Winston S. Churchill by Martin Gilbert Volume VIII Never Despair 1945-1965 (1988)
Part Four: Final Decade
61
New Strength, and a New Book
...The Middle East was one of the subjects to which Churchill referred in a letter which he wrote to Eisenhower on April 16. ‘I am so glad that you recognise so plainly the importance of oil from the Middle East,’ Churchill told the President. ‘When I was at the Admiralty in 1913 I acquired control of the Anglo-Persian Company for something like £3,000,000, and turned the large fleet I was then building to that method of propulsion. That was a good bargain if ever there was one.’
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Churchill also wrote in his letter of April 16 about the imminent arrival in Britain of Marshal Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, who had recently, in a speech to the Communist Party Congress, denounced Stalin and Stalinism in terms of contempt and derision. Churchill commented:
Our Russian guests are expected this week, and we shall soon see whether anything material results. We have only forty or fifty thousand professional Communists in this country, but I suppose the people as a whole will treat them on the Malenkov lines.
They have made an extraordinary volte-face about Stalin. I am sure it is a great blunder which will markedly hamper the Communist Movement. It would have been easy to ‘play him down’ gradually without causing so great a shock to the faithful.
Stalin always kept his word with me.
...During the visit of Bulganin and Khrushchev to Britain, Churchill was Eden’s guest at 10 Downing Street to meet the Soviet leaders. ‘I sat next to Khrushchev,’ he told his doctor. ‘The Russians were delighted to see me. Anthony told them I won the war.’
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Churchill also wrote to Eisenhower of the failure of the United States to share its hydrogen bomb secrets with Britain. ‘This is past now so far as the main secret is concerned,’ Churchill reflected, ‘but we have lost two or three years in having to work it out for ourselves.’ His letter continued:
I do not think, however, that a world war is likely to develop in the next decade. Till then we are, of course, defenceless against a Russian attack. After that or a lesser period we shall be able to say to the Russians, ‘If you kill twenty or thirty million Englishmen, we have made unbreakable arrangements to kill double that number of Russians in the next few days.’ The creation of such a situation would certainly be the end of nuclear war, except, of course, for accidents, which all nations have an equal interest in preventing.*
*Eisenhower disagreed with Churchill’s conclusion, writing to him in reply: ‘I do not fully share your conclusion that an end to nuclear war will come about because of realization on both sides that by using this weapon an unconscionable degree of death and destruction would result. I do think it might tend to reduce very materially the possibility of any war; but I think it would be unsafe to predict that, if the West and the East should ever become locked up in a life and death struggle, both sides would still have sense enough not to use this horrible instrument. You will remember that in 1945 there was no possible excuse, once we had reached the Rhine in late ’44, for Hitler to continue the war, yet his insane determination to rule or ruin brought additional and completely unnecessary destruction to his country; brought about its division between East and West and his own ignominious death.’ (‘Dear Winston’, The White House, Washington, 27 April 1956: Churchill papers, 2/217.)
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At Chartwell, Churchill worked on the final volume of his History. Would it come ‘right up to the present?’ Lord Moran had asked him on June 19. ‘“No, no,” he replied. “I stop in Victoria’s reign. I could not write about the woe and ruin of the terrible twentieth century.” (Sadly) “We answered all the tests. But it was useless.”’
62
‘A temple of peace’
...That same day Lord Moran noted in his diary:
Winston is very angry about Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal.
Moran: ‘Nasser is not the kind of man to keep his job for long?’
Winston: ‘Whoever he is he’s finished after this. We can’t have that malicious swine sitting across our communications.’ (He said this with something of his old vehemence.) ‘I saw Anthony on Monday. I know what they are going to say. Anthony asked me to treat it as a matter of confidence.’
Moran: ‘What will the Americans do?’
Winston snapped: ‘We don’t need the Americans for this.’
Moran: ‘Will you speak in the House?’