The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The president then told Colville that “whereas Winston looked upon the [hydrogen bomb] as something new and terrible,” he believed it to be simply the latest “improvement in military weapons.” The president implied, Colville told his diary, that “there was in fact no distinction between ‘conventional weapons’ and atomic weapons.” Churchill had once believed likewise, in 1945, but no longer did. After Churchill at one of the plenary sessions outlined at length his “double dealing” approach to the Soviets—an atomic bomb in one hand, the other extended in friendship—Eisenhower responded with a harangue of a sort none around the table had ever heard at an international conference. As for the Soviets’ “new look,” Eisenhower compared Russia to a whore wearing a new dress but “it was surely the same whore underneath.” The French, predictably, leaked all of this to the press.186

  Yet Eisenhower had to step with care. Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was riding high that year, and riding roughshod over the State Department, which for three years McCarthy had alleged was rife with Communists. When, during a private lunch in Bermuda, Churchill asked Eisenhower about McCarthy’s influence in America, the president suggested he pay no attention to McCarthy, just as Americans paid no attention to Aneurin Bevan. It was not an apt comparison; Bevan might be a socialist gadfly, but he was not a dangerous presence in British politics. Many Americans presumed the British Foreign Office and the British intelligence services were likewise infested with Reds, a conclusion drawn in part by the defections to Moscow by Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in 1951, although their exact whereabouts were not ascertained until 1956. It would not do for Eisenhower to encourage the notion that the British and Churchill had bullied him into glad-handing with the godless Communists in the Kremlin. Churchill could not bring himself to condemn his old wartime colleague for bowing to anti-Communist fury. Instead, he shifted blame onto John Foster Dulles, to whom he had taken an immediate and visceral dislike the previous year. “It seems that everything is left to Dulles,” Churchill told Moran. “It appears that the president is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll.” In any case, Churchill went home to London without his prize. There would be no Anglo-American-Soviet summit anytime soon.187

  Soon after Churchill’s return from Bermuda, the Daily Mirror began calling for his resignation. One Mirror piece, under the headline SHADOW OF A GIANT, quoted the New York Times: Churchill “was only the shadow of the great figure of 1940.” The Daily Mirror’s attacks got under Churchill’s skin, Moran told his diary, but an article and cartoon in Punch hit the Old Man harder. The article, titled “A Story Without an Ending,” was written by Malcolm Muggeridge, then the editor of Punch. It was an allegorical tale of a fictitious Byzantine ruler who had served his nation well but had lost his once-splendid faculties to old age and decrepitude. Accompanying the piece was a cartoon that depicted Churchill with a slack jaw, the left side of his face flaccid, as if from his stroke. Churchill’s hands as depicted in the cartoon—“podgy, shapeless,” in Moran’s description—peered out from white cuffs. Churchill held his hands up to Moran. “Look at my hands,” he said, “I have beautiful hands.” Then he offered that, as Punch goes everywhere, he must resign. Years later Muggeridge declared that statement showed that Churchill “was totally out of touch with the contemporary situation,” because by 1954 Punch did not go everywhere. It once did, Muggeridge declared, “but only in the 19th century.”188

  On March 1, 1954, the Americans detonated a hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. Three months later, on June 16, Churchill convened a secret session of the Defence Policy Committee at which he and his defence ministers agreed to a dramatic new atomic policy: Britain would build its own hydrogen bomb. The decision was so secret that not even the cabinet was informed. A week later, on June 24, Churchill departed by air for Washington.189

  It was his last official trip to the United States, his final chance to garner Eisenhower’s support for a summit. The usual group attended to his needs—Eden, Moran, Colville, and Christopher Soames. His mood aboard the Stratocruiser was at first somber. To Moran he lamented the changes wrought by the Wright brothers. The world had grown smaller: “It was an evil hour for poor England.” But the mood passed, and at ten in the morning British time, he told the steward to remove his whisky and bring on the champagne and caviar. Knowing that Eisenhower, guided by John Foster Dulles, would not agree to a three-party or four-party summit, Churchill arrived in Washington with a new proposal—to conduct a two-party summit, himself and Malenkov.190

  Thus his mood improved exponentially when on Friday, June 25, shortly after arriving at the White House, Eisenhower voiced no objection to Churchill’s holding bilateral talks with the Russians, and did so before Churchill had even presented his case, which he had thought would be a long and complicated process. The objective of talks with the Russians, as Churchill saw it, was to buy ten years of “easement” in relations with Moscow, such that America, Russia, and Britain could divert their monies and scientific research away from catastrophic atomic bombs and into fruitful, peaceful endeavors. Eisenhower agreed, and even suggested that he and Churchill, along with the French and Germans, hold preliminary talks in London before Churchill went off to engage the Russians. Colville noted that Dulles tried to squelch the Russian initiative, without success. Eisenhower hosted a small dinner on Sunday, described by Colville as “very gay,” with Churchill and Eisenhower agreeing that Germany must re-arm, even if over French objections. The French, Eisenhower declared, “were a hopeless, helpless mass of protoplasm.” In fact, within weeks, the EDC died in the French Assembly and the tri-party occupation of West Germany was lifted, and within ten months, Germany was welcomed into NATO. Another cause for cheer had been Eisenhower’s reaction when Churchill told him of the British decision to build a hydrogen bomb: Eisenhower had made no objection. Churchill could return to London a victor. As well, with a summit in mind, if not in hand, he now had another reason to stay on at No. 10.191

  This he imparted to Eden on the return voyage to Britain, aboard the Cunarder Queen Elizabeth, named for the queen’s mother, consort of George VI. When asked by Eden when he might resign, he set September 21 as a tentative date. This was important, because British law called for a general election to be held at least every five years. That meant October 1956 at the latest. If Churchill stayed on well into 1955, Eden would have precious little time to chart the course of his new government before the election. Churchill understood that well. Yet he would not go before he met with the Russians.

  On that front, while on board the Queen Elizabeth, Churchill dictated a telegram to Soviet foreign minister Molotov in which he proposed direct talks between himself and the Soviet leaders, talks in which the United States would not participate. When Eden objected, pointing out correctly that such a message could not be sent without cabinet approval, Churchill dismissed his rationale as “nonsense,” telling Colville that if the cabinet objected, he’d resign. That, Colville told the P.M., would split the Tories and the country “top to bottom.” Churchill was practicing blackmail of a sort, and it worked. Eden backed off. Churchill’s approach to Eden, Colville noted, had been “ruthless and unscrupulous.” Eden finally agreed under Churchill’s relentless pressure to inform the cabinet that he approved of the message. The telegram to Molotov was duly sent. The Russians waited three weeks to reply, and when they did, their proposal, by its absurd demands, effectively killed any chances of bilateral talks. They demanded a thirty-two-party all-European conference, with NATO withdrawal from Germany topping the agenda. Eden had been correct: by shooting off the message, Churchill had confused the Russians, angered Eisenhower, and alienated his cabinet. They all now questioned his wisdom. Of Churchill’s crusade for a summit, Macmillan told his diary: “It was his last passionate wish—an old man’s dream—an old man’s folly, perhaps, but it might have saved the world.”192

  Churchill admitted defeat during the cabin
et meeting following the arrival of the Soviet message. There would be no talks. Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, needed only a few words to close this chapter of the Great Man’s life: “Churchill’s last great foreign policy initiative was at an end.”193

  By all rights, so, too, should have been his premiership. But he held on, in part to secure cabinet approval on making a hydrogen bomb, which he duly gained on July 8; four days later he told the House that decisions had been made regarding atomic weapons, but he gave no details. Earlier in the year, he had proposed to leave in June, then July, then September. In August he decided against September. As summer gave out to fall, Eden and Harold Macmillan increased their efforts to move him out, to no avail.

  In late July, Macmillan approached Clementine on the matter, a tactical mistake. He should have gone directly to Churchill, but perhaps did not, knowing well the Old Man’s blunt style of debate. Churchill summoned Macmillan in order to discuss the matter. Colville feared an eruption. Macmillan was ushered into Churchill’s study to find the Old Man engaged with Colville in a game of bezique. Churchill offered Macmillan a whisky and cigar, and continued his game. Then he insisted the score be tallied and that he pay Colville the monies owed. They disputed the exact amount. Churchill’s checkbook was sent for and a pen. The pen arrived, the wrong pen. Macmillan meanwhile was allowed to fidget for the better part of a half hour. Finally, Churchill asked if Colville would be so good as to leave the room, because it appeared Mr. Macmillan “wanted to talk about some matter of political importance.” The meeting did not last long; it took Churchill only a minute to make his point, which was that he was staying, although he told Macmillan that the party leaders had the authority to replace him as leader. Macmillan knew full well that given Churchill’s popularity, a coup by the Tory leadership would spell their doom, not Churchill’s. “I cannot understand what all the fuss was about,” Churchill told Colville after Macmillan’s departure. “He [Macmillan] really had nothing to say at all. He was very mild.”194

  In early August, Macmillan told his diary: “His [Churchill’s] present mood is so self-centered as to amount almost to mania. It is, no doubt, the result of his disease [his stroke].” Were Churchill a king, Macmillan wrote, he’d be deposed. When pressed by Butler, Macmillan, and Eden, Churchill replied, “You cannot ask me to sign my own death warrant.” Yet by not going he was signing theirs. “All of us, who really have loved as well as admired him,” wrote Macmillan, “are being slowly driven into something like hatred.”195

  Churchill’s treatment of Eden became shabby. During one luncheon, he told Eden that it would all be his by the time he was sixty. For Eden, that birthday was three years away. Colville wrote that Churchill had begun “to form a cold hatred of Eden, who, he repeatedly said, had done more to thwart him… than anybody else.” That was a cruel and untrue assessment. Of Churchill during these final months in office, Colville wrote: “And yet on some days the old gleam would be there, wit and good humour would bubble and sparkle, wisdom would roll out in telling sentences and still, occasionally, the sparkle of genius could be seen in a decision, a letter or a phrase.” But Colville asked himself, was Churchill still the man to negotiate with the Soviets and nudge the Americans to a less militant attitude toward Russia? “The Foreign Office thought not; the British public would, I am sure, have said yes. And I, who have been as intimate with him as anybody during these last years, simply do not know.”196

  Churchill turned eighty on November 30, 1954, the first prime minister since Gladstone to hold that office at that age. He was now the Father of the House and the only MP then sitting who had been elected during Queen Victoria’s reign. Parliament, to mark his birthday, presented him with the portrait painted by Graham Sutherland, for which Churchill had sat throughout the autumn. He loathed it. In public he declared that it “certainly combines force with candor.” In private he called it “malignant.” Clementine thought it hideous, and soon banished it to the attic, and sometime later had it burned. It portrayed him as old, which he was, and his face as coarse and cruel, which it was not. The royal family sent a birthday gift of four silver wine coasters engraved with the signatures of those who joined in giving it. On Churchill’s birthday, Clement Attlee, who now led the opposition, delivered a long and generous tribute on the floor of the House, during which he declared that Churchill’s wartime speeches reflected both the will of Parliament and of the nation.197

  Churchill replied to Attlee’s address the next day:

  I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right places to use his claws. I am now nearing the end of my journey. I hope I still have some services to render.198

  His nine grandchildren and four children were on hand for the holiday season. During a family celebration that season, his daughter Diana expressed wonderment of all that he had seen and done in his life. He listened and said, “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”199

  Churchill pondered his exit during the Christmas holidays and into the winter. Colville later wrote that during the long winter months, “alone with him at the bezique table or in the dining-room, I listened to many disquisitions of which the burden was: ‘I have lost interest; I’m tired of it all.’ ” During a mid-March dinner with Rab Butler, he proclaimed: “I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.” Finally, in late March, he told Colville that he’d leave just before the Easter recess. Easter fell on April 10 that year.200

  Churchill made his last major address to the House of Commons on March 1, 1955, on the subject of that year’s defence white paper, wherein his government announced for the first time the decision to build a hydrogen bomb. Churchill understood that Britain was indefensible against such weapons, yet he was determined that other countries—Russia—be made indefensible as well. The bomb could not help England regain its former glory but it might just offer England the means to survive. He titled his speech “The Deterrent—Nuclear Warfare.” “There is no absolute defence against the hydrogen bomb,” he told the House, “nor is any method in sight by which any nation, or any country, can be completely guaranteed against the devastating injury which even a score of them might inflict on wide regions.” He went on to ask, “What ought we to do?”

  Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not matter so much to old people; they are going soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind. The best defence would of course be bona fide disarmament all round. This is in all our hearts.201

  He took care to speak of the “Soviets” and “Soviet communism,” telling the House that he was avoiding the term “Russian” because he greatly admired the Russian people “for their bravery, their many gifts and their kindly nature.” It was the Communist dictators who posed the threat to human survival, not the Russian people. He declared, “There is only one sane policy for the free world in the next few years.”

  That is what we call defence through deterrents…. These deterrents may at any time become the parents of disarmament, provided that they deter. To make our contribution to the deterrent we must ourselves possess the most up-to-date nuclear weapons, and the means of delivering them.

  Entire continents, not simply small islands such as Britain, were now vulnerable and would become more vulnerable as the Soviets developed new means to deliver atomic bombs:
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  There is no reason why, however, they should not develop some time within the next four, three, or even two years more advanced weapons and full means to deliver them on North American targets. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that within that period they will.

  A “curious paradox has emerged,” he declared. “Let me put it simply. After a certain point has been passed it may be said: The worse things get, the better.” He still believed that, as he told the House, “mercifully, there is time and hope if we combine patience and courage…. All deterrents will improve and gain authority during the next ten years. By that time, the deterrent may well reach its acme and reap its final reward.” After forty-five minutes, his voice still strong, he came to the end, and his valediction to the House and to his countrymen:

  The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.202