Abstract
On June 30, 1963, President John F. Kennedy, his British counterpart Harold Macmillan, and a coterie of ambassadors, Foreign Ministers and assistants, met for talks at scenic Birch Grove, England. A joint press communique revealed that the delegations discussed issues of mutual and global importance, such as the multilateral force treaty. However, nowhere in the text of the communique is it mentioned that the question of British Guiana (now Guyana) figured prominently in the Birch Grove discussions. Macmillan's memoirs and those of Presidential Aide Theodore Sorenson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk all fail to acknowledge that British Guiana—a small, economically backward colony in South America with the population of a small American city—was actually the first subject on the agenda that summer day in 1963. Even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Kennedy Administration only covers the Birch Grove meeting in one cryptic sentence: "... Macmillan said no on multilateral force and yes on British Guiana."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
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