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    Political Encounters: That Changed the World
    Political Encounters: That Changed the World
    Political Encounters: That Changed the World
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Political Encounters: That Changed the World

    By Rodney Castleden

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    About this ebook

    This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication.

    On 26 September 1960, an estimated 70 million Americans watched John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the first ever televised presidential debate. Nixon perspired heavily and appeared unshaven while Kennedy was immaculate and composed with a California suntan. Kennedy had found his perfect medium and in future he was to use it to great effect. Read about the famous TV encounter between Kennedy and Nixon along with other significant political encounters that changed the world.

    Contents: The Old Etonians, The Yalta Conference – Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, The Bandung Conference, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Kennedy and Nixon on TV, Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, The Reykjavik Summit 1986, The Bush- Gorbachev Summits, The Earth Summit at Rio1992, Camp David Summit 2000, The Pyongyang Summits 2002 and 2007

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanary Press eBooks Limited
    Release dateJul 16, 2020
    ISBN9781908698414
    Political Encounters: That Changed the World

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      Book preview

      Political Encounters - Rodney Castleden

      Introduction

      We all have encounters that change the way we think, the way we see the world, and ultimately the way we behave. It is one of the characteristics that make us human beings. A lot of these encounters are commonplace, like the encounters we have with our teachers at school, and most of us can remember moments when a teacher somehow, by telling us or showing us something, made us see things differently.

      Then there are encounters with friends, colleagues, husbands, wives and lovers, building over the course of months, years and decades to change us piecemeal in all sorts of ways. And there are fleeting encounters with strangers, maybe a brief conversation, maybe no more than a fragment of someone’s conversation overheard as they pass.

      All these different encounters, significant and insignificant alike, are woven into the fabric of our lives, changing us sometimes subtly and gradually, sometimes with dramatic suddenness, into different people.

      One political encounter that has inspired an enormous amount of media comment and speculation over the years is the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they were UK prime minister and chancellor respectively.

      Exactly what happened in the way of deals and promises of handing over power is still not known. Were there promises? Or hints of promises? Or conditional promises? Even those immediately involved in such exchanges only see part of the situation, not all of it.

      I suspect that neither Gordon Brown nor Tony Blair fully understood one another, or what they were doing to one another psychologically. It may well be that the whole truth will never be known about that unusually tense political encounter.

      On the other hand the relationship between Che Guevara and Fidel Castro was built on friendship and mutual admiration. Castro realized how much he owed Che in bringing about a successful revolution in Cuba. After his death, Che became an iconic figure, and Castro knew that together they had created an imperishable modern legend.

      This book is inevitably about encounters experienced by people who have made their mark, famous people whose lives are a matter of record. Some encounters look full of promise, as if they should lead on to something momentous, others like Blair and Brown end in harsh words and arguments. Many go from strength to strength, like Che and Castro, culminating in emotional eulogies for lost friendships. But, as I hope the book shows, it is always the unpredictability of human encounters that give them their peculiar interest.

      1

      The Etonians: Harold Macmillan, Bobbety Cranborne, Oliver Lyttelton, Harry Crookshank

      (1914)

      Four Englishmen were born within a few months of one another at the end of the 19th century: Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton, Bobbety Cranborne and Harold Macmillan. They were all at Eton at the same time, Cranborne and Lyttelton from patrician families (Cranborne was the son of Lord Salisbury, the prime minister), Crookshank and Macmillan from ‘new money’. But any social division that might have separated them was removed by the time the four young men joined the Grenadier Guards, in itself a socially élitist group.

      When the First World War broke out and they were sent to the Western Front as junior officers, Lyttelton and Cranborne became cynical about their senior commanders. The general view was that Haig was a fool. During action at the battle of Festubert, in which both Cranborne and Lyttelton fought, Cranborne was deafened by rifle fire close at hand and sent home on extended leave. Then in 1915 Macmillan and Crookshank were to fight in the battle of Loos. After a mine exploded, Crookshank was buried by the earth thrown up in the explosion; it was 20 minutes before he was dug out and rescued, shaken but alive, and ready to return to duty the same evening. Of the four men, Macmillan proved to be the least adaptable to life in the trenches. Of the four he looked at that time and later on the least likely to succeed. He tried to create a reading circle among his fellow officers in an attempt to hang onto some vestiges of the civilized life.

      In the battle of Loos, Macmillan was shot in the head, a glancing blow which even so concussed him; then he was shot in the right hand. Macmillan was troubled by his damaged right hand for the rest of his life. The battle of Loos was a failure as far as the Guards Division was concerned. Macmillan said, ‘It has been rather awful – most of our officers are hit.’

      After Loos, Crookshank was out in mist with a wiring party when he too was shot, in the left leg. He was out of the fighting for the rest of 1915 and, being sent back to a London nursing home, he missed Winston Churchill’s arrival at the Front to serve with the 2nd Battalion. Churchill had suffered the humiliation of being thrown out of the Cabinet. The Dardanelles expedition had failed and Churchill was held responsible for it. Lyttelton and his circle had regarded Churchill as a turncoat for several years, ever since he had moved from the Tory to the Liberal Party. But Churchill was undaunted by his unpopularity, holding forth at dinner on the

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