Tome without Tang

At the End of the Day: 1961-1963 By Harold Macmillan Harper, 572 pp., $16.50 First, consider an old man, brave in war, cunning in peace, learned, witty, and tough, a good Prime Minister of Britain, almost a great one. Then, if you have the time, read the six volumes of the Macmillan memoirs, each about 500 pages, turgid, rambling, evasive, bespattered with clichés and half truths, and enlivened only by the occasional flash of irony—and you may wonder how the one could be the author of the other. The most charitable conclusion is that At the End of the Day, like its five predecessors, is a fake manufactured by the KGB to discredit Western leaders. But we must shun this tempting hypothesis in favor of the probability that Mr. Macmillan like so many statesmen has tried to build himself a monument and has only succeeded in hewing his own tomb. Unfortunately, the political memoirist can claim neither the diarist’s tang of reality nor the historian’s breadth; he can only embalm his self-image.

The final years of Macmillan’s premiership, however, do their best to resist the embalmer’s art, for the record is less than glorious. He himself remarked at the time in a diary parenthesis: “We have had a run of bad luck. Once this starts, everything seems to go wrong. Really, everything that would have been passed over as a minor contretemps when things are good is elevated into a major crisis when things are bad.” True, but in the majority of cases things were bad in the first place only because the policies followed were unsound. This was so in Central Africa, in South Arabia, in the Congo, and, far more importantly, in the management of the economy and in Britain’s application to join the Common Market. Mr. Macmillan’s searing experience of deflation and unemployment in the 1930s rendered him incapable of fully understanding either the causes or the dangers of inflation. And, despite or perhaps because of his long wartime dealings with de Gaulle, he also failed to grasp that de Gaulle’s suspicion of “the Anglo-Saxons” was based on something more than pique.

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Ferdinand Mount

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At the End of the Day: 1961-1963 By Harold Macmillan Harper, 572 pp., $16.50 First, consider an old man, brave in war, cunning in peace, learned, witty, and tough, a good Prime Minister of Britain, almost a great one. Then, if you have the time, read the six volumes of the Macmillan memoirs, each about 500 pages, turgid, rambling, evasive, bespattered with clichés and half truths, and enlivened only by the occasional flash of irony—and you may wonder how the one could be the author of the other. The most charitable conclusion is that At the End of the Day, like its five predecessors, is a fake manufactured by the KGB to discredit Western leaders. But we must shun this tempting hypothesis in favor of the probability that Mr. Macmillan like so many statesmen has tried to build himself a monument and has only succeeded in hewing his own tomb. Unfortunately, the political memoirist can claim neither the diarist’s tang of reality nor the historian’s breadth; he can only embalm his self-image.

The final years of Macmillan’s premiership, however, do their best to resist the embalmer’s art, for the record is less than glorious. He himself remarked at the time in a diary parenthesis: “We have had a run of bad luck. Once this starts, everything seems to go wrong. Really, everything that would have been passed over as a minor contretemps when things are good is elevated into a major crisis when things are bad.” True, but in the majority of cases things were bad in the first place only because the policies followed were unsound. This was so in Central Africa, in South Arabia, in the Congo, and, far more importantly, in the management of the economy and in Britain’s application to join the Common Market. Mr. Macmillan’s searing experience of deflation and unemployment in the 1930s rendered him incapable of fully understanding either the causes or the dangers of inflation. And, despite or perhaps because of his long wartime dealings with de Gaulle, he also failed to grasp that de Gaulle’s suspicion of “the Anglo-Saxons” was based on something more than pique.