When I visited the United States again in September 1977, the Carter Administration was still enjoying its political honeymoon. President Carter had brought a new informal style to the White House which appeared to accord with the mood of the times. Although there was unease about some of his appointments, this was largely put down to Washington resentment against outsiders. In Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Adviser, he had two remarkable assistants, whose differences of outlook were not yet apparent.
I had met Jimmy Carter himself in London in May when he attended the G7 Summit. In spite of my growing doubts about his foreign policy, I liked him and looked forward to meeting him again. At our discussion in the White House the President was most keen to explain and justify his recently launched initiative for a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Although he had clearly mastered the details and was a persuasive advocate, I was not convinced. Believing as I did in the vital importance of a credible nuclear deterrent, and knowing that nuclear weapons had to be tested in order to be credible, I could not go along with the policy.
Equally, I was unable to agree with President Carter, or indeed Cyrus Vance and Andrew Young, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, on their preferred approach to settling the Rhodesian question. The Americans were insisting that the Rhodesian security forces be dismantled. But I knew that would never be acceptable to the white population — who still enjoyed military superiority over the ‘armed struggle’ — without some real guarantee of peace. The Americans were also toying with the idea of imposing sanctions against South Africa, which seemed to me equally ill-judged considering that they needed to have the South African Government on their side if they were to persuade Ian Smith to compromise.[48]
At least on this occasion I did not have to contend with hostile briefing from the Embassy, which was ironic considering that the new Ambassador, Peter Jay, was Jim Callaghan’s son-in-law. There had been loud accusations of nepotism when this appointment had been announced. But I liked and admired Peter Jay personally. His understanding of monetary economics would have made him a welcome recruit to the Shadow Cabinet. Even so, I have to confess that I took a certain mischievous pleasure in quoting an extract from Jim Callaghan’s speech to the previous year’s Labour Party Conference as the introduction to my own speech to the British-American Chamber of Commerce. In it the Labour Prime Minister had said:
We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that this option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist it only worked by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy followed by higher levels of unemployment as the next step.
It was an open secret that this uncharacteristically sound passage had been drafted by none other than Peter Jay.
In fact, the only embarrassment I faced during my American trip resulted from an open disagreement between Jim Prior and Keith Joseph about Lord Scarman’s report on the Grunwick affair and about the right policy towards the closed shop. Members of the press corps were more interested in this than the results of my discussions in Washington, and I had to issue two statements to try to calm the waters. But the important matters of substance could only be sorted out on my return.
Meanwhile, uncertainties about the direction of American policy and the extent of Soviet ambitions had increasingly focused attention on those countries which were balanced uneasily between the two blocs. Of these, Yugoslavia had a special significance. Since Marshal Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia had been in an anomalous but important position. After horrendous early repression and mass murder, Tito and his comrades had become somewhat more liberal because circumstances forced them to look to the West for financial support and security. This gradually moved Yugoslavia in a pseudo-capitalist and quasi-liberal direction. There might have been even more progress of this kind if Tito’s every move had not been greeted with fawning admiration by a particular kind of British socialist. In fact, his real talent was as an illusionist. He persuaded both East and West, and perhaps even a section of Yugoslav opinion, that the country was an important player in the great international game. The high point of this was the formation under Tito’s inspiration of the so-called ‘Non-Aligned’ Movement of Third World countries.
By the mid 1970s the country’s economic problems were growing. The Yugoslavs had financed a consumer boom on the back of Western credit. A kind of chaotic semi-capitalism masquerading as ‘self-management’ had evolved. Living standards were higher than in other communist countries, partly because of remittances from Yugoslav workers overseas; but, correspondingly, the implications for the regime if living standards had to fall might be even more serious.
The fragility of Yugoslavia was both symbolized by and depended upon the state of Tito’s own health. It was an open question whether the Soviets would try to reassert control in the chaos which was widely expected to follow his death. At eighty-five, he was still in control of events, but ailing. I had wanted to visit Yugoslavia for some time, but my visit was twice postponed because Tito was not well enough to receive me.
On a bitter early December day in 1977, however, in the company of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a comrade in arms and old friend of the Yugoslav President from the Second World War, I arrived in Belgrade. My first duty was to climb the 150 steps up to the huge war memorial on the top of Mount Avala to lay a wreath. I did not have a warm coat with me and so by the time we descended I was chilled to the marrow. The general political reception, though, was warm enough, not just from the politicians but even from the communist newspapers.
As ‘the Iron Lady’, I was seen as someone who understood the fact that the Yugoslavs lived every day under the shadow of possible Soviet intervention. Paradoxically, this was one of the main considerations which kept the country together. Only with the end of the Cold War could the nations of Yugoslavia achieve real self-determination. An illustration of this is that the President of the National Assembly who hosted lunch for me, Kiro Gligorov, is now the President of the newly independent if embattled state of Macedonia.
Fitzroy Maclean and I visited Tito at his Belgrade home. His was a powerful personality, retaining some of the outward panache of his flamboyant partisan past, but leaving no doubt about the inner steel that explained his post-war dominance. We discussed and broadly agreed about the Soviet threat. The looming question of his legacy did not figure in our talks. Perhaps he had already concluded, for all the elaborate constitutional safeguards, that it would indeed be the déluge.
Before I departed for Yugoslavia, Alfred Sherman had asked me to raise with Tito the case of Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former friend and colleague and for many years most insistent domestic critic. Djilas had been one of a number of political prisoners recently freed but was, I understood, the object of continuing harassment. It seemed likely that he would soon disappear back into prison. I decided on a shot across Tito’s bows. I said with studied innocence how pleased I was that Djilas had been released. Tito glowered.
‘Yes, he’s out,’ the President said, ‘but he’s up to his old tricks. And if he goes on upsetting our constitution he will go straight back to gaol.’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘a man like Djilas will do you far more harm in prison than out of it.’