1 - Winston Churchill

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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
FULTON +50he wrote that Bolshevism would never work because itwas at war with "intractable" human nature and wouldbe unable to control "the explosive variations of its phenomena."In the midst of the Depression, when many inthe West looked longingly at the promise of rationalistcentral planning, Churchill wrote that not only hadCommunism "lost the distinction of individuals," it had"not even made the nationalisation of life and industrypay. We have not much to learn from them, except whatto avoid." 32Later, in January 1952, at the height of the ColdWar, he told a joint session of Congress:"I am by no means sure that China will remain for generationsin the Communist grip. The Chinese said of themselvesseveral thousand years ago: 'China is a sea that salts all thewaters that flow into it.'" 33Of the subjugated states of Eastern Europe, Churchillpredicted in February 1954:"Time may find remedies that this generation cannot command.The forces of the human spirit and of national characteralive in those countries cannot be speedily extinguished,even by large-scale movements of populations and mass educationof children."He then contrasted the temporary nature of Stalin'sconquests with other results of his aggression "whichwill live and last":"Nothing but the dread of Stalinized Russia could havebrought the conception of united Europe from dreamland intothe forefront of modern thought."Nothing but the policy of the Soviets . . . could have laidthe foundations of that deep and lasting association whichnow exists between Germany and the Western world, betweenGermany and Britain and, I trust, between Germany andFrance."These are events which will live and . . . grow while theconquests and expansion achieved by military force and politicalmachinery will surely dissolve or take new and otherforms." 34Finally, in his 1957 epilogue to the one-volume editionof his World War II memoirs, Churchill wrote that Russia'speople experience every day ... those complications andpalliatives of human life that will render the schemes of KarlMarx more out of date and smaller in relation to world problemsthan they have ever been before. The natural forces areworking with greater freedom and greater opportunity to fertiliseand vary the thoughts and the power of individual menand women. They are far bigger and more pliant in the vaststructure of a mighty empire than could ever have been conceivedby Marx in his hovel. . . . [h]uman society will grow inmany forms not comprehended by a party machine." 35How interesting that Churchill foresaw the collapseof Communism even at the height of its powers — aswell as at its inception — when most scholars, with alltheir detailed study, were unable to see this as late asthe mid-1980s. Churchill's philosophy of hopes and limitsalso taught him the inescapable demands of power,which, used wisely, is the indispensable tool of progress.What Churchill called "the combined strength of theEnglish-Speaking Peoples" and their allies, not theutopian dreams of his critics, brought victory in the coldwar.FOOTNOTES1. George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little Brown& Co., 1967), p. 294.2. New York Times, 1 March, 1946, p. 10.3. Congressional Record, 27 February, 1946, pp. 1692-95.4. Beginning in mid-February, the State Department took a numberof steps to stiffen US policy in Eastern Europe, Iran and Turkey.See Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and theOrigins of the Cold War (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1986), pp. 165-170.5. See Henry B. Ryan, "Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' Speech," The HistoricalJournal, 22:4 (1979) and Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill,Vol. VIII, Never Despair, 1945-1965 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1988),pp. 192, 197.6. New York Times, 7 March, 1946, p. 1.7. Congressional Record, 6 March 1946, p. 1974.8. Ibid., p. 1970.9. New York Times, 7 March, 1946, p. 5.10. Washington Post, 6 March, 1946, p. 10.11. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, Hansard vol. 420,14 March 1946, col. 1293.Vl.Time, 18 March, 1946, p. 19.13. Newsweek, 18 March, 1946, p. 49.14. Quoted in U.S. News, 15 March 1946, p. 39 (nb: it was notWorld Report in those days).15. Saturday Review, 30 March 1946, p. 28.16. The New Republic, 25 March 1946, p. 396.17. Congressional Record, 18 November 1943, pp. 9678-79, quotedin John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the ColdWar, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1972), pp. 30-31.18. Samuel Rosenman, ed., Public Papers and Addresses ofFranklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950), p. 586(1 March, 1945).19. Los Angeles Times, 6 March 1946, p. 9.20. Ibid.2l.New York Herald Tribune, 7 March, 1946, p. 26.22. Ibid., p. 25 and Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the AmericanCentury (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1980), p. 429.23. Ryan, op. cit., p. 915.24. Newsweek, 25 March, 1946, p. 27.25. Washington Post, 6 March, 1946, p. 1.26. Public papers and Addresses of Harry S. Truman, 8 March,1946, p. 145. And see n. 5 above.27. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, Hansard vol. 420,11 March 1946, col. 760-61.28. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Vol I, Youth1874-1900 (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 334.29. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1948), p. 210.30. Address of 9 November 1953, in Robert Rhodes James, ed.,Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963 (New York:Chelsea House, 1974), Vol. VIII, p. 8507 (Cited hereafter as Speeches).31. Address of 3 January 1920, in Speeches, Vol. II, pp. 2920-21.32. "Mass Effects in Modern Life," in Winston S. Churchill,Thoughts and Adventures (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), pp. 185-86.33. Address of 17 January 1952, in Speeches, Vol. VIII, pp. 8326.34. Address of 25 February 1954, in Speeches, Vol. VIII, pp. 8532.35. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (one volumeabridgement) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 1015-16. $5FINEST HOUR 89 / 33
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1 - Winston Churchill

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