Elizabeth the Queen (25 page)

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
laugh
(a vital thing) at our advisers and ourselves.” He reported to the Queen that Kennedy had “surrounded himself with a large retinue of highly intelligent men.”

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.”

Later in the year during her rescheduled state visit to Ghana, Elizabeth II proved her worth to the American president in an unanticipated way. Following the African country’s independence from Britain in 1957, newly elected president Kwame Nkrumah had appeared to be an enlightened leader, hospitable to Western political and business interests and committed to multiracialism. He had an Egyptian wife who was a Coptic Christian, and several of his top aides were English, including an army captain as his secretary and a woman who served as his aide and amanuensis.

But in the two years since the Queen’s visit was postponed, Nkrumah had hardened into a dictator presiding over what Winston Churchill characterized as a “corrupt and tyrannical regime,” imprisoning hundreds of members of the opposition without trial, expelling British officers and advisers, and railing against Britain in speeches. Just as ominously, after a visit to Moscow in September 1961, Nkrumah had edged toward an alliance with the Soviet Union and a possible departure from the Commonwealth.

Despite the specter of violence triggered by demonstrations, labor unrest, and death threats against Nkrumah, Macmillan advised the Queen to proceed with her travel plans for mid-November. At the same time, he urged Kennedy to help thwart Soviet designs on Ghana by offering the country millions of dollars for the Volta Dam project, a request the American president held in abeyance. Members of Parliament and some elements in the press pushed for the Queen to cancel the trip. Churchill wrote to Macmillan of the “widespread uneasiness both over the physical safety of the Queen and perhaps more, because the visit would seem to endorse a regime … which is thoroughly authoritarian.” Macmillan replied that day, saying that “her wish is to go. This is natural with so courageous a personality.”

The Queen was profoundly irritated by the pressure from the “fainthearts in Parliament and the press.… How silly I should look if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception.” Even after bombs exploded in Accra five days before her trip was to begin, she refused to waver.

She melted Nkrumah, with whom she was photographed dancing at a state ball, and she charmed the Ghanaian press, who called her “the greatest Socialist monarch in the world.” The people of Ghana “fell for her—went out of their minds for her,” said the BBC’s Audrey Russell. “In that open car … she didn’t bat an eyelid—Nkrumah next to her. You just saw the Queen very calm, very poised—not smiling too much—just right.” Afterward Elizabeth II sized up Nkrumah with uncanny precision in a letter to her friend Henry Porchester, expressing surprise at “how muddled his views on the world seemed to be, and how naïve and vainglorious were his ambitions for himself and his country,” along with her dismay at his “short term perspective” and inability to “look beyond his own lifetime.”

On her return to London in late November, Macmillan called Kennedy and said, “I have risked my Queen. You must risk your money!” JFK responded that he would meet Elizabeth II’s “brave contribution” with his own, and less than two weeks later he announced the U.S. financing of the Volta Dam. With that, the fear of Ghana’s departure from the Commonwealth abated.

The Queen did not see Jack Kennedy again, although Jackie and Lee came through London in March 1962 on the way home from India and Pakistan. This time Elizabeth II gave the American sisters a Buckingham Palace luncheon with the Macmillans, Andrew Devonshire (the 11th Duke), Michael Adeane, Master of the Household Patrick Plunket, and other guests. Unlike the previous visit, the first lady and the Queen seemed to click. “It was a great pleasure to meet Mrs. Kennedy again,” Elizabeth II wrote to JFK. “I hope her Pakistan horse [a bay gelding named Sardar given her by President Mohammad Ayub Khan] will be a success—please tell her that mine became very excited by jumping with the children’s ponies in the holidays, so I hope hers will be calmer!”

T
HAT SPRING IT
was time for Prince Charles to take the next step in his education after his final year at Cheam. In April he was dispatched at age fifteen to Gordonstoun. If anything, Philip had become even more convinced that the rigors of his alma mater were vital to strengthening his timid and introspective son and making him more resilient. He felt it was important that a boy should be shown “the stuff he is made of, to find himself, or become even dimly aware of his own possibilities.” After a young man had overcome physical challenges, Philip could see “a light in his eye, and a look about him that distinguishes him from his fellows.” The reason such young men looked different, he said, was their discovery that “they can take it,” that “they were only frightened of themselves to begin with and now they know they have no cause to be frightened of themselves or of anything else either.”

Yet as with Cheam, Philip transmuted his own successful experience at Gordonstoun into wishful thinking about his son, and neither Elizabeth II nor her mother could dissuade him. The Queen Mother had advocated Eton as an easier fit, a place where Charles could find familiar companionship with the sons of aristocrats. But Philip argued against its proximity to Windsor Castle and London, where tabloid journalists were lurking. The modernist in Philip also saw advantages in exposing his son to a more egalitarian and diverse environment than Eton, with its deeply rooted upper-class traditions.

Charles suffered what he later called his “prison sentence” of five years in northeastern Scotland under conditions even worse than at Cheam. More than the short pants in frigid weather, the early morning runs, the cold showers, and open windows in all seasons, Charles found the constant bullying intolerable. He wrote to his parents of the “hell … especially at night,” when his dorm mates would throw slippers and pillows at him or “rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can.” He pleaded to come home, but his father responded that Charles should find strength in the adversity.

The only respite for Charles came from visits to Balmoral, and particularly Birkhall, where he could be pampered by his grandmother and share her interest in art and music. But even then, “an awful cloud came down three or four days before he had to return,” recalled David Ogilvy, the 13th Earl of Airlie, a family friend. “He hated returning to Gordonstoun.”

Following the royal family’s annual Balmoral holiday that year, the world stood still for thirteen days in October when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba and narrowly averted a nuclear war. The Queen was kept informed throughout the crisis by Macmillan, who was in frequent contact with Kennedy. The missile crisis further solidified British-American ties. Kennedy had relied on David Ormsby Gore’s counsel for some crucial tactical decisions, most importantly the size of the blockade perimeter, and Macmillan had served as a useful sounding board.

By the Queen’s seventh and final year with Macmillan as her prime minister, they had settled into an amiable relationship of mutual understanding and respect. He had his own sense of grandeur, yet he treated her with a courtly deference in the spirit of Churchill. “She loves her duty and means to be Queen and not a puppet,” he wrote. He had particularly earned her admiration with his conscientious efforts to stabilize the Commonwealth. She in turn knew how to offer him levity, strength, compassion, or admiration as his mood required, and in 1963 she would deploy her entire range of reactions.

In January she commiserated over his disappointment when de Gaulle condescendingly vetoed British membership in the Common Market. Shortly afterward she and Philip left on
Britannia
for another major tour of Commonwealth nations in the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. On her return to Britain that March, she learned of a disturbing sex scandal that threatened to topple Macmillan’s government. His secretary of state for war, John Profumo, had been having an affair with a “fashionable London call girl” named Christine Keeler, who in turn was the mistress of a Soviet military attaché, leading to suspicions of espionage by Keeler and an impression of “political squalor” in a “frivolous and decadent” government, in the words of Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger.

Profumo initially denied his sexual intimacy with Keeler both to Macmillan and to the House of Commons, but in June he was forced to resign in disgrace after admitting he had lied. Macmillan was compelled to tell Parliament that he had been “grossly deceived”—which David Bruce called “pitiable and extremely damaging.” Bruce feared that confidence in Macmillan had been “greatly undermined.”

To the Queen, the prime minister wrote a letter expressing his “deep regret at the development of recent affairs” and offering his apology for “the undoubted injury done by the terrible behavior of one of Your Majesty’s Secretaries of State,” adding that he had “of course no idea of the strange underworld” of Profumo and his coterie. Elizabeth II replied with what Alistair Horne described as a “charmingly consoling letter … sympathizing with her prime minister over the horrible time he had been experiencing.”

Profumo withdrew from the public stage and devoted the rest of his life to working quietly on behalf of the poor and homeless. Years later he was discreetly befriended by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who so admired his dignified and responsible service that for her seventieth birthday party at Claridge’s in 1995 she seated him next to Elizabeth II. The Palace approved his place of honor, reflecting the Queen’s tolerance and capacity for forgiveness. She shared Thatcher’s respect for Profumo’s dedication to good works, and that evening she was seen “in animated conversation with him,” recalled Charles Powell, Baron Powell of Bayswater, one of Thatcher’s senior advisers.