Harold Macmillan, Ex-British Prime Minister, Dies at 92; Negotiated Disbanding of an Empire

LONDON —  Harold Macmillan, who overcame a crippling shyness and years of political obscurity to become one of the most successful British prime ministers of the post-World War II era, died Monday at age 92, his family said.

Macmillan’s grandson, Viscount Macmillan of Ovendon, said in a statement that his grandfather died peacefully at his home in Sussex in southern England after a short illness.

Macmillan had been in poor health for some time after a bout of pneumonia. A private funeral was planned.

Mourned by Queen, Thatcher

A spokesman for Queen Elizabeth II said the queen heard the news of his death “with great sadness.”

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that “his reputation and standing as a statesman gave him a leading role in the world.”

“Macmillan’s life spanned the history of civilized Western man in the 20th Century with its blend of hope and disappointment, triumph and tragedies,” Thatcher said, noting that Macmillan served in World War I and lost many friends in the conflict. “His death leaves a place which no one else can fill.”

Between 1957 and 1963, employing quiet, self-effacing diplomatic skills, Macmillan negotiated the peaceful liquidation of the British Empire. After the Suez crisis, in 1956, he used those same skills to repair the worst breach in Anglo-American relations in nearly a century.

Came to Power Abruptly

Macmillan came to power abruptly, replacing Anthony Eden as prime minister after the Suez debacle. He left office just as abruptly, because of ill health, a few months after a sensational scandal involving his defense minister, John Profumo.

In between, he presided over the Indian Summer of the British Empire, with aplomb, intelligence and dynamism, and always with a style that seemed relaxed and effortless.

For years after his resignation, he seemed to take little interest in politics, but in his late 80s he suddenly reappeared in the House of Lords as a brilliant orator and perceptive political critic.

His Edwardian appearance and his often unusual attire gave him an air of haggard nobility that endeared him to cartoonists and caricaturists. Malcolm Muggeridge, the political commentator, once remarked that “Macmillan always struck me as a parody of a Conservative politician.”

Unflappable Reputation

Macmillan had a reputation for being unflappable. Once, when confronted in the U.N. General Assembly by an enraged Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, who was spewing insults and banging his shoe on his desk, Macmillan calmly asked: “Mr. President, perhaps we could have a translation. I could not quite follow.”

Macmillan’s greatest disappointment came in 1963, when French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s application for membership in the European Common Market. The veto was tinged with irony, for in World War II Macmillan had helped to preserve De Gaulle’s position as leader of the Free French military forces.

Macmillan was born in London in 1894 to a Scottish father, who founded the Macmillan publishing empire, and an American mother, who gave him a social conscience and an understanding of Americans that was to prove vitally important to his success in later years.

He often joked with his friend and mentor, Winston Churchill, whose mother also was American, that an American mother was essential for success in British politics.

Macmillan was educated at Eton and Oxford, and he joined the cream of his generation in going straight to the trenches in France after the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded twice, once in the Battle of the Somme. On that occasion, he lay for five hours in a shell hole between the lines until a rescue party found him.

Politically Active Family

His marriage, in 1920, to a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire brought him into a politically active family that had sent 16 men to Parliament.

In 1922, Macmillan, too, was elected to Parliament, as a Conservative from a northern, industrially depressed constituency at Stockton-on-Tees.

He quickly established a rapport with his poverty-stricken constituents. He felt a strong responsibility for easing their suffering, but his performance in the House of Commons was stifled by his shyness.

More than a year passed before he made his first speech, and he later remarked that the experience terrified him as much as the Battle of the Somme. For the better part of two decades, he languished as an ineffectual Tory backbencher.

Former Prime Minister David Lloyd George once told him that he had no idea how to make a speech, and another distinguished contemporary, Richard A. (Rab) Butler, tactfully suggested that he try a line of work more suited to his talents.

Opposed to Appeasement

But Macmillan plodded on. In 1938, his vehement opposition to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler caught the eye of Churchill, who in 1940 gave him a junior post at the Ministry of Supply.

He moved for a brief time to the Colonial Office. Then, his big break came in December, 1942, when Churchill appointed him as his personal representative and ordered him to resolve political differences among the Allied forces in North Africa. It was here that his understanding of Americans, and his affinity for them, paid off.

He skillfully managed to improve the frosty relations that had developed between the British and American commands, and he established a close, easy relationship with the U.S. commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Years later, when he was prime minister and Eisenhower was President, this relationship became vitally important.

Counseling British officers on how to deal with the Americans, Macmillan told them: “We British are the Greeks in their Roman Empire. Our job is to change their minds without their realizing it.”

Supported De Gaulle

Macmillan’s most important achievement in Africa was to dissuade the United States from ditching the temperamental De Gaulle as leader of the Free French forces in favor of the more pliable but uninspiring governor-general of Algiers, Henri Giraud.

His newly discovered diplomatic skills quickly propelled Macmillan, as minister resident in the Mediterranean, into a series of high-level tasks related to the war effort.

In the Labor Party landslide of 1945, Macmillan lost his seat in the House of Commons, but he returned to the House a few months later after winning a by-election. Now in the opposition, he joined Churchill’s shadow cabinet, and in 1952, when the Conservatives returned to power, he was appointed minister of housing.

Major Triumph in Housing

In this post, he achieved a major government triumph by carrying through on a boast to build 300,000 housing units despite a national austerity program and shortages of key materials.

In 1955, when Anthony Eden replaced Churchill as prime minister, Macmillan was made defense secretary, then foreign secretary and then chancellor of the exchequer, the post he held in October, 1956, when the Suez crisis erupted.

Together with France and Israel, and over the strenuous opposition of the United States, Britain attacked Egypt after it nationalized the Suez Canal. A joint Anglo-French military force was landed to secure the canal but was withdrawn within days under strong diplomatic pressure.

The debacle made a shambles of Anglo-American relations, signaled the eclipse of Britain as a world power and precipitated Eden’s political demise. In January, 1957, Eden resigned and Macmillan, at the age of 63, became prime minister.

Confident, Adroit

His low-key confidence and adroit political skills quickly established him as one of the most popular prime ministers of the century. But his transformation from a gawky, shy backbencher into a polished statesmen was anything but natural.

“He made a tremendous effort to overcome his poor image,” commentator Anthony Sampson, who wrote a book on Macmillan, observed. “He had lessons from actors on timing and presence. His use of gestures became unparalleled.”

From his parliamentary colleagues, Macmillan picked up public speaking tips, including the value of the pause, an oratorical tool he employed in his later years with a kind of mischievous delight.

But, even as prime minister, Macmillan never fully conquered his nerves. His official biographer, Alistair Horne, noted that he would sometimes become physically sick before an important parliamentary speech.

As prime minister, he rallied his party and his country, both of which were demoralized over the crushing setback at Suez. He transformed the potentially humiliating liquidation of the empire into the triumphant creation of an enlarged, robust Commonwealth of nations newly independent from Britain.

Friendship With Eisenhower

Macmillan considered a strong relationship with Washington as essential for a Britain no longer capable of acting alone as a global policeman. He quickly re-established his old friendship with Eisenhower and built on it.

Later, he forged a similarly close relationship with President John F. Kennedy, backing him in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and negotiating the purchase of U.S. Polaris missiles that still form the backbone of Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

Macmillan was an enthusiastic advocate of the summit conference and face-to-face diplomacy. He shuttled endlessly among Paris, Washington, Bonn, New York and Moscow, and he traveled more widely through the Commonwealth than any prime minister before or since.

He is credited with playing a significant role in formulating the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty, but two of his most important diplomatic efforts ended in failure.

Two Major Failures

The summit conference of May, 1960, involving the British, U.S., French and Soviet leaders, to which Macmillan had devoted much personal effort, was wrecked before it began when an American spy plane was brought down in Soviet territory.

Three years later came De Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s application for membership in the Common Market, and Macmillan saw it as a crushing setback.

In 1963, the Profumo scandal erupted. Profumo resigned from the Ministry of Defense and Parliament in the face of disclosures of his affair with a young woman, Christine Keeler, who at the same time was involved with the naval attache at the Soviet Embassy.

In October, with shock waves from the Profumo affair still buffeting his government, Macmillan entered the hospital for prostate surgery. Eight days later, demoralized and facing the prospect of a long convalescence, he resigned from office after arranging for Alec Douglas-Home to succeed him as prime minister.

Six Volumes of Memoirs

His health returned quickly, but instead of returning to politics, he became active in his family’s publishing firm and wrote six volumes of his memoirs along with two other books.

In 1984, at the age of 89, he was given a peerage, the title of the First Earl of Stockton and membership in the House of Lords. He described himself as a kind of political Rip Van Winkle, but his mixture of dry wit and historical perspective made him a powerful, effective critic.

At the age of 90, he delivered a cogent, stinging critique of his government’s policies, speaking for 32 minutes without notes in an address that brought the House to its feet and led a leading daily newspaper to hail him as the finest orator of the age.