Churchill and America by Martin Gilbert Winston Churchill loved the United States unashamedly. ‘This is a very great country my dear Jack,’ he wrote to his brother. He took pride in his American blood – his mother was born in Brooklyn – and his US connections helped him make his fortune. During the 1920s and 1930s he undertook several series of staggeringly lucrative lecture tours throughout the US – Churchill always made a great deal more as a writer and speaker than he did in politics – and cannily purchased cheap American stock during the Depression.
Above all, Churchill loved the idea of America. Its wealth of possibility invigorated him, and he was dazzled by the country’s sheer size and power. Until the end of his life, he never ceased to extol the wonders of what he called his ‘adopted country’. Martin Gilbert unobtrusively contrasts this romantic view with Churchill’s experiences in dealing with US politics and politicians.
As First Lord of the Admiralty and Minister for Munitions during World War I, Churchill was often frustrated by President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to supply war materials and to be an active ally. And he always regarded the US Senate’s 1919 vote against accepting the Treaty of Versailles – thereby making the US turn its back on the League of Nations – as a turning point in the prospects for European and global peace. He believed that the rise of Hitler was entirely preventable.
The bulk of Gilbert’s book is taken up with World War II. Heartened by his warm friendship with Franklin D Roosevelt – elected US president in the same week Hitler became chancellor of Germany – Churchill as prime minister from 1940 thought he could count on US support. He even observed that, where Britain and the US had been ‘walking out’ together they were now married. Without stretching a coy metaphor that Churchill often used, it was always a difficult relationship. Gilbert describes Roosevelt’s tricky behaviour in the desperate early days of the war, providing support for Britain but stopping short of actual help and, at one point, like a calculating lover, coming across with wat was required and immediately demanding full payment in gold.
Churchill’s relief when the US entered the war was always tempered by anxiety about the consequences of Lend Lease for the Bfritish economy and the fear that Roosevelt would abandon the US commitment to the war in Europe and concentrate on the Pacific. He knew how much Britain needed the US and found the role of junior partner – sometimes even mendicant – frustrating and humiliating.
Churchill once told Roosevelt when the latter found him stark naked in a bedroom dictating to a secretary, ‘You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide from you.’ It was a joke, but he meant it.
Roosevelt was not similarly open. He sometimes failed to share information with his wartime colleague, not telling him, for instance, of the US’s plans for the atomic bomb and arranging with Stalin behind Churchill’s back to abandon Poland to communist rule in 1945.
Gilbert writes that after the war ‘Avoiding estrangekent with the United States and seeking ‘easement’ with the Soviet Union remained the twin pillars of Churchill’s world view’.
Churchill repeatedly clashed with Eisenhower and his intransigent secretary of state John Foster Dulles about Russia: Churchill was all for seeking rapprochement with Stalin’s heirs, or at least entering into dialogue. Dulles wouldn’t hear of it, the Russians were also reluctant and Churchill watched helplessly while the standoff deepened into Cold War.
Yet despite this, Churchill always publicly expressed admiration for the IUS. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the less important he and Britain were to America’s fortunes, the more florid became his rhetoric.
Gilbert is almost a one-man academy of Churchill studies: he wrote six of the eight volumes of Churchill’s official biography and is the author or editor of at least 20 other books about him. He is clearly not in the business of messing with his subject’s reputation and anyone who wants a critical appraisal of Churchill’s politics and beliefs should not look to Churchill and America. Gilbert mostly lets Churchill’s words – in a wide range of letters, articles, speeches, interviews and memos – speak for themselves.
The effect is oddly one-dimensional: some analysis or even speculation about US policy and attitudes to Britain and its place in the world would have been welcome. Clearly Gilbert is a classic historian of the old school who is less interested in motivation than in who did what when.
But there are other books on the subject of Churchill and America, and this is a useful and interseting summary of a relartionship central to European history during the 20th century.
Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, February 2006
