by Alan Watson
First the trigger. The Westminster College president, F. L. McCluer, dates his letter 3 October 1945. Truman’s footnote is not separately dated:
Dear Winnie,
This is a fine old school out in my state. If you come and make a speech there, I’ll introduce you.
At the time Winston was receiving many such invitations, and this from a small Midwestern college was brought to his attention only because of Truman’s footnote. How did this come to be penned by the president? The author of the letter, McCluer, was a formidable networker. The key man was Truman’s military aide, General Harry H. Vaughan, a Westminster alumnus whose assistance McCluer had secured. The letter of invitation was placed before Truman who appended the crucial footnote, ‘I’ll introduce you’.1 Churchill will have checked the logistics of this and realised that he would be with Truman on an eighteen-hour train journey. Churchill was being offered intimate access to the leader of the Western world and therefore was fully motivated.2
He replied:
If you, as you suggest in your postscript, would like me to visit your home State and would introduce me, I should feel it my duty – and it would be a great pleasure – to deliver an address to the Westminster University on the world situation, under your aegis. This might possibly be advantageous from several points of view.3
Churchill would insist, before and after the Fulton speech, that he was speaking in a private capacity but he clearly trusted that Truman would be there as president, publicly seen to endorse what he would propose. Indeed the film coverage shows Truman enthusiastically applauding the crucial sections of the speech – not only the warning of the Iron Curtain but also the British–American alliance to counter the Soviet threat.
The advocacy of this alliance was Churchill’s predominant political motive in accepting the invitation. He would headline it as ‘the crux of what I have travelled here to say’. There is background to this sense of priority. It was his experience of the price paid for appeasement (a term he would use in the Fulton speech) and equally the cost of inaction in opposing Hitler.
One of his most famous and successful pre-Second World War speeches was in the House of Commons on 12 November 1936. He castigated Baldwin’s government for being ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift’. He was appalled by this paralysis in the face of the growing threat.4 These were ‘the years that the locust hath eaten’.5 He was determined to avoid a repeat of the locust years.
Churchill was haunted by a nightmare: he had not been heard. He had been unable to break through the barriers of complacency and fear. His lion’s roar was muffled – his shout was stifled. At Fulton he relived the frustration of this stasis. He was to recall with anguish, not self-congratulation:
Last time I saw it coming and cried aloud to my own fellow countrymen and to the world but no one paid any attention . . . but no one could listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.6
Above all he was seized by his sense of urgency. He believed that as before, when he had foreseen the mortal threat posed by Adolf Hitler, the democracies were facing an equal danger from Joseph Stalin. In her autobiography his daughter, Mary, recalled what it was like in 1939:
On looking back, the late spring and early summer of 1939 seem to stand out with an almost three-dimensional clarity. We were on a countdown . . . During these increasingly fraught months, Winston would often recite a verse he had gleaned as a schoolboy . . . from a volume of Punch cartoons that he had seen at Brighton. The poem had been inspired by a recent railway accident caused by the train driver falling asleep:
Who is in charge of the clattering train?
For the carriages sway and the couplings strain,
And the pace is fast,
And the points are near,
And sleep had deadened the driver’s ear.
And the signals flash through the night in vain
For DEATH is in charge of the clattering train.
Edwin J. Milliken7
Churchill’s purpose in America was to wrest control of events from death once more, seemingly ‘in charge of the clattering train’.
If this was the imperative that drove him – the need to force the world to listen – were there other, very human motivations as well?
He needed to recuperate, not so much from exhaustion after his wartime leadership as from his rejection by British voters afterwards. His ‘black-dog’ mood had him in its thrall. He needed sun and luxury and he had already accepted an invitation to holiday in Miami for a week at the home of the Canadian Frank Clarke. Clarke was the man to whom, on the train back from Fulton, Churchill confided his verdict that this had been his most important speech. To his doctor, Winston had also confided at the moment when he was voted out of office in 1945 that he feared above all that the power to shape the future would be ‘denied me’.8 Miami was the holiday he needed and the United States the platform he required.
As a younger man he had reflected that ‘we are so often mocked by the failures of our hopes’. He felt now to be mocked by fate and the sun of Florida was not enough to dissipate his gloom. He yearned to be again at the centre of great events. He needed to restore his celebrity status. He sensed that in the United States ‘they will take things from me’.9 The prospect of voyaging across the Atlantic to meet the president and capture the headlines, the chance once again to ‘grasp the hem of history’, was irresistible. Mary, his daughter, was in no doubt. She wrote to him and her mother Clementine, who would travel with him, ‘I shall rejoice to imagine you both tossed by star-spangled waves’.10 This would be a journey to change him and the world.
5
‘I am deserted’
It is important not to underestimate what a colossal task these two changes involved. To change Churchill’s morale and self-esteem meant repairing the significant, some thought permanent, damage done by defeat and apparent exclusion. The second – changing the world into a safer and more hopeful place after catastrophic global conflict – seemed way beyond the reach of any one mortal, let alone a defeated prime minister.
The physiology and psychology of Churchill in 1945 were tested to near breaking point. In August that year Churchill confessed to his doctor, Lord Moran, something of his real desperation. ‘It’s no use pretending,’ he said, ‘I’m not hard hit. I cannot school myself to doing nothing for the rest of my life. It would have been better to have been killed in an aeroplane or to have died like Roosevelt.’1 To have contemplated death this way and talked about it tells us how fundamental his doubts were about his ability to cope. He desperately needed the adrenalin he and his family hoped would flow into him on his American journey.
Churchill was physically brave. Indeed as a young man he was almost oblivious to danger. Had the Nazis reached London, he would, by instinct, have sought a hero’s death, revolver in hand as he depicted himself facing danger in My Early Life.2 That would surely have been his preference had events allowed it. But such admirable spirit could not disguise his sense of physical vulnerability to illness. He was an anxious patient detailing the symptoms that alarmed him, seeking reassurance from Lord Moran throughout the war and after it. He drove himself through the barriers of illness time and time again. Desperately ill before the Tehran Conference, struck down at critical times by influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia and strokes, he battled on. Cigars, whisky, his predilection to be easily but only satisfied with the best, the flamboyance of his clothes from dressing gowns and boiler suits to full dress uniforms, all projected a robustness he did not have or feel. Photographs reveal the cost of survival.3 Physical vulnerability and anxiety, for Churchill, were interconnected. One often led to the other and even though he resolutely overcame illness in order to stay on top of events, his frequent but temporary corporal weaknesses fed into his characteristic bouts of depression and vice versa.
There was another corrosive force impairing his self-confidence. Not only defeated at the polls in 1945, he knew he had never wo
n Downing Street by election. Somewhat reluctantly he had been chosen by the king and his own party for the highest office in 1940, but only the depth of the national crisis produced his elevation. With the war over, he was rejected. Did he have the energy and will to win the premiership for himself? If Churchill had been sure in August 1945, he would not have contemplated doing ‘nothing for the rest of my life’.4 Like Truman, who took the Oval Office on the death of Roosevelt and not on the vote of the electorate, he felt that he had to win power at the polls for himself. In the case of Truman, this would involve a very tough election in 1948 but he had no doubt that he could do it. In the case of Churchill, he had not determined to run until after the stimulus of his US visit.
Electoral defeat and exclusion from the top table at Potsdam marked the nadir of decline already evident before the war’s end. Alexander Cadogan’s diaries record the concerns of Churchill’s inner circle. On 19 April 1944, Cadogan confided to his diary after a particularly frustrating cabinet meeting: ‘P.M. I fear is breaking down. He rambles without a pause. I am really fussed about the P.M. He is not the man he was 12 months ago and I really don’t know whether he can carry on . . .’5
What is important in Cadogan’s entry is that it goes beyond irritation. It expresses real anxiety. Of course Churchill’s habits and ways of working had exasperated many during the war years. So often sharp and witty he could also be loquacious and repetitive. He was consistently selfish about other people’s timetables – sleeping for quite long ‘siestas’ during the afternoon and requiring attendance and attention in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes brusque, often argumentative, the people around him put up with a great deal. He was, after all, during the war, irreplaceable. Indeed Britain’s war effort was inconceivable without him.
Thus Cadogan during the war had a talk with Anthony Eden complaining that he had to rest during the day because he expected the prime minister to keep him up until 3am.
That such routines had to be accepted as part and parcel of Churchill’s wartime leadership was well known. However, their acceptance did not mean that people were not offended and hurt by them.6
In 1940, Clementine had written to her husband that his ‘rough and sarcastic and overbearing manner was producing either dislike or a slavish mentality’. Clementine’s verdict was loving but blunt. ‘My darling Winston, I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner and you are not as kind as you used to be.’7
Hurt though many were, Churchill remained well able to persuade and to charm but by 1945, with the end of the war in sight and Labour’s growing confidence that they would win the election afterwards, tolerance by his deputy prime minister began to shade into deep dissatisfaction, even disdain.
In January 1945, the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee wrote Churchill a letter. It was the most direct criticism of the nature of Churchill’s leadership at that time and it was being made by the only person who could make it. The letter pinpointed a failure of leadership, evident as early as 1940 as testified in his wife’s letter to him. Few now doubted that without his leadership Britain could not have survived the war. But the burden of those years had rendered Churchill more fractious and less resourceful. Thus Attlee, who by then knew that the odds were that he would replace Churchill at Number 10, wrote this damning indictment of how Churchill ran the cabinet. Over six pages of systematic criticism Attlee set out why he had ‘for some time had it in mind to write to you on the method or rather lack of method of dealing with matters requiring Cabinet decisions’.8 Its tenor is well illustrated by this excerpt:
Often half an hour and more is wasted in explaining what could have been grasped by two or three minutes reading of the document. Not infrequently a phrase catches your eye which gives rise to a disquisition on an interesting point only slightly connected with the subject matter. The result is long delays and unnecessarily long Cabinet imposed on Ministers who have already done a full day’s work and who will have more to deal with before they get to bed.9
Cadogan’s irritation had morphed into Attlee’s condemnation.
However, as Allen Packwood, curator of the Churchill Archives at Cambridge University, has expressed it to me, Churchill’s taut reply ‘is not the whole story’. In fact, Jack Colville, Churchill’s private secretary and confidant, was present when Churchill received Attlee’s letter and described the incident in a document that survives in his papers. According to Colville, Churchill was furious at receiving Attlee’s letter. Initially he wanted to make a full reply – a point by point rebuttal – and such a draft survives in his papers. But first Brendan Bracken (Churchill’s close friend), then Lord Beaverbrook (his close ally and frequent benefactor) and then Clementine (his ever closest ally but often most insightful critic) all told him that Attlee was right.
On the record, Churchill’s reply to Attlee’s missive is a characteristically brief, caustic and wounding riposte: ‘I have to thank you for your private and personal letter – you may be sure I shall always endeavour to profit by your counsels.’10 Churchill’s feelings were hurt. After replying to Attlee he then told Colville, ‘I am deserted by my friends and even by my wife.’
In 1945, as Churchill surveyed the scene, he must have felt not only deserted by his friends and his wife but also deserted by so many of the great certainties that had sustained him in the past. Where was the power of France? Certainly not restored. Where was the wartime Allied coalition? It lay in ruins with Stalin at the gates of the West. Where was the Empire? He knew India would go, and without India what real imperial status would remain for Britain?
On what was Britain’s power and influence to be based?
Her economy was nearly bankrupt, her armed forces quite unable to match those of the Soviet and American superpowers. Above all could Britain’s friendship with the USA – the Anglo-Saxon partnership so close to his heart – be able to counter Roosevelt’s naivety with Stalin? Roosevelt’s distrust of the British Empire had deeply shocked Churchill but at least he had known Roosevelt and won his support in the early desperate stages of the war. Now he was dead and the new man, Truman, had not impressed him at Potsdam.
What chance did he – a defeated prime minister – have to create a new certainty? How could he bring forth a new world order sustainable and strong? Could he once again rally the cause of freedom?
The challenge now before him was to persuade voters on both sides of the Atlantic that defending freedom had not been completed with the defeat of the Axis powers. A farther task awaited the free world, namely containing a tyranny as menacing as Nazism had been before the Second World War. Anthony Montague Browne, who grew close to Churchill after the war, recounts how Churchill dealt with someone who suggested that communist Russia was the antithesis of Nazi Germany. Churchill’s argument was this: ‘If you were blindfolded and placed on the ice at the South Pole you wouldn’t know the difference from the North Pole, which is indeed its antithesis.’ His task was to re-orientate the democracies to the reality of a new geography.11
In his history of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had written of Marlborough’s death: ‘Noble spirits yield themselves willingly to the successively falling shades which carry them to a better world, or to oblivion.’12
Fortunately, by January 1946, as he prepared for America, his purpose was the opposite of oblivion.
6
Outward Bound
On 8 January 1946, the day before he boarded the Queen Elizabeth for New York, Winston Churchill made the shorter journey up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. There George VI conferred on him the Order of Merit. As Churchill explained to friends, ‘The Order of Merit comes from the King alone and is not given on the advice of Ministers. This renders it more attractive to me.’1 Months earlier, when Churchill first heard that the king wished to bestow this most prestigious and personal honour upon him, he rejected the idea with trademark self-pity. Why should he receive the OM from the king when he had just received the ‘Order of the Boot’
from the British people?2
But in the New Year, with the prospect of the journey before him, Churchill was already feeling more buoyant. As one who had always lived beyond his means, the costs of being had become crippling with the loss of office. Gone was the support of No. 10 with its endless supply of ‘the very best’ even during the war. Gone too was the luxury of Chequers, the country residence of the prime minister. On hearing, therefore, just before his departure to the USA that Viscount Camrose was proposing to make Churchill’s home at Chartwell ‘a national possession’ run by the National Trust where Churchill would be able to live until he died, paying an annual rental of only £350, gave him profound relief. It was in Churchill’s view ‘a princely plan’, and now there was the imminent prospect of the voyage itself.
The ‘star-spangled’ waves beckoned and as he was to demonstrate, on arrival in New York on 14 January, his sap was rising. His press conference on landing would be a triumph and certainly disquieting to Anthony Eden, so desperately waiting in London, wanting to inherit the crown.
The 81,000 ton Queen Elizabeth, freshly sporting funnels repainted in Cunard red and black, was overall, however, still decked in her wartime camouflage colours, and was waiting at the Southampton dockside for the 11am arrival of Churchill’s party – his wife Clementine, his secretary Miss Jo Sturdee, whose letters to her parents provide much colour to this narrative, a valet, Mrs Churchill’s maid and a police officer. At 2pm the ship sailed out of Southampton Water under the captaincy of James Biset. Although still configured to transport troops, Cunard had established on board the Queen Elizabeth a private suite on the sun deck for the Churchills and reserved a section of the deck for their sole use.
Churchill spent much time on board on the bridge. It was his favourite vantage point. On the day before their arrival in New York he was invited by Commodore Biset to address the crew and the 12,314 Canadian troops crammed on board returning home. He ended his remarks by sharing his perspective from the bridge.
