by Alan Watson
These two representatives of the world’s two most powerful countries would not be present but both would be totally alert to what Churchill would say. Truman had already distanced himself from Fulton. Stalin was about to launch his counter-offensive.
Stalin’s attack on Churchill came in Pravda on 14 March. It was virtually unprecedented. Stalin very rarely gave interviews even to the media he controlled. It sought to position Churchill as the aggressor – the instigator of what would be termed the Cold War. It also sought to tar Churchill with a Hitlerian brush by implying that his Anglo-American alliance was racist. Not only that but Stalin’s interview sought to deride the democratic credentials so treasured by Britain and the USA, the absence of which they so deplored in his takeover of Central and Eastern Europe. Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Churchill, rates the ‘racist’ charge as a ‘shrewd hit’ but it is difficult to see why. Stalin said to Pravda, ‘Churchill is starting his process of unleashing war like Hitler with a racial theory declaring that only people who speak English are full blooded nations whose vocation is to control the fate of the whole world.’3 But a shared language was hardly a blood characteristic.
Jenkins describes Stalin’s diatribe against Britain’s democratic credentials as ‘purely dialectical’ and a ‘spirited piece of Alice Through the Looking Glass audacity’.4 Stalin’s taunt was this: ‘In England today the government of one party is ruling. The Opposition is deprived of the right to take part in the government.’ Churchill claims that this is ‘true democracy’ while in Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Hungary the governments are from four to six parties. This Churchill dismisses as ‘totalitarianism, tyranny, a police state’.5
There is some debate even today about whether Stalin ruled out any form of democracy in Eastern Europe. Was his adherence to the Yalta protocols pure hypocrisy? Anne Applebaum, in her magisterial account of the Iron Curtain, argues that ‘both the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe thought that democracy would work in their favour’.6 But what form of democracy? Not the word but the reality. Subsequent events do show that Churchill was not exaggerating and that Stalin was deceiving.
For Churchill, preparing his final major speech of his American tour was an imminent critical test of Stalin’s intent. It was to draw attention to the pace of Russian aggression over Iran and Turkey – the focus of so much discussion on the train journey to Missouri. He was to write into his last New York speech a direct challenge to Stalin. The USA and UK had left Iran as agreed at Tehran by Roosevelt, Stalin and himself. ‘But now we are told that the Soviet government, instead of leaving, are actually sending in more troops.’ So what was to happen? The 2 March deadline for withdrawal from Iran had come and gone and there had been no Soviet withdrawal.
After the fall of the USSR and the opening of their archives it became known that in 1945 Stalin had pinned a new map on the wall of his dacha and had told Molotov, pointing south of the Caucusus with the stem of his pipe, that ‘this frontier I don’t like at all . . . the Dardanelles . . . We also have claims to Turkish territory and to Libya.’7
Churchill could only speculate on Stalin’s ambitions but his conviction, stated clearly at Fulton and to be repeated now in New York, was that if the West did not resist Stalin would always go for the most he could get. Strength was all he would respect. So Churchill was clear that the USS Missouri’s mission to Istanbul was critical. He was right. Churchill would sail from New York on 20 March. Two days later the USS Missouri left New York for Istanbul. On that same day, 22 March, Russia conceded and announced its troops would leave Iran. This came too late for Churchill’s finale at the Waldorf Astoria but it did prove his point as London and Washington acknowledged. Although Churchill’s departure from New York would see the fiercest demonstrations and criticisms of his message at Fulton, history had reached a tipping point and Fulton was on the way to historic vindication.
His last days in New York equalled the drama of the rest of his trip.
First there was Stalin’s attack in Pravda on the 14th. Then there was a further chorus of American criticism. In the House of Representatives Howard Buffet, a Republican, charged Churchill with wishing to ‘entangle the USA in another war’.8 Churchill, he said on US radio networks, was ‘war-mongering’. Howard Buffet was from the isolationist right. From the other side of the House, the Democratic Secretary of Commerce urged his country to return to its traditional policy of ‘mediating between British and Russian interests’9 and refrain from aligning with either. The Secretary of Commerce was speaking at a dinner on the 14th held in honour of, and in the presence of, Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor. Meanwhile one of their sons, James, joined the attack on Churchill from Chicago over the radio. He charged that ‘The kind of speeches Mr. Churchill has been making in this country are harmful to the peace of the world.’10 Meanwhile in his suite in the Waldorf Astoria Churchill was preparing for his final speech of the tour scheduled to take place in the same hotel.
On board the Queen Mary, the 81,000 ton liner preparing to take him home, workmen were frantically trying to complete alterations to the principal passenger suite on the main deck amidships. As the Daily Telegraph reported, ‘As a gesture to Mr. Churchill for his outstanding service to the country, Cunard are fitting out this suite with something like its pre-war comfort.’11
As to his official agenda on his journey – the British loan – Churchill felt he had done his best and was now content to leave the outcome to Congress. He had further meetings with Bernard Baruch and cabled to Attlee that he was confident Baruch would not now oppose action on the loan though he was still against it. However, ‘he considers that the Russian situation makes it essential that our countries should stand together’. Churchill was trying to lever his ‘other agenda’ to advance the official one.
He also made time to give another sitting to Douglas Chandor – a British painter – to complete the portrait of the ‘Big Three’ meeting at Yalta. He was depicted in his RAF uniform but he wanted all his decorations painted in – including ones he had not brought with him. It was important to him that his image as a military leader in the Second World War was retained. After all, neither Roosevelt nor President Truman were ever depicted in uniform.
It was wet on 15 March. His speech would be in the evening. Beforehand, he would ride in an open car to City Hall to receive New York’s Gold Medal. Along the route 1,400 police were posted and, despite the weather, Churchill rode resplendent in the grey-green Chrysler that had once carried the king and queen. He sported his black homburg hat and a white silk muffler against the elements. The protesting amongst the crowds appeared to elate him. They were outnumbered by thousands shouting ‘Good old Winnie’. In all over 750,000 people were on the streets to watch the ticker-tape parade. However at the City Hall Plaza those most antagonistic suddenly caught the cameras waving placards proclaiming, ‘No American shall die for Churchill – No World War III’.12
Inside City Hall a police band played the national anthems and, for good measure, the police glee club gave a rendering of ‘There’ll always be an England’. Flatteringly, if inaccurately, the citation on his gold medal read ‘To the Rt. Hon Winston S Churchill victorious Prime Minister of the British Empire’.
Churchill was in his element and ready for his final speech at the Waldorf Astoria. Neither Acheson nor Gromyko would be there but, rather like Kennan’s ‘long telegram’ they had asked for it and they were going to get it. Unlike his speech at Richmond, Churchill was not out to mollify. Perhaps he felt there was no longer any need. The day before – the day of Stalin’s onslaught – he had received a most private note from Truman. It read simply, if still guardedly: ‘The people in Missouri were highly pleased with your visit and enjoyed what you had to say.’13
In the event, Churchill was absolutely unapologetic. On Fulton he said:
I do not wish to withdraw or modify a single word. If men who ‘hold all the 180 million Russians and many more millions outside Russia in their grip�
� discourage or chill Western efforts to ensure their honoured place in the van of world organisation . . . the responsibility will be entirely theirs.14
Churchill was presaging the outmanoeuvring of Stalin by the Marshall Plan and the re-establishment of the German economy. On Russia he concluded: ‘There is no reason why Soviet Russia should feel unrewarded for her efforts in the war. If her losses have been grievous her gains have been magnificent.’
He was going to add another paragraph to his speech but at the last moment deleted it. It would have said of Stalin’s denunciation of Fulton:
It is extraordinary that the head of a mighty, victorious government should descend . . . to enter into personal controversy with a man who has no official position of any kind. Nor am I dismayed by harsh words – even from the most powerful of dictators. Indeed I had years of it from Hitler and managed to get along alright.15
It is a pity the paragraph was deleted as it would have been a fitting response to Stalin’s attempt to compare Churchill’s enthusiasm for the English-speaking world with Hitler’s advocacy of Aryan racial mastery. There may have been 2,000 demonstrators picketing the Waldorf Astoria that night waving placards denouncing him: ‘Churchill wants war. We want peace.’ But Churchill knew he had won the argument. He was ready to bid farewell to the Big Apple.
15
Homecoming
The last hours before sailing on 20 March gave Clementine Churchill and their daughter a little time for shopping. The two women watched the St Patrick’s Day Parade on 5th Avenue. Churchill stayed at the Waldorf Astoria and savoured the generosity of American friends. The Metropolitan Club of New York had sent him a hundred of the very finest cigars presented in a handsome humidor. Another gift was that of a century-old silver cigar case. His preferences were known and indulged.
Boarding the Queen Mary, Churchill was delighted that Captain Ford was in command. He had been a commodore of conveys at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic and Churchill was to spend many hours on the bridge reliving that struggle by Admiral Doenitz’s U-boats to break the trans-Atlantic bridge. Churchill had always seen it as the most crucial campaign for Britain. If the bridge had been severed in 1942 Britain might have starved. If it had not been reinforced and so strengthened by a combination of the code breakers’ success at Bletchley Park, the invention of new depth charge technology and the closure of the mid-Atlantic gap by new long-distance aircraft, then the build-up before D-Day would have been rendered impossible. Unlike the westward voyage on the Queen Elizabeth there is no record of any speech to the crew and others on board and the ship would have been far less full – there were no US troops going to Europe, only GIs preparing for the return voyage and repatriation from Europe. Yet Churchill would have been delighted by the success of the eastward bound USS Missouri following two days behind. The Soviet climb-down over Iran was confirmation that with Russia strength worked. As we have seen his Fulton thesis was vindicated. Violet Bonham Carter wrote to him, ‘Events have powerfully reinforced your words.’1
The reception awaiting him in England was less confirmatory. Attlee had distanced himself from any overt criticism of Fulton and privately had expressed his ‘warm thanks and appreciation’ for Churchill’s efforts on the loan.
The real push back was coming from Anthony Eden and Lord Salisbury of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. On the very day that Churchill delivered his speech at Fulton, Eden was faced with a question from the Labour benches asking whether Churchill was about to make ‘a sensational speech in America’ putting Russia ‘on the spot’.2 Eden replied that he ‘had not heard anything of the kind from my Right Honourable friend [Churchill] and I do not believe it for one single moment’.3 Lord Salisbury, as David Reynolds writes in his insightful book In Command of History, believed that Fulton had ‘strengthened the case for Churchill retiring from the Tory leadership’. If he did so ‘he could say what he liked, without associating the Party with it’ – an outcome devoutly to be wished for in Salisbury’s view. As for Eden, wracked by his desire for a vacancy at Number 10, he hoped that Churchill would ‘now be less anxious to lead’ and would wish ‘to pursue an anti-Russian crusade, independent of us’.
These views were to be aired at a dinner party with Eden scheduled for 9pm on the day of Churchill’s arrival back in the UK. Unfortunately the Queen Mary was delayed for several hours by fog in the Channel and it was 7pm before the liner had docked and Churchill could descend. Asked at the immediate press conference how he felt about parliamentary opinion, he quipped that he did not know the state of business in the House but ‘I expect Mr Eden will tell me tonight’.4
We do not know what Eden said to Churchill at the long delayed dinner party but it would have been instantly obvious that Churchill’s will to stay on had been massively reinforced by his US trip. This was not what Eden had expected or what he had hoped for. Churchill of course reported on his American trip to King George VI. On 12 March 1946, the king recorded his admiration for what Churchill had achieved: ‘the whole world has been waiting for a statesman – and a statesman-like statement’. A month later the king dismissed Stalin’s tirade against Churchill in his interview with Pravda saying that it merely ‘showed he had a guilty conscience’. It is perhaps the clearest compliment. After all, the king had favoured Halifax’s appointment over Churchill’s in 1940.5
From the moment Churchill appeared on the bridge of the Queen Mary at Southampton, alongside his wife and Captain Ford, it was visually evident that he was back in form. Dressed in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity House – one of his favourites – he doffed his cap and waved to the crowd who cheered enthusiastically. In New York, before he had left, he had stated unequivocally that he had ‘no intention whatsoever of ceasing to lead the Conservative Party’ and now his whole demeanour would prove it.6 As David Reynolds comments, ‘Buoyed up by his new celebrity status Churchill had hardened his mind against political retirement.’
Thus his American journey had ended. It had been dramatic and unprecedented – a defeated prime minister seeking to lead the world’s most powerful nation to a new course, reversing Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin, replacing, as Kennan would have seen it, optimism with realism. He had challenged and defied Stalin, seeking to unmask him as the tyrant he was – the marauder to be resisted. For this he needed maximum publicity and controversy; he had to fulfil his hope that ‘over there’ they would listen to him. And they had done so.
However, as we have seen, Churchill’s message was more than that contained in his Fulton speech. His agenda was bolder and more comprehensive. His priority was to alert the USA to the Soviet threat and Fulton did that. But for his wake-up call to work, policies had to change and further policies brought forward. At Fulton he indicated the next imperative. His words were carefully chosen, as we have seen multiple times: ‘The safety of the world requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast.’
The policy he would call for next would be an almost unthinkable partnership between the pariah of Europe – Germany – and its implacable foe, France. Churchill’s business for 1946 was thus far from over. After Fulton the platform would be Zurich. He had certainly determined not to retire from politics and his political activities would not be limited to Westminster. His agenda was to inspire a new Western alliance and a rejuvenated Europe was essential if the USA was to commit to its construction. It is the relationship between the Fulton speech and the one he was now about to deliver in Zurich that reveals his brilliance in that bleak year of 1946. The connection that he was to fashion illuminated world politics at the decisive moment forcing people to see their problems in a new light.
The sheer originality and force of what he intended he expressed exactly in an article he wrote for the Daily Telegraph at the close of the year. Europe’s predicament, as he saw it, was in some ways even clearer than it had been immediately before the war. In that war the European peoples tore
each other to
pieces with more ferocity on a larger scale and with more deadly weapons than ever before. But have they found stable and lasting peace? Is the brotherhood of mankind any nearer? Has the Reign of Law returned? Alas, although the resources and vitality of nearly all the European countries are woefully diminished many of their old hatreds burn on with an undying flame.7
Churchill then conjures up an extraordinary image. He asks ‘is there ever going to be an end?’ He answers his own question:
There is an old story of the Spanish prisoner pining for years in his dungeon and planning to escape. One day he pushes the door. It is open. It has always been open. He walks out free. Something like this opportunity lies before the peoples of Europe today.
Churchill had seen something no one else had seen. His vision stemmed from cardinal aspects of his character – his experience of dark depression, his courage, his compassion, and his extraordinary grasp of history and how apparent reality can be transformed if the motors of change are understood. He concluded his article ‘the only worthwhile prize of Victory is the power to forgive and to guide and this is the price which glitters and shines beyond the French people’. It was the prize he offered them at Zurich.
In this speech he challenged the French to overcome their hatred of the Germans. His profound grasp of political realities was what ensured that this speech was not an overture in wishful thinking. Its bedrock was his insight into the motivation of his second country, the United States, and his sense of urgency because of the Soviet threat. Herein lies the link between these two speeches which together aimed to save the world. At Fulton he was confident that he could initiate the process of committing the USA to the defence of Western Europe. This was possible because of America’s temporary monopoly of the atomic bomb. But Western Europe had to be revived economically, psychologically, spiritually. This could only happen with the reconciliation of France and Germany, impossible though that seemed. And why was this so essential? Because without it the USA would never pour its treasure into Europe’s recovery. He understood the pre-condition of US generosity.