Harold Macmillan by Charles Williams
Orion, 560 pp., $29.95
In 1959, Evelyn Waugh published a biography of the priest and writer Monsignor Ronald Knox, his greatest friend among the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church they had both joined as young men. Knox was the son of a Church of England bishop who went to Eton and then Oxford, where he became a don and a clergyman and formed a coterie of young devotees whom he instructed in extreme Anglo-Catholic, or High Church, doctrines.
Then came the war in 1914 when all those young men joined up, and most of them were killed. Knox became a Catholic in 1917 and, like Newman, wrote an account of this spiritual journey. It mentions two young disciples by the initials "B" and "C." "B" was Guy Lawrence, who also became a Catholic, and was killed months before the Armistice, but "C" chose not to follow the others to Rome, and survived the war.
By still calling him "C" in his biography, Waugh tantalizingly excited interest in his identity, before that "prize shit" Malcolm Muggeridge (as Waugh called him in a letter to Sir Maurice Bowra) made an inspired guess, bluffed the truth out of Waugh's aged mother-in-law, and published it: "C" was none other than Harold Macmillan, a Balliol undergraduate before the Great War, then a subaltern in the Grenadier Guards--and by 1959 prime minister. This was a scoop by any standards. Was it also the key to Macmillan's life?
As Charles Williams tells us in this informative biography, the story begins on the isle of Arran off the western coast of Scotland where the Macmillans were simple crofters. They moved to Ayrshire (and to English rather than Gaelic) before Daniel Macmillan went to London to seek his fortune in 1833. He found it as a bookseller, and then, at a time when the two trades overlapped, as a publisher, married respectably, and begot Maurice, who did well at Cambridge, joined the Church of England, went into the family business, and married Nellie Belles Hill from Spencer, Indiana. They had three sons; Maurice Harold Macmillan was born in 1894.
All of this was later relished by Harold Macmillan: the humble crofting forebears; the American mother, of whom he, like Churchill with his own mother from New York, made much when addressing Congress; the family firm of Macmillan & Co. which had become one of the most illustrious publishing houses in London. He went to Eton and then to Oxford, having been coached by Knox, who also introduced him to his exotic religion--to Mrs. Macmillan's horror. A snob as well as a prude, she pulled strings to get Harold commissioned in the Grenadiers when war came.
Even now the story of those next years is almost intolerably poignant. The Western Front devoured a generation, leaving behind emotionally as well as physically scarred survivors. Macmillan was severely wounded and could never use his right hand again with ease. His life changed again dramatically when he was appointed aide-de-camp to the governor-general of Canada, the duke of Devonshire, and married his daughter Lady Dorothy Cavendish, to complete the rapid upward ascent.
But a bad fairy was present at St. Margaret's, Westminster, when the two wed in the presence of a past queen of England and a future king. While Macmillan worked in the family firm, looking after authors as eminent as Hardy, Kipling, and Yeats, and was then elected to Parliament in 1924, the marriage was always uneasy. In later years Macmillan became a worldly-wise raconteur, a cabaret turn I witnessed in Clubland and in Oxford common rooms, and he ended his days as something like the dowager duke of Devonshire. And yet as a young man he was thought a crashing bore, not least by his Cavendish in-laws, who saw him as an unprepossessing middle-class outsider: Dorothy's sisters competed not to sit next to him at dinner.
Much worse, Dorothy fell deeply in love, and with the appalling Robert Boothby, also an MP but more to the point a bisexual scoundrel and charlatan. Their liaison lasted for decades. "No one knew," inasmuch as it was never mentioned in print in those days, but "everyone" knew at Westminster and in Society. Three of Dorothy's children were possibly Macmillan's, but one was probably Boothby's, or so Sarah thought: She was "the most famous bastard in England," she said bitterly. This private humiliation unquestionably affected Macmillan's public life, making him both more ambitious and more ruthless in compensation.
In the 1930s he became prominent among a group of progressive Tories opposed to appeasement and in favor of industrial conciliation, or The Middle Way. This was the title of his long and exhausting 1938 book much influenced by one of his authors, J. M. Keynes, and bearing the unalluring subtitle "A Study of the Problem of Economic and Social Progress in a Free and Democratic Society."
Although this new biography of Macmillan by Lord Williams of Elvel--the author is a sometime banker and a minor political player himself--is based on thorough research and contains much of interest, it has its own uninviting passages. Or at least, the author's invention occasionally flags, with sentences like "One thing, of course, led to another. . . . The outbreak of the Second Word War was, of course, a momentous event. . . . The years, as they do, moved ineluctably on."
Then again, that may be appropriate to the subject, whose colleagues often found him tedious, though also devious. This quality began to manifest itself during the second war, when Macmillan entered government at last, in minor posts before he had his real break as British minister in Algiers after the Torch landings in 1942. He remained a British plenipotentiary in the Mediterranean theater until the end of the war. These years are in some ways the most interesting part of the book, showing how divided and indecisive the Allies often were. The unexpected hero is Charles de Gaulle, cantankerous, obstinate, playing the weakest possible hand with consummate skill.
At the end of the war came the blackest moment in Macmillan's career, when he was complicit in the decision to send scores of thousands of men who had fought for the Germans back to Russia and Yugoslavia against their will, along with their women and children. It was not a simple question. Some of these "Cossacks" and Croats had participated in terrible war crimes. But many of them were merely anti-Communist, and indeed plenty of those "repatriated" into Stalin's hands were by no possible measure Soviet citizens. Macmillan knew very well, and said that "to hand them over to the Russians is condemning them to slavery, torture, and probably death," but handed over they were by force and fraud, to the horror of the British soldiers ordered to do so. As Lord Williams says, the episode was "dreadful--and shameful," and Macmillan was unforgivably callous, a brutality made no better by his saying toward the end of his life that the Cossacks were "practically savages."
After losing his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide, Macmillan found another, and returned to government with Churchill in 1951, given at first what he thought an insultingly unimportant post. It didn't help that Mrs. Churchill disliked him, but then so did others. He climbed through the ranks and became foreign secretary when Anthony Eden at last succeeded Churchill. Then came the Suez escapade in 1956, when Macmillan was at his slippery worst: "First in, first out," in the lethal jibe of Harold Wilson, later the Labour prime minister, meaning that he had been gung-ho for action but then lost his nerve and called for a halt. Lord Williams shows in devastating detail that Macmillan's subsequent accounts of the affair were grossly mendacious.
One consequence of Suez was the departure of poor Eden and his succession in dubious circumstances by Macmillan. His premiership seems almost an anticlimax, and although it lasted from 1957 to 1963, it cannot be accounted much of a success. The country became more prosperous, and Macmillan won the 1959 election, but structural economic and industrial problems were ignored, and foreign policy was all over the place, with Macmillan's belated bid to join what was then the Common Market brutally snubbed by--now President--de Gaulle. And Macmillan's dealings with Washington were even more of a mess.
He it was who coined the idea that the English were "Greeks to their Romans." The Americans were "great big, vulgar, bustling people," as he patronizingly put it, who must be guided as the Roman emperors had been by learned advisers (overlooking the inconvenient fact that those sophisticated Greek mentors in Rome were, in fact, slaves). Before John F. Kennedy became president, Macmillan had never met him, although they had a family connection: JFK's sister Kathleen had married Lord Hartington, Dorothy's nephew (not Macmillan's brother-in-law, as Lord Williams says), shortly before he was killed in action in 1944.
Now Macmillan tried to befriend the younger man in an avuncular or Greek way, but to no political effect at all. It is chastening to be reminded that during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the White House did not so much inform London of events, let alone ask those "Greeks" for any advice; not when Air Force Boeings were circling the Arctic with hydrogen bombs on the second level of alert below war; not when Robert Kennedy cut a secret deal with the Russians on his brother's behalf by agreeing to withdraw missiles from Turkey. Lord Williams puts this very well: Like other prime ministers before and since, Macmillan persuaded himself that there was some mystical bond between the two countries, quite failing to see that "the United States, like all great powers, would in the end follow--without necessarily much regard for others--what it perceived from time to time to be its own interests."
That led on to the disastrous last year of Macmillan's prime ministership, beset by scandal, mocked by satirists, and with all authority draining away, before he disgracefully fixed his succession in favor of Lord Home in the lurid conspiracy of October 1963. All in all, Macmillan does not emerge well or attractively from this thoughtful book, more than something of a political as well as social sham, and with a spiteful, vindictive streak beneath the feigned geniality.
In old age he made much fun of Margaret Thatcher, by any standards a more remarkable prime minister than he had been. She was famously philosemitic, and there were several prominent Jewish ministers in her cabinets. In 1919, Macmillan had written to a friend about Lloyd George, "Our nasty little Prime Minister is not really popular any more, except with the International Jew"; in the 1980s he said that, whereas Tory Cabinets had once been full of Old Etonians, now they were "full of Old Estonians," which caused much mirth in some circles.
But even if it's hard to like or admire Macmillan, one may almost feel sorry for him. Along with his miserable marriage, he was a most unsuccessful father (like Churchill in this respect). His offspring all took to drink, and then worse: His grandson died of a drug overdose while at Oxford. Saddest of all was Sarah's story. She had more than one breakdown before finding a boyfriend, whom she was due to marry when he was taken severely ill. The wedding was postponed, but Sarah learned she was pregnant. Years before, a failed marriage had been kept going to protect Macmillan's career. Now Dorothy told her daughter to get rid of the baby for the same reason, but the illegal abortion was botched, and Sarah could never afterwards have children. She died at only 39, in a drunken accident.
After Muggeridge's scoop, Waugh denied that he had wanted to protect Macmillan, but he still felt private distate for him. A half-American prime minister "cannot be judged by English standards," he sarcastically told Anne Fleming, and he recalled meeting Macmillan in Naples in 1944, when he had heartlessly spoken of abandoning Christian Eastern Europe to Stalin as one problem out of the way. Since then Macmillan had "grown a carapace of cynicism," Waugh thought. Had he become a Catholic as he should, "he would not be prime minister nor married to a Cavendish but he would have been a happy and virtuous publisher." A partisan view, but it might have been not far from the truth.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include The Strange Death of Tory England.