Abstract
Historians’ views of the transatlantic financial diplomacy of the later 1960s have been dominated by the idea of a secret deal made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1965, trading US financial help for a continuation of Britain’s world defence role. This notion has become extremely widespread, often taken for granted in historical writing.1 There was a high level of co-operation between the two men: as a number of writers have made clear, Wilson and Johnson shared a number of unspoken objectives which may have tied the interests of the two leaders together without any formal pact.2 However, the difficulty with arguments focusing on their ‘deal’ is that such work often underestimates the extent to which the British were able to manipulate the relationship to their own ends, given that the Americans still required British help, and needed therefore to support Britain, in a number of fields — diplomatic, economic and military.
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Notes
Most influentially in C. Ponting, Breach of Promise: The Labour Government 1964–70, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1989, pp. 48, 52–3.
J.W. Young, ‘Britain and “LBJ’s War”, 1964–68’, Cold War History 2, 2002, pp. 71–3, 87–8;
J. Dumbrell, ‘The Johnson Administration and the British Labour Government: Vietnam, the Pound and East of Suez’, Journal of American Studies 30, 1996, pp. 212–13;
A. Dobson, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century: Of Friendship, Conflict and the Decline of Superpowers, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 132.
C. Wrigley, ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Harold Wilson and Labour’s Foreign Policy 1964–70’, in R. Coopey, S. Fielding and N. Tiratsoo (eds), The Wilson Governments 1964–70, London, Pinter, 1993, pp. 123, 127–8, 132–3.
See Strange, Sterling, pp. 36, 299–302; C. Bell, ‘The “Special Relationship”’, in M. Leifer (ed.), Constraints and Adjustments in British Foreign Policy, London, Allen and Unwin, 1972, p. 105;
A. Cyr, British Foreign Policy and the Atlantic Area: The Techniques of Accommodation, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1979, pp. 142, 155–7 on the US link;
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (2nd edn), Harlow, Longman, 2002, pp. 632–40 on the decline of the sterling area.
P. Foot, The Politics of Harold Wilson, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, esp. pp. 211–16, is a good example of the contemporary accusation of ‘betrayal’.
Crossman diary, 11 February 1965, 15 June 1966: R. Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol. I: Minister of Housing, 1964–1966, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1975, pp. 156, 440;
see Crossman diary, 1 January 1967: R. Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol. II: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, 1966–1968, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1976, pp. 181–2.
Castle diary, 18 July 1966: B. Castle, The Castle Diaries 1964–70, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984, p. 76.
E. Short, Whip to Wilson, London, Macdonald, 1989, p. 37;
see Morgan, Callaghan, pp. 177–8. On King’s views see King diary, 16 July 1966: C. King, The Cecil King Diaries 1965–1970, London, Jonathan Cape, 1972, pp. 78–9.
H. Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–1970: A Personal Record, London, Michael Joseph, 1971, pp. 48, 263–4;
J. Callaghan, Time and Chance, London, Collins, 1987, p. 176.
H. Brandon, In the Red: The Struggle for Sterling 1964–66, London, Deutsch, 1966, p. 58;
W. Davis, Three Years Hard Labour: The Road to Devaluation, London, Deutsch, 1968, p. 29.
J. Callaghan, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History, London, Routledge, 2007, pp. 257–9.
J. Colman, A ‘Special Relationship’? Harold Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson and Anglo-American Relations ‘At the Summit’, 1964–1968, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 37–43.
E.g. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Archives, Austin, Texas (hereafter LBJ) National Security Country Files (hereafter NSCF), box 213, Wilson–Johnson talks, minutes, 7 December 1964; see S. Dockrill, ‘Forging the Anglo-American Global Defence Partnership: Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and the Washington Summit, December 1964’, Journal of Strategic Studies 23, 2000, pp. 118–22.
NAUK PREM 13/258, Callaghan–Fowler telephone conversation, 3 September 1965; M. Jones, ‘A Decision Delayed: Britain’s Withdrawal from South East Asia Reconsidered, 1961–68’, English Historical Review 117, 2002, pp. 582–3.
The relevant text of the ‘Appraisal’ is available in U. Kitzinger, The Second Try: Labour and the EEC, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1968, pp. 244–56.
D. Blaazer, ‘“Devalued and Dejected Britons”: The Pound in Public Discourse in the Mid-1960s’, History Workshop Journal 47, 1999, esp. pp. 126–35.
R.M. Collins, ‘The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the “American Century”’, American Historical Review 101, 1996, pp. 406–7.
A. Hamilton, ‘Beyond the Sterling Devaluation: The Gold Crisis of March 1968’, Contemporary European History 17, 2008, p. 83.
Wilson, Labour Government, pp. 507–9; R. Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, London, Macmillan, 1991, pp. 235–8.
NAUK CAB 128/46, Ministerial meeting, minutes, 15 March 1968; Wilson, Labour Government, pp. 509–12; P. Paterson, Tired and Emotional: The Life of Lord George-Brown, London, Chatto and Windus, 1993, pp. 245–52.
Samuel Brittan diary, 10 February 1965: R. Middleton (ed.), Inside the Department of Economic Affairs: Samuel Brittan, the Diary of an ‘Irregular’, 1964–6, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 48. I am grateful to Professor Middleton for allowing me to see this in manuscript form. See also Cairncross diary, 23 March 1966: Cairncross, Wilson Years, p. 124.
B. Tew, The Evolution of the International Monetary System 1945–77 (3rd edn), London, Hutchinson, 1985, table 6, p. 104.
H. James, International Monetary Co-operation since Bretton Woods, Washington, DC, International Monetary Fund, 1996, pp. 169–70.
J. Ellison, ‘Defeating the General: Anglo-American Relations, Europe and the NATO Crisis of 1966’, Cold War History 6, 2006, p. 89.
H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 105–6.
B.J. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 119; Kunz, ‘Dollar Diplomacy’, p. 97.
S. Cohen, International Monetary Reform 1964–69: The Political Dimension, New York, Praeger, 1970, pp. 51–2; Strange, Sterling, p. 332; Tew, International Monetary System, pp. 112–14.
M.G. de Vries, The International Monetary Fund 1966–1971: The System under Stress, Washington, DC, International Monetary Fund, 1976, vol. I, pp. 79–81.
As across a range of policy areas: see N.P. Ludlow, ‘Transatlantic Relations in the Johnson and Nixon Eras: The Crisis that Didn’t Happen — And What it Suggests about the One that Did’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 8, 2010, p. 50.
LBJ Bator papers, box 8, Deming to McCloy, 17 May 1967; box 9, Bator to Rostow, 24 April 1967. See W.G. Gray, ‘“Number One in Europe”: The Startling Emergence of the Deutsche Mark, 1968–1969’, Central European History 39, 2006, pp. 65–9.
F.J. Gavin, ‘Ideas, Power and the Politics of America’s International Monetary Policy during the 1960s’, in J. Kirshner (ed.), Monetary Orders, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 205–7.
T.A. Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 128–33.
F.J. Gavin, ‘The Myth of Flexible Response: United States Strategy in Europe during the 1960s’, International History Review 23, 2001, pp. 866–7.
J. Ellison, The United States, Britain and the Transatlantic Crisis: Rising to the Gaullist Challenge, 1963–68, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 85–6.
For the roots of the trilateral talks see J. Ellison, ‘Stabilising the West and Looking to the East: Anglo-American, Europe and Détente, 1965 to 1967’, in N.P. Ludlow (ed.), European Integration and the Cold War: Ostpolitik–Westpolitik, 1965–1973, London, Routledge, 2007, pp. 109–10.
K. Böhmer, ‘“We Too Mean Business”: Germany and the Second British Application to the EEC, 1966–67’, in O.J. Daddow (ed.), Harold Wilson and European Integration: Britain’s Second Application to Join the EEC, London, Frank Cass, 2003, p. 216.
G. Hughes, Harold Wilson’s Cold War: The Labour Government and East–West Politics, 1964–1970, Woodbridge, Royal Historical Society, 2009, p. 103.
D.B. Kunz, Butter and Guns: America’s Cold War Economic Diplomacy, New York, Free Press, 1997, pp. 176–7.
H. Parr, ‘Britain, America, East of Suez and the EEC: Finding a Role in British Foreign Policy, 1964–67’, Contemporary British History 20, 2006, p. 412.
J. Pickering, ‘Politics and “Black Tuesday”: Shifting Power in the Cabinet and the Decision to Withdraw from East of Suez, November 1967–January 1968’, Twentieth Century British History 13, 2002, pp. 163–9.
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© 2012 Glen O’Hara
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O’Hara, G. (2012). President Johnson, Prime Minister Wilson and the Slow Collapse of Equilibrium, 1964–68. In: Governing Post-War Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361270_5
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