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The Hungarian Revolution and the military phase of the Suez Crisis occurred virtually contemporaneously in the last week of October and the first week of November 1956. While a great deal of historical research and writing has been done on the two crises individually, there has been relatively little investigation of the interconnection between the two episodes. The interconnections were of particular importance in influencing the Soviet decision to use brutal military force to suppress the Hungarian Revolution and in explaining the depth of bitterness in the rift between Britain and the United States over the Suez Crisis.

The article is based on British government sources opened in the Public Record Office at Kew since 1993. It demonstrates how these newly opened British sources illuminate many aspects of the Cuban missile crisis by offering some new details and new perspectives. The first half of the article provides a chronological discussion of Britain's role in the crisis. The second half analyses particular aspects, such as the legality of the American blockade, and assesses the importance of Britain's role, arguing that the fundamental solidarity of British support was of crucial importance to the United States in the resolution of the crisis.

Eisenhower’s historical reputation has fluctuated widely. During his two terms in office, 1953–1961, he was very popular. He was re-elected by a landslide in 1956, and, if the Constitution had not prohibited it, he could have been easily re-elected for a third term in 1960.1 Although his standing among the general population was very high, however, Eisenhower was heavily criticised and constantly derided by intellectuals and sophisticated commentators, especially supporters of his urbane political opponent, Adlai Stevenson. The first books dealing with Eisenhower’s presidency, written in the 1960s, reflected the views of such critics, who portrayed Eisenhower as a president of limited intelligence and vision who delegated authority to powerful subordinates such as John Foster Dulles, while Eisenhower spent as much time on the golf links as in the Oval Office.2 In a poll of historians in 1962 rating the 33 US presidents up to that time in order of merit, Eisenhower was placed twenty-second, between Andrew Johnson, who was Abraham Lincoln’s disastrous successor in the 1860s, and Chester Arthur, an obscure, lacklustre Republican who served for a few years in the 1880s.3 In 1967, an article by Murray Kempton began the process of revision of Eisenhower’s historical assessment, which gathered pace with the opening of archives in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.

Between 1948 and 1951 a transition took place in American foreign policy from containment in its economic form, particularly the Marshall Plan, to containment in its military form, particularly NATO, the military assistance programme and western rearmament, with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 acting as a catalyst in this process of change. This transition was disapproved of by the father of containment, George F. Kennan, who felt that the overmilitarization of western foreign policy was dangerous and selfdefeating.1 The opening of the British Foreign Office and Cabinet papers for the late 1940s and early 1950s, in accordance with the thirty-year rule, has produced a vast amount of revealing material on the British perspective of the beginning of the Cold War. It is valuable, therefore, to examine how far the British agreed with Kennan's criticism of the over-militarization of western foreign policy in the years 1948-51 or to what extent they tended rather to agree with the main trends and assumptions of US foreign policy as pursued by President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

On 21 February 1947, the US Government was informed of Britain's decision to terminate aid to Greece as from 31 March 1947. This produced a flurry of activity culminating in President Harry Truman's address to Congress on 12 March 1947 in which he requested $400m. aid for Greece and Turkey and pronounced the Truman Doctrine, thereby commiting the United States to the worldwide containment of Communism by means of American aid to nations threatened either by Communist insurgency from within or by Communist aggression from abroad. Debate on the Greek-Turkish Aid Bill and on the implications of the Truman Doctrine was one of the important sources of Secretary of State George C. Marshall's speech at Havard University on 5 June 1947 which initiated the idea of the Marshall Plan, the four year programme (1948–52) of American Aid to sixteen European nations designed to build up the economics of these countries and to lessen the prospect of Communism gaining strength within them. Was Britain's sudden withdrawal of aid from Greece determined simply by financial weakness, or did British policy have a more positive and subtle aim, namely to induce the United States to commit itself decisively to a policy of containment in both its political and economic form? The British Foreign Office papers for the late 1940s, as well as the papers of other government departments such as the Treasury, which are now open as a consequence of the thirty year rule, facilitate a better understanding of British policy in 1947–48 and of the British view of American policy in those years, in particular with regard to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote of Pearl Harbor that ‘Isolationism for any realist ended on that day’. For two decades after Pearl Harbor this judgement was generally accepted both by statesmen and by scholars in America. Pre-World War II isolationism, it was felt, had been a policy of blindness which culminated in disaster. In the post-war period, it was generally agreed, America learned from the mistakes of her pre-war isolationism and helped to keep peace and defend her interests by pursuing an internationalist policy of the containment of Communism.