The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (499 page)

Churchill was unaware at the time that the United States had exploded an H-bomb on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok in November 1952. The device was far too large—seventy tons—to fit inside an airplane. The Americans were now at work perfecting a smaller though far more powerful version. The Russians had followed in August 1953 with their own H-bomb test in Kazakhstan. Both tests had so far remained state secrets. But Churchill and the world were well aware that a hydrogen bomb would soon be exploded, somewhere, by someone, most likely the Americans.

He developed his remarkable “odd thought” further, and in doing so became the first world leader to articulate what later became known as the policy of MAD: mutually assured destruction.

Churchill left the House under his own power, strolling to the smoking room, where he drank brandy for two hours (having abandoned
his experiment with Cointreau). The speech was the final hurdle, he told Moran, to restarting the Bermuda talks. Churchill fully expected to soon be meeting with Malenkov, after gaining Eisenhower’s approval. He was ebullient, telling Moran, “I’m thinking of substituting port for brandy.” That night, Moran said this of Churchill in his diary: “I love his guts. I think he’s invincible.” Macmillan committed similar thoughts to his diary: “Indeed, he [Churchill] was complete master of himself and the House. It seems incredible that this man was struck down by a second stroke at the beginning of July.”
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Within the week, Eisenhower agreed to an early December meeting with Churchill in Bermuda, with the purpose of discussing a unified approach to the Russians, preparatory to an Anglo-American-Soviet summit. The French would attend the Bermuda meeting as well, in their role as the third Western power. Indeed, the conference had been postponed not only because of Churchill’s summertime hiatus, but because the turnover in French ministers had been so great for so long that the French government at times had no one to send to conferences. Neither the P.M. nor Eden believed the French would add anything of value to the discussion. The Bermuda talks would be fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, always a concern to foreign ministers when their heads of state are doing the flying. Churchill’s belief that Russia was ready to talk was a result, Moran believed, of Churchill existing “in an imaginary world of his own making.” On December 2, Churchill, Eden, Moran, and Colville boarded the pressurized Stratocruiser
Canopus
for the seventeen-hour flight to Bermuda by way of Gander, Newfoundland. For much of the journey—a far cry from the days of rattling and unheated B-24s—Churchill read C. S. Forester’s
Death to the French,
an unfortunate choice if he was seen carrying it into the conference.
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Clementine did not accompany Winston to Bermuda. She was in Stockholm that week to accept on Churchill’s behalf the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded for Churchill’s war memoirs. The prize was £12,500, tax free, a sum that Churchill in a note to his wife declared was “not so bad!” She likely would not have made the trip to Bermuda in any event. “Her heart had never been in this second term of office,” her daughter Mary later wrote. She was tired, and prone to agitation, especially around her husband, to whom she made clear that his soldiering on as P.M. imposed great burdens upon her. She was mistress of Chartwell and the Hyde Park Gate house, as well as hostess at No. 10 and Chequers, where the constant entertaining and steady streams of visitors were a strain. For Clementine, the present held no joy and the future promised only more worries.
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Britain had tested its first atomic bomb a year earlier. It deployed its first atomic weapons days after Churchill’s November 3 address. Yet the hydrogen
weapon, not the A-bomb, obsolete now in Churchill’s opinion, lay at the core of Churchill’s strategy to bring the Russians into disarmament talks. Soon after the Bermuda meetings began, he learned that Eisenhower did not believe likewise. As if to prove the risks inherent when heads of state sit down to talk, Churchill supported Eisenhower—in turn seconded by his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles—without hesitation when the president declared he felt “free to use,” indeed was prepared to use, atomic bombs in North Korea if the Chinese violated the armistice. Eisenhower added that he intended to say just that in an upcoming speech at the United Nations, a copy of which he gave Churchill to look over. Eden was shocked, and told Churchill so in private. Churchill began to grasp Eden’s point: any such declaration by Eisenhower would not help to bring the Russians to the conference table. Churchill dispatched Colville to Eisenhower’s quarters at the Mid-Ocean Club with a brief note in which he suggested the president temper his language by changing “free to” to “reserved the right to” use atomic weapons. Eisenhower agreed to do so, and offered as well to call for the creation of an international atomic regulatory agency.

The president then told Colville that “whereas Winston looked upon the [hydrogen bomb] as something new and terrible,” he believed it to be simply the latest “improvement in military weapons.” The president implied, Colville told his diary, that “there was in fact no distinction between ‘conventional weapons’ and atomic weapons.” Churchill had once believed likewise, in 1945, but no longer did. After Churchill at one of the plenary sessions outlined at length his “double dealing” approach to the Soviets—an atomic bomb in one hand, the other extended in friendship—Eisenhower responded with a harangue of a sort none around the table had ever heard at an international conference. As for the Soviets’ “new look,” Eisenhower compared Russia to a whore wearing a new dress but “it was surely the same whore underneath.” The French, predictably, leaked all of this to the press.
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Yet Eisenhower had to step with care. Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was riding high that year, and riding roughshod over the State Department, which for three years McCarthy had alleged was rife with Communists. When, during a private lunch in Bermuda, Churchill asked Eisenhower about McCarthy’s influence in America, the president suggested he pay no attention to McCarthy, just as Americans paid no attention to Aneurin Bevan. It was not an apt comparison; Bevan might be a socialist gadfly, but he was not a dangerous presence in British politics. Many Americans presumed the British Foreign Office and the British intelligence services were likewise infested with Reds, a conclusion drawn in part by the defections to Moscow by Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in
1951, although their exact whereabouts were not ascertained until 1956. It would not do for Eisenhower to encourage the notion that the British and Churchill had bullied him into glad-handing with the godless Communists in the Kremlin. Churchill could not bring himself to condemn his old wartime colleague for bowing to anti-Communist fury. Instead, he shifted blame onto John Foster Dulles, to whom he had taken an immediate and visceral dislike the previous year. “It seems that everything is left to Dulles,” Churchill told Moran. “It appears that the president is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll.” In any case, Churchill went home to London without his prize. There would be no Anglo-American-Soviet summit anytime soon.
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S
oon after Churchill’s return from Bermuda, the
Daily Mirror
began calling for his resignation. One
Mirror
piece, under the headline S
HADOW OF A
G
IANT,
quoted the
New York Times:
Churchill “was only the shadow of the great figure of 1940.” The
Daily Mirror’
s attacks got under Churchill’s skin, Moran told his diary, but an article and cartoon in
Punch
hit the Old Man harder. The article, titled “A Story Without an Ending,” was written by Malcolm Muggeridge, then the editor of
Punch.
It was an allegorical tale of a fictitious Byzantine ruler who had served his nation well but had lost his once-splendid faculties to old age and decrepitude. Accompanying the piece was a cartoon that depicted Churchill with a slack jaw, the left side of his face flaccid, as if from his stroke. Churchill’s hands as depicted in the cartoon—“podgy, shapeless,” in Moran’s description—peered out from white cuffs. Churchill held his hands up to Moran. “Look at my hands,” he said, “I have beautiful hands.” Then he offered that, as
Punch
goes everywhere, he must resign. Years later Muggeridge declared that statement showed that Churchill “was totally out of touch with the contemporary situation,” because by 1954 Punch did not go everywhere. It once did, Muggeridge declared, “but only in the 19th century.”
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On March 1, 1954, the Americans detonated a hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. Three months later, on June 16, Churchill convened a secret session of the Defence Policy Committee at which he and his defence ministers agreed to a dramatic new atomic policy: Britain would build its own hydrogen bomb. The decision was so secret that not even the cabinet was informed. A week later, on June 24, Churchill departed by air for Washington.
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It was his last official trip to the United States, his final chance to garner Eisenhower’s support for a summit. The usual group attended to his
needs—Eden, Moran, Colville, and Christopher Soames. His mood aboard the Stratocruiser was at first somber. To Moran he lamented the changes wrought by the Wright brothers. The world had grown smaller: “It was an evil hour for poor England.” But the mood passed, and at ten in the morning British time, he told the steward to remove his whisky and bring on the champagne and caviar. Knowing that Eisenhower, guided by John Foster Dulles, would not agree to a three-party or four-party summit, Churchill arrived in Washington with a new proposal—to conduct a two-party summit, himself and Malenkov.
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Thus his mood improved exponentially when on Friday, June 25, shortly after arriving at the White House, Eisenhower voiced no objection to Churchill’s holding bilateral talks with the Russians, and did so before Churchill had even presented his case, which he had thought would be a long and complicated process. The objective of talks with the Russians, as Churchill saw it, was to buy ten years of “easement” in relations with Moscow, such that America, Russia, and Britain could divert their monies and scientific research away from catastrophic atomic bombs and into fruitful, peaceful endeavors. Eisenhower agreed, and even suggested that he and Churchill, along with the French and Germans, hold preliminary talks in London before Churchill went off to engage the Russians. Colville noted that Dulles tried to squelch the Russian initiative, without success. Eisenhower hosted a small dinner on Sunday, described by Colville as “very gay,” with Churchill and Eisenhower agreeing that Germany must re-arm, even if over French objections. The French, Eisenhower declared, “were a hopeless, helpless mass of protoplasm.” In fact, within weeks, the EDC died in the French Assembly and the tri-party occupation of West Germany was lifted, and within ten months, Germany was welcomed into NATO. Another cause for cheer had been Eisenhower’s reaction when Churchill told him of the British decision to build a hydrogen bomb: Eisenhower had made no objection. Churchill could return to London a victor. As well, with a summit in mind, if not in hand, he now had another reason to stay on at No. 10.
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This he imparted to Eden on the return voyage to Britain, aboard the Cunarder
Queen Elizabeth,
named for the queen’s mother, consort of George VI. When asked by Eden when he might resign, he set September 21 as a tentative date. This was important, because British law called for a general election to be held at least every five years. That meant October 1956 at the latest. If Churchill stayed on well into 1955, Eden would have precious little time to chart the course of his new government before the election. Churchill understood that well. Yet he would not go before he met with the Russians.

On that front, while on board the
Queen Elizabeth,
Churchill dictated a
telegram to Soviet foreign minister Molotov in which he proposed direct talks between himself and the Soviet leaders, talks in which the United States would not participate. When Eden objected, pointing out correctly that such a message could not be sent without cabinet approval, Churchill dismissed his rationale as “nonsense,” telling Colville that if the cabinet objected, he’d resign. That, Colville told the P.M., would split the Tories and the country “top to bottom.” Churchill was practicing blackmail of a sort, and it worked. Eden backed off. Churchill’s approach to Eden, Colville noted, had been “ruthless and unscrupulous.” Eden finally agreed under Churchill’s relentless pressure to inform the cabinet that he approved of the message. The telegram to Molotov was duly sent. The Russians waited three weeks to reply, and when they did, their proposal, by its absurd demands, effectively killed any chances of bilateral talks. They demanded a thirty-two-party all-European conference, with NATO withdrawal from Germany topping the agenda. Eden had been correct: by shooting off the message, Churchill had confused the Russians, angered Eisenhower, and alienated his cabinet. They all now questioned his wisdom. Of Churchill’s crusade for a summit, Macmillan told his diary: “It was his last passionate wish—an old man’s dream—an old man’s folly, perhaps, but it might have saved the world.”
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