Churchill then called for an alliance of “the English-speaking commonwealths that would adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations” to confront and contain further Communist expansion. Churchill knew that Britain couldn’t go it alone, and he was determined to make his best case for the United States to remain a player on the international scene. America was at the “pinnacle of power,” he told the audience, with an “awe-inspiring accountability to the future.”
The speech might have been given to college students, but Churchill was quite aware that the presence of a Paramount Pictures movie camera would ensure that his remarks would soon reach a majority of Americans who still depended on local theaters for their weekly newsreels. He had hoped it would awaken American interest about conditions in Europe vis-à-vis Soviet aggression. Most U.S. citizens didn’t know much about these things, nor did they much care; they were merely glad the ordeal of war had ended. Moreover, much of America wasn’t ready for such a commitment—far from it. The country had lost four hundred thousand men in the war, and had made immeasurable material sacrifices at home. Like the British, American citizens had suffered from food and gas rationing, as well as shortages of just about everything for four long years, since all possible exertions had gone into the war effort.
One of Churchill’s statements was particularly irksome to many: “From what I have seen of our Russian friends during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing that they admire more than strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness—especially military weakness.” The implication seemed to be that the United States needed to maintain a large military presence in Europe, staying armed and ready to fight a major war with the Soviet Union if challenged.
Reaction was overwhelmingly negative and provoked a storm of controversy. The Chicago Sun-Times declared that Churchill was trying to lead the United States into war and said it would be “disastrous” to follow this “great but blinded aristocrat.” The Nation complained that Churchill sounded as if “the British and Americans were ganging up on Russia.” Three liberal Democratic U.S. senators attacked Churchill in a joint statement, claiming that “his interpretation of international events would destroy what remained of Big Three unity and undermine the UN.” Eleanor Roosevelt was deeply troubled by Churchill’s position, fearing that it might push Truman into an anti-Soviet stance. Others heaped similar abuse, accusing him of being a “reactionary” and a “warmonger.” Reporters demanded whether President Truman had read the speech beforehand when he was caught on the movie camera heavily applauding it. Truman lied and denied it.32
The speech might have been a controversial bombshell but it served to awaken a considerable number of Americans to the plight of the Soviet-dominated countries. Churchill’s dramatic use of the Iron Curtain metaphor immediately entered the English lexicon and remained prominent as such for fifty years.
A year almost to the day from Churchill’s speech, President Truman announced what would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine, a tectonic shift in U.S. foreign policy in which the president pledged that the United States would endeavor to give all possible assistance to the people of countries confronting a takeover by the Communists. It became the first iteration of what was to be the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. This led directly to the formation of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Stalin, for his part, declared that “Russia would rearm, at the expense of producing consumer goods,” because “capitalist-imperialist monopolies guaranteed that no peaceful international order was possible.” To make his point, within the year Russian MiGs shot down a British aircraft that had strayed into the Soviet sector of occupied Berlin.
Not long afterward, George Kennan, the chargé d’affaires in Moscow, sent a lengthy assessment of the Soviet situation to the U.S. State Department, in which he forecast that Stalin’s “neurotic view of world affairs” would bring about a Russian foreign policy inclined to “use every means possible to infiltrate, weaken, and divide the West.” Stalin, he said, was paranoid over “capitalist encirclement” from which, the dictator said, “in the long run there could never be a peaceful co-existence.” Kennan wrote that for the West to make gestures of goodwill to the Soviets was a waste of time, because Moscow was convinced that the West would never “stand firm” against Soviet aggression. A new era was at hand.33
Noting these developments, George Marshall, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now secretary of state, had undertaken a fact-finding tour of Europe—and he didn’t like the facts he’d found. He told President Truman that if something wasn’t done to put the prostrated nations of Europe back on their feet, international trade would be crippled and some, if not most, of these countries would fall to Communist proselytizing and intrigue. What became known as the Marshall Plan was a multibillion-dollar American self-help handout in which war-torn nations could apply for direct aid from the United States after submitting a recovery plan. (The package was worth more than a trillion in today’s dollars and up to 15 percent of the U.S. federal budget.)
Stalin stupidly forbade the Soviet Union or any of the countries it occupied in central and eastern Europe from participation, dooming them to backward shabbiness well into the 1990s, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan is generally credited with speeding the recovery in western Europe by a decade or more, and Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
* * *
CHURCHILL REOPENED CHARTWELL in 1946 and began the lengthy process of restoring its gardens, orchards, and fish ponds after five years of disuse.*5 In between the landscaping projects and working on his long-awaited History of the English-Speaking Peoples,*6 he tended to his easel and paints.
In 1946, a wealthy Englishman removed a sharp financial burden from Churchill’s shoulders when he convened a group of donors who purchased Chartwell and all of Churchill’s papers for a considerable sum; the understanding was that the property would belong to Churchill for the rest of his life, after which it would be turned into a national monument. And at last, Churchill managed to permanently secure his financial future by signing an agreement to write his war memoirs. He created a six-volume first-person history of the Second World War, one of the most successful endeavors in publishing history, which would earn Churchill more than $50 million and secure his being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953.
Aside from the money, the mere writing of The Second World War served as a substantial buffer against the old “black dog” of depression that had nagged at Churchill from time to time—especially now, when he was out of power as momentous events clouded the world scene. He watched the horrific Hindu-Islamic violence accompanying the breakup of India (which he had warned of), resulting in the slaughter of up to 2 million people; the Korean War; the Berlin crisis; the British disarmament-rearmament argument; the rise of Communist China; and Russian development of nuclear weapons. To these things Churchill could only speak, not act, as the role of Great Britain in international affairs diminished year by year.
The British Empire did not dissolve peacefully. After India broke away, Burma followed suit and was soon taken over by Communists. A Communist insurrection broke out in Malaya that resulted in her departure from the empire, followed by Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which descended into a thirty-year civil war that ended with a republican government in 2009. The same was true for England’s African colonies, where widespread fighting broke out as British rule ended, followed by dictatorial rule that remains destabilizing even today.
The breakup of the British Empire put an appalling strain on the British economy, as the country could no longer depend on the smooth conduct of trade between its former colonies and Great Britain. Roosevelt, who was strongly anti-imperialist, would no doubt have been pleased at this development (minus the slaughter). But he didn’t live to see it.
His war memoir was Churchill’s tonic against this so
ur state of affairs. Most of the writing was done at Chartwell, where he kept a staff of research assistants to help him sort the historical record and a gaggle of stenographers to whom he dictated passages, often well into the evening.
When the House of Commons was in session he also spent time in London—sometimes at the Other Club, where the future prime minister Harold Macmillan captured him vividly in his diary. “He has used these days to give a demonstration of energy and vitality,” Macmillan wrote. “He has voted in every decision, made a series of brilliant little speeches, shows all his qualities of humor and sarcasm, and crowned all by a remarkable breakfast (at 7:30 a.m.) of eggs, bacon, sausages, and coffee, followed by a large whisky and soda and a huge cigar,” after which he was prepared to face the day and the Labour Party in the House of Commons.34
* * *
IN 1951, CHURCHILL was back in power. By a minor miracle, Labour had been squabbling with itself and Prime Minister Clement Attlee felt compelled to call an election. In a narrow vote, Churchill’s Tory Party prevailed, and he once more had his old job back. He didn’t have the majority necessary to overturn the vast socialist legislation of the past five years. But now he could at least put a halt to its expansion.
Churchill himself had run a very moderate campaign in view of his previous political stridency, offering to work across party lines with Labour and what was left of the Liberal Party. The old king was dying of cancer, and there was something atavistically solid in Churchill that the British public felt would see them through.
By the time Churchill regained office the Russians had developed first the atomic bomb and then the much larger hydrogen weapon. In the words of his biographer Roy Jenkins, “The saving of the world from destruction in a reciprocal holocaust of H-bombs…became more important [to Churchill] than any policy issue.”35
To that end Churchill frequently traveled to the United States, working with Truman and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower to convene a summit with the Soviets on preventing nuclear war. But the Russians, usually at the last minute, always seemed to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings, and Churchill was never able to broker a rapprochement.
Otherwise, Churchill seemed preoccupied with simply staying in power, long after many in his own party thought he ought to retire. He had told his doctor, “If I leave office, I’ll die.”
That wasn’t the case, at least not right away. After at last turning over his party leadership to Anthony Eden in 1955, Churchill, at the age of eighty, returned to his bench in the House of Commons as an ordinary, if singular, member. He had served four kings and two queens, including Victoria, fought in four wars, and received numerous honors including the Order of the Garter, considered England’s most prestigious decoration for chivalry. He had sired five children, who gave him nine grandchildren. And he stayed married and faithful to the same woman for fifty-seven years.
Churchill had many defining moments in his long career. But his leadership during the Second World War stands at the pinnacle—especially as reflected in his brilliant speeches: “Their finest hour,” “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” “We will fight them on the beaches…,” “What kind of people do they think we are!”
If there is a single shining moment among the others, it would certainly have been in May 1940, the “Darkest Hour” of the war. When France was falling and the British army had its back to the sea at Dunkirk, Churchill resisted the strong admonitions of his foreign secretary Lord Halifax that a truce, or “acceptable peace terms”—surrender—should be arranged with the Nazis. Halifax, moreover, was not alone in such thinking in the cabinet or in the House itself. But Churchill would have none of it. He told them, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end when each of us is choking on his own blood upon the ground.” Forthwith, he ordered every ship and boat afloat to evacuate the Dunkirk army. Thus England was saved.
* * *
OUT OF POWER AT LAST he had a decade more to live. This period has been compared by a few historians to his “wilderness years,” but that analogy doesn’t hold. Churchill sought no government office but was often consulted by ministers on a variety of subjects. He also continued making speeches, though fewer than when he was actively in office. His life was far from dull and mundane.
In one infamous episode he had sat for a portrait by Britain’s highly regarded artist Graham Sutherland, which was meant to be an eightieth birthday gift to him from the House of Commons. At the first few sittings, Churchill was allowed to see the basic drawing and was much impressed. But as time wore on Sutherland refused to let Churchill look at the canvas and follow the portrait’s progress. When the finished product was unveiled Churchill not only didn’t like it, he despised it, saying it made him look “old and spent” and his face “cruel and coarse.”36
At the presentation ceremony he showed admirable restraint by declaring, “The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art. It certainly combines force and candor.” In private he told his doctor, “I think it is malignant.” The House divided along party lines as to whether the painting looked “remarkably accurate” or “disgusting.”
Clementine stuck it down in the cellar and later had it cut up and burned.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Churchill spent time at Chartwell reveling in his marvelous view of the Weald of Kent, or watching his racehorses run at the various meets nearby. He enjoyed gambling, at which he was not very good, in the casinos at Monte Carlo and other posh spots on the French Riviera. With the publication of his memoirs he had money to lose.
He became friends with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who owned a spectacularly appointed yacht, aboard which Churchill traveled in the style to which he had become accustomed. His sailing companions at times included the English ballet doyenne Margot Fonteyn, the celebrated diva Maria Callas, and Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee Radziwill. He once refused, however, to sail with the Duke of Windsor, whom he considered an “empty man,” and his wife, the Duchess, whom he considered not at all. He stayed for months at a time with friends at their luxurious villas in the South of France. And always, there were the ever present paints and easel.
Churchill toyed with the idea of buying a villa of his own but nothing came of it; in the words of biographer Jenkins he “wisely settled down to be a perpetual guest,” even though there were at times spats over whom Churchill would stay with, or on whose yacht he would sail. Sometimes Clementine went along on these excursions, and sometimes not; in their twilight years she seemed more likely to go her own way. But they exchanged letters almost daily when apart.
In 1962, Churchill took a fall and broke his hip. That seemed to be the downward turning point in his health. He suffered heart and artery issues during the next several years, plus three minor strokes, which left him weak. He continued traveling but not nearly as much. His time was running out.
In 1963 Churchill was made an “honorary citizen” of the United States—the first time this honor had been bestowed since the Marquis de Lafayette—but he was too frail to attend his installation. On November 30, 1964, he turned ninety. Seven weeks later, on January 24, 1965, he passed away from a severe stroke that he had suffered two weeks earlier.
* * *
CHURCHILL’S BODY LAY in state at Westminster Hall for three days: the only other nonroyal besides Gladstone and the Duke of Wellington to be accorded such an honor. More than 320,000 people visited the catafalque.
At 9:30 on January 30, a bitter cold and damp gray London morning, eight Grenadier Guards placed Churchill’s Union Jack–draped coffin on a gun carriage, drawn by one hundred sailors of the Royal Navy. Churchill’s son Randolph and the older male grandchildren filed in behind the casket, while Clementine and the other women and girls of the family rode inside horse-drawn funeral coaches. Dozens of companies of the famous old regiments, some on horseback, some afoot, marched behin
d, as did dozens of heads of state, presidents, prime ministers, and other dignitaries from across the world come to pay their respects.
Hundreds of thousands of reverent spectators lined the route of the procession that moved slowly and deliberately to the jarringly muted beat of drums, while distant cannons every minute fired a final, haunting salute.
The funeral ceremony was conducted at St. Paul’s Cathedral, designed in 1697 by Christopher Wren, which had miraculously survived the German bombing during the war. Afterward, the coffin was placed on the varnished stern of a Royal Navy admiral’s barge in the Thames to be transported to Waterloo Station. There, a Battle of Britain–class locomotive named the Winston Churchill waited to carry it to the church cemetery near Blenheim Palace, sixty miles distant, where many of his distinguished relatives lay.
As the funeral barge moved past on the river, operators of the scores of huge stevedoring cranes that lined the banks of the Thames for miles dipped their vast mechanical limbs in graceful, final bows to the great man. A lone piper on the bow of a following barge played “Flowers of the Forest.”
“At Bladon,” wrote Lord Moran, “in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to the English earth, which in his finest hour, he had held inviolate.”37
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