“Twenty years ago, there did seem to be an alternative system on offer. This involved a close and equal friendship between the two great Anglo-Saxon powers. We could then have smashed both Germany and Japan. Had we chosen that system—and I am really only following your own reasoning here in those articles you wrote for Beaverbrook—we might not have ended up as the world’s hegemonic power on sufferance. We might not have sat like some inwardly rotting fruit, waiting for everyone else to wake up to the fact that we couldn’t really defend our position. Together with the Americans, we could have stamped our dominion on the world, unshakable forever.”
“But the Americans are out of it,” I said in the pause that resulted. I lit another cigarette and looked defiantly across the desk. “Talking of fruit, America was like the tamarind—it went rotten before it was ripe.” Macmillan smiled and took a key from his waistcoat pocket. With this, he unlocked a drawer in his desk and stared down at what was in it.
“You talk, dear boy, of how the Americans ‘went’ rotten,” he said, still looking down. “Everyone thinks the Roosevelt assassination, and then Lindbergh’s, and all the other troubles that America has had since 1940, were sad accidents. And it is terrible to think how all that dynamic force, that should have been turned outward on the world, for its control and improvement—indeed, for its salvation—should instead have been turned against itself. Even today, if you look at fundamentals like coal and steel and grain production, America remains the richest nation in the world. But, after those troubles, and under the demented sway of Harry Anslinger, America might as well not exist.
“But supposing I could show that America’s troubles were not accidental—supposing I could show evidence of a meeting between Chamberlain and Halifax and Goering, in which the settlement of all main disputes between Britain and Germany was sealed in American blood?” He now reached into the drawer and pulled out perhaps a dozen sheets of white foolscap. Except they were uncharred and unfolded, I saw, by the writing that covered every sheet, that they were the continuation sheets of the Churchill Memorandum. Macmillan held them up and grinned at me.
“The Pressburg Accords!” I said softly. “To show that he was aware of them, Anslinger summarised them at his meeting with Halifax—and Churchill faithfully recorded what was said. I suppose we and the Germans agreed to intervene in American politics to destroy the country. So long as America remained our potential ally, the Germans would never agree to put themselves at the disadvantage we were demanding. Therefore, the public treaty signed at Pressburg was accompanied by a secret protocol.”
“Got it in one, my dear, young friend,” Macmillan purred. He raised his glass in a mock toast, and went back to inspecting the stack of Churchill writings. “I won’t give you more than a distant sight of these, Anthony. Your uncharacteristic firmness of mind might extend to an impulsiveness of action. And, though I’ll not be so vulgar as to produce it, be assured that I do have a gun in my pocket. But you’ve really hit the nail on the head about what was agreed at Pressburg. We jointly put up the cash and trained and armed the assassination squad that bombed Roosevelt and his Cabinet, and the entire Congress assembled to hear him. What the continuation sheets also show is that, when Anslinger refused our initial offer, we added the further assassination of Lindbergh and then a private subsidy to Anslinger of a million a year in gold to enable his own takeover. It’s all terribly sordid, you’ll agree. And, since he was in up to his neck with both deals—Goering at Pressburg, later with Anslinger in Chartwell—you’ll also agree that it won’t look too good with Halifax when it’s all published in The Daily Worker and then discussed on Michael’s television show.
“Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we do need the whole document if the world is to be fully persuaded of what happened. These few pages in my hand don’t say that Churchill is the author, and don’t actually say who is speaking. I haven’t seen the opening of the Memorandum, but I imagine dear Winston was rather more collected in his account at the beginning that he was towards the end.”
“But why all this plotting to get an account of the Protocols given at second or third hand by a drink-sodden manic depressive?” I asked. “Why not just leak the original text?”
“Oh, Anthony,” he laughed, “you really are stuck in the past. You remember all that fuss after the Great War about secret treaties? Well, the modern rule is that the full text of every treaty must be published, in full and at the time of signing. And so, when you want to make a secret treaty, you just don’t write anything down. The reason Halifax went with Chamberlain to Pressburg wasn’t just out of regard for his status as Foreign Secretary. It was because Chamberlain knew that, this time, his cancer really was fatal. When he and Goering sat down in private and settled their unwritten Protocols to the Treaty of Pressburg, there had to be someone on our side who’d live long enough to carry our part into effect.
“How Anslinger got wind of the agreement is a bit of a mystery. But, so far as I can tell, our Churchill Memorandum is the only documentary evidence for the Protocols. I wish we had more than that. But, so long as the text is properly authenticated, it fits in well enough with what everyone already knows to be accepted.
“Therefore, we’ll publish old Winston’s Memorandum. My part in the matter will be to show the uttermost shock and horror—and to be the only man left in the upper reaches of government with clean hands.
“The Americans will think ill of us, we can have no doubt. But, when all the dust is settled from the explosion I have arranged, and America has shaken Anslinger off, I also have no doubt that his successors will see the logic of their position and embrace the hand of renewed friendship.”
I suddenly recalled those women outside the toilet on the railway train. “It’s the children I feel sorry for,” one of them had said. “They just don’t know which side they’re on.” Like Churchill, Macmillan himself was half-American. If I was only half-English, I was at least all Empire. I lit another cigarette and looked up at one of Macmillan’s ancestors—or at someone in a wig whose picture had stayed on the wall when the Macmillan family had got enough cash from publishing to put on the airs and graces of aristocracy.
But Macmillan’s immediate and distant ancestry was a side issue. For days, I’d been trying to rack my brains to make sense of what was going on about me. Now, it was all making sense. As if I were safe and snug in the Public Records Office, the elements of the puzzle were falling neatly into place. If Macmillan thought the Americans would come round to what he called the “logic of their position”, he knew more about them than I did. But it was plain that what he was aiming at was the unsettling of the entire world order as it had come out of that conference in Pressburg. This was his only chance of smashing up Butler and getting himself into Downing Street. He’d do all this—and doubtless much more—to make sure it was his lips brushing the Royal Hand once Halifax was out of the way.
“And what’s in all this for Michael Foot?” I jeered. “Don’t tell me you’ve offered him a seat in the Lords. That may be the only way he’ll ever get into Parliament. But I doubt if he’d give you the full weight of the Communist Party—not to mention whatever you’ve been promised by Moscow—just to get himself called Lord Foot of the Lubyanka.”