The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (34 page)

Slowly, however, he began to get himself together. He went for long painting holidays to Italy (where on one occasion he tactlessly painted some bombed buildings, and got booed by the locals). He had his duties as Leader of the Opposition. He continued to denounce the ‘Bolshevisation’ of eastern Europe, and said that the Russians were ‘
realist-lizards of the crocodile family’. Towards the end of the year he received an interesting invitation from Truman, to come and give a speech at a ‘
wonderful school’ called Westminster College at Fulton in his home state of Missouri.

On 4 March 1946 he and Truman left the White House to make the twenty-four-hour train journey to Missouri. It is important to note that the themes of the speech had now been long in gestation, and that Churchill had by no means kept his thoughts secret. He had shared the gist with James Byrne, the US Secretary of State, who ‘
seemed to like it very well’. He had discussed it with Clement Attlee, who wrote to him on 25 February to say, ‘
I am sure your Fulton speech will do good.’ He had shown a draft before boarding the train to Admiral Leahy, Truman’s senior Service adviser, who was (at least according to Churchill) ‘
enthusiastic’. He continued to polish the speech as they drew into Missouri, and as they chugged by that vast river he gratified his host’s curiosity, and showed the whole thing
to Truman. ‘
He told me he thought it was admirable,’ reported Churchill. And so it is.

Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, is unlike anything from modern political discourse. It has not been written on a word-processor. It has not been composed by a committee of speech writers. The thing is almost five thousand words long, and every phrase is redolent of the author.

He swoops from a Thomas Hardy-esque poetic style (the future is the ‘after-time’, for instance) to various hard-edged if batty proposals for defence cooperation. He at one stage proposes that every nation should commit a squadron to an international air force, to be directed by a world organisation—an idea that I have seen properly taken up only in the 1970s kids’ TV programme
Thunderbirds
. He meditates on ideas that unite Britain and America:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence . . .

All this means that the people of any country have the right, and should have the power by constitutional action, by free unfettered elections, with secret ballot, to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell; that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom. Here are the title deeds of freedom which should
lie in every cottage home. Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Let us preach what we practice—let us practise what we preach.

The majority of the electorate may no longer live in ‘cottage homes’—not unless they have a million or two—but these are still the ideals in which American and British democrats believe. They were the causes for which Churchill fought all his life. Finally he comes to the key point—the bombshell that he knows his audience is half expecting. ‘There is a threat to the safety of the world, a threat to the Temple of Peace; and that threat is the Soviet Union.’ He begins by insisting that he bears no ill-will either to the Russian people or towards his ‘wartime comrade Marshal Stalin’ . . .

We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure
of control from Moscow. Athens alone—Greece with its immortal glories—is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

He goes on in his
tour d’horizon
, taking in virtually everything from the atomic bomb to the situation in Manchuria. He calls for a ‘
special relationship’ between the UK and the USA, with ‘similarity of weapons and manuals of instruction’. He calls for a united Europe and a brotherhood of man; a spiritually great Germany and a spiritually great France.

It is a magnificent speech and an inspiring vision—but it was of course the commie-bashing which made the news.

Churchill was denounced as an ‘alarmist’—just as he had been accused of over-egging the threat from Nazi Germany. In London,
The Times
sniffed that his sharp contrast between Western democracy and communism was ‘
less than happy’. The two political creeds had ‘much to learn from each other’, said the fatuous editorial.

In New York the
Wall Street Journal
was appalled at the suggestion that the USA might enter into some new period of close cooperation with Britain. ‘
The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation,’ said the
Journal
;
absurdly, in view of what was about to happen in just a couple of years. The rumpus grew so loud that Truman was obliged to give a press conference, at which he weedily denied that Churchill had showed him the speech in advance.

In Moscow there were inevitable denunciations, with Churchill depicted as a crazed hand-grenade-toting warmonger. With his sinister racial theories about the superiority of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ he was the heir to the Nazis, said
Pravda
—a point explicitly echoed in an interview by Stalin himself.

At Westminster, Tory drips such as Butler (the old appeaser) and Peter Thorneycroft, later Tory Party chairman, used the kerfuffle as an excuse to start briefing against Churchill. ‘Winston must go’ was the word from the lunch tables. Labour MPs were so scandalised by his red-baiting that they called on Attlee to repudiate the speech, and when Attlee (with typical integrity) refused to do so, they tabled a motion of censure against Churchill, calling the speech ‘
inimical to the cause of world peace’. Among the ninety-three signatories of this motion was the future Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.

I have not been able to discover any public act of contrition by Callaghan—but he must surely have eventually realised that he had made a fool of himself, and that Churchill, again, was right.

Within only a couple of years it was obvious that communism in eastern Europe did indeed mean a tyranny. Stalin shut off his dominions from economic integration with western Europe. He blockaded Berlin, and attempted to starve the population into surrender. A new entity was created—the Eastern bloc—in which brutal one-party states were forced to toe the Moscow line, and in which hundreds of thousands were killed or bullied into silence. With his Iron Curtain speech (as it became known) Churchill sketched out the whole moral and strategic framework of the world in which I was born; and it was
emphatically not the world he wanted, but the world the Russians, in their paranoia, insisted upon.

Having disowned Churchill after Fulton, Truman saw that he was right—and adopted his famous doctrine of ‘containment’. His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was if anything even more hardline against the communists; and by the time Churchill came back to office as Prime Minister, in 1951, he was sufficiently alarmed by the state of global tension—and the new menace of the hydrogen bomb—that it was he, Churchill, who became the peace-monger.

He became obsessed by the idea of a ‘summit’, a frank and personal exchange of views between America, Russia and Britain (incarnated by himself). If only the world leaders could come together, he said, he was sure that world war could be avoided.

But by now he was seventy-six. He had led his country through five years of war; he had been Leader of the Opposition for six. He had marshalled his parliamentary troops heroically in the run-up to the election—staying up all night for debates, and in the course of the night he would make a series of brilliant little speeches, studded with jokes and sarcastic asides, and then at 7.30 a.m. he would top it all off with a truck driver’s breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausages and coffee, followed, as Harold Macmillan noted, by a large whisky and soda and a huge cigar.

These things take their toll. The psychic urge to power was still as strong as ever but the mortal stuff of him was beginning to fail. He suffered from arterial spasms; he had skin irritations and eye complaints. He could no longer hear the voices of children or the call of birds. A splendidly named nerve specialist called Sir Russell Brain said that the reason he suffered from a ‘
tightness’ in the shoulders was that the cells in his brain that received sensory messages from the shoulder were dead.

The story of Churchill’s last years in office is not of some giant red sun, heat gone, sinking slowly out of sight. He is no volcano puttering himself to extinction. He is Tennyson’s Ulysses—always struggling, striving, seeking: always convinced that some deed of note may yet be done. It is a story of unbelievable courage and willpower—and cunning.

In March 1953 Stalin was dead; Churchill seized the opportunity to call for a new start. I know what, he told Eisenhower: a summit! With the Russians! And let’s build on the Anglo-American partnership as the foundation for world peace. Eisenhower wasn’t interested.

On 5 June 1953 Winston Churchill sustained a serious stroke. His doctor thought he would die; and yet through sheer force of will he carried on. The following day he insisted on presiding at the cabinet, even though his mouth was twisted and he was finding it difficult to use his left arm. His colleagues didn’t even notice that he was ill—just a bit pale and quiet.

The next day he was even worse: his left side was paralysed. He was taken to Chartwell to recover, and the press was given a message that the Prime Minister required a ‘
complete rest’. No one thought to ask why. A week after the stroke he received his Private Secretary, Jock
Colville, and the Cabinet Secretary, Norman Brook. Churchill was in a wheelchair, and after dinner he said he was going to try to stand up. Brook recounted:

Colville and I urged him not to attempt this, and when he insisted, we came up on either side of him so that we could catch him if he fell. But he waved us away with his stick and told us to stand back. He then lowered his feet to the ground, gripped the arms of his chair, and by a tremendous effort—with sweat pouring down his face—levered himself to his feet and stood
upright. Having demonstrated that he could do this, he sat down again and took up his cigar . . . He was determined to recover.

And he was utterly determined to get his meeting with the Soviets—the nuclear summit at which he could reinsert himself at the head of global events. The Russians were non-committal. Eisenhower was vague. His cabinet colleagues were more or less in a state of mutiny—secretly or openly hoping he would jack it in, and yet fearful of abandoning their talisman, the one British politician to be known around the world.

By 1954 he was under subtle and continuous pressure to go, and though he was capable of astonishing feats of exertion for a stroke victim, he was starting to feel, as he put it, ‘
like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing’. Still that plane flew on for almost a year, dodging and weaving through the flak of his enemies (and quite a lot from his friends) until finally, on 5 April 1955, at the age of eighty, he went to the Palace and resigned as Prime Minister.

‘
Man is spirit’, he informed the cabinet at the last meeting, and gave them one piece of advice: ‘Never be separated from the Americans.’

The so-called warmonger had spent his last years in office engaged in what was—for him—a futile mission to bring the great powers together and to promote a ‘world easement’: by which he meant abating what he saw as the unparalleled menace of thermonuclear weapons. And yet that summit did take place—three months after he finally left office, when Eisenhower, Eden, Faure and Bulganin met in Geneva.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism—
that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous. He also understood that only capitalism, for all its imperfections, was capable of satisfying the wants of human beings.

I am of the generation that saw communism in action, in that we were sometimes able to travel behind the Iron Curtain before 1989—and to see how right he was, in every particular, in that astoundingly prescient speech in Fulton, Missouri. We saw the fear, we heard the whispering, we read the ludicrous propaganda slogans of a failing system that could not supply basic needs, and which controlled the population by taking away the elementary freedom to travel.