Alexander Haig

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might have been expected to produce. A month later, when I stopped in London, I met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She is a most intelligent and courageous and politically gifted leader, utterly devoted to the West and to her country's friendship with the U.S. She is also among the Reagan Administration's best friends. I had to tell her that the President was thinking of going beyond the pipeline sanctions. It was possible he would impose a total embargo on the Soviet Union, even call the Polish debt into default.

Mrs. Thatcher gasped: there would be nothing left to do were we to go the whole hog at once; the Soviets might as well go into Poland. Britain, and the other members of the alliance, wanted desperately to follow the American lead on Poland in a policy that would protect the Polish people and discomfit the Soviets and the regime in Warsaw. But it was too much to ask that they punish their own economies and their own interests in support of policies that would inflict no noticeable wound on Moscow.

In June 1982 the NSC considered pipeline sanctions. The Administration had come under heavy pressure from our European allies during the summit meeting of its leaders in Versailles earlier that month. I was fearful of the worst, but determined that the historical record would show that the State Department had fought for a rational course by opposing the extension of sanctions to overseas manufacturers. At the NSC meeting, which I did not attend, Clark placed only the strongest option paper before Reagan, who uncharacteristically approved it on the spot. There had been little discussion and virtually no participation by the President before this decision was formalized.

I was holding two days of meetings in New York with Gromyko at that time. Inasmuch as sanctions were directed primarily against the Soviet Union—a point that tended to be lost as analysis concentrated on the damage to the British, German and Italian economies—the President's decision was a matter of no small interest to the Soviet Foreign Minister. But at our first session, I did not raise the pipeline with him; though I foresaw the outcome of the NSC meeting, it would have been wrong to tell the Soviets of such an action before telling our allies and before the decision had been formalized.

All my experience with the White House public relations machinery notwithstanding, I trusted that the decision would not be announced before the flash cables the department would send to our allies had been delivered. But when I returned to the hotel from my meeting with Gromyko, I learned that Clark had already informed the press. Next day, Gromyko angrily suggested that I had either withheld the truth from him or did not speak for the U.S. Government.

"Mr. Foreign Minister," I replied in my weariness, "I'm afraid it is the latter."

The Falklands: "My Waterloo"

On March 28, 1982, a Sunday, the brilliant and studiously rumpled British Ambassador, Sir Nicholas ("Nikko") Henderson, brought me a letter from Lord Carrington. A party of Argentines, wrote the Foreign Secretary, had landed nine days earlier on the island of South Georgia, a British possession in the South Atlantic, some 800 miles southeast of the Falkland Islands, a British crown colony. "I should be grateful if you would consider taking up the