Word: macmillan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lost Teeth. Macmillan draws on his diaries and seldom has to correct by hindsight his first impressions. They are not without humor, as in the episode involving Lord Davies, a Welsh magnate who was Macmillan's companion on a mission to Finland. Macmillan's diary records the event thus: "Lord Davies has left his teeth in the train. "Lord Davies has lost his passport...
...intense kind has been made. As the Malmö train connects with the Berlin train, it is thought that the teeth have been stolen by a Gestapo agent. Later still. Lord Davies' teeth have been found." All, however, was not low jinks in high diplomacy. Churchill drew Macmillan closer to him, and the fact that both men had American mothers made it seem right that Macmillan would work better than most others in the vital area of Anglo-American cooperation. In this field, Macmillan won many of the battles. He grasped the essential point that an American commander...
Baneful Influence. If Macmillan won many battles of a military-diplomatic kind, it is sadly clear that he believes he lost the same military-diplomatic war. The Anglo-American conflict was over the grand question of what shape Europe would assume after the ultimate victory. Macmillan had seen the Poles left to defeat and noted Chamberlain's indifferent impotence with contempt and pity. Then, in mid-1944, he saw decisions made that reflected Franklin Roosevelt's obsessive desire to please Stalin and his "almost pathological suspicions" of British foreign policy, "especially in the Balkans...
Eight divisions and 70% of air strength were taken from the Italian campaign and diverted to a pointless landing in the south of France; this meant the end of hopes for an Allied occupation of Austria and influence in the Balkans. Macmillan mournfully charges that the Roosevelt policy, designed, with Stalin, to keep the Allies in the West, was "to exercise a baneful, and nearly fatal influence over the future of Greece." He notes that the postwar burden of correcting this "almost unilateral American decision [has] fallen largely on the American people . . . Thus were sown the seeds of the partition...
...hundreds of psychological portraits of war figures, Macmillan thus characterized Mussolini's successor, Marshal Badoglio: "Honest, broadminded, humorous. I should judge of peasant origin." It might stand also as a fair self-portrait of the grandson of a Scots crofter...