Читать книгу Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955 - Barbara Leaming - Страница 9

Seated beside a bed of red poinsettias near the pink brick seaside house his wife had arranged to borrow from a friend, Churchill contentedly scanned the coconut palms overhead in search of a ‘paintaceous’ angle. His tropical-weight tan suit fit snugly across his stomach. The deep creases radiating from the centre button, which looked as if it was about to burst, testified that he had grown thicker since he acquired the suit in North Africa during the war. In the white patio chair beside him, Clementine Churchill wore one of her customary headscarves, big round white-rimmed sunglasses and wrist-length white gloves. After the bone-chilling cold they had had to endure in New York harbour and the rain-splashed train windows en route through Virginia and the Carolinas, she proclaimed the intense heat and sunshine on the day they arrived in Miami Beach ‘delicious’. Churchill had lately suffered his share of colds and sore throats, and in keeping with his wife’s wishes he intended to rest and to enjoy the good weather in Florida. Still, from the outset the couple had contrasting perspectives on their stay. She saw their holiday as an end in itself, he as a chance to get in shape for the main event in Missouri.

The next morning, the Churchills were unhappily surprised. The sky had darkened and the temperature had plummeted. There followed a day and a half of shivering cold and rustling palm fronds until the afternoon emergence of the sun prompted Churchill to rush off with his painting paraphernalia. He worked for hours in the shade on a picture of palms reflected in water. Despite the knitted afghan which Clementine draped around his shoulders when she brought him his tea, he caught another cold and was soon running a slight temper ature. The episode was exactly the sort of thing they had come to Florida to avoid. At a time when he was supposed to be gearing up for Fulton, the usual concerns about pneumonia plunged him into a fit of agitation. For all of his philosophy, he always found it maddening when illness threatened to get in the way of his great plans. Friends affectionately called Churchill the world’s worst patient. This time, he alternated between insisting he wanted no medicine and taking several conflicting remedies all at once.

His fever broke after thirty-six hours. The perfect weather resumed and Churchill was able to paint again and to swim in the ocean. Welcome news arrived in the form of a message from Truman that he would soon be on holiday in Florida and would be happy to dine with Churchill on the presidential yacht. The prospect freed Churchill from the need to brave any more bad weather were he to have to fly north to confer with Truman. In the meantime, Truman sent a converted army bomber to transport the Churchills to Cuba for a week of painting and basking in the sun. The President and the former Prime Minister were set to meet after that, but when Churchill returned from Havana he discovered that Truman had had to cancel his holiday because of the steel strike. Churchill insisted he would fly to him the next day.

The exceptionally rough five-hour trip proved to be an ordeal. Churchill was finishing lunch when the B-17 bomber passed into a sleet storm above Virginia. Suddenly, plates and glasses pitched in all directions and Churchill was thrown against the ceiling. Not long afterwards, the aircraft landed safely amid a swirl of ice pellets. Churchill rose amid the shattered glass that covered the cabin and relit his cigar by way of composing himself. He descended the steps at National Airport beaming and waving his hat to Lord Halifax and other official greeters as if he had just enjoyed the most tranquil of flights. After he had bathed and dined at the British Embassy, he was off to the White House to meet Truman for the first time since Potsdam.

When Churchill last saw him, Truman had recently inherited Roosevelt’s unrealistic perception of Stalin, as well as his predecessor’s tactic of dissociating himself from Churchill in an effort to win the Soviet leader’s confidence. Accordingly, Truman had had little use for Churchill’s perspective or advice. By early 1946, however, Moscow had given the President reason to reconsider. A series of speeches in January and February by Molotov and other of Stalin’s lieutenants warning of the peril of an attack from the West had culminated, the previous day, in a bellicose address by Stalin himself. A translation appeared in American newspapers on 9 February, the day Churchill flew into Washington. Stalin’s enunciation of a tough new anti-West policy was a throwback to prewar Soviet attitudes. Immediately, as Halifax pointed out, the speech had the effect of ‘an electric shock’ on the nerves of a good many people in Washington. Could this possibly be the wartime ally with whom they had been looking forward to close future cooperation?

In part, Stalin’s confrontational tone had its origins in a two-month holiday he had taken starting in early October 1945. While the ailing, exhausted Stalin rested near Sochi at the Black Sea, he had left Molotov in charge of daily affairs at the Kremlin. The arrangement set off a chain reaction of rumour and gossip in the international press. By turns, Stalin was reported to be contemplating retirement, about to hand over to Molotov, and nearly or already dead. There were news profiles of Molotov and some of the other possible contenders should a fully-fledged succession struggle erupt on Stalin’s demise. Though he was supposed to be resting, Stalin obsessively pored over a dossier collected under the title ‘Rumors in Foreign Press on the State of Health of Comrade Stalin’. References to the second-in-command’s ever-expanding prestige both at home and abroad fired Stalin’s suspicions. Was Molotov behind the reports? Why had he not censored such material? Was the anointed heir using Stalin’s absence to con -solidate his position?

The rumours about Stalin’s health had also distressed Churchill, who continued to hope that he might one day face him across the conference table and pick up where they had left off at Potsdam. Churchill therefore had been greatly relieved when the US Ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, announced that he had visited Stalin’s seaside retreat and found the Soviet leader in good health. In the House of Commons on 7 November 1945, Churchill had expressed gratitude that Stalin was well, offered some kind words about his leadership, and voiced a wish that the bond that had developed between their two peoples during the war be allowed to continue in peacetime. On the face of it, Churchill’s remarks were innocuous. Nonetheless, when Molotov directed that they be published in Pravda, Stalin breathed fire and fury. Such praise would have been welcome during the war, but now Stalin insisted that it was simply a cover for Churchill’s hostile intentions and that Molotov should have recognized it as such.

Soon, it was reported in the British press that, according to high-level sources in Moscow, Stalin’s power was not as great as many outsiders believed and government affairs were perfectly capable of being carried on without him. Incensed, Stalin lashed out at his designated heir, who, even if he were not the actual source of such statements, should have undertaken to suppress them. Stalin set his other satellites, Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, and Anastas Mikoyan, against Molotov. They vied to denounce him for, among other outrages, consenting to an interview with the journalist Randolph Churchill. (‘The appointment with Churchill’s son was cancelled because we spoke against it.’) At length Molotov managed to stay afloat by tearfully admitting his mistakes to his rivals and penning a cringing letter to Stalin. Molotov kept his job, but from then on Stalin refrained from speaking of him as his successor.

Thus Stalin had put Molotov and the others on notice that he was always watching and that they ought not to grow too lax or too ambitious. Now, he had to dispel the rumours and to leave the world in no doubt that he, Stalin, was still number one and that he meant to keep things that way. By insisting to the Soviet people that their wartime allies in the West had already become their postwar adversaries, Stalin set himself up as the warrior whose duty it would be to drive back the enemy and save the Communist motherland – again. Under the circumstances, he simply could not contemplate retirement.

In this speech, Stalin bore no resemblance to the man Roosevelt had mistaken him for. Truman was beginning to recognize the need for a new approach to Soviet relations, one based on facts rather than on wishful thinking. Analysis of Stalin’s presentation having yet to arrive from the US Embassy in Moscow, Churchill’s take on what was going on at the Kremlin was suddenly of particular interest. And the visitor had something even more important to offer. At a time when Truman had yet to emerge from Roosevelt’s shadow, it might be difficult politically to depart from his predecessor’s Soviet policy. The Fulton speech, delivered by a private citizen who also happened to be a master of the spoken word, as well as a figure of exceptional appeal to Americans, would allow Truman, at no political cost to himself, to see if the public was ready to accept a change.

After he met with Truman, Churchill spent the night at the British Embassy. He had planned to return to Florida the next day, but snow-bound airfields caused him to stay an additional night. Besides, the difficult trip north had left him feeling bilious and unsteady on his feet. His condition persisted in the days that followed. Back in Miami Beach, he remained in bed when he received James Byrnes, the US Secretary of State, for two hours of talks. Following Churchill’s White House visit, an announcement had gone out that he and Truman would fly to Missouri together on 4 March. In view of his health, it was later quietly agreed that they would travel by train instead. Less than forty-eight hours before he and Clementine Churchill left for Washington on the first leg of his trip, he was coughing and complained on the phone to a friend that he was unwell.

Again, the timing of Churchill’s appearance in the capital was fortunate. Again, actions taken by Stalin the day before Churchill arrived gave point to the visitor’s argument. On 2 March, the Churchills were en route from Florida when Stalin failed to heed the deadline by which it had long been agreed that all Red Army troops would be withdrawn from Iran. It was the first flagrant violation of a treaty obligation since Hitler, and commentators in the US and Britain were soon anxiously comparing it to the Führer’s march into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles a decade before. The Rhineland episode had been only the first of many such unilateral violations. Would Iran prove to be the same?

In the fortnight since Churchill’s visit, the State Department had received an eye-opening message from the US Embassy in Moscow. US chargé d’affaires George Kennan had long been frustrated by his government’s naive view of Stalin. He used the present opportunity to put his considerable literary skills to work limning the postwar Soviet mind-set. Widely distributed and much read within the administration, the 8,000-word cable known as the Long Telegram did much to alter attitudes left over from the Roosevelt era. It fell to Churchill, however, to test the waters publicly. When Truman reviewed the final draft of the Fulton speech as they travelled on the ten-car presidential special to Missouri on the 5th, he called it admirable, said it would do nothing but good, and predicted it would cause a stir. Nevertheless, Churchill understood from the outset that he could count on White House support only if his presentation was well received. If he sparked off a controversy, he was on his own.

Resplendent in red robes that prompted some spectators to remark that he resembled a well-fed cardinal, Churchill made his case about time, the bomb, and the Soviet menace to an audience of 2,600 in the college gymnasium. Billed as the opinions of a private individual with no official mission or status of any kind, his comments were broadcast on radio across the US and reported around the world. As he talked on, he alternated between holding the chubby fingers of his left hand splayed across his round torso and using that hand to drive home a point.

He spoke again (though most listeners would be hearing that arresting phrase for the first time) of an ‘iron curtain’ that had descended across the continent from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. As he had done with Stalin at Potsdam, he ticked off the names of the Eastern and Central European capitals now under Soviet control. ‘This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.’ He rejected the idea that another world war was either imminent or inevitable, and he argued that Soviet Russia did not at present desire war, but rather ‘the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’.

Churchill observed that in his experience, there was nothing the Soviets respected so much as strength and nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, particularly military weakness. He called on Britain and the US to emphasize their ‘special relationship’, in the interest of being able to negotiate from a position of strength. The danger posed by Soviet expansionism would not be removed by closing one’s eyes to it; it would not be removed by waiting to see what happened or by a policy of appeasement. What was needed was a settlement. The longer a settlement was put off, the more difficult it would be to achieve and the greater the danger would become.

Returning to the theme of fleeting time which he had sounded in his address in the House of Commons on 16 August 1945, he emphasized the necessity of acting in the breathing space provided by one side’s exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. ‘Beware, I say; time is plenty short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.’

The Fulton speech set off an avalanche of criticism and controversy in the US. In the wake of Stalin’s remarks the previous month and of the Red Army’s failure to leave Iran, there was perhaps little room to quarrel with Churchill’s blunt review of the unpleasant facts. His recommendations were another matter. Members of Congress lined up to administer a vigorous spanking to Churchill for – as they had heard him, anyway – proposing an Anglo-American military alliance, calling on Washington to underwrite British imperialism, and nudging the US in the direction of a new war. At the time, Halifax privately compared Churchill’s situation in the US to that of a dentist who has proposed to extract a tooth. His many detractors were not so much claiming that the tooth was fine (given the recent news, how could they?), only that the dentist was ‘notorious for his love of drastic remedies’ and that surely modern medicine offered ‘more painless methods of cure’.

When he spoke in Missouri, Churchill had been careful to call attention to Truman’s presence on the same platform and to point out that the President had travelled a thousand miles ‘to dignify and magnify’ the occasion. Truman had applauded Churchill’s address for all to see and he had praised it to him afterwards in private conversation. In view of the uproar, however, he was quick to distance himself publicly. Three days after Fulton, he claimed not to have read the speech beforehand, and he declined to comment now that he had heard it. He wrote to his mother that while he believed the speech would do some good he was not ready to endorse it yet. Other figures associated with the administration also ostentatiously backed off. Secretary of State Byrnes denied advance knowledge of the content of the speech, though he, like Truman, had been shown a copy by Churchill himself. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson abruptly cancelled a joint appearance with Churchill in New York.

In the belief that his views had been misrepresented in Congress and in a broad swathe of the American press, Churchill spent the next two weeks trying to undo some of the damage. He made widely reported speeches and public appearances, but he also did some of his most important and effective work behind the scenes in Washington and New York. In one-on-one sessions with journalists, government officials, military leaders, and other opinion-makers, he patiently and methodically pointed out that he had called for a fraternal association, not a military alliance or a treaty. He maintained that, contrary to popular fears, he did not expect the US to back British foreign policy in every respect, or vice versa. He clarified that he had asked for a build-up of strength in pursuit of negotiations and that his purpose, as laid out in the text of the speech, was to prevent another war, not to start one. Throughout, Churchill toned down his language considerably; it was not his natural idiom perhaps, but it was what he felt people wanted to hear.

Halifax judged that by the time Churchill finished meeting with everyone on his long list he had made himself ‘a far more popular figure’ than he would have been had he returned to England immediately after Fulton. And he had done much to put across his argument that Soviet expansionism was a topic the US was going to find it impossible to evade. All in all, Churchill had provided, in Halifax’s view, ‘the sharpest jolt to American thinking since the end of the war’.

He also produced a jolt in Moscow, though the Soviets waited several days to speak out. Churchill was in Washington preparing to go on to New York when the news broke that Pravda had run a front-page editorial headlined ‘Churchill rattles the saber’. The piece denounced him for calling for an Anglo-American military alliance directed against the Soviet Union. A similar assault ran in the newspaper Izvestiya the following day. The day after that, Moscow radio broadcast a blistering attack by Stalin himself.

Speaking to an interviewer, Stalin called Churchill a ‘warmonger’, compared him to Hitler, and accused him of seeking to assemble a military expedition against Eastern Europe. He seized on Churchill’s address as an opportunity to put a face on the danger from the West which he had evoked in his speech of 9 February to the Soviet people. George Kennan characterized Stalin’s comments as ‘the most violent Soviet reaction I can recall to any foreign statement’. In a curious way, Churchill had actually done Stalin a favour. The potential aggressor that Stalin had set himself up to defeat need no longer be an abstraction; Churchill was the threat personified. As Molotov later said, the Fulton speech made it impossible for Stalin to retire.

Stalin in turn gave Churchill a boost when he attacked him. Bypassing the elected leaders of Britain and the US, Stalin portrayed the emerging East–West conflict as a personal contest between Churchill and himself. At a moment when the news of Soviet troop movements in Iran and of US protests to Moscow over its actions not only there but also in Manchuria and Bulgaria were heightening public fears about Soviet intentions, Stalin drew Churchill into a debate that conferred upon him the unique status of the voice of the West. When Stalin pounced on what were after all the remarks of a private citizen, he ratcheted up the drama as Churchill could never have done alone.

On 14 March, after a stack of evening newspapers with articles about the Stalin interview had been delivered to Churchill’s twenty-eighth-floor suite at the Waldorf Towers, he sent word to reporters in the lobby that he would make no statement – yet. He was, however, set to speak at a banquet in his honour the following night in the hotel’s grand ballroom, and he let it be known that he believed his comments would be of world interest.

Friday, 15 March, proved to be foggy, rainy, and windy. In spite of the downpour, Churchill insisted on sitting on top of the back seat of an open touring car at the head of a twelve-vehicle motorcade which advanced at a walking pace. On both sides, a row of raincoated policemen flanked the car, provided by the city of New York, which flew an American flag above one headlight and a British flag above the other. The rain flattened Churchill’s few remaining wisps of ginger-grey hair and streamed down his snub nose and jutting lower lip. Confetti clung to his blue overcoat as he held up a soggy black homburg to New York.

That evening, double rows of as many as a thousand demonstr a -tors, dubbed ‘Stalin’s faithful’ by the local press, formed outside Churchill’s hotel two hours before the banquet. Protestors carried picket signs, chanted, ‘GI Joe is home to stay, Winnie, Winnie, go away,’ and distributed reprints of a Communist Daily Worker cover showing a military cemetery with the headline, ‘Churchill wants your son’. Mounted police maintained order, especially near the revolving doors where invited guests, including the Mayor, the Governor, and numerous ambassadors and other diplomats, were to enter. (The Soviet Ambassador, notably, had sent last-minute regrets.) Inside, police detectives dressed in evening attire guarded the grand ballroom where four orchid- and carnation-laden daises had been set up in tiers on stage. A tangle of microphones marked the spot where it was widely expected that Churchill would reply to Stalin.

As the hour of Churchill’s talk drew near, Manhattan bars and restaurants filled with people eager to hear him. One midtown restaurant promptly lost much of its business when its radio failed to work at half past ten. The proprietor of another East Side spot marvelled that he could not recall a broadcast listened to by so many people or with such avidity since late 1941. Churchill came on the air twelve minutes later than scheduled, and the ovation he received at the Waldorf kept him from starting for an additional minute. At last, the familiar dogged, defiant voice on the radio answered Stalin’s challenge to the Fulton speech by saying, ‘I do not wish to withdraw or modify a single word.’

Churchill was back at the centre of great events, where he loved to be, but the exertions required to get there had cost him dearly. On the night of the broadcast he was in splendid form, but in the days that followed he experienced dizzy spells. Once or twice, as he rose from a sitting position he began to fall forward and had to steady himself by grabbing his chair. He later said that acting as a private individual rather than a prime minister had been like ‘fighting a battle in a shirt after being accustomed to a tank’.