Sterling and Strings

Peter Davies

In opposition, Harold Wilson spoke out against American involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China . . . we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else.’ Later the same day, in a speech in Manchester, he had gone even further, proclaiming that ‘at the moment the danger to a negotiated settlement in Asia is provided by a lunatic fringe in the American Senate.’ After he became leader of the Labour Party in 1963, Wilson placed much emphasis on close Anglo-American co-operation, going against his earlier position. He continued, however, to voice his opposition to any extension of the Vietnam conflict and in March 1964, and again in June, pressed the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to advise President Johnson against extending the war into the North.

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Vol. 30 No. 22 · 20 November 2008 » Peter Davies » Sterling and Strings (print version)
Pages 17-18 | 3099 words

Letters

From Patrick Renshaw

Peter Davies, in his piece on Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, does not address a question which has always puzzled me (LRB, 20 November). Britain had been co-chairman, along with the Soviet Union and Thailand, of the Geneva peace conference which ended the French war in Indochina in 1954. So would it ever have been appropriate for Britain to send troops to Vietnam, even the two platoons or the military field hospital that Johnson apparently suggested?

Patrick Renshaw
Sheffield

From Solomon Hughes

Standard histories suggest that Harold Wilson’s government was quite tolerant in its attitude to anti-Vietnam protesters in Britain. However, three thick files of papers released to me by the Cabinet Office, Home Office and Metropolitan Police Special Branch indicate that Wilson’s home and defence secretaries, James Callaghan and Denis Healey, seriously discussed using soldiers to hold back demonstrators in 1968. The police seemed genuinely to believe that anti-Vietnam demonstrators would use explosives as well as petrol bombs and ‘acid-filled eggs’.

Wilson also tried to undermine the protesters with subterfuge and propaganda. Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary, called together a joint committee of the prime minister and the foreign, home, education and Scottish secretaries to address the ‘state of student unrest’. It was agreed that the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit close to MI6, would ‘put together and circulate among students material which would help put student organisations on their guard against the ill-disposed’. It would, of course, ‘be circulated anonymously’. Another committee paper shows that ministers backed a plan to discredit the militants with a ‘fairly light-hearted, satirical leaflet’ prepared by the IRD ‘for distribution by the National Union of Students in time for the opening of the new term, aimed particularly at the sceptical first-year student’.

The released papers also reveal that Callaghan leaned hard on newspaper editors and BBC bosses to oppose the protests, calling in the chairman of the BBC governors, Lord Hill, before a demonstration to ‘put the view that, on these occasions, television cameras were not neutral and contributed to the atmosphere’. Callaghan told the BBC boss that ‘the police … would feel particularly strongly if television cameras showed some momentary lapse of retaliation on the part of a police officer, but not the deliberate violence which provoked it.’ Hill readily agreed. Callaghan also called in ten chairmen of top newspapers and told them much the same thing. One of these responded by asking Callaghan if his staff could chase demonstrators.

Solomon Hughes
Southampton