Supermac’s Triumph

It was not as prime minister, as Paul Goodman asserts, but as defence secretary that Harold Macmillan spoke to deferential journalists before leaving for a NATO meeting in Paris in 1954 [HOW THE PRESS HAS CHANGED, AND HOW IT REMAINS THE SAME, MARCH]. He departed on 21 October 1954 for talks to try to end a row over the Saarland. As he recorded in his diary, France — which had administered it since 1945 — threatened to “bring down the whole fabric” of the Western Alliance at the height of the Col...