Office of the Historian

373. Letter From Prime Minister Macmillan to President Eisenhower0

London, May 20, 1960.

Dear Friend: Thank you so much for your letter1 which cheered me up a great deal. It was typically generous of you to send it.

Of course all this is very depressing, but I am now pretty sure, looking back on the course of the Paris meeting, that Khrushchev had determined before he arrived to break it up.2

I cannot tell you how much I admired the magnanimity and restraint with which you acted throughout those trying few days. I shall have an opportunity of saying something of what I feel in the House of Commons today.

As to the future, no one can tell which way it will go. But certainly our experiences in Paris make it all the more important to strengthen our Western alliance. I am sure that what you said at our last tri-partite meeting will have a lasting effect.

Yours ever,

Harold Macmillan3
  1. Source: Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, International File. Confidential; Personal.↩
  2. Not printed.↩
  3. On May 15, President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Macmillan arrived in Paris to attend private meetings preliminary to the opening session of the summit meeting with President de Gaulle and Premier Khrushchev. The four Heads of Government met at the Elysée Palace on May 16. During the meeting, Khrushchev read a statement in which he declared that the Soviet Union could not participate in the conference unless the U.S. Government immediately stopped flights of U–2 reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet territory and apologized for past flights, including that of an airplane shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1. At this session, Eisenhower stated that the reconnaissance flights had been suspended and that the U–2 incident should not be an issue before the summit conference. Subsequent private meetings between the four leaders and their advisers May 17–18 did not resolve the situation, and Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Macmillan left Paris on May 19. Documentation on the summit conference is in volume IX. For Macmillan’s account of these events, see Pointing the Way, pp. 195–216.↩
  4. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩