The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (486 page)

Then:

He could not resist telling the audience that although a terrible war had been fought to a successful conclusion, that war need not ever have happened because “no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.” Although he did not believe the Russians wanted another war, he did believe they sought “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.” Then he arrived at his central message:

To safeguard the West’s liberties, he proposed a fraternal association of America and Britain, calling that idea “the crux of what I traveled here to say.” He offered specifics, including “the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world.”
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He had titled his speech “The Sinews of Peace.” Many heard more of a war chant. The reaction was immediate, and not favorable.
The Nation,
a small, sober, left-wing magazine, said that Churchill had “added a sizeable measure of poison to the already deteriorating relations between Russia and the Western powers,” and added that Truman had been “remarkably inept” by giving Churchill the platform from which to administer his poison.
The Wall Street Journal,
echoing the isolationist mantra of earlier in the decade, rejected Churchill’s call for an English-speaking alliance, saying that “the United States wants no alliance or anything that resembles an alliance with any other nation.” The
New York Times
noted that the speech was “received with marked applause in the passages where it dealt with the responsibility of this country to see that another World War was avoided, but the proposal for ‘fraternal association’ brought only moderate handclapping.” In fact, the Paramount movie camera set up to capture the scene caught Harry Truman applauding with vigor during Churchill’s more controversial passages. Churchill had declared himself an Atlanticist, in the Walter Lippmann mode, and Truman liked it.
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Stalin did not, and his reaction was also immediate. He granted an “interview” to Pravda, wherein he took the shrewd position that Churchill, by calling for an English-speaking union, was no less a racist than Hitler, and no less a “war monger.” By arranging the Anglo world against the rest of the world, Stalin claimed, “Mr. Churchill… [is] presenting those nations who do not speak English with a kind of ultimatum—recognize
[Anglo-American] superiority over you, voluntarily, and all will be well—otherwise war is inevitable.” The marshal had a point, and one not lost on the French, who had been seeking an understanding with Moscow for two years (de Gaulle had long predicted France and Russia would emerge as the two great postwar European powers). Truman’s response to Churchill’s address was muted. When asked by reporters in Fulton if he had read the speech beforehand, Truman declared he had not. “Much to our relief,” Clifford later wrote, “Churchill… did not contradict” the president. Still, to placate the peanut gallery, Truman forbade Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson to attend a New York reception for Churchill. Yet the arrival of Kennan’s “Long Telegram” just two weeks earlier had set the stage for a reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy, a process Dean Acheson believed necessary although slow in coming about. Churchill had spoken with emotion in contrast to Kennan’s lawyerly white paper, but their messages were similar. In those weeks a new era came into being.
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The Cold War, as it soon came to be known, had had its start before World War Two ended, but soon enough—from Moscow to London to Washington and on around the globe—all agreed that it had been declared on March 5, 1946, by the Citizen of the World Without Portfolio, in Fulton, Missouri. That month, Truman sent Averell Harriman—who just weeks earlier had resigned his Moscow post in hopes of leaving government—to London as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Stalin had not withdrawn Soviet troops from Azerbaijan, in northern Iran, as promised, a circumstance, Truman believed, that “may lead to war.” “I want,” Truman told Harriman, “a man in London I can trust.” Stalin pulled his troops from Iran weeks later, but within the year the Russians shot down a British aircraft that had strayed from one of the three Western air corridors leading to Berlin. The fires of war remained banked, but a banked fire, in English folklore, holds the most heat. From the day Churchill delivered his Fulton speech until more than four decades later, all knew the Cold War could turn hot at any time, through weakness of will, geopolitical overreach, or a cascading series of diabolically unfortunate events. Churchill left Fulton secure in his belief that peace would be guaranteed as long as America maintained its monopoly on nuclear weapons. It could not be guaranteed by a nuclear-armed Britain because the U.S. Congress that year passed the McMahon Act, which dissolved the gentleman’s agreement Churchill and Roosevelt had reached on atomic bombs. Henceforth Washington would share no atomic secrets with London. Harriman thought the law “shameful” given that during the war Britain “had given us everything they had…. Now the Congress of the United States had made it illegal even to exchange information with the British.”
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O
n September 19, 1946, seven weeks after Truman signed the McMahon Act, Churchill told a Zurich audience, “The atomic bomb is still only in the hands of a State and nation which we know will never use it except in the cause of right and freedom. But it may well be that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization, but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.”
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He had gone to Zurich not to expressly wax melancholic about the possible doom of Europe in the atomic age, but rather to propose a defense. He told the Zurich audience that the recent war had been fought to prevent a return of “the Dark Ages” and “all their cruelty and squalor,” though he warned, “They may still return.” Then:

His Fulton speech had marked the postwar renewal of his long-held vision of a special Anglo-American relationship. The 1946 Zurich address marked the start of his active campaign for a united Europe, one that would include Germany but would not necessarily include Britain. Historians ever since have plumbed the seeming paradox of Churchill’s desire for Britain to be in, but not really
in,
a united Europe. Jock Colville had listened to Churchill’s pronouncements on a united Europe throughout the war and had come to understand the root of the matter: in essence, the Old Man sought European stability such that the Royal Navy (which he presumed would assume its former role in global politics after the war) might roam over the high seas without having to fret potential troubles back home. United Europe, for Churchill, meant global opportunity for England. He had called for a “Council of Europe” in a March 1943 broadcast, and had made mention of a “United States of Europe” in a November 1945
Brussels speech. He sought such an arrangement not only to create a Franco-German bulwark against Soviet transgressions but also to align the interests of Germany and France such that they would never again have reason to go to war against each other. That would benefit both Europe and England. Churchill believed that a robust France living in harmony with a rebuilt Germany would, someday—if time and the Russians did not derail events—form such a buffer. In late 1946, neither nation, alone or together, was in any shape to form a buffer between Russia and Britain. Germany had been conquered, partitioned, and reduced in size, and the rump occupied. In France the Fourth Republic, just wobbling into existence, was conducting a pogrom against all things Vichy, while overseas it was fighting a war in Indochina against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, who had declared a breakaway republic in the north of Vietnam the year before. Rapprochement with Germany was not high on the French agenda.

The reaction to Churchill’s Zurich address was, as with his Fulton speech, muted at best. Attlee and Labour thought the objectives of European security “would be better achieved through the United Nations.” Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton believed any such movement should be driven by Europe’s Socialists and for Europe’s socialists, an attitude Churchill later derided as “squalid” and “a declaration that if Europe is to unite and Britain is to play any part in such a union, it can only be on a one-party basis—and that party the Socialists.” Ironically, Attlee, on the very day he belittled Churchill’s grand idea, also gave Churchill “Top Secret” reports that showed the Red Army maintained 116 divisions in occupied Europe, enough force, one Ministry of Defence official concluded, to make “a Russian conquest of western Europe” a “practical possibility.” When Churchill sent his son-in-law and champion of the united Europe movement, Duncan Sandys, to France to measure the French reaction to his Zurich speech, Sandys had to tell the Old Man that the French people “were violently opposed” to reconstituting a unified German Reich, although de Gaulle (out of office) “believed firmly in the project.” Yet de Gaulle’s endorsement came with a caveat: although he sought a unity of purpose between Britain and France with a possible role for Germany, the precise part Germany would play in any such arrangement had first to be determined. De Gaulle was not in the least prepared to endorse a resurgent and re-armed Reich.
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Over the next eighteen months, the European unity movement gained momentum, with Churchill pushing from the sidelines. In May 1948 he addressed Europeanists at The Hague:

He moved on to a vital part of his vision, one not shared by many on both sides of the Atlantic—the inclusion of Germany in this new Europe:

On May 5, 1949, ten nations signed the Treaty of London, which brought into being the Council of Europe. That August, after having invested much of his political capital on the issue, Churchill was rewarded with an invitation to Strasbourg and the first session of the Council of Europe Assembly. This was a true, though nascent, European parliament, a congress not of parties but of principles—of the rule of law, free speech, and international cooperation. The Germans were not in attendance, but by the following year, they would be.
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