Papers Show Rare Friction for Thatcher and Reagan
By
JOHN F. BURNS DEC. 28, 2012
LONDON — The bond between Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and President
Ronald Reagan, both in office in the 1980s, has become a kind of gold standard, showing what the “special relationship” between
Britain and the United States can be when their leaders share a political creed.
But even though the two shared a belief in the virtues of the free market and the need to face down the Soviet Union over Afghanistan and other cold war issues, the Thatcher-Reagan embrace had its thorny passages — perhaps never more so than during the 1982 Falklands war in the South Atlantic.
Just how thorny was revealed on Friday by the publication of British
government papers covering the period, under a rule that mandates the release of hitherto secret documents after 30 years. The papers, including records of the Thatcher cabinet and her occasional prickliness toward Reagan, have added spice to what was previously known about rocky patches in their relationship.
A memo written by one Thatcher aide chronicled a midnight telephone call Reagan made to Mrs. Thatcher on May 31, 1982, when British troops were closing in on Port Stanley, capital of the British-ruled
Falkland Islands, off the coast of
Argentina, and the site of the last undefeated Argentine garrison.
Reagan, yielding to advisers who regarded Britain’s insistence on retaining sovereignty over the sparsely populated islands as a colonial anachronism, urged the prime minister to show magnanimity rather than force the invading Argentine troops to surrender, and to reach a cease-fire deal providing for a shared Argentine-British role in the islands’ future and a joint American-Brazilian peacekeeping force.
“The best chance for peace was before complete Argentine humiliation,” the memo recorded Reagan as saying. “As the U.K. now had the upper hand, it should strike a deal now,” rather than act in a way that further hardened Argentine feelings.
But the memo said Mrs. Thatcher rejected the president’s appeal for talks three times, becoming more emphatic each time. “Britain had not lost precious lives in battle and sent an enormous task force to hand over the queen’s islands to a contact group,” Mrs. Thatcher told him, adding a brusque reminder that Britain had been forced to “act alone, with no outside help,” in recovering the islands,
an oblique reference to the American refusal to be drawn directly into the conflict on the British side.
Speaking before the final toll had been tallied — 255 British and 649 Argentine military personnel dead — the prime minister “asked the president to put himself in her position,” the memo said. “She was sure the president would act in the same way if Alaska had similarly been threatened.” The memo said the call ended with Mrs. Thatcher saying that the only acceptable outcome was for the Argentines to agree to withdraw without negotiation, which happened a few weeks later.
British newspapers highlighted the Thatcher-Reagan exchanges in their Friday editions, with interest heightened by the fact that Mrs. Thatcher, 87, spent the Christmas holiday in a London hospital after having an operation to remove what her family described as a growth on her bladder. Though she has been increasingly frail in recent years and suffering from dementia, the family said she was recovering well.
The documents also offered new insights into Britain’s fractious relationship with France, centering on Mrs. Thatcher’s dyspeptic exchanges with President François Mitterrand over French-made Exocet missiles that Argentina used to sink several British naval ships during the Falklands war. At the time, British military leaders were warning that a successful Exocet strike on one of Britain’s aircraft carriers could lead to defeat.
But the hardest-edged document was a diplomatic cable from Britain’s ambassador in Washington at the time, Sir Nicholas Henderson, fulminating against Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s United Nations ambassador, who supported Argentina’s claim to the Falklands. The cable described Ms. Kirkpatrick, a former Georgetown University professor, as “more fool than fascist” for her support of Argentina’s military dictatorship, and added, “She appears to be one of America’s most reliable own-goal scorers: tactless, wrong-headed, ineffective and a dubious tribute to the academic profession.”
