1 - Winston Churchill

FULTON +50very unfortunate for the US to enter into any militaryalliance with England, Russia, or any other country intime of peace." 19 Senator Aiken (R-Vt.) commented: "I'mnot ready to enter a military alliance with anyone.Britain, the United States and Russia should pull togetherto make the United Nations work." 20Others were concerned about placing the UnitedStates in the position of backing British imperialism.The New York Herald Tribune felt the speech had "miscarried"and noted that "American comment suggests areluctance to assume responsibility for all British imperialinterests." 21 The country's most prestigious columnist,Walter Lippmann, wrote: "The line of the Britishimperial interest and the line of American vital interestare not to be regarded as identical." He also criticizedwhat he saw as Churchill's call for an anti-Soviet alliance.(In private, he deplored the speech as "a directincitement to a preventive war" and an "almost catastrophicblunder.") 22 The British Embassy in Washingtonfound in its mail that the main criticism was notChurchill's warning against Soviet Russia but whatwas seen as his call for an anti-Soviet alliance in supportof British imperialism. 23While support came from The New York Times, TheChristian Science Monitor, Time and the PhiladelphiaInquirer (but not many beyond the East Coast), andfrom columnists like Ernest K. Lindley of Newsweekand George Fielding Eliot of the Herald Tribune, thespeech had ignited so much controversy that Newsweekdescribed it as the "worst diplomatic storm of the postwarperiod." 24 The Washington Post found it merely "audacious."25 At a press conference three days after thespeech, President Truman refused to endorse it andwrongly denied that he knew its contents in advance. 26Prime Minister Attlee refused to comment on thespeech in response to a question in the House of Commons.27 When Churchill visited New York for ChurchillDay on 15 March for a Broadway ticker tape parade, hewas greeted by hundreds of protestors and Under Secretaryof State Dean Acheson abruptly bowed out of hisplace as the US representative at Churchill's addressat the Waldorf Astoria, which, in the event, was unrepentant.Churchill's Philosophyof International PoliticsThe clash between Churchill and his critics, especiallythose on the left, was inevitable, for they werebearers of conflicting philosophic assumptions and traditions:indeed, it is not too much to say they representedthe gulf between the Old World and the New.Where many of the critics took inspiration from whatthey saw as the limitless potential of the future,Churchill was tempered by his knowledge of the past.Churchill's speech at Fulton was not somethingpulled together from headlines and opinion pages, butthe product of mature reflection and an impressive consistencyof outlook dating back to his youth. In 1897,aged 22, in a letter to his mother written while servingwith the Army in India, he explained his efforts to"build up a scaffolding of logical and consistent views,"which was to be constructed of facts and "muscles," orprinciples. 28 In 1936 he stated:"Those who are possessed of a definite body of doctrine andof deeply rooted convictions . . . will be in a much better positionto deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairs thanthose who are merely taking short views, and indulging theirnatural impulses as they are evoked by what they read fromday to day." 29He commented in 1953:"True wisdom is to cultivate a sense of proportion whichmay help one to pick out the three or four things that governall the rest and as it were write one's own headlines and notchange them very often." 30Among the three or four things that governedChurchill's outlook were his view of history as the greatteacher and guide; his view of unchanging human nature,with both its lust for power and impulse for liberty;power and strength as the guarantors of peace andfreedom; and the evolutionary, natural process of politics.Churchill was keenly aware of man's limitationsand skeptical of Utopian, rationalistic solutions to ageoldproblems. Like Edmund Burke and others in theempirical, conservative tradition, he saw politics as anorganic process in which concrete facts and human nature— as embodied in custom, tradition and experience— counted for far more than man-made theories, ideologicalconstructions and legalistic formulas.Churchill's philosophy is illustrated by his predictionsof the collapse of Communism. In January 1920,he predicted it would fail in Russia because it was "fundamentallyopposed to the needs and dictates of thehuman heart, and of human nature itself." He denouncedBolshevism as a". . . rule of men who in their insane vanity and conceit believethey are entitled to give a government to a people whichthe people loathe and detest .... The attempt to carry intopractice those wild theories can only be attended with universalconfusion, corruption, disorder, and civil war." 31o,ut of the "bloodshed and foment" of the civil warthen raging, Churchill continued, would emerge not thevisionary Communist republic, "but something quite different.""The ferocious military leaders and artful politicalwirepullers are the people who emerge in their owninterest and the interest of their belongings." In 1931FINEST HOUR 89/32