Overview
"When Harold Macmillan became prime minister in 1957 he promised to restore Britain's pride after the humiliations of the Suez crisis. 'The British people', he declared, 'would never accept the position of a second rate power'. No one seemed better equipped for the task." The first prime minister to master the sound bites and photo opportunities of the television age, Macmillan had a penchant for the dramatic and flamboyant. During the Second World War, he had been dazzled by the summits between Churchill and Roosevelt - 'the emperor of the east and the emperor of the west'. Macmillan now set out to walk in their footsteps with President Eisenhower as latter-day emperor. This book follows Macmillan on his Churchillian quest, from the theatrical Moscow 'voyage of discovery', via the U-2 crisis, to the acrimony of the 1960 Paris summit.Synopsis
One of the key aspects of the foreign policy of British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan was his belief that personal summits could be used to cement the "special relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United States and steer the shoals of the Cold War. Aldous (international history, U. College Dublin, Ireland) presents a historical narrative of the results of MacMillan's meetings with American President Dwight Eisenhower, examining how the "special relationship" evolved in the context of Anglo-American policy towards the Soviet Union and arguing that it wasn't until the arrival of John F. Kennedy in the White House that MacMillan managed to get the personal relationship between leaders that he had sought with Eisenhower. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR