Churchill's Legacy

by Alan Watson

  It went straight over their heads. They hung on every word because this was truly a great man. He was famous everywhere and here he was, in Fulton. It was a unique moment – the most important in Fulton’s history and that of the college. We were part of it and it made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. We may not have understood the speech but my God we knew it mattered!

  We struck up a lengthy, illuminating conversation. Watson enquired whether I really knew who had most influenced Churchill’s rhetoric. Who had been the person on whom he modelled his style? Did I know who had taught Churchill that words can sing? It was, he assured me, Congressman Bourke Cockran, and had heard this confirmed many times. I had read a little of Bourke Cockran but not grasped his significance. Watson had made it the study of a lifetime. He explained that he wished to entrust this research to me because he believed it would be crucial to my undertaking of Churchill’s world-shaping oratory. Before I left Fulton he deposited a hefty folder for me at the front desk of the Churchill Museum in the undercroft of Fulton’s unlikely Christopher Wren parish church.

  The contents of the folder did not contain any original papers but Watson had meticulously collected all published sources about Bourke Cockran and collectively they have proved a rich vein of resource for which I am indebted to him.

  The first and cardinal fact is that the Irish-American, in the words of Roy Jenkins, ‘had undoubtedly been one of Churchill’s mother’s most successful admirers’.11 Or, as author Richard Holmes expressed it more bluntly, ‘one of Jennie’s oldest and most durable lovers’.12 Their assignation had begun, according to Ralph Martin’s account in Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill, at a dinner in Paris at 34 Avenue Kleber in March 1895. He tells us that ‘the attraction was quick and mutual . . . they were free enough to do as they pleased, adult enough to know what they wanted in this summer of their lives’.13

  Whatever the veracity or accuracy of all this, what is quite clear is that Churchill’s mother trusted Cockran to act as her son’s host and mentor when Winston first arrived in New York in November 1895 on his way to Cuba. He had five months’ leave before his posting to India and he intended to use it to see and report on war – in this case the Spanish government’s determined attempt to suppress rebellion in Cuba. His route of travel had to be via New York and it was to Cockran that his mother wrote, asking him to host her son. He readily agreed and was on the quayside to greet the young Churchill and his friend Barnes, another subaltern destined for India.

  Churchill was an eager visitor, hugely excited by the glamour, brashness and energy of New York.

  Cockran was a splendid host, doubtless in part motivated by his devotion to Jennie and their love affair which had started only six weeks earlier. He lavishly entertained and hosted the two young Englishmen at his quite luxurious apartment at 713 West Avenue. He shared his best cognacs and introduced Winston to his finest Havana cigars – a taste that would be enhanced in Cuba and give him great pleasure for the rest of his life.

  Much more important than Cockran’s generosity was his advice. Churchill wrote later: ‘I must record the strong impression that this remarkable man made upon my untutored mind. I have never seen his like or in some respects his equal.’14

  Richard Holmes perhaps touches the heart of the matter. Cockran had become intimate with Lady Randolph Churchill after the death of her husband. He may have ‘helped fill the void left by the death of Lord Randolph’15 for his son.

  What is clear is that Cockran pulled aside a curtain of understanding for Churchill. As Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, ratifies in his biography of his father, Cockran was ‘the first man or woman Churchill met on level terms who really saw his point and potentialities’.16

  Yet what matters most in evaluating Churchill’s grasp of the power of the word was what he learnt from Cockran about presence, delivery and the drama of speech. The US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson recalled how Winston had confided to him that Cockran had been ‘the mould on which he based his oratorical style. Bourke Cockran taught me to use every note of the human voice as if playing an organ.’ Churchill then quoted long passages of Bourke’s speeches and ended by admitting that is was he who ‘was my model. I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.’17

  One of the reasons why Churchill’s two speeches in 1946 do not suffer from the weaknesses that he had evidenced again in the House of Commons as Leader of the Opposition in 1946 was simply that the task of being Leader of the Opposition bored him, whereas he was exhilarated by the challenge of the Fulton and Zurich speeches. Here he was able to match the moment with his rhetoric.

  This rhetoric may have gone over the heads of his audience in the gymnasium at Fulton, and escaped the full understanding of the professors and VIPs in the hall at Zurich University, but the nuclear centre of Churchill’s oratory was his professionalism, his accuracy, his command of the word.

  Churchill was not only a prolific author and unique orator, he also had a profound understanding of the media and how to use it. He had started his career as a journalist. He made his name by writing dramatic accounts of his experiences in battle and war – in Cuba, on the Indian frontier and above all in South Africa. He built his own profile and as was commented at the time, his history of the First World War – The World Crisis – was essentially a history of his own participation in it. He did believe that his own history was too important to be left to others.

  He consumed newspapers as well as contributing to them. His friendship with Beaverbrook was not only legendary but lucrative for Churchill. His lifestyle, which far exceeded his means during the interwar period, depended on the earning power of his pen.

  The two world wars engendered a global press and Churchill well understood this. He exploited the way in which he was depicted. His personal branding was the equal of Charlie Chaplin’s. The V sign, the Homburg hat, the bow tie, the cigar. All these were multiplied endlessly across newspapers and increasingly in the newsreels which also became global during the period. Churchill also mastered radio. He ensured that both Fulton and Zurich were broadcast worldwide and fully covered by newsreels.

  He never accommodated television but no doubt if he’d lived in a different age, he would have done so. Certainly his funeral contained one of the most famous television pictures of all time – the cranes of the port of London bowing in respect.

  Motivation, mandate, professionalism, media. None would have ensured the coup of 1946 without Churchill’s grasp of the moment and the meaning of history in the making. Like Bismarck he believed in grasping the mantle of history. It was his sense of moment that transformed the banality of the gymnasium in Fulton into the fulcrum of the new alliance architecture. It was his sense of the moment and its drama that enabled him to tell his rather dull audience in Zurich ‘I will surprise you’ and then to shock them beyond measure by suggesting a partnership of leadership between France and Germany.

  20

  Perspective

  This is a tale full of giants – some malevolent like Stalin, some blessed with extraordinary talent and spirit of which Churchill is the exemplar. It was he who remarked that while we are all worms, he was a glow worm. There is Harry S. Truman – initially an unexpected, unwanted and underrated president of the United States who emerges as ‘the first President to preside over Pax Americana’.1 There are smaller men who nonetheless strut this stage – Lord Halifax, ever sceptical of Churchill’s judgement, and Anthony Eden, ever envious of Churchill’s occupancy of Number 10. There is Molotov, ever ready with a ‘Niet’, and George C. Marshall, ever ready with a solution. And many others too. But towering above them all is Churchill – a man of unique dimensions of character, a man who not only grasped the hem of history, but wrapped himself in its mantle. As written so memorably by Isaiah Berlin, Churchill was ‘the largest human being of our time’.2

  Thus, in retrospect, we should look at the key players in judging who were the winners and losers in this journey that chang
ed Churchill and the world. Who were they?

  The focus of this book has been Churchill’s role in 1946. Assuring his achievement in ‘smiting the crocodile’ with his two speeches at Fulton and Zurich, one can thus ask of the three giants – Stalin, Truman and Churchill – to what extent each emerged a winner or a loser.

  Stalin lost the initiative his wartime victory had seemed to confer. In July 1945 he travelled to Potsdam in an armoured train guarded all the way along a near 2000 kilometre route by thousands of NKVD forces. In his report to Stalin on the arrangements for the journey, Beria details where they are to be deployed. It gives us a dramatic glimpse of the empire Stalin had at his feet. ‘To provide proper security,’ he wrote, ‘1515 NKVDIGB men of operative staff and 17,409 NKVD forces are placed in the following order: on USSR territories – 6 men per kilometer; on Polish territory – 10 men per kilometer, on German territory – 15 men per kilometer.’3 The day after Stalin arrived in Potsdam – 16 July – the USA successfully tested its first A-bomb. At Yalta, earlier at Tehran and now at Potsdam, Stalin would seem to get all he wanted. But the atomic bomb provided the window of opportunity that Churchill so brilliantly exploited in the year that followed.

  That by June 1948 Stalin had decided to start his blockade of Berlin provides the measure of how his victory had been diminished and its potential eroded. Churchill’s speeches were key to this process. As we have seen they revealed Uncle Joe for the tyrant and threat he was and by alerting the USA and Europe to the imperative of a new alliance they thwarted Soviet ambition. The blockade was Stalin’s last chance to counter the momentum of the West. It seems that one reason why he thought he might pull it off was the Nazi failure to reinforce the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad during their siege of that city. Stalin’s failure to understand the realities of the Berlin airlift is powerfully demonstrated by the idea that because Goering could not save Paulus’s 6th army in 1942 the US Air Force and the RAF could not save Berlin in 1948.

  In his last years Stalin was imprisoned by this unreality. His paranoia and megalomania consumed him. His ruthlessness and cynicism grew into cancers that destroyed him. He outmanoeuvred all those who hoped to succeed him, terrifying them at party meetings, tricking them into charge and counter-charge, having unknown numbers, high and low, purged, tortured and killed. He planned and began an anti-Semitic terror against the alleged Jewish doctors conspiracy, which had he not died in 1953, would have imitated Hitler’s cruelty. Both men relished violence and enjoyed the details of the brutalities they ordered, from Stalin’s red hot irons applied by the NKVD in torture cells to Hitler’s gratification in having the death throes of those involved in the July plot and hung by piano wire at Plötzensee filmed for him to view.

  Stalin was not only thwarted in Europe. His cynical misleading of Mao and the North Koreans in the Korean War availed him nothing. Stalin was happy to see the North Koreans fight to their last man but it was Truman’s skill at the United Nations that ensured the West could fight to defend South Korea as a UN force and succeed.

  When Stalin first met Truman he was not impressed. This was not a man he would lose out to in any contest. He judged Truman to be ‘neither educated nor clever’, in no way to be compared to Roosevelt. This first encounter took place at the Cecilienhof in Potsdam on 17 July 1945. Within hours, however, Stalin was confronted with a directness, a sharpness he had never experienced with Roosevelt.

  Truman led off their first plenary session. Around a table engulfed in tobacco smoke from Churchill’s cigars and Stalin’s cigarettes, Truman rejected any obfuscation. Looking directly at Stalin he read from a prepared statement. It addressed Stalin’s failure to deliver the promises he had given at the Yalta conference. Churchill as well as Stalin was taken aback. Here was a new, untested US president, virtually unknown and not present at Yalta, accusing the Russians of bad faith. ‘Since the Yalta conference,’ he declared, ‘the obligations undertaken in the declaration on liberated Europe remain unfulfilled. In conformity with these obligations . . . the Governments of the three powers must discuss how best to help the work of the provisional Governments in holding free and fair elections.’ He then listed the causes of his concern: ‘Such help,’ he explained, ‘will be required in Romania, Bulgaria and possibly other countries too.’ Stalin said nothing. Truman pressed on with his agenda. He asserted it was important to admit Italy to the United Nations. Churchill could not contain himself. These were matters too important to be dealt with ‘somewhat too hastily’.4 Within minutes of the Potsdam Conference getting under way the ‘natty’ former haberdasher from Missouri, immaculate in his double-breasted suit, had astonished Churchill and Stalin both resplendent in their military uniforms. The newcomer was focused, bold, energetic – so very different from the ailing Roosevelt at Yalta. His sharpness was evident in his face – eyes bright and level behind no-nonsense, steel-rimmed glasses. His manner was entirely new. At the end of their first session, he insisted that they ‘specify the concrete questions for discussion’ the next day. Churchill argued that their secretaries could give them enough points ‘to keep us busy’. Truman’s riposte was a challenge: ‘I don’t want to discuss. I want to decide.’ He added that ‘our sittings should start at four o’clock instead of five’. Clearly puzzled, Stalin conceded with ‘Well, all right’ and Churchill with the ironic ‘I will obey your orders’.5

  Churchill was ambiguous about the new president expressing both positive and negative views. Despite Truman’s inexperience, however, Churchill understood that the new president was reorganising the reality of the US–USSR relationship. Much later Churchill admitted to Truman that at Potsdam he had misjudged him. He then paid the president the greatest compliment he could express. Since their first meeting when he had misjudged him so badly, he had come to recognise that Truman ‘more than any other man’6 had saved Western civilisation. Given Churchill’s own contribution to that cause, it was an awesome tribute.

  Churchill’s admiration for Truman grew steadily during his presidency but there were difficult episodes. There was the shock of Truman’s abrupt cessation of Lend-Lease the moment the war ended. The USA could afford its aid to Britain. Its industries were intact, while Britain’s were damaged by bombing and almost entirely given over to war production. Suddenly America’s financial and material support vanished. Unless it was resumed the UK faced bankruptcy – a cruel reward for British courage.

  That was how Churchill saw it. When America did offer a loan of $3,750 million the terms were harsh and, as we have seen, led Churchill to abstain when the House of Commons voted on them.

  Then when Churchill gave his Fulton speech there was Truman’s strange behaviour in denying any knowledge of its contents and distancing himself publicly from its case proposed for a powerful Anglo-American alliance. Privately, Churchill took some offence noting that the newsreels showed Truman applauding the idea as Churchill spoke at Westminster College. However, he must have recognised the ‘realpolitik’ determining Truman’s actions. Truman’s intent in urging Churchill to give his Fulton speech was to alert Americans to the Soviet threat. He was not – at that moment – prepared to commit to a new alliance with Britain. In reality, he needed Churchill to do his work for him in preparing public opinion.

  Truman’s own direct appeal to the American public came a year later in his address to Congress on 12 March 1947. Truman saw this as ‘America’s answer to the surge of expansion of Communist tyranny’. In his own account of the writing of this speech, he made clear that he wanted ‘no hedging in this speech’. The doctrine he expounded had to be ‘clear and free of hesitation or double talk’.7 It was and its clarity echoed his bluntness of Potsdam on the first day of that conference in warning Stalin directly that he was in breach of the commitments he had given at Yalta.

  In a fascinating study of the Truman Doctrine speech, Duke University provides the polling evidence of how Truman jolted Americans into much greater awareness of the threat facing the West. It cites the polls showing that foll
owing the end of the war only 7 per cent of Americans named ‘foreign problems’ as giving them any concern. After all they had just won the war. Following Truman’s speech on 12 March 1947, the figure rose to 54 per cent. This swing in public mood was to be essential in the confrontation with Stalin over Berlin. However, it was Churchill who started the process. In the summer of 1946, the percentage of Americans rating foreign problems as ‘most important’ reached and stayed above 20 per cent – not high, but rising.

  The reality was that both Churchill and Truman were up against an understandable American preference for peace. Congress was hostile to the taxation and conscription implications of an alliance to opposing Russia. Without Truman’s clarity and firmness the Berlin airlift could not have been mounted in the weeks before it began. Truman confronted the risk of war. He was unequivocal: ‘We would have to deal with the situation as it developed.’8

  Was Truman a winner or a loser? He was indeed the first president of the Pax Americana. He committed the power of the United States to a policy of active containment of communist aggression. Berlin did not fall. Neither did South Korea. And he won a second term in the White House. Underestimated at the start by Stalin, Churchill and the US public, Truman emerges a winner.

  When Stalin died in 1953 his daughter Svetlana was in the room. She described the scene. ‘He literally choked to death . . . the death agony was terrible . . . at the last minute he opened his eyes . . . it was a terrible look, either mad or angry and full of the fear of death.’9 He suffered the fate he had ordered for so many. For all his power and cunning, Stalin was a loser.

  On Truman’s side he never doubted the stature of Churchill. In the judgement of Roy Jenkins’s biography of Truman, the president ‘had come to adore Churchill’. When Churchill died in January 1965, Truman’s tribute was characteristically pithy and to the point. Churchill, he said, ‘typified man’s resolution to be free’.10