One of the less well-reported facts about Henry Kissinger was the role
he played in the episode of the UK’s still controversial accessing of IMF funding in 1976.
I served during this period as private secretary to the managing director of the IMF, Johannes Witteveen, and consequently was familiar with his periodic, in-person briefings on the state of US Treasury thinking by
the under-secretary for monetary affairs, Ed Yeo.
The US had been highly resistant to what they saw as the UK’s efforts to avoid taking the right medicine for what they saw as its self-made problems. They were particularly annoyed at a ask for a direct loan from the US government. Harold Lever, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, secured an audience with President Gerald Ford, where he attempted to ask a loan. According to Yeo, who had been present, Ford wagged his finger at him and said,
“Mr Lever, recall New York City!”; if the federal government was not going to assist a bankrupt New York, it was certainly not going to help what it regarded as a feckless foreign government.
Some time later, Yeo visited again
to say he had very surprising news; Kissinger had just briefed the president to the effect that the UK was on the brink of an internal revolution that would have grave consequences for the whole of Nato. Ford had taken this seriously and as a result the US position was totally reversed and every effort was now to be put into mounting a rescue package involving the IMF.
We never learnt, of course, the basis for Kissinger’s judgment, but it had a decisive effect.
David W Green
London NW3, UK
