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Ordinarily, when a President, after hearing the arguments on both sides in a contested issue, adopts a policy, an adviser who disagrees has the choice of closing ranks or resigning. That Mrs. Kirkpatrick chose to keep on pushing her own view should not be taken to suggest that she had departed from honorable practice, because the concept of closing ranks had no meaning to the President's aides. The necessity of speaking with one voice on foreign policy simply never took hold among Reagan's advisers.
In a series of conversations with the British and the Argentines, it became clear that both sides hoped I would serve as intermediary. By now the State Department had produced the bones of a solution. It involved diverting the British task force—28,000 strong, aboard more than 100 ships—withdrawing Argentine military forces from the Falklands and interposing on the islands a peace-keeping force consisting of personnel from Canada and the U.S. and two Latin American countries. Negotiations would follow.
The Argentine ambassador, when I shared this paper with him, told me that he thought it was at the extreme of what the junta might be able to accept. Ambassador Henderson was unequivocal: Argentina must withdraw; anything less would mean the fall of the Thatcher government. Britain would prefer to see the U.S. alone, rather than a consortium of nations, as the guarantor of the security of the Falklands.
As evening fell on April 6,1 called the President and suggested that I go to Buenos Aires and London in an attempt to find a solution. "If you order me to try, and if we prevent more bloodshed, it will be worthwhile," I said. "It involves a high risk for you, but I don't think we can sidestep the issue. If we fail, all we have worked for in Latin America will be up in the air." Reagan agreed I should try.
I was under no illusions as to my chances of success. It was clear to me also that if I undertook this mission and did not find a way to stop the hostilities, I might have to resign. By now it was clear enough that there were men and women around the President who would urge my departure. "If the situation cannot be saved, and this is very possible," I told my wife, "then whatever I do will be seen as a failure, even if it is a success in larger terms than the conflict itself. I'm going to take this on because I have to, but it may turn out to be my Waterloo."
On April 8, the day of my arrival in London, Britain imposed a blockade of the Falklands. Our excellent deputy chief of mission in London, E.J. Streator, told me Britain was in a bellicose mood, more high-strung and unpredictable than we had ever known it. In the drawing room at No. 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Thatcher rapped sharply on the table top and recalled that this was the table at which Neville Chamberlain sat in 1938 and spoke of the Czechs as a faraway people about whom we know so little. She begged us to remember this: do not urge Britain to reward aggression, to give Argentina something taken by force that it could not attain by peaceful means; that would send a signal round the world with devastating consequences. It was evident, as I afterward reported to the President, that the Prime Minister "had the