Fulbright was a pragmatist. Foreign policy was not about making friends it was about doing what was right for one’s own country. America had enough problems of its own without another war. Besides, once the fighting was over somebody would have to pick up the pieces afterwards and potentially that was a much more lucrative deal…
“I had expected better of you, Bill,” Lord Franks, the urbane, scholarly man who had cut an increasingly embattled figure in Philadelphia in recent weeks said sadly, as the two men shook hands.
Fulbright raised an eyebrow.
“How so, Oliver?”
The British Ambassador viewed the bigger man thoughtfully.
Fifty-nine year old Oliver Sherwell Franks had been Ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952. He was a man used to being around powerful men and intimately acquainted with the ways, means and nefarious mores of Realpolitik. Yet even he had been somewhat taken aback by the hypocrisy and cynicism evident in the most recent pre-meditated craven foreign policy u-turn of the Kennedy Administration.
That he had seen the volte face over the US-UK Mutual defense Treaty coming for some weeks made it not less unpalatable. The furore over the false, presumably State Department sponsored stories, about the late Sir David Luce’s prospective elevation to the post of Supreme Commander All Allied Forces (Mediterranean) had been the final signpost on the road to the Administration’s perfidy.
The signalled ritual denouement of the ‘special relationship’, this time most likely permanently was to be stage-managed around the forthcoming Philadelphia Summit. The networks and the press had already been primed to expect the President to stand up for ‘American’ vital strategic interests, to confront ‘unreasonable demands from its European Allies’, and not to ‘fly in the face of the expressed will of Congress’.
Not for the first time Lord Franks had asked himself if the Kennedy Administration knew what it was doing? He was desperately seeking some indication that somebody in the White House understood, really understood, that the World was going to be a very difference place the day after America betrayed its own soul?
“I am not one of those people who believe that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of those who went before us,” Lord Franks said resignedly. “However, it seems obvious to me that the United States has forgotten the consequences of its decision to shun the League of Nations and its isolationist stance in the 1930s. We in the old world eventually forgave you for coming late to two World Wars, because everything turned out for the best in the end. Now it seems that after weeks and months of fine words; the Administration plans to leave us in the lurch. Very much in the manner of a suitor who has had his sordid pleasure with his putative partner under false pretences and subsequently jilted her at the altar.”
Fulbright’s face was suddenly a hard mask.
“And you have the nerve to ask me ‘how so’?” The Englishman observed with such impeccable civility that it almost but not quite veiled his quietly seething contempt. “Presumably, it was your people encouraged the Argentines to invade the Falkland Islands?”
The Secretary of State visibly flinched at this softly spoken accusation.
“That’s nothing to do with us, Oliver.”
“No. What else does the CIA have up its sleeve? Further rabble rousing in Ireland, perhaps? Or should we expect miscellaneous assassinations throughout the Commonwealth? Or perhaps, another attempt to murder the surviving members of the Royal Family?”
The directness of the attack had rocked the veteran Senator from Arkansas back on his heels. It was all the more shocking because Lord Franks seemed oblivious to the presence of the senior State Department staffers who had witnessed every word he just said.
“Clear the room please!” Fulbright barked.
Lord Franks waited until the doors closed at his back.
“The first duty of a politician is to get elected, Oliver,” the Secretary of State said grimly. “Do you honestly think that if Jack Kennedy loses in November that the first thing his successor will do is buddy up to the old country?”
Oliver Franks shook his head.
Not in disagreement but in despair.
Whoever came out on top on 3rd November 1964 was so irrelevant to the scale of the crisis in the Middle East, it beggared belief that his American friends had eyes only for the demands of the immediate electoral cycle.
“If Jack Kennedy gets re-elected in November things will be different,” Fulbright assured the British Ambassador. “The Administration will want to do the right thing by its friends…”
Lord Franks turned on his heel and walked away.
“Oliver, I…”
As the British Ambassador listened to the sound of his own feet ringing on the stone floor he could not help but recall Winston Churchill’s words, voiced in the darkest days of another war.
‘We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone…’
Chapter 13
The Secretary of State for Defence was the last man to arrive in the ancient room of a displaced College Fellow. Forty-five year old William Stephen Whitelaw, a veteran of the campaign in North-West Europe in 1944 and 1945 was going about his business with a fresh spring in his stride, and an odd lightness of heart. Part of his good humour was because he was feeling fitter and generally better within himself than he had at any time since the night of the October War; but perversely, now that the worst had happened and things looked uniformly grim, this was a time for action.
Moreover, the great outstanding question left unanswered from the cataclysm — had the USSR been destroyed or just severely mauled? — had now been comprehensively resolved and in the next couple of days he, and everybody else in England would discover exactly what all those fine American promises, hedged around by innumerable abstruse caveats and clauses, amounted to in reality. One way or another within a matter of days the government would know the precise depth of the dark, airless hole into which recent events had pushed it!
It was 1940 all over again…
The room appointed for the morning’s conference with the Chiefs of Staff looked out over Mob Quad, a quadrangle of the college that had a middling to fair claim to be Oxford University’s oldest seat of learning. Of course, the other two claimants to this status; Balliol and University Colleges, fiercely disputed Merton’s claim and had done so for centuries. Merton had been founded by Walter de Merton, Lord High Chancellor to both Henry III and Edward I, who had drawn up statutes for a self-governing college and organised endowments to support it in 1264. Balliol’s charter dated to 1263 but thereafter the matter of which college possessed greater intrinsic antiquity was blurred by questions surrounding the physical existence of this or that institution. Merton College — or to give it its full name: The House of College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford — had not actually laid down foundations in its present site in the south east corner of the city until 1274, while the supporters of Balliol and University Colleges made rival pre-dating claims.