The special relationship - 19 March 1976

A long time ago, something like 40 years ago, an American journalist wrote a piece about the mountain of trivial chores that the President of the United States has to plough through every day of his life.

Oh, things like sending telegrams to party politicians who have just been blessed with a son or a grandson, signing the appointment to some hack to an inspectorship of customs in the port of Norfolk, Virginia, autographs for leaders of Boy Scout troops, and the new chairwoman of the Iowa chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, telegrams of sympathy to the widow of a famous footballer, or a movie star and so on. And he ended this list with noticing the rewards of these labours – once a year, the president is repaid by receiving a cable on his birthday, from the King of England. These autographs are cherished by presidents and they leave them, post mortem, to the Library of Congress.

If you go up the Hudson River to Hyde Park where Franklin Roosevelt was born and lived, and which is now a national shrine, you can still see in the guest room there, standing on a dressing table by the bedside, signed photographs of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In Roosevelt’s day, Britain was top dog, and even Anglophobes knew it, and bowed to it as an inevitable fact of life.

But even by the 1960s there had been a profound shift in the balance of power and I recall a shock of a press conference in Palm Beach, at which President Kennedy was discussing a coming visit to Europe and mentioning the capitals he thought it essential to visit. He would go to Berlin, and he would see General de Gaulle in Paris, he would go to Ireland on a sentimental pilgrimage to the home of his forebears, and he might, he mused, drop in on Madrid.

Now this was a rather exclusive press conference, more or less the secret get-together of a dozen correspondents picked by the president and I was the only foreign correspondent invited, and since I had been brought up on the tradition that only members of the American press put questions in public to the president, I swallowed my gall over what seemed to me a glaring omission in the Kennedy itinerary and waited till we broke up and I was able to get close to a presidential advisor.

"Why do you suppose," I asked, "did he forget London?" And this amiable, and later to be famous, member of Kennedy’s intimate clique, what we call the Irish Mafia – he looked at me and said "Er, he didn’t forget it, London doesn’t count that much any more." And seeing my rather shocked response to this blunt remark he patted me on the shoulder, offered me a winning smile and said "Of course, you could tell your paper that the old alliance is so much taken for granted that there is no need to advertise it with a side trip to London."

Well this was no doubt a tactful, or possibly tactless, moment in Anglo-American relations but it was a frank one – and it showed that the transatlantic wind was now blowing from west to east. Well, as the years have gone by other presidents have not needed to say this out loud, and when they are faced with any representative Briton they are full of polite reassurances that our relationship was never more cordial or more firmly grounded. Maybe.

But, how shall I say it, when one nation is impressed by the power of another, there is always a residue of anxiety in its relations. There is no anxiety in Washington about Britain. Because for years, there has been the unspoken feeling, sometime spoken, that Britain no longer had the weight, the clout they call it, to decide the fate of Europe or America.

Now the serious American papers cover Britain as well as they ever did but the dispatches from London tend to be on the inside pages – they are there to instruct students, not to alarm or comfort citizens, just as, in the old days, dispatches from Africa or China were there to be read by particular people interested in Africa or China.

I had occasion a few months ago to look over the New York Times for the winter months of 1936 and '37, the front-page dispatches day after day, month after month, were datelined Berlin, London, Rome, Vienna. Today, they are datelined Peking, Moscow, Cairo, Angola, Havana.

I hope this has not been too graceless an opening, if so, we can very quickly make amends because, last week for the first time in many years, something happened in London that received the sort of coverage here that you might expect from an abdication. Indeed it was a sort of abdication, and the New York Times for one covered it with so much thoroughness and yes, anxiety, as to suggest that that facetious reassurance Kennedy’s Irishman gave me might be true after all – that much is taken for granted in the relations between Westminster and Washington and to that extent there is a steady absence of concern. But Mr Wilson’s resignation received more space, the day after the Illinois primary, than the possibly wounding blow Illinois gave to the presidential ambitions of Ronald Reagan.

In all there were 19 columns of reports, and the leading editorial – two pages devoted to nothing else –and a three-column headlined piece on the front page. There was a huge biography of Mr Wilson and, more significantly, there was a five-column piece from Bonn, headlined, "Western Europe puzzled and unsettled at Wilson’s sudden move". For one day at least London again seemed to be the hinge of Europe’s fate. Quite suddenly Washington turned from its own affairs, to ponder and argue first, about the weakness of the British pound, and the French franc, and then about the recent gains of the Communists at the polls in France and Italy.

But in the end, when something big happens in Europe, Washington comes down to what – after the Russian moves in Africa and the alarm bell recently sounded by Solzhenitsyn – comes down to what is once again topic A, the strength or precariousness of NATO, of our common defence structure in western Europe.

Mr Wilson has been paid his due of tributes and criticism, but he is not the issue, it's the question of where Europe is to look for democratic leadership, and the more anxious question of how much that leadership will be devoted to strengthening the powerless defences of the NATO alliance, to reasserting a dependence on the American partnership absolute enough to take for granted.

The New York Times editorial is not necessarily a reflection of what was being said and thought by the administration. Nothing so alarming, say, as the thoughts of the men in the Pentagon. But it's typical of serious discussion here, after some sharp criticism of Mr Wilson’s tendency, as they called it, to pass off appearances as substance, it had this to say, "a good deal of Mr Wilson’s comportment in office and out can be explained by his obsession at all costs to hold together the disparate elements that make up the Labour party. That overriding objective arose from the deep wounds inflicted on the party by Ramsay MacDonald's venture into coalition government in the 1930s. It goes far to explain Mr Wilson’s backing and filling on issues, his passion for balance in his appointments, and his unwillingness to have a definitive showdown with Labour's unruly left wing.

"At substantial cost to his reputation, and his record, Mr Wilson has been able to keep government and party together during trying times, and to outmanoeuvre both his Tory opposition and his own left-wing when it was necessary. He solidified Britain’s membership of the European Community over left-wing opposition by resorting to an unprecedented national referendum on the issue, which many still believe was incompatible with the parliamentary system.

"He kept Britain firmly inside the NATO alliance despite left-wing sniping, and the economic necessity for severe defence budget cuts. He maintained an influential British role, in a rapidly-changing commonwealth of nations. And he preserved a relationship with the United States which remains special despite all the attempts to belittle it. Whoever is elected by the Labour members of parliament to take over the reins of government and party from Harold Wilson is likely soon to discover that these were considerable achievements after all."

Well, since this editorial appeared I have been on a couple of plane trips, mooched through a city or two and run into people who assume that any Englishman, no matter how long exiled from his native soil gets private bulletins every day from Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street.

Knowing how little I know of what goes on in Britain, and the forces that are joined, political, social, what have you, it depresses me to think of the number of Americans who sit around Britain in the summer, guileless tourists, who are accosted by Britons and asked how America feels about this and that. The chances of ever running into a visiting foreigner who has superior or even reasonable information about his government are remote. Most of us balloon a generalisation out of the squib of our prejudices.

I say this because Americans ask me, why had Mr Wilson really resigned, was he anticipating some appalling crisis to come, was he getting off a sinking ship, did he have knowledge of some issue on which the government would likely lose in the next vote of confidence, and so on. In other words, the people who ran into me seemed unable or unwilling to accept Mr Wilson’s simple explanation that after all these years he wanted to lay down the burdens of an exhausting job of leadership. After Watergate we are not disposed to accept an explanation of anything at face value.

But behind these questions I sensed a quite new kind of anxiety, and suppose it is only a popular, or ignorant, anxiety; such things will make themselves felt in the long run. It’s the slow gathering anxiety that has arisen from the knowledge, now confirmed, that the Communist nations of the Warsaw Pact are infinitely stronger than the NATO nations, not in nuclear, but in the conventional weapons that would be required to overthrow the West. It’s not too strong a word.

It’s the one, that Solzhenitsyn used in a broadcast that is beginning in this country to have the quietest but the most profound influence, on the administration. More perhaps, than the defeat in Angola or the resignation of Mr Wilson.

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