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President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan: Part II (1989-11-17)
About this film
The Berlin Wall had just come down, and this rich discussion with three men who were behind the scenes in Washington and London starts with the erection of the Wall in 1961. (Macmillan served as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, stepping down just a month before Kennedy was killed.) One sample: AH: "From Kennedy's point of view, Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of Florida, was absolutely overriding, and it swept off his vision any threat to Berlin. Macmillan, three thousand miles away but much closer to Europe, saw Berlin as the possible danger, and he saw that what Khrushchev may have been playing, as he often did in his rather crazy, adventurous policies, was a maximum and a minimum. The maximum was achieved if Kennedy lost his nerve and he could get Cuba, and then he could roll up Berlin. But the minimum might have been to have taken Berlin as a pawn and exchange a pawn ... over Cuba.".
Directors & creators
Southern Educational Communications Association
Subjects
public broadcasting, AAPB, John F. Kennedy, Harold Macmillan, William F. Buckley Jr., Berlin Wall, Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Nikita Khrushchev, Washington D.C., London, United Kingdom, Foreign policy, Diplomacy, Geopolitics, International relations
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