At the End of the Day: Macmillan’s Account of the Cuban Missile Crisis
| Author | Peter Catterall |
| Published date | 01 September 2012 |
| Date | 01 September 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0047117812451838 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Relations
26(3) 267 –289
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117812451838
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At the End of the
Day: Macmillan’s Account
of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Peter Catterall
University of Westminster
Abstract
Pre-publicity for the final volume of Harold Macmillan’s memoirs, At the End of the Day, stressed
that it would provide the British side of the Cuban missile crisis for the first time. The Churchillian
model chosen, changes required by the Cabinet Office and Macmillan’s desire to rebuke those
political opponents who claimed that the crisis demonstrated a lack of British influence in
Washington, however ensured a focus on his personal relationship with President Kennedy.
His larding the text with contemporary observations from his diaries also skewed Macmillan’s
account and, in particular, underplayed the significance of British moves at the United Nations
in New York to secure a credible United Nations inspection regime and a US guarantee of the
inviolability of Cuba. Careful reconstruction of Macmillan’s real-time experience of the Cuban
missile crisis demonstrates the limitations of his own account of this event.
Keywords
British foreign policy, cold war, Cuban missile crisis, memoir-writing, Macmillan, personal
diplomacy, United Nations
In October 1962, Harold Macmillan had been Prime Minister for nearly six years. His
account of those momentous days appeared almost 11 years later when At the End of the
Day, the sixth and final volume of his memoirs covering the period from 1961 to 1963
was published on 26 September 1973 in Britain and on 9 January 1974 in the United
States. By this time, Macmillan, 68 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, was nearing
his 80th birthday. Although the physical infirmities of age were exacerbated by his Great
War wounds, he nevertheless remained mentally robust. Indeed, by turns with his son
Maurice, he continued to chair the family publishing firm that also published his memoirs
Corresponding author:
Peter Catterall, History Department, University of Westminster, 309 Regent
Street, London W1B 2UW UK.
Email: p.p.catterall@qmul.ac.uk
245183IRE26310.1177/0047117812451838International RelationsCatterall
2012
Article
268 International Relations 26(3)
until 1980.1 This might help to explain how the autobiography of ‘Mr Harold’ eventually
ran to 3763 pages and some 1.5 million words.
Macmillan was active in the publishing business before he was first elected to
Parliament in 1924. However, unlike his elder brother Daniel, a political career was
always his priority. Publishing was a sideline undertaken when on the backbenches or
out of Parliament and certainly something he had little time for during his long continu-
ous stint in Cabinet from the return of the Tories to government on 26 October 1951 to
his health-induced resignation as Prime Minister on 18 October 1963. Nevertheless, he
was pleased to be one of the few in Cabinet who had practical experience in business2
and always knew that he would return to publishing when his political career was over.
He attended his first Board meeting on 31 October 1963 and had, by the end of that year,
assumed the company chairmanship.
Physical recovery, however, was not swift. It was not until the New Year that he felt
well enough to set about addressing the managerial and financial problems inherited
from Daniel’s long and idiosyncratic reign as chairman.3 On 12 January 1964, he noted
in his diary:
The truth is that I am still in a kind of daze – like a man who has had concussion. I can just
manage to concentrate on a limited range of problems (e.g. those of M&Co) but all the flexibility
and resilience of my mind (wh. I think was considerable) has gone. However, I suppose this is
the result partly of the operation but partly (and perh[aps] principally) of 10 years and more of
tremendous work at tremendous pressure.4
The first brief mention of the memoirs project in Macmillan’s diary was not until a
month later, when he discussed the idea with one of Churchill’s former research assis-
tants, Bill Deakin of St Antony’s College, Oxford.5 Exhaustion and publishing demands
were not the only reasons for avoiding haste in such matters. Macmillan was acutely
conscious of the damage done to the efforts of his successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to
secure a Conservative re-election that year by the rush into print in early 1964 of disgrun-
tled former ministers, Iain Macleod and Lord Kilmuir.6 Of Kilmuir, whom Macmillan
had sacked in the massive Cabinet reshuffle of July 1962 (christened the ‘Night of the
Long Knives’), he observed: ‘The fact that he criticised all his colleagues so freely and
so soon (there is a decent interval to be observed in memoirs of this kind) has angered the
Party’. He went on to note: ‘What makes it so sad is that I am told he sold the rights of
his book (or at least the serial rights) for a very modest sum – £2000 or so – hardly
enough to justify such a breach of decorum’.7
Macmillan’s serialisation agreement was signed with the same newspaper, the Sunday
Times, but was far more lucrative. A book trust had been established as the owner of
Macmillan’s literary estate, and it contracted with the Thomson Organisation a fee of
£360,000, ‘of which £34,000 is to be paid to me in 4 annual instalments to write the book
and pay the assistants etc’.8 Thomson in turn contracted the American rights with Harper
and Row. By then, Douglas-Home had narrowly lost the October 1964 elections and
Harold Wilson’s Labour Party had taken charge: it was now safe for Macmillan to pro-
duce his memoirs.
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