Introduction

Abstract

It was not a promising beginning. Despite the best-laid plans, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s first meeting with the new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy did not take place in Washington during the first week of April 1961. Instead, responding to what amounted to a summons from Kennedy at the end of March, the aged prime minister flew to the US Naval Base at Key West in Florida. This detour, involving two five-hour flights in the middle of a planned trip to the Caribbean, was, as Macmillan’s press secretary Harold Evans put it, like flying to Moscow for lunch.1 Across the perspective of four decades, the reason for this hasty change in plans seems somewhat improbable. A civil war between communist and Western-backed forces in the land-locked South East Asian state of Laos had, in Kennedy’s estimation, raised issues vital to the waging of the Cold War. Not only that, but from the new president’s point of view, the prime minister’s attempts to wriggle out of any British military commitment to stem the communist advance in Laos threatened a ‘serious difference of opinion between the United Kingdom and the United States …’2