The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (498 page)

Acheson later wrote that the French seemed always to arrive in Washington bearing demands, while the American press believed the British did likewise, and in fact ran roughshod over American leaders. But Acheson understood that the British and Churchill had come only in search of friendship. In his third address before the U.S. Congress, an unprecedented honor for a foreign leader, Churchill made clear he had not come “to ask you for money to make life more comfortable or easier for us in Britain.” Rather, he came to pledge his support for American policies in Asia, the Middle East,
and in Europe. Speaking in a sense to the Kremlin, he declared, as he had many times since 1945, that Britain sought nothing from Russia. Although he regularly called Communists and communism sinister and malignant, he did not do so now. Nor did he refer to the Communists as “godless” or “atheists,” as was the wont of many Americans in high office. The words, in fact, do not appear in any of his public addresses delivered between 1940 and 1961. His battle was fought not over Christian dogma, but over liberty. He ended with his favorite Bismarck quote: “Bismarck once said that the supreme fact of the nineteenth century was that Britain and the United States spoke the same language. Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the twentieth century is that they tread the same path.”
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Harry Truman, who was not running for reelection in 1952, deferred to his successor any decision on a possible summit. That turned out to be Dwight Eisenhower. Churchill’s New Year’s 1952 Atlantic crossing was the first of four journeys to Washington and Bermuda that he undertook over the next three years, each one a quest for his summit prize. Implicit in that is the fact that Churchill did not leave office in a year or so as he had told his colleagues he would. Instead, he stayed on for almost four more years, in pursuit of his prize, which in the end eluded him. He never flagged in that pursuit, even as pneumonia and then a terrible stroke hobbled him, even as his colleagues, driven in part by their concern for his health, and in part by their own ambitions, sought to ease him out of Downing Street, even as Stalin and his successors rebuffed him after the ogre’s death in 1953. President Eisenhower did likewise.

Truman often told Dean Acheson that Churchill was the greatest public figure of their age. Acheson thought that an understatement. Churchill’s greatness, Acheson wrote, “flowed not only from great qualities of heart and brain, indomitable courage, energy, magnanimity, and good sense, but from supreme art and deliberate policy.” These elements, Acheson believed, fused into a style of leadership “that alone can call forth from a free people what cannot be commanded.” One would have to go back almost four hundred years, to Queen Elizabeth I, Acheson believed, to find Churchill’s equal. Churchill’s final battle, to bring the Americans, Soviets, and British to the conference table, fought into his eighties, was as dogged as any he ever fought. And yet, tragedy is the wasting shadow always cast, sooner or later, by towering heroism.

J
ock Colville later wrote that Churchill’s “return to power seemed to many to presage the recovery of hopes tarnished by the dismal aftermath
of the war.” Those hopes fell short of complete fulfillment during the three and one-half years of Churchill’s last administration, but during those years, the austerity programs and rationing disappeared, the standard of living rose, if modestly, and Europe remained at peace, albeit an uneasy peace. The first year under Churchill remained bleak: rationing was severe, and coal still scarce. Then King George VI died on February 6, 1952. Colville found Churchill in tears that morning, staring straight ahead, reading neither his official papers nor the newspapers. The Old Man feared he could not work with the new Queen, as he did not know her and “she was only a child.” But he pledged to stay on as prime minister until her coronation in mid-1953.

Here was the first delay in his promised departure; there would be more. It was much the same tactic he had used when he delayed the second front during the war: pledge support for an outcome but keep moving the timetable back. Had he announced in early 1952 that he might stay on until 1955, he’d have sparked a palace revolt by Eden, Butler, Macmillan, and most certainly by Clementine, who wanted him out of Downing Street and home in Kent.
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On April 24, 1953, the Queen summoned Churchill to Windsor Castle, where she conferred on him the Order of the Garter. He had declined her father’s offer of the Garter in 1945. At that time, the law held that the prime minister must approve the monarch’s nomination. Churchill, as prime minister, refused his own knighthood. But the law had been changed; the decision was now the Queen’s alone to make. And so Churchill became Sir Winston Churchill, K.G.

The young Queen heralded a new era of youthful optimism as the old order and the old wars receded into Britain’s collective memory. In early June 1953, twenty million Britons watched Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on live television, mostly in pubs, but the new TV experience led to a doubling of television sales in Britain. America watched, too. For the young, a golden future beckoned, rich with promise.

But not for the old. For some weeks before the Queen’s coronation, Churchill had once again, as during the war, been acting foreign minister after Anthony Eden was forced to undergo a third operation for his debilitating stomach ulcers. In his role as acting foreign minister, the P.M. concluded that the Soviets had changed their stripes following the death of Stalin in March, felled by a stroke, although rumors coming out of Moscow had it that he had been poisoned by the murderous head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, the man responsible for the Katyn forest massacres. Indeed, Beria was arrested in June. Churchill had sent friendly greetings to Stalin’s apparent successor, Georgy Malenkov, who responded in kind. It was all simply diplomatic dancing in the dark, but Churchill believed the
moment had arrived to “grasp the paw of the Russian bear.” He had told Britons since 1950 that the goal of sitting down with the Russians was to work toward a nuclear disarmament treaty, always stressing that any such treaty must include provisions for international inspections and enforcement. Now, believing the moment had arrived, he sent preliminary feelers to Eisenhower, suggesting that they meet in order to plan the big summit. Eisenhower tentatively agreed; Bermuda was to be the place, the date not yet confirmed.

Then, on June 23, just two weeks after the Queen’s coronation, Churchill went to rise from the dinner table at No. 10 and instead collapsed into his chair, unable to walk, his words slurred. Colville at first thought the Old Man had had too much to drink. Colville, Christopher Soames, and Clementine managed to get Churchill to bed. They summoned Lord Moran, who took only a few minutes to conclude that his patient had suffered a stroke. When Churchill, pale but mobile, chaired a cabinet meeting the next morning, no one present thought anything amiss. Moran moved him to Chartwell that afternoon. The next day the symptoms grew more severe, so severe that by the following day, his doctors believed the end might come within days. He lost feeling on his left side and then the ability to make a fist. Moran concluded that the “thrombosis is obviously spreading,” but did not tell Churchill in so many words. The doctor ordered bed rest—no cabinet meetings, no Questions in the House, and no Bermuda. Moran drew up a medical bulletin that referenced a “disturbance of cerebral circulation.” That phrase was axed by Rab Butler and Churchill. The edited bulletin simply stated the P.M. needed respite from his arduous duties. So began an almost two-month news blackout of a sort that would be impossible to pull off in this age of total media. Churchill’s health improved slowly during those months. During one low point, he told Colville that he’d resign in October, as he no longer had “the zest” for the work and thought the world was in “an abominable state.” He was depressed, he said, by thoughts of the hydrogen bomb.
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Then he changed his mind on the matter of resigning. With logic only Churchill could conjure, he told all those who believed he should resign due to his ill health—Clementine, his cabinet colleagues, and Lord Moran—that the time to leave office was not when he was weak but when he recovered. To speed that process, he informed Moran that he had given up brandy, substituting Cointreau instead, and that he had switched to milder cigars. He read a great deal:
Jane Eyre,
Trollope,
Candide, Wuthering Heights, 1984, Phineas Finn,
C. S. Forester. He edited his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
He banged croquet balls about on the lawn, more from frustration over his condition than from any love of the game.
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Churchill’s spirits were boosted in early July by the prospect of Eisenhower’s visiting Britain, an idea that apparently had germinated in Churchill’s imagination. In fact, Eisenhower followed in the footsteps of presidents Truman and Roosevelt, footsteps that never led to London. Bitterness was Churchill’s response as it dawned on him later in the month that Eisenhower was not coming to Britain and did not see eye to eye with him on a thaw in relations with Russia. The Democrats should have won the election, the Old Man told Colville, adding that Eisenhower was “both weak and stupid.”
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Slowly, he regained his gait and powers of speech. He was cheered by the news on July 27 that the armistice was signed that day ending the Korean conflict. But there would be no V-K day celebrations; the West had not won, and the Chinese or North Koreans might at any time violate the treaty. That night he told Moran that the opportunity for peace had been within reach before the stroke, “if only, Charles, I had the strength. I’m a sort of survival. Roosevelt and Stalin are both dead. I only am left.”
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Eden, himself frail, paid a visit to Churchill in August. By then Rab Butler was exhausting himself filling in for both Eden and Churchill. Colville noted that Eden seemed to come with one burning thought in mind: “When do I take over?” Yet it dawned on Eden that he would not be moving up to No. 10 until and unless his health improved considerably. Eden’s was a family visit, in that the previous year he had married Jack Churchill’s daughter, Clarissa, which made him Churchill’s nephew-in-law. But the familial bonds did not guarantee a warm relationship. Churchill was growing increasingly resentful of Eden’s transparent ambition. The Old Man told Colville that the more Eden tried to hustle him out, the longer he’d stay.
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Churchill ran only three cabinet meetings over three months, and kept his visits to No. 10 at a minimum. By late August he was on his way back. Still, one consulting physician, the aptly named neurologist Sir Russell Brain, told Lord Moran that he doubted Churchill could ever again give speeches or answer Questions in the House.
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C
hurchill proved Sir Russell’s diagnosis dead wrong in early November, when, on the third, he made his first parliamentary speech since the stroke. Other than members of Churchill’s cabinet, no one in the chamber knew he had been ill. Yet rumors of a stroke had percolated through the press. The
Daily Mirror
had repeated the rumor running in the American press that he had been struck down, was expected to recover, and then resign. The eyes of the world were therefore upon him that day. He covered a plethora of domestic and international matters before arriving at the root
of the matter: defense. He declared that two dominant events had taken place since 1951—the shift of hostilities in Korea from the battlefield to the conference table, and the death of Stalin. He wondered aloud if the death of Stalin had ushered in a new era in Soviet policy conducive to détente, a “new look.” He had no ready answer but told the House he believed all nations act in their best interest and that the Soviets might have “turned to internal betterment rather than external aggression.” How could the West encourage such behavior? His proposed solution was to be found in the third dominant event of the last two years: