In the aftermath of the October War the United Kingdom’s remaining ‘white’ dominions, and virtually all of its still ‘white’ former dominions — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Southern Rhodesia — even the newly ‘republican’ South Africa — and a raft of colonial outposts including Singapore, Hong Kong and miscellaneous island dependencies scattered across the Pacific and the South Atlantic — had in effect, circled the wagons around the dreadfully mauled former mother country. In the United States, itself sorely damaged and bleeding, the sudden unity of the ‘British Commonwealth’ — the Commonwealth of Nations formed in 1931 had formally ceased to be the British Commonwealth after World War II but American commentators and most politicians had not yet caught up with the fact yet — had been in stark contrast to the reluctant and the qualified, nervous ‘loyalty’ it enjoyed from fellow members of the ‘Americas club’ and the open hostility of the former European colonial outposts in the Caribbean, many of whom had been badly affected by fallout from the destruction of neighbouring Cuba and received no help or compensation from Washington. In short, to many Americans it had seemed lately as if they had no ‘real friends’ in the World; while the United Kingdom, which in the eyes of many in the United States had somehow ‘let down’ America, had somehow emerged from the war with a ‘new empire’.
The depressing thing was that there were still people in the State department and within the President’s inner circle who clung to this belief.
Of course nobody at the British Embassy would ever publicly intimate that far from the United Kingdom having in any way, shape or form ‘let down’ its trans-Atlantic ally; if anybody had ‘let anybody down’ it was the Americans who had done all the ‘letting down’. This was the rampaging five ton African bull Elephant drawing breath in the corner of every room that nobody wanted to mention each time the ‘two old allies’ sat down to ‘talk turkey’. Consequently, the British side was never going to forget it, or lightly take the word of any President, or of any senior member of any American Administration on trust any time soon. Only deeds counted in this brave new post-cataclysm age.
No matter how blurred ‘the facts’ were, or were likely to become in the future, Lord Franks knew exactly what had happened on that night late in October 1962. The United States had launched a massive all out pre-emptive first strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact enemies, without first warning its ‘oldest ally’. The first that Harold MacMillan’s government had known about the war was when the early warning radars in the Yorkshire had detected the first Polaris missiles breaking surface in the Norwegian Sea and proscribing sub-orbital trajectories towards the east. By then it had been too late to implement the most rudimentary of civil defence measures or to even sound the air raid sirens left over from World War II; plain language ‘war warnings’ had been flashed to all British forces on land, sea and air by men who knew they would shortly be dead, and the code ‘EIGHT-EAST’ — you are hereby authorised to attack all designated war targets — had been flashed to the V-Bomber bases on the English East Coast more or less at the moment the first Soviet missiles had popped up over the horizon. Shortly thereafter, the dying had begun.
“Lord Franks!”
The British Ambassador blinked bleary-eyed at his First Secretary. The man was irritatingly wide-awake, although his tie was at half-mast betraying that he too, had only recently been awakened.
“Something has happened in the Med,” the man explained. “At Malta, we think. There are already journalists, photographers and a couple of TV trucks outside the Embassy and,” his tone said that the news got worse, “the Secretary of State says he has to talk to you. Urgently, sir.”
Although Oliver Franks had never planned to be a diplomat and had had few old friends either in the pre-war Foreign and Colonial Office or in its much reduced post-October War reincarnation, he had been an obvious choice to replace Sir James Sykes who had been assassinated during the Battle of Washington in December. Serendipitously, he loved America and respected Americans of all mainstream political persuasions and had a wealth of contacts garnered during his earlier period in Washington. More important, there was a calm, gentle method in everything he did. He was that rare thing; a man whose life had prepared him for exactly the challenges confronting him in Philadelphia during his second sojourn in America.
“If you’d inform Secretary Fulbright’s people that I will be happy to take his call in five minutes time please,” he decided, stifling a yawn and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He stepped into his dressing gown and stuffed his feet into his slippers. “I will take the call in my office. Be a good fellow and organize a pot of tea please.”
Oliver Frank’s ‘office’ was a large, airy room with — during daylight hours rather than at this time of day — a view of the sprawling campus of La Salle University to the north, and Wister Woods to the east and south spoilt only by the two armoured personnel carriers of the Pennsylvania National Guard permanently posted just beyond the Embassy compound’s razor wire topped steel mesh fence.
The Ambassador trudged down the stairs and entered his working sanctum accompanied by two assistants, both very young and like the First Secretary, vexingly bright-eyed and bushy tailed!
Bill Fulbright wants to talk to me ‘urgently’ at a time of day when neither of us — were we in our right minds — would want to discuss anything of substance?
Oliver Franks pondered this thought as he settled behind his desk, eyeing the phone next to his right hand as he began to work through the possibilities ahead of hearing what inevitably was going to be very bad news.
His calmness was no act. He was as unflappable as he seemed. A lifetime of service had taught him to see past the emotional and the emotive, to cut logically to the heart of a matter and if it was humanly possible, form opinions and judgements with equanimity. Although in practice this was harder to do — especially in a crisis — than say, he had learned to master most of his fears and now this ‘trick’ served him and his country well.
Born in 1905 Oliver Franks had been too young to fight in the Great War. A graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, he had pursued an academic career between First and Second World Wars. In the 1930s he had been Provost of Worcester College, and then between 1936 and 1946 — a period interrupted by war service — Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. During Hitler’s War he had joined the Ministry of Supply, rising to become its Permanent Secretary, and after 1945 he had dutifully encapsulated the lessons learned during the war in Central Planning and Control in War and Peace, a document which had been at Margaret Thatcher’s elbow — in her pre-prime ministerial role as Minister of Supply in Edward Heath’s United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration — and remained the source ‘bible’ for much of the work of the Ministry of Supply. A man of the middle, moderate left of British politics, Franks had been a close personal friend of Clement Atlee, the Labour Prime Minister between 1945 and 1951, and of Ernest Bevin. It was Bevin, the first post-1945 Foreign Secretary who had tempted him away from Queen’s College, where he was Provost, to head the British mission to discuss the Marshal Plan. Later as Ambassador in Washington he had been intimately involved in the negotiations which resulted in the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). In time he had become the Chairman of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, and had spent the eight years before the October War as Chairman of Lloyds Bank.