| Description | The diary was written while Shuckburgh was Assistant Secretary-General of NATO. It begins on 18 August and ends on 14 October 1959. There are no page numbers.
The diary describes various meetings with NATO and Foreign Office colleagues. On 18 August, Shuckburgh attends a meeting of the NATO Political Committee, which includes various NATO ambassadors; they discuss preparations for Dwight D Eisenhower's forthcoming visit to Paris. On 18-21 August, Shuckburgh visits Oslo, speaks at the NATO Seminar, and meets Lange, the Norwegian Foreign Minister. He calls at the Foreign Office on 15 September for discussions about the Common Market and Africa with Tony Rumbold and Alan Watson. On 22 September, he attends his first Political Advisers Committee Meeting - 'all attention is on the Eisenhower/Kruschev meeting'; he comments that 'NATO is going to find it hard to concentrate upon important topics this autumn, partly because of the direct US/USSR contacts and partly because disarmament, which is presumably going to be the great issue, will be handled by in the UN Ten-Power Commission'.
On 23 September, he hears 'reports of recent meetings of Adenauer, Spaak, Norstad, and Stikker in the Italian Lakes, at which A. showed the most fanatical distrust of the British' which is the reason for Spaak's fears about French policy: 'the French dream is to build up a European bloc against the Anglo-Saxons.' He describes a discussion with Paul-Henri Spaak on 27 September, who confirms the anti-British attitude of Adenauer, says that the idea of reviving the Western European Union is likely to fail, and suggests that if Labour win the election, one of the most acute questions in Europe would be Britain's relations with her allies'. On 6 October, he attends a Polads meeting which includes a discussion about Iraq; and a meeting with Gladwyn Jebb where they discuss future organization in Europe, Charles de Gaulle, and the outcome of the British General Election. |