Winston S. Churchill by Martin Gilbert Volume VIII Never Despair 1945-1965 (1988)
Part Three: Second Premiership
42
Return to the United States
...On February 19 Churchill’s doctor found him reading George Orwell’s 1984. ‘Have you read it, Charles?’ he asked. ‘Oh, you must. I’m reading it for a second time. It is a very remarkable book.’
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Since their journey together to the United States at the end of 1951, Churchill seemed, noted Moran, ‘to have taken a new lease of life’, and-he went on to record some of Churchill’s remarks that February 24:
‘I’m much better than I was a year ago,’ he said gaily. ‘I can bite now, really hard.’ And he snapped his jaws together. ‘After our trip to America I was in poor form. Gladstone lived to be eighty-eight; I might go on another eight years. If I do it will be very tiresome for those who manage my finances. Things are already getting very complicated. You see, Charles, during the war I retired from business, but by the end of the war I had become notorious; and all sorts of things, such as film rights and for the copyright of my books, gave me quite a bit of capital. For the first time in my life I was quite a rich man. But the income-tax people take it all. I let Hyde Park Gate for £2,000 a year-2,000 sixpences.’
...Eisenhower declined to accept Churchill’s proposal for a joint Anglo-American approach to Egypt. ‘You have decided,’ Churchill wrote to him six weeks later, ‘that unless invited by Neguib, who like all dictators is the servant of the forces behind him, we cannot present a joint proposal. We therefore have to go on alone.’
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43
Stalin’s Death
...That same day Churchill telegraphed to Eisenhower:
I am sure that everyone will want to know whether you still contemplate a meeting with the Soviets. I remember our talk at Bernie’s when you told me I was welcome to meet Stalin if I thought fit and that you intended to offer to do so. I understand this as meaning that you did not want us to go together, but now there is no more Stalin I wonder whether this makes any difference to your view about separate approaches to the new regime or whether there is a possibility of collective action. When I know how you feel now that the personalities are altered I can make up my own mind on what to advise the Cabinet.
...With the last volume of his war memoirs now in the final proof stage, on March 28 Churchill sent a copy to Sir Alan Lascelles for permission to publish two messages which he had sent to King George VI. He had held the whole volume back, he explained to Lascelles, ‘until after the Presidential election in the United States, and since then I have gone over it again and taken out any critical references to General Eisenhower which, now that he is President, might conceivably damage Anglo-American relations’. Stalin’s death, Churchill added, ‘has now removed my last remaining doubts about the expediency of publishing this volume, and I hope to bring it out in the autumn’.
...The Queen gave her permission for the two letters to be published, but felt that a reference by Churchill to the London and Lublin Poles was ‘rather rough on the Poles’ and wondered whether it ought not, ‘in the interests of international amity, to be toned down a bit’. Churchill did as suggested.
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Churchill also wrote to Eisenhower on March 28, telling the President:
My dear Ike,
The sixth and last volume of my History of the Second World War was finished before I took office again & will be ready for publication, here and in the United States, towards the end of this year. It deals with the period from the launching of ‘Overlord’ down to the Potsdam Conference-a period of almost unbroken military success for the Allied arms but darkened by forebodings about the political future of Europe which have since been shown to have been only too well founded.
не пример ли это самосбывающихся пророчеств?
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Notes
...On 12 March 1953 a Royal Air Force Lincoln bomber on a routine training flight from Yorkshire was shot down near the border of the British and Russian Zones of Germany, while flying along the Hamburg-Berlin air corridor. Six of the crew were killed and one wounded. The Russians claimed that the bomber had strayed into their air space.