BY 1961 John F. Kennedy was no stranger to Bermuda but during previous visits to the island the most distressing thing he had to contend with was a nasty case of road rash. He had enjoyed two golfing vacations here in 1953 shortly after being elected as the United States Senator from Massachusetts. Staying at Eventide (now Kennedy House) on Burnt House Hill, like so many visitors during that time JFK had come to grief on Bermuda’s roads while trying to break a bucking rental moped.He had also pursued his low-key courtship of fiancee Jacqueline Bouvier from the island during one of these trips. “... He never played the devoted lover,” said the 1994 Times obituary of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “ He once sent her a rather perfunctory postcard from Bermuda saying ‘Wish you were here. Cheers, Jack’, which Jacqueline held up to friends as her sole piece of courtship correspondence.”

By the time of the December, 1961 Bermuda summit meeting with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, President Kennedy - who had been in office for less than a year - was already familiar with the truth behind Shakespeare’s dictum about how uneasily the crowned head lies at night.

Although in public he continued to wear his charisma as confidently as cavalier’s plume - and the press dutifully telegraphed the telegenic, carefree Camelot facade that surrounded his Administration to an adoring world - privately Kennedy was a thoughtful and deeply troubled man.

After the eight monochromatic years of Eisenhower Administration the public was naturally enough enchanted by Kennedy’s vision of a New Frontier, one he painted in bold strokes using vivid primary colours.

But the President himself was occasionally doubtful the world would survive long enough to cross that frontier into the Promised Land described in his soaring rhetoric - one where unfulfilled hopes and dreams, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice and unanswered questions of poverty and surplus would all be resolved.

In 1961 thermo-nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union was not just a possibility, it remained a near certainty. In September, during one of the many super-power flare-ups that year over Berlin, British Foreign Secretary Lord Home - a man not given to hyperbole - cautioned gravely: “One false step, one failure in communication, even one failure in comprehension, might mean war”.

As a consequence of this hair-trigger international environment, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was determined to ensure a ratcheting down of Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow topped the agenda in Bermuda when he met with Kennedy on December 21 and 22.

Historian Nigel Ashton underscores the primacy the threat of thermo-nuclear Armageddon assumed at the Bermuda talks in his book Kennedy, Macmillan and The Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence>

The Soviets had resumed atmospheric tests of increasingly powerful hydrogen bombs in September - Premier Nikita Khruschev arbitrarily breaking a moratorium on such detonations which had been in effect since 1958, during which time the US and UK also abstained from any forms of testing.

A reluctant Kennedy believed the US would ultimately have no other option but to resume its own above-ground tests despite the fact his Administration was committed to implementing a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets that would preclude future atmospheric tests - with the risks they carried of lethal radioactive fall-out drifting into civilian population centers. Macmillan was opposed to such an American move, arguing that a resumption of thermo-nuclear muscle-flexing with the Soviets could dangerously escalate the arms race and further destabilise the already dangerously unstable balance of power.

“The Macmillan-Kennedy summit meeting held at Bermuda from 21-23 December provided an opportunity to air face-to-face Anglo-American differences over atmospheric testing,” writes Ashton. “The first discussion between Kennedy and Macmillan on the Prime Minister’s belief in the unparalleled need to arrest the nuclear arms race, ‘You and I,’ Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesigner quotes Macmillan as telling the President, ‘cannot sit in an ordinary little room four days before Christmas and talk about these terrible things without doing something about it. Before we (resume atmospheric nuclear tests), should we not make one more effort to break the cycle’?”

The arms race, an emotional Macmillan went on to tell Kennedy, was the “rogue elephant” against which the Western allies must act in concert. Kennedy listened to the older man’s counsel and accepted his view that shows of Western strength must also be tempered by restraint so as not to alarm Khruschev and, more critically, the Communist and military hard-liners who surrounded him in the Kremlin.

However, JFK believed the West could not allow the Soviets to steal a march on the West in the area of nuclear testing at a time when the Red Army was testing NATO resolve in Berlin and sponsoring clients from Cuba to Vietnam in a global battle of nerves.

The competitive pressures being applied by the Kremlin were just too great and the US could not afford to lose face. In fact, in Bermuda Kennedy pressured Macmillan into acceding to US demands that remote Christmas Island in the Pacific - a British possession used for nuclear tests in the 1950s - be the site of a new series of tests if Soviet negotiators taking part in the Test Ban talks continued to be hostile to Western demands for effective arms inspection and control systems being linked to any agreement imposing a new moratorium on future detonations.DURING the Bermuda meetings, Kennedy was swayed on the nuclear testing question by the deliberations of American and British technical experts who were simultaneously holding discussions at Government House on the resumption of Soviet weapons tests. According to a US State Department memorandum, the scientists concluded that while the United States “retains over-all nuclear advantage,” without US atmospheric testing the Soviets could “gain over-all advantage in two or three years” - especially in the area of anti-intercontinental ballistic missile (AICBM) weapons tests, effectively destroying the US strategic lead.

Appalled by the “risks” and “waste” of the arms race, Macmillan urged Kennedy to consider making a bold and dramatic gesture - reaching out personally to Khrushchev to finally conclude a test ban agreement. Kennedy believed such a personal appeal to Khrushchev would reduce US freedom of action to make “nuclear advances necessary to our security.”

However, Kennedy did agree to Macmillan’s suggestion that US Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Foreign Secretary Lord Home initiate three-way talks with Soviet counterpart Andrei Gromyko, with a view to setting the stage for a Kennedy/Macmillan/Khruschev summit on Cold War tensions.

But the Prime Minister recognised direct British participation in any such meeting would likely be vetoed by the Soviets who viewed the UK as a spent force on the international stage. “A fervent believer in summitry, Macmillan would dearly like to attend a conference on West Berlin, but the British have let it be known (in Bermuda) that they would support a man-to-man meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev,” reportI> Time.

Kennedy had previously met with the Soviet leader in Vienna in June - a summit at which Khruschev decided the young American leader lacked both the intellect and the fortitude to stand up to Moscow’s expansionist policies. JFK had been both chastened and tempered by that humiliating experience. His early ambition to negotiate forthrightly with the Soviets had been replaced by a carrot-and-stick approach, one in which he would link the new mutual benefits that could accrue from a reduction in Cold War tensions to stark warnings of what might befall the Kremlin if the Soviets continued to pursue recklessly aggressive international policies.

During the Bermuda talks, for instance, Lord Home asked the President Kennedy if he intended to link any final decision to renew US atmospheric nuclear testing with the Berlin issue. According to the memorandum of conversation, Kennedy “replied in the affirmative. If a really good settlement could be achieved on Berlin, he believed - as a private matter, not for publication - that it would be easier to make a decision not to test. The Secretary of State emphasised that these two propositions would never be linked formally with the Soviets — but the (US intent would be clear).”

The final communique issued on the Bermuda talks on December 23 reflected the emphasis both leaders had placed on the potentially suicidal nuclear arms race — with Macmillan’s particular concerns about ending the folly of nuclear profileration finding their way into the final text: “The President and the Prime Minister have had two days of valuable discussions surveying the world situation,” read the statement. “Their discussions centered mainly on the question of Berlin, on nuclear problems and on the situation in the Congo.

“The President and the Prime Minister considered the problems of the nuclear arms race. They took note of the new situation created by the massive series of atmospheric tests conducted in recent months by the Soviet Government after long secret preparations.

“They agreed that it is now necessary, as a matter of prudent planning for the future, that pending the final decision preparations should be made for atmospheric testing to maintain the effectiveness of the deterrent.

“Meanwhile, they continue to believe that no task is more urgent than the search for paths toward effective disarmament, and they pledge themselves to intensive and continued efforts in this direction.

“Serious progress toward disarmament is the only way of breaking out of the dangerous contest so sharply renewed by the Soviet Union.”

Ultimately US atmospheric tests did resume in 1962, helping to pressure the Soviets into siging the world’s first nuclear weapons moratorium in August, 1963.

The United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union all agreed to suspend nuclear weapons tests under water, in the atmosphere or in outer space and pledged the nations to work towards an end to the arms race and an end to the contamination of the environment by radioactive substances.

The treaty, ratified overwhelmingly by the US Senate, was concluded just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to the edge of the nuclear precipice than it had ever been before.

“It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilisation,” commented JFK in the wake of that nuclear stand-off, echoing the sentiments of Macmillan who, ever since the Bermuda meeting, had become the Merlin to Kennedy’s King Arthur on nuclear issues.

Indeed, White House insiders grumbled that when JFK was trying to find a peaceful resolution to the Cuban crisis the President liased with Macmillan, by telephone, far more frequently than he did with senior members of his own Cabinet.BRITISH Ambassador to Washington David Ormsby Gore said the Kennedy/Macmillan relationship “blossomed very considerably during the course of that (the Bermuda) meeting, and after that it was almost like a family discussion when we all met”. And Barbara Leaming in her b Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman, only slightly overstated the case when she argued that after Bermuda the twol British courtiers in JFK’s Camelot began to subtly exert more infuence on the Kennedy Administration’s international policy than Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Special Advisor to the President McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other advisers who JFK once famously described as being among “the brightest and the best”.

“In Bermuda, Macmillan began the process of guiding (Kennedy) to act as a statesman,” says Leaming. Critics have argued this statement makes Kennedy sound like a British puppet.

But Macmillan was a deft manipulator and even Robert F. Kennedy conceded that David Ormsby Gore was “almost part of the government”, wielding disproportionate influence within in what C.S. Lewis once called the “Inner Ring” of powerbroking. “One should not under-estimate the degree of intimacy which the older Macmillan achieved with the young John F. Kennedy,” says Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a leading figure in the UK Conservative Party, former Shadow Foreign Secretary and an enthusiastic amateur historian of late 20th century British foreign policy.

“Indeed, during the 1961 Bermuda Summit, Kennedy felt so relaxed in Macmillan’s presence that he confided to him that if he, Kennedy, did not have a woman every three days, he would have a terrible headache.”

It is not known how Harold Macmillan responded to this revelation although his Edwardian facade camouflaged a far more worldly personality than was generally realised at the time. As Rifkind says: “Macmillan himself had been known to remark with his usual ambiguity, ‘Whenever I feel bored, I like to go to bed with a Trollope’.”

Whether he was in fact referring to one of the interminable Victorian novels by Anthony Trollope or the alliterative term “trollop”, a promiscuous woman, was never established.

Certainly a close friendship between JFK and Macmillan was cemented in Bermuda, one that would reap dividends for world peace during the test ban negotiations and, more crucially, the Cuban missile crisis.

Macmillan’s genuine fondess for the young American President is evident in his diary entires on the Bermuda meeting; although their fourth meeting of 1961, the Bermuda talks were also the longest and most intimate — allowing the general contours of their future relationship to take shape.The Prime Minister was somewhat alarmed by the President’s physical condition in Bermuda. In May he had injured his back, at a tree-planting ceremony in Ottawa (necessitating Agriculture & Fisheries staff to actually plant JFK’s Canary Island date palm in the Government House grounds for the December summit, with the President simply cutting a green, gold and white ribbon tied around it: “That’s a very good way of doing it,” said JFK at the Bermuda tree-planting. “Much easier than in Canada.”)

Kennedy had chronic back problems exarcebated by Addison’s disease, the incureable adrenal gland deficiency he was diagnosed with in 1947 and which was kept secret during his lifetime. Beginning in October, 1954 he underwent a series of major back surgeries which helped to alleviate the constant pain he endured but which were so traumatic he was administered the Roman Catholic Last Rites during his various post-operative recoveries.

In his private diary, Macmillan recorded his impressions of Kennedy’s physical disposition and mood in Bermuda: “In health, I thought the President not in good shape. His back is hurting. He cannot sit long without pain.

“He is very restless owing to his back ... He finds it difficult to sit in the same position for any length of time.

“I noticed the difficulty he had in picking up a piece of paper that had fallen to the floor ...

“It is really rather sad that so young a man should be so afflicted, but he is very brave and does not show it except, as I say, by his unwillingness to continue to talk for any length of time without a break.”

Concluded next week