by Alan Watson
Ominously, The Times, close to the Conservative Party, wrote of the ‘perhaps less happy’ passages in his speech.3
Waiting disconsolately in the wings was Anthony Eden, surrounded by others in the Tory Party who felt the time had more than come for Churchill to step aside and become the elder statesman ‘concentrating’, as Eden actually suggests, ‘on grand speeches on grand themes’, reflecting his own views rather than the policies of the opposition. All these signs and sounds of discontent were to be rebuffed by the return of the rejuvenated Churchill to Britain but until then London’s reaction was dangerous.
Lord Halifax of course reflected the dismay of likeminded Tories, as it did his own predilection for what Churchill saw as appeasement. Having returned from Miami for a few days in the sun after his speech in Fulton, Churchill received a telegram from Halifax urging him to say that his Fulton speech had been misrepresented. It arrived four days after Stalin’s tirade and urged Churchill to apologise to ‘Uncle Joe’. He responded that this reminded him of the advice he received before the war that he should visit Adolf Hitler and – as was implied – apologise for his bellicose opposition to the dictator. Churchill rejected Halifax’s advice but refrained from reminding him that, back in May 1940, Halifax had urged mediating with Hitler via Mussolini.
In his Life of Lord Halifax, the Earl of Birkenhead quotes Halifax’s telegram to Churchill: ‘Uncle Joe’s speech is pretty insolent but any public argument between you will get the world nowhere except in a worse temper.’ Halifax urged Churchill to say publicly that ‘Uncle Joe has completely misunderstood’ Fulton; ‘Uncle Joe does not appear to appreciate any of the causes that are responsible for the present anxiety about Russian policy’; and then crucially, ‘You attach too much importance to your war comradeship with Uncle Joe to be willing to allow it to be frosted over if it can be avoided.’ Birkenhead rightly notes that for Churchill this could have only one meaning: ‘It must have seemed like some resurrection from the past, another indication of that incapacity for righteous anger in the face of evil that had been the fraud of appeasement.’4
Birkenhead then recounts a fascinating phone call from Churchill to Halifax’s wife Dorothy, after he had received Halifax’s telegram. He said to her that he could not possibly follow Halifax’s proposal, which had included the idea that Churchill should visit Uncle Joe after his departure from the USA. It would, Churchill said, be like ‘the whipped cur coming to heel – like going to see Hitler just before the war’.
Equally telling is Halifax’s reaction to Churchill’s anger. As his biographer notes, he ‘had a thick skin on the subject and was in no way mortified’.5 Indeed, Halifax’s rejection of Churchill’s attitude was characteristically blunt: ‘I thought at the time as I have thought since, that he was wrong.’ Halifax wanted to mediate in 1940, and he wanted to do so again in 1946,
I will return in more detail to both the American and Soviet criticisms of Fulton, but first it is important to consider just why Churchill’s speech stirred up such upset in the United States.
There was the matter of the Bomb. In his Fulton speech Churchill carefully ruled out any idea of sharing nuclear technology with the United Nations Organisation or its peace force, and this clearly implied that it should not be made available to the Russians. Churchill and Truman would both be aware of Stalin’s frantic efforts to catch up on the Bomb both by espionage and the manic pace of research in the USSR supervised by the KGB boss, Beria.
The technology Churchill describes as being held by the USA, the UK and Canada in his Fulton speech masked both the truth and British resentment. Churchill knew that ‘Britain had now been cut out of the atomic bomb project and that the Combined Chiefs of Staff were withering away. This was the background of his speech.’6 Fulton does speak about shared bases and logistical co-operation. But it does not refer to the co-operation the British most wanted. They wanted what they saw as their share of America’s atomic secrets. On this, Churchill, Bevin and Attlee had left the US government in no doubt that there was to be no ’give’ on the UK side.
On 29 August 1940, despite Churchill’s reservations, a small black metal box had been shipped out of Liverpool to New York containing ‘Britain’s technological crown jewels’ including plans for the atom bomb.7 By handing over its atomic secrets, Britain had earned, in Churchill’s view, inclusion in the American nuclear programme. To be excluded now was an offence as deep in its way as Roosevelt’s snubbing Churchill over Stalin. Ultimately America’s attitude on sharing its nuclear secrets would lead to Prime Minister Attlee’s unilateral decision to build Britain’s own bomb. Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary, resented being talked at and down to by Secretary of State Byrnes. Bevin argued defiantly over the need for a British nuclear weapon: ‘we have got to have this thing over here whatever it costs and . . . we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it’.8
The Americans would have seen Fulton’s call for the closest alliance between the United States and Britain as coming dangerously close to a demand for the nuclear intimacy they were determined not to grant.
There was also the sheer heresy of depicting Stalin and his Soviet empire as the new ‘marauder’ threatening tyranny, if not war. It is hard to imagine the veneration felt at that time for Stalin and, above all, for the courage of the Russian people. What was happening behind the Iron Curtain was little known and little reported. What is more, most people did not want to know. It was complicated, foreign, a long distance away and the GIs, their families and loved ones were focused on life back home.
In August the previous year, Truman had called for universal military training. Congress would have none of it and overwhelmingly defeated the proposal. Public opinion in Fulton, however, was, as reported, firmly anti-isolationist but its citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, were allergic to foreign entanglements. In calling for an ever-closer military alliance in the face of the Soviets, Churchill at Fulton was arguing against the grain of American opinion and with an administration still deeply uncertain and electorally weak. Truman was an unexpected president and, compared with the monumental Roosevelt, seemingly politically puny. In Fulton, the president cut a grand figure but not to the nation as a whole. As we know, he had not as yet been directly elected. Truman’s position was also ambiguous on foreign policy. Marshall was not yet at his side and he did not trust Byrnes. The fact was that Truman was still listening to the voices that had surrounded Roosevelt. After Potsdam he had sent Harry Hopkins, one of his closest advisors, to Moscow to assure Stalin that the USA and he ‘had no ambitions in Eastern Europe’ and that America’s only interests ‘concerned world peace’. Hopkins had returned, ‘bubbling with enthusiasm about Soviet friendliness’. He assured the president that ‘Stalin will co-operate’.9
And then there were the emphases so vital to Churchill’s purpose, the passages that go to the heart of his judgement and determination: that the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada should not share the secrets of the atomic bomb with anyone; that the British Empire and Commonwealth retain an ‘abiding power’10 that no man should underrate; that the special relationship between Britain and the United States could contain the Soviet threat; that that threat was evident and growing as Russia ‘desired the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’11; that an Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, behind which their grip was ever tightening; and that – and this was the first time he had raised this spectre – the Russians in Berlin were seeking ‘to build up a pro-Communist Germany in their areas’, which would cause serious difficulties in the British and American zones.
Lastly, while there was daring in Churchill’s appeal there was also effrontery, even impertinence. Here was an ousted British prime minister who had come to the United States to plead for a loan, calmly lecturing America on the responsibilities of power. It was, he proclaimed at Fulton, ‘a solemn moment for American Democracy. Viewing the world they shoul
d not rest on their laurels – you must feel not only the sense of duty done but also anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement.’12
It was breath-taking in its temerity. This was not merely playing Greece to Rome, namely the more cultured nation advising the more powerful. This was Greece telling Rome what it had to do.
In the light of all this, the harshness of the US media reaction was understandable and, for Truman, probably predictable. To the Chicago Sun Churchill’s aim was nothing less than ‘world domination through arms by the United States and the British Empire’. The more measured and authoritative Wall Street Journal condemned the speech and reminded Churchill and the British that ‘the US wants no alliance or anything that resembles an alliance with any other nation’. Behind its disapproval lay not only the suspicion of entanglement but also the self-confidence that the USA, at its peak of power, didn’t need any alliance. Another paper, The Nation, accused Churchill of adding ‘poison’ to a deteriorating relationship with the USSR. It also charged Truman with ineptitude in having sat on the platform next to Churchill at Fulton.
It was no doubt criticism of this order that led Truman, a few days later at a press conference, to explicitly deny that his presence implied endorsement. Even more shamingly he repeatedly denied that he had seen the speech before, read it, or known of its contents.
13
With Ike to Richmond
With all the drama of Churchill’s visit to the United States in the first three months of 1946, 8 March was to prove one of the most dramatic days. It was on this day that Truman and Byrnes were to deny publicly, not once but repeatedly, that they had known what Churchill would say at Fulton. Churchill was perhaps not surprised but nonetheless dismayed. Back in London he would complain that the Pathé newsreel proved that Truman had applauded all the most ‘controversial’ passages in his speech.
The press conference on the 8th was given by both the president and the secretary of state. As the Daily Telegraph reported, ‘In spite of persistent questioning Mr Truman declined to be drawn into making any direct comment on Mr Churchill’s speech at Fulton on Tuesday. He insisted that he had not read the speech in advance.’ The tone adopted by Byrnes was slightly defensive but equally deceptive. He stated that ‘he had not known before Mr Churchill’s speech what Britain’s former Prime Minister intended to say. He had seen Mr Churchill three weeks before but the speech had not been written at that time.’ In fact, as we know from Churchill’s cable to Bevin sent the day before, Churchill was emphatic that he ‘showed it albeit an earlier draft to Mr Byrnes the night before leaving Washington’. Churchill adds of Byrnes that ‘he was excited about it and did not suggest any alterations’.1
The 8th also proved dramatic because of Churchill’s visit to Richmond and Williamsburg in Virginia. He was accompanied by Eisenhower and the visit was the scene of an accident that was certainly dangerous and might even have proved fatal. It was also the occasion of intensive discussions between the two men, a proposal from the general and a shared experience of popular acclaim that would have enhanced their taste for public office.
The accident occurred during the second half of the visit. The day’s timetable had been meticulously choreographed. On arrival in Richmond from Washington both men alighted and were driven in an open car to the Capitol where the speeches were made. There were 150,000 people on the streets of the city, once the Confederate capital. The journey took twenty-five minutes. It was raining but this did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowds. The American media’s disapproval of the Fulton speech did not appear to be replicated, and Truman’s distancing at his press conference would not yet have been known to people. Churchill enjoyed himself ‘acknowledging the cheers with his V sign’. On his arrival at the Capitol the military cadets lined up at the front where they, although ‘drenched, snapped smartly to attention’.
Inside he was welcomed by William Tuck, the state governor, and he soon settled into his speech. His tone was designed to mollify the opposition Fulton had aroused. He had the audience in mirth as he joked about the furore he had caused. Did they not think, Churchill asked, ‘they were running some risk by inviting him to talk to them?’ No they did not. Any tension felt by the Virginia Assembly was dissipated. What is more he chided the media for suggesting that the president’s presence on the stage at Fulton indicated that he was ‘partly responsible’ for its content. No – he had been speaking for himself.2
In the main body of his speech to the Assembly, Churchill never referred to the ‘Iron Curtain’, or even to Russia. His message was unthreatening and dignified. ‘In these last years of my life there is a message of which I conceive myself to be the bearer. It is that we should stand together in malice towards none, in greed for nothing but in defence of those causes which we hold dear.’3 Referring back to his address to Congress in 1941, Britain and America ought ‘to walk together in majesty and peace’. He was certain that was the wish ‘of an overwhelming majority of 200,000,000 Britons and Americans’. Churchill quoted John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘Great heart must have his sword and armour to guard the pilgrims on their way.’4 But what he offered and wanted above all was ‘a union of hearts based on conviction and common ideals . . . Both countries must find a means and a method of working together not only in times of war but in times of peace.’ This was to elicit a proposal afterwards from the ever practical Eisenhower. Churchill didn’t want Britain to become the 49th state, nor America to rejoin the British Empire, but to pave ‘a path of wisdom’ between such ‘scarecrow extremes’. Peace could not be preserved by casting aside ‘our panoply of warlike strength’, he warned, perhaps thinking above all of US demobilisation and exodus from Europe as well as the cessation of the close collaboration between the US and British chiefs of staff achieved during the war.5
Churchill displayed his skill in flattering an audience that mattered – again and again hitting exactly the right note both for the delegates and for Eisenhower. The Virginia Assembly was the successor of ‘the most ancient law making body on the main land of the Western hemisphere’6 – the descendant of the House of Burgesses established by the Jamestown settlers who had arrived in 1607. Here he was beside Eisenhower, whose qualities he compared to Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army. As a younger man Churchill had studied the Virginia battlefields of the Civil War. He confided that in the Second World War he had read secret German reports referring to ‘those ridiculous American troops’. ‘Well,’ he growled, to rapturous applause, ‘surely they should not have forgotten or have ignored so soon the example of tenacity, will power and self-devotion which shines all through the records of the great American Civil War.’7
Churchill now turned to Eisenhower who, more than any other, had worked to weld Allied troops – British, American, Canadian – ‘into a force which fought as soldiers of a single nation’.8
Churchill sat down to thunderous applause. The Speaker of the Assembly then introduced General Eisenhower, who had not planned to speak but the delegates insisted. ‘I could not come on a happier occasion than as one of the aides of one of the great men of the world . . . Of all the things that supported me in the years of war none was so inspiring as the courage and indomitable spirit of the Prime Minister of Great Britain.’9
They left the Capitol on a wave of enthusiasm. Eisenhower spoke individually to GIs who served in France and their warmth was overwhelming. Clearly he was popular on a scale of intensity that impressed Churchill. Back in 1944, when Churchill was mired in disagreement with Roosevelt, Eisenhower had confided that after the war he would retire from the military and devote himself ‘to the promoting of good US–British relations’.10
Eisenhower did, in fact, retire from politics to become president of Columbia University but then decided, a few years later, to return to politics, run for president and win. It is a conjecture but the adulation both men experienced in 1946 may have contributed to the decision of both to run for the highest offices their c
ountries could afford.
Fate, however, might have frustrated all ambitions later that afternoon. Leaving Richmond by train they travelled the short distance to Williamsburg – the old colonial capital meticulously restored by the Rockefeller family. John D. Rockefeller Jr. would join them for dinner. First, however, they were to tour Williamsburg in an open horse-drawn carriage. This they did but the two horses, frightened by the mass of flash photography, reared up, backing the coach into an iron railing. The harness snapped. As the local paper reported, it was ‘a potentially grave accident followed by a hectic scene of confusion and consternation’. In the event neither former cavalry officer panicked. Churchill continued to puff a large black cigar and Eisenhower reached over and regained control of the harness. Churchill’s wife, Clementine, surveying the scene, said of her husband only that ‘he is good driver. They will be alright.’ However, the tour was abandoned.
So they returned to Washington that night. By then both would have been aware of Truman’s press conference. The next reaction would come from Moscow. Richmond provided a breathing space and a chance to cement the relationship with Eisenhower but the drama of Churchill’s American journey was far from over.
14
Leaving the Big Apple
Churchill’s last ten days in America were based in New York and, in terms of public performance, focused on his concluding speech at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel scheduled for 15 March. It would be attended by over 2,000 guests. On the platform no fewer than forty ambassadors to the United States would take their seats. However, two critically important VIPS were not there: Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state, had been instructed by the president not to attend since ‘Urgent matters made it imperative for him to remain in Washington.’1 The other empty space was predictably that of the other superpower: Andrei Gromyko, then Soviet ambassador, who told the press, ‘I do not know anything about it. If my radio set is in good order I will listen.’2