Mr Johnson's Little Winston
AMERICA
From DAVID WATT
WASH INGTON
BRITAIN will remain a world power until further notice. President Johnson and the Prime Minister agreed as much last week and what these two have ordained it would be fruit- less for anyone but a central banker to deny. Both the British and American governments had obviously decided separately before Mr Wilson's arrival here on Thursday that they were pre- pared, on balance, to go on paying the price required to support this pretension. And most of the implications of the decision had already been worked out. Mr McNamara and Mr Healey had settled on a mutually acceptable scheme for the withdrawal of British troops from Germany and South-East Asia when they met in Europe last week. Mr Callaghan and Mr Fowler had similarly reviewed the situation of the pound in London and The Hague.
Formally speaking, therefore, not much re- mained to be done by the two principals last Friday except to confirm these decisions with as much public fervour as could be mustered— and as might have been expected of the greatest living virtuosos of verbal devaluation, the fer- vour of Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson was awesome to listen to. The President, within the space of a ten-minute toast, succeeded in men- tioning Shakespeare, Milton, Churchill and Palmerston and managed to imply that Mr Wil- son was the reincarnation of each and all of them—`gallant and hardy leadership . . . a man of mettle . . . enterprise and courage . . . in the tradition of the great men of Britain . .a com- rade with pluck ... a delightful sense of humour.'
Mr Wilson's score was not quite so high but his reputation need not suffer. We had 1940 and all that, the horrid prospect of Britain 'throwing in the sponge,' and 'our Atlantic loyalties and our Pacific loyalties as well.' The Prime Minister even scored something of a coup by including some offensive remarks about the French and the Germans and a mildly indecent story all of which he solemnly warned the assembled bigwigs of Washington were 'off the record.'
It is interesting that all this heart-warming flummery, together with its attendant press con- ferences and so on, occupied so much time that little was left for serious talks between Wilson and Johnson—perhaps one and a half hours in all. (The figure of four hours, which was put out for the record, included the lunch at which John- son and Wilson were sitting side by side. But since the President spent most of that meal shout- ing what looked like interesting abuse across the table at Senator Fulbright, little Anglo-American business can have been transacted.) The plausible conclusion would therefore be that the whole visit was an elaborate public relations exercise and scarcely worth the long toil across the Atlantic.
Perhaps in the widest sense this is true. But from Mr Wilson's immediate point of view the trip was obviously important and useful. After all, a sizeable part of what has been at issue in these last few weeks has been the Prime Minister's personal credibility. The American government decided after careful thought and a great deal of argument that its national interest dictated that this was no moment to encourage the British to abandon the sterling area or make massive withdrawals from the Far East. The reasons why Mr Wilson has come to the same conclusion are complex and possibly highly per- sonal. But one reason is presumably that he wishes to go on exerting some influence on US policy, and as I suggested two weeks ago this cannot be done in the atmosphere of dis- illusionment and irritation which had begun to gather around Mr Wilson's American image or in a position of utter dependence and weakness from which there is no prospect of escape.
What has been required in Washington there- fore has been a swift demonstration of the British government's economic determination and another application by Mr Wilson of that strange hypnotic worldliness which Mr Johnson apparently finds genuinely fascinating. Both were duly provided and both accomplished a good deal of what was expected from them.
The statutory sanctions of the wage freeze (neatly announced just as Mr Wilson was sitting down to his consommé madrilène 'Atlantic' and his Californian Pinot in the White House) remedied the last serious defect that the Ameri- can government had complained of in the economic package. As for the Wilson mes- merism, though its effect was not quite as startling as it was last December and though it certainly needed the wage-freeze to help it out, it was enough to convince the administration once more that the Prime Minister is in earnest, that he will stick to the Atlantic policy and do his best to damn the costs, and finally that he still has a sporting chance of mesmerising his party and his countrymen as well as the American government. Weighed against these virtues. peccadilloes like the disavowal of the Hanoi bombing are easily forgiven.
But if Mr Wilson himself is provisionally back in favour, the chief American doubts about the British economy and its long-term ability to sus- tain even a modified world role are lurking in many corners of Washington. Mr Wilson can swear till he is puce in the face that the trade unions have no choice but to follow him or that the British are at their best when they are up against it. But those who remember the similar oaths of the last four British Prime Ministers are bound to retain some unworthy scepticism. Again, the old Grand Designers in the admini- stration like Mr George Ball and Walt Rostow are not going to abandon, after a single day of the Wilson treatment, their view that Britain's destiny is in Europe and that the attempt to bear global responsibilities is a dangerous and archaic distraction.
Even the US Treasury, which has been the citadel of the status quo brigade, has its fifth column. The accepted British wisdom is that the pound and the dollar stand or fall together and must continue to do so in the face of all that continental obscurantism. Mr Fowler and his colleagues are prepared to go along with this for the present in the fervent hope that another year or so of American backing will he enough to set the British economy above the vicissitudes of the foreign exchange market. But they will not hope for ever. The healthy man does not stand with a corpse or fall with an incurable invalid.
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