Lecture to the Churchill Society of New Orleans,
Windsor Court Hotel, November 30, 2006

Günter Bischof, University of New Orleans

Download this lecture as a word document 

Churchill, more than any other of these great statesmen and ruthless dictators, can lay claim to the most distinguished political career prior to becoming head of government in the “darkest hour” in mid-May 1940. He had been in and out of the thicket of British politics and world affairs with a string of junior and senior Cabinet appointments since 1908. He was politically active as a very young man prior to World War I -- in the old Europe, shaped by Prince Metternich in 1815. Churchill, more than any of them, can boast multiple distinguished careers. His soaring rhetoric of asking the British people for “blood, toil, tears and sweat” to withstand the Nazis uplifted a nation as well as the entire shrinking free world; he stood out as one of the great political orators in history.

His journalism going back to the Indian frontier and the Boer War of the late 19th century first established him as a well-known writer; his life of his ancestor Marlborough established his claim as great biographer; his history of World War II won him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 (it was announced on October 6, oddly the day I was born); his history of the English speaking people solidified his reputation as a great and expansive writer. Next to these political and literary achievements, his contemporaries and the generations thereafter are still fascinated and entranced by his sheer joie de vivre.

He sported the lifestyle of a true sybarite. Martin Gilbert’s 8-volume life -- in and of itself one of the great achievements of political biography of the 20the century -- devotes pages on end to Churchill’s rambling late-night sessions. Churchill must have downed more champagne, port and brandy in his long life span than all these great leaders taken together (Stalin was not bad downing his vodkas either). Only Hitler and Stalin kept his associates up into the wee hours of the morning as mercilessly as did Churchill, holding forth on their strategic views. Yet Churchill’s intellect was more profound. They all kept their associates waiting the next day until noon to make important decisions (Hitler fitfully slept through the early hours of the D-Day invasion).

But let me come to the theme of this evening’s talk – Churchill and the Cold War. My main contention tonight is that during World War II Churchill played a vital role in starting the Cold War; he then wanted to elevate himself in a similarly central position to end it before a nuclear holocaust might wreck the world -- like Allied bombers had laid ruin to entire German cities. In this own country Winston Churchill is much better known and appreciated as a wartime leader and as a principal of the Anglo-American “special relationship” that was central in defeating Hitler. He is less visible as a major figure in the unfolding of the early Cold War.

We know him for shaping the international postwar order and for coining the memorable “iron curtain” metaphor that defined the early Cold War. But he is little appreciated for his consistent effort -- ever since his signal “iron curtain” speech in  Fulton, Missouri in early March 1946 – to “parley with the Soviets” in a summit meeting like Potsdam in 1945. It was his postwar vision to negotiate from strength with Moscow to end the Cold War, temper the civilization threatening nuclear arms race, and reinvigorate the “special relationship” with the United States. He also was an early apostle of European integration and Franco-German rapprochement. He aimed at establishing a permanent peaceful security framework in Europe à la Locarno in 1925. He desired to end the division of the continent which he helped bring about in the first place.

Churchill returned to No. 10 Downing Street in October 1951 and made summitry and a peaceful European order the most persistent theme of his second Premiership.

His most astounding literary feat was his writing of his six-volume history of  World War II between 1947 and 1953. While leader of the opposition, after the painful electoral defeat in July 1945, he remained the major figure of the Conservative Party and in Parliament and plotted his return to power as a ripe septuagenarian. With his masterful In Command of History, Cambridge historian David Reynolds has recently given us a wonderful book about Churchill’s writing and publishing his 2-million-word magnum opus The Second World War. Churchill, like no other statesmen, used his time between his two hitches in power in Downing Street 10, to write a history that has been defining our understanding of the war to this day. During many a wartime controversy he liked to say “I shall leave it to history, but remember that I shall be one of the historians.” This translates into the better known adage “History will be kind to me for I shall write it.”

At the very same time as Truman was hammered by McCarthy and the Republican stalwarts about “appeasing the Soviets”, Churchill hammered away at Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in The Gathering Storm. At the very same time in 1953, when he tried to convince President Eisenhower to meet Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin for a summit meeting to ring in a new era of détente, he was readying for publication the chapters on the crucial Yalta summit in Triumph and Tragedy (vol. 6 of The Second World War). Yet while he was waxing about summitry in 1953, he had to tone back his denunciations of Stalin’s expansionism in 1945 and Roosevelt’s cozy relationship with Stalin and their mutual “selling out Eastern Europe” to the dictator to salvage wartime cooperation. Of course, he also would not dwell on embarrassing policy decisions like the handover of some 40,000 Cossacks to the Soviet in June 1945 in Austria. This indicated that he himself was still prepared to adhere by wartime agreements and cooperate with Stalin at a time when he was slamming the Americans for pursuing the same policy to salvage wartime cooperation. Churchill’s was an unusual high wire act of writing history while trying to make it.

Reynolds aptly sums up Churchill’s literary achievement: “Awarded the Nobel Prize as modern Caesar writing in the style of Cicero, lauded by Britain’s premier literary journal for an Iliad composed by Agamemnon, and back in Downing Street this time as a man of peace not a war leader – it was such along way from the gloom of August 1945” (p. 500). Criticized for hiring a well-funded research group (“the Syndicate”, including the well-known Oxford don Bill Deakin) to help research and write The Second World War, one of the researchers rebuked such a charge as “superficial” as asking a master chef: “Did you cook the whole banquet with your own hands? (p. 502).”  

Back to Churchill and the origins of the Cold War in the final months of World War II. Churchill was one of the most vocal anti-Communists in the West from day one of the success of the Bolshevist revolution and helped engineer the Western interventions in Russia. As the chief culprit in postponing the “second front” landings in France, he aroused Stalin’s suspicions. With the “percentage agreement”, concocted with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill prepared the way for the takeover of Eastern Europe after its conquest by the Red Army in 1945.

Attempts at Yalta in February 1945 to reverse such earlier agreements, came to naught. Churchill later unfairly heaped much of the blame on the ailing Roosevelt. Churchill fought like a lion with Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in the latter part of the war to shape an Anglo-American strategy. His goal was to liberate Central Europe -- through the “soft underbelly” of Europe by way of  Italy and the “Ljubljana Gap” in northwestern Yugoslavia. Thinking ahead politically about the future of postwar Europe, while the final weeks of the war were unfolding, he worked hard to preempt  Soviet expansion. In Churchill’s vision Anglo-American armies ought to liberate the great capitals of Central Europe Berlin, Prague and Vienna in order to maintain Western influence there after the war. Yet the Americans were concerned that a reversal of already agreed to Allied strategies threatened to raise tensions among the allies and unleash military clashes with the Red Army even before the war was over (in May 1945 clashes with the Communists almost occurred over the liberation of Trieste).

In the 6th volume of his The Second World War he went a long way not to reveal too many of these profound disagreements with the Americans late in the war. Thus, in order not allow disharmony to enter his cherished “special relationship” with Eisenhower and thus threaten his chances for a summit in 1953, he cut the punch line in the final editing of one of his final chapters in Triumph and Tragedy: “Berlin, Prague and Vienna were needlessly yielded to the Soviets. Here may be discerned the Tragedy in our hour of Triumph” (p. 479). Similarly, he defanged another harsh charge, namely: “the complete victory of the most successful combination in modern times condemned more than half of Europe to a tyranny no less terrible and perhaps more enduring than that which had been vanquished by the Grand Alliance.” Instead he published the much tamer conclusion: “the overwhelming victory of the Grand Alliance has failed so far to bring general peace to our anxious world” (p. 441). Thus he could assure Eisenhower in a letter written on April 9, 1953, that “I know that nothing I have written will damage our friendship” (Boyle, p. 40).

Also, calling Molotov an “animal” was cut from the final draft of Triumph and Tragedy, since in 1953 old “iron bottom” was again Soviet Foreign Minister. Churchill recognized the threat of a breakdown of wartime Allied cooperation earlier than Roosevelt and the Americans. As early as March 1945 he warned Washington about ruthless Soviet expansionism into the center of Europe. In 1953, as he aimed at easing Cold War clashes, he needed to transcend these 1945 tensions that led to the Cold War in the first place. His persistent vision was trying to improve relations with the new leaders in the Kremlin after Stalin’s death and resume his special relationship with the Americans in order to get a summit meeting going.

In 1945 Churchill and the British Foreign Office envisioned themselves as the noble and worldly-wise “Greeks” giving advice and tutor the uncouth Americans – the new “Romans” who would govern the world. Then Churchill felt the Americans saw the world with rose-colored glasses and needed to be given a lesson in imperial governance. Apart from Churchill’s consistent late-war anxieties and warnings about Soviet aggressiveness and a future division of Europe (and Asia), the Prime Minister provided the memorable metaphor that would define the Cold War in the world public’s mind. 

On May 13, in a message to Truman, Churchill warned: “an iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands” (p. 479). As early as March 1945 he had written to FDR about “an impenetrable veil”; in mid-May he spoke of an “iron screen”; the image was gradually hardening and “by May ‘iron’ had entered Churchill’s rhetoric and his soul,” notes Reynolds (479). The line where exactly the iron curtain was being drawn down on Europe changed over time in Churchill’s mind. In the Fulton speech in March 1946, he noted that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic” an “iron curtain” had settled; and in 1953 in Triumph and Tragedy the great wordsmith revised it with an alliteration to “from Lübeck to Linz” (p. 442).  It was Churchill’s power of literary imagination to make the “iron curtain” that divided free and communist-controlled Europe the most resonant image defining Cold War tensions between a free and enslaved world.

But as the German-born historian Klaus Larres reminds us, the famous 1946 “iron curtain speech” was not only designed to rally the American public towards an engagement in containing Soviet expansionism in Europe. This perceptive Churchill scholar teaching in Northern Ireland, impresses on us in his massive Churchill’s Cold War about the concomitant vision of détente in his analysis of Churchill’s style of personal diplomacy and penchant for summitry. Churchill pioneered the idea of “negotiating from strength” with the Soviets -- what Dean Acheson would later made his signature Cold War diplomatic posture during the “ice age” of the Cold War in the early 1950s. Reminding his audience (including President Truman) at Fulton that “a new war is not inevitable,” he insisted that the Soviets wanted to enjoy the fruits of war. Rather than appeasing Moscow, Churchill advocated a general peace settlement. He noted that “the longer this is delayed the more difficult it will be and the greater the dangers will be” (p. 124). Churchill’s ultimate grand vision in his “iron curtain” speech was one of peaceful reconciliation, not confrontation as is often maintained. In the following years as opposition leader he refined this vision of a “policy of strength” through Western rearmament while striving for informal summit negotiations with the Soviets to ease Cold War tensions and settle for a peaceful future in an age of growing nuclear threat. (Larres, p. 384).

Churchill returned to Downing Street 10 in October 1951. Roy Jenkins thinks that in his second government Churchill often did not do his homework and “was gloriously unfit for office” (Jenkins, p. 845). The aging statesman set out to implement his vision of “parleying” with the Soviets. Stalin’s unexpected death on March 6, 1953, seemed to be propitious for initiating a summit with the new leaders in the Kremlin. Georgi Malenkov, who emerged as the primus inter pares among Stalin’s successors, soon proclaimed a new policy of “prolonged coexistence and peaceful competition of two different systems, capitalist and socialist” (Larres, p. 189). Washington and Bonn, as well as Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and his Foreign Office advisers along with the British Cabinet, quickly decided that the Kremlin’s clarion call for “peaceful coexistence” was a propaganda move to divide Western public opinion, especially in the matter of quick West German rearmament within the controversial scheme of an “European Defense Community” (EDC).

Churchill, however, never one to lack in supreme self-confidence, thought that the generalissimo’s death handed him a unique opportunity to “parley at the summit” level to overcome the East-West conflict and the division of Europe. As the sole surviving member of World War II’s “Big Three”, Churchill envisioned himself the last of the great statesmen capable of defusing Cold War tensions and maybe even bring about a general détente (p. 191). With the explosion of both American and Soviet hydrogen bombs in the course of 1952 to 1954, especially the terribly destructive 1954 American “Bravo” tests in the Bikini Atoll, Churchill also became increasingly apprehensive about a nuclear holocaust that could destroy civilization. Here he perceived a new urgency to defuse the Cold War conflict. He also hoped that a summit with the Soviets might keep Great Britain in the club of superpowers. Churchill, the great romantic of empire, also hoped that such a great power status might save what was left of the British Empire. On all these counts he felt that it would be missing a great opportunity not to talk to the Soviets at the highest level to make the world a safer place.

Historians since have failed to agree whether an old and increasingly senile Churchill simply did not see the handwriting on the wall about British second class power status, or indeed, whether a great opportunity was missed when Churchill’s visionary endeavors were stopped dead in their tracks by Washington and London realpolitik (see the essays in Larres/Osgood).

Between March of 1953 and the fall of 1954 a dogged and seemingly unperturbable Churchill never ceased trying to arrange some top-level bilateral British-Soviet, or trilateral British-American-Soviet summit meeting, either in Moscow, or a neutral European city. In personal letters to the President he waxed eloquently: “great hope has arisen in the world that there is a change of heart in the vast, mighty masses of Russia” (April 11, 1953, Boyle, p. 41); he cautioned Eisenhower that “it would be a pity if a sudden frost nipped spring in the bud” (April 12, 1943, Boyle, p. 43).  In incorrigible dramatic fashion, Churchill indicated that he was even prepared to go on a “solitary pilgrimage” to Moscow – without hordes of experts in his entourage or even a fixed agenda -- for a tête-à-tête with Malenkov (pp. 217 ff).

In his speech to the British Parliament on may 11, 1953, Churchill even went a step further in calling for a private and informal meeting in Moscow. He called for a revival of the Locarno Treaty of 1925, where Great Britain would guarantee a Russo-German security arrangement in Europe, namely with a united Germany (p. 223). U.S. Senate majority leader William Knowland showed the most intemperate reaction by accusing Churchill of “appeasement” and compared his proposal with Chamberlain’s journey to Munich (p. 227). Any talk of “appeasement” of dictators and “Munich”, of course, was a kiss of death at this stage of the Cold War.

Opposition to Churchill’s summit idea was uniform. President Eisenhower was more diplomatic than Kowland and thought such a meeting was premature. In a major speech in April, Eisenhower had called on the Kremlin to back up its words with “deeds” – namely concessions in Korea, Germany, Austria, and nuclear disarmament. Breakthroughs on these issue more than anything would demonstrate that the new Kremlin leaders were serious with their peace initiative. The President was also apprehensive about proving his staunch anti-Communism to McCarthy and his minions at a time when they were hunting for “Communists in the government.” A trip to Moscow indeed would have looked like appeasement (Bischof 1995, 145).

West German Chancellor Adenauer was appalled about Churchill’s initiative of advocating a neutralized unified Germany in the midst the ratification struggle over the EDC in the French Parliament. Churchill’s own Foreign Office felt that he was “whoring after the Russians” (p. 197). The perennial Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, who was impatiently waiting in the wings to be Churchill’s successor, wrote in exasperation to his son: “All is well … except that W[inston] gets daily older & is apt to ring up & waste a great deal of time. Between ourselves, the outside world has little idea how difficult all that becomes. Please make me retire before I am 80” (p. 198).

Incidentally, after a prolonged medical leave for much of 1953, Eden would get his chance in 1955 and mess things up royally in the fall of 1956 over Suez even before he was 60; he enjoyed a long retirement of 20 years.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the public, Churchill was incapacitated by a stroke in late June of 1953 for the rest of the summer; yet he kept agitating for a summit. He succeeded talking Eisenhower into a Western summit meeting at Bermuda in December 1953. In the Bermuda meeting with the French and Americans, Churchill kept pounding away at his vision of negotiating with the Soviets from a position of strength. His Private Secretary John Colville noted down in his diary:  “the P.M. (who had not prepared anything to say) launched forth into a powerful disquisition on his theory – which he calls a ’double-dealing’ policy – of strength towards the Soviet Union combined with holding out the hand of friendship … only by proving to our peoples that we would neglect no chances of ‘easement’ could we persuade them with the sacrifices necessary to maintain strong armed forces” (Colville, P. 683). Ike “came down like a ton of bricks” on Churchill’s idea of peaceful coexistence with the Kremlin, “very rude and coarse,” wrote Eden’s private secretary Evelyn Shuckburgh in his diary (Larres, p. 310).

Colville quoted Eisenhower’s reply as: “He said that as regards the P.M.’s belief that there was a New Look in Soviet Policy, Russia was a woman of the streets and whether her dress was new, or just the old one patched up, it was certainly the same whore underneath. American intended to drive her off the present ‘beat’ into the back streets.” Colville added: “I doubt if such language has ever before been heard at an international conference”; he concluded: “pained looks all around.” Eden tried to save the day by inquiring about the next meeting to. Ike replied “’I don’t know. Mine is with a whisky and soda’ – and got up to leave the room” (Collville, p. 683). This gives you a good idea of how tough and hostile Washington’s resistance to Churchill’s idea of “parleying with the Soviets” was.

Churchill made one last effort in the summer of 1954. After a visit with Eisenhower in Washington he thought he finally had the green light. On his leisurely trip back on the Queen Elisabeth II he drafted a telegram to Molotov for a meeting in Vienna to resolve the Austrian treaty issue. Eden could not talk him out of dispatching the cable in a hurry without discussing it with the full Cabinet in London. A major cabinet crisis and parliamentary row ensued that almost brought down his government. Harold Macmillan felt that Churchill’s idea of a Russian visit to save the world had become an obsession and that his judgment had become distorted; he could not concentrate and was of bad hearing and was “now quite incapable  - mentally as well as physically – of remaining Prime Minister” (Larres, p. 349).

Churchill’s failure to bring about a summit and become the big peacemaker of his age, rang in his prolonged farewell. Churchill insisted on celebrating his 80th birthday in office to postpone his retirement once again. Only when Malenkov was demoted in the Kremlin in early 1955, did Churchill finally concede that his “solitary pilgrimage” to Moscow would never have a chance of materializing.

And yet it did! Eden still had to wait until April 1955 to take over the reigns after numerous postponements of Churchill’s resignation and retirement. Strangely, within a month after Churchill’s retirement, the western powers sent a note to the Soviet Union with an invitation for a summit meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Eden, now in power, suddenly felt the time had come for top level talks among the heads of government to reduce world tensions. West Germany’s direct integration into NATO on May 5 and the signing of the Austrian State Treaty on May 15 were among the “deeds” Eisenhower had called for before he would contemplate meeting the Soviet leaders. The four power summit in Geneva took place in late July 1955 produced good atmospherics between East and West but no major breakthrough.

The summit Churchill had fought to for so valiantly in the end took place without him. Eisenhower personally tried to console him: “I cannot escape a feeling of sadness that [the summit’s delay] brought about by the persistent hostile attitude toward NATO has operated to prevent your personal attendance at the meeting” (Boyle, p. 213). However, this was disingenuous – the President’s attitude towards Churchill’s summit initiative was at least as hostile as the Kremlin’s opposition to German rearmament. Could Churchill have injected his personal diplomatic skill and achieved some type of breakthrough at Geneva? Would an earlier summit with Malenkov have produced a détente 20 years before it actually came in the 1970s? Unlikely, but we will never know.

A final note: Churchill is rightly remembered on his birthday as one of the 20th century premier statesmen; next to Pitt and Gladstone he towers among Great Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers; Roy Jenkins goes even a step further in his wonderful biography of Churchill by concluding that he was “the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street” (p. 912). His birthday is not celebrated in German speaking lands for he brought ruin to German cities in the war in the gargantuan struggle to defeat Nazism. Coming to think of it, my generation of Germans and Austrians, too, and those coming after us, should remember Churchill’s mighty and noble effort to forge a grand alliance and rally the world to defeat the barbarian Hitler state. Churchill’s effort allowed my generation to grow up in freedom and prosperity. And that should be plenty of cause to celebrate and keep alive the memory and great deeds of this giant of the Western world.




Select Bibliography
    

Bischof Günter and Stephen E. Ambrose, eds. Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1995

------- and Saki Dockrill, eds. Cold War Respite: The Geneva Summit of 1955. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press  2000

Boyle, Peter G., ed.. The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953-1955. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1990

Colville John. The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955. New York: W.W. Norton 1986

Gilbert Martin. ’Never Despair’: Winston S. Churchill, 1945-1965, vol. VIII. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co 1988

Jenkins, Roy. Churchill: A Biography. New York: Plume Pb 2001

Larres, Klaus. Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy. New Haven: Yale University Press 2002

------ and Kenneth Osgood, eds. The Cold War after Stalin’s Death: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? (The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2006

Louis, William Roger and Hedley Bull, eds. The Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press Pb 1989

Reynolds David. In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing The Second World War. New York: Random House 2005

Seldon Anthony. Churchill’s Indian Summer: The Conservative Government 1951-55. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1981

Young John. Winston Churchill’s Last Campaign: Britain and the Cold War 1951-1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996.