throne—her remarkable accumulation of political experience.”
On his trip through Africa early in 1960, Macmillan had told the white South African parliament that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” Scarcely a month later, South African police killed sixty-seven protesters in Sharpeville, and the biennial Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London threatened to fracture over apartheid.
After ten days of wrangling, Macmillan engineered a communique that mollified both black and white African leaders. “The official text is weak,” he confided to the Queen, “but has the advantage of being agreed.… It does at least keep the Commonwealth for the time being from being broken up.” But South Africa continued on its separatist path, and in October 1960 the white population voted overwhelmingly to abolish the monarchy in South Africa and establish a white-dominated republic.
One of the cornerstones of Macmillan’s foreign policy was his campaign to secure Britain’s admission to the Common Market, the European free trade zone consisting of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, which he believed was essential for Britain’s economic progress. The main power broker was French president Charles de Gaulle, who needed to be persuaded that the United Kingdom intended to be a full- fledged partner, since he suspected that the British had stronger affinities with the Commonwealth and the United States. To help with the sales pitch, Macmillan enlisted the Queen, who presided over a lavish three-day state visit for de Gaulle and his wife.
Twice a year since the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth II had been entertaining heads of state at Buckingham Palace according to strict protocol and unchanging rituals. (Later in the 1960s she would add Windsor Castle as an alternative setting.) These state visits were an essential part of her portfolio of duties, and she extended her legendary hospitality with the same care and attention to leaders of nations large and small. The British government would choose the head of state to be honored, but only the Queen could extend the invitation.
The visits typically lasted three days, and the head of state would stay in the most opulent accommodations in Buckingham Palace—the six-room Belgian Suite on the ground floor, overlooking the gardens. The set routine began with a ceremonial welcome (usually on a Tuesday) with a military guard of honor and marching bands followed by a carriage procession to the Palace for a luncheon with the royal family. After an exchange of gifts, the Queen presented an exhibit in the Picture Gallery featuring royal memorabilia of interest to the visiting head of state. In the evening she would host a white-tie state banquet for around 160 in the Palace ballroom. Over the next two days, the visiting leader would meet with officials in government and business, and on the second evening would host a “return” dinner in honor of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.
For the French president, the British government added an extra layer of magnificence to the usual pomp and pageantry “to appeal to de Gaulle’s sense of grandeur—and vanity.” In addition to his impressive arrival on April 5 in an open carriage with the Queen and the state banquet including her effusive toast, he was heralded by trumpeters from the Household Cavalry before his address to the House of Lords and House of Commons in Westminster Hall, and he was treated to a gala at Covent Garden as well as a nighttime fireworks spectacular outside the Palace. De Gaulle, who could be a difficult dinner partner prone to speaking elliptically, later wrote that Elizabeth II was “well informed about everything, that her judgments on people and events were as clear-cut as they were thoughtful, that no one was more preoccupied by the cares and problems of our storm-tossed age.” As for Britain and the Common Market, he remained coyly noncommittal.
Shortly after the turn of 1961, the Queen resumed her travels, embarking with Philip on a five-week tour of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Iran, Cyprus, and Italy, missing the first birthday of Prince Andrew. Not long after her return in early March, Macmillan gave her his insights into America’s new first couple, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his glamorous young wife, Jacqueline. Jack Kennedy had been a familiar presence in England in the years before World War II when his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had served as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (the official title of the American envoy to Britain). No modern American president before or since had such close connections to Britain as Jack Kennedy.
Nearly a decade older than Elizabeth II, Jack had been a college student in the late 1930s while she was still a child, so they hadn’t known each other. But she had seen Joe Kennedy and his wife, Rose, on their visits to Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace. The Queen revealed to Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney the affection she had for JFK’s mother, mentioning a time when a relative had died and she and Margaret had been confined to a small room while their parents received dignitaries. “Only Rose Kennedy came into the room and chatted with them,” Mulroney recalled. “They were ignored by the other guests—and she remembered it some forty years later!”
Joe Kennedy had failed as ambassador, serving only two years before Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled him in November 1940. Kennedy had urged appeasing the Nazis and drew the scorn of the British for his cowardice when he retreated to an estate in the country during the Blitz. The humiliating performance of his father had “eaten into [JFK’s] soul,” in the view of the president’s friend, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. But rather than creating resentment, Kennedy’s experiences in England as a young man deepened his affection for the country and its leaders, above all Winston Churchill, whom he regarded as “the greatest man he ever met.”
Macmillan actively disliked Joe Kennedy and was initially dubious about his son, worrying that he was a “young cocky Irishman” and a “strange character” who could be “obstinate, sensitive, ruthless and highly sexed.” Yet Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy, the Marquess of Hartington, had been married to Jack Kennedy’s sister Kathleen (both died in plane crashes in the 1940s), and this sharpened Macmillan’s curiosity.
Following his first two encounters with Kennedy in March and April 1961, the sixty-six-year-old prime minister forged an instant bond with the forty-three-year-old president. “We seemed to be able (when alone) to talk freely and frankly to each other,” Macmillan later wrote, “and to
At Kennedy’s suggestion, Macmillan appointed as British ambassador to the United States forty-two-year-old Sir William David Ormsby Gore, a friend of Jack’s since prewar days, and first cousin to Billy Hartington. Gore’s sister Katharine was also married to Macmillan’s son Maurice, further sealing what became known as the “special relationship within a special relationship.” Kennedy named as his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s sixty- three-year-old David K. E. Bruce, a highly regarded veteran of the diplomatic corps who had previously headed the embassies in France and West Germany. Bruce’s first wife, Ailsa, was the sister of Paul Mellon, the Queen’s closest American friend in horse racing circles. At ease in plus fours on the shooting field and in jodhpurs riding to hounds, Bruce melded perfectly with the Queen’s social set. Known among his peers as a “professional statesman,” he won the confidence of senior members of the royal household as well as top politicians, and would serve for eight years, the longest tenure of an American ambassador in London.
In June 1961 the first couple visited London after they had dazzled the French on a swing through Paris, and JFK had faced a truculent and intransigent Nikita Khrushchev during a sobering two-day meeting in Vienna that put Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in sharp relief. Billed as a private stopover to attend the christening of the daughter of Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, and her husband, Stas, the real purpose was for Jack to unburden himself to Macmillan about his discussions with Khrushchev. The prime minister would later report to the Queen that Kennedy had been “completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian premier.”
The evening after the christening, the Queen and Prince Philip gave a dinner for the Kennedys at Buckingham Palace—the first time an American president had dined there since 1918 when Woodrow Wilson was entertained by King George V. The royal couple “put on a good show in the beautiful reception rooms,” David Bruce wrote afterward. Yet the thirty-one-year-old first lady, who eight years earlier had written with confident insouciance about the coronation, now felt uneasy with the thirty-five-year-old Queen, whom she dismissed as “pretty heavy going.” “I think [she] resented me,” Jackie told author Gore Vidal. “Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them.”
The first lady was equally indiscreet with photographer Cecil Beaton. While conceding that “they were all tremendously kind and nice,” Jackie said that she “was not impressed by the flowers or the furnishings of the apartments at Buckingham Palace, or by the Queen’s dark-blue tulle dress and shoulder straps, or her flat hairstyle.” The first lady recounted to Vidal that “the Queen was human only once.” Jackie had complained about the pressures of being on tour in Canada, causing the Queen to throw her a conspiratorial glance and reply cryptically, “One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.”
