Winston S. Churchill by Martin Gilbert Volume VIII Never Despair 1945-1965 (1988)
Part Four: Final Decade
61
New Strength, and a New Book
...On March 6, in a letter to Bernard Baruch, Churchill commented on Baruch’s report that he still rode on horseback: ‘I am sure I could ride, but I have not done so for five years.’ As to Baruch’s assertion that Churchill would in a few years be accorded the opportunity ‘of righting the world’, Churchill replied that he was ‘not so sure’, adding:
However, if an emergency arises during the time I am hanging about the guardroom, I hope you will consider that I have not failed.
Personally, I think that the Soviets will exploit their peaceable policy another five or six years during which the United States is on duty. But we have made sufficient progress, though greatly hampered by the McMahon Act, to be able at the end of that time to send them back, whatever they choose to send us. It is on this that I rely for the safety of the world and the impossibility of war.
...Now a similar case had arisen, Churchill pointed out, ‘though on a much smaller scale’. Egypt and Israel were ‘face to face’. It was ‘perfectly sure’ that the United States, as well as Britain, would intervene ‘to prevent aggression by one side or the other’. The moment for this would probably never come, but, Churchill warned, ‘it may come, and come at any moment’. If Israel was to be ‘dissuaded from using the life of their race to ward off the Egyptians until the Egyptians have learnt to use the Russian weapons with which they have been supplied’, he argued, ‘and the Egyptians then attack, it will become not only a matter of prudence but a measure of honour to make sure that they are not the losers by waiting’.