This is a relatively brief account of Harold Macmillan's quest for détente by means of a summit meeting in the late 1950s. It provides a discussion of the background of diplomacy with regard to summit meetings in the 1950s and the buildup to the Paris summit meeting of May 1960, which was destroyed by the U-2 affair. Although the book contains the name of Eisenhower as well as Macmillan in the title, there is much less attention devoted to Eisenhower than to Macmillan, on whom the author has previously written Harold Macmillan: A Political Life (1999) and edited Harold Macmillan and Britain's World Role (1995). The treatment of Eisenhower is quite thin, and the discussion of the relationship between Eisenhower and Macmillan is fairly superficial. On Macmillan, there is nothing particularly new in this account, but the tale of Macmillan's efforts to achieve détente by means of a summit in the late 1950s and its dramatic failure in Paris in 1960 is a topic of sufficient significance and drama that it is worth a study in its own right.

The opening chapter discusses the background to summit meetings in the early 1950s, pointing out that, as with regard to so many matters, the phrase was coined by Winston Churchill, the leading proponent of summitry in the early 1950s. Macmillan, it is shown, wished to assume the mantle of Churchill's heir, especially when Macmillan succeeded to the premiership in January 1957 in such unfavorable circumstances after the Suez crisis of 1956. Richard Aldous discusses in considerable detail Macmillan's diplomatic efforts to work toward a summit in the years 1957–59, at which time there was considerable U.S. skepticism following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the Berlin crisis in 1958–59, and the uncertain direction of Soviet policy under the leadership of the mercurial Nikita Khrushchev. Aldous discusses Macmillan's relationship with Eisenhower, which went back a long way to 1942, when Macmillan was minister resident in North Africa while Eisenhower was commander of the Allied forces. Aldous, however, could have developed Macmillan's relations with Eisenhower in greater depth. Also, there is need to bring out more fully the U.S. reservations about the whole concept of summit meetings, which went deep in the U.S. psyche from their experience at Versailles and Yalta, producing an association of summitry with chicanery and betrayal, while Eisenhower's wariness of summit meetings had been modified only to a slight extent by the Geneva summit of 1955.

Aldous is on stronger ground when dealing with Macmillan's pursuit of a meeting with the Soviet Union on his own, which resulted in his celebrated visit to Moscow in February 1959, when he arrived in Moscow wearing a white fur hat. As Aldous observes, this flair for showmanship had not been a particular characteristic of Macmillan's earlier career, but the great success of his visit to Moscow, and the apparent aplomb with which he carried off the public relations aspects of the occasion, was of great significance in building up the image of Supermac, which, along with Britain's growing economic recovery in the late 1950s, led to Macmillan's electoral triumph in 1959, when the Conservatives, rising from the ashes of the Suez debacle, were returned to power with a majority of a hundred seats in the House of Commons.

Aldous then discusses how Macmillan built on the success of his personal diplomacy to work for a four-power summit meeting. Aldous brings out quite well the rising sense of hope in 1959–60 when Macmillan in particular felt that his years of hard work and negotiation seemed to be producing a fruitful outcome not only in the form a summit meeting but the beginning of a process of regular summit meetings. Aldous then describes the tragedy of the destruction of these hopes as a result of the U-2 affair, leading to the collapse of the summit and to a reversion to heightened cold war tensions. Aldous recounts Macmillan's reaction to the news of the shooting down of the U-2 flown over the Soviet Union by Francis Gary Powers on 1 May 1960 and describes Macmillan's somewhat desperate efforts to save the summit and his despair when the summit broke up in failure. “The summit, on which I had set high hopes and for which I had worked for two years,” Macmillan later wrote, “had blown up, like a volcano!” (163; the quotation is cited by the author in a footnote as being from Peter Catterell, ed., Macmillan Diaries, vol. 2 [London, forthcoming], entry for 21 May 1960).

The concluding postscript is a brief chapter in which Aldous points out that, ironically, the Anglo-American relationship did not weaken after 1960, as might have been expected when Eisenhower, Macmillan's close associate, was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, from a new generation and from an Irish American background. Paradoxically, Macmillan's relationship with Kennedy was stronger than the one with Eisenhower. By contrast, four-power summitry had come to an end, and the United States, from Kennedy and Khrushchev to Nixon and Brezhnev to Reagan and Gorbachev, engaged in bilateral U.S.-Soviet relations, with Britain reduced to a distinctly subsidiary, advisory role.

Aldous, then, has produced a useful, well-written account of summit diplomacy in the 1950s and its collapse in 1960. British sources have been used quite fully. American sources, however, have been used much less extensively. The account of the U-2 affair, for example, relies largely on Michael Beschloss's Mayday (1986) and does not include the very significant new documents that have been released in recent years in the Eisenhower Papers in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. There is, moreover, perhaps too much emphasis on personal exchanges at the expense of substantial issues. The issues of a test ban and disarmament, for example, are given very little attention, yet they were of great sig nificance in the diplomacy leading up to the summit. Within its limitation, however, this is a useful contribution to our understanding of an important phase in the development of the cold war.