Elie Kedourie
Contents
Background
Biographical Information
History
Activities
Adviser to Margaret Thatcher
In early 1980 Michale Howard was invited by Margaret Thatcher to lunch at Chequers. Thatcher had been advised by the Foreign Office that the Soviet Union did not pose a serious military threat, so she invited Howard and other right-wing experts to take part in a committee offering 'independent' advice:
In the USA a group of hawks formed a well funded Committee on the Present Danger, consisting largely of pupils and associates of Albert Wohlstetter, who urged the breaking off of arms-control negotiations and massive rearmament. Mrs Thatcher was temperamentally inclined to agree with them. The Foreign Office was not. Not surpringly, the Prime Minister sought further options...She asked Hugh [Thomas] to set up a small committee to draft independent recommendations for the conduct of British foreign policy consisting of myself, Leonard Schapiro and Elie Kedourie...We put together a totally incoherent docuement which deserved to go straight into the waste paper basket and probably did. I continued to be invited to Chequers seminars and always found the Prime Minister friendly and courteous. But she was not easy company, lacking as she was in any sense of humour, and increasingly impervious to new ideas. [1]
Howard recalls that Leonard Schapiro and Elie Kedourie "believed the recently concluding Helsinki Accords had been a defeat for the West by 'legitimizing' the Soviet control of Eastern Europe." Howards says he was sceptical of the worst case scenario peddled by the Committee on the Present Danger but "believed strongly in the need to preserve credible deterrence". [2]
Views
Affiliations
Publications
Resources
- Martin Kramer Elie Kedourie A formidable and dissident historian of the Middle East. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, accessed 24 October 2008.
- Wikipedia Elie Kedourie, accessed 24 October 2008.
Contact, Notes
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