Wednesday, May 12, 2010

small beer

There's an old expression -- "That's small potatoes."
Apparently in England they say, "small beer."
-------------------------------
[a passage from Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History Of The Kennedy Years, by Barbara Leaming. Copyright 2001, The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster Inc. New York, NY]:
Macmillan [British prime minister, early 1960s], for his part, had a great deal to offer. Much as he liked and admired Kennedy, whom he praised in a letter to the Queen as "a very effective, even ruthless, operator in the political field," he worried that the President did seem "more interested in short-term than in large and distant problems."
In his diary, Macmillan went...further: "There is a marked contrast between President Kennedy 'in action' on a specific problem (e.g. Congo, West Irian, Ghana) and his attitude to larger issues (...nuclear war, the struggle between East and West, Capitalism and Communism, etc.). In the first, he is an extraordinarily quick and effective operator -- a born 'politician' (not in a pejorative sense). On the wider issues, he seems rather lost."
In Bermuda, Macmillan took it as his mission to shift Kennedy's perspective to precisely those "large and distant problems" with which the Prime Minister believed a great leader must be concernd.
Joe Kennedy had taught his son to win at any cost. Macmillan, of a very different cast of mind, pressed him to...gaze "two or three years into the future and, if possible, even longer." A veteran of two world wars, Macmillan believed that war, nuclear or conventional, no longer provided an option for sane people. To reduce armaments was the only rational approach.
Whether Macmillan would have been quite so effective under other circumstances is impossible to say; his words, coming as they did at a time when Joe Kennedy's influence was suddenly removed, made a huge philosophical impact. Adding to the intensity of the experience for both men were the "country house conditions" in which the conference was held. Kennedy and Macmillan lived under the same roof, ate all meals but breakfast together, took long walks, and had lots of time to talk. It seemed to Ormsby-Gore that Kennedy's instincts were similar to Macmillan's, but that the Prime Minister had thought out his positions in ways the younger man had yet to do.
"I think that not many people had talked to President Kennedy in quite those sweeping terms before," Ormsby-Gore remembered. "And I think that this did add a dimension to his thinking." As far as Macmillan was concerned, no topic was more important than that of nuclear testing. Even Berlin, discussed passionately and at length, struck the Prime Minister as "small beer compared to the destruction of humanity."
----------------------------------------
Small beer.
And half-a-sandwich.
Hold the nukes.
-30-

No comments:

Post a Comment