Winston S. Churchill by Martin Gilbert Volume VIII Never Despair 1945-1965 (1988)
Part Two: In Opposition 1945-1951
33
‘Such awful hazards’
...As she herself wrote to Churchill, in a dictated note:
With regard to Mr Wood, when I suggested that he should use the front room, I had alas quite forgotten the detectives. They now have nowhere to sit. Do you not really think that with a little politeness and pressure Mr Wood could be asked to do his work in his own house, and come two or three times a week to Hyde Park Gate to hand it over? We are really horribly short of room. The Studio is used every day by a succession of people; and as I said, having offered the Front Room to Mr Wood which I regret to say he spurns, we now have nowhere for the detectives. Sergeant Murray was seen sitting outside the Servants’ Hall on a laundry basket. It is impossible for the detectives to sit in the Servants’ Hall. They would not like it. It is very small; and the Servants would not like it either.
...The reason, as Daniel Longwell explained to Henry Luce, ‘is that his trust fund for Mrs Churchill and family will be five years old July 31st this year. If he lives past that date, all money deposited up to that time will be subject to something like a capital gains tax and not the eighty per cent inheritance tax.’1642 Thus Churchill gained the maximum benefit from the advice which Leslie Graham-Dixon had given him five years earlier.
...In the United States, public opinion had been amazed by President Truman’s decision, while the Korean War was still being fought, to dismiss General MacArthur from his command. MacArthur had wanted to bomb air bases inside China. Truman had rejected his advice. Churchill, who planned to cross the Atlantic in May, telegraphed to Truman in accepting a dinner with him at the White House: ‘I look forward very much to a talk with you. May I also assure you that your action in asserting the authority of the civil power over military comman