Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955. Barbara Leaming

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СКАЧАТЬ the essentials of permanent peace.’ He rejected the idea that another world war was either imminent or inevitable, and he argued that Soviet Russia did not at present desire war, but rather ‘the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’.

      Churchill observed that in his experience, there was nothing the Soviets respected so much as strength and nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, particularly military weakness. He called on Britain and the US to emphasize their ‘special relationship’, in the interest of being able to negotiate from a position of strength. The danger posed by Soviet expansionism would not be removed by closing one’s eyes to it; it would not be removed by waiting to see what happened or by a policy of appeasement. What was needed was a settlement. The longer a settlement was put off, the more difficult it would be to achieve and the greater the danger would become.

      Returning to the theme of fleeting time which he had sounded in his address in the House of Commons on 16 August 1945, he emphasized the necessity of acting in the breathing space provided by one side’s exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. ‘Beware, I say; time is plenty short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.’

      The Fulton speech set off an avalanche of criticism and controversy in the US. In the wake of Stalin’s remarks the previous month and of the Red Army’s failure to leave Iran, there was perhaps little room to quarrel with Churchill’s blunt review of the unpleasant facts. His recommendations were another matter. Members of Congress lined up to administer a vigorous spanking to Churchill for – as they had heard him, anyway – proposing an Anglo-American military alliance, calling on Washington to underwrite British imperialism, and nudging the US in the direction of a new war. At the time, Halifax privately compared Churchill’s situation in the US to that of a dentist who has proposed to extract a tooth. His many detractors were not so much claiming that the tooth was fine (given the recent news, how could they?), only that the dentist was ‘notorious for his love of drastic remedies’ and that surely modern medicine offered ‘more painless methods of cure’.

      When he spoke in Missouri, Churchill had been careful to call attention to Truman’s presence on the same platform and to point out that the President had travelled a thousand miles ‘to dignify and magnify’ the occasion. Truman had applauded Churchill’s address for all to see and he had praised it to him afterwards in private conversation. In view of the uproar, however, he was quick to distance himself publicly. Three days after Fulton, he claimed not to have read the speech beforehand, and he declined to comment now that he had heard it. He wrote to his mother that while he believed the speech would do some good he was not ready to endorse it yet. Other figures associated with the administration also ostentatiously backed off. Secretary of State Byrnes denied advance knowledge of the content of the speech, though he, like Truman, had been shown a copy by Churchill himself. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson abruptly cancelled a joint appearance with Churchill in New York.

      In the belief that his views had been misrepresented in Congress and in a broad swathe of the American press, Churchill spent the next two weeks trying to undo some of the damage. He made widely reported speeches and public appearances, but he also did some of his most important and effective work behind the scenes in Washington and New York. In one-on-one sessions with journalists, government officials, military leaders, and other opinion-makers, he patiently and methodically pointed out that he had called for a fraternal association, not a military alliance or a treaty. He maintained that, contrary to popular fears, he did not expect the US to back British foreign policy in every respect, or vice versa. He clarified that he had asked for a build-up of strength in pursuit of negotiations and that his purpose, as laid out in the text of the speech, was to prevent another war, not to start one. Throughout, Churchill toned down his language considerably; it was not his natural idiom perhaps, but it was what he felt people wanted to hear.

      Halifax judged that by the time Churchill finished meeting with everyone on his long list he had made himself ‘a far more popular figure’ than he would have been had he returned to England immediately after Fulton. And he had done much to put across his argument that Soviet expansionism was a topic the US was going to find it impossible to evade. All in all, Churchill had provided, in Halifax’s view, ‘the sharpest jolt to American thinking since the end of the war’.

      He also produced a jolt in Moscow, though the Soviets waited several days to speak out. Churchill was in Washington preparing to go on to New York when the news broke that Pravda had run a front-page editorial headlined ‘Churchill rattles the saber’. The piece denounced him for calling for an Anglo-American military alliance directed against the Soviet Union. A similar assault ran in the newspaper Izvestiya the following day. The day after that, Moscow radio broadcast a blistering attack by Stalin himself.

      Speaking to an interviewer, Stalin called Churchill a ‘warmonger’, compared him to Hitler, and accused him of seeking to assemble a military expedition against Eastern Europe. He seized on Churchill’s address as an opportunity to put a face on the danger from the West which he had evoked in his speech of 9 February to the Soviet people. George Kennan characterized Stalin’s comments as ‘the most violent Soviet reaction I can recall to any foreign statement’. In a curious way, Churchill had actually done Stalin a favour. The potential aggressor that Stalin had set himself up to defeat need no longer be an abstraction; Churchill was the threat personified. As Molotov later said, the Fulton speech made it impossible for Stalin to retire.

      Stalin in turn gave Churchill a boost when he attacked him. Bypassing the elected leaders of Britain and the US, Stalin portrayed the emerging East–West conflict as a personal contest between Churchill and himself. At a moment when the news of Soviet troop movements in Iran and of US protests to Moscow over its actions not only there but also in Manchuria and Bulgaria were heightening public fears about Soviet intentions, Stalin drew Churchill into a debate that conferred upon him the unique status of the voice of the West. When Stalin pounced on what were after all the remarks of a private citizen, he ratcheted up the drama as Churchill could never have done alone.

      On 14 March, after a stack of evening newspapers with articles about the Stalin interview had been delivered to Churchill’s twenty-eighth-floor suite at the Waldorf Towers, he sent word to reporters in the lobby that he would make no statement – yet. He was, however, set to speak at a banquet in his honour the following night in the hotel’s grand ballroom, and he let it be known that he believed his comments would be of world interest.

      Friday, 15 March, proved to be foggy, rainy, and windy. In spite of the downpour, Churchill insisted on sitting on top of the back seat of an open touring car at the head of a twelve-vehicle motorcade which advanced at a walking pace. On both sides, a row of raincoated policemen flanked the car, provided by the city of New York, which flew an American flag above one headlight and a British flag above the other. The rain flattened Churchill’s few remaining wisps of ginger-grey hair and streamed down his snub nose and jutting lower lip. Confetti clung to his blue overcoat as he held up a soggy black homburg to New York.

      That evening, double rows of as many as a thousand demonstr a -tors, dubbed ‘Stalin’s faithful’ by the local press, formed outside Churchill’s hotel two hours before the banquet. Protestors carried picket signs, chanted, ‘GI Joe is home to stay, Winnie, Winnie, go away,’ and distributed reprints of a Communist Daily Worker cover showing a military cemetery with the headline, ‘Churchill wants your son’. Mounted police maintained order, especially near the revolving doors where invited guests, including the Mayor, the Governor, and numerous ambassadors and other diplomats, were to enter. (The Soviet Ambassador, notably, had sent last-minute regrets.) Inside, police detectives dressed in evening attire guarded the grand ballroom where four orchid- and carnation-laden daises had been set up in tiers on stage. A tangle of microphones marked the spot where it was widely expected that Churchill would reply to Stalin.

      As the hour of Churchill’s talk drew near, Manhattan bars and restaurants filled with people eager to hear him. One midtown restaurant promptly СКАЧАТЬ