Ronnie’s Friend Maggie

The phrase, inevitably, is Winston Churchill’s. Long an advocate of Anglo-American alliance, the wartime British Prime Minister often spoke of what he called the “ties of blood and history” between the two nations. For Churchill, a “special relationship” with the U.S. had been a matter not of choice or convenience but of life and death. Faced with Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg across Western Europe in 1940, the new Prime Minister had no doubt about which way salvation lay. No lover, Churchill later remarked, had ever studied the whims of his mistress as he did those of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was “the New World, with all its power and might,” Churchill declared in the wake of Dunkirk in 1940, that one day would come “to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

The special relationship returned to mind in the wake of the death of Margaret Thatcher at 87. Among the British, reaction was mixed; they are often much more frank about the vices of the dead than Americans tend to be in the hours after the passing of a public figure. Obituary writers attacked Thatcher for being too tough on, and wrong about, the Irish, miners, the poor, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, and Argentina, which she fought in the Falklands war in the early 1980s. The Daily Mirror called her “the woman who divided a nation.”

For many others, though, her death recalled epic days, not so far distant, when both economic stagnation and the Soviet bloc were overwhelming facts of life. Journalist and biographer Nicholas Wapshott, writing in the New York Times, recalled sharing Champagne with Thatcher on a flight home from Japan. “It was Mrs. Thatcher’s charisma that those who thought of her as merely a hectoring bossy-boots did not grasp,” wrote Wapshott. “And it was that sense of subdued danger and not-quite-erotic excitement that inspired the most important Anglo-American alliance since that of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.”

Among transatlantic skeptics, the Anglo-American special relationship is at best a genial bit of sentimentality. Nations, we are often told, have no friends, only interests. That is true, and the romantic glow of the Roosevelt-Churchill saga obscures many of the real difficulties the two men experienced in prosecuting the war and preparing the peace. It is equally true, however, that the personal friendship Roosevelt and Churchill “forged in the fire of war” (as Churchill put it to Eleanor Roosevelt after FDR’s death) had political effects and established a useful template for their successors.

After FDR and Churchill–who, one wartime dinner guest at the White House said, clearly savored acting like a “couple of emperors,” drinking, smoking and plotting the end of Hitler–Presidents and Prime Ministers had a new weapon at their disposal. Americans seeking at least the appearance of multilateral action knew they were likely to be able to count on the Brits; Brits seeking a postimperial role and global clout knew they could likely benefit from a periodic renewal of the relationship that had made victory possible in their nation’s hour of maximum danger. Is the “special relationship” unequal? Absolutely. Does that make it any less potentially potent in hours of crisis? Not at all.

The Iron Lady–a nickname that came from the Soviet Union–played a unique role in modern statecraft. A pioneering conservative force in a socialized Britain, she, like Reagan, shifted the terms of political conversation and of public possibility in her nation by challenging the received liberal wisdom of the postwar era. She quickly became a defining feature of the global landscape, an unapologetic, nearly always blunt advocate of freer markets, greater individualism and tougher anticommunism. Her fellow Tory Alan Clark was once asked whether he liked Thatcher. “Like her?” he replied. “She is not there to be liked. She’s a force of nature.”

So she was, along with her transatlantic friend Ronald Reagan. Dismissive of the language and ethos of détente with the Soviets, they were frank about the goal of winning, not merely enduring, what JFK had called the “long twilight struggle” with communism. And for all their ferocious and bracing rhetoric–Thatcher’s delivered in a no-nonsense British way, Reagan’s in the plain-speaking style of the American frontier–they were fundamentally pragmatic. It was Thatcher who first declared that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom she could “do business,” and the Soviet leader’s ensuing partnership with Reagan (and later with George H.W. Bush) resulted in the collapse of the totalitarian system that had seemed a permanent force before Thatcher and Reagan’s joint rise to power in their respective nations.

On the home front, both were attacked as uncaring. Thatcher was dubbed the Milk Snatcher for attempting to reform a free-milk program in British schools when she was Education Secretary in the 1970s; Reagan was pilloried when his Administration proposed categorizing ketchup as a vegetable in American public schools. They both soldiered on, sustained by active historical imaginations; they fervently believed that their countries, and the free world, had a great destiny to fulfill if only individual energies and communist nations could be freed.

The two first met one on one in London in 1975. Thatcher had just been elected leader of the Conservative Party in bleak, unreconstructed Labourite Britain; Reagan was between the California governorship and his nearly successful challenge to President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. Asked about Thatcher afterward, he said he thought she would be a “magnificent Prime Minister.” According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, Reagan’s British questioner said such a thing could never happen: No woman could be Prime Minister. “England had a Queen named Victoria once who did rather well,” Reagan is said to have replied.

Four years later, Reagan was proved right when Thatcher won the 1979 general election. She went to Washington to see Reagan just a month after his own Inauguration in 1981. In a meeting in the Oval Office, she was “as firm as ever re the Soviets and for reduction of govt.,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “Expressed regret that she tried to reduce govt. spending a step at a time & was defeated in each attempt. Said she should have done it our way–an entire package–all or nothing.” The next day, the Prime Minister went to Capitol Hill and essentially lobbied for the President’s economic program. “Some of the [Senators] tried to give her a bad time,” Reagan wrote, adding proudly, “She put them down firmly.”

They had their moments, of course. This magazine reported Thatcher’s stone-faced silence during a joint appearance with Reagan in 1982; the Prime Minister believed that her usually heroic friend had failed to be fully supportive during a controversy at the U.N. about the Falklands crisis. Still, they largely thought themselves a terrific team. “There were many times that Margaret Thatcher spoke up and put her finger on the little thing we were trying to resolve or settle, or the wording of something,” Reagan said after an early summit. When she called to let the President have it on some issue or another, Reagan would hold up the phone to advisers as she spoke and remark, “Isn’t she wonderful?”

He meant it. Their dynamic was a political echo of the formidable marriage between Nancy and Ronald Reagan–a relationship so intense, so consuming, that even the couple’s children felt there was little room for them in the Reagans’ private world. Quoting Charles Dickens, Thatcher once noted that Americans are, “by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate,” and that to her, no one better fit that description than her conservative comrade in arms. Thus it wasn’t surprising to her, she said, that she so loved her time with Reagan in the White House, in England, at Camp David, at sundry summits. Citing Thoreau, Thatcher told Reagan that she believed “it takes two to speak the truth, one to speak and another to hear. Well, sometimes one of us has spoken and sometimes the other. But together, Mr. President, I would like to think that we have spoken the truth.”

They were so close, in fact, that Thatcher found the transition to new American leadership a bit tricky when Bush became President in 1989. The 41st President and his Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, were less than enthusiastic about the Prime Minister’s habit of speaking for both nations (or “Ron and I think …” as she used to say, a lot) in sessions with other allies. The tribute that Thatcher videotaped for Reagan’s funeral focused so exclusively on the Thatcher-Reagan contributions to the end of the Cold War that other world leaders who played roles in the collapse of communism glanced at one another and wondered, as one such figure privately put it afterward, “What are we? Chopped liver?” To Thatcher, they probably were.

The Roosevelt-Churchill/Kennedy-Macmillan/Reagan-Thatcher model has endured–and as always in politics, the results have been for better and for worse. Tony Blair’s decision to stand with Bill Clinton during the American President’s impeachment woes helped sustain Clinton and was an early sign that the scandal was not something that the rest of the world would ultimately take very seriously. Blair was quick to cultivate the second President Bush and was a critical ally in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11 and, more notoriously, in the preparation for the Iraq war. Blair’s reputation has yet to recover fully from the charge that he was overly deferential to the Bush Administration’s press to topple Saddam Hussein come what may–a reminder that allies who save you in one hour can wound you in others. As Churchill and Thatcher knew, such is the nature of politics in a fallen world. The only thing worse than having allies, Churchill remarked, is not having them. In his last Cabinet meeting in 1955, Churchill gave his colleagues a solemn benediction: “Never be separated from the Americans.” It’s counsel that his successors, the Iron Lady chief among them, have never forgotten.