnamization”, two years after the withdrawal of American ground forces the North Vietnamese Army drove triumphantly in Saigon and dealt a death blow to an American ally. This moment of North Vietnamese victory is generally where histories of the war end. 5 However, the end of the war did not end the suffering of the people of Southeast Asia, and many fled or attempted to flee the new communist regimes in Cambodia and Vietnam. Some of those that fled by boat became known as “small boat” refugees. Many of these refugees ended up in British custody as they flowed into
Hong Kong. The British struggled to deal with this growing crisis both with their own resources and in concert with their allies and the other nations in the region.
3 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 162.
4 Pham, Ending “East of Suez” the British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and Singapore, 1964 1968 . Louis, Ends of British Imperialism .
5 This lack of focus on the final years of the war and its aftermath is one of the weaknesses of most of the scholarship on Vietnam. The best examination of the post 1975 period is Robert Schulzinger, A Time for Peace the Legacy of the Vietnam War. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006). This weakness is analyzed in Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999). Sorley cites Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, a history (New York: Viking Press, 1983) and Neil Sheehan, A bright shining lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988) as representative of this problem. Even works that claim to examine the story of Vietnam’s wars as a whole to pay less attention to the post 1975 period. For example Marilyn Blatt Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945 1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
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Most studies of the refugee crisis have focused on the American response to the crisis, either the limited American effort to save their allies in the closing days of the war or the conflicted American efforts to bring Vietnamese immigrants into the United States and the difficulties those immigrants faced once they arrived. Studies of the American response to this crisis have emphasized the Cold War context of the American response, even going so far as to argue that the American effort to deal with the refugees and bring them into the United States was nothing more than an attempt to continue the war by others means. 6
For the United States, the centrality of the Cold War to its approach to refugee politics was especially clear in the 1970s. The issue of limits, restrictions, and the costs of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel was the core of Senator Scoop
Jackson (D, WA) campaign that linked Soviet behavior to Most Favored Nation status which was a counter point to the efforts of the Nixon administration to achieve detente. 7
Both the Ford and Carter administrations admitted large numbers of Indochinese refugees to the United States, and Carter experienced some difficulties during his 1980 re election campaign due to his varying responses to the simultaneous refugee crises of the Mariel boat lift from Cuba and an influx of Haitian refugees. 8 The United States and western
6 Some of the major works are Koehn, Refugees from Revolution . Jeremy Hein, States and International Migrants: The Incorporation of Indochinese Refugees in the United States and France (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993). Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate . Charles B. Keely, “The International Refugee Regime(s): The End of the Cold War Matters,” International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 303–14.
7 Jussi M Hanhimäki, The rise and fall of détente: American foreign policy and the transformation of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2013), esp. Chpt 5. For more on Jackson and larger significance as a “Cold War” Democrat, see Robert Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson : A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
8 John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency : a Re evaluation , 2. ed. (Manchester Univ. Press, 1995), 65–66.
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countries in general were far more likely to admit refugees that resulted from Cold War proxy conflicts than those generated by the crises after 1991. This led to accusation of racism later on, particularly in the comparative European response to crises in Africa and
Bosnia where Europeans were viewed more favorably for asylum that those refugees from the Third World. 9
Britain came into the refugee crisis because of what was left of its shipping industries and of its empire. The British government in Hong Kong and the refugees that landed there and the British defense relationship with Brunei forced the British to confront this humanitarian crisis. The United States and France took in the majority of the refugees from Southeast Asia after 1975 and Britain and some other countries took in smaller numbers as well, but the neighbors of the newly united Socialist Republic of
Vietnam (SRV) overall did not want the waves of refugees generated by the post war collectivization of the communists. Their refusal to admit refugees meant that many refugees (and those that would seek to profit from their desperation) saw Hong Kong as the best place to go to try to escape their fate.
Britain and Refugees
9 Keely, “The International Refugee Regime(s): The End of the Cold War Matters,” 312.
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Part of the challenge that Britain faced in these years was its contrasting histories of welcoming refugees and a strong anti immigrant current in its post war politics.
Kathleen Paul’s Whitewashing Britain argued that Home Office and other officials after
1945 were at first eager to use British emigration as a way of expanding its influence in the wider world and then acted independently of, rather than being influenced by, popular opinion in acting to restrict Commonwealth (i.e. non white) immigration prior to the
1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act. 10
The most infamous moment in the history of post war immigration was the so called “Rivers of Blood” speech by Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1968. Powell’s erudite references to Virgil could not disguise the racialist nature of his remarks. Powell stressed the economic cost of immigration, and for his remarks Heath kicked him out of
Shadow Cabinet. Powell spent the rest of his time in Parliament as a backbencher.
Despite Heath’s rebuke, the power of Powell’s rhetoric carried over into the election.
One analysis indicated the Conservatives gained 6.7% more votes in the General Election of 1970s thanks the public perception that Conservatives were more likely to restrict
10 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
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immigration thanks mostly to Powell’s speech. 11 In a 1979 survey, 86% of Britons believed the government was allowing too many immigrants into the country. 12
This general hostility to immigration, be it popular, official, or a combination of both contrasted with Britain’s heritage (or self image) of humanitarianism and some acceptance of immigrants. Britain had been accepting of Jews escaping the pogroms of late Czarist Russia, and had acted to save some of the refugees of World War II. 13 These refugee groups included Polish soldiers and other eastern Europeans. In the aftermath of the war, Britain signed the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention that clarified the definition of “refugee” status and outlined the responsibilities the sheltering state and the refugee had toward each other. 14 The refugee, according to the Convention, “should have a well founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, … or political opinion.” 15 After 1945, groups of refugees welcomed into Britain included Cold
War refugees (post 1948 Czechs, post 1956 Hungarians, post 1968 Czechs), Indians
11 Donley Studlar, “Policy Voting in Britain: The Colored Immigration Issue in the 1964, 1966, and 1970 General Elections,” American Political Science Review 72, no. 1 (March 1978): 46. There had been no advantage for the Conservatives in previous elections on the immigration issue. A recent article has argued that one of the reasons immigration is more acceptable in today’s Britain than in 1968 is a shifting definition of citizenship from patriotism to loyalty to political procedures. For this interpretation, see Julia Stapleton, “Citizenship versus Patriotism in Twentieth Century England,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 151–78, doi:10.2307/4091682.
12 “Immingration to Britain: Too Many or “Gone to Far”, http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/data and resources/charts/immigration britain too many or gone too far 0, Accessed 14 March 2015.
13 Kramnick, Harold Laski , 9. According to Kramnick and Sherman, most of the Jews that escaped Russia lived in London. However, there was a significant Jewish community in Manchester, including the Laskis.
14 UNHCR, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html , Accessed 21 March 2013.
15 GEN 100(77) “Report: General Policy on Admission of Refugees” , CAB 130 1017
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fleeing Amin’s Uganda, and Chileans. 16 In 1977 as the number of refugees in Britain’s care started to rise, the Government’s policy was that the refugees would be treated in accordance with the Convention. By that point Britain had accepted 2,500 Chileans in the post 1973 period. 17 One of the major principles that would constrain the ability of
London to make decisions was the principle of “non refoulment” which meant that refugees could not forcibly be returned to the place from where they had fled. 18 This commitment to both the rules and practices of international institutions would shape
Britain’s response, as would their relationship with the United States and their fiscal constraints.
One of the symptoms of British weakness in the 1970s was the restrictions of its choices it faced when its fiscal weakness collided with its humanitarian traditions. From the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 to Czechs after the
Soviet destruction of “socialism with a human face”, Britain had welcomed at least some of those fleeing from repression. However, in the aftermath of North Vietnam’s successful conquest of South Vietnam in 1975 and their subsequent consolidation of
16 Home Office “Admission to the United Kingdom of Refugee Students” 28 Oct 1977, Annex 4, CAB 130 988.
17 Home Office “Admission to the United Kingdom of Refugee Students” 28 Oct 1977, Annex 1, CAB 130 988.
18 This principle is one of the cornerstones of post 1945 status of refugees under international law. The architects of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status on Refugees designed the right not be returned to oppression as an individual right to prevent governments from being forcibly overwhelmed by mass migration, but also wanted to ensure that there would never be a repeat of the events of the 1940s were Jews were sent back to Europe. Suzanne Gluck, “Intercepting Refugees At Sea: An Analysis of the United States’ Legal and Moral Obligations,” Fordham Law Review 61, no. 4 (1993): 882–885.
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power, Britain’s last remnants of empire in Southeast Asia attracted those refugees fleeing violence and re education. The refugees arrived not just in British territories, but also in countries and kingdoms where the British had soldiers. When British ships picked up the refugees, the maritime law which the British had helped to create was under scrutiny and the remaining British shipping which was under financial pressure as ship’s masters picked up desperate Vietnamese refugees at sea.
The Cold War’s proxy wars and the refugees they generated also served as markers in Britain’s domestic political debates. In particular, the overthrow of the
Allende government in Chile in 1973 and the refugees generated by this coup were an affront to the Labour Party. Labour’s members wished to do what they could against the new government, and wondered why the Conservatives had recognized it so quickly. In a debate in the Commons 10 weeks after the fall of Allende, the Shadow Minister of
Overseas Development Judith Hart sparred with Julian Amery, then Minister of State for
Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs over the events in Chile and the Conservative response. Among the pieces of evidence that Hart and others in the Opposition presented to discredit the new junta were the refugees that had fled in the face of fear and violence. 19
The Collapse of South Vietnam
The General Election of 1970 removed Harold Wilson’s troubled Labour government and brought the Conservatives under Edward (Ted) Heath into office.
Heath’s government stood out for its European orientation and its failure to successfully
19 Chile, HC Deb, 28 November 1973, vol 865 cc474 7, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/nov/28/chile , Accessed 18 March 2013.
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confront the trade unions that led to a State of Emergency. 20 For several reasons, there was very little personal comity between Heath and Nixon. This lack of rapport was somewhat surprising. The two men were both conservatives, and despite his orientation toward Europe Heath and Lord Home as his Foreign Secretary were supportive of Nixon and Kissinger’s efforts to end the United States’ involvement in the war in Vietnam.
During the desperate effort of the United States and South Vietnam to turn back the conventional NVA “Easter” Offensive of 1972, Heath’s government was supportive of the American actions. 21 Kissinger, despite his dislike of Heath and the British government’s later failure to support Israel and the United States’ airlift during the 1973 war, noted that Heath was almost alone in the United States’ allies in supporting the
Christmas bombings of 1972 that attempted to secure North Vietnamese acceptance of
American concessions. 22 When the North Vietnamese and the Nixon administration finally signed a peace agreement in early 1973, the response on both sides of British politics seemed to be one largely of relief. 23
The Shadow Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, as he had promised in his response to Home’s announcement in Parliament about the end of the fighting, visited
20 For the best study of the diplomacy between the Nixon administration and the Heath government, see Catherine Hynes, The Year That Never Was: Heath, the Nixon Administration, and the Year of Europe (Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press, 2009). For the latest study of the Heath government, see Philip Ziegler, Edward Heath: the authorised biography (London: Harper Press, 2010). For an overview, see Stuart Ball and Anthony Seldon, The Heath Government, 1970 1974: A Reappraisal (New York: Longman, 1996).
21 Spelling, “Edward Heath and Anglo–American Relations 1970–1974: A Reappraisal,” 646–647.
22 Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 137.
23 Vietnam, HC Deb, 24 January 1973, vol 849 cc. 461 6, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/jan/24/vietnam , Accessed 1 Feb 2015.
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North and South Vietnam as part of a larger trip through Southeast Asia, including Laos,
Thailand, and Hong Kong in early 1973. Callaghan took along Tom McNally and Ian
Mikardo with him as well. Mikardo was an experienced MP from the left (Bevanite) wing of the Labour Party who had served in Parliament since 1945. McNally was a member of the Fabian Society that Callaghan had hired as a political advisor. 24
Mikardo (seen lighting his pipe), McNally, and Callaghan with North Vietnamese officials, Hanoi, February 1973
Photo Courtesy of Callaghan Papers, Bodleian Library
The delegation arrived in South Vietnam on 10 February and spent a week in the country. Prior to their arrival, the delegation had stopped in Hong Kong where, among other activities, Callaghan spent $1,170 (HK) Dollars, or about £117 to buy two new suits. 25 While in South Vietnam, the delegation noted that government hoped the
24 McNally would follow Callaghan to Number 10 in 1976, and then became part of Social Democratic Party in 1981.
25 Receipt from Dr. Man Cheong to Callaghan, 8 February 1973, Box 47, Callaghan Papers. This is roughly equivalent to £1,020.92 in 2013.
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struggle over the future of Indochina would now be political, rather than military, and that Thieu and his ministers understood no level of American air support like they enjoyed in 1972 would again be forthcoming. The South Vietnamese would have to depend on their own (American supplied) aircraft and equipment to repulse any further
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong offensives. However, this dependence on machines and the very size of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) meant the economic strain of the continued war effort would most likely be too much for the country to sustain. Likewise, according to McNally who drafted at least the first draft of the delegation’s report, a political solution was only possible if all superpowers refrained from interference. Ultimately, South Vietnam’s legitimacy rested not on the ability to integrate outside elements into government (like the much discussed “Third Force”) but on the ability of the military to defend the country. 26
While in North Vietnam, Callaghan and the others surveyed the damage inflicted by the air campaign. In spite of the campaign, however, Hanoi retained the “sleepy elegance of a pre war French provincial town.” In contrast to the “Americanised, militarised Saigon”, the people of Hanoi possessed a “self discipline and dedication … almost beyond belief.” The equipment removed from factories in preparation for the
American air campaign lined the roads between Hanoi and Haiphong. McNally believed that the air campaign had convinced the North Vietnamese to abandon their military campaign and pursue the goal of reunification by political means. 27
26 Tom McNally, “Vietnam Report – First Draft”, Box 47, Callaghan Papers.
27 Tom McNally, “Vietnam Report – First Draft”, Box 47, Callaghan Papers.
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Despite these assessments about the possibility of negotiations between the two sides, Callaghan and his staff at the FCO knew that the war was not over. Callaghan’s told McNally that he did not think the North would “wait for history to take its course.”
North Vietnam still intended to eventually remove Thieu from office and replace him with the Northern backed Provisional Revolutionary Government. 28 Callaghan’s judgment was correct. Satisfied that the United States had separated itself from South
Vietnam and established a “decent interval”, Nixon and Kissinger mostly turned away from Vietnam. They attempted to keep pressure on the North through diplomatic and financial means, but the curtailment of funds for military activity in Southeast Asia by
Congress that summer limited the ability of the United States to influence activities in the region. In Vietnam, fighting restarted in the fall of 1973 when the ARVN tried to reclaim territory from the PRG, but continued aid from the North turned the tide and by the fall of
1974 the NVA began its conventional offensive that the North believed would allow them to win by 1976. The rise in inflation triggered by the oil shock in late 1973 and early 1974 lowered the value of the already declining amount of US aid to South
Vietnam, and Congress remained intransigent about not supporting the Thieu government despite the increase in North Vietnamese military activity. 29
As 1975 turned from winter to spring, it became clear that the ARVN and the government of South Vietnam were collapsing. The poor decision making of Thieu accelerated the speed of the collapse. In abandoning the ARVN defense in the Central
28 Letter from Callaghan to McNally, 6 March 1973, Box 47, Callaghan Papers.
29 George C Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950 1975 , 3rd ed, America in Crisis (New York: McGraw Hill, 1996), 290–293.
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Highlands in favor of concentrating forces around Saigon that spring, Thieu had yielded vast tracks of land to the North Vietnamese and unwittingly precipitated a general retreat.
The North Vietnamese had not imagined that they would be able to capture Saigon in
1975, but their incredible success against the demoralized ARVN and the complete lack of an American response allowed them to move ahead with the “Ho Chi Minh” offensive earlier than expected. As the NVA closed in on Saigon and the chaos in South Vietnam increased, the embassies of most western governments began preparing to withdraw their personnel. 30 The private oil companies in the region used helicopters to evacuate their workers out of Vietnam, including some who ended up in Brunei. The Sultan accepted this so long as the companies were responsible for the evacuated ethnic Vietnamese. 31
The intransigence of the Sultan to outsiders would be a feature of Brunei’s foreign policy in the coming years, and would bring them into disagreement with Britain’s attempt to mitigate the coming refugee crisis.
By April, the situation had deteriorated to the point where Callaghan recommended that since Saigon’s fall was inevitable the British embassy should order a
Service Assisted Evacuation (SAE) when it appeared that the battle for Saigon was about to commence. The British had already closed their embassy in Phnom Penh on 21 March due to the worsening situation in Cambodia. 32 The plan for the British to evacuate their embassy personnel was codenamed STELLA. STELLA had been in existence for several years prior to the collapse. The planners had anticipated that the embassy would have to
30 Ibid., 295–297.
31 Memo from Davidson to FM Brunei, “Indo China: Evacuation to Brunei of Oil Company Personnel”, 9 April 1975, FCO 15 2137.
32 Callaghan to Phnom Penh, “Closure”, London, 19 March 1975, FCO 77 263.
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coordinate the departure not just of the staff but also members of the local banks and oil companies. 33 The basic concept of STELLA was to position RAF aircraft and a Royal
Navy frigate (originally the HMS Achilles , then the HMS Mermaid) close to Saigon to facilitate the evacuation of British embassy personnel and British civilians. Callaghan hoped the British would not be the first embassy to pull out, and he preferred that the embassy staff and British would use civilian means if possible to leave the country.
Callaghan wanted the military evacuation to be the “last resort” because there was hope that “an orderly transfer of power” would permit the British to stay. 34 Callaghan was concerned that in the attendant breakdown of law and order sure to accompany any fighting in Saigon the North Vietnamese Army might not respect diplomatic immunity, and that because of this uncertainty the safety of the embassy personnel trumped keeping them in place to maintain a diplomat station in Saigon. Understanding this concern, on
21 April the Embassy requested that the STELLA aircraft stand by on 12 hours notice to fly from Singapore. The embassy personnel believed that despite the relative quiet inside
Saigon the ARVN’s collapse meant the end was close.35
The United States ambassador held off ordering an evacuation for as long as possible so as not to cause a panic. The British became aware of the United States’ decision to close its embassy on 28 April through information from a meeting chaired by
33 R. Brash to Squire, “Emergency Plans: Saigon”, 21 April 1972, FCO 47 640. Vietnam was not the only country where the FCO and MOD thought about how to evacuate British nationals in case of war. In Argentina, the MOD considered it impractical to secure all British nationals and the departments came to a consensus that HMG would simply hold Argentina accountable for the safety of any British citizens. See Windle to Langford, “Contingency Planning” 7 Sep 77, FCO 47 944.
34 Callaghan to Bushell, “Evacuation Plans”, 17 April 1975, FCO 2137.
35 Bushell to Callaghan, Evacuation Plans, 21 April 1975 FCO 15 2137.
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Ford of the National Security Council that was passed to Ramsbotham on the advice of
Kissinger. 36 Confusion and panic marked the American evacuation. Even as Gerald
Ford marked the end of American involvement in the war to raucous cheers at Tulane, images of American Marines clubbing desperate Vietnamese civilians away from the embassy were broadcast around the world. The chaos surrounding the evacuation meant that those officials of the former government who could not fly out had to flee by sea. 37
Consulting with Callaghan and the other diplomats in Saigon as well as learning that the Americans had begun evacuating en masse, the British under John Bushnell decided to close their embassy on 24 April. 38 Once the British in Saigon made their decision to shut down, the British embassy in Hanoi informed the North Vietnamese
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the closure. Callaghan’s ambassador in Hanoi relayed the reason for temporarily closing the embassy in Saigon was on the grounds of safety. 39 On
24 April, the British embassy turned its interests in Saigon over the French embassy, but the French warned that they could not place Britain’s interests over their own. 40 The embassy staff, along with some Vietnamese, arrived in Singapore late on the 24th. 41
Upon their arrival, Callaghan telegraphed Bushnell that Whitehall was “full of admiration
36 Ramsbotham to Callaghan, “Indochina”, Washington, 28 April 1975, FCO 15 2138.
37 Douglas Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford , 1st ed. (New York: Times Books, 2007), chap. 7.
38 For the American decision to evacuate, see “Memorandum for the Record of National Security Council Meeting, 24 April 1975” Ford Library, National Security Adviser, NSC Meeting File, 1974–1977, Box 1, Chronological File. Secret. http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969 76v10/d258#fn1 , Accessed 4 January 2014.
39 TELEX from Callaghan to Hanoi, 22 April 1975, FCO 15 2138.
40 Ramsbotham to Callaghan, “Indochina”, Washington, 28 April 1975, FCO 15 2138.
41 Singapore to FCO, “Saigon Evacuation”, 24 April 1975, FCO 15 2138.
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for … your constant good advice … in reaching decisions which have been difficult and often unpalatable.” 42 The total cost of the operation was £14,992.51. 43 The MOD incurred the initial expense and then was paid back out of the FCO’s funds. 44 The MOD then had to pay £325.19 out of that sum back to the FCO for the 3 British servicemen who had been part of the evacuation. 45
One part of South Vietnam’s collapse that involved the British was the issue of how a government that is about to be destroyed should be treated by international institutions. One problem that the British took part in solving was South Vietnam’s request for a payment from the IMF against its (GVN) gold on 23 April. The staff at the
IMF was reluctant to pay out to a state that might soon cease to exist because a default on the loan would cost the IMF about $1 million. However, the British, American, and
Indonesian members of the board at the IMF stated that there was no legal reason the
IMF should not pay the money. 46 The Vietnamese officials at their embassy in London presented a similar problem of how to deal with a rapidly disappearing state. The
Vietnamese members of the embassy, their families, and their personal staff (61 people in all) requested to stay in Britain “in case Her Majesty’s Government [decided] to officially
42 Callghan to Wilford, 24 April 1975, FCO 15 2138.
43 Cleary, MOD to Lawrenson, FCO, “Evacuation from Saigon: 22 24 April”, 28 July 1975, FCO 81 52.
44 Lawrenson, FCO, to Cleary, MOD “Evacuation from Saigon: 24 April”, 26 September 1975, FCO 81 52. This is approximately equivalent to $187,439.18 in 2013.
45 Cleary, MOD to Lawrenson, FCO, “Evacuation from Saigon: 22 24 April”, 13 October 1975, FCO 81 52.
46 Rawlinson, UK Director IMF to Callaghan, “IMF and Vietnam”, 24 April 1975, FCO 15 2138.
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recognise the new government.” 47 The FCO recommended that a solicitor be employed to conduct that handover of the real estate, and that the staff be allowed to stay in Britain if another country (most likely the United States or France) would not take them. 48
At the beginning of the crisis, it was the opinion of the Home Office that the
“United Kingdom is a small and overcrowded country, and so is not a country of immigration.” 49 However, even before the fall of Saigon, however, Britain had begun receiving refugees from Vietnam. On 6 April, a planeload of 99 children and 47 adults sponsored by the Daily Mail arrived at Heathrow. Many of the children were adopted either in Britain or overseas, and the rest were taken in by “voluntary organisations” including the British Standing Conference for Aid for Refugees. The Home Office believed that there were not going to be any more direct flights of refugees due to the
South Vietnamese discouragement. 50 Even before Saigon fell, the United States was asking its allies to accept “substantially more than” 100 refugees and allow Vietnamese diplomats to stay in London. 51
The first small boat refugees that came into British administered Hong Kong came on a boat that wasn’t small. Clara Maersk took approximately 4,500 Vietnamese refugees from the waters off Vietnam to Hong Kong. Two children had been born on the ship, including one named “Clara”. This mass influx was a shock, but the British
47 Letter from Pham Dang Lam, Ambassador, to C.W. Squire, MVO , SE Asia Department, FCO, 3 May 1975, FCO 15 2027.
48 R.J.E. Thomas to Squire, “South Vietnamese and Cambodian Refugees”, 7 May 1975, FCO 15 2027.
49 Fitzgerald, HO to Hawley, FCO, 30 April 1975, HO 376 197.
50 RA McDowell to Mr. Fitzgerald, “South Vietnamese Children”, 6 April 1975, HO 376 197.
51 “Hawley (FCO) to Fitzgerald (HO)”, 28 April 1975, HO 376 197.
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authorities took the refugees in, medically checked them, and then sought a place to put them for both the short and long term. 52 These 4,500 refugees were a strain on Hong
Kong’s limited resources and space. Britain accepted only 100, but there might be
120,000 total refugees in south East Asia caused by the destruction of Vietnam and
Cambodia. 53
MV Clara Maersk , circa 1975 54
The British had to contend with the fate of one political refugee in particular.
Former President Thieu had fled South Vietnam after he had been deposed from power on 21 April. South Vietnam had two more presidents, Tran Van Huong and Douong Van
(Big Minh) Minh, before it was defeated. 55 The change of Thieu government did nothing
52 Macelhose to Callaghan, “Vietnamese Refugees”, 5 May 1975, HO 376 197.
53 Callaghan to Ramsbotham, “Hong Kong: Vietnamese Refugees”, 13 May 1975, HO 376 197.
54 Clara Maersk , http://7seasvessels.com/?p=35753 , Accessed 23 March 2013.
55 Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect , 396.
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to deter the NVA, as Hanoi radioed after it learned of the change that Huong was just a
“puppet of the Thieu empire”. 56 Thieu made his way to Taipei and asked the British government through his brother Kieu who had been the former ambassador to London and now lived in Taiwan if he could relocate to Britain. Thieu’s wife had made multiple visits to Britain, and his son currently attended school at Aldenham near London. Thieu informed the British that he wished “to live in obscurity without any political activity”. 57
Roy Jenkins at the Home Office recommended to Callaghan based on the analysis of the Foreign Office and his own sentiments that Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) should admit Thieu. Jenkins told Callaghan that “it has been accepted policy over the years to grant asylum to former Heads of State”, but that the initial acceptance should be
“temporary.” 58 Jenkins urged that Thieu’s entry be low key as to not complicate relations with the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) or DRV. Wilson agreed, but
Macelhose in Hong Kong warned that the Chinese and Vietnamese refugees in camps there might object to Thieu passing through Hong Kong. 59
Thieu’s trip to Taiwan was not without trouble. Thieu’s bodyguard attempted to steal correspondence between Thieu and Nixon/Kissinger from around the time of the
Paris Agreement that Thieu had taken with him when he fled. The bodyguard instead stole Thieu’s clothes and then fled to the United States. Had he succeeded, however, his prize would not have met with much of interest because the correspondence in question
56 Bushell to Callaghan, “Evacuation Plans” 23 April 1975 FCO 15 2138.
57 Letter from Callaghan to Jenkins, 12 June 1975, FCO 15 2027.
58 Letter from Jenkins to Callaghan, 18 June 1975, FCO 15 2027.
59 Macelhose to FCO, “Thieu” 27JUL75, FCO 15 2027.
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had already been published in the New York Times .60 Thieu eventually made it to Britain on 20 September 1975. After he arrived, he presented a thank you gift of four panels depicting the seasons to P.S. Astley of the South East Asian Department of the FCO for assisting in the relocation. Astley, concerned about the propriety of accepting these gifts, admitted they were simply cheap Taiwanese decorations like “the sort of thing one sees in a Chinese restaurant”, but asked to keep them because Thieu was coming over for dinner soon. 61
Negotiations with the PRG began in June 1975 in London for the handover of the previous government’s embassy in London and other goods, including an Air Vietnam plane that had ended up in Hong Kong. At that time, the PRG stated that they only planned to nationalize American property, but that the PRG was looking for international partners for continued off shore oil exploration and that “the time [was] not ripe” for reunification. 62
By the summer of 1976, Britain seemed to have the refugee problem within its span of responsibility under control. By the summer of 1977, Britain had accepted 430
Vietnamese refugees, as compared to the 146,000 for the USA and 36,000 for France.
Hong Kong itself had accepted 154. This did not include the 4 5,000 illegal immigrants who had snuck into Hong Kong that were causing trouble with the rest of the Hong Kong population. 63 The suffering of the boat people continued, as they were rejected or kept
60 Notes for File, “Ex President Thieu”, UK EYES ONLY, PS Astley, 14 Oct 75, FCO 15 2027.
61 Memo from Astley, “Acceptance of Gifts” SE Asia Department, to Simons, 24 Nov 75, FCO 15 2027.
62 Tomkins to Callaghan, “Vietnam: Talks with the PRG”, 18 June 1975, FCO 77 269.
63 Crosland to UKMIS Geneva, “Vietnamese Refugees”, 14 July 1976, HO 376 197.
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offshore around the South China Sea. The rate of refugee arrival by small boat or rescue for 1977 was around 500 refugees per month by country, and the United States was pushing for the other countries in the area as well as its European allies and countries in
South America (a list from which Britain was excluded) to take in more refugees. 64
As the flow of immigration into the South East Asia increased through 1978, the
UNHCR tried to deal with the situation by arranging a meeting in Geneva in December
1978 that would involve most of the major players. David Newsom, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs led the United States’ delegation. The Foreign Office’s Evan
Luard would take the lead for the British. 65 The UNHCR and American mission were not just trying to alleviate the crisis in Southeast Asia, but also to aid the numerous refugees attempting to flee from Eastern Europe. 66 Before the conference, Assistant Secretary of
State Richard Holbrooke consulted with Jay at the British embassy in Washington to coordinate their approach at the Conference. Holbrooke understood that compared to
France or Australia there was little Britain could do, but it might be able to use its “moral authority” and Luard’s commitment to “human rights” to sway other countries, such as
Japan, to do more. 67
64 TELEX from SECSTATE Vance, “Indochinese Refugees: Approaches to Countries of Traditional Immigration”, 12 August 1977.
65 Owen to Hanoi, “Geneva Conference on Indo Chinese Refugees: Geneva, 11 12 December 1978”, 12 Dec 78, FCO 15 2316.
66 John Buche, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Charles Kennedy, December 15, 1999, Library of Congress, http://www.adst.org/Readers/United%20Nations%20 %20Geneva.pdf.
67 Jay to Owen, “Indo Chinese Refugees”, Washington, 5 December 1978, FCO 15 2316.
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The British faced a conundrum of wanting to support the UNHCR, needing to preserve good relations with Thailand and Malaysia, and a desire not to “seek a leading role because of our limited ability to absorb more refugees.” It would allow the United
States, France, and Australia to take the lead while agreeing to take in 1500 more refugees (mostly from Hong Kong), spend £1.5 million on the UNHCR, and attempt to pressure Vietnam to cease this outflow. 68 This tentativeness was not unexpected given the fact the British were entering the Winter of Discontent. The conference had the
Vietnamese present as well as most Western countries, but with little Third World participation. The major result of the conference was the United States’ willingness to take in 50,000 refugees a year (a two fold increase), and a surprisingly low level of criticism of Vietnam. Only Australia and the British under Luard criticized the
Vietnamese, while the Vietnamese blamed the whole crisis on the inability of some of its citizens to get over capitalism. 69
Britain’s conduct before and during the conference showed its struggle to balance domestic politics with international commitments. Outside its commitment to the United
States, Britain would have had even less incentive to welcome these refugees. Without
Hong Kong, it would have had almost no reason to do so. This combination of alliance and the remnants of Empire pushed Britain away from its legal and social identity as a country that did not accept immigrants toward a more welcoming attitude. For the
United States, even Britain in its moment of weakness was still a moral beacon that could
68 D. Murrary to Lord Gorownwy Roberts, “UNHCR Consultations on Indo Chinese Refugees: Geneva, 11 12 December 1978”, 6 Dec 1978, FCO 15 2316.
69 Luard to Owen, “UNHCR Consultation on Indo China Refugees “ 14 Dec 1978, FCO 15 2316.
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speak to the world for the good of the weak. Britain, however, would soon face a sterner test of its multitude of commitments for even when the international community seemed to have the problem of refugees in hand, it was about to get much worse.
The Trials of the Huey Fong
During Britain’s winter of discontent, the British authorities in Hong Kong struggled to manage the increased flow of refugees from Vietnam, propelled by the growing repression of the ethnic Chinese Hoa minority population by an increasingly repressive Vietnamese government. One of the events that marked the upswing in the number of refugees in the Southeast Asian seas was the saga of the crew and refugees who arrived in Hong Kong aboard the MV Huey Fong. Huey Fong was a ship that claimed to be on a humanitarian mission but was instead on a voyage of exploitation and profit. Its voyage attracted international attention and challenged Hong Kong and the
British government to deal with desperate people fleeing tyranny, upholding the laws of the sea, and managing an isolated outpost of empire in an age of fiscal weakness.
Huey Fong was originally a cargo ship registered in Panama, and was sailing out of Singapore and was destined for Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Huey Fong sent a telex to Hong
Kong on 18 December 1978 that it was enroute with approximately 2,700 refugees aboard. 70 The British authorities in Hong Kong replied that the Huey Fong was to alter its course and remain on course for Taiwan. The port authorities at Hong Kong repeated the message the next day, but Huey Fong refused to alter its course. On 22 December, the Huey Fong informed Hong Kong that it was now only 145 miles away. The
70 “Report on the Arrival of the MV Huey Fong in Hong Kong” Security Branch, Government Secretariat, 16 February 1979, FCO 58 1747.
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authorities replied that it “would not be allowed to enter Hong Kong waters” due to the
British “government’s adherence to the principle that shipwrecked survivors rescued by ocean going vessels should be landed at the first scheduled port of call and given shelter there pending eventual resettlement by the UNHCR in third countries.” 71 The term
“shipwrecked” is significant in the response because that designation carried specific requirements for the ships’ master. According to the laws of the sea, ships’ masters were to take shipwreck victims aboard the ships and then continue on to their original destination. The apparent problem with this approach was the number of refugees the
Huey Fong and ships like it that would follow is that they were logistically unequipped to handle several thousand starving, weakened, and desperate people of all ages. Rather than run out of food, ships’ masters would logically head to the nearest friendly port.
This designation often excluded ports in Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. The governments of these states, many of whom had a few years before been a part of
Britain’s empire, were now hostile to the arrival of Vietnamese refugees. Hong Kong, being a British possession, was governed by a country with a public commitment to human rights, international law, and the principles of the United Nations.
Because of the importance of this rule and the potential to exploit the humanitarian impulses of western governments when confronted by refugees that fell under their responsibility under international law, the authorities in Hong Kong had to be vigilant to prevent smugglers from exploiting their openness. One of the ways the Hong
Kong Legislative Council sought to deter such action was to pass a new law on 10
71 “Report on the Arrival of the MV Huey Fong in Hong Kong” Security Branch, Government Secretariat, 16 February 1979, FCO 58 1747.
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January 1979 that held ship’s masters liable if they entered Hong Kong’s waters with
“shipwreck” victims who were later to prove to be something else. This law was to be of some significance as the truth came out about the Huey Fong .
When Huey Fong arrived in Hong Kong, there were approximately 5,000 refugees already residing in Hong Kong who had escaped from Indochina by various means. Based on humanitarian considerations and a belief that little could be done to physically alter the ship’s course, the British simply monitored the situation. A reconnaissance aircraft that spotted the Huey Fong on her way in reported that “her decks were covered with refugees.” Eventually, late on 22 December the HMS Wasperton intercepted the Huey Fong and then shadowed her as she sailed to Po Toi Island just outside Hong Kong’s territorial waters where she was remain for the next 27 days. The
Policy Group in the Hong Kong government that had been formed to deal with the burgeoning crisis decided that the Huey Fong was to be re supplied by helicopter because it would it would reduce the chance of the refugees would take hostages of any medical or humanitarian personnel. Aerial resupply would also lessen the chances that the
Vietnamese refugees would leap from their ship to a resupply ship and make their way ashore. The authorities determined that those refugees that would need medical care during the ship’s time in the harbor were to be taken by a Wessex helicopter to hospitals ashore. During the planning for the ship’s arrival there was a concern that the refugees might fake diseases to get off the ship. This concern however was to prove unfounded until the very end.
The Hong Kong authorities first attempted to restock the ship so it could return to sea. This included not just food and water, but also lifesaving equipment to ensure the
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British complied with international law and to prevent the crew or the ship’s owners from claiming “force majeure” in the British attempts to resolve the crisis. 72 The Ministry of
Defense ruled the British could not simply take over the ship and put it to sea, so the
British authorities were forced to use the promise of continued aid would be needed to get the ship back on its way. Simultaneously, the British were attempting to persuade the
Taiwanese authorities to let the ship dock with its refugees, something the Taiwanese were loath to do.
Eventually, the Governor of Hong Kong Murray Macelhose and the Executive
Council decided they would have to eventually admit the ship and its refugees, despite the damaging precedent this would establish. In the interim, Macelhose sought to continue the pressure against the Master of the Huey Fong to resume his voyage, but suspected that it would be futile. He informed Whitehall of this reality on 5 January
1979, and decided that with the new law passed on 10 January in place prosecuting those who abused the norms of rescuing those at sea the Government could admit refugees while maintaining a degree of deterrence against Masters who would exploit this generosity. The ship’s master was presented with the threat of a trial as well as the incentive of resupply to get him, the ship, and the refugees on the way. The threat to the master included a warning that the crew and passengers on the boat would be questioned if the ship entered Hong Kong’s waters, and that he would face prosecution. The ship’s master was warned again about the possibility of prosecution on the 15 th , and the ship was resupplied on the 17 th . A day later, the harbor master informed the ship’s master that
72 Report on the Arrival of the MV Huey Fong in Hong Kong” Security Branch, Government Secretariat, 16 February 1979, FCO 58 1747.
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the Huey Fong could now enter the harbor. The final trigger for the ship’s entrance was the failure of a last minute effort by the American embassy in Taipei to secure assurances for the refugees. At this same time, the refugees aboard the Huey Fong began to threaten to send large numbers of its passengers into the hospitals ashore. Faced with these increasingly dire circumstances, Macelhose allow it to enter. On 2100 on 19 January, the
Huey Fong entered Hong Kong’s waters and was seized by the Hong Kong police.
The admission of the Huey Fong worried many locals in Hong Kong, but the
British promise to accept approximately 1,000 refugees into the British Isles calmed concerns in Hong Kong as well as being a small enough number to not raise the ire of the
British people. The Government initially housed the refugees in an old RAF barracks and the surrounding buildings. The area was fenced off as well. Almost immediately, the police began interviewing the refugees and examining the ship’s logs and charts. The refugees in the hospital were questioned as well, and a disturbing picture of deceit began to emerge. The Huey Fong’s log revealed a 51 hour discrepancy after the ship left
Bangkok. The ship’s log stated it had an oil leak on 9 December that delayed its voyage for 51 hours. The log also stated the vessel encountered nine fishing junks (an event that would not normally be of note) that were all foundering and full of people begging to be saved. The ship’s crews saved the people and then sailed for Hong Kong out of humanitarian necessity.
The refugees told a different story. Once the refugees from the Huey Fong came ashore, it quickly became apparent that they had not been shipwrecked. Instead, they had given almost all the gold they had left for a chance to become refugees. The ship had altered its log to conceal that it had sailed near to Saigon, rendezvoused with Vietnamese
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officials, and welcomed the refugees aboard. To secure their place on the ships, each potential refugee had to pay 12 taels of gold. The majority of the refugees were Hoa, ethnic Chinese who were the merchants that had stayed behind in South Vietnam after it was conquered. When the Provisional Revolutionary Government was pushed aside by the North and Vietnam was reunited in 1976, the Hoa merchants were allowed to retain their businesses. However, as time passed the Communists began cracking down on their activities. This repression, combined with the growing tensions between Vietnam and
Communist China, induced the Hoa to begin fleeing. Seeking to profit from this purge, the government of Vietnam charged this now persecuted minority an exit fee. This method had several advantages in that it provided currency to the government which was in great need of money after 30 years of war, demonstrated the government’s commitment to its Communist values, and allowed the Vietnamese to rid their newly unified country of a potentially counterrevolutionary element. This method of purchasing permission to leave was a common tactic in the later phases of the Cold War. A few years after this, East Germany set a going rate for those that wished to emigrate that it knew West Germany would pay in order to reunite families. This payment injected much needed hard currency into the East German economy as borrowing costs grew during the
1980s. 73 The Soviet Union’s contemporaneous exit tax on Jews attempting to leave, ostensibly as repayment for their education, served much the same purpose. 74
73 John O Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 8.
74 Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect , 340–342.
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As the refugees revealed the truth about their voyage when the ship entered the harbor, the Far East Economic Review published an article entitled “New Vietnam
Profits from Human Traffic” that described the voyage of the Huey Fong . This article was a revelation about the nature of the plight of the refugees and the depravity of the crew, and paved the way for the prosecution of the ship’s crew and some of their con conspirators under the new laws passed in the wake of the Huey Fong’s arrival. 75
The trial of the ship’s master, six members of the ship’s crew, and three businessmen with ties to the crew and Vietnam who had attempted to arrange for the ship’s arrival, along with one of those businessmen’s sons took five weeks. 76 The report from the trial revealed a few moments of dark humor, but mostly the story was grim.
Using evidence from the ship’s log and testimony of some of the conspirators, including a shadowy businessman nicknamed “Kwok the Dwarf” who had a family in Singapore and a wife in Hong Kong, the Crown presented damning case of greed, conspiracy, and duplicity.
With the growing tensions with China in the fall of 1978, Vietnamese officials switched from policy of encouraging the Hoa to leave illegally to a plan to profit from their departure. The motto was “you Chinese should rescue your own Chinese people.”
The motive for the series of crimes was as “a lust for gold”. Through a network of shadowy contacts, the Vietnamese contacted smugglers in Hong Kong, Taipei, and
75 Report on the Arrival of the MV Huey Fong in Hong Kong” Security Branch, Government Secretariat, 16 February 1979, FCO 58 1747.
76 Hong Kong to FCO, “ Huey Fong Trial”, 17 August 1979, FCO 58 1747.
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Bangkok to help them arrange the way to smuggle the troublesome merchants out to sea.
The senior Vietnamese official behind the scheme had been a “Viet Cong paymaster” prior to 1975. The negotiations went on for several weeks as each side sought to make the maximum amount of money possible. The rate the Vietnamese charged to escape was 12 taels of gold per passenger, with 10 taels going to the government and 2 taels going to the networks of smugglers. One tael of gold was worth approximately £100, and the crew of the Huey Fong ended up with 3,273 taels of gold on board when the ship was seized. Some of the most riveting parts of the trial were the descriptions of the
Vietnamese officials in the newly named Ho Chi Minh City sitting in a room silently weighing and counting the massive intake of gold from the soon to be refugees. Those refugees were also obliged not just to pay for a chance to escape, but were also compelled to sign statements stating that they were “grateful to the government for being so kind” and that they had “surrendered [their] property voluntarily”. The Vietnamese officials had lied to the smugglers as well because they claimed that they had arranged for small ships to sneak the refugees into Hong Kong. These small boats, of course, never appeared and the crew was forced to remain off Poi Toi Island until the British admitted them.
The Huey Fong rendezvoused with the junks transporting the 3,318 refugees just off Ho Chi Minh City after embarking from Bangkok. A man who the court documents described as “Kwok the Dwarf”, one of the conspirators who had been part of connecting the North Vietnamese with the smugglers, came aboard the ship in Bangkok and later attempted to hide among the refugees. The Hong Kong authorities discovered his presence and identity when the refugees came off the Huey Fong . Since Kwok’s
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presence was proof that the Captain had conspired to bring aboard refugees and altered his log, the ship’s master claimed during the trial that he had no knowledge of Kwok. He instead claimed that Kwok (whose name appeared in one the cables the ship had sent to
Vietnam) was “a woman who has slept with me often but whose name I cannot remember.”
At the end of the trial, the crew of the ship as well as the three Hong Kong businessmen who arranged for the ship were jailed and the gold they had collected from the Vietnamese Communist officials was seized. While these trials were successful in punishing those who had exploited the Vietnamese refugees aboard the Huey Fong, the repression inside of Vietnam and the growing tension with China continued the compel refugees to take to sea in hopes of escape. The next ship into Hong Kong’s harbor would not provoke a legal crisis, but would force Macelhose and the rest of the local government to confront a even more desperate group of people. 77
Skyluck
While the drama of the Huey Fong trial played out, the next ship to arrive in Hong
Kong without authorization and loaded with refugees, the Skyluck , was not so lucky.
Instead of radioing ahead to Hong Kong, the Skyluck simply showed up in harbor on 7
February 1979. The ship’s master claimed to have left Singapore on 12 January, encountered some sinking fishing boats off Vietnam on 19 and 21 January, and continued on to Hong Kong. The government instantly suspected the master was lying, and the
77 Court Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus & the International Response , Politics in Contemporary Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 31.
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police took charge of the boat and moved it to an isolated part of the harbor. The ship had
3,000 refugees (2,500 ethnic Chinese and 500 ethnic Vietnamese), which brought the total Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong to almost 14,000 people. 78
David Owen responded by sending a message to the British Mission at the UN
High Commissioner on Refugees in Geneva asking for relief from this burden. Although the British had “[maintained] their traditional humanitarian attitude” toward refugees, it was getting more difficult to do so with the higher and higher costs of the increasing number of refugees and less space. 79 A day later, the British request to the Philippines to take in 1000 of the refugees was rejected as the Philippines was dealing with shiploads of refugees, including the Tung An with 1,000 refugees who had recently shown up illegally in Manila which was not their ship’s scheduled next port of call. 80
The case against the crew of the Skyluck came together quickly. The ship was originally christened SS Waimate in 1951 after it was built in Leith, Scotland. The ship was flagged out of Panama and registered out of Singapore by 1977 when it was renamed
Skyluck . However, the speed the ship was capable of meant that the 10 knots she had supposedly done between Singapore and Hong Kong was far less than she was capable of. The voyage took 25 days, a long trip that was “difficult to explain.” 81 As the authorities in Hong Kong investigated, they determined that the Skyluck had painted the name Ky Lu on its side and deposited 606 refugees in the Philippines before it made for
78 Macelhose to FCO, “Refugee Ship: Skyluck”, 7 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
79 Owen to UKMIS Geneva, 7 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
80 Bentley to Owen, “Skyluck”, 8 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
81 Hennings to Macelhose, “Skyluck”, 8 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
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Hong Kong. 82 The UN High Commissioner, Poul Hartling, commended the British for their work, but was concerned that the Philippines were not doing enough. He was pressuring Manila and President Marcos to do more and would be taking a trip to the Far
East later in February to pressure the governments in the area. 83
Despite this pressure, it was becoming clear both in Hong Kong and in Whitehall that although the actions of the ship’s captains in pretending human cargo were refugees were now illegal and voided the aspect of international law about allowing a ship to proceed to its initial port of call, ships that showed up in Hong Kong could not be pushed back out in the sea. The only way to prevent incidents like this in the future was to get early warning of ships and steer them away. 84
The British resupplied the Sky Luck in the same way as the Huey Fong , but the refugees started getting restless. On 12 March, one hundred fifty of the refugees jumped over the side and tried to swim to shore. The British stopped 87, but the rest made it.
These men were rounded up and taken back to the ship, except those who had to be taken to the hospital. 85 Conditions on the ship continued to deteriorate. On 13 June, the refugees began refusing food and engaging in a hunger strike. The refugees were eating from the ship’s stores, and tensions on the ship were starting to rise. 86
82 Macelhose to Owen, 8 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
83 Murray to Owen, “Skyluck and Tung An” 8 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
84 Macelhose to Owen, “Vietnamese Refugees”, 9 Feb 79, FCO 58 1769.
85 Macelhose to Owen, “MV Sky Luck”, 12 March 1979, FCO 58 1769.
86 Macelhose to Carrington, “Vietnamese Refugees: Skyluck”, 18 June 1979, FCO 58 1769.
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On 29 June 1979, the refugees took an even more drastic action. They cut the mooring lines on the ship and let the ship drift. The refugees forcibly repelled attempts to remoor the ship by the harbor police and claimed they would “hang the captain” if the authorities tried again. The ship eventually ran aground and began to break apart in rough seas. Rescue efforts began immediately, and the police took the refugees to the
Chi Ma Wan Detention Center. 87 There was little Macelhose and the other authorities could do but remind ship’s masters that they would face prosecution and to ask other countries and the UNHCR to do more to take care of the tens of thousands of refugees that were continuing to arrive. 88
Conflicts
This question of resettlement was a difficult one for both the Callaghan and the
Thatcher governments to come to grips with as the crisis went on. In Downing Street
Years, Thatcher wrote that the subject of the Vietnamese boat people came up on her first trip overseas as Prime Minister in June 1979 during at a European Council meeting. A few months later, Thatcher brought up the subject of boat people and Britain’s role in humanitarian rules at sea at the G7 meeting in Toyko with Soviet Premier Kosygin.
Thatcher appealed to him to help stop the flow, but Kosygin said that the refugees were
87 Macelhose to Carrington, “Skyluck”, 29 June 1979, FCO 58 1769.
88 Macelhose to Carrington, “Skyluck: Press Statement”, 29 June 1979, FCO 58 1769.
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all “drug addicts or criminals”. Thatcher’s last mention of the topic spoke of handing off the task of dealing with the boat people to the United Nations. 89
The United Nations held a second conference in June 1979 to negotiate an international solution. At the earlier G7 Toyko Conference, Carter announced he would
“double resettlement numbers”. Japan responded by increasing aid, and Thatcher agreed to take in 10,000 refugees from Hong Kong. 90 Once in Britain, a variety of voluntary organizations aided the refugees and then those refugees were spread among various cities throughout the entire United Kingdom. 91 Ultimately, between 1975 and 1990
Britain settled approximately 18,600 refugees from this area. The majority were the ethnic Chinese that fled to Hong Kong in these years. 92 Thatcher was initially reluctant to admit any refugees, but the arguments of the Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw and her own arguments to the Soviet leadership swayed her judgment. 93
One of the possible schemes the Thatcher government considered to deal with the increasing number of refugees in Southeast Asia was to move some of them to the
Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Like Hong Kong the British only tenuously held this outpost, and although Argentina presented a less overwhelming military threat than
Deng’s China, the Foreign Office had sought a way to rid itself of this problem since at
89 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 64–65.
90 Robinson, Terms of Refuge , 54.
91 Ibid., 147–148.
92 Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National, and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (Portland: F. Cass, 1999), 312.
93 Alan Travis, “Margaret Thatcher Reluctant to Give Boat People Refuge in Britain,” The Guardian , December 29, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/30/thatcher snub vietnamese boat people.
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least 1964. 94 A small group of Members of Parliament led by Bernard Braine and the
Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Attempts prevented the Government from reaching an understanding with Argentina under the auspices of UNGA Resolution 2065.
Their rallying cry had been that any agreement must have the consent of the Falklanders.
When Nicholas Ridley, a Thatcherite MP, visited the Falklands in July 1979 to explore the idea of an agreement for some type of shared sovereignty with the residents of the
Falklands, he also raised the question of whether or not they would be willing to accept some Vietnamese refugees. The islanders agreed to take in approximately 10 families, but the FCO was worried about the cost of housing them as well as the difficulty in finding them jobs. 95 The scheme ran into further problems when it became apparent that the Government had no money to move any refugee families to the South Atlantic or to house them. The housing alone would cost approximately £20,000 per family. Attempts were made to acquire money from the UNHCR, but since the South Atlantic was not near the top of UNHCR’s list of priorities, the amount of money the British realized they could received was “tiny”. 96 Ridley was disappointed and urged the British representatives in Geneva to try to acquire the funds anyway, but the UNHCR was reluctant to see any group of refugees smaller than 100 settle in a new place for reasons of allowing them to “retain some cultural identity and the possibility of inter marriage”. 97
There was also the concern that spending so much money on housing for new arrivals
94 Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, The Battle for the Falklands (New York: Norton, 1983), 14–41.
95 Mr. Parker to Mr. Cowling, South American Department FCO, 13 September 1979, FCO 7 3693.
96 Mr. Fearn to Mr. Ridley FCO, “Falkland Islands: Vietnamese Refugees”, 22 November 1979, FCO 7 3693.
97 Mr. Snoxell UKMIS GEN to Mrs. C.M. Anderson, “Resettlement of Indo Chinese Refugees in the Falklands and Belize” 28 December 1979, FCO 7 3693.
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that could provoke a backlash from the farmers outside of Stanley. 98 Ridley’s trip was also marred by the mauling he received in Parliament by both sides of the House upon his return due to beliefs of his excessive desire to share sovereignty over the islands with
Argentina. The scheme to settle these refugees in the Falkland Islands appeared to have been dropped and other events in the Falkland Islands would soon over take it in importance in the mind of British officials.
This aborted scheme is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is it lays bare the fiscal weakness of Britain at the end of the 1970s. A country that has a hard time moving and housing 40 to 50 extra people on a series of small islands far away is one that probably cannot rationally afford to retain to those islands in the face of a hostile threat, and is also a country that is still committed to some humanitarian principles. This, more than anything else, probably explains the FCO’s desire to rid themselves of the cost of defending the Falklands. One other major revelation of this incident is the exposure of the faith in the United Nations system within the British government. It is difficult to imagine, and illustrative of the divide in approaches to the UN that marked the contrasting diplomacy of the United States and the British, the State Department going cap in hand to Geneva to ask for more funds to settle such as a small number of refugees.
There is both a dependency and a confidence in the UNHCR that is revealing about both the British mindset toward international institutions and their perceived ability to undertake any new expenses. The last mindset revealed by this incident is the attempt by the British to balance their humanitarian impulses with their desire to limit immigration
98 Letter from Mr. Nedham, Coalite Group to Mr. Ridley FCO, “Vietnam Refugees to the Falkland Islands”, 27 December 1979, FCO 7 3693.
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into their country. There was a clear desire to do something for the refugees and it would be unacceptable for either the Government authorities or the press back home if these men, women, and children were stranded on the ship indefinitely. However, admitting large numbers of cultural and racially dissimilar people into the United Kingdom would possibly undermine any Government’s effort to contribute to the international effort to solve this problem and cause a domestic backlash. Any solution, even one that involved complicating Britain’s already tense hold on the Falklands, was worth it.
It wasn’t only the British government that was experiencing a period of weakness in the late 1970s. It was British shipbuilding and commercial shipping as well. The approach of British industry to the refugee problem is illustrative of the overall problem
British industries faced at the time. The supertanker Port Hawkesbury picked up 24 refugees in the South China Sea in January 1980. Although the tanker was flagged out of
Bermuda and working for Gulf Oil, she had a British master and a British crew, as did the other 30 ships of the line working for the company. The ship was in drydock with refugees still on board and scheduled to sail to the Middle East, so something had to be done. 99 David Ropner, the President of the General Council of British Shipping (GCBS) had to think about how to keep British shippers in business while recognizing that a government that was committed to holding masters and crews to the traditional standards of humanitarian practice at sea was supervising him. The GCBS had proposed a tacit understanding with HMG the year prior that would allow ships to drop refugees at the first port that would accept them with the guarantee that the British government would
99 David Ropner, General Council of British Shipping, to John Nott, 25 Feb 1980, FCO 15 2613.
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support the refugees if no one else would. 100 However, HMG rejected this as the agreement would be discovered very quickly and would impose an unacceptable fiscal and immigration burden on the government. 101 Carrington was aware of the financial burden the shippers were taking on, and the fact that the admittance of some boat people in 1979 had failed to produce negative consequences meant the British might be able to take more. 102 Nott did tell Ropner that the UNHCR would recoup shippers any funds lost for taking in refugees, and HMG would help them apply for the funds. 103
Britain’s attempts to deal with the refugee issue sometimes brought it into conflict with other countries. One of the toughest nations in the area to deal with refugees was
Brunei. Brunei had a longstanding defense relationship with Britain, and British military personnel were seconded to the Royal Brunei Malay Regiment. The Sultan through his advisors cited Singapore as a example of why he was keeping the Chinese out of his country. He would only accept refugees on British flagged ships where the refugees had been designated for resettlement in other countries.
Brunei was also one of the fiercest rejecters of the ethnic Chinese refugees. The
British attributed this to the Sultan’s desire to limit the number of ethnic Chinese in his
100 David Ropner, General Council of British Shipping, to John Nott, 6 June 1979, FCO 15 2613.
101 SS Holness to J Noss, West Indian & Atlantic Department, “PORT HAWKSBURY”, 26 Feb 1980, FCO 15 2613.
102 Nott to Carrington, 12 Mar 80, FCO 15 2613.
103 Nott to Ropner, 12 March 1980, FCO 15 2613.
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kingdom so they would not become a “controlling majority.” 104 The Sultan’s government had turned away ships in 1979, and warned the British that any influx of refugees would require additional British forces to deal with the problem, mostly likely two companies of Gurhkas from Hong Kong. The situation was made worse by the fact the Brunei government used a “requisitioned” Norwegian tug to push the Cun Long , one of the ships bringing in refugees, back out into international waters. 105 The British stressed to the Sultan that he could not use HMG forces to violate the UN Conventions on refugees and embarrass the British government. HMG stressed that Gurkhas, if loaned out to Brunei, would only be used for humanitarian relief and not expulsion. The balance the British had to strike was how to preserve the relationship with the Sultan with the need to keep British troops from violating their own rules and international law. 106 After they approached the Brunei Defence Committee, the Brunei government indicated that it took the threat of the withdrawal of British troops from their control as seriously jeopardizing to the defense relationship and they would not be swayed from their policy of exclusion of refugees. 107 Britain responded by reminding the Sultan through Peter
Blaker MP at the FCO of the British government’s commitment to work with the
UNHCR and promote the international norms at sea. The Brunei government would not
104 Watson to Burns, “Brunei: Vietnamese Refugees and British Military Personnel”, 19 Feb 1980, FCO 25 2617. This part about the Sultan’s desire to maintain the ethnic balance and exclude the Chinese was blacked out from further reports in the file.
105 Burns to Murrary, “Brunei: Vietnamese Refugees and British Military Personnel”, 2 July 1980, FCO 25 2617.
106 Watson to Burns, “Brunei: Vietnamese Refugees and British Military Personnel”, 19 Feb 1980, FCO 25 2617.
107 Watson to Burns, “Brunei Policy on Vietnamese Refugees”, 28 July 1980, FCO 25 2617.
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be swayed, and the British admitted that although they could not shape the internal policies of the Brunei government, they would work to force Brunei to adhere to international norms concerning refugees. 108
Conclusion
Although the amount of small boat refugees in Southeast Asia was decreasing in
1980 due to Vietnam’s improving diplomatic relations with its neighbors and a decrease in the amount of political repression inside the country, the worldwide refugee problem was expanding with the emergence of growing refugee populations in Africa and Central
Asia. 109 The funding for the UNHCR was growing even more strained, and the majority of funding came from the United States ($79 million) and Japan ($64 million) with
Britain coming in third ($13.6 million). 110 In all of 1979, the British had resettled 5,000 refugees from Southeast Asia in Britain in a move designed mostly to relieve the pressure in Hong Kong. 111 In contrast in 1979, the United States took 11,900 of the refugees from
Hong Kong and were still taking in about 1,000 a month in 1980. The British had hoped for more, and knew that every refugee that they had to care for made their job harder, but they could not ask more of the country that was already doing more than any other to take in additional refugees. 112 The United States was also helping move refugees not just to the United States for family reunification but also to processing centers in the
108 Blaker to “His Highness the Sultan”, 6 Oct 1980, FCO 25 2617.
109 Carrington to Watson, “MIPT Brunei Policy on Vietnamese Refugees” 11 June 1980, FCO 25 2617.
110 “Status of Contributions to all UNHCR Assistance Activities for 1980”, 29 Feb 1980, FCO 15 2614.
111 Marshall to Hartling (UNHCR), 14 May 1980, FCO 15 2614 FCO 15 2615.
112 Cater to Carrington, “Vietnamese Refugees: US Program in Hong Kong”, 31 Jan 1980 FCO 15 2615.
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Philippines. 113 The United States was carrying the majority of the burden for the refugee population, but one of the major factors ensuring the United States Government would continue to do so was Britain’s and other countries’ willingness to share the burden. 114
Britain throughout the crisis balanced its commitment to human rights and international institutions, its increasingly perilous fiscal position, and its varying commitments to allies and outposts without seeming to fail in any of them. Britain, a small island populated by many who believed that theirs was not an island that needed immigration, was still able bring desperate refugees to its shores, stay in the bounds of international law, and maintain at least working relations with Brunei, Vietnam, the
UNHCR, and the United States. For Britain, the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War and their response to it was neither directly shaped by Cold War concerns or by purely humanitarian motives. Their response was an attempt to balance their remaining “imperial” commitments both formal and informal, the fiscal realities of the British economy, their relationship with the United States, and their commitment to the norms of international law embodied in the United Nations.
113 Newsom to Henderson (UKAMB), 8 March 1980, FCO 15 2615.
114 Carrington to Macelhose, “Vietnamese Refugees: US Programme” 1 Oct 1980, FCO 15 2615.
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Chapter 5: From Grimsby to Lusaka: Henry Kissinger, Labour, and Decolonization in Southern Africa in 1976
After the disasters of 1975, Henry Kissinger shifted his efforts to preserve southern African free of further Soviet domination. Rather than oppose Communist expansion with mercenaries and military force, Kissinger sought to use diplomacy to solve the long running problem of white minority rule in the breakaway British colony of
Southern Rhodesia. Ian Smith’s ruling white supremacist Rhodesian Front Party had been holding out against decolonization since Southern Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in 1965.
From the beginning, Britain had eschewed military force as a way of bringing
Smith and his regime down. Both Wilson’s and Heath’s governments had sought to end the standoff with diplomacy. Despite the international community’s condemnation,
Rhodesia initially prospered but then fell into an increasingly brutal “Bush War” or
Second Chimurenga .1 Subsequently, the fall of the Portuguese empire in the mid 1970s had created a vacuum of political power in their former colonies. 2 Angola turned into a three way battle between armies backed by Cuba, the Soviet Union 3, the United States,
1 Chimurenga is a Shona world meaning “Struggle”. The guerillas referred to the war as the Second Chimurenga. The Rhodesian whites called it the “Bush War”. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), vii–viii.
2 The struggle for the future of these colonies was not limited to southern Africa. The deadliest struggle was in East Timor where the Indonesian Army seized control with extreme brutality. This was done with American foreknowledge. Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005, 247.
3 The Communist backed movement was the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
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and China. 4 The Ford Administration’s failure in late 1975 to stop the Cuban backed
MPLA forces in Angola via CIA funded proxy forces alongside the intervention of South
African Army not only illuminated another in a string of failures in American foreign policy, but also risked drawing all of southern Africa into the Cold War with the threat of further direct Soviet intervention. 5 Faced with diplomatic impasses in much of the rest of the world and troubles at home, for much of 1976 the unlikely partnership of American
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and British diplomats under the direction of Anthony
Crosland conducted a joint diplomatic effort to end white minority rule in Rhodesia. This
Anglo American endeavor had at its heart two distinct goals: the containment of Soviet influence and the enabling of the exercise of self determination by an oppressed people.
Kissinger and Crosland’s pursuit of these twin goals forced them to rely on each other and a wide variety of states to set the stage to convince Ian Smith to grant majority rule. Their choice in particular to enlist South Africa in bringing Smith to heel was an anathema to many and seemed to contradict both the expressed goals of ending minority rule and stopping Soviet expansion. A more influential South Africa would likely be able to retain apartheid and subsequently strengthen the anti imperialist forces that surrounded
4 The two forces back by the United States and China were the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the Nation Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA). Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005, 228–238.
5 Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions ; Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005; Kissinger, Years of Renewal . Gleijeses’ account is the best account so far of the fight over Angola and the larger history of Cuba exporting revolution in the Cold War. Westad places Angolan independence in the context of the broader East West confrontations in the Third World in the post Bandung era. Kissinger’s own account stresses his role in trying to prevent Soviet sponsored Cuban aggression from expanding into Africa.
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it. 6 The choice for this diplomatic track begs several questions: why would Kissinger take this chance in the face of a weakening position in the government at home and why would Ford support him? Also, why would Crosland and Callaghan, both staunch socialists, ally themselves with a Republican administration that had shown Africa south of Egypt almost no attention as a matter of policy?7
Three fundamental questions underlie the following analysis: why did Kissinger and Crosland undertake their mission as an Anglo American project, why did it fail, and what are the larger implications of both the project and its failure for the Special
Relationship in the Third World? Throughout 1976, the limits imposed on the British and the United States by the conception and execution of their diplomacy had a large role in shaping the outcome. In the end, how productive could the Anglo American partnership be when it entered into the arena of Third World politics when both powers were at the ebb of the influence?
Southern Rhodesia was a singular story in the history of decolonization. In the midst of shedding its colonies in the 1960s, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia made the transition from colonies to the nations of Zambia and Malawi under the Conservative
Government of Harold Macmillan and his Colonial Secretary Ian Macleod. Southern
6 The KGB efforts to use South Africa as an anti western cudgel in this time are described in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way , 464–469. Despite the Soviet public repudiation of Southern Africa, in 1984 Debeers was paying the Soviets over a billion dollars a year for diamonds.
7 The previous course of American policy toward Southern Rhodesia that almost totally ignored the interests of black Africa is detailed in Anthony Lake, The “Tar Baby” Option: American Policy toward Southern Rhodesia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). The longer history of the United States’ relationship with Southern Rhodesia is in Andrew DeRoche, Black, White, and Chrome: The United States and Zimbabwe, 1953 to 1998 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001).
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Rhodesia (later Rhodesia) with its larger European population rejected British decolonization and sought to preserve continued minority rule. 8 Harold Wilson pledged in 1965 not to invade Rhodesia to reverse Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of
Independence (UDI). This decision placed Britain in the unique position of earning the criticism of the other newly free African states for not using military force to bring about regime change.9 Complicating British diplomacy was the insistence of the so called
Front Line States such as Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia on the principle of No
Independence before Majority Rule. Rhodesia was not a politically recognized state, and despite the trading embargo put in place by the United Nations the United States and its car companies bought Rhodesian chromium in order to make high quality steel. The
1971 Byrd Amendment legalized this practice by creating an exception to allow the
United States to import strategically vital raw materials. 10
The primary American diplomat in the effort to end white rule in Rhodesia was
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had begun his career as an academic, but by 1976 he was the leading American (and possibly Western) diplomat of his generation.
8 William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,” in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 495.
9 Trevor Owen Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558 1983 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 358– 360. DeRoche, Black, White, and Chrome . For a summary of the Rhodesian decision in the context of white settler regimes, see Caroline Elkins, “Race, Citizenship, and Governance: Settler Tyranny and the End of Empire,” in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century , ed. Pedersen, Susan and Caroline Elkins (New York: Routledge, n.d.), 218.
10 Finger, American Ambassadors at the UN , 172–177. Finger recounts that he and Arthur Goldberg played a larger role in reconciling the British desire to resolve the crisis without force with the demands of the newly free African countries to impose sanction that could be enforced under Chapter VII with the threat of force. For the passage of the Byrd Amendment, see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line : American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), 236–237.
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He had surpassed Ambassador Averell Harriman in securing an end to American involvement the Vietnam War, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in bringing about meaningful détente with the Soviet Union. Kissinger had survived the infighting of the
Nixon White House and the downfall of so many tied to the Watergate break in and subsequent cover up. 11 However, while Kissinger was at the peak of his influence in the
American government, the possibilities for creative diplomacy were rapidly decreasing.
What possibilities existed for Kissinger’s foreign policy after the Congressional veto on the administration’s attempt to stop Cuban adventurism in Angola? Détente with the Soviets had progressed as far as it could and had even become more of a liability in an election year. The Ford administration would even abandon the term in favor of
“peace through strength”. 12 China was racked with turmoil as Mao moved closer to death and his potential successors struggled for power. North Vietnam was triumphant and
India was truculent, but the rest of Asia to include Indonesia was holding out against communism. 13 There was at least the appearance of stability in South America and the
Middle East, and relations with Europe were stable as well. Africa was the only place left, and the Soviets along with the Cubans had chosen to contest it.
Scholars such as Jussi Hannamaki and Daniel Sargent have remarked that most scholars of Kissinger have focused on his “White House Years” and “Years of Upheaval”
11 Isaacson, Kissinger .
12 Hanhimäki, The Rise and Fall of Détente , 96.
13 This includes Indonesia’s campaign against the newly freed population of East Timor, an action that both Ford and Kissinger knew of in December 1975. Although not fully knowledgeable about the brutal depths of the campaign, Ford later regretted his passive acquiescence to it. Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford , 2007, chap. 9.
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where as National Security Advisor he wrested control of the execution of foreign policy from the State Department. These were the years of Shuttle diplomacy, secret missions to China that were so secret Kissinger’s clothes got left behind in Pakistan, and the painfully protracted negotiations with Le Duc To to bring about the end of America’s military involvement with the Vietnam War. Both Sargent and Hannamaki noted that
Kissinger’s transition to role of Secretary of State marked a more global, less Great
Power centric approach to American diplomacy because of either the necessity of circumstance or Kissinger’s new responsibility for managing a large bureaucracy in contrast to the more nimble National Security Council. Sargent notes the importance of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo in reorienting Kissinger’s thinking toward the importance of commodity prices in relations with the Third World,14 while Hannamaki notes
Kissinger’s transition from primarily “conceptual” thinking on behalf of Nixon while at the National Security Council (NSC) to the head of a major Cabinet department with bureaucratic responsibilities. 15 While Kissinger’s brain trust was relatively unchanged from his time in the White House with Winston Lord in charge of the Policy Planning
Staff as well as Peter Rodman, Hal Sonnenfeldt, Hal Saunders, and Larry Eagleburger at various sections at State. Kissinger as Secretary of State strove to reconcile his ability to act quickly and in secret with the need to use normal channels. 16
14 Daniel Sargent, “The United States and Globalization in the 1979s,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective , ed. Niall Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 49–64.
15 Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect .
16 Lord, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
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British foreign policy in 1976 was in the hands of a genuine intellectual as well.
The return of Labour in 1974 and the resignation of Harold Wilson in March 1976 had brought an unlikely politician to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Anthony
Crosland by his own admission had spent the previous decade and a half deeply immersed in the running the British welfare state. 17 Crosland, like Kissinger, was a veteran of the Second World War and a respected author. However, where Kissinger’s books had explored 19th century diplomacy and the impact of nuclear weapons, Crosland had sought to transform socialism from a series of efforts at nationalization into a way of making life more equitable. 18 He was a Gatskillite in an increasingly Bennite Party. As
Labour’s foremost revisionist intellectual, he was living proof of Irving Kristol’s jab that the only interesting socialist thinkers lived in democratic countries. 19
As Kissinger and the Ford administration recovered from the debacle in Angola, the British tried to decode what Kissinger’s next move would be. As it became clear that
Kissinger would keep his eye on Africa with the intention of limiting the damage from the Soviet Cuban intervention, the British speculated on what the US actions might look like based on Kissinger’s public statements. The FCO Planning Staff reckoned that US policy in Africa would be motivated by the upcoming Presidential primaries, and that the
17 The most well known biography of Crosland is his wife’s posthumous Crosland, Tony Crosland . A more recent biography is Kevin Jefferys, Anthony Crosland (Politico’s, 1999).
18 Crosland, The Future of Socialism.
19 Kristol and Kristol, “Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea.” This article was republished in Tyrrell and Brittan, The Future That Doesn’t Work . This idea of the intellectual exhaustion of the Soviets was not confined to intellectuals. James Callaghan expressed a similar thought in a meeting with NATO’s Foreign Ministers in late 1975. MEMCOM, Kissinger et al, EAST WEST RELATIONS, 12 DEC 1975, National Security Archive.
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“range of options open to the US administration in 1976 is not a broad one”. 20 The
Foreign Office believed that the United States would not directly intervene (an approach that the US had been pursuing outside of Indochina since the articulation of the Nixon
Doctrine), would attempt to hurt the Cuban economy but not Soviet, and use rhetoric to deter any further communist aggression. 21 However, the planning staff admitted that only by conferring with Kissinger could the British understand what was to come. 22
With the Cubans triumphant in Angola and détente in danger of being detached from the behavior of the Soviet Union in the Third World –which was the Politburo’s goal all along – Kissinger wanted to block further Soviet expansion in Africa. 23 To accomplish this, he wanted to use the prestige of the United States to end white minority rule in Rhodesia. This achievement, or even the attempt to solve it, might solve numerous problems at once. It would place the United States against one of the most reviled “countries” in the world and on the side of the Third World, it would give the
Democratic Party one less area to criticize Ford in the upcoming election, and would check the Soviets while attempting to restore US credibility with the Chinese who had
20 Edmonds to Crowe, FCO Planning Staff, London, 31 March 1976, FCO 45 1876.
21 Logevall and Preston, “Introduction: The Adventurous Journey of Nixon in the World,” 5–6.
22 Memo from Derek Thomas to Crowe, Planning Staff, London, 30 March 1976, FCO 45 1876.
23 Kissinger’s describes his views on the matter in Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 29. The centrality of Africa in the Soviet Union’s ideological campaign to spread socialism is in Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow , 1st ed. (Knopf, 1985), 270–271. How tensions in the Third World helped undo the gains of détente from the Soviet perspective is in Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962 1986) (New York: Times Books, Random House, 1995), 470– 471.The leading role of the KGB in Soviet involvement in the Third World is in Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way , 10–24. The effect of Third World conflicts on weakening the commitment to détente with the Executive branch is in Robert Michael Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 64–84.
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also recently been checked in Angola. 24 To end Rhodesian white rule, Kissinger needed a diverse set of allies. He needed the British with their expertise and ultimate legal responsibility for their once and future colony. While Kissinger was planning his visit to
Africa, he had dinner with Ambassador Ramsbotham and indicated he would like
Crosland’s advice before proceeding on his journey to Africa. 25 He needed the support of the Front Line Presidents who were assisting nationalist guerilla groups led by Robert
Mubage (Zimbabwe African National Union)and Joshua Nkomo (Zimbabwe African
People’s Union) in their war against the white government of Rhodesia. He also needed the help of the state that perhaps even more than Rhodesia was the great pariah state of the age South Africa.
The realism in Kissinger’s approach was at its most evident in using South
Africa’s influence to force Smith’s hand. The British repeatedly warned Kissinger that
African leaders might not trust him, and Kissinger did not want to further squander the
United States’ prestige by failing. He chose to deal with Rhodesia by detaching it from
South Africa and by giving South Africa time to end apartheid as it saw fit. This is the justification that Kissinger gave at the time through the New York Times and later on in his memoirs. 26 Kissinger’s choice was a stark application of realpolitik even if it was in the service of democracy and human rights and seemed to go against the tide of growing
24 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 29. In his memoirs, Kissinger explicitly disavows any domestic political motive for the timing of his trip but details his meetings with civil rights groups to build support for the initiative.
25 Ramsbotham to Crosland, Washington, 11 April 1976, FCO 45 1876.
26 Ramsbotham to Crosland, “Southern Africa”, Washington, 30 April 1976, FCO 45 1876. See also Kissinger, Years of Renewal .
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rejection of South Africa by the international community through sport, trade, and culture. 27 The Soweto uprising of 1976 had killed “at least dozens and perhaps hundreds.” 28 The only justification for Kissinger’s choice would be if it worked on
Rhodesia immediately and on South Africa in a timely manner.
Diplomacy in Africa in this time was a risky proposition domestically for Ford.
Any show of weakness or disruption of the flow of chromium might weaken a shaky
American economy and thereby strengthen the insurgent campaign of Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, give Soviet backed forces a more prominent place in
Southern Africa, or further weaken Kissinger’s command of American policy. 29
While Kissinger’s reputation as a foreign policy thinker by 1976 was unchallenged, Crosland was relatively new to diplomacy. He was a socialist with international connections, but he had not been involved in the formulation of policy.
Crosland left two undated notes in his personal papers from his time at the Foreign Office that outlined his vision. Crosland liked to take notes in a spiral bound notebook, and these included not just thoughts on contemporary issues but also written reflections on books. In a note entitled “Objectives of F.P.”, Crosland outlined some of his priorities.
The list included assuring Britain’s security through NATO, “lessening a conflict in
Europe between E[east] and W[est]”, “reducing conflict and [the] risk of war in rest of
27 William Minter, Charles Cobb, and Gail Hovey, No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over Half a Century, 1950 2000 (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008).
28 Borstelmann, The 1970s , chap. 4.
29 The Ford Reagan rivalry in 1976 is detailed from a conservative and liberal perspective respectively in Steven F Hayward, The Age of Reagan. (Roseville, Calif.: Forum, 2001); Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan , 2014.
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world”, “stopping spread of nuclear weapons”, dealing with the “N[orth] and S[outh] economic conflict”, “assist[ing] human rights and liberties in particular”, and
“strengthen[ing] int[ernational] bodies: EEC, NATO, UN.” 30 These were all uncontroversial, but they do illuminate the fact Crosland understood the interlocking nature of British foreign policy. Crosland was, despite his earlier reservations, committed to working within the Common Market. He was for human rights –for who was not? 31 Crosland supported other international institutions, wanted to pursue détente, and hoped to solve the economic difficulties between North and South. Not on the list, however, were the two major foreign policy issues closest to his heart. Crosland once remarked to Callaghan that “when… they cut open my heart, on it will be engraved ‘Fish’ and ‘Rhodesia’.” 32
While Kissinger had been preoccupied with Angola, the British had experienced another round of failed talks with Ian Smith. Callaghan, still Secretary of State for
Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs despite Harold Wilson’s recent announcement of his resignation, updated the Commons on the failure. 33 Smith had been proposing a series of negotiations to visiting British diplomats but had made absolutely no concessions about granting majority rule. Callaghan felt that British diplomacy had hit a dead end, and it
30 Undated Note, Objectives a F.P., File 5/13/9, Crosland Papers.
31 The intellectual origins of human rights as a concern in the 1970s and how they emerged from the perceived failures of decolonization is explored in Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). The idea that human rights has a longer and more unbroken tradition in western thought is found in Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History , 2007.
32 Crosland, Tony Crosland , 339.
33 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 22 March 1976, vol 908, cc29 45.
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was time to enunciate principles for any further diplomacy. He discussed this plan socially with the Queen, and then more formally within the Foreign Office before presenting it to Parliament in March. 34 Callaghan used the session to establish the principles that would guide the diplomacy for the next year.
Members of the Labour Party were tired of the last decade of fruitless negotiations with Smith. Smith had maintained that white supremacy in Rhodesia would endure forever, and the 1000 year leases the European population signed as they came into the country in the 1950s and 1960s meant that a good portion of Smith’s Rhodesian
Front (RF) party agreed with this philosophy. Smith’s position, however, was not as strong as his rhetoric suggested. The Cuban backed success of the MPLA in Angola had elevated the threat to Rhodesia and was expanding the violence of the Cold War in the
Third World directly into southern Africa. If the United States could not defeat the North
Vietnamese, would not fight the MPLA, and did not want to risk détente, what possible ally could Rhodesia have? 35
Callaghan laid out four principles that would define Britain’s approach to diplomacy with Smith. The first was that Smith had to accept the principle of majority rule. The second was that the transition from the white minority government to majority rule would take place within two years. The third was the principle of no independence before majority rule. The fourth was that Smith or any other Rhodesian leader could not
34 Transcript of Callaghan Press Conference, 10 March 1977, Washington DC, Box 140, Callaghan Papers, Bodleian Library.
35 The story of Rhodesia’s whites is briefly told in Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 616–621. It is covered in depth in Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock, “Rhodesians Never Die”: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, C. 1970 1980 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
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cause an excessive delay in the negotiations. Once these conditions were met, Britain would work to establish a new constitution that would include both Europeans and
Africans in a new state that would be supported financially and diplomatically by Britain.
Britain’s goals were to service “African aspirations” and assuage “European fears” while establishing a constitution that would serve the population and end the violence that was affecting not just Rhodesia’s white population but was pulling in more and more of the population of southern Africa. 36
Both Reginald Maudling for the Tories and David Steel for the Liberals worried about the consequences of the resumption of legal control. Callaghan assured Labour members that he would not tolerate Smith’s continued delays and he would work with the
Front Line Presidents to keep Cuban influence from expanding, Callaghan assured Evan
Luard that the Commonwealth and the EEC would be brought to bear to pressure
Rhodesia, but that until these conditions could be met or the dynamics of the situation changed there was very little the British could do. Callaghan had come to regard Smith as unreliable and that “his suppleness is such that one is never quite sure when one has grasped him and when he is out of one's reach again.” 37
Callaghan also drafted a long letter to Kissinger on 15 March explaining Britain’s views on Southern Africa. Kissinger personally supported Callaghan’s bid to be Prime
Minister, but could not say so openly. 38 Callaghan was slightly more optimistic on the
36 Rhodesia, HC Deb 22 March 1976, vol 908, cc29 45.
37 Ibid.
38 Kissinger to Callaghan, Washington, 21 March 1976. DOC 192, Department of State, Southern Africa , ed. Myra Burton, vol. 28, Foreign Relations of the United States 1969 1977 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 2011).
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situation in Angola than Kissinger, and he felt that the Cuban and Soviet influence would be limited to Angola in spite of their military victory. Callaghan did worry that the
Communist appearance of being on the side of the Africans made it seem in fact that the
US allied with the minority regimes against African aspirations. Callaghan called for the
US and Britain to “pre empt” the Soviets. To shape the situation in Rhodesia, continued
British aid to Mozambique would help the channel the government’s support of guerilla violence toward negotiations. In addition, if President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania could be convinced of the rightness of Callaghan’s principles, he would be a formidable aid in bringing about majority rule. Lastly, Callaghan warned that Smith was “slippery as ever” and that he would “play the Russia card.” Callaghan also believed in spite of the
American alliance and Labour’s well known antipathy toward white Rhodesia that Smith thought the US would come to his aid. Callaghan ended his missive with the note that
Kissinger should “take comfort”. 39 Kissinger replied that he was broadly in agreement with Callaghan’s points, but did not want to be seen taking action on Rhodesia as part of
Cuban “blackmail”. 40 Kissinger clearly valued Callaghan and the British Foreign
Office’s advice, and wanted to meet with them personally prior to his trip. To do so, however, he had to change his usual itinerary.
The first meeting between Crosland and Kissinger took place far from London.
Crosland was in his constituency of Grimsby in North Lincolnshire for the weekend, and
Kissinger’s flight diverted from Heathrow to the RAF base at Waddington. The two
39 Callaghan to Kissinger, “Dear Henry”, London, 15 March 1976, FCO 82 662.
40 Telegram of Kissinger to Callaghan, Washington, 21 March 1976. DOC 192, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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men covered a great deal of ground in their first meeting. 41 The fundamental diplomatic issue for Kissinger was how to keep Cubans and Soviets from getting any further support and influence in Africa while not aligning the United States with Smith and the
Rhodesian whites. Kissinger wanted the advice of Crosland and the Foreign Office on how to best work with and along side African leaders. Antony Duff of the FCO warned
Kissinger that Nyerere would be suspicious of American intentions, and Crosland warned him to make sure concerns about Southern Africa rather than a global struggle against communism were the center of Kissinger’s efforts. Kissinger replied the point of his efforts was to prevent Southern Africa from being an area of conflict. Africa, to
Kissinger, was not worth the fight with the Soviets that would occur if it did become a
Cold War battleground. To win the trust of the Africans, the US had endorsed
Callaghan’s principles as a way of “committing itself as a principle of policy to a greater respect for human equality”. 42
There were still the white Rhodesians to consider. The announcement that
Kissinger was headed to Africa to declare the United States for majority rule achieved through encouraging diplomacy by the Front Line States and that the US policy toward white minority rule would be “unrelenting opposition” did real damage to Ford’s campaign to retain the Republican nomination. Ford even more so than Kissinger viewed
41 Crosland to Ramsbotham, “Secretary of State’s Meeting with Dr Kissinger”, 26 April 1976, FCO 45 1876.
42 MEMCON of Crosland and Kissinger, Waddington, 24 April 1976, FCO 45 1876.
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this choice as “doing the right thing” and the best way of “[heading] off a race war.” 43
Duff warned Kissinger that the United States’ actions in Angola made the Rhodesians believe that the US would save them from the Cubans, but Kissinger replied that his
Lusaka speech would make it clear to the Rhodesians that the United States was against minority rule and that the whites needed to stay in their new country.
Kissinger was also looking to the British to give him specific guidance in how to deal with President Nyerere of Tanzania. Kissinger’s State Department staff, particularly his Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles Schaufele, understood that
Nyerere was primus inter pares in southern Africa. 44 Schaufele was a Yale educated
Foreign Service Officer who had served in Congo when it gained independence in
1960. 45 If Kissinger could persuade him that the United States was committed to majority rule, then President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and the guerillas would be more likely to agree to support the coming Anglo American initiative. 46 Duff stated that Nyerere would be suspicious of Kissinger and the Americans. Kissinger wanted to stress to the African leaders the Soviets would be worse imperialists than the British. The Egyptians had kicked out the Soviets, but it had been a difficult process. Michael Palliser of the FCO pointed out most Africans did not see Cuban involvement in Angola as a Soviet imperial
43 Gerald R Ford, A Time to Heal : The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 380.
44 Nyerere’s commitment to a particular version of non aligned socialism is explicit in his “Arusha Declaration”. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nyerere/1967/arusha declaration.htm , Accessed 13 February 2015.
45 William Schaufele, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Lillian Mullin, November 19, 1994, Library of Congress, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Schaufele,%20William%20E.%20Jr..pdf.
46 According to Schaufele, “Nyerere kind of controlled things in that corner of Africa”. Ibid.
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project, but Kissinger related the Soviet involvement in Angola to their involvement in
Syria where even Assad had to go to the Kremlin as “first in line as beggars”. The
British delegation finished their advice to Kissinger by reminding him that the African leaders he encountered did not want the Cold War to penetrate any further into Africa.
American support for majority rule was the surest way of keeping the Communists out. 47
In addition to setting conditions for Kissinger’s diplomatic meetings, Crosland also engaged Kissinger about the ongoing Cod War in the North Atlantic and Kissinger told Crosland that he “would do his best” to prevent US from selling gunboats to Iceland, but admitted that he might not be able to stop the sale. The meeting was a good start between the two men even if Crosland believed it was a “firm promise”. 48
After Kissinger’s visit to Britain, he headed for Africa. His first stop on the trip was Tanzania to see Julius Nyerere. Nyerere was at the forefront in the Third World of using socialist theories to attempt to modernize his country. 49 Nyerere was the most powerful and secure of the Front Line Presidents, and one of the harshest critics of South
Africa. He was a leader in the spirit of Bandung who wished to keep to the spirit of non alignment and keep the Cold War out of Africa.
47 The quote from Assad comes from a discussion Kissinger had asked the Shah to have with Syria’s leader. Kissinger had asked the Shah to tell Assad that it was not wise to try and blackmail Americans in an election year. Assad had in turn replied that the US had abandoned Vietnam, had weakened their ties with Formosa, and would someday “sell out” the Shah. The Shah preferred dealing with the Americans who could at least be talked to, but Assad preferred to be the Soviet Union ’s client even if it meant going cap in hand to them. MEMCON of Crosland and Kissinger, Waddington, 24 April 1976, FCO 45 1837.
48 Crosland, Tony Crosland , 325.
49 Scott, Seeing like a State , 223–252.
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Only his aide Peter Rodman accompanied Kissinger into the decisive meeting with Nyerere in Dar er Salaam. 50 Kissinger sought to persuade Nyerere that the United
States wanted to end minority rule in Rhodesia. He admitted that he had not been deeply involved with African affairs before this point but wanted to improve relations now. 51
Despite their differences, Kissinger and Nyerere quickly established a rapport. When the two men were discussing communicating through their ambassadors, Kissinger claimed that Reagan would make a good ambassador, as his experience as an actor meant he would read his instructions and not deviate from what he had been told to say. 52
Kissinger’s message to Nyerere was the same in this private forum as in public, where he stressed the same points and Kissinger used his openness and willingness to explain what the United States was trying to do to earn the support of Nyerere. 53 Kissinger understood that Nyerere was utterly committed to non alignment, but the US’s need to keep communists out and Tanzania’s leadership in southern Africa could function together profitably. Nyerere at the height of his power and influence concurred.
Negotiation and diplomacy would work in concert with the guerilla war to bring about what all parts (with the exception of Smith and at the time the South Africans) wanted – a negotiated solution that would quickly bring about majority rule. 54
50 MEMCOM of Kissinger and Nyerere, Dar es Salaam, 25 April 76. Department of State, Southern Africa .
51 Ibid. Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 30.
52 MEMCOM of Kissinger and Kaunda, Lusaka, 27 April 1976. DOC 195, Department of State, Southern Africa .
53 Schaufele, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
54 Kervin Brown to Aspin, “Dr Kissinger’s Visit to Dar Es Salaam, 25 26 April 1976”, Dar Es Salaam, 28 April 1976, FCO 45 1876.
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The details of the event showed two powerful statesmen at the top of their game.
Nyerere forbade a planned TANU protest, in contrast to Sir Alec Douglas Home’s visit the year prior where a protest got out of hand. Despite the avowed socialist nature of the
Tanzanian government, Kissinger attended “Tanzanian Union Day” which was a
“trooping the colors” style event. The Tanzanian soldiers had been taught to goose step by the East Germans, but their training had not accounted for the sandals the soldiers would wear resulting in some lost footgear. Nyerere also introduced Kissinger to his mother and some members of his tribe at his home. 55 To the British, Nyerere liked playing up his image as a revolutionary socialist abroad but in domestic policy he was a pragmatic man. Nyerere shocked the younger Marxists of Tanzania by giving “arch imperialist” Kissinger treatment as a “guest of honor”. Only Nyerere’s stature made such a gesture possible. 56
Kissinger repeated his successful high level diplomacy in Tanzania in Zambia.
For the British, Kissinger had as in Zambia achieved “greater success than anyone on either side expected”. They noted Kissinger had demonstrated “personal charm and skillful diplomacy”. Kaunda, like Nyerere and the British, was suspicious of Smith’s intentions but understood Kissinger’s approach to the situation. 57 Kaunda told Kissinger he supported Callaghan’s principles, but also wanted British military intervention to help
55 Schaufele also recounts that every time he saw Nyerere in Tanzania, Nyerere would have him over to his house to grill and to meet his mother. Schaufele, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
56 Kervin Brown to Aspin, “Dr Kissinger’s Visit to Dar Es Salaam, 25 26 April 1976”, Dar Es Salaam, 28 April 1976, FCO 45 1876. For Kissinger’s account of the meetings and events, see Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 30.
57 MEMCON of Kaunda and Kissinger, Lusaka, 27 April 1976. DOC 195, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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speed the process along. In contrast to a 1975 visit to the White House where he had attacked American foreign policy, Kaunda echoed Kissinger and Callaghan’s points and spoke out against racialism. 58 Kaunda and other Zambians politicians were still distrustful of US policy, but were glad Kissinger had finally taken an interest in achieving majority rule. 59 Kissinger viewed Kaunda as more reasonable and western oriented than
Nyerere, but like his fellow Front Line President Kaunda had no desire to be a pawn of the West. He, like Kissinger, ultimately backed Nkomo’s bid for power as it would likely lead to a more stable border with Zimbabwe. 60 In their meeting, Kissinger stressed to
Kaunda that his commitment to the creation of Zimbabwe was serious, but he would use
South Africa to pressure Smith to make the necessary concessions.
With the ground laid with the Front Line Presidents including Jomo Kenyatta of
Kenya, Kissinger could take advantage of Kaunda’s hospitality for a speech where he would begin his rhetorical offensive designed to end minority rule in Rhodesia as a preventative measure against Cuban aggression. Winston Lord wrote Kissinger’s speech as part of the Policy Planning Staff with the assistance of the African bureau within the
State Department. The Africa bureau stressed a commitment to human rights, while Lord pushed the geopolitical angle that he knew Kissinger would respond to better. 61
Kissinger’s speech, conceived to quarantine Soviet and Cuban influence in Angola, was also a pivotal moment in American foreign relations and Kissinger’s own diplomacy. It
58 Ibid.
59 McQuiggan to Reid (Central and Southern Africa Dept FCO), Lusaka, “Dr Kissinger’s Visit to Zambia” 28 April 76, FCO 45 1876.
60 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 30.
61 Lord, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
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established a clear commitment by the United States to eventual majority rule in all of southern Africa. Paired with his speeches on the need for greater economic cooperation with the Third World and the importance of morality in US foreign policy the year prior,
Kissinger proved that the Third World and a growing concern for human rights were also elements of his foreign policy in 1976. 62
Kissinger reported to Congress after his visit to Africa. He praised Congress’ recent increased support for both Africa and UNCTAD. He stressed that President Ford had approved the text of the Lusaka speech and was committed to the repeal of the Byrd
Amendment. 63 Kissinger repeated the US pledge about majority rule to a CENTO meeting as well later that month. 64
As Kissinger updated Congress, Crosland took questions in the House about the initiative. 65 Crosland reiterated Labour’s commitment not to negotiate with Smith until he agreed to the preconditions outlined by Callaghan in March while supporting
Kissinger’s new diplomatic efforts. Kissinger’s speech signaled that there was no escape for Smith. Crosland’s confidence in Kissinger was an odd counterpoint to the disasters that had befallen American foreign policy and Kissinger personally over the past year.
62 Isaacson, Kissinger , 686–689; Sargent, “The United States and Globalization in the 1979s.” For Lord, “he [HAK] would always grant a role for values in our policies”. Lord, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
63 Ramsbotham to Crosland, “Kissinger’s Africa Tour”, Washington, 13 May 1976, FCO 45 1876.
64 “CENTO Restricted Session: Review of the International Situation Summary of Record of Statement by Dr Kissinger 27 May 1976”, FCO 45 1876. CENTO is short for Central Treaty Organization. The organization ceased to exist in 1979 with the fall of Iran. The decline of CENTO is outlined in Panagiotis Dimitrakis, “British Diplomacy and the Decline of CENTO,” Comparative Strategy 28, no. 4 (October 2009): 317–31.
65 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 28 April 1976, vol 910 cc353.
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Vietnam and Angola had fallen, he had lost his position as the National Security Advisor and had come close to resigning, but his actions had committed the United States to majority rule and brought the fall of Smith much closer to the realm of the possible.
Several of the more imperialist Tories including Winston Churchill (the former Prime
Minister’s grandson) used Crosland’s statement as a way of criticizing Labour’s decision to send financial aid to Mozambique which was sponsoring guerillas fighting the Smith regime, but Crosland replied that a refusal to back the Government’s standards and
Kissinger’s efforts would condemn the entire region to cycles of even greater violence.
The Tories objected, but there was little they could do. Kissinger’s speech in Lusaka had set him on a course against Smith and with Crosland.
As Crosland took questions on Kissinger and his diplomacy, some latent anti
Americanism began to surface. Jon Biggs Davison claimed that this Anglo American initiative had “[undermined] every moderate person in Rhodesia and [given] comfort to
Soviet imperialism in Southern Africa.” 66 Julian Amery compared Kissinger in the
Africa to Dulles and Eisenhower in the Middle East and their weakening of the British position in the post Suez era. 67 Crosland defended Kissinger and compared his speech in
Lusaka to Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech.
Peter Morrison mocked Crosland for his early morning meeting with Kissinger at an obscure RAF base. 68 Morrison’s jab in particular gave lie to the situation. It was
66 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 28 April 1976, vol 910 cc353.
67 Eisenhower’s post Suez diplomacy in the Middle East in the subject of Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
68 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 28 April 1976, vol 910, cc363 5.
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Crosland’s insistence and not Kissinger’s pique that had set the place of their meeting. If it were not for Crosland’s commitment to his corner of Lincolnshire, Kissinger might never have had the opportunity to ask “Where is Grimsby?” The criticism was not limited to the Tories. Frank Allaun, the Labour idealist who would emerge as the
Chairman of the National Executive Committee in 1978, asked Crosland if he could ask
Kissinger to “keep the CIA out of Britain.” 69
However, there were still some problems going forward for the partnership. The primary problem was that there was no real plan. When Christopher Brocklebank
Fowler, then a Tory who would later defect to the Social Democrats, asked Crosland to provide more details on how exactly the British would guarantee the security of the people of Rhodesia during the transition, Crosland could not provide an answer. With
Labour’s end in mind, Kissinger’s staff and the British began their planning. 70
Time, it seemed to the planners on Kissinger’s staff and in the Rhodesia
Department of the FCO, was on the side of the Soviet Union and its allies such as Cuba.
If a “speedy resolution” were to take place, it would forestall the extreme left in the national liberation movements from gaining power, would protect the countries of
Southern Africa –both white and black – from Soviet influence, and “time would be gained” for South Africa to establish economic ties with its neighbors and be shown a way that could lead to the solution of its “more intransigent racial problems.” 71 Kissinger
69 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 28 April 1976, vol 910, cc363 5.
70 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 28 April 1976, vol 910, cc353 8.
71 Aspin to Rowlands, “Talks with State Department on Southern Africa”, Washington, July 1976, FCO 36 1826.
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saw not only the threat to Southern Africa in the renewed Communist offensive, but also the possibility of an emboldened Cuba ready to strike out at Latin America. 72
As Kissinger prepared for his meeting with South African Prime Minister
Johannes Vorster in Germany in June, Schaufele met with Rowlands and discussed how to proceed. The British delegation stressed that any South African support might help end white rule in Rhodesia, either by pressuring Smith to reverse his position or by forcing the white Rhodesians who were dissatisfied with the embargo and the war to replace Smith. The United States would have to take the lead on this issue, however, due to distrust of Vorster among the Front Line States. Schaufele also pointed out that
Kissinger had stated in testimony before the Senate the day prior that the US would try to solve the problems of Namibia and Rhodesia to buy South Africa time “to put her own house in order.” 73 Schaufele also hinted that the United States’ influence with both the insurgents and Smith’s government ultimately might be a matter of how much money the
US was willing to spend to ensure the whites stayed or that business would come to invest. 74 The British were equally sensitive to the fiscal realities of the situation. The
British wanted as much western unity as they could get in creating Zimbabwe, if for no other reason it would spread the burden of any financial compensation for the white minority. 75
72 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 29.
73 MEMCON, “Southern Africa”, 21 June 1976, FCO 36 1826.
74 MEMCON, Meeting between FCO Officials [Rowlands MP, Duff, Aspin, Young] and A/SOS for African Affairs [Schaufele], “Southern Africa”, London, 23 June 1976, FCO 36 1826.
75 Rowlands to Crosland, “Meeting with Dr Kissinger, 24 June”, 24 June 1976, FCO 36 1826.
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Kissinger’s penchant for secrecy was on display during his meeting with Prime
Minister Johannes Vorster of South Africa in Germany in June. Popular revulsion against the South African apartheid government forced the meeting between Kissinger and Vorster to take place in Bavaria rather than the “Social Democrat bastion” of
Hamburg. To compound this isolation, the two groups were in both hotels nearly 50 kilometers apart which protestors surrounded. 76 In his meetings, Kissinger cut the
American diplomats in Germany out of the talks so the British diplomats in Germany had to rely on reports from London passed through Schaufele for reports about the conference. 77
Kissinger and Vorster held several private meetings before announcing the results of their talks in front of their collected staffs on 24 June. Kissinger had leaned hard on
Vorster while offering what amounted to a bargain for time: action in persuading Smith to give up white power in Rhodesia would give South Africa longer to negotiate an
“outcome acceptable to all parties.” Vorster countered with the idea of “self determination” among multiple “homelands” for each race. Kissinger told him flatly this would “never be accepted.” Vorster and his advisors began to bow to Kissinger’s logic, and looked to Nkomo as the best option they could hope to get for Zimbabwe’s eventual leader. 78 Regarding the deal, Kissinger was more concerned about getting an agreement with South Africa than needing Smith to sign it because Smith might very well not be a
76 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 31.
77 Bullard to Aspin, “Kissinger–Vorster Meeting”, 25 June 1976, FCO 36 1826.
78 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 31.
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part of the next government. For his part, Vorster found it easier to meet with the British as well as African leaders if it looked as if Kissinger was pushing him to do so. 79
After the conference with Vorster, Kissinger stopped in London to meet with
Callaghan and Crosland. In contrast to Germany, Ambassador Anne Armstrong was present for the meeting. Armstrong had replaced liberal Republican Elliot Richardson who had served for only a short time before moving to another Cabinet post. 80 Later that summer, Ford would seriously consider Armstrong as his pick for a replacement running mate for Nelson Rockefeller before deciding on Bob Dole. Ford admitted later he should have taken the chance on nominating the diplomat who would have been the first female
Vice Presidential nominee from a major party. 81
At this point, it was possible that all the parties working in parallel were moving toward a mutually beneficial solution. Kissinger relayed to Callaghan and Crosland that he had sold Vorster on giving South Africa “breathing space” by solving the problem of
Rhodesia rapidly instead of South African taking Rhodesia and Namibia as a “colonial outpost.” Vorster would not accept a purely British proposal for ending white rule, but would only take an international one. The Front Line States would prefer the Americans in the lead, while Kissinger himself believed the reassertion of British colonial control
79 MEMCOM of Vorster and Kissinger, Grafenau, 24 June 1976. DOC 196, Department of State, Southern Africa .
80 Geoffrey M Kabaservice, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (New York: H. Holt and Co., 2004), 441–442.
81 Ford, A Time to Heal , 401–403.
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might be the best way of assisting in a peaceful transition. Callaghan and Crosland both wanted to make sure the whites stayed, if for nothing else to ensure Rhodesia could still feed its neighbors. Kissinger sought to influence events in the area indirectly, by winning
Nyerere’s and Kaunda’s support to deal with Nkomo and by getting Vorster to put Smith in a place where the whites would be forced to agree to a timeline for majority rule.
Rowlands agreed it might be possible for the British to restore their colonial government, but only with Smith gone and a “legal framework” in place that would place Nkomo in power as Prime Minister with the full support of the Front Line States. 82 In a subsequent meeting, German Social Democratic Prime Minister Helmut Schmidt told Callaghan that the West German government was excited about Kissinger’s new diplomatic focus on
Southern Africa, but were opposed to sending British troops which would lead to
“another Vietnam” and deflected any discussion of compensation for white Rhodesians. 83
The only one excluded from this circle of mutual congratulation was Smith himself. Meanwhile, Vorster was pushing Smith to at least accept racial parity in
Parliament, while Smith thought Nkomo would be the best leader Zimbabwe could hope for. Vorster used the specter of Carter’s victory to urge Smith to make some concession to give Kissinger and Ford an advantage in the upcoming election. Vorster also echoed
Kissinger’s point that for all the fear of communism in the West no one would save
Rhodesia from the Soviets and the Cubans without proof that Smith in some way was committed to majority rule in the future. Smith countered Vorster was asking him to sign his own “death warrant” and attitudes within the RF were hardening, but privately
82 MEMCON, “Rhodesia and Southern Africa”, 25 June 1976, FCO 36 1826.
83 MEMCON, “Rhodesia”, 30 June 1976, FCO 36 1836.
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accepted the inevitability of eventual majority rule. He further stated it must be
“evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary”. 84
Kissinger (through Schaufele, among others) kept the British informed as he prepared to head back to Africa, balancing South African distrust of the British, British distrust of Smith, Kissinger’s own distrust of his ambassadors, and the quest to line up countries that could provide financial backing for Zimbabwe. Schaufele also reminded the British of the experience of Portugal and France who each had to invest to help their former white colonists integrate back into society.85
On 8 July, the American and British principles met at the State Department.
There were five major areas where the British were concerned: 1) putting a new government in place, 2) getting Nkomo into power without it appearing he owed anything to the west, 3) finding money for compensation to the whites, 4) how to restore any
British government in the interim period, and 5) the political problem of “buying off a number of Europeans who have been in rebellion against the Crown.” 86
Duff, being pessimistic and realistic in equal shares, reminded the group that any agreement with Smith would be suspect. There was disagreement at this point about how complete the plan could be for a post Smith transition, with Kissinger warning not to get too far ahead on the planning, and Crosland needing a document that could gain rapid
84 Record of Conversation between Smith and Vorster, 17 August 1976. DOC 201, Department of State, Southern Africa .
85 Laver to Aspin, “Rhodesia”, 1 July 1976, FCO 36 1836
86 Letter from Duff to Wright, 9 July 1976, FCO 36 1836.
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approval from Prime Minister Callaghan. The proposed total compensation for the whites was to be between £1.3 and £1.5 billion paid out over 25 years. 87
When the reasons for the incentives came up in the planning process, Kissinger was dismissive of the mandarins in the Foreign Office who brought up the domestic
British political cost for Labour of seeming to pay off racist rebels against the Crown. To his staff, Kissinger had articulated four reasons such payments would be necessary: domestic political opinion in the United States, domestic political opinion in South
Africa, domestic political opinion in Britain, and improving the economy of Zimbabwe.
Kissinger knew of the British desire to solve this problem through negotiation, and he and his team had to acknowledge the dual necessity for the British of bringing Smith to heel without the threat of arms and of not allowing the butchering or penury of
Rhodesia’s European settlers. Kissinger and the mandarins of the Foreign Office held very different views on South Africa, and as Kissinger prepared to leave in September he was concerned that too much pressure on South Africa might inhibit his ability to put indirect pressure on Smith. To his staff, Kissinger singled out Duff and Rowlands by name as the ones who might undercut him. 88
After this cross Atlantic consultation, Schaufele returned to Africa to update the
Front Line Presidents on the course of Anglo American planning. Nyerere was still
87 MEMCOM of Kissinger and Crosland, 8 July 1976, FCO 36 1836. This would be approximately 9.4 billion pounds sterling in 2013.
88 MEMCON of Kissinger and Staff, Washington, 17 Aug 76. DOC 200, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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skeptical of Kissinger’s initiative, and believed Kissinger might be underestimating
Smith and in danger of using South Africa as a partner rather than pushing them towards ending apartheid. There was also the danger that a change in government in Britain might mean a lack of support for this initiative. Nyerere gently mocked Callaghan that
Tanzania enjoyed a higher level of political stability than Britain. 89 Schaufele made clear that black African support for Kissinger’s diplomacy would be key in securing domestic
American support. Schaufele also pressed Nyerere and Kaunda to acknowledge that the
British should “play an active role”. Nyerere and Kaunda responded positively to the
Anglo American plan, with General Joseph Mobutu of Zaire being told less but still responding in a supportive fashion. Schauefele felt he walked away with a “general mandate” from the Front Line Presidents for the plan, and a shared agreement that the
Presidents regarded the Anglo American initiative as a way of limiting superpower involvement in Africa. 90
Callaghan as well as Kissinger felt the need to keep their other allies in the loop.
After Schaufele’s trip in July, Callaghan informally but directly relayed the contents of the talks to French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Schmidt. 91 Soon after, when
Ford was hosting Schmidt in the United States, Kissinger stressed to British Ambassador
Peter Ramsbotham the need for speed and secrecy. Ramsbotham indicated that he would prefer a more public approach, but he appreciated the need for speed. Ramsbotham also stressed that the plan “had not received the formal endorsement of ministers” and that the
89 Letter from Nyerere to Callaghan, 12 August 76, Dar es Salaam, FCO 36 1829.
90 Ramsbotham to Duff, “Southern Africa: Schaufele’s Tour” 14 July 1976, Washington, FCO 36 1836.
91 Crosland to Samuel, “Rhodesia” 15 July 1976, London, FCO 36 1836.
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constitutional issues relating to reassuming colonial control would have “weighty implications.” 92
Part of Kissinger’s diplomatic offensive in the summer of 1976 included a visit to
Africa by his Ambassador to the United Nations William Scranton. Scranton toured southern Africa reinforcing Kissinger’s message from Lusaka about support for African economies and the United States’ wish to end white minority rule in Rhodesia. Scranton had a far warmer reputation at the United Nations than his predecessor (See chapter 3), but even he found he had to defend Israel abroad from comparisons to South Africa.
African leaders Scranton met on his trip expressed serious reservations that the United
States could change its policies in the face of a clearly beneficial economic relationship between Rhodesia and American car companies. Scranton tried to assure the leaders he met that Kissinger’s plan was preferable to war, but many of the leaders he met were skeptical anything short of an “all out guerilla” struggle could liberate Rhodesia from
Smith and his cronies. 93 Later that year, when Angola’s membership came up for a vote in the Security Council Scranton was the one who abstained for the United States.
Although he used the opportunity to criticize the Cuban forces and their “bloody” activities, he also stressed the United States’ “support for African solutions to African problems.” 94
92 Ramsbotham to Crosland, “US/UK Planning: Rhodesia” 17 July 76, Washington, FCO 36 1836.
93 William Scranton, Press Release USUN 80(76), 9 July 1976, S 0904 0046 04, UN Records.
94 William Scranton, Press Release USUN 157(76), 22 November 1976, S 0904 0046 04, UN Records.
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Despite Kissinger and Crosland’s best efforts to keep the details of their diplomacy quiet, varying accounts of their missions began to leak out. Nyerere gave an interview to the Observer that claimed that the United States wanted to use the African states to get Britain to intervene militarily against Smith. Nyerere, according to the article, would only support such a plan if it were to “immediately” impose a ruling triad of Muzorewa, Nkomo, and Mugabe. The British and Kissinger denied to each other that this was the plan, and the reporter admitted he might have misunderstood Nyerere. 95
In early August, Kissinger accompanied by Rogers, Schaufele, Armstrong, and
Rodman again met with Callaghan, Rowlands, Duff, Ramsbotham, and McNally.
Callaghan voiced his support for Kissinger’s efforts, but offered another warning about
Smith. Kissinger echoed the need for teamwork, but made it clear the Front Line States had to be involved in the process. A defined transition period would aid in making any plan acceptable to the African states, as would the exclusion of South Africa from the formulation of policy. The group agreed that the British should draft a more detailed economic and political plan for the transition, while quiet approaches to South Africa and the Front Line States should continue. 96
The major document the Americans and British formulated to shape the political and economic transition of Rhodesia back into a colony with a transitional government had three major annexes. The one that would emerge as a rift as well as a major Anglo
American misunderstanding as well as earn the allies the ire of Smith was Annex C.
Annex C was the portion of the plan the British developed within the Foreign Office to
95 Fingland to Crosland, “Rhodesia”, 19 July 1976, Nairobi, FCO 36 1836.
96 Callaghan, Kissinger, et al, “Meeting with Dr Kissinger” London, 5 Aug 76, FCO 36 1829.
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create a two tiered transitional government. There would be some manner of British authority reasserted, an Executive Council, and a Legislative Council. The African controlled Parliament would fill the Legislative Council. The Executive Council would control the security services and have representatives of both races, but would have a white majority. The issue that would emerge during the fall’s negotiations was rooted in
Smith’s desire to see the agreement that the British constructed and Kissinger presented him (but not to the Front Line Presidents, who might see the document as too pro white) as the end, rather than a basis for negotiation. There would also be a major issue in that
Kissinger was using a document as the basis for negotiation, seemingly backed by the
British, that in fact was not the official policy of their government. Although developed by the Foreign office, the full Cabinet had never approved the document. This distinction would haunt the coalition in the fall. 97
On 4 September, the American and British principles met in London to determine what the next steps would be. Ted Rowlands had just come back from Africa, and he reported Nkomo’s role in the guerilla war was “declining” in favor of Mugabe, and this shift in the balance of influence might put the chances of negotiation at risk. Rowlands had also met with Nyerere, who stressed he wanted Britain to have a “diplomatic” but not
“colonial” role, and did not want an “international” struggle. Nyerere was weary of neo colonialism (to which Kissinger added as a likely ironic aside, “he’s right”), and
Rowlands only alluded to an economic package to assist in the transition. The consensus among the Front Line States, according to Rowlands, was that no one had any idea how to unify the opposition, but everyone seemed to think Smith would have to go before a
97 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , 32.
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new white government that would negotiate with the rebels could come to power. A near simultaneous meeting of the African heads of state in Dar es Salaam produced no unity either on how to proceed. Nyerere did not want to be left with a “hot baby” if negotiations failed. Failure to stop the fighting would mean a civil war, and that meant another possible Angola. In addition, both Kissinger and Crosland expressed frustration with domestic public opinion that ran from hostile to indifferent to their cause. The two men described the challenges of conducting the foreign policy in a democracy thusly:
KISSINGER: After my Lusaka speech, I received 1800 letters, 23 of which supported it. After months of public education, I have received 120 letters of which 36 support it. So I have moved from 99% against to 66% against.
CROSLAND: My experience is the same. My constituency in Grimsby is restrained by illiteracy, and most of the mail concerns whether I wear white tie with the Queen.
Kissinger had to break Smith’s will for the peace process to go forward. The need to oppose Smith and keep the opposition somewhat united meant that no Front Line
President could compromise first unless a settlement was at hand, and Callaghan and
Crosland insisted the British would not go forward without African support. The key remained separating Vorster from Smith. Kissinger articulated that he would sell Vorster on the guarantees that would be part of the transition in giving the whites some say in the security forces and the executive, and then use this South African willingness to push
Smith to bring the Front Line States into agreement. Kissinger was honest with the
British and admitted a diplomatic success in bringing about majority rule would only help
Ford break even, for no white liberal or black would vote for him in the coming election.
Failure however would be ugly, for in Kissinger’s calculation nothing could be done for
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at least six months due to change of administrations. One of the British diplomats reckoned that an escalation of the guerilla campaign would include “kidnapping and killing white women”. The group agreed that while Kissinger talked to Vorster,
Schaufele would talk to Front Line Presidents who would attempt to keep them from presenting any new initiatives that might disrupt the American efforts. 98
After the meeting with the British, Kissinger reengaged with South Africa. He stressed American weakness in the region and how the US “[had] no cards” in Africa.
Vorster received a summary of Britain’s plan for the handover including Annex C outlining the projected political apportionment of the internment government. This summary would not be given to the Front Line Presidents, because Kissinger and the
British felt it might be seen as too rewarding to the settlers. The outline of the plan was to allow a transition period of no more than two years, with the interim government having a white controlled executive and a black controlled Cabinet from the all parties
Parliament. The formula for the interim government would be “white, black, and
British”. Vorster wanted to make sure the British nominated someone acceptable to oversee the transition as well as supervise the Army, police, and civil service. Kissinger explained the British would sell it by virtue of telling the Africans that they would have power eventually. Vorster replied that he hoped the British would improve the deal to make it more acceptable to all the parties , but Kissinger replied that if the British were
98 MEMCOM, UK: Crosland, Rowlands, Palliser, Duff, Ramsbotham, et al, US: Kissinger, Rogers, Lord, Schaufele, Eagleburger, Rodman, London, 4 Sept 76. DOC 202, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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that skilled in dealing with Africa they would still be ruling. Kissinger also described his distrust of Rowlands in working on the deal as he might trend too pro African.
Once the substance of the plan was clear, Kissinger and Vorster moved to the specifics of the negotiations. To prevent an escalation of demands by the Front Line states, Smith had to agree rapidly and without “800 escape clauses” and then announce the transition plan as his own. Kissinger was keen to avoid conflict with Africans, for conflict between the Africans and Kissinger would bring Kissinger into further conflict with the Democrats in Congress who would see this disagreement as further evidence of
Kissinger’s perfidy. 99 During his visit to see Smith, Kissinger wanted his meeting with
Smith to be secret and did not want to meet black South African leaders on his trip because he thought both could complicate the negotiations. Kissinger reminded Vortser that there could be no perception that this was a South African plan and there was no
“quid pro quo”. The basis for the negotiation would remain the political and economic plan developed by the British .100
Throughout the meeting, Kissinger was solicitous and polite to Vorster, even apologizing for not asking him to bless the food before lunch . This ability to charm almost anyone he came in contact with in the course of his diplomacy was one of
Kissinger’s major assets as a public and private diplomat. Ford, parts of the press,
99 The conflict between the newly assertive Democratic Congress of 1974 and Kissinger is outlined in Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect , 428–433. The end of the seniority system in Congress at the hands of the Democrats in these years is described in Borstelmann, The 1970s , 110–111.
100 MEMCOM of Kissinger, Vorster, et. al., Zurich, 6 Sept 76. DOC 203, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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foreign leaders, all seemed to be amazed by Kissinger’s talents. However, the number of
Kissinger’s enemies had begun to mount. The messy ending with Moynihan the year prior had signaled to Robert Novak of the Washington press corps that Kissinger was losing his touch when it came to wining bureaucratic fights. 101 Congress was pushing back not just against his actions and judgment, but against any idea of secret government action undertaken by the Executive branch. Rumsfeld engineered the loss of his job as the National Security Advisor, and the emerging foreign policy voices of neoconservatives were reviving the rhetoric of Wilson to challenge the ideas of détente. 102 Kissinger, despite these challenges, still wielded tremendous power to bring to bear against Ian Smith.
Touring the Front Line States prior to his meeting with Smith, Kissinger joked with Nyerere that among right wing South Africans he was a communist, and Nyerere joked about Kissinger’s possible attendance at the next non aligned conference. For the substance of Kissinger’s points, Nyerere had no objection to any scheme that would encourage Europeans to stay. He also showed flexibility on what the British role in resuming control of the colony would look like. Nyerere agreed that Smith had to accept the idea of a rapid transition to majority rule, and wished Kissinger luck. 103
101 See Chapter 3. Another description of Kissinger’s relative loss of position is in Isaacson, Kissinger , 666–672.
102 Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation : American Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 538–539.
103 MEMCOM of Kissinger and Nyerere, Dar es Salaam, 15 September 76. DOC 204, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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In Zambia, Kissinger sold Kaunda on the British plan by presenting it as mostly as a collection of Nyerere’s and Callaghan’s ideas. Kissinger believed that conditions had been set and Smith would agree to “majority rule in two years, a provisional government which has a black prime minister and a black dominated cabinet with only a few white members”. He told Kaunda that part of Vorster’s reasoning for pressuring
Smith was to improve South Africa’s relations with the rest of Africa. Kaunda, as well as
Nyerere earlier, voiced concerns about the control of the civil and security services by the whites and whether this would be a point of contention in the negotiations.
Kissinger also outlined his actions if Smith failed to agree. If Smith refused to acquiesce to majority rule, Kissinger would go on the offensive against him publicly and would use South Africa to impose sanctions. When Kaunda reminded Kissinger the fighting would still go on despite these negotiations, Kissinger countered with the fact that the US was still trying to end minority rule. The two tracks, echoing Duff’s analysis of how Nyerere and Kissinger would work together, would compliment each other.
Kaunda was also worried that the United States’ support for this initiative would end if
Carter won, but Kissinger assured him that the details of the diplomacy were being communicated to Jimmy Carter via a domestic backchannel through former Secretary of
State Dean Rusk (then teaching law at the University of Georgia) and support for the initiative would continue regardless of the outcome of the Presidential election. 104
As to the structure of the government, Kissinger deflected Kaunda’s questions about who would control the security forces during the transition period by promising
104 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , 588–589.
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South African sanctions on Rhodesia if Smith tried reasserting white control. If South
Africa failed to press him, then Kissinger would “consider sanctions” against South
Africa. Kissinger flattered Kaunda by praising the beauty of Victoria Falls and by comparing Kaunda’s standing up and applauding after the Lusaka speech to Kissinger’s handshake with Chou En Lai. This was clever for Kissinger, for Kaunda acknowledged
China was supplying the guerillas with weapons that passed through Zambia. 105
As Kissinger had departed for Africa, there was still some doubt in Washington if he would succeed. Liberals in Congress supposed Kissinger had little chance of averting war but Kissinger’s diplomacy was the “least best alternative.” Democrats had also, in the opinion of the British, begun to question why Kissinger ignored Africa until the
Angola crisis. The British embassy reported that the Ford administration had little to gain or lose domestically from their initiative. Success would not swing black voters to their cause, but failure would not help the administration either. 106
By the time Henry Kissinger found himself in the same room as Ian Smith in
Pretoria on 19 September, the intransigent Rhodesian leader faced one of the most experienced and toughened negotiators in American diplomatic history. Kissinger had at this point bargained with Brezhnev, Mao, Le Duc To, Sadat, Meir, King Hussein, Brandt,
Haldeman, and Dobrynin. 107 He possessed the backing of Rhodesia’s only external ally, and brought to bear the damaged albeit still powerful prestige of the United States.
105 MEMCON of HAK and Kaunda, Lusaka, 16 Sept 76. DOC 205, Department of State, Southern Africa .
106 Muir (UK EMB WDC) to Reith (FCO), “Domestic Opinion on Kissinger: African Trip” 16 Sept 1976, WDC, FCO 45 1876.
107 Lord, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
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Kissinger had consulted the Front Line States and their leaders understood that Kissinger and the United States were sincere in this attempt to bring about majority rule. That
Kissinger would succeed at least in the short terms appears obvious in retrospect, but all other diplomatic attempts to reach an agreement with Smith over majority rule had failed.
Kissinger even saw Smith’s reputation for truculence as an advantage. Smith’s previous rejections of outside diplomacy meant that his agreement as opposed to Muzorewa’s would provide a measure of assurance that African leaders would honor any agreement. 108
Kissinger’s multinational preparations paid off. Seven total hours of negotiation spread out over two meetings on 19 September 1976 forced Ian Smith to adopt the
Anglo American principles leading to majority rule and the creation of Zimbabwe.
Kissinger wired back to Scowcroft in Washington that the Rhodesians had agreed to majority rule in two years, black representatives in the interim government, a Council of
State to draft a new constitution, the British Parliament reasserting its authority prior to majority, and an end to sanctions when the interim government formed. Kissinger let
Washington know he was on his way to see Nyerere and Kaunda to tell them the good news. Kissinger now had momentum, and all the parties except for Smith had an interest in getting an interim government stood up as soon as possible. 109
108 MEMCON of Kissinger, Crosland, et. al., “Kenya; UN Security Council; Rhodesia; Namibia”, Washington, 8 July 76, DOC 197, Department of State, Southern Africa .
109 Kissinger to Scowcroft, Pretoria, 20 Sept 76, DOC 206, Ibid.
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However, to reach this accord Kissinger left room for ambiguity in his agreement with Smith that would haunt future negotiations. Kissinger left Smith with the impression that he could bargain for whites to control the Defense and the Law and Order
Departments. Smith took this as a promise, rather than a point for future negotiations. 110
The private reaction from the Front Line Presidents to this development was positive. Kaunda was “speechless” about Kissinger’s results. 111 However, what had been agreed to was already the cause of some confusion. Nyerere believed the agreement was the basis for a conference while Kaunda believed it to be the structure of the new government. Smith would not go to London, and the British would control the follow on conference once the “teams” of blacks and whites formed to negotiate to avoid drawing in the Soviets. The public statements issued by the Front Line Presidents from Lusaka a few days later which condemned the compromises to Smith belied this private praise and received wide distribution thanks to their publication in Pravda .112
In his speech accepting the principle of majority rule, Smith made it clear to the whites that Kissinger was working in concert with the British to bring the settlement about. Smith sold his countrymen on the deal as a way of continuing to keep communism out of Rhodesia and of ending terrorism. He stressed that he had agreed to a
110 Martin and Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe , 250–252. Kissinger’s memo back to Scowcroft on 20 September has no details on this subject. In his memoirs, Kissinger makes much the same statement that he acknowledged it might be possible for Smith to have two white ministers, but that the British and Front Line States would be hostile to this point.
111 Kissinger to Scowcroft, Lusaka, 21 Sep 76. DOC 207, Department of State, Southern Africa .
112 Smith (Moscow) to Crosland (FCO), “Soviet Comment on Rhodesia”, Moscow, 28 September 76, FCO 36 1837.
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“package deal” and that the Constitution would be drawn up by Rhodesians, but the details of Smith’s address were the same in substance to what Kissinger had described to both Nyerere and Kaunda. Smith ended his speech with a call to hope and to show the
“great fighting spirit” of the past decade that had “earned great respect from the rest of the world”. 113 White Rhodesians reacted in a wide variety of ways to Smith’s capitulation to the Anglo American initiative, but there seemed to be a growing acceptance of the impending reality of majority rule. 114
However, the matter of Annex C awaited Kissinger back in London. When the story broke about Kissinger’s success, Crosland wrote Kissinger that Annex C was not an official British government document, despite the fact the British wrote it and set it out as the way forward for negotiations. Crosland had not gained the support of the Cabinet for the document, and now Kissinger had to brief the Cabinet on the negotiations. 115
Ambassador Armstrong was nearly beside herself, and Kissinger was able to calm her by inviting her into the Cabinet. 116 Discussing the matter, both Kissinger’s team and the Cabinet agreed the future course was one of negotiations between Smith and the Front
Line. Lord Elwyn Jones pointed out that the key difference between Kissinger’s diplomacy and the earlier talks on the Tiger and Fearless was the inclusion of the Front
Line States. This, in turn, was the result of Kissinger’s rapid shuttling from country to
113 Telegram from Bowdler (SA) to HAK, Text of Smith’s Speech, Pretoria, 24 September 76. DOC 209, Department of State, Southern Africa .
114 Godwin and Hancock, “Rhodesians Never Die,” chap. 5.
115 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 32.
116 Ibid.
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country. For his part, Kissinger credited Smith’s turn of opinion to the guerillas, sanctions, and plummeting morale among the young who did not wish to fight forever.
Kissinger continued that a speedy resolution of the issue would help assure money from
Congress to support the settlement no matter who won the election. Chancellor of the
Exchequer Healey indicated that the British contribution would be 15 million pounds a year for five years. The group agreed that this diplomacy was still worth pursuing despite the risks (Healey seemed particularly concerned about all the ways it could go wrong), but all things would definitely get worse if they did nothing. 117 Callaghan stated that
Rhodesia was a “debt of honor” but their present fiscal situation had made them initially reluctant to get involved. However, Kissinger’s achievement in securing an agreement from Smith meant they would participate. The two sides agreed that they would not ask the guerillas to stop fighting until the interim government was established, and that the
Front Line Presidents now had a basis for negotiations. 118
In his public comment on the matter, President Ford stressed that the diplomacy was in line with Callaghan’s 22 March statement of principles. He called for an “African solution to an African problem”, and reiterated American support for an “Independent
Zimbabwe”. 119 The next day in London, Kissinger reminded the Cabinet that Smith would bring up the issues of the two white Cabinet ministers for Defense and Law and
117 MEMCOM of Callaghan, Crosland, Kissinger, et. al.,London, 23 Sept 76, DOC 208, Department of State, Southern Africa . The British record of the meeting is recorded in MEMCON of Callaghan, Crosland, Kissinger, et. al., “Rhodesia”, London, 23 September 76, FCO 36 1835.
118 MEMCOM of Callaghan, Crosland, Kissinger, et. al.,London, 23 Sept 76, DOC 208, Ibid.
119 Kissinger to African Diplomatic Posts, “Presidential Statement on Rhodesia”, USDEL SECRETARY AIRCRAFT, 24 September 1976.
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Order. Crosland argued the British should stick as closely as possible to the original agreement to have a place where all the parties could return to during the negotiations. 120
This initially positive reception, however, started to stall when Smith began to back away from the deal. By the end of September, Smith sent a message to Crosland,
Kissinger, and Vorster indicating he might not be able to hold up his end of the bargain because of the influence of Mugabe on the rebels. 121 Kissinger urged Smith to stick to the agreement as the best way to secure a “moderate solution.” He let Smith know he regarded Angola’s statements on the agreement as not helpful. 122 As the British reiterated the point that the ultimate structure of the transitional government would be determined in Geneva, Smith issued more and more objections to this line of diplomacy and referenced the paperwork he had seen on 19 September. The British embassy in
South Africa was also receiving reports from Air Vice Marshall Harold Hawkins that
Smith was issuing the protests to keep the harder line elements in the Rhodesian Front at bay and he ultimately understood that “there is room for give and take.” 123
The Annex C confusion continued between the British and the Americans into
October, despite the seeming burying of the hatchet by Callaghan when Kissinger came
120 MEMCON of Kissinger, Crosland, Armstrong, et. al., “Rhodesia”, London, 24 September 76, FCO 36 1835.
121 Smith to HAK, 30 Sept 76, Pretoria, DOC 213, Department of State, Southern Africa . Lake, The “Tar Baby” Option .
122 Letter from HAK to Smith, Washington, 1 Oct, DOC 214, Department of State, Southern Africa .
123 Scott (Pretoria) to Crosland, “Rhodesia: Full Text of Statement Made by Adam Smith”, 7 Oct 76, Pretoria, FCO 36 1840; Scott (Pretoria) to Crosland, “Rhodesia”, Pretoria, 7 Oct 76, Pretoria, FCO 36 1840.
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back to London after meeting Smith. When Schaufele and Rowlands visited Smith on 4
October, the two men told Smith that the five points he had agreed to were a distillation of Annex C. Smith countered with his belief that the Patriotic Front could not be trusted if the terms of the conference were not clear. 124 As Smith continued to demand Kissinger keep to the promises surrounding Annex C, in particular the composition of the Security forces, Kissinger reminded Smith the provisions for the government that he wanted
“could” be the subject of further diplomacy, but public demands would help him with neither the Africans nor the British. 125
Two substantial debates centered on Kissinger’s diplomacy when it resumed session in October. The first centered on Crosland’s announcement of the breakthrough with Smith. The second and more extensive of the two centered on whether or not to extend, as the Commons had every year since 1966, the Southern Rhodesia Act of 1965 which imposed sanctions on the post UDI government. Barring disaster for the
Government, renewal of the Act was a virtual certainty. What Parliament debated was the conduct of Labour’s diplomacy and what exactly it was Smith had signed up to do after his meeting with Kissinger. In essence, the Commons was passing judgment on the wisdom of working with Henry Kissinger and Kissinger’s abilities as a diplomat. If the
Foreign Office had passed the initiative on southern Africa to Kissinger, how good of a deal did the British get?
124 MEMCOM of Smith, Rowlands, Schaufele, et. al., “Meeting at Mr Smith’s House”, Salisbury, 4 October 76, FCO 36 1840.
125 Kissinger to Wisner, “Smith’s Comments about Annex C” Washington, 26 October 76, DOC 216, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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The first debate on 12 October was the formal announcement of Smith’s decision. 126 Crosland credited Rowlands and Duff along with Kissinger of conducting the diplomacy that led to Smith’s concession, and announced that Ivor Richard would lead the British efforts in Geneva to make Smith’s commitment to majority rule into a political reality. Maudling as the Shadow Foreign Secretary immediately challenged
Crosland to see if Smith had made a concrete agreement that would inhibit negotiations and if there were still forces (meaning the guerillas supported by the Front Line States) that were pushing for the immediate political solution. Crosland and Maudling sparred over Smith’s level of commitment to diplomacy and how detailed the plan he had agreed to was. Crosland maintained the British still had room to maneuver and that he had the utmost confidence in Richard, despite the belief of some that it would be better if
Crosland or Kissinger himself were to chair the conference. Crosland had to answer from the Conservatives if whether or not Kissinger had irrevocably committed the British and
Smith to a particular path, and from Labour on why Smith was given a two year stay of execution to continue running a minority government. There was an angry assertion from the Labour side that much of the controversy from the Conservatives rested on believing Smith instead of both Crosland and Kissinger. This challenge was ironic because Smith’s intransigence would outlast both Kissinger’s and Crosland’s terms in office. Crosland stuck to his opinion there was no specific document to which Smith had agreed. Responding to Thatcher’s assertion that the Foreign Office had been in error when it announced Smith’s agreement to a package, Crosland replied that Kissinger agreement was nothing more than an “enlargement of the Prime Minister's own statement
126 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 12 October 1976, vol 917 cc240 53.
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of 22nd March.” This assertion would be the basic conflict that would remain between
Kissinger and Crosland over Annex C.
The second debate took place one week later on 20 October. 127 At the heart of the debate over Kissinger’s diplomacy was what Smith had agreed to when he decided to agree to majority rule. The dissent was over whether the five points that Smith had signed on for with Kissinger were legal or political. The Conservatives made the point that if Smith had agreed to a specific plan and then negotiations in Geneva forced a change on Smith he might possibly be in the right in withdrawing from the conference.
Labour responded in two ways. The first was that Smith had agreed to majority rule because of weaknesses rather than principle, and the other was that any future avoidance of majority rule would make greater levels of violence inevitable. Rowlands ended the debate with a reminder that “no one can fairly accuse the British Government of bad faith on that issue” and that in all his negotiations with Smith there was no package deal.
Crosland stated again that the five points were an area of negotiation rather than the end of the matter, but the dissent over Kissinger’s diplomacy was voiced early in by
Peter Bottomley an anti Smith Conservative MP who argued that Kissinger’s and
Schaufele’s refusal to meet with Mugabe and wading into the situation without as much diplomatic experience in the area made this confusion over Smith more likely. This point was echoed by Liberal Jeremy Thorpe who praised Kissinger’s diplomacy but argued that the package nature of the deal could have easily have mislead Smith. Ever the dour realist, Enoch Powell once again accused the British government of subordinating its
127 Southern Rhodesia, HC Deb, 20 October 1976, vol 917 cc1474 619.
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interests to that of the United States and accepting responsibility for something it knew it did not have the power to effect. He urged the British to accept the UDI and along with it the limits on power that were the reality of the post war world.
Other members praised Kissinger, and argued despite Kissinger’s unsavory reputation in some circles that the closeness of the Anglo American diplomacy made it impossible for Smith to misunderstand the reality of his situation. Robert Hughes argued that Kissinger’s constructive ambiguity was the key to bringing Smith to the table. Smith still ran a repressive and racist regime, but self interest might still be able to compel him to change. This self interest, other members made clear, was what drove the South
Africans (Ioan Evens, Labour) and Kissinger (Julian Amery, Tory) himself to make the decisions he had during the last year. Amery directly tied Kissinger’s diplomacy to his interest in keeping the Soviets and Cubans from getting any further foothold in Southern
Africa. Winston Churchill (Tory) echoed this point when he reminded the Commons that were it not for the initiative of the Soviets Kissinger would likely never have engaged with Smith. Amery also was worried about violence derailing the Geneva Conference.
From his view, continued violence would mean that when Smith walked away from the table, the fault would be with the guerillas for maintaining the violence. Kissinger had thought about this problem as well but in order to make sure that the Front Line
Presidents would continue to support the talks it was agreed that the guerillas would not be asked to stop fighting, but that they would hopefully reduce the level of the attacks.
Crosland and Kissinger and their staffs had agreed to this. 128
128 MEMCOM of Callaghan, Crosland, Kissinger, et. al.,London, 23 Sept 76, DOC 208, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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Neil Kinnock echoed this realism when he declared that Kissinger’s involvement in and of itself was a benefit because it allowed Smith to claim force majeure in accepting the principle of majority rule and thereby make its inevitability more domestically palatable. Rhodesia had to matter on the global stage if the man who brought about détente and opened up China was getting involved. Kinnock admitted he had criticized Kissinger before, but found his involvement in Rhodesia was assisting the cause of majority rule. Other Labour members remarked that the United States had reversed its policy from the Cold War and was no longer supporting a” corrupt minority régimes wherever they may have been in Asia, Africa and America (Bruce George)”.
This had some truth, but the Byrd Amendment allowing the United States to import chromium was still the law and Kissinger had been forced to depend on a minority regime as well as several one party states to box Smith in to an agreement.
In addition to embracing majority rule, Kissinger had hit another mark that made the British more inclined to support his efforts. John Mendelson on the left of the Labour
Party praised Kissinger not just for working to bring about majority rule but for doing so through the United Nations by his rhetoric and his ambassador. Even though other members scoffed at this, Mendelson claimed that it added strength and legitimacy to
Kissinger’s approach.
The signs for increased Soviet influence in the area were legitimate. Vasili
Solodovnikov, the “the top Soviet expert on Africa, a man who has been Chairman of the
African Institute in Moscow for 10 years” (Patrice Wall, Conservative) had just been
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appointed ambassador to Lusaka. 129 This appointment combined with the continued financial support to Mozambique, a constant point of the Tories and an increasingly untenable commitment for the Labour Government given Britain’s growing fiscal problems, meant that the British had no way of abandoning the situation while maintaining good relations with the United States and the Commonwealth. A complete scramble out of Africa would mean ceding control of the situation to a United States who would dislike this withdrawal, a Commonwealth who would further isolate Britain, and an increasingly influential Soviet Union and Cuba would have proven they could best any army in the area.
When the summit convened in Geneva, Lord Richard assumed the diplomatic lead. Almost immediately, the issue over Annex C emerged as a sticking point in the negotiations. Smith insisted that the specific points of what the transition government would look like were up for debate, while the Patriotic Front demanded Smith adhere to the five bullets of Annex C. Richard, much to Kissinger’s dismay, became absorbed with the issue over the timeline prior to independence rather than adhering to the principles of
Annex C. 130 Smith proved as truculent as ever, and the delegations spun their wheels until early January. Kissinger, now a lame duck with the loss of Ford, intentionally kept
129 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way , 461. Solodovnikov was the Soviet ambassador to Lusaka. Despite his influence in providing weapons to ZANU and the suspicion by among others Nkomo that he was KGB, he was not an intelligence officer.
130 Reinhardt to Kissinger, “Rhodesia Conference: Geneva Prospects: Assessment and Recommendations”, Geneva, 19 November 76, DOC 223, Department of State, Southern Africa .
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his distance from the conference. He did, however, blame the British for the ultimate failure of the negotiations. 131
Five days after Carter’s inauguration, Parliament held another debate on the failure on the Geneva Conference. Smith’s rejection first of Kissinger’s points as anything short of a definitive political settlement and his subsequent rejection of Britain’s proposals for the basis of negotiation meant there was little left to do. This meant no
American backed financial support and recourse for both the whites and the guerillas to continue the war. Crosland rejected suggestions that this failure was fatal to an eventual peaceful transition, for Smith had done nothing more than repeat the tactics of rejection he had employed since 1965. Despite his scuttling of the conference, Smith had now agreed to eventual majority rule. Kissinger’s intervention, in Crosland’s mind, had still done some good. Smith now rejected the British proposals because they would bring about Marxism and white flight during the transition, rather than rejecting them simply because they would bring about transition.
Crosland stuck to his belief that there was a “moral and constitutional obligation” to keep trying to reach a solution when faced with the question on why Britain should keep attempting to lead the parties to a solution. Crosland also answered Enoch Powell who accused the Government of accepting “responsibility without power”, but Crosland indicated that even though there had been the “possibility of failure”, it was still worth the effort.
131 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 32.
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Some of Labour criticized Kissinger’s diplomacy with its secrecy that allowed
Smith to claim he could negotiate nothing beyond what he agreed to in September, but
Crosland deftly replied the fault for the failure of the talks still laid with Smith. Despite calls to the contrary, no “Internal Settlement” of “moderate Rhodesians” could ignore the power and influence of both the Front Line Presidents and the guerillas. To the suggestion Labour’s hostility toward Smith was the cause of white Rhodesian resistance,
Crosland simply reminded Parliament that “illegal régimes” deserve a certain amount of hostility. Despite the setbacks, Britain would continue to work for a genuinely representative multi racial government in Rhodesia with the assistance of the Front Line
Presidents, South Africa, and the Carter administration. 132
Through the debate, it was clear there was a growing frustration among the
Labour side of the house for playing the sucker when it came to Smith making promises.
Kissinger had thoroughly debunked the idea, if it was in good faith, on the Conservative side that Smith might become more conciliatory if the British government made the first move. Smith had only agreed to the transition to majority rule when he had no other options and every possible ally and way of escape had vanished. The Conservatives who argued there was nothing British diplomacy could do to solve the problem of white rule in southern Africa were, in Crosland’s gibe, a “relic of the nineteenth century.” 133
132 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 25 January 1977, vol 924 cc1182 95. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1977/jan/25/rhodesia#S5CV0924P0_19770125_HOC_183 , Accessed 31 May 14.
133 Rhodesia, HC Deb, 25 January 1977, vol 924 cc1182 95. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1977/jan/25/rhodesia#S5CV0924P0_19770125_HOC_183 , Accessed 31 May 14.
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While Crosland remained at the Foreign Office, Kissinger had begun to hand over the reins at the State Department to Cyrus Vance. To ensure that the Carter administration understood what he had accomplished in the previous year, Kissinger with his selected members of his the staff met with Vance, National Security Advisor designate Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Ambassador designate Andrew Young the day before Carter’s inauguration to try to maintain the course of the administration’s policy.
In his memoirs, Kissinger characterizes the meeting as perfunctory. 134 That may have been Kissinger’s perception, but the men who would shape Carter’s foreign policy took a keen interest in Kissinger’s endeavors. Young in particular was interested in
Kissinger’s take on the situation and the attempt to create an international fund to support
Zimbabwe. Kissinger recounted the history of the negotiations, justified his prioritizing a search for an end to minority rule in Rhodesia over the Front Line Presidents’ preference for dealing with Namibia, and blamed the British (specifically Ivor Richard) for the breakdown in negotiations. He also recounted how the British discounted Annex C after it had formed the basis for much of the previous summer’s diplomatic activity and his disbelief that a Government official could hand over an official document that did not have official standing. 135
134 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 34.
135 MEMCON of Kissinger, Vance, Young, et. al, “Southern Africa”, Washington, 19 Jan 1977. DOC 239, Department of State, Southern Africa . In fact, Richard had spent so much time in Geneva the task of writing the yearly report from the UN Mission fell to his deputy. Simpson Orelbar to Byatt, “Annual Review” London, 2 Mar 1977, FCO 58 1064.
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Kissinger’s genuinely close relationship with Crosland belied his remaining professional bitterness toward the British disavowal of Annex C. In one of the last letters
Crosland sent to Kissinger, Crosland wrote:
“It must be a fairly unusual experience to make a new friend, and so quickly, comparatively late in life, and our friendship over the last nine months has given me enormous pleasure, as well as adding gaiety and wit to the sometimes bleak world of foreign policy. It must be even more unusual when the new friend is someone whom one greatly admires.” 136
Crosland went on to make a joke that Kissinger’s “misadministration” of the State
Department had delayed a gift from Susan Crosland to her sister Ellen. The details were to be found, of course, in Annex C which is “a basis for discussion only, and not (repeat not) endorsed by the British Cabinet.”
The efforts of Crosland and Kissinger in southern Africa were at an end. Their friendship had survived the argument over the nature of Annex C, Kissinger’s disappointment over the British diplomatic effort to follow up his breakthrough, and
Crosland’s hostility to accepting the American backed terms of the IMF loan that same year. 137 Crosland was still friends with many of the men who criticized Kissinger from the right, and Kissinger was notorious for cutting down those men whose criticism might harm his reputation. 138 What might have been was unknown, for Crosland was to pass
136 Crosland to Kissinger, 7 Jan 1977, Folder 13, Part 5, Crosland Papers.
137 Burk, Goodbye, Great Britain .
138 Crosland’s relationships with Kristol, Bell, and Moynihan is detailed in Chapter 3. For Kissinger’s post office behavior see Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press,
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away unexpectedly the next month. Crosland’s ashes were scattered at sea from a fishing trawler, and the Foreign Office passed on to Crosland’s relatively junior deputy, David
Owen. 139
Conclusion
In the end, Kissinger and the British were only partially successful in their pursuit of the goal of ending white minority rule in southern Africa. They had forced Smith to cross a rhetorical and diplomatic boundary that made the creation of Zimbabwe a matter of time. Theirs had been an intricate piece of diplomacy involving several close allies of the United States, multiple states whose leaders easily fell into the category of British born socialism that Moynihan had written about the year prior, and two international pariahs. Kissinger himself and the Ford administration at large was under the dual assault at home from the neoconservatives on the right and the growing influence of the
McGovernite left on the Democratic Party. Kissinger’s last attempt at a foreign policy coup had its parallels with Johnson’s dispatching of Harriman supported by former
Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance and General Andrew Goodpaster to Paris in
1968 to end the Vietnam War. In both cases, the ultimate cause of failure was the intransigence of the other side of the table. 140 Smith still believed he could play for time, and that the British would not be able to succeed in ending his regime. Callaghan
2003). In an amusing portrait of Kissinger after he left office, Pipes depicts not just how Kissinger not only advised him to supplant his boss in the Reagan White House but also how Kissinger could almost seem bemused by his own reputation when in public.
139 For the details of Crosland’s funeral at sea, see Crosland, Tony Crosland , 402–405.
140 Kissinger enjoyed far more support from President Ford than Harriman possessed in 1968. For Johnson’s undercutting of and distrust of Harriman’s efforts, as well as Harriman’s disregard for Johnson’s views, see Kabaservice, The Guardian .and Sorley, A Better War , 90–92.
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compared the efforts of the British and Americans together in 1976 to “playing in the three quarter line and you pass the ball to each other.” 141 Kissinger with his love of soccer would have grasped this metaphor, but in the end he could take no comfort in his failure.
Throughout the debates of 1976, the British discussed the possibility of British military force as a tool for resolving the issue of Rhodesia. To some, the failure to allow
Rhodesia to have broken away at all in 1965 without a fight was the basis for the problem. To others, the spectacle of British soldiers fighting recent expatriates was a specter invoked to stymie any discussion of an outside solution. British soldiers might have a role in enforcing any agreement, but there were several barriers to this happening.
One was fiscal and one was psychological. The cost of a unilateral intervention would be unbearable in late 1976 when the US State Department was pushing diplomacy while the
US Treasury was demanding domestic spending be cut and the US Defense Department needed Britain to help keep the shipping lines to Europe open and keep deterring the
Soviets. 142 Britons fighting among other Europeans to resolve an ethnic dispute involving other Britons was not something the British Army was inexperienced with at this point, but a war in Africa was something almost no one on the right or left wanted.
This truth was the heart of Powell’s objection to continuing British diplomacy that in the end Britain had neither the money nor the will to force Smith to buckle under. Crosland was right as well that Britain had assumed responsibility without power, but it still had
141 Transcript of Callaghan Press Conference, 10 March 77, WDC, Box 140, Callaghan Papers.
142 Callaghan made the point about using British forces in Rhodesia as weakening their European commitment to Kissinger ion 5 August. Callaghan, Kissinger, et al, “Meeting with Dr Kissinger” London, 5 Aug 76, FCO 36 1829.
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allies. Kissinger’s efforts had pushed Smith to the table and forced him to concede the inevitability of majority rule, and the continuing of the guerilla war would erode
Rhodesia’s will and manpower.
After a decade of relatively cool relations, the first conscious Anglo American project in the Third World in the 1970s proved that close collaboration and correct aims do not automatically translate into success. Kissinger attempted to bring his previous credibility, the American alliance with the British, and his genuine concern for not permitting further Communist advance into southern Africa into the service of self determination of a colonized people. Even this modest goal eluded both him and
Crosland, for realism as a practical approach has the inherent weakness of limits. As a philosophy that informs the conduct of international relations, realism has only one real justification: the successful achievement of the desired end. To strive valiantly for what is impossible, even if it is a moral good, is to the realist an absurdity. It was the dangers inherent in the self righteous quest for a universal ideal that Kissinger had decried in his earliest writings. Kissinger and Crosland could only go so far into pushing Smith for they both understood the fiscal and psychological limits of their means. Smith had bent and even broken for a moment but he did not yet believe himself beaten. The means of forcing his hand were beyond the limits of the Anglo American partnership. However, even the effort had value for the future. Although a realist would regard failure as a miscalculation, the effort had carried on Britain’s diplomacy and made Rhodesia an enduring issue in American politics. Neither did this failure decrease American or British credibility on the issue with the Front Line. Although the memory of Kissinger and his applications of realpolitik would mark the conduct of the Carter administration, the
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British and Americans would walk farther down the path that Kissinger and Crosland had blazed to play a part in solving the problems in southern Africa.
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Chapter 6: Division and Discontent: The Limits of Anglo American Cooperation on Iran and Rhodesia 1977 1980
Surprising victories by unlikely candidates were a mainstay of Anglo American politics in the 1970s. When Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination in 1976
Democratic elder statesman Averell Harriman asked “How can Carter be nominated? I don’t know him and don’t know anyone who does!” 1 The United States’ embassy in
London reported that “Margaret Thatcher has blazed into national prominence almost literally from out of nowhere” upon her election to lead the Conservative Party in 1975. 2
The electoral successes of Thatcher and Carter in the late 1970s were surprises to the political establishments of their countries. Neither Carter nor Thatcher instituted a radical shift in the Anglo American relationship, but each leader sought to mix their commitment to the relationship with a drive to honor their domestic political commitments. Carter promised a renewed morality in American policy at home and abroad, and Thatcher was committed to curbing the excesses of socialism that climaxed during the Winter of Discontent. 3 Together, these two unlikely leaders would play leading roles in defining the outlines of the Anglo American relationship as the two
1 Quoted in Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (New York: Putnam, 1982), 277.
2 Spiers to Kissinger, “Margaret Thatcher: Some First Impressions”, London, 16 Feb 75, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111068 , Accessed 21 Feb 15. Cited in Claire Berlinski, “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 29.
3 For the best analysis of the sources and implementation of Carter’s foreign policy, see Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power . The neoconservative critique of Carter’s foreign policy was first articulated in Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade . Thatcher’s political and personal life up through the Falklands War is described in the authorized Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands , First Edition edition (New York: Knopf, 2013).
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countries confronted the foreign policy challenges of the end of white rule in Zimbabwe and the taking of American hostages in Iran.
Rhodesia and Iran were not the only crises in the world in these years, but they defined the limits and possibilities of the Anglo American diplomatic tradition. The energy crisis, closely linked to the Iranian Revolution, involved the United States and
Britain working with OPEC and the G 7. 4 Nuclear strategy and arms control were the dominant concerns of NATO. The Soviet deployment of a new medium range missile pushed NATO in deploying its own controversial medium range missile despite serious domestic dissent. 5 Arms control was perhaps the dominant concern of the American foreign policy establishment, and the battle over the contents of the second Strategic
Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) did much to shape the departure of many neoconservatives from the Democrats to later serve in the Reagan administration. 6
Intersecting with these troubles were continued shows of strength by countries in the
4 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 67–71.
5 Gates, From the Shadows , 111–112. Gates’ account of the decisive meeting in Guadalupe makes two major points: 1) that Carter’s leadership was the key factor in binding the United States, Britain, West Germany, and France into an agreement and 2) the lush Caribbean setting was vastly different from the winter weather that greeted Prime Minister Callaghan during his infamous “crisis” press conference. For more on the contrast, see Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945 1990 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 419.
6 The story of SALT II is covered in Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation : American Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 801–820; Strobe Talbott, Endgame: The inside Story of SALT II (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). For the role of SALT II played in the shaping and promoting the neoconservative movement, see Vaïsse, Neoconservatism , 161–182. The Soviet Ambassador to Washington at the time focused far more on arms control and human rights than Afghanistan or Iran, and saw those areas rather than any confrontations in the Third World as the reasons why the Soviet Union grew to distrust Carter and blame him for the end of the era of détente. Dobrynin, In Confidence .
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Third World that had been areas of shared Anglo American interest over the past decades.
The emergence of modern Iran had begun as a covert Anglo American project that involved engineering the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh and allowing the restoration of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1953. American and British intelligence agents, to include Kermit Roosevelt, put the Shah back in power and crushed
Mosaddegh’s attempt to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. 7 As British power in the Middle
East waned in the decades that followed, the Shah’s Iran became a centerpiece of
American strategy of stabilizing Central Asia against real and perceived Soviet threats. In these years the Shah’s government, formerly a pillar of stability taking an oil boom funded leap toward modernity, fall away and a Shia fundamentalist government take its place. 8 This revolution introduced a volatile new force into the Cold War that rejected both the American and Soviet models of modernity. This ideological challenge to both the Soviet Union and the United States expanded when “Students Following the Line of the Iman” challenged the very norms of diplomacy and seized the American embassy in
7 Donald Wilber , CIA Clandestine Service History, "Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952 August 1953," March 1954, by. http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/ , Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup, the Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979). Roosevelt’s book proved an embarrassment to the Carter administration when it was published in the midst of the revolution. The most recent English language history of the CIA’s efforts is Stephen. Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons, 2003).
8 The best place to start with Carter’s history with Iran is Sick, All Fall down . Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005, 292–296. The other major account of the Iranian hostage crisis from inside the Carter administration is Jordan, Crisis .
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November 1979 and held the American diplomats captive there for 444 days. 9 Faced with this breach of international law and the precarious position of their own diplomats,
Britain had to negotiate its commitments to international law, its alliance with the United
States, and its relative military and fiscal weakness to play a role in resolving the crisis.
The joint Anglo American project to end white minority rule in Rhodesia was of a more recent vintage than Iran. The effort that began as a mix of global anti communist strategy and globe trotting diplomacy transformed first into a foreign mirror of the
American civil rights movement and then a show of British diplomatic skill as Henry
Kissinger and Anthony Crosland’s partnership gave way to the efforts of David Owen and Andrew Young. 10 Their efforts in turn gave way to the determination of Lord Peter
Carrington and Prime Minister Thatcher and the establishment of Zimbabwe through the
Lancaster House Conference. 11
These crises presented a paradox in their respective outcomes. Britain at its post war low point in terms of international prestige was able to muster a formidable coalition of allies thanks to forceful diplomacy and personal commitment by the Prime Minister and her Foreign Secretary. The Tory Government defied the right most elements of the party and allowed an avowed Marxist to take charge of what had been the last British
9 The most recent book of the hostage crisis is Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah . For an Iranian perspective on the crisis by a hostage taker, see Ebtekar and Reed, Takeover in Tehran .
10 See Chapter 5.
11 Michael Charlton, The Last Colony in Africa: Diplomacy and the Independence of Rhodesia (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1990); Jeffrey Davidow, A Peace in Southern Africa: The Lancaster House Conference on Rhodesia, 1979 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984).
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settler colony in Africa. 12 Carter in contrast saw an ally become an enemy and his country lose the aid of its other allies in its attempt to resolve the hostage crisis. Neither the British nor the United Nations nor the American military could get the diplomats back. In the end, what resolved the crisis was bilateral negotiations between the United
States and Iran. Britain and Algeria acted as conduits for both words and money but could do little to influence the conduct of either side.
Given both countries’ commitments to support the other’s foreign policy, the resolutions of each crisis was ultimately in the hands of only one of the allies. Why did the previous history of Anglo American diplomatic cooperation on Iran and Rhodesia fail to translate into direct roles for both countries in resolving these issues during the years
1979 1980? The actions of each country had some effect on the diplomacy of the other, but the continued coordination meant less in a world where Anglo American power was diminishing.
Anglo-American Foreign Policy Figures at the end of the 1970s
Callaghan and Thatcher each had a prominent Foreign Secretary who shaped their
Governments’ approach to diplomacy. For Callaghan, it was David Owen. For Thatcher, it was Lord Carrington. Owen was the youngest Foreign Minister since Anthony Eden and brought a strong personality as well as a sense of mission to his new assignment.
Owen strived to implement an Anglo American peace plan for Zimbabwe that was first overcome by Smith’s plan to implement an internal solution and then by the defeat of
12 A journalistic account of Mugabe’s life before and after his assumption of power is Heidi Holland, Dinner with Mugabe: The Untold Story of a Freedom Fighter Who Became a Tyrant (Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2008).
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Labour after the Winter of Discontent. 13 Carrington then took up the mantle for the
Tories. A committed Heathite and “wet”, he still agreed to serve in Thatcher’s Cabinet until he resigned at the outbreak of the Falklands War. 14
American foreign policy was in the hands of a very different Democratic Party than had been voted out in 1968. 15 There were still representatives from the Johnson administration, but there also were new voices from the many factions of the Democratic
Party. Carter’s administration was remarkable as well for the extent these personalities shaped the approach to policy. While this focus on people rather than systems is one of the key differences between the American and British systems of government, it was particularly true for the Carter administration. 16 Carter’s Democratic Party had torn itself asunder since the middle years of the Johnson administration. The New Left had, at least to the viewing audiences at home, destroyed the outside of the Democratic National
Convention in 1968. It had done the same thing to McGovern’s electoral chances from inside in 1972. 17 In response to the changing demographics of the party, Carter sought to be inclusive in his selections for posts inside the Executive Branch. Responding to
13 David Owen and Kenneth Harris, Personally Speaking to Kenneth Harris (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). Owen spent his time out of office breaking away from Labour with other centrists to form the Social Democratic Party. He was a man who often clashed with his civil servants and even before the split in Labour alienated his colleagues.
14 Peter Carrington, Reflecting on Things Past : The Memoirs of Peter Lord Carrington. , 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
15 Ford puts his gaffe into the context of the campaign in Ford, A Time to Heal , 422–435. The shattering effect on the campaign is described in Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford , 2007, chap. 10.
16 Steiner, “Decision Making in American and British Foreign Policy: An Open and Shut Case.”
17 This transformation and its links to the origins of neoconservativism as a political as opposed to intellectual force is found in Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks , 290. The chaos the 1972 Democratic Convention is described in Hayward, The Age of Reagan. , chap. 8.
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Secretary of State Vance’s note about a panel that State was convening to pick replacements for the ones who were “not qualified to carry out their functions”, Carter wrote that future panels “need many more women.” 18 Carter echoed these remarks when the Cabinet met on 7 February 1977. 19
The dominant personalities in the Carter administration for foreign affairs regarding the Third World in general were the President himself, Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Andrew Young. 20
Jimmy Carter was at the beginning of the 1976 election season no one’s pick to be the President but his own. Carter’s indefatigable efforts in the living rooms of Iowa propelled him toward the Presidency past such liberal luminaries as Henry “Scoop”
Jackson, Mo Udall, and Jerry Brown as well as the Democratic reactionary George
Wallace. 21 Carter was an outlier within the demographic trends of the Democratic Party.
He was a born again Southern Baptist in an era where evangelicals were just beginning to emerge as a political force. He had won the election without emerging from either a significant urban Democratic machine or from Congress. 22
18 Vance to Carter, “Moving to Replace Ambassadors”, 26 Jan 77, Washington, NLC 126 6 6 1 8.
19 Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, 7 Feb 77, Washington, NLC 7 11 6 2 4.
20 A full study of the Carter administration’s foreign policy would also have to include Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Patricia M. Derrian and Vice President Walter Mondale. Derrian, a central figure in the Carter administration’s quest for improved human rights behavior by some countries some of the time, was like Young a veteran of the Civil Rights movement.
21 Jules Witcover, Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972 1976 (New York: Viking Press, 1977).
22 George C Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 831–832.
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For Carter, “human rights” would be a key part of his foreign policy. He made it a centerpiece of his speeches, met with dissidents, and cut off aid to countries for their poor performance. Despite this Presidential level commitment to putting human rights into practice, there was still some resistance inside the government. 23 In June 1979, a
National Security staffer argued that diplomats within the regional bureaus were ignoring
White House directives on enforcing human rights provisions in order to protect the interests of the country against a President “who ‘didn’t understand’ the realities of international politics.” In this terse analysis, it meant that even three years later
“Kissinger lives.” 24
The Carter administration was far from alone in making a commitment to human rights as a guiding principle. The late 1970s saw a flowering of NGOs dedicated to the fight for human rights. Amnesty International won the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize. Human rights were an explicit part of the Labour Government’s policy as well. David Owen, during his tenure as Foreign Secretary produced a book entitled simply Human Rights .25
Owen cited the Magna Carta as the foundational document for human rights in Britain, and argued that there was a powerful linkage between democratic socialism and human rights. Owen wanted to show the essential linkage between socialism as a way of
23 Muravchik, The Uncertain Crusade , 22–39.
24 Thorton to Brzezinski, “Human Rights” undated (July ’79), DOC 188, Department of State, Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs , ed. Kristin Ahlberg, vol. II, Foreign Relations of the United States 1977 1980 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 2013), 589. Sick’s account of the debate over the battle between human rights and the sale of military goods to questionable countries was usually resolved in favor of selling the weapons. The best known case in Iran’s case is the selling of the same riot control gear to the Shah that the Washington police used to suppress the protests when the Shah visited DC. See Sick, All Fall down , 49.
25 David Owen, Human Rights , 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1978).
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improving everyday life and the natural place of human rights in all societies. Much of the book is less about human rights and more about what a democratic socialist foreign policy should look like for Britain. As early as March 1977, Owen was stressing the role of human rights both in public and in Parliament. Human rights would take a “high priority” no matter what government the British were dealing with, but that due to the chances of harm to the relationship with “other governments” the specific plan for how human rights would shape individual interstate relationships would remain confidential. 26
Carter’s personal relations with Callaghan and the useful working relationship that he and Thatcher developed was not a given. Carter thanked Callaghan for his efforts at arranging for support for the handover of the Panama Canal. 27 Carter alienated fellow democrats as diverse as Menachem Begin, Tip O’Neill, and Helmut Schmidt. 28 Thatcher in her memoirs portrays a sympathetic yet ineffective Carter. She rates him highly for his intelligence, his scientific training –a rarity in politics that they shared, and his sincerity.
However, she also saw an indecisive man with no clear vision of economics or foreign policy whose policies produced conflicting and often sub optimal results. In the end,
Thatcher judged Carter unlucky. 29
26 Human Rights, HC Deb, 30 March 1977, vol 929 cc396 8.
27 Vance to Brewster, “Reply to Prime Minister Callaghan’s Message on Panama Canal Treaties” Washington, 9 Oct 77, WHCF CO 167, Carter Library.
28 Carter and Schmidt’s mutual dislike is outlined in Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power , 247. Carter’s poor relations with Congressional Democrats based on the general anti Washington tone of his election campaign and his legislative bullying is found in Hayward, The Age of Reagan. The most even handed analysis of Carter’s ongoing and perhaps unintentional alienation of the neoconservative Democrats, including the infamous “Breakfast Meeting” of January 1980, is in Vaïsse, Neoconservatism , 126–135.
29 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 68–69.
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Carter’s initial trip to Britain in 1977 had gone well. Press reaction within the
United States to Carter’s visit was generally positive, and Carter had proven himself by charming the press, the Queen, and much of Labour. 30 Carter honored the smaller moments in the Anglo American relationship as well. In January 1978, he recognized the first trans Atlantic wireless conversation between Edward VII and President Roosevelt with a proclamation. 31 Thatcher’s initial meeting with Carter was in May 1977. On her visit to the United States in September 1977 as the Leader of the Opposition, she had met with him as well in spite of concerns this meeting might not be appropriate. Although the meeting with Carter in the White House produced only a polite note that praised Carter’s
“convictions” the rest of the trip went well. Thatcher impressed both David Rockefeller and Cyrus Vance in her meetings with them. 32
Much of the Labour Party welcomed the election of Carter. Tony Benn was impressed with his speech at Notre Dame in the spring of 1977, and passed a copy of The
Levelers to Carter’s son during the family’s visit to London in 1977. 33 Carter addressed
30 Ransmbotham to Owen, “U.S. Press Reactions to the Summit” Washington, 9 May 1977, FCO 82 764.
31 Schneider (Office of Science and Technology Policy) to Schneider (UKEMB), Washington, 19 December 1977, FCO 82 765.
32 Thatcher to Carter, London, 15 September 1977, CO167 , Carter Library, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110486 , Accessed 15 February 2015. Russell to Melhuish, “Visit to Washington D.C. of the Rt. Hon Margaret Thatcher, M.P. 11 14 September 1977” London, 26 September 1977, FCO 82/775. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/120817 , Accessed 15 February 2015.
33 Benn, Conflicts of Interest , 128.; Carter to Benn, Washington DC, 3 Jun 77, WHCF CO 167, Carter Library.
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Callaghan as “Jim” in his letters, but Thatcher was “Mrs. Thatcher” until her victory in
1979. 34
Carter’s lack of standing in the national Democratic Party before the campaign mirrored his lack of experience in foreign affairs during his time as Georgia’s governor.
Carter self consciously sought to expand his grasp of foreign policy, and his tutor in these matters was Zbigniew Brzezinski. A former professor of foreign relations at Columbia
University, Brzezinski sought to focus Carter more on the balance of “power and principle” in relations with the wider world and to not be afraid to take a harder line with the Soviets than Vance would endorse. 35 Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission along with oil heir and banker David Rockefeller and other Japanese and Western
European thinkers and politicians in 1973. The Commission had quickly become part of the foreign policy establishment, and produced the definitive establishment statement on decline in the mid 1970s. 36 Brzezinski sought to bring a greater degree of architecture to
American foreign policy than he felt had been present in the Kissinger years. He later concluded that Soviet actions, internal policy disagreements springing from philosophical differences, and a lack of public understanding of their policies undercut the administration’s foreign policy. 37
34 Carter to Callaghan, “Dear Jim” Washington DC, 16 May 1978, WHCF CO 167, Carter Library; Carter to Thatcher, “Dear Mrs Thatcher”, Washington DC, 11 October 1977, WHCF CO 167, Carter Library.
35 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977 1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).
36 See Chapter 2. For the report itself see Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission . Samuel Huntington, one of the authors of the report, served under Brzezinski at the National Security Council from 1977 1978.
37 Brzezinski, Power and Principle , 56–57.
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The executor of foreign policy for Carter was his Secretary of State. Cyrus Vance was the establishment. Along with Harold Brown at Defense, he was picked to reassure the still deeply consensus Democratic East Coast establishment that this Southern
Governor was not going to govern as an outsider. Carter had campaigned as an outsider, a visible repudiation not just of the scandals of Watergate but of the problems of
Washington in general. Vance, with his credentials as a New York lawyer as well as a
Cabinet officer in the Johnson administration, accepted the conventional wisdom of how the world should work while trying to change it for the better. He was in many ways the most tragic figure of the Carter administration, a man whose faith in tradition, diplomacy, and non violence was rudely violated by the Soviet Union, the revolutionary students and leaders of Iran, and ultimately the decisions of his President. 38 Rejecting Carter’s attempt to rescue the American hostages by force in 1980, Vance resigned with his conscience clear but with American diplomats still in the hands of a radical new power. Vance labored mightily for a lasting peace in the Middle East, for arms control and the limiting of the dangers of nuclear war, and for the virtues of diplomacy. 39 His memoir of his time at the State Department ends with a thoroughly conventional description of how the
38 This opinion of Vance was held even by some of those he had to fire under less than pleasant circumstances. Vance fired Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Schaufele at the behest of President Carter and Young in 1977 despite an earlier agreement between Vance and Kissinger that he could stay in position. Despite this incident, Schaufele proclaimed later that “Vance was almost too much of a gentleman to be a Secretary of State.” ADST, Schaufele.
39 Vance’s career is discussed in David S McLellan, Cyrus Vance (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985).
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United States needed to act to meet the challenges of the 1980s. Vance, even in retirement, spoke for the consensus that had been splintering over the past twenty years. 40
Compared with these two men, the man who most mirrored the outsider status of
Carter was Andrew Young. He had been a Congregationalist minister in a Civil Rights movement dominated by Baptists. Young had become the first African American
Congressman elected from Georgia in the post Reconstruction era. As a Representative he was part of the Watergate era of young Congressmen who broke the seniority system in the House of Representatives which made Congress more representative, more democratic, and less productive. 41 Young was Carter’s link between the domestic shifts in the demographics of the Democratic Party and his commitment to human rights abroad. 42
Young was the most controversial of Carter’s nomination to the intellectual right, but he was not the only Carter nominee to draw fire. When Carter nominated former
Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to be the Director of Central Intelligence, concerns about his previous treatment of classified information and his assistance to
“Pentagon Papers” leaker Daniel Ellsberg led to Sorensen withdrawing his nomination. 43
The selection of Paul Warnke, a noted “dove” and the author of a well known article
“Apes on a Treadmill” that argued the arms race was a matter of Soviet imitation of
40 Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices : Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983). This commitment to the a liberal centrism by Vance and his fellow Establishment figures such as Elliot Richardson is the central theme of Kabaservice, The Guardians .
41 This is the argument in David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life For Better or Worse (Basic Books, 2000).
42 Young explores his own life in Andrew Young, A Way out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young. (Nashville: T. Nelson Publishers, 1994). The best biography of Young that integrates his personal and professional lives is DeRoche, Andrew Young .
43 Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power , 45–46.
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American actions, to run the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency was challenged by young neoconservatives on just elected Senator Moynihan’s staff. 44 In one of the best recorded slights of the Carter administration, the highest ranking position a supporter from the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) received in the Carter administration was as Ambassador for “negotiations on the status of Micronesia.” 45
Young’s position at the United Nations made him a visible repudiation of
Moynihan’s approach of just a year prior. Members of the mission who had left during or after Moynihan’s tenure wrote back to congratulate Young on his approach to international relations. Tap Bennett, who had been dismissive of Moynihan in 1975, now wrote from his new position in Belgium at NATO that Young’s visit to South Africa and his speech to the business community in Johannesburg in 1977 had been “outstanding.” 46
Where Moynihan had confronted the Third World over its lack of liberty, Young confronted the issue of racism. An illuminating example of Young’s perceptions of the problem of racism on the global stage was his criticism of Nixon and Ford as “racist” in an interview with Playboy magazine. 47 Young did not mean that Nixon and Ford were personally prejudiced against minorities (although Nixon was) but that “they had no understanding of the problems of colored people everywhere.” 48 Young would later write that he was able to forge a very human connection with Gerald Ford during their
44 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism , 129–130.
45 Ibid., 127–128.
46 Bennett to Young, 26 May 1977, Brussels, BOX 143, AJY Papers.
47 “Playboy Interview: Andrew Young,” Playboy , July 1977.
48 Quoted in “OP ED Racist Remarks Looks Milder in Context,” Honolulu Star Bulletin , June 11, 1977, sec. OP ED.
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shared physical rehabilitation appointments. 49 Young’s willingness to talk with those with whom he disagreed sometimes often had concrete political benefits in terms of votes gained. 50
Another key difference between Young and the neoconservatives was that Young was also far more a committed capitalist than many in the Democratic Party. This commitment sprang from Young’s time in the civil rights movement where Southern local businesses had often played an integral role in ending segregation. 51 Young made this argument about how it was financially beneficial to end apartheid on his visit to
South Africa in March 1977. Young’s commitment to capitalism was such that Steve
Biko, a noted South African leader against apartheid, refused to meet with him. 52 Irving
Kristol, even as he was writing for the Wall Street Journal , had less trust in the average businessman who did not understand the morality of what business did. 53
However, in an echo to the dust up between Moynihan and Richard in 1975,
Young publicly challenged the British as well. Responding to criticisms about American foreign policy toward South Africa, Young remarked that the Soviets were the “most
49 Young, A Way out of No Way , 119.
50 “When I was trying to get a thing passed on Portugal, in relationship to Angola and foreign assistance, I mean, nobody in the liberal caucus or the black caucus could have helped me. It would have almost been the kiss of death for me to go to one of them for help. But John Buchanan, conservative Republican from Birmingham, Alabama, agreed to help. And it was because he agreed to help that we got some extra votes that got it passed.” Quoted in Andrew Young, Interview with Andrew Young, interview by Jack Bass and Walter Devries, December 31, 1974, Southern Oral History Program Collection, http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A 0080/A 0080.html.
51 DeRoche, Andrew Young , 82.
52 Ibid., 82–83. Biko was beaten to death later that year by South African police.
53 Irving Kristol, “Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Neo Conservatism: Selected Essays 1949 1995 (New York: Free Press, 1995), 258–99.
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racist people in the world.” 54 Young also remarked that Britain had “invented racism” and had “’institutionalized racism’ more than anybody else on the face of the earth.” 55
Questioned about it during a joint press conference with Owen, Young shot back to a
British reporter that the BBC questioner had been “taunting” him about the racial problems in the United States. He also remarked that racism remained a “pervasive problem” “all over the world.” 56 Despite the ensuing outcry and Carter’s insistence that
Young personally apologize to British Permanent Representative Ivor Richard, Young kept his job for another two years. Young’s reputation for bold and often provocative pronouncements was so well known that a tame performance was cause for comment by the British behind closed doors. 57
Young did have connections to the Third World, and even with the Moynihan conceived “British revolution.” Young had accompanied Coretta Scott King to India when she received the Nehru Award in 1969 on behalf of her fallen husband. There, he met fellow Christian and Nehru compatriot Joachim Alva. Both Alva and his daughter in law Margaret wrote to congratulate Young after Carter nominated him. Alva took
Carter’s selection of Young to the Cabinet and his mother Lillian Carter’s visit to the funeral of India’s President Ali Ahmed to mean that the Carter administration was serious
54 DeRoche, Andrew Young , 83.
55 AP Report, “Young apologizes for remarks about racism in Britain”, St. Petersburg Times , 8 April 1977, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19770408&id=OFwqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jF0DAAAAIB AJ&pg=5678,6869332 , Accessed 23 Dec 2014.
56 “Subject: Ambassador Young/Dr Owen Post Meeting Remarks”, 26 May 1977, London, FCO 82 773.
57 Darling, North American Department, to Melhuish, Private Secretary, “Visit of Mr. Andrew Young”, London, 25 May 1977, FCO 82 773.
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about improving relations with the Third World as well as minorities at home. 58 Young also carried with him to the United Nations his reading of Wendell Wilke’s One World which he had received from his father as a young man. 59
Ambassador Andrew Young on the Cover of Newsweek , 28 March 1977. Box 146, AJY Papers.
Young’s criticisms were not the only areas of public contention between the
United States and Great Britain. British civil servants were not above trying to use the influence of the United States in other areas as well. The Thatcher government’s first budget reduced the BBC’s funds for foreign broadcasting. The BBC’s leaders appealed to the American embassy in London to ask if Carter could intervene with Thatcher to reverse the cuts. Ambassador Brewster agreed to this proposition, and the proposal made it as far as a memo from Brzezinski to Carter with a letter to Thatcher in which he appealed to her as a “long time friend and ally of Great Britain.” 60
As part of the Carter administration’s push to make human rights the centerpiece of its foreign policy, the State Department began to issue yearly reports on the status of
58 Alva to Young, “Dear Mr. Andrews”, New Dehli, 23 February 1977, Box 142, AJY Papers
59 Bartlett Jones, Flawed Triumphs : Andy Young at the United Nations (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996), 4–5.
60 Brzezinski to Carter, “Threatened Cuts in BBC External Services”, Washington, undated (Likely Oct ’79), Carter Library, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/112269 , Accessed 22 Feb 2015.
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human rights. Britain was among the states that received this report card, and Assistant
Secretary of State for Human Rights Patricia Derian found that British civil servants used her reports to influence government policies in Northern Ireland. 61
There are intriguing parallels between Young and Moynihan. Each had experienced the death of their hero. 62 Both men were proud Democrats. Both Moynihan and Young were aware of the dangers of the President sidelining his UN Ambassadors as
Moynihan listed in the opening passage of A Dangerous Place and Young echoed in an infamous interview with Dan Rather in early 1977. 63
However, there were differences between the men as well. Moynihan’s guiding concerns were the ethnic and the intellectual, while Young’s were the racial and the spiritual. Moynihan believed in reasoned argument passionately delivered, while Young understood struggle and redemption and the need to change hearts. Moynihan was cosmopolitan, while Young was universal. However, Young’s true importance to the politics of his day and to the Anglo American relationship was his transformation of the
United Nations into a place of concern about explicit American accommodation to the
Third World.
61 Patricia M. Derian, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Charles Kennedy, March 12, 1996, Library of Congress, http://adst.org/wp content/uploads/2013/12/Derian Patricia.19961.pdf. Derian was like Young a product of the civil rights movement. She began as the Coordinator for Human Rights but was elevated to the Assistant Secretary for Human Rights on 17 August 1977.
62 Young was one of the pillars of the Civil Rights movement and had been in the Lorraine Motel when Dr King was assassinated. Moynihan had been in the Kennedy White House in November 1963 when his fellow Irishman was killed in Dallas.
63 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 1.
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Young’s attack on the British, whatever else it was, was not so much premeditated as it was a belief that racism was the most challenging problem that the world faced. Moynihan’s vision of a Third World sprung from an analysis of the dominant trends of political economy then practiced in the world’s second most populous country with 15% of the global population. The clear break between the men was their perception of what was the true crisis of the era. Moynihan saw a lack of liberty, while
Young saw the persistence of racism. Despite the PLO’s internal assessment that Young was an ally of capitalism and American empire, traditional Republicans and neoconservatives alike were worried about the implications of Young’s thinking. 64
Young was the first in a line of prominent Democrats that would threaten to turn the
Democratic Party down the path of “Third Worldism”. To conservatives both old and new, down that way lay accommodation to the Soviets abroad and most likely the total delegitimazation of Israel. 65
Not just neoconservatives found in Young a figure worthy of rallying public opinion against the broader contours of the Carter administration. The Republican
Governor of New Hampshire Meldrim Thomson circulated a letter written in his role as the National Chairman of the Conservative Caucus in June 1977 urging the recipients to write to Congress and demand Young’s removal prior to the convening of the General
Assembly that fall. The letter accused Young of favoring the Third World over the
64 “Andrew Young: The Two Edged Sword,” Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 139–145.
65 Norman Podhoretz Interview, 2 Dec 1980, American Jewish Committee Oral History , New York Public Library.
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United States and of disrupting “delicate” negotiations with the South Africans that risked turning the whole of southern Africa communist. 66
Young usually replied to his mail with a reply that flatly stated some unobjectionable nostrum about a commitment to human rights or democracy. He did however occasionally engage his critics personally. A negative May 1977 column by
William F. Buckley about Young’s speech in South Africa merited a handwritten reply about what he “really said in South Africa.” 67 Buckley did not just criticize Young in print. He hosted a session of Firing Line featuring the stars the 1977 Young Americans for Freedom convention where the first item on the agenda was their call for the resignation of Young. The arguments recounted many other criticisms, but included the same criticism that some in the establishment and on the left made against Moynihan that his rhetoric and indeed his very presence had become a detriment to the United States. 68
Young’s campaign to end white rule in Rhodesia and throughout all of Southern
Africa was the focus of his time at the United Nations. However, Young’s tenure at the
United Nations ended in scandal when he met with the PLO’s Representative Zehdi Terzi against the express policy of the State Department. Young then dissimulated about his
66 Meldrim Thomson, “Dear Friend”, Concord, NH, undated (likely April May 1977), BOX 143, AJY Papers
67 Young to Buckley, “Dear Bill”, 2 June 1977, New York, Box 132, AJY Papers
68 Transcript, Firing Line, “Young Americans for Freedom”, Broadcast date 2 September 1977, http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline . Accessed 30 August 2014. The other major subjects under discussion were the upcoming vote on the status of the Panama, the continuing effects of the Vietnam War and the radicalization of the 1960s on college campuses, and the divides in the conservative movement over economic policy (balanced budgets vs lower taxes and accepting deficits).
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meeting, and the ensuing outcry forced Carter to accept Young’s resignation. 69 The situation worried many members of the Democratic Party that the splits in the left that had begun at Ocean Hill –Brownsville in 1968 were both accelerating and becoming the debate of a foreign policy split. 70
A tumultuous moment in black Jewish relations followed Young’s resignation.
Members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference met with the PLO’s
Ambassador for lunch, and others met with Yasser Arafat on a trip to Lebanon.
However, the NAACP reacted more cautiously, and the SCLC issued a statement confirming their commitment to “Israel as a Jewish homeland.” The split in opinion about the issue of Israel and the PLO was a mirror of the split between the Old and New
Left, where new leaders such as Jesse Jackson who stressed the centrality of identity conflicted with older leaders such as Bayard Rustin who came out of the labor movement. For his part, the Israeli ambassador further aggravated matters when he suggested to a civil rights group that foreign policy was better left to “professionals.” 71
After Young resigned, reactions on the American political right varied.
Reflecting on her time at the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick believed that what
“happened with Andy Young” was that he had simply been in a “high visibility role” for
69 Young to Carter, “Dear Mr President” NewYork, 14 August 1979, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=32738&st=young&st1=andy , Accessed 28 Feb 2015.
70 The battle over local control of schools in Brooklyn and its fracturing of the civil rights alliance is described in Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal .
71 Jake C. Miller, “Black Viewpoints on the Mid East Conflict,” Journal of Palestine Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 39–43.
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too long. 72 Buckley was of an even keel about the turn of events as well. He attributed
Young’s motive for meeting with the PLO Representative to a genuine search for peace and his dismissal to poor timing and the “Profumo factor” of lying about the encounter. 73
Young’s dismissal just overlapped the 1979 General Election, and so his and Owen’s efforts in Rhodesia would pass to a new group of diplomats and politicians.
Rhodesia
The campaign of Kissinger and Crosland to bring Smith to heel had ended with stalemate in Geneva in December 1976. Smith had successfully played for time and prevented Ivor Richard and the Patriotic Front (ZANU and ZAPU) from reaching any agreement to end minority rule. The conference never reconvened after Richard suspended it on 18 December. With this stalemate the Carter administration began to look for a new way forward.
One of Carter’s first acts in office was to dispatch letters to ten African nations asking them to keep faith in the ongoing diplomatic process related to Rhodesia. Smith’s rejection did not undermine the determination of Vance and Crosland to keep up the diplomatic pressure, and Vance informed Carter that he would inform South Africa that any internal settlement that “excludes important nationalist leaders” would be
72 Jeane Kirkpatrick, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Ann Miller Morin, May 28, 1987, Library of Congress, http://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Kirkpatrick,%20Jeane%20Jordan.toc.pdf.
73 William F Buckley, “Andrew Young’s Double Faults,” Park City Daily News , August 20, 1979, sec. Editorials. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1697&dat=19790820&id=GCUqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_E YEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6479,3067616 .
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unacceptable. 74 Despite these setbacks, Richard believed that it was still “possible [for] the US” to “play a direct role in the Rhodesia settlement efforts.” 75
The Carter administration sought to “[develop] some new alternatives.” 76 After the initial meetings with Ivor Richard, the two sides committed to working together to create “a set of ‘propositions’” that could restart the talks in Geneva. The two sides developed an 11 point plan for moving toward independence which included giving the guerillas a “majority in the council of ministers”, assigned a British Resident
Commissioner, and declared that the process of transition would be both peaceful and
“irreversible”. 77 At a Cabinet meeting on 7 February, Vance was pessimistic about the prospect for a rapid resolution in Rhodesia based on his meetings with Ivor Richard. 78
Not everyone mourned the failure in Geneva. Nyerere told Richard that he was glad the talks had failed so the “Nationalist forces could get on with the war for
Rhodesia’s complete liberation.” The embassy in Dar es Salaam proposed that Nyerere’s enthusiasm was rooted in his distrust of Smith and a belief that the only thing that would change his mind is a military defeat. 79 The Defense and Liberation Committees of the
Organization for African Unity meeting in early February 1977 also invoked the need for
74 Vance to Carter, “Rhodesia”, 26 Jan 77, Washington, NLC 126 6 6 1 8.
75 White House Situation Room, “Noon Notes: Richard to Continue Shuttle”, 26 Jan 77, Washington, NLC 1 1 6 29 2.
76 Vance to Carter, “Southern Africa Situation”, 5 Feb 1977, Washington, NLV 128 12 5 14 6.
77 Vance to Carter, “Discussions with the British on Southern Africa” 8 Feb 1977, Washington, NLC 128 12 5 16 4.
78 Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, 7 Feb 77, Washington, NLC 7 11 6 2 4.
79 “Nyerere Switches Colors” White House Situation Room Report to David Aaron (Mondale’s Team in Paris), Washington, 28 Jan 77, NLC 4 32 1 29 0.
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continued armed struggle. At this time as well, Kaunda was growing more frustrated with outside powers not cutting off trade with Smith to include Japan, the US, and the
British. Kaunda “vented” to Callaghan over these diplomatic failures, and Vance was worried that Young would be subject to the same bad attitude on his visit to Africa in early 1977. 80
Just after his confirmation by the Senate, Young with his aide and fellow civil rights veteran Stoney Cooks flew to Tanzania to attend a political conference as well as a
Nigerian cultural festival. Despite some initial pushback from the bureaucracy at State based mostly in cost, Young attended the conferences and in the words of one scholar
“made an instant hit.” 81 Upon his return, Young argued that the way ahead in southern
African was to work with the British to “develop consensus on … [the] transition period.” In addition, the US had to work with South Africa to get Smith to stop his cross border attacks in fear of escalating and internationalizing the crisis. Young stressed that the British still held a “colonial attitude toward Africa” and could not deal with the post independence leadership in Africa. The British were also concerned about relations with
South Africa and the impact sanctions might have on their economy, as well as some worry on the British side that Kissinger had led them down the garden path and now they were on their own. 82
80 Vance to Carter, “Rhodesia”, Washington, 1 Feb 77, NLC 128 12 5 9 2.
81 Jones, Flawed Triumphs , 1996, 20.
82 Young to Carter, “Recommendations for Discussion Resulting from African Tour”, New York, 13 Feb 77, NLC 128 12 5 23 6.
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In May 1977, Vice President Walter Mondale and David Owen were discussing
British plans for Rhodesia with Vorster in Geneva. Vorster indicated South Africa was still willing to work with the British and the US to pressure Smith. One major shift in
Owen’s plan over Kissinger’s efforts the year before was that any post independence development fund would not try to prevent white farmers from leaving, but instead would serve the black African population. Balancing reassurances to whites and commitments to blacks was one of the diplomatic problems the two countries faced, as was the structure of the interim government. Owen indicated to Mondale that resumed British control would be contingent on American approval as well as an end to the violence in the country. In addition, both Smith and the guerillas would have to accept the British presence. Richard’s January plan was still the best developed option at this point, and was still the accepted way forward for the United States and the British. 83
Another key point in the Carter administration’s efforts in Rhodesia was the repeal of the Byrd Amendment. Senator Byrd had sponsored the amendment in 1971 as a way of ensuring the flow of chromium into the United States and prop up the Smith regime. The Carter administration lobbied Congress to drop the amendment. Kissinger and Ford had a made a half hearted attempt to convince Congress to repeal the law the year before, but Carter threw the full weight of his prestige behind the attempt. 84 Young
83 Uncleared Draft MEMCON of Mondale, Owen, et. al., “Mondale Owen”, 23 May 77, London, NLC 16 22 2 51 2.
84 Isaacson, Kissinger , 688–689.
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assisted Carter in securing the votes in Congress, and Congress quickly did away with the amendment. This loss served another body blow to the Rhodesian economy. 85
Young visited Britain after his trip to South Africa, and let the British press know that he had met with among other figures Robert Mugabe. 86 Young’s meeting with
Mugabe and his consultations with Owen throughout this summer were both ways of getting closer to the end of white rule in southern Africa while making sure the Africans saw the Soviets as a “negative force.” 87
By September 1977, Young and Richard had agreed to press Smith on the way ahead due to the “unequivocal support of the Frontline presidents”. Young wanted to press South Africa to pursue a more constructive approach to Rhodesia and Namibia, something that might improve their relations with the US and other countries. Both men also agreed Smith was still not entirely trustworthy, but that with more unity the
Nkomo’s and Mugabe’s forces might prove increasingly credible. Getting rid of the mercenaries and more violent Special units like the “Celous [sp] scouts” and keeping
Nationalist forces in reserve that could move in once Smith capitulated would solve any post independence security problems. 88 Young and Owen met Smith in September and attempted to sell him on the plan. In their meeting, Smith was more cordial with Young
85 Herring, From Colony to Superpower , 843.
86 Darling to Melhuish, “Visit of Mr Andrew Young” London, 25 May 1977, FCO 82 773.
87 MEMCON of Owen, Young, et. al. London, 18 July 1977, FCO 82 773.
88 Vance to Brzezinski, “UK/US Permanent Representatives Discuss the Next Steps in Rhodesia”, 9 September 1977, Washington, NLC 16 22 3 70 0.
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than he had traditionally been with his other sparring partners, but the next day Smith declared the plan “insane”. Young later compared Smith to a Mississippi sheriff. 89
At the UN Session in September, Richard and Young made sure to secure understanding from the Front Line Representatives as they built their joint proposal. 90
During their meeting with Kaunda’s advisor Mark Chona, Vance stressed that eventually
South Africa would come under the same pressure as Rhodesia. If Smith agreed to further talks, Chona replied, that would help diplomacy in the UN toward the settlement.
However, the number of players involved in the diplomacy meant that getting closer to a solution was always a challenge. 91
Later in 1977, the Carter administration reexamined its policies toward Southern
Africa. Owen and Young’s efforts since January had increased American efforts to resolve the situation, but Owen wanted to make sure that the venture remained a joint one. Any negotiated settlement would require parliamentary approval in Britain and an approval by referendum in Rhodesia, and the goal was that by the end of 1978 Zimbabwe would exist. Lord Carver would serve as Resident Commissioner and supervise both forces during any election period. The transition period would involve a British
Commissioner and Commonwealth forces to enforce any cease fire as well as a development fund to help grow the entire economy. The major problem with this arrangement was that neither Britain nor any other Commonwealth force wanted to be
89 Jones, Flawed Triumphs , 1996, 62; DeRoche, Andrew Young , 89.
90 Vance to Carter, “Rhodesia”, Washington, 16 Sep 77, NLC 128 12 12 11 1.
91 Vance to Carter, “Rhodesia Initiative”, Washington, 15 Sep 77, NLC 128 12 12 10 2
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responsible for suppressing any violence, and neither element possessing armed force in
Rhodesia could entirely be trusted. The Front Line Presidents were still skeptical about
Anglo American diplomacy, and were just as worried that the various nationalist groups would splinter or that the US and Britain would abandon the process. Smith was still
“intransigent”, but he was waiting for the Americans and British to make the next move. 92
When Owen went before Parliament to both provide an update on the progress he and Young had made as well as another one year extension of the Southern Rhodesia Act of 1965, the tone of the debate had shifted from the year before. What had been a debate over Kissinger’s actions and promises to Smith now focused on the difficulties of turning even parts of the Rhodesian government or security forces over to the guerillas. Owen stressed that Rhodesia was still Britain’s responsibility, but that he was working with
Young to bring about a settlement. 93
Faced with a worsening war and growing economic pressure, Smith decided to opt for a political move that would work to negate the efforts of Owen, Young, and the
Front Line Presidents to discredit him. Smith opted for an “internal solution” where
Bishop Abel Muzorewa would take power, but whites would still hold the majority in the legislature and the security forces. 94 At the same time, the member of the Patriotic Front met with Lord Carver, the presumptive British Commissioner, on the island of Malta.
92 “SECRET Southern Africa – Policy Review”, Washington, undated (1977), NLC 132 63 5 1 9
93 Southern Rhodesia, HC Deb, 11 November 1977, vol 938 cc1018 139, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1977/nov/11/southern rhodesia , Accessed 14 Dec 2014. 94 DeRoche, Andrew Young , 98–100; Godwin and Hancock, “Rhodesians Never Die,” chap. 7.
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Young was able to forge a connection to both Mugabe and Nkomo over their shared
Christian faith, but Smith was still proceeding with his internal settlement. 95
Smith used 1978 to attempt to consolidate his position while Owen and Young continued to push for a settlement. The guerilla war grew worse for the whites and the
Africans as the cross border raids increased and the guerillas began targeting civilian airliners. White morale, which had been high for the first ten years after UDI, began to plummet as conscription grew more demanding, emigration increased, and the economy slid downhill. 96 When pushed even further, Smith decided to allow elections that included balloting for all Africans not in the Patriotic Front. Bishop Abel Muzorewa became the first black Prime Minister of the newly renamed Zimbabwe Rhodesia. This election, however, coincided with the British General Election that swung the Parliament to the
Conservatives and made Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister.
Opinions on the legitimacy of the election varied. The Nation sent a correspondent to Zimbabwe and found that the election was a “sham” and that the election did nothing more than put a “black mask” on “white power”. 97 Freedom House, an American based organization that produced a yearly report on the status of civil democracy in countries around the world, sent nine men to Zimbabwe to observe the
95 DeRoche, Andrew Young , 92–93.
96 James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire , 620.
97 David Caute, “The Sham Election in Rhodesia,” The Nation , July 14, 1979, 52.
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election. The team concluded that 64% of the potential electorate had voted, and that the election “represented a significant advance to multiracial majority rule.” 98
As it became clearer that the Conservatives would most likely triumph in the
General Election, the White House (specifically Brzezinski) began to think about how
Margaret Thatcher would approach foreign policy. The London embassy believed the difference between her and Labour would be mostly one of “tone”. She was “pro
American, pro European, anti Soviet and distrustful of change in the third world.” She was also relatively inexperienced in foreign affairs, but the general Tory view was to preserve détente and approving of SALT, although wanting to ensure cooperation was tied to Soviet behavior. 99
Prior to the General Election, Carter had hoped for a Labour victory. Callaghan had escorted Carter on his trip to Britain and introduced him to the politics of the union hall. Carter had reciprocated the warmth, welcoming Callaghan to the White House in
1977 and bonding over time in the Navy. Both men were quite socially “conservative” in their personal and religious convictions. Carter was Baptist, and Callaghan was a monarchist. 100 When the Conservatives won in 1979, Brzezinski wrote a memo to Carter that stressed that Thatcher and the Tories would “move with considerably more caution
98 Raymond Duncan Gastil, Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 1980 (Transaction Publishers, 1980), 171.
99 NSC Staff to Brzezinski, “Tory Foreign Policy”, Washington, 30 Mar 1979, NLC 1 10 2 30 4, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/124470 , Accessed 22 Feb 1979.
100 “Visit of Prime Minister James Callaghan of Great Britain Remarks of the President and the Prime Minister at the Welcoming Ceremony”. 10 March 1977. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7143 , Accessed 14 December 2014.
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than Labor [sp] in southern Africa”. However, her selection of experienced Tories in the field of foreign affairs would “help compensate for her own lack of experience.”
Although Thatcher and the other members of her Cabinet were quite keenly pro US, the chance that her government might recognize the internal settlement in Rhodesia with
Muzorewa was the one area where there was a real chance of trans Atlantic tension. 101
Carter balanced the perception he supported Labour with a personal call to Thatcher. 102
Reminding Carter of their earlier 1977 meeting, Brzezinski referred to Thatcher as
“dogmatic” then but “pragmatic” now. 103
With the election of Thatcher and Smith successfully implementing his internal settlement, Carter was worried that Britain would decide to cut its losses and acquiesce to the existence of Zimbabwe Rhodesia. This time is perhaps the key moment of the United
States’ diplomacy regarding the end of Rhodesia. Young lobbied hard for Carter to reject the “internal settlement” and to keep sanctions in place because lifting sanctions would destroy much of the good will the administration had worked so hard to build in Africa.
If either Carter or Thatcher decided to lift sanctions, that decision would create a good deal of pressure on the other party to do the same. Young was assisted in the this effort
101 Brzezinski to Carter, “Thoughts on Thatcher: Foreign Policy Implications of the Tory Triumph”, Washington, 11 May 1979, NLC 6 77 2 8 1.
102 Rentscheler to Brzezinski, “Mrs. Thatcher”, Washington, 4 May 1979, WHCF CO 167, Carter Library.
103 Brezezinski to Carter, “NSC Weekly Report #96” Washington, 12 May 1979, Carter Library, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=110467 , Accessed 26 February 2015.
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by Representative Stephen Solarz from Brooklyn who was the decisive force in Congress in keeping sanctions in place against the efforts of Senator Jesse Helms. 104
In Britain, the decisive force keeping Thatcher from supporting the internal settlement was Lord Carrington. Thatcher came into office sympathetic to the internal settlement, but Carrington convinced her otherwise.105 In his autobiography, Carrington pays homage to Thatcher’s “striking firmness of purpose and integrity of character.” She also was possessed of a strong will and a sense of bravery rooted in duty. 106 She could not be moved on reasons of philosophy, but would take “in everything” she received from her advisors. This trait of the Prime Minister’s put a premium on ministers being
“precise in the advice and information” that they provided. 107 Once Thatcher had made her choice, she and Carrington had to formulate a new way ahead for Rhodesia. Rather than continue further down the road of the Anglo American agreement, Thatcher decided to take a new tack. She instead decided to solve the problem by returning it to British control. Before that could happen, the British had to convince the Front Line States that this was the best approach. 108
104 Stephen J. Solarz, Journeys to War & Peace: A Congressional Memoir (UPNE, 2011). After the success of the Lancaster House Conference, Carter wrote Solarz to thank him for his work in brining about the end of white rule. Carter to Solarz, Letter, Washington, 7 Jan 80, WHF CO 167, Carter Library.
105 William Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 302. Minter credits Carrington’s mining interests with providing him insights into the politics and future of Southern Africa.
106 Carrington, Reflecting on Things Past , 274–277.
107 Henderson, Mandarin , 318.
108 Davidow, A Peace in Southern Africa , 26–31.
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Thatcher would make her case for the British overseeing the resolution of the
Rhodesia crisis at the August 1979 Commonwealth Meeting. In the 1970s, the
Commonwealth Secretariat had been at the forefront of calls for the New International
Economic Order that would seek to remedy the inequities between North and South. Prior to the meeting, Thatcher expressed her concern to Commonwealth Secretary General
Shridath Ramphal that the members would be able to “transcend artificial divisions” and focus on the work at hand. Because of the mixed membership between developed and less developed countries in the Commonwealth, the British regarded it as the best forum for issues related to the NIEO as the UN. 109
In preparation for Lusaka, the Commonwealth Secretariat distributed a list of the topics for the plenary sessions. Two of the top three international issues of concern were
Southeast Asia including the current state of politics in China and the refugee crisis from
Vietnam, and Southern Africa which involved the struggle for self determination in
Zimbabwe. 110 The Queen formally chaired Commonwealth meetings and arranged for “a banquet and two receptions.” She attended the beginning of the conference, and the
British leveraged her presence to calm some of Kaunda’s potentially inflammatory rhetoric. This intrusion in politics was a risk for the monarchy, but useful in ensuring the smooth proceedings of the conference. 111 Thatcher was nervous about the presence of the
109 “North South Dialogue: Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting” , 10 July 1979, FCO 68 827.
110 Letter from Shridath Ramphal to Commonnwealth Heads of Government, London, 13 June 1979, 2010 94 1 CHGM Sec Gen Papers 11 Jan 12 Sept 79, Ramphal Papers, Commonwealth Secretariat .
111 This remarkable entry of the Queen into politics is placed in the context of post war decolonization in Philip Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 10.
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Queen, but HM left after two days leaving Thatcher and Carrington to represent
Britain. 112 At the conference, discussions among the delegates were “traditionally undertaken in an informal, friendly and relatively unstructured way.” 113
Thatcher addressed the opening session on 1 August. Her speech paid tribute to the Commonwealth, but painted a grim picture of the future of the Third World if inflation and oil prices continued to rise unchecked. She praised the role of the United
Nations and other Commonwealth countries, notably Malaysia, in dealing with the refugee crisis in Asia. For the “Rhodesia problem”, she and her country were committed to “genuine black majority rule.” Having made the same pledge in the Commons before she left for Lusaka, Britain had manifestly rejected Smith’s internal settlement. 114 For their part, the Carter administration viewed the speech as “constructive and well received”. 115
Thatcher put to good use her ability to be the master of her brief in Lusaka.
Carrington later recalled that when she was harangued by Commonwealth members about their economic problems and more aid was demanded, Thatcher would “stage whisper … for the sheet of paper setting out the details of the aid HMG was providing .. she put it in her purse and brought it out threateningly whenever any delegates started
112 Moore, Margaret Thatcher , 452–453.
113 Background Note: Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, 17 July, FCO 68 827.
114 Statement by the British Prime Minister – Opening Session, Lusaka, 1 August 1979, 2010 94 2 CHGM Sec Gen Papers 11 Jan 12 Sept 79, Ramphal Papers, Commonwealth Secretariat.
115 Funk to Brzezinski, “Prime Minister’s Lusaka Speech on Zimbabwe” Washington, 4 Aug 79, WHF CO 167, Carter Library.
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lecturing her.” 116 She had also worn glasses when getting off the plane for fear of an acid attack. The glasses were not remarkable as much as her determination to get off the plane.
In spite of the fears about a diplomatic impasse before the conference, the matter of Rhodesia took up only half a day at the formal conference. It was at the “weekend retreat” in the midst of the conference where the issue was resolved. 117 On Friday August
3rd, Southern Africa had come up as a topic among the heads of state. Nyerere led the conversation and reminded the participants that Rhodesia represented a near unique failure in the process of decolonization and that many countries had preserved rights for the minority in their constitutions. However, Rhodesia had gone too far in preserving power for the whites, and there was no support for the internal settlement in black Africa.
The other African ministers agreed, but many were impressed with Thatcher’s clear statement at the opening. 118 Thatcher stated during the session on 3 August that Rhodesia had made progress in electing an African Prime Minister, but it was up to assembled leaders of the Commonwealth to ensure that progress continued. She reasserted that the
Constitution was “defective”, that the consultation with the Commonwealth countries had been very helpful, and that Britain as a “responsible colonial power” would find the solution to Rhodesia’s “problem.” 119 Thatcher’s cumulative remarks were having their desired effect. The press at the conference and the other Commonwealth Heads of State
116 Henderson, Mandarin , 317.
117 Carrington to all Commonwealth Capitals, “Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Lusaka 1 7 August”, 14 August 79, London, FCO 62 827.
118 Allison to all Commonwealth Capitals, “GHGM”, Lusaka, 3 August 79, FCO 68 827.
119 Allison to all Commonwealth Capitals, “GHGM: Southern Africa”, Lusaka, 3 August 79, FCO 68 827
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were convinced she wanted to end minority rule in Zimbabwe. Her linkage of the next constitution for Zimbabwe to the process of how many of the other countries had secured their post independence constitution was important in convincing the conference that
Britain could run a Constitutional Convention. 120
That weekend, a small group of leaders to include Ramphal, Nyerere, Kaunda, and several others met with Thatcher and Carrington. It was in these two sessions that the language of the communiqué came together. It was in the words of the British diplomat Sir Walter Allison “better than we might have hoped.” 121 At the end of the weekend, Thatcher wrote Jimmy Carter a letter outlining what the small group had achieved. She assured him that they were working toward the “type of constitutional change” that the American government had been hoping would be the outcome of the conference. 122
The rest of the conference was remarkably calm, so much so that Carrington remarked in one telegram that a session was “constructive, if unexciting”. 123 At the last session, chaired by Kaunda as the hosting head of government, several leaders praised
Thatcher for her clarity and determination on the subject of Rhodesia. Kaunda reminded
Thatcher near the end of the conference that he had never “entertained hatred for the
British people.” 124 Grenada’s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop who’s New Jewel Party
120 Allison to all Commonwealth Capitals, “GHGM: Press”, Lusaka, 4 August 79, FCO 68 827.
121 Allison to all Commonwealth Capitals, “CHGM – Rhodesia”, Lusaka, 5 August 79, FCO 68 827.
122 Thatcher to Carter, “Personal Message”, Lusaka, 5 August 79, FCO 68 827.
123 Carrington to all Commonwealth Capitals, “CHMG 8 th Session 6 August”, Lusaka, 9 August 1979, FCO 68 827.
124 Allison to London, “CHMG Rhodesia: Press Club”, Lusaka, 7 August 1979, FCO 68 827.
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had seized power earlier that year praised her for “clearly assuming Britain’s responsibility.” 125 Carrington closed his note on the final session by noting that
Thatcher’s leadership and decision on Rhodesia and its effect on the rest of the
Commonwealth would be “for the historians … the significance of the Lusaka
Conference.” 126
The communiqué the Commonwealth issued at the end of the conference confirmed that the internal settlement was “defective” and that the only way to ensure the
“free elections” that would lead to a “democratic constitution” was a Constitutional
Conference. 127 The communiqué also echoed Thatcher in praising the efforts of the
UNHCR in dealing with the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia, as well as the efforts of
Hong Kong and Singapore to alleviate the crisis. 128 The language on Rhodesia mirrored that of the United Nations which condemned the internal settlement in the UN Security
Council on 30 April in Resolution 448 which termed the settlement “null and void.” 129
As the British announced their success and the plan for the Lancaster House
Conference, the need to keep the Americans “fully informed” was at the forefront of
125 Bishop was murdered by the other members of his party just before the US invasion in 1983. Mark Adkins, Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada (Toronto: Lexington Books, 1989), 74–76.
126 Carrington to all Commonwealth Capitals, “CHMG 10 th and Final Session: PM 7 August”, Lusaka, 10 August 79, FCO 68 827.
127 Carrington to Commonwealth Posts, “Rhodesia”, 5 August 1979, FCO 68 824.
128 Peter Carrington, “Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 1 7 August 1979 Communiqué” (Her Majesty’s Government Stationary Office, August 1979), 4.
129 UN Security Council, Resolution 448 (1979) Adopted by the Security Council at its 2143rd meeting, on 30 April 1979, 30 April 1979, S/RES/448 (1979), available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f17154.html , Accessed 2 September 2014.
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British considerations. 130 Carrington’s announcement of the success of the conference mentioned previous consultations with the United States, but his emphasis was on cooperation with the Commonwealth and the British led initiative. 131 Carrington wanted the Americans involved, but did not want them to leak any information early. 132
The British from the beginning were worried about the eventual success of the conference starting with whether all parties would accept their invitations. 133 Muzorewa would be the leader of the official Rhodesian party, with Smith included as a “Minister without Portfolio.” 134 The concern over attendance included the Foreign Office’s concern to limit Prime Minister Thatcher’s involvement. Too much involvement meant that the heads of state and government would appeal to her over the head of Carrington. 135 In addition, maintaining the support of the Commonwealth was an important part of the
Foreign Office’s plan. Ramphal at the Commonwealth Secretariat assured the Foreign
Office that Nkomo planned to use the Non Aligned Conference in early September 1979 in Cuba to keep the rest of the Third World in line behind the conference. 136 The
130 Renwick, Rhodesia Department, to Duff, “Rhodesia” London, 13 August 79, FCO 36 2435.
131 Carrington, “Rhodesia”, London, 10 August, FCO 36 2435.
132 Robinson to Gilmour, “Rhodesia, Constitutional Conference”, Washington, 10 August 79, FCO 36 2435.
133 Rhodesia Department, FCO “Rhodesia: First Reactions to the Invitation to the Constitutional Conference and the Outline Proposals for Constitutional Change” London, 16 Aug 79, FCO 36 2435.
134 Day to Carrington, “Rhodesia: Constitutional Conference”, Salisbury, 22 August 79, FCO 36 2435.
135 Powell, Rhodesia Department, to Duff, “Rhodesia: Constitutional Conference: Prime Minister’s Role”, London, 28 August 79, FCO 36 2436.
136 “Call by the Commonwealth Secretary General to the Secretary of State on Thursday 30 August” London, 30 August 79, FCO 36 2436.
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conference’s final communiqué indicated the Non Aligned Movement would only support the conference if it “established genuine minority rule.” 137
Eventually all the parties agreed to come to the conference. Prime Minister
Murorewa “accepted ‘without conditions’” but was unhappy with Smith’s participation.
The Patriotic Front agreed as well, but they were still upset with the specific security proposals. However, the Patriotic Front was under pressure from the Commonwealth to attend the conference. The British worried that any intransigence on the part of the
Rhodesian Front would trigger a withdrawal by the Patriotic Front. The British would need to balance keeping the Commonwealth involved with “carrying the United States government with us” to keep the conditions external to the conference in check. 138 If either the United States or the Commonwealth did not see the terms as legitimate and bringing about a “legitimate constitution” the international community would reject the terms of the agreement. 139
At this point, former revolutionary turned member of the “internal settlement” government Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole believed among others that Britain “was now in a more powerful position than it had ever been on the Rhodesian Issue.” 140 The most intransigent of the black African leaders, Mugabe, used a trip through Yugoslavia on the
137 “Documents of the Sixth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non Aligned Countries”, 9 September 1979, Havana, http://cns.miis.edu/nam/documents/Official_Document/6th_Summit_FD_Havana_Declaration_1979_Whol e.pdf , Accessed 23 Feb 15.
138 Carrington to Thatcher, “Rhodesia: Constitutional Conference”, London, August 79, FCO 36 2436.
139 Carrington, “Rhodesia Conference” London, 3 Sep 79, FCO 36 2436.
140 Day to Carrington, Telex, Salisbury, 5 Sept 79, FCO 36 2436.
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way to the Conference to denounce the previous internal settlement. Mugabe noted that the UN and the United States had both been involved in making Britain once again a “full de colonizing power.” He characterized previous Anglo American proposals as
“realistic’, but insisted that the guerillas would form the new security forces. He accepted Britain as the authority for the conference, and wanted to make sure that the next Non Aligned Conference in Havana backed the results of the Conference. 141
Thatcher and Carrington assured Murorewa that the British goal was an independent
Zimbabwe that was acceptable to every international party. 142 Once the conference began, Carrington took the lead and took about the task first of establishing the
Constitution. The next tasks were agreeing on how to make the transition, and then lastly setting conditions for the security handover. 143
As the conference progressed, the United States’ diplomats continued to support the British effort. The embassy in London passed information from the American consulate in New York that President Samora Machel of Mozambigue had used the
OAU’s prestige to keep Nkomo and Mugabe at the negotiations without precondition. 144
141 Farquharson to Carrington, “Mugabe Press Conference”, Belgrade, 27 Aug 79, FCO 36 2436.
142 MEMCON between Thatcher, Carrington, Muzorewa, et al, London, 13 July 79, FCO 36 2436.
143 Carrington to Embassy, Dar es Salaam, “Rhodesia: Constitutional Conference”, London, 9 Sept 79, FCO 36 2436.
144 Layden to Duff,“Rhodesia: Constitutional Conference: Front Line Pressure on the Patriotic Front”, London, 11 Sep 79, FCO 36 2436.
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The Patriotic Front agreed to come to London, but insisted they were there because of
British failure and the success of Zimbabwean arms.145
There was continued concern that both the Patriotic Front or Smith’s National
Front could both sabotage the talks, and the British were concerned they had to guarantee elections to ensure American support. 146 Ian Smith claimed early on that he was receiving support from the British Cabinet so that he would not have to give in to pressure to amend the Constitution. 147 Two staffers for Senator Jesse Helms were also in
London and passing information to the Rhodesian Front that the United States was planning on lifting sanctions in October. 148 The Rhodesian Department at the FCO urged its contacts in the State Department such as Anthony Lake, then the Director of the Policy
Planning Staff, to stress that some of the whites from Salisbury might grow more intransigent with greater perception of American support that would come with lifting sanctions. 149 Helms did succeed in passing a bill in the Senate that allowed Carter to release Rhodesia from sanctions in November, but Carter deferred on lifting them until after the conference. 150 By mid October, Carrington believed that there “was no need for
Washington to take further action at this stage.” Excessive amounts of outside
145 J.N. Nkomo, “Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe Opening Statement at the Lancaster House Conference” London, 11 Sept 79, FCO 36 2436.
146 Powell to Duff, “Meeting with Rhodesian Delegates” London, 14 Sept 79, FCO 36 2437.
147 Day to Duff, “Meeting with Mr David Smith, 15 September” London, 17 Sept 79, FCO 36 2437.
148 Renwick to Duff, “Rhodesia Conference: Mr David Smith” London, 17 Sept 79, FCO 36 2437.
149 Renwick to Walden, “Rhodesia: US Senate” London, 21 Sept 79, FCO 36 2437.
150 DeRoche, “Standing Firm for Principles: Jimmy Carter and Zimbabwe,” 681.
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involvement would both encourage intransigence on the outside parties and undermine the British Parliament’s legal authority to approve any settlement. 151 Meeting a few days later, Lake relayed that the Carter administration supported the compromise Britain had reached for the Constitution, and contrary pressures in the Senate would not sway Carter.
Duff also assured Lake at this point that a development fund from the international community was not an issue at this point. 152 This meeting did not end American indirect involvement in the talks. A week later, Vance helped assure the Front Line Presidents that the British were sincere about their efforts to bring the majority to power. 153
As part of the negotiations over the Constitution in October, Mugabe wanted to move beyond the British run framework to one supervised by the United Nations. Even when the Constitution was settled, Mugabe and the Patriotic Front would have preferred a
United Nations force to a Commonwealth Force to supervise the elections. However, this proposal was unacceptable to Muzorewa and Smith, and even where the United Nations had been present in earlier end of colony elections in Africa the colonial power ran the election while the UN supervised. 154 As the security force structure came into agreement, multiple Commonwealth countries agreed to contribute forces. 155 The force would not
151 Carrington to Henderson et al, “Rhodesia” London, 16 Oct 79, FCO 36 2440.
152 MEMCON, Duff and Lake, “Rhodesia”, London, n.d (Oct 79), FCO 36 2440.
153 Warren Christopher to Carter, “Lancaster House”, 1 Nov 79, Washington, NLC 128 14 13 1 9.
154 Foreign Office, “Rhodesia: Pre Independence Arrangements”, London, 24 Oct 79, FCO 36 2441.
155 Carrington to Henderson et al, “Rhodesia: Constitutional Conference”, London, 14 Nov 79FCO 36 2441.
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just monitor the elections but would first supervise the cease fire. 156 These countries were willing to participate because both the security forces and the Patriotic Front enjoy a general amnesty for their actions since the UDI. 157
This persuasion of the American Senate was not the only piece of public diplomacy undertaken by the Conservatives. Thatcher’s lead in discussing foreign policy at Blackpool in her leader’s speech in December stressed that it was Britain that had made good on the promise of bringing about Zimbabwe in line with the country’s past experiences with decolonization. 158 As early as October, Thatcher stressed that
Carrington’s efforts were both in Britain’s interests and a way of enhancing “Britain’s standing in the world.” 159 Thatcher possessed the authority to lift sanctions in November when the 1965 Southern Rhodesia Act expired, but delayed doing so until December when all sides had reached the final agreement about the future of Zimbabwe. 160 Britain’s sanctions ended on 12 December, and the United States followed three days later. 161
At the conclusion of the conference, Carrington declared that “fourteen weeks of concerted and concentrated effort” had laid the “foundations for a free, independent and
156 Carrington to Parsons et al, “Rhodesia: Statement by the British Government”, London, 23 Nov 79, FCO 36 2442.
157 MEMCON, Duff and General Walls, et al, “Second Session of Bilateral Meeting”, London, 5 December 79, FCO 36 2443.
158 Margaret Thatcher, “Leader's speech, Blackpool 1979” http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech archive.htm?speech=125 , Accessed 10 Nov 2014.
159 Lyne to Renwick, “Prime Minister’s Speech at Blackpool”, London, 10 Oct 79, FCO 36 2439.
160 Carrington to Jenkins et al, “Rhodesia” London, 10 Dec 79, FCO 36 2443.
161 Carter, “Executive Order 12183 Revoking Rhodesian Sanctions” Washington, 16 December 1979, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=31837&st=&st1 =, Accessed 11 Nov 2014.
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democratic society.” 162 Days earlier, Carter had welcomed Thatcher to the White House and noted that he was “deeply grateful and filled with admiration at the successful efforts that you have brought to resolving the longstanding problems in Zimbabwe Rhodesia.” 163
As part of the agreement, Winston Churchill’s son in law Lord Soames became
Zimbabwe Rhodesia’s last Governor General and supervised the election in February
1980. There was a growing disquiet over the increasing likelihood that Mugabe would win the election. Vance mentioned to Michael Palliser that the “international community” would not accept a government that excluded Mugabe from a coalition if he won the “largest number of black seats.” 164 Like the previous election, Freedom House came and observed the election. 165 Freedom House sent Leonard Sussman and Raymond
Gastil from their staff, anti Communist social democrat Bayard Rustin, and political scientist Howard Penniman. 166 These observers found the election the “relatively free expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe/Rhodesia and to constitute a necessary
162 Carrington to AMB Salisbury, “Statement of the Secretary of State” London, 21 Dec 79, FCO 36 2443.
163 “Visit of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom Remarks at the Welcoming Ceremony”, Washington, 17 Dec 79, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=31841&st=&st1 =, Accessed 11 Nov 14.
164 Palliser to Carrington, “Mr Vance’s Visit”, London, 20 Feb 1980, FCO 82 1030.
165 Susan Rice, "The Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe, 1979–1980: Implications for International Peacekeeping" D Phil thesis, New College, Oxford University.
166 Freedom House, “Report of the Freedom House Observer Team: The Common Role Election in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), February 1980,” World Affairs 143, no. 1 (Summer 1980): 85–120.
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step toward unfettered majority rule." 167 Mugabe, despite accusation of intimidation during the election, was now Prime Minister.
Despite the relatively peaceful constitutional and electoral end to the seven year
Chimurenga, at the ceremony in Salisbury where the British lowered their flag and Bob
Marley performed “Zimbabwe”, there were signs of the discord to come. Carrington and children’s author Laurens van der Post (there as the guest of the Prince of Wales) noted that Nkomo had turned his back on his revolutionary comrade Mugabe as a gesture of contempt for Mugabe’s ethnically based victory. 168 However, Zimbabwe was born and
Mugabe held the reins of power. Britain’s last African colony was gone.
Iran
If the creation of Zimbabwe was a British triumph, then the fall of the Shah and the humiliation of the United States at the hands of radicalized Iranian students was an
American defeat. Britain was no longer the equal partner it had been when the two countries overthrew Mossadagh in 1953. However, British and American diplomats worked together to advise the Shah in the years before the revolution as he still sought to balance being a regional power with being an American client state.
Britain’s primary diplomat in Iran before the fall of the Shah was Anthony
Parsons. Parsons, a career diplomat, had spent most of his career in the Middle East with short tenures at the United Nations during the late 1960s and the American Department
167 Freedom House, “Report of the Freedom House Observer Team: The Common Role Election in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), February 1980,” World Affairs 143, no. 1 (Summer 1980): 90.
168 Carrington, Reflecting on Things Past , 305–306.
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during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had seen revolution at a distance in 1958 with the death of Said in Iraq and up close in Sudan in 1964. 169 He had been witness to the decolonization of Britain’s Middle Eastern Empire and headed to Iran just after OPEC had quadrupled oil prices in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. He was the
Ambassador there for almost the entire time that Labour was in power from 1974 to
1979. Opinions of his performance in the role varied. As the crisis grew in early 1979,
Tony Benn complained to his diary that Parsons had been feeding the Cabinet bad information throughout the crisis from both Tehran and New York. 170
When Parsons arrived, Iran was in the midst of the White Revolution as the Shah used oil revenue to modernize his country. However, in building economic advantage prior to the ever delayed political liberalization the Shah had managed to alienate not just the traditionalist Shia clerics of the villages but also the educated urban middle class of
Tehran. However, as long as economic growth kept up, the country was relatively quiet.
The “oil shock” of 1974, so destructive to both the Third World and West, was a short term boom to Iran. Britain sold 36% of its military exports to Iran, and Tehran was becoming a hub of foreign business investment. 171 The American presence, in particular, was quite substantial. However, this rapid attempt at modernization provoked a growing domestic discontent, and the Shah began to attempt to liberalize Iran through domestic
169 Anthony Parsons, British Diplomatic Oral History Programme, interview by Jane Barder, March 22, 1996, Churchill College, https://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/bdohp/.
170 Benn, Conflicts of Interest . Benn had recorded in 1976 that any British embassy was simply the Tory party abroad.
171 Parsons, British Diplomatic Oral History Programme.
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reforms as the economy began to falter. 172 Tocqueville’s quip that “the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform” was certainly true of Iran. 173
With the influx of money into Iran due to the global spike in oil prices and the
Shah’s aggressive courtship of outside capital and expertise, the economy quickly overheated and the country’s infrastructure could not keep up with the increased urban population and demand for consumer goods. The Shah’s White Revolution had combined authoritarian rule with attempts to impose western education and land reform on the traditional rural population. The introduction of Western education into rural areas, especially where women taught male children, alienated the traditional Shia clerics. 174 Land reform weakened the power of the rural elite and increased the population inflow into urban centers. All of these factors meant that the Shah had alienated almost every possible base of support except the military. Outside observers even heard criticism of the Shah from his closest representatives. 175
172 The problems and inherent limitations of modernization in all its forms are best surveyed in Scott, Seeing like a State . The fundamental text for the American model of modernization was W. W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, a Non Communist Manifesto. (Cambridge: University Press, 1960). For some recent critiques of American modernization efforts, see Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia , Reprint edition (Harvard University Press, 2013); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present , 1 edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
173 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution , trans. John Bonner (Harper Brothers, 1856), 214 . 174 Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005, 289–295.
175 Sick, All Fall down , 161–162.
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Although the American embassy fell in late 1979, 1978 from the month of
Moharram (which includes the Day of Ashura , a significant day in the Shia tradition) to the next Moharram was when the Shah lost control. What began as a localized revolt in
Qom centered on the death of Ayatollah Khomeini’s son and the Shah’s ham fisted response blossomed in to a full scale revolt. 176 The brutality of the Shah’s repression grew, as did questions within the United States of the wisdom and morality of supplying the Shah with anti riot gear.
Parsons and Ambassador William Sullivan often met with the Shah together, and
Parsons grew increasingly skeptical of the Shah’s ability to rule. He later attributed this insight to the time spent in Sudan before the coup there. 177 Sullivan was more positive in his assessments of the Shah’s abilities until almost the end. When Sullivan did change his mind, the effect on official opinion in Washington was dramatic and tilted most of the
Carter administration’s officials other than Brzezinski away from supporting the Shah in his final days. 178 Despite this change, Sullivan would still offer some support to the Shah even as his rule became less and less tenable. National Security Council member
Commander Gary Sick noted that Ambassador Sullivan’s reversal of opinion on 2 Nov
1978 had perhaps an even greater effect on American policy as it made it possible for
176 Ibid., 34–35.
177 Parsons, British Diplomatic Oral History Programme.
178 Sick, All Fall down , 3–4. Others in the State Department questioned the correctness of Sullivan’s reporting as well. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Derian believed that Sullivan’s reporting was particularly inaccurate. Derian, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
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elements of the American government to admit that the Shah’s regime was not resilient enough to survive. 179
The White House was aware of the potential danger to Americans in Iran as the
Shah’s grip on power grew shakier. In November 1978 after Sullivan’s shocking change of opinion, Brzezinski was warned that the religious fervor of the season combined with the possible repression of the Shah’s security forces could trigger a public backlash against Americans or other foreigners. Some Americans in Iran had already received death threats. Despite these warnings, the consensus between Sullivan and Parsons was that if the Shah made it through December, he might be able to pull off the transition to the role of a constitutional monarch against Khomeini’s wishes. 180 This British concurrence with American reporting was still true a month later as the Shah struggled to turn day to day politics over to his Prime Minister while he tried to deal with larger political issues. 181
The analysis of the National Security Council in late 1978 focused on the increasing violence. Parsons’ reports about the increasing number of deaths in recent urban riots raised concerns about the safety of American citizens. Companies had already begun to send family members home, and wives and children of military families had to pay their way home in the absence of a formal evacuation. There was a concern
179 Sick, All Fall down , 4.
180 Tarnoff to Brzezinski, “Moharram in Iran”, 26 Nov 1978, Washington, NLC 132 118 14 6 3.
181 Sullivan to Vance, “U.K – U.S. Perceptions of Iranian Situation”, 24 Dec 78, Tehran, NLC 16 59 5 16 8.
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that the Communists would attack families to draw an American or an Iranian response or to cause an evacuation which would undermine the Shah. The council wanted to stay away from criticisms of the Shah at this time and to not put pressure on him about the specific form of the next government. 182
As the Shah’s multiple attempts to form a government failed and the cycle of repression in the streets escalated, the Iranian government began to splinter. The Shah had deliberately avoided putting his most repressive generals in positions of power. 183
Eventually, the Shah fled on 16 January 1979 and turned the government over to Shapour
Bakhtiar. Bakhtiar allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to return to Iran from Paris, and the
Ayatollah’s followers quickly began to take the leading role in the Revolution. 184
While the Revolution gathered steam, students assaulted the American embassy in
Tehran on 14 February 1979. The siege only lasted two hours and ended when the provisional deputy Prime Minister escorted the armed militants away. 185 This attack resulted in the embassy shipping its classified material back to the United States and reducing its staffing. However, as 1979 wore on, material and people started flowing back to the embassy as the US government grew more comfortable working with the moderates in Khomeini’s revolutionary government. This included meetings with the
182 WHSR, “Mini Special Coordination Committee Meetings”, 5 Dec 78, Washington, NLC 25 95 11 3 5.
183 Sick, All Fall down , 170–171.
184 Westad, The Global Cold War , 2005, 295.
185 Brian M. Jenkins, Embassies Under Seige: A Review of 48 Embassy Takeovers, 1971 1980 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1981), 34, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2005/R2651.pdf.
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remaining charge d’affairs Bruce Laingen and a meeting by Brzezinski with Iranian moderates in Algiers. 186
As 1979 went on and the Ayatollah gained more power, the revolution grew more destructive to the non theocratic elements. The new Constitution made the Ayatollah the supreme human power in Iran. 187 To both the American and the Soviets, the revolution presented a challenge. America’s client and strategic bulwark had been lost as had an important source of the world’s oil. For the Soviets, a cleric had spearheaded and now controlled an anti imperial revolution. The later Soviet invasion of Afghanistan resulted in Moscow’s embassy coming under multiple attacks in 1980. The new regime was hostile to both sides in the Cold War. 188
While the Ayatollah consolidated power, the Shah was increasingly ill with cancer. After time in the Bahamas and Mexico, the Shah was admitted to New York for treatment. Outraged at this decision, a group of Iranian students seized the American embassy on 4 November 1979. The ruling clerics did not direct this action, but in a single day the students further radicalized the revolution and gave the Ayatollah a powerful weapon. Three of the American staff were stuck in the Iranian Foreign
Ministry and would remain there for most of the crisis. 189
186 Sick, All Fall down , 189.
187 Ibid., 200–204.
188 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way , 184–186.
189 Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah , 3–110.
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In the chaos surrounding the capture of the American embassy, few noticed that the British embassy had suffered a similar fate. For five hours on 5 November, Iranian radicals seized British diplomats and their families before fading away. This was similar to the raid on the American embassy months before, but it illustrated that the British embassy was just as vulnerable as the American one.190 Parliament was initially more concerned with the safety of the diplomats’ families than the American embassy, and was unsure who to protest to given the confusing structure of the Iranian government. 191
One of the only ways that the United States government had to influence the situation inside Iran was fiscal pressure through sanctions. For these sanctions to be effective, the United States would need the aid of its allies. When asked in late
November if she planned to block Iranian funds in Britain, Thatcher initially replied that the government did not have the authority to do so.192 Vance met with Henderson along with Donald McHenry on 22 December to secure British support for sanctions on Iran.
Henderson expressed concern that British sanctions could trigger violence against British interests in Iran. McHenry replied that the danger must be weighed against the damage
Iranian actions were inflicting on the “role of international law”. The British wanted to execute their actions through the United Nations and to ensure that sanctions would not cover humanitarian exports and “means of communication.” Both sides agreed that the
190 Tehran (British Embassy), HC Deb, 6 November 1979, vol 973 cc225 228, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1979/nov/06/tehran british embassy , Accessed 10 November 2014.
191 Ibid. 192 Prime Minister (Engagements), HC Deb, 20 November 1979, vol 976 cc868 72, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1979/nov/20/prime minister engagements , Accessed 10 Nov 14.
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Soviet Union’s emphasis on the “inviolability” of embassies had helped. Henderson also noted that the British embassy was quietly reducing its staff, and that the 300 or so
“unofficial Britishers” in Iran had begun to leave for the holidays. 193 By the time of the hostage taking, the British government estimated that between 400 500 Britons were living in Tehran. 194 Conversely, the year prior the British government tracked 10,079 students from Iran studying in Britain. 195 In contrast, in 1976 there had been nearly
100,000 Americans in Iran, many of whom were connected to the expansion of the
Shah’s military and his modernization projects. 196
While there were concerns about the number of Iranian students in the US and
Britain, Khomeini’s reach showed itself in some unexpected places as well. When
Islamic extremists inside Saudi Arabia seized the Grand Mosque, Khomeini blamed the
United States. With a week, crowds burned down American embassies in Islamabad and
Tripoli. In Islamabad, one Marine died during the attack. 197
The United States’ push for sanctions on Iran ran into another difficulty. On
Christmas 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This event was perhaps the last
193 Vance to Brewster, “Demarche to UK Ambassador Henderson on UN Sanctions”, 29 Dec 79, New York, NLC 16 119 4 33 3.
194 Nicholas Ridley, Written Answers, Iran, HC, 10 December 1979, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/search/iran?day=1979 12 10&sort=date&speaker=hon nicholas ridley .
195 Dr Rhodes Boyson, Written Answers, Iranian Students, HC, 10 December 1979, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/search/iran?day=1979 12 10&sort=date&speaker=dr rhodes boyson .
196 Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power , 183.
197 Cameron Barre, “A Day of Terror Recalled: 1979 Embassy Siege In Islamabad Still Haunts Survivors” Washington Post, Saturday, November 27, 2004; Page A20, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp dyn/articles/A15332 2004Nov26.html , Accessed 14 Dec 14.
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straw for Carter and pushed him decisively in favor of Brzezinski’s more hostile view of the Soviet Union over Vance’s more diplomatic approach. The tensions surrounding the
Soviet actions led to the Soviet Union vetoing UN Resolution 461 to authorize sanctions against Iran. Without the legal authority of a UN resolution, Thatcher’s government could do very little economically against Iran. 198 During Young’s tenure at the United
Nations, the Soviets had not vetoed any of his resolutions. This impressive record for the
Carter administration could not stand against the Soviet Union’s aggression. 199 Without the backing of the United Nations, the only sanctions against Iran were the assets in excess of $12 billion in assets that remained frozen in the United States. The effect on the
Iranian economy went beyond the loss of this combination of private and corporate currency. Carter’s freeze meant that Iranian assets in European banks could not process transactions through the currency hub in New York. Iran protested, but since Iran had been found at fault by the International Court of Justice and the financial institutions that processed the transactions were in the United States and therefore under American law there was no recourse for the revolutionary regime in Tehran. 200
Less successful at an international level at resolving the crisis was Secretary
General Waldheim’s attempt to find a diplomatic solution. Waldheim wrote Khomeini two days after the siege began. The tone of his letter was solicitous in the extreme, but he
198 W. Michael Reisman, “The Legal Effect of Vetoed Resolutions,” American Journal of International Law 74 (1980), http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/716.
199 DeRoche, Andrew Young , 83.
200 Robert Caswell, “Economic Sanctions and the Iran Experience,” Foreign Affairs , no. Winter 1981/82 (n.d.), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/35846/robert caswell/economic sanctions and the iran experience.
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reminded the Ayatollah that the safety of diplomats was “codified” and “long standing”.
The letter did no good. 201 Waldheim received a letter back from Bani sadr that blamed
Eisenhower, Dulles, Eden, and American censorship for the current crisis and claimed the crisis could be resolved if the United States admitted its guilt and returned Iran’s frozen and stolen assets. 202 Waldheim later went to Tehran to see if he could negotiate the hostages’ release, but Khomeini refused him an audience and Waldheim endured the same propaganda campaign that most visiting Westerners received. 203
As the crisis went on and even seemed to expand, what concerned the Foreign
Office the most was the increasing tendency of the Carter administration to make decisions without consulting their allies. Announcing the Carter doctrine that called for repelling any outside force entering the Middle East, ignoring NATO in the policy for
Afghanistan, withdrawing their Moscow ambassador, the embargo of grain against the
Soviets, and the choice to boycott the Olympics: the United States did all these things without consulting any major European ally. 204
Although there was widespread belief that a rescue mission might be in the works, there was also skepticism about its viability. In Carrington’s mind, an “Entebbe like” operation to rescue the hostages was impossible. Any premature American military action would dissipate sympathy and would create equivalence in the region with the
201 Waldheim to Khomeini, “Your Excellency”, New York, 6 Nov 1979, S 0904 0093 04, UN Archives.
202 Banisadr to Waldheim, English Translation, 13 Nov 79, Tehran, S 0904 0093 04, UN Archives.
203 Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah , 288–289. Bowden’s account indicates that both the Americans and the Iranians were convinced Waldheim was utterly irresolute.
204 Maitlad to Carrington, “America’s Relations with the Allies”, London, 21 Feb 80, FCO 82 1030.
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Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carrington and the FCO were also worried that any internal disruption would simply strengthen the hand of the revolutionaries and push
Khomeini to further defiance. 205 Conversely, Gary Sick of the NSC held the opinion that the only way to push Khomeini to release the hostages (outside of a purely military intervention) was through sanctions. One of the British ideas for ending the immediate crisis at this point came from Anthony Parsons. Parsons’ suggestion for ending the crisis was using the Human Rights Council. In brief, immediately after the American hostages were released, the United Nations would launch an investigation into the situation in Iran prior to the Revolution. When Henderson presented this idea at a meeting with representatives of the National Security Council and the State Department, State’s Iran expert Henry Precht informed Henderson that McHenry at the US Mission in New York had not informed them of the proposal but that it was “not realistic.” 206 The British view from the embassy suggested that the split of opinion that had marked the conduct of
Carter’s foreign policy so far continued with Vance pushing for diplomacy and
Brzezinski pushing for a mission to rescue the hostages. 207
While Carter struggled to find a way to free the hostages, he was also attempting to win his party’s nomination for the Presidency. Neoconservatives had perhaps their worst fears confirmed when in March 1980 Young’s successor Donald McHenry voted along with the majority on the Security Council to condemn Israeli actions in their West
205 Carrington to Henderson et. al., “US/IRAN”, 8 Jan 1980, FCO 8 3581.
206 Henderson to Carrington, “US/IRAN”, 12 JAN 80, FCO 8 3581.
207 Henderson, Mandarin , 312–313.
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Bank settlements. The Carter administration had initially backed away from the vote until three weeks later when Vance in one of his last acts as Secretary of State confirmed that the vote accurately reflected the United States’ policy. This admission extended the
Democratic primaries by giving Kennedy an important win in New York and significantly weakened Carter’s chances for re election. 208 This was the breaking point for many neoconservatives who saw an administration that fused the appeasement of the establishment with the appeasement of the Third World. McHenry served out his term, but his vote and the refusal of the Carter administration to fully repudiate it pushed neoconservatives to the right and reinforced the need for a more combative presence at the United Nations.
Indicative of the mood in the Democratic controlled Senate as the crisis wore on,
Frank Church and Jacob Javits sent a joint letter to Cyrus Vance urging him to consult with the Senate about any impending military action against Iran. Carter’s public statements had not ruled out military force as a possibility, and the continued failures in
Iran along with Carter’s direction of an American capability to respond militarily to outside (ie Soviet) threats to the Middle East demanded that the President fulfill the law by consulting the Senate. 209 Carter did not inform the Senate before but did file a report
208 Two very different accounts of this vote and its consequences are found in Moynihan, “‘Joining the Jackals’: The U.S. at the UN 1977 1980.” and Donald McHenry, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Charles Kennedy, October 1, 1998, Library of Congress, www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/McHenry,%20Donald%20F.toc.pdf.
209 Church and Javits to Vance, 24 April 1980, FCO 82 1026.
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after the rescue attempt. 210 Javits and Church were both out of the Senate less than a year later. 211
After the mission failed, Carter sent Thatcher a personal note explaining reasons for the failure and that the “sole purpose” of the mission had been “the release of the hostages.” 212 He also pledged not to conduct further military action without consulting his allies. 213 Despite the failures of the rescue attempt, Carrington and Henderson both believed that Britain was still a stronger ally than either France or Germany. However,
Europe at large seemed to the American people to be unhelpful in an increasingly dire world. 214 This growing divergence became clear during Carrington’s visit to Washington in early May. Carrington met with Muskie, Brzezinski, and members of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. He wanted to ensure these politicians knew there was little stomach in Europe for renewed military action while sanctions were hurting
Europeans more than Americans. 215
210 U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. The situation in Iran. Hearing, 96th Congress, 2nd session. May 8, 1980. Washington, U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1980. P. iii.
211 Javits insistence on running on the Liberal ticket in New York undoutably gave the Republican nominee, Alfonse D’amato his thin margin of victory over the Democrat’s Elizabeth Holtzman.
212 Carter to Thatcher, “Dear Prime Minister”, Washington, 25 Mar 80, Carter Library, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/112710 , Accessed 22 Feb 2015.
213 Miers (Middle East Department) to Maitland, “Iran”, 7 May 1980, London, FCO 8 3586.
214 North American Department to Carrington, “The American Mood and the Atlantic Alliance”, 1 May 1980, FCO 82 1029.
215 Carrington to Thatcher, “Visit to Washington: 3 6 MAY”Washington, 6 May 1980, FCO 82 1029.
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International opinion was mostly hostile to the American rescue attempt. There were exceptions to this sentiment in the aftermath. En route to an OAU summit the week after the attempt, Nyerere called on Iran to release the American hostages and for the evacuation of “foreign” troops from Afghanistan. 216 British reports from Tehran indicated that although the Iranians had scattered the hostages to prevent a second attempt, there was a new threat to foreigners. 217 The British embassy proposed the Carter administration provide the United Nations or the Non Aligned Movement as a forum for the Iranians to air their grievances, to “do nothing” and let the incident decrease in importance, or even to find a way to let the Iranians place the diplomats on trial and then expel them. The false “show trial” had been a practice of Israel and Syria in the past decades, but it had the weakness of getting a rigged trial to turn out the way everyone wanted and for the Iranians to “keep the bargain.” 218
Just after the rescue mission, there was a strange but shorter sequel. On 30 April,
Iranian Arab separatists seized the Iranian embassy in London. The siege went on for several days until Thatcher ordered the British Army’s anti terrorist force to storm the embassy and return it to Iranian control. This was not the first time an embassy was
216 Morgan to White (West Africa Division), “Visit of President Nyerere”, Freetown, 2 May 1980, FCO 8 3586.
217 Emergency Unit, “Sit Rep 1400 BST 26: Developments following US Attempt to Rescue Hostages” 26 Apr 80, Tehran, FCO 8 3586.
218 Graham to Carrington, “US/Iran” 29 April 80, Tehran, FCO 8 3586.
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assaulted in London. In 1973, three Pakistanis attacked the Indian High Commission and took hostages. Two of the terrorists were killed and one was arrested. 219
Throughout the London siege, Thatcher used the British ambassador in Dubai to keep the Iranians informed. This dialogue had the purpose not just of securing tacit
Iranian acceptance of the British handling of the crisis, but also of laying a foundation of reciprocity which might be used later to resolve the hostage crisis. 220
As time dragged on, it became apparent that Britain’s role in ending the hostage crisis would be a fiscal conduit rather than as a diplomatic partner. The main conduit for the American connection to the British financial actions was the American embassy in
Grosvenor Square, then headed by former Yale President Kingman Brewster. Brewster was a popular ambassador with the British. He served more as a symbol of Carter’s commitment to appoint qualified men and women to be ambassadors than as a policymaker. 221 The embassy had been the site of anti Shah protests prior to the
Revolution which then morphed into more purely anti American protests. 222 Brewster was a liberal New England patrician Republican, one of a dying breed. Brewster’s knowledge of finance and international law was an important part of creating a method by which the United States could release funds back to Iran that it had frozen.
219 Jenkins, Embassies Under Seige: A Review of 48 Embassy Takeovers, 1971 1980 , 27.
220 WHSR to Brzezinski, “Evening Notes: Iran Embassy Siege”, 1 May 80, Washington, NLC 1 15 3 4 7. Thatcher discusses the event briefly in her memoirs. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years , 88–91.
221 John Kimball, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Charles Kennedy, May 24, 1999, Library of Congress, www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Kimball,%20John%20W.toc.pdf.
222 Eileen Malloy, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, interview by Charles Kennedy, November 3, 2008, Library of Congress, http://adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Malloy,%20Eileen%20A.toc.pdf.
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Exchanging these billions, along with an apology and the departure of Carter, helped put an end to the hostage crisis. 223
As it became clear that the United States and Iran would exchange each other’s frozen assets as the way of ending the standoff, a Labour backbencher asked if some of the Iranian funds could be used to fund the education of Iranian students in Britain.
Douglas Hurd, then a Minister of State at the Foreign Office, stated that it would be
“entirely inappropriate” for the British government to make that request. 224
Conclusion
At the end of Carter’s term in office, Zimbabwe had faded as an issue from the front lines of the struggle for self determination in southern Africa. What remained and would surpass it as an issue in the next decade was the struggle over apartheid in South
Africa. 225 Iran would struggle in its brutal border war with Iraq, and would begin supporting terrorism and kidnapping throughout the Middle East. 226
By 1981, the Third World with its revolutions, cartel control, and numbers, seemed to have checked the United States. Khomeini remained in power in Iran when
Carter had left the White House. Mugabe and Nkomo and the leaders of the
Commonwealth brought Smith to Lancaster House, and Carrington’s skills and patience
223 Kabaservice, The Guardians .
224 Iranian Students , HC Deb, 07 November 1980, vol 991 cc677 8W, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1980/nov/07/iranian students , Accessed 14 December 2014.
225 Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited .
226 Bill, The Eagle and the Lion .
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as a diplomat kept them there. In the analysis of Kissinger’s point man for African issues, the combination of Carter’s liberal desires and Thatcher’s firmness was the winning combination that forced Smith to capitulate. 227
The fundamental reason the United States and Britain could not successfully undertake a joint project to solve the problems of either Rhodesia or Iran was the power of the Third World in 1979. For Iran, the disintegration of the Shah’s regime and the power that now rested with the mullahs meant that all the United States could do was work at the edges. In Iran, there was even less the British could do than the United
States. In Rhodesia, the decisive moment in settling the crisis was not Thatcher’s relationship with Carter but Thatcher’s convincing of her fellow Commonwealth leaders that Britain was serious about ending Smith’s rule. The United States played only an indirect role in bringing about a settlement.
This moment of Third World power would wane with the debt and low commodities prices of the next decade. However, the strength of the Third World had ended Johnson’s presidency, the British Empire, Bretton Woods, and conquered Vietnam.
Its triumph over the best laid Anglo American plans at a moment of weakness for both countries was a logical outcome of the trends of the previous decade.
The diplomatic effort over Rhodesia and Iran do reveal one insight into the nature of the Special Relationship. Carter’s closest relations with foreign leaders were not with fellow democrats. Carter admired Sadat, and forged a close relationship with Omar
227 Schaufele, ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.
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Torrijos. His relations with democrats were less cordial. Carter and Begin were never as close as Carter and Sadat, and Schmidt and Carter had a break in 1980 over leaks about
Germany’s positions on nuclear weapons. In contrast, Carter’s relations with Thatcher were the closest of any democratic leader without the personal warmth that Carter shared with Callaghan or Thatcher shared with Reagan. This closeness translated into
Thatcher’s ability to use the Commonwealth to pressure Smith, and for Carter to know the British government was doing all it could during the hostage crisis. Respect mattered more than rapport.
Both politicians also understood the importance of whom they would send to the
United Nations and who they sent to each other’s country as an Ambassador. Thatcher sent an ambassador to Washington who had echoed in print her views on British decline, and sent an Ambassador to the United Nations would was one of the few civil servants she trusted. Carter dispatched a true Establishment figure to Britain and a true believer to the United Nations. Each appointed as their chief foreign policy advisor a figure who was deeply reassuring the other country’s foreign policy establishment. Each would lose that same advisor over the issue of military force.
The Thatcher Carter Years of the Anglo American relationship saw two politicians who had defied the odds wrestle with issues that had vexed their predecessors.
Thatcher’s success was no great comfort to Carter’s fortunes, and Carter’s defeat provided Thatcher with a more personally and politically compatible American President as her partner. However, Reagan’s choices at the United Nations would prove a far greater challenge to the Anglo American relationship than any of Young’s words or
McHenry’s votes. That bomb would lay buried until Argentina exploded it in 1982.
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Chapter 7: “Stubbornly Democratic”1: The Aftermath of the 1970s on Anglo American Politics
The end of the Carter administration was the climax of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s apostasy from the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party. The first years of the Reagan administration and the re election campaign in 1982 brought Moynihan back into the
Democratic fold. Moynihan did not join in the transition of the neoconservatives from dissenting Democrats to erstwhile Republicans. He maintained his iconoclastic status in
Washington, but the standard conservative critique of Moynihan’s twenty four years in the Senate was that he said all the right things but voted the wrong way. 2
Moynihan signaled his intention to remain a force within the Democratic Party much the same way he had brought neoconservatism into the struggle over the future of the Third World: with an article in Commentary . Published in February 1981, “’Joining the Jackals’: The U.S. at the UN 1977 1980” took Moynihan’s earlier work as a rubric and used it to evaluate the conduct of the Carter administration. Moynihan was more sanguine about the Third World than he had been in 1975. The end of the Emergency in
India had restored that country to its place as the world’s largest democracy. Some
Caribbean and Central American countries were maintaining both positive relations with the US and a friendly voting record in the United Nations. However, in Moynihan’s analysis the majority of the Third World was still inclined against the United States and
1 Moynihan, “‘Joining the Jackals’: The U.S. at the UN 1977 1980.” In his article, Moynihan refers to Israel with this term. It would seem to equally apply to both Britain and the United States.
2 William F. Buckley, CSPAN Interview “Getting it Right”, 26 March 2003, http://www.c span.org/video/?c1514280/clip getting right, Accessed 20 September 2014.
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in favor of an internationalized version of British socialism. Carter and his administration were found wanting in their ability to manage this reality.
Moynihan saved some of his choicest criticisms for Ambassador Donald
McHenry’s vote against Israel in the Security Council in March 1980. The vote and
Vance’s subsequent defense of it before Congress was perceived to have cost Carter a win in the New York primary, as well as costing him the chance to end Senator Edward
Kennedy’s ultimately futile and self involved insurgency. A dollar spent combating
Kennedy was a dollar lost with which to fight Reagan later, and this may have been the difference between victory and defeat in November. 3 Moynihan, however, was concerned with more than the results of the 1980 election. The defeat of Carter pointed to a larger problem in the Democratic Party.
Moynihan did not so much Carter as he did the McGovernite coalition within the
Democratic Party. Moynihan believed the influence of these voices was less important in the execution of foreign policy than in its conception. The vision that had triumphed in much of the Democratic Party was one where “if the United States denied itself the means of aggression, it would cease to be aggressive.” 4 This vision, along with the
Carter administration’s attempt to move beyond the Cold War to focus on economic aid and human rights, placed the Third World in the forefront of Carter’s foreign policy calculations. Moynihan sought to judge Carter and his administration on their foreign policy performance, therefore, in the Third World’s preferred arena: the United Nations.
3 Julian E Zelizer, Jimmy Carter (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2010), chap. 6.
4 Moynihan, “‘Joining the Jackals’: The U.S. at the UN 1977 1980.”
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The real villain of Moynihan’s piece was neither Andrew Young nor Jimmy
Carter. It was not the staff of the United States’ Mission with whom Moynihan had such a rocky relationship. It was Cyrus Vance. Vance, by either commission or omission, had missed the fact that his (and the country’s) mission to the United Nations had allowed not just an ally but the Camp David process and the expulsion of the USSR from Egypt to be brought under assault. His influence on the State Department was such that even after his resignation the Mission allowed the General Assembly to judge Israel guilty of violating the Fourth Geneva Convention in December 1980. Israel had faced an escalating campaign of de legitimization since the early 1970s, and now it looked as if that campaign (run from the Third World and at least tacitly supported by the USSR) was nearing its culmination.
What was worse for Moynihan than these individual votes was that the
Democratic Party as a whole had begun to succumb to the Third World’s view of the
United States. The gentlemen of the Establishment (of whom Moynihan and the neoconservatives had been skeptical) had seemingly lost their nerve. First they had crumbled before the New Left at home, and now they bowed to the Third World abroad.
The election of Reagan meant the end of their influence on the Republican Party. 5
Some of the neoconservatives saw the contradictions of the Carter administration in more general terms. For Carl Gersham, one of Moynihan’s intellectual allies during the battles of 1975, the struggle between Brzezinski and Vance was one of power rather than
5 Kabaservice, The Guardians . Kabaservice argues that George H.W. Bush was not a member of the Establishment due to his beliefs and his public embrace of the conservatism of the American Southwest. In contrast, Elliot Richardson retained the perspective and beliefs of the northeastern Establishment and was out of place in the 1980’s Republican Party.
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end. Vance’s principles were arms control and détente, while Brzezinski’s goal was managing the growing interconnectedness of the world. Neither man, to Gersham, was actually for bringing about democracy (even social democracy) within the Communist world. 6 Gersham was too harsh in his assessment. In the end, Carter and Brzezinski were able to see the difference between the Soviet Union’s actions and their rhetoric. Vance, with his abiding concern about arms control and diplomacy above all else, could not.
Carter increased defense spending and created the baseline for military capability that would allow the US to intervene directly in the Middle East. 7
The ultimate irony of Moynihan’s life and career was that he was so singular a figure he could not carry either party with him. He could not even give as many cheers for capitalism as Kristol, and his passion for liberty and his intellectual consistency put him at odds with both parties. Moynihan cheered for Kennedy in 1980, but Kennedy’s views on foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union were far more conciliatory than
Carter’s. Moynihan was secure in the Senate with New York’s support, but it was doubtful that his politics would play among many other of the 49 states. The criticism from the New York Times and others at the end of his career that he had not accomplished much legislatively was less a result of Moynihan’s political skills than the profound hesitation within both political parties to follow ideas to their logical conclusions. 8 To
6 Carl Gersham, “The Rise & Fall of the New Foreign Policy Establishment,” Commentary , July 1980.
7 Paul Davis, Observations on the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force: Origins, Direction, and Mission (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1982).
8 Moynihan was genuinely angered that the New York Times would publish such a cruel piece in the Sunday magazine. Moynihan to Sulzberger, Washington, 3 November 2000, Reprinted in Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan , 645.
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Moynihan, the Republicans thought too much of the Soviets and the Democrats thought too well of them. Moynihan’s middle way, which he at least considered an extension of containment, was simply an electoral non starter on the national level. 9
The World in 1980
The political and economic situations in the United States and Britain were worse at the end of 1980 than they had been in 1975. In Britain, unemployment was growing and with it grew the Tory dread that Thatcher’s government was failing just like
Heath’s. 10 In the United States, another Third World crisis had ended another
Democratic presidency. The second oil crisis of the decade had spawned gas lines and triggered a recession. The Cold War had returned thanks to the issue of Intermediate
Range missiles in Europe and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 11
Anglo American diplomacy had eliminated some of the problems of 1975. Most notably, Zimbabwe had come into existence without an expansion of Soviet influence in
Southern Africa. Britain had played a small but crucial role in finally ending the hostage crisis with Iran, but the United States still faced a dangerous regional power whose actions would continue to plague the Reagan administration. 12 Both the United States and Britain were cooperating with the UNHCR to solve the problems related to the
9 Moynihan to George Mitchell, (undated, likely 1991 1992), Reprinted in Ibid., 590.
10 Moore, Margaret Thatcher , 522.
11 Herring, From Colony to Superpower , 861–870.
12 Ibid., 878–880.
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continuing refugee crisis in Southeast Asia, but the global refugee crisis continued to grow. 13
Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, but the Carter administration’s commitment to the project forced Carter to defend Young long after it would have been expedient to remove him. By appointing a Permanent Representative to the United Nations that was in some ways a recognition of the contributions of a domestic interest group, Carter took a risk in politicizing the United Nations. Whereas Moynihan’s rhetoric propelled him into the
Senate from New York, Young’s diplomacy inflamed both traditional conservatives and the emerging neoconservative movement.
One of the major impacts of the growing role of the United Nations in Anglo
American relations in the 1970s was the adoption of an intellectually combative approach to the United Nations by Republicans. This neoconservative focus on the United Nations meant it became more rather than less of a factor in American politics. Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador for his first term, lasted far longer than Moynihan at
Turtle Bay while firing off rhetoric even more damaging to the electoral prospects of those on the left of the American political spectrum. 14 Neoconservatives saw the United
Nations not just as a dangerous place, but also as an important place as befitted their background in the Democratic Party. Rather than ignore it, Democrats saw it as a place worth fighting in and fighting for. Kirkpatrick’s presence was a visible symbol that it
13 United Nations Department, FCO, “Review of Vietnamese Refugee Quota”, London, 9 September 1980, FCO 58 2166. The FCO estimate for worldwide refugees in 1980 was 10 million, “nearly half in Africa.”
14 “Convention in Dallas: The Republicans; Kirkptrick’s Speech Delights Party,” The New York Times , August 22, 1984.
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was the neoconservative rather than the isolationist or Establishment streams of conservative thought that had triumphed in this area of foreign policy after 1980.
Kirkpatrick and the elements of the State Department that supported her in 1982 earned the wrath of those on the British political right. 15 However, Weinberger’s aid and
Reagan’s choices ultimately overruled Kirkpatrick. 16
Reagan, like Ford, reached across party lines to put a Democrat in the United
Nations who again believed it was a place to struggle against illiberal forces. Moynihan argued for more liberal democracy as the long term hope for the United States.
Kirkpatrick had much the same long term aim, but she was far more willing to publicly defend “authoritarian” allies with the caveat that they would be more likely to turn toward liberal democracy. 17 What Kirkpatrick (and nearly everyone else) failed to foresee was the rapid transitions of Communist governments in Eastern Europe a decade later. Totalitarian governments could turn democratic. They just had to first fail utterly.
The importance of the United Nations as a forum for justifying Anglo American actions continued past the Cold War. The UN’s lack of approval for NATO’s operations in Kosovo in 1999 was one controversial piece of the bombing campaign. Colin Powell’s insistence on bringing the case against Saddam Hussein to the United Nations was as much an attempt to gain domestic support for the war as it was an attempt to sway the world. George Bush made the case against the Baathist regime in Iraq in September
15 Alan Clark, Mrs. Thatcher’s Minister: The Private Diaries of Alan Clark (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 70. Clark’s term for her out of his uninhibited diaries was “Anglophobe harridan.”
16 Moore, Margaret Thatcher , 686.
17 Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary 68, no. 5 (November 1979): 34– 45.
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2002, and Powell again in February 2003. Eventually, to be too critical of the United
Nations was fundamentally disqualifying for service at Turtle Bay. John Bolton expressed variations on the themes of Moynihan voiced a generation earlier, but his nomination never made it past the Senate.
As a factor in domestic politics, the United Nations was far more important in
American political life than in Britain. British governments of both persuasions accepted the boundaries imposed by the United Nations far more than the United States did.
Kirkpatrick’s presence at the United Nations was an enduring repudiation of Carter by the Reagan administration. In the years hence, Carter’s reputation has waned and waxed, and far more than Ford’s been the subject of continuing debate in American Presidential elections. Part of the reason for this enduring struggle over the rightness of Carter was the administration’s often contradictory foreign policy. Proponents of Carter promote his dedication to human rights to defend his Presidency, while Carter’s antagonists cite Iran and inflation as the prime examples of why Carter was broadly a failure. 18
Despite the debates over Iran, Afghanistan, and Carter’s conception of human rights, one area where Carter’s foreign policy was unquestioningly successful was his relations with Britain, particularly when compared to Reagan’s first term in office.
Carter’s team argued about the correct course of American foreign policy, but his administration’s normal relations with the British had some advantages. They could at least take credit in the fact their actions did lead to questions over whether HMG was in
18 The revisionist views of the Carter administration are captured in Douglas Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford , Kindle, The American Presidents (New York: Henry Holt & Co, n.d.); Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency . An example of the contemporary conservative view on the Obama Carter parallels is John Fund, “The Carter Obama Comparisons Grow Walter Mondale Himself Sees a Parallel,” The Wall Street Journal , September 22, 2010, sec. Opinion.
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fact in charge of what happened regarding nuclear weapons in Britain following an
American military strike on Libya. 19 Members of the Carter administration did not dine with members of a foreign government who were to invade a British territory the next day. 20 Jimmy Carter did not order the invasion of a Commonwealth country without the consent of the British. 21 Although Carter had poor relations with foreign leaders that ranged from Schmidt to Begin to the Ayatollah, he worked well with the British in many areas in the Third World and beyond.
Carter’s great failure was not his mixture of morality and appeals to political expediency, but it was his failure to make his change of opinion matter. A new forcefulness and purpose triggered by both the renewed aggression of the Soviet Union outside its borders or rhetorical volleys at the Students Following the Line of Iman meant nothing when the Soviets remained intransigent, the hostages remained in captivity, and inflation and gas prices rose precipitously. These failures which seemed to conservative commentators at the time an echo of Britain’s weaknesses in the 1930s were fatal to
Carter’s Presidency.
Carter’s true heir might not have been Barack Obama, but George W. Bush.
Instead of striving for order, Bush strove for liberty within some limits (China for example was not a focus of his efforts). He viewed despotism as the true danger to the
United States. Had 100,000 people in Ohio voted the other way in 2004, Bush and Carter would share the legacy of leaving office in the midst of escalating foreign policy
19 Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo American Relationship (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 350–351.
20 Wapshott, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher .
21 Adkins, Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada , 122–123. 301
disasters. Bush’s second term was most notable for his rejection of the advice of the Iraq
Study Group and forfeiting the Republican Party’s electoral prospects to enact the
Surge. 22 A second Carter term might have produced similar results if Carter without
Vance or Young in the administration had adopted a harsher line against Soviet actions against the wishes of many in his party and the protests of the nuclear freeze movement.
The relationship between Carter and Thatcher was perhaps the least “special” of the relations between a Prime Minister and a President during the Cold War. It did not have the tensions of Truman and Clement Attlee, the conflict between Eisenhower and
Eden, Macmillan and Kennedy’s self styled dramatics, Wilson and Johnson’s feud,
Nixon and Heath’s distance, or the warmness between both Ford and Carter with
Callaghan. Thatcher supported Carter’s nuclear strategy and gave what help she could in
Iran, while Carter supported Carrington’s efforts in Lusaka and Lancaster House without direct American involvement in the day to day negotiations.
Like Ford and Carter, James Callaghan deserves reconsideration as well.
Callaghan had, much like Attlee before him, a way of being both a low key and reassuring leader and a skilled manager of a group of proud, intellectual, and driven political animals. A man who could balance Roy Jenkins’ Euro enthusiasms, Denis
Healey’s erudition, Tony Benn’s rabble rousing, and David Owen’s crusading while countering both Margaret Thatcher’s criticisms and the campaigns of the IRA seems to
22 More than the Iraq War caused Bush’s loss and the Republican “thumpings” in 2006 and 2008. One poll in October 2008 showed that when asked what the “most important problem facing the country today” was, 89% gave answer directly related to the economy. Roper Center, “Most Important Problem”, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/presidential/presidential_election_2008.html, Accessed 6 March 2015. For a general discussion of the Surge and the election of 2008 in the context of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, see Matthew S Muehlbauer and David J Ulbrich, Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Era to the Twenty First Century , 2014, 513.
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merit a greater regard than he is given. Callaghan kept Britain a strong member of
NATO, held Argentina in check, and achieved a temporary peace with the unions until the late fall of 1978. 23
Thatcher was more able than Callaghan to balance a relationship with the United
States with the demands of her party and of the Commonwealth. One of the factors that made this possible was a lack of anti American voices in her Cabinet. High Tory criticism of the United States by politicians like Enoch Powell and journalists such as
Henry Fairlie was not as prominent in the ruling Tories as the anti American criticisms of
Tony Benn were in Labour. 24 Thatcher was a democratic head of government that Carter could work with, even if she and he stood far apart on the tone and content of governance.
Despite the enduring debate over Carter’s legacy, the politician who deserves reconsideration most from this era is Gerald Ford. Ford left office after a loss that proved he could neither unite nor inspire the Republican Party. He came closer to losing the nomination that Carter did four years later, and lost a close election thanks to a gaffe in the second Presidential debate. 25 Like Truman, Ford was a man who rose to the job.
23 Kenneth O. Morgan, “Was Britain Dying?,” in New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments 1974 1979 , ed. Kevin Hickson and Anthony Seldon (New York: Routledge, 2004), 305–307.
24 Fairlie’s characterization of the Republican delegates in 1980 deserves a full reprinting. “"Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious." He neglected “popular.” Quoted in Jeremy McCarter, “Reagan Was Wrong” Newsweek , 17 June 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/reagan was wrong 80759, Accessed 19 Jan 15. 25 Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford , 2007, chap. 10.
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Like Truman, he came up in politics through the legislative branch. He faced a hostile
Congress and a divided party and was able to govern in spite of his problems.
The rehabilitation of Ford must begin with how his contemporaries viewed him.
He was an odd choice for a man to earn so much respect, but Ford looms large in many of his contemporaries’ lives as both a statesman and a good man. He was Kissinger’s protector, Young’s agent of stability in that most tumultuous of American times,
Callaghan’s friend – far more than Carter, and Moynihan’s example. 26
He did the right things, even if he did not always know it. Vladivostok and
Helsinki were forthright diplomatic efforts at preserving something of détente and maybe even searching for a sense of normalcy between the two superpowers. Ford did not challenge the spending authority of Congress when South Vietnam was dissolving and the funds it needed to stretch its survival were cut off. He pardoned Nixon in spite of the cost and then appeared before Congress to justify his choice. In an era of partisan tension and questions over the most basic of Constitutional views, Ford respected Congress enough to both veto their legislation and listen to their concerns. Although Ford was not a “consensus” politician (no President with his number of vetoes could claim to be), he was able to work with European leaders of almost every political background.
The end of the crises of the 1970s did result in one of the more curious phenomena of the 1980s. There was a resurgence of interest in the British Empire in
American popular culture. Despite the rioting and climbing unemployment during the first few years of her government, Thatcher’s reforms triggered an unexpected nostalgia
26 Kissinger, Years of Renewal , chap. 34; Moynihan, A Dangerous Place , 272; Healey, The Time of My Life , 472–473; Brinkley, Gerald R. Ford , 2007, chap. 11; Young, A Way out of No Way , 119.
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in the United States for the glory days of the British Empire. Shows such as “Upstairs,
Downstairs” and “Brideshead Revisited” on PBS and “Gandhi” and “Chariots of Fire” on the big screen portrayed a more positive view of Britain than the pettiness, bureaucratic nonsense, and sense of futility depicted in British shows such as “Monty Python” or
“Fawlty Towers” from the 1970s. 27
It was not just British stories that gave the popular culture of the 1980s a sense of glamour. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger sat at the fulcrum of American politics and diplomacy during the 1970s. They were the bridge between the more realpolitik approach of the Nixon administration and the human rights focus of the Carter administration. After Ford left the White House, he and Kissinger did not spend much time together. Kissinger went on to found a successful consulting firm, and Ford retired into being an elder statesman spending time with the other leaders of his day. 28 However, the two men had a reunion of sorts when they both appeared in a cameo in the nighttime soap Dynasty in 1983. 29
The Third World and the Special Relationship
The question of why dealing with the Third World resulted in a closer Anglo
American relationship from 1975 to 1980 reveals a paradoxical answer. The efforts to
27 Lisa Szefel, “Welcome Back, 1970s”, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/57698, Accessed 18 January 2015
28 Michael Hirsh, “What Bush Can Learn From Ford”, Newsweek, 26 Dec 06, http://www.newsweek.com/hirsh what bush can learn ford 105871, Accessed 19 Jan 15. It is notable that Ford, rather than Carter, was the leader who forged the closest bonds with his fellow western leaders.
29 “Kissinger and the Fords To Play 'Dynasty' Bits” 12 Dec 83 http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/12/arts/kissinger and the fords to play dynasty bits.html, Accessed 19 January 2015. Kissinger was the one who got lines with Joan Collins.
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resolve some of the problems of the Third World either through international institutions or an explicitly Anglo American framework was a way of uniting domestic and foreign policy concerns under a moral framework. This unusual unity was the link in American foreign policy between the end of the Ford administration and the beginning of the Carter administration. Easing the plight of the Third World, striving for peace in Southern
Africa, and aiding refugees were all defensible on a combination of grounds. Cold
Warriors could point to the need to contain the Soviet threat and the defense of democratic allies. Those on the left could point to the growing importance of human rights created through greater self determination, the end of racist regimes, and the alleviation of human suffering.
The paradox of these results was that while the Anglo American partnership generally resolved the issues it confronted, the effort had an impact of helping to end the post war consensus within the United States. Britain’s post war consensus came under attack primarily due to factors inside of the country, but the breakdown of the Golden
Age in the United States was intimately tied to foreign policy. Neoconservatives described Britain’s problems in the 1970s as the worst case of what could go wrong with social democracy. 30 Had the relationship not mattered so much, Britain’s problems would not matter either as an example or as a warning. Politicians and thinkers on the right invoked Britain’s past and present as a warning. Justin Vaisse lists Churchill first among the “heroes” of the “Second Age” neoconservatives. 31 However, the
30 Tyrrell and Brittan, The Future That Doesn’t Work .
31 Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson , 243; Norman Podhoretz, “The Culture of Appeasement,” Harpers , October 1977. Reagan compared Carter to Chamberlain in a speech in 1979. Hayward, The Age of Reagan. , 595– 596.
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neoconservative search for an American Churchill would founder on the utopian visions of Reagan and the tragic detachment of George Bush.32
The years of 1975 to 1980 forced the British to deal with the full spectrum of
American diplomats, from the fiery intellectuals (Moynihan) to the idealistic peacemakers (Young) to the paragons of the Establishment (Vance) to the cold executors of realpolitik (Kissinger). It is a measure of Britain’s stability that its governments were able to work successfully with all of these politicians. Only Moynihan who deliberately targeted the British government of the day in both his personal and public rhetoric had to go. Foreign Office officials like Duff and Rowlands or diplomats like Parsons were equally capable under either American or British party.
Conclusion
The rise of the political right in the United States and Britain is a common political narrative of the 1970s. While conservative parties won elections in 1979 in
Britain and 1980 in the United States, the true political debates of the era were within the parties on their left. For the Democrats, the 1970s were a struggle between what became incompatible factions. Civil rights activists looked to move beyond political equality to claim a fairer share of the jobs and prosperity of previous generations. Establishment figures groped for ways of managing change, even if it meant negotiating their own demise. Cold War liberals, disenchanted with the realpolitik and détente of Kissinger, the failure of nerve of the establishment in the face of the New Left, and the increasing
32 Despite reading the book in 2002, Bush’s conduct during the first three years of the Iraq War is almost exactly the opposite of the prescription for a successful war leader in Eliot A Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).
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Third World assault on the United States and Israel, sought to restore with their rhetoric a world with a concern for law, liberty, and public morality.
For the British, neither the half hearted attempt at a more free market approach of
Ted Heath nor the confidence and coordination of James Callaghan brought domestic accord. Britain, having gone farther down the path of socialism in the 1940s and 1960s, now turned to a leader who sought to restore Britain’s glory not through empire and conquest but through a commitment to thrift and efficiency that would lead to morality.
However, even Thatcher’s most ardent advocates will admit while her reforms improved the overall state of the British economy they ultimately did nothing for Britain’s moral state. 33
The road that led to the liberal defeat ran through the Third World. The consensus foreign and economic policies within Britain and the United States existed at the same time formal empire was ending. The power of the Third World after decolonization counted in numbers at the United Nations and in control of oil through
OPEC had an unexpected consequence. One of the factors that led to decolonization was the impossibility of fighting the Cold War, building a “New Jerusalem” at home, and investing enough money in colonies to bring up the standard of living and productivity. 34
When empire ceased to profitable, it usually ceased. Empire particularly in the Middle
East served to control the price of oil and with it the global rate of inflation. When OPEC
33 Berlinski, There Is No Alternative .
34 Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation State , 2014, 91–94, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=663454; Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558 1983 , 347–354. Lloyd cites not only the cost of the development but the possible cost of wars to prevent decolonization as a driving force behind the British drive to end Empire in the 1950s and early 1960s.
308
asserted its control, social democracy came under direct attack. OPEC was trying to punish Israel, but instead it punished the “vital center”. Conservatives in both the United
States and Britain drew much of their rhetorical advantage from the economic conditions the power and material possessions of the Third World had triggered. However, the
Special Relationship lacked the power it had possessed earlier. Britain and the United
States could no longer drive Iran’s internal politics with spies and money, and the institution they created for world peace now regularly voted against them. Kissinger’s diplomatic skills that had served him so well failed to force one isolated African leader to keep his word, and Thatcher and Carrington had to depend on the Third World to keep the Patriotic Front at the table in 1979.
The United States and Britain walked hand in hand together through the tumult of the Third World after the Vietnam War. While both countries struggled at home to find a way forward in a world where their power had faded, they met the crises in their areas of shared interest together with as much cooperation as personality and politics allowed.
Sidelined for a decade, the “Special Relationship” became a normal part of the foreign policy for both countries as they worked together in a world that had grown beyond their control. Their trials together at the moment of the Third World’s greatest influence proved that the two countries could work toward common goals while respecting each other’s independence. This time of balance and normalcy had neither the drama of war nor the disenchantment of separation, but it was as useful as it was necessary. That legacy is worth remembering as long as the United States and Britain seek to work together in the world.
309
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Journal Articles
“Andrew Young: The Two Edged Sword.” Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 139–45. Caswell, Robert. “Economic Sanctions and the Iran Experience.” Foreign Affairs , no. Winter 1981/82 (n.d.). http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/35846/robert caswell/economic sanctions and the iran experience. Caute, David. “The Sham Election in Rhodesia.” The Nation , July 14, 1979, 46–52. DeRoche, Andrew. “Standing Firm for Principles: Jimmy Carter and Zimbabwe.” Diplomatic History 23, no. 4 (n.d.): 657–85. Dimitrakis, Panagiotis. “British Diplomacy and the Decline of CENTO.” Comparative Strategy 28, no. 4 (October 2009): 317–31. Farer, Tom J. “The United States and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation.” Foreign Affairs 54, no. 1 (1975). Freedom House. “Report of the Freedom House Observer Team: The Common Role Election in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), February 1980.” World Affairs 143, no. 1 (Summer 1980): 85–120. Keely, Charles B. “The International Refugee Regime(s): The End of the Cold War Matters.” International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 303–14. Kirkpatrick, Jeane. “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Commentary 68, no. 5 (November 1979): 34–45.
Kristol, Irving. “A View from Miami.” Encounter , November 1963, 86–90. ———. “Review of ‘The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek.’” Commentary , April 1960. ———. “The Heterodox Conformist: Review of Socialism and the New Despotism by R.H.S. Crossman.” Encounter , April 1956, 77–79. Leary, William M. “Woodrow Wilson, Irish Americans, and the Election of 1916.” The Journal of American History 54, no. 1 (June 1, 1967): 57–72. “London Diary.” New Statesman , November 28, 1975. Meaney, Thomas. “Empire States: On Pankaj Mishra.” The Nation , June 3, 2013. http://www.thenation.com/article/174366/empire states pankaj mishra. Miller, Jake C. “Black Viewpoints on the Mid East Conflict.” Journal of Palestine Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 37–49. Moss, Robert. “Anglocommunism.” Commentary 63, no. 2 (February 1977): 27–33. Moynihan, Daniel. A Dangerous Place . 1st ed. Boston: Little Brown, 1978.
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———. “‘Joining the Jackals’: The U.S. at the UN 1977 1980.” Commentary , February 1981. ———. “Was Wilson Right?” Commentary , no. 57 (May 1974): 25–31. Nelson, Edward. “Milton Friedman and U.K. Economic Policy: 1938 1979.” Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review 91, no. 5 (2009): 465–506. “Playboy Interview: Andrew Young.” Playboy , July 1977. Podhoretz, Norman. “The Culture of Appeasement.” Harpers , October 1977. Raison, Timothy. “The British Debate the Welfare State.” Public Interest 1, no. Autumn 1965 (n.d.): 110–18. Rees, Goronwy. “Column ‘R.’” Encounter , November 1975, 29–31. Reisman, W. Michael. “The Legal Effect of Vetoed Resolutions.” American Journal of International Law 74 (1980). http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/716. Russett, Bruce, Christopher Layne, David E. Spiro, and Michael W. Doyle. “The Democratic Peace.” International Security 19, no. 4 (April 1, 1995): 164–84. Solow, Robert. “Science in Ideology in Economics.” Public Interest , no. 21 (Fall 1970): 94–107. Steiner, Zara. “Decision Making in American and British Foreign Policy: An Open and Shut Case.” Review of International Studies 13, no. 1 (January 1987): 1–18. Spelling, Alex. “Edward Heath and Anglo–American Relations 1970–1974: A Reappraisal.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 20, no. 4 (2009): 638–58. Stapleton, Julia. “Citizenship versus Patriotism in Twentieth Century England.” The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 151–78. doi:10.2307/4091682. Taylor, A. J. P. “Review: Kingsley Martin’s Harold Laski.” New Statesman and Nation , January 17, 1953. Wilson, James Q. “Crime and Punishment in England.” Public Interest , no. 43 (Spring 1976). Warwick, Paul. “Did Britain Change? An Inquiry into the Causes of National Decline.” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 1 (January 1985): 99–133.
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