Postwar

89

Kennedy’s remark was not only confidential at the time, it was even kept out of the documents from the summit meeting when they were first published thirty years later.

90

As they were to discover in 1990, their fears were not unfounded.

91

Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence (Times Books, 1995), p. 46. Khrushchev’s aversion to war was genuine. As he wrote to Kennedy on October 26th, at the height of the Cuba crisis: ‘If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and I know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.’

92

As late as 1971, 95 percent of Italy’s senior civil servants had begun their careers before the overthrow of Fascism.

93

Though in the light of Italy’s earlier history it is not entirely fair to lay the blame for the country’s institutional corruption on American foreign policy. See Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York, 1994), pp. 238-39.

94

In the elections of 1945 the Austrian Communists received just 174,000 votes—5 percent—and elected four deputies to the parliament. Thereafter they played no role in Austrian politics.

95

On the eve of the 1938 Anschluss there were 189,000 Jews in Vienna. When the city was liberated in 1945 there were fewer than 1,000 remaining.

96

In Belgium the long-established Catholic Party changed its name to Christian to emphasize its cross-denominational appeal and its more modern, reforming aspirations. In the Netherlands, where intra-Christian distinctions actually mattered, the Catholic Party kept its old title.

97

To which Resnais responded, ‘Naturally I hadn’t realized that the National Socialist regime would be represented at Cannes. But now, of course, I do.’

98

‘No-one can take this shame from us.’

99

With unintentionally revealing hyperbole he described the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a ‘Morgenthau Plan squared’.

100

Many of modern Germany’s senior public figures (including the Federal Chancellor and Foreign Minister at the time of writing—2005) were children of this time, raised in single-parent families by a working mother.

101

The Portuguese dictator Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was asked in 1968 (seven years into the Angolan revolt that began in February 1961) when he envisaged independence for Portugal’s African colonies, Angola and Mozambique: ‘It is a problem for centuries’, he replied. ‘Within five hundred years. And in the meantime they will have to go on participating in the process of development.’ (See Tom Gallagher, Portugal. A Twentieth-Century Interpretation, 1983, page 200.) But then Salazar’s principled denial of the modern world was legendary: for most of the 1950s he succeeded in keeping Coca-Cola out of his country, something even the French could not manage.