Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955

During his first week in London, Churchill was a whirling dervish of activity, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that he meant, and retained the capacity, to lead. He set policy with his Shadow Cabinet. He cut a lively figure on the Opposition front bench. He offered the first Opposition motion and he directed all Conservatives to be present the following week when he assailed a bill to prolong government controls on labour, rations, prices, and transport for five additional years. Parliamentary commentators noted his bronzed, robust appearance, and King George remarked privately that Churchill had returned from Italy and France ‘a new man’. As if he had energy to spare, Churchill capped off a busy week by attending a Friday evening performance of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan.

By the next morning, however, his efforts began to unravel. While her husband was at Lake Como, Clementine Churchill had worried that in his passion to transfer a scene to the canvas he might labour on oblivious to the chill of the evening air. Given his medical record, there was always anxiety that were he to catch cold it could escalate into pneumonia. As feared, he returned from the South of France with a cold. Despite promises to be careful, he largely ignored it. By Saturday, he had lost his voice. By Sunday, a statement went out that he was confined to his house on doctor’s orders due to an inflamed throat.

Churchill had rallied the troops, but in the end he would not be there to lead them. Instead, to his frustration, he spent the week in his sickbed unable to speak. At a moment when he had been eager to fashion an image of vitality, press reports brought up his prolonged bouts of pneumonia during the Second World War, his impending seventy-first birthday, and the undeniable fact that for a man of his years a tiny cold could prove to be a very big deal. In view of his comeback plans it was all a bit of a disaster, but as a friend once said, Churchill ‘produced his greatest efforts in disaster’. Adversity tended to stimulate him.

While he was abroad, a stack of invitations to speak had accumulated at Hyde Park Gate. One request in particular fired Churchill’s imagination by appealing to his sense of drama. F. L. McLuer, the president of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, asked him to lecture on international affairs. The proposal dovetailed with Clementine Churchill’s wish that they spend part of the winter in Florida for his health. Still, McLuer’s letter is likely to have been of little interest had it not been for an addendum scribbled across the page: ‘This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you. Best regards, Harry Truman’. Even Truman’s seconding of the invitation would have made little impact on Churchill without the offer, however casual and offhand, to introduce him.

Churchill instinctively grabbed on to those three words as if they were a lifeline, and he refused to let go until he had used them to hoist himself back up onto the world stage. Truman’s presence on the same platform would call world attention to his message about the looming Soviet threat in a way he could never hope to achieve by himself. In his present circumstances, it would mean everything to Churchill, a defeated politician after all, to be able to borrow and bask in the American leader’s power.

As Churchill crafted his reply, he went significantly beyond an attempt to formalize Truman’s commitment. He tried to draw the President further into the picture, to suggest that Truman had intended a good deal more by his words than he probably had. (In fact, Truman as yet had no real investment in the visit. An intermediary, a Westminster alumnus, had solicited his involvement in the invitation. Truman had merely added his hasty endorsement and passed the letter on as a favour to a friend.) Though it was McLuer who had written to him, Churchill cut the college administrator out of the loop by addressing his letter, dated 8 November 1945, directly to Truman. He wrote as if he had in hand an official presidential invitation to speak under Truman’s ‘aegis’. Careful to refer to his understanding that Truman planned to introduce him, Churchill insisted it would be his ‘duty’ to come to the US and do as the President requested. He pledged to Truman that the Fulton speech would be his only public address in America ‘out of respect for you and your wishes’.

Churchill was unquestionably distorting the tenor of Truman’s message, and his decision to point out that he had praised Truman in the House of Commons the previous day was also risky. At Potsdam, Truman had complained in his diary of what he perceived as Churchill’s efforts to soft-soap him. Nevertheless, having cleared the speaking engagement with his successor, Churchill sent off his answer via Attlee’s secretary, to be hand-delivered when the American and British leaders met presently to discuss atomic policy and related matters in Washington.

While Churchill waited for Truman to respond, he went to Paris and Brussels for a week to speak and be feted. His painting holiday had helped him regain perspective and confidence after the election and he was happy once again to receive honours. Now, with an eye towards a comeback, it suited him to shift public attention back to his war triumphs.

In Brussels, adoring crowds waited for hours to catch a glimpse of him. They fought their way past police and tossed flowers at his car. A girl managed to hurl herself onto the running board and kiss him, and an old woman was heard to declare that now that she had seen Churchill she was ready to die. He was made an honorary citizen and proclaimed ‘the saviour of civilization’. Hailed for his war leadership, Churchill missed no opportunity to showcase his achievements in the run-up to war as well. When he told a joint session of the Belgian Senate and Chamber on 16 November that had the Allies moved to stop Hitler early on, the Second World War (‘the unnecessary war’) would probably never have had to be fought in the first place, he was reminding people that he had been right in the 1930s and letting them know that he was right now.

In contrast to his rapturous reception abroad, there were no cheers for Churchill when he returned to London on 20 November. Immediately, he faced a new challenge to his leadership. This time the malcontents were younger parliamentarians who mocked their tired elders in the Conservative Party as ‘Rip Van Winkles’, content to sleep through the socialization of Britain. To the young Tories’ outrage, Churchill had been absent from Parliament on 19 November, resting at Chartwell after his trip, when Labour unveiled further nationalization plans. The party’s number two man, Anthony Eden, had been missing as well.

At a meeting of the backbenchers, Churchill slouched in a red leather armchair for an hour and a half, but he might as well have been enduring a slow stretch on the rack as his juniors by many years criticized his leadership. At the time of the general election, Churchill’s belligerence had landed him in trouble; now the complaint was that he was not belligerent enough. The man of blood had gone anaemic. The young people wanted him to set off a debate in the House of Commons on the broad matter of nationalization by introducing a motion of Government censure.

No one can have wanted to turn out the Government more than Churchill. No one can have had greater reason to be impatient. He was truly, as his father had said of Gladstone, an ‘old man in a hurry’. Still, he protested, the timing was all wrong. The Attlee Government had only been in power for a few months and it was too soon to argue that they had failed. Like it or not – and Churchill did not like it – the Opposition had little choice but to wait upon events. The Conservatives needed to let some time pass and give things a chance to go wrong. Far from benefiting Conservatives, Churchill argued, a premature confrontation would spotlight Tory weakness, allowing Labour to emerge even stronger than before.

Churchill suggested that when his critics had had more experience they would see that he had been right, but they were unyielding. At last he reluctantly consented to go on the warpath against Attlee; it was either that or allow the charge to stand that somehow he had lost the will to fight.

On the evening of 27 November, three days before his seventy-first birthday, Churchill placed a motion of censure before the House, which claimed that the Government had focused on long-range nationalization plans at the expense of the people’s immediate postwar needs. Churchill filed the motion without comment in expectation of a full-dress debate the following week.

Robert ‘Rab’ Butler, Churchill’s wartime Minister of Education, established the tone at the next day’s Conservative Central Council meeting in London. The pale, balding, pouchy-eyed Butler introduced Churchill as the ‘Master Fighter’. Churchill’s mockery of Socialist ministers elicited peals of delight, and when he slowly, mischievously flapped his arms to help listeners visualize ‘the gloomy vultures of nationalization’ hovering over Attlee’s Britain, the hall echoed with appreciative laughter. Delegates from throughout Britain insisted they had never known Churchill to be in better form.

He met a less enthusiastic reception in the House of Commons. Labour shot down Churchill’s motion – by this time, despite its genesis, it was very much identified in the public mind as his motion – by a vote of 381 to 197. But then, he had expected it to fail. What he could not have expected was the wit and ferocity of Attlee’s counterattack. Churchill was known to view his successor as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’, but there was nothing sheepish about Attlee’s devastating performance on 6 December.

Clementine Churchill watched from the gallery, and more than a hundred politicians had to stand or squat on the floor for want of seats, as the small, spare, fidgety Attlee, who had a reputation as a lacklustre speaker, gave what was widely received as the best speech of his parliamentary career to date. Attlee made Churchill seem ridiculous for asking why a Government that had been elected to carry out a socialist programme did not carry out a Conservative programme. He avowed that Britain disliked ‘one-man shows’ and he characterized the motion of censure as nothing more than ‘a party move by a politician in difficulties’.

Every time Attlee scored a hit – and there were many – the Labour benches roared. His plush pink target looked on in silence. Churchill made a point of rising above the abuse. Still, that Attlee had out-debated him was a blow to his prestige. Soon, it looked as if it might even have been a knockout, and the talk in political London was that Churchill might be preparing to step aside.

In fact, that was the last thing he meant to do. While Churchill had been managing the unrest in his party, Truman had officially confirmed his offer to introduce the Fulton speech. Since then, Churchill had been back and forth with Washington to press for a firm date, to ask that the event be announced simultaneously from the White House and in London, to urge Truman to make public his endorsement of the invitation, and to express a wish for talks between the President and himself. Ironically, when Truman granted all of these requests, the news of Churchill’s impending trip, to speak in Missouri and to enjoy a rest in Florida with Mrs Churchill, sparked new rumours of resignation.

Speculation was rife that Churchill’s willingness to leave Britain at a time of deep division in the Conservative Party meant that he intended to give up the leadership upon his return. There were reports in the world press that he was travelling to Florida on doctor’s orders and that the state of his health might soon force him to retire. Meanwhile, mindful of the havoc that had ensued when both he and Eden were missing from Parliament on 19 November, Churchill reassured a large gathering of Opposition members that Eden was set to lead in his absence. Instead of allaying fears, however, his comments provoked upset in certain Conservative quarters.

Eden enjoyed broad support in the party, but if indeed Churchill was preparing to hand over, not everyone was pleased with the prospect of power passing to Eden. His critics dismissed him as a lightweight who possessed more style than substance and who had risen only because so many of the best young men of his generation had perished in the First World War. In a public challenge to received wisdom about the succession, the Evening Standard, which was owned by Lord Beaverbrook, questioned whether Eden was quite up to the task. There followed a round of press comment, both at home and abroad, about Rab Butler and other possible successors should Churchill retire.

As 1946 began, representatives of fifty-one countries gathered in London for the first United Nations General Assembly. On 9 January, final preparations were under way at St James’s Palace for that night’s state banquet on the eve of the historic session when the Churchills sailed for America. Their giant liner, the Queen Elizabeth, which had delivered Eleanor Roosevelt and other members of the US deleg ation four days previously, was part of the effort to repatriate nearly two million American and Canadian troops that had begun after the surrender of Germany. On the present westward crossing, more than twelve thousand Canadians were finally on their way home. The day before they reached New York, Churchill addressed the troops over the ship’s loudspeaker system. In the course of speaking to them of their future, the old warrior offered some hints about how he saw his own.

As the young men prepared to begin new lives after the war, Churchill promised them that the future was in their hands and that their lives would be what they chose to make them. The trick, he told them, was to have a purpose and to stick to it. He recalled that the previous day he had been standing on the bridge ‘watching the mountainous waves, and this ship – which is no pup – cutting through them and mocking their anger’. He asked himself why it was that the ship beat the waves, when the waves were so many and the ship was one. The reason, he went on, was that the ship has a purpose while the waves have none. ‘They just flop around, innumerable, tireless, but ineffective. The ship with the purpose takes us where we want to go. Let us therefore have a purpose, both in our national and imperial policy, and in our private lives.’

Some people at the time interpreted those remarks as Churchill’s ‘farewell to politics’. In retrospect, they appear to have been anything but that. Far from being inclined to shut down his political life, Churchill, though he too was no pup, was about to restart it.

V The Wet Hen St James’s Palace, 1946 (#litres_trial_promo)

A cold rain pelted London on the night of Britain’s first state banquet since 1939. Inside St James’s Palace, crackling wood fires perfumed the air. Servants wore prewar red-and-gold and blue-and-gold liveries, and royal treasures that had been stored away for the duration of the war were once again on display. Candles twinkling in gold candelabra illuminated a banquet table set for eighty-six with heavy gold plate. As each of the fifty-one chief UN delegates and other guests entered, they were taken to a cavernous, tapestry-lined room where they were presented to the King. The fifty-year-old George VI wore the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. The Colombian delegate responsible for overseeing the preparations for the first General Assembly sat at his right, and the Belgian who was expected to be elected its president the following day sat at the King’s left. Among the topics dominating the delegates’ conversation was who would be appointed to the post of Secretary General.

Hours after Churchill sailed, Anthony Eden arrived at the UN dinner for what would be his first public appearance as deputy leader of the Opposition. For at least a week he had been fuming at the prospect of being left in charge, as he complained to Cranborne, ‘rather like a governess on approval’. Unlike Churchill, he lacked the stomach to prove himself again. Eden believed that as Foreign Secretary, as well as Leader of the House of Commons, he had demonstrated his abilities and should not have to endure another round of tests. Had not a decade passed since Stanley Baldwin made him Britain’s youngest Foreign Secretary since the mid-nineteenth century? Had not Churchill singled out his experience and capacity when he anointed him heir apparent?

There had been a time before the war when Eden struck many of the anti-appeasers as a more viable candidate for prime minister than the pugnacious, provocative, unabashedly and carnivorously ambitious Churchill. There had been a time when Cranborne, Eden, and others in their circle had barred Churchill from their meetings because they thought him unstable, untrustworthy, and unsound, and because they feared he would dominate their discussions and corrupt their cause by involving them with the adventurers who formed his claque. There had been a time when Eden’s determination to bring Conservatives together and to formulate a unified Tory position on the Fascist threat had seemed much more sensible and appealing than Churchill’s willingness, even eagerness, to split the party asunder.

Cranborne believed that when he became prime minister Churchill never really forgave the Edenites for shutting him out. Close observers would long suspect that however highly and affectionately Churchill spoke of Eden, he truly ‘despised’ his second-in-command. One could never be sure: when Churchill ostentatiously referred to Eden as ‘my Anthony’, was that a note of contempt in his voice? Nevertheless, from early on the matter of the succession in general and of Eden’s claims in particular had been prominently in play. At the outset of his premiership, Churchill had spoken of his intention to resign at the end of the war to make room for younger men. In 1940 he told Eden that he regarded himself as an old man and was not about to repeat Lloyd George’s error of attempting to carry on after the war. On various occasions and in various ways he made it clear that he wanted Eden to succeed him.

As the war dragged on, it seemed as if Eden would not have to wait for the peace after all. When there was broad dissatisfaction with aspects of Churchill’s leadership and the progress of the war, when the old man was gravely ill, and when there were fears he might soon die, Eden had had reason to believe the handover would occur at any moment. Both verbally and in his letter to the King, Churchill spelled out his wish that should anything happen to him Eden would take his place.

Despite Churchill’s assurances to Eden that it would not be long before the younger man took control, somehow that golden day always failed to arrive. There were persistent grumblings in certain quarters that the Prime Minister was ‘losing his grip’ (Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1942) and ‘failing fast’ (Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, 1944), that he had grown too old, sick and incompetent, and that he really ought to ‘disappear out of public life’ (Brooke) before he damaged both his reputation and the country; but still Churchill managed to endure. As a friend of Eden’s later said, ‘Waiting to step into a dead man’s shoes is always a tiring business, but when the “dead” man persists in remaining alive it is worse than ever.’ Ironically, in 1944 it was Churchill who took on Eden’s duties in addition to his own when the ill, exhausted heir apparent, twenty-two years his junior, needed to go off for a rest.

When Churchill battled to retain the premiership in Britain’s first postwar election, Eden was perhaps only being human when he discovered that he could not stifle ‘an unworthy hope that we may lose’. And when he did get what he had guiltily wished for, he confided to his diary that while history would dub the British people ungrateful for having dismissed Churchill, perhaps they had, in reality, only been wise. Believing that the Tories would be out for ten years, Eden spoke to friends of his fervent desire to lead the Opposition and mould the party for the future, but he also voiced concern that Churchill would insist on holding on to the job – ‘and get everything wrong’. By the time six months had passed, Eden’s fears – at least, those about Churchill’s intentions – seemed to have been realized.

As far as Eden could tell, at the start of 1946, Churchill had not even contemplated the possibility of retirement. Eden whined to Cranborne that Churchill meant to go on ‘forever’. He was sure that the Conservative Chief Whip James Stuart and the party chairman Ralph Assheton were encouraging Churchill to hold on to the leadership for as long as possible in the interest of putting off the ‘evil day’ when Eden took over. And even if Churchill were miraculously to step down, Eden was no longer confident that the party leadership, not to mention the premiership, would ever be his. He worried about being displaced by the likes of the forty-two-year-old Rab Butler or the fifty-one-year-old Harold Macmillan, though neither man was generally regarded as ready to lead. He also worried about the impatient young Tories who, when they mocked the party’s Rip Van Winkles, meant the second-in-command and other venerable Conservatives no less than they did Churchill. To make matters worse, Eden’s tumultuous personal life threatened to bar him from the premiership for good. His marriage was in tatters; Beatrice Eden wanted to marry her American lover. A divorce could sink Eden’s political dreams. Had he worked and waited all this time, for nothing?

Eden’s complaint was not that he could have been a contender. It was that he had been one for too long. At a moment when he felt ‘fed up with everything’, the prospect of a new job suggested a way out of the succession trap. Even as Churchill had been using Eden to allay concerns about his own impending absence in America, Eden had been hoping he might soon be in a position to bolt. Nothing had been settled and other names were still prominently in play, but on 2 January 1946, Ernest Bevin confirmed to Eden that he was a candidate to become the United Nations’ first Secretary General. Following their talk, Eden let it be known at the Palace that he was ‘anxious’ to be considered.

Characteristically, he was not without ambivalence. Eden had a lifelong tendency to vacillate that had prompted Lady Redesdale, the mother of the Mitford sisters, to dub him ‘the wet hen’. In the present instance, he seemed to be scurrying in all directions at once. Eager as he was to escape to the UN, he hesitated to abandon his prime ministerial ambitions after all that he had done and endured to realize them. By turns he insisted that he longed to extricate himself from the rough and tumble of British politics and vowed to return to lead his party when Churchill was gone at last. Eden’s former boss, Stanley Baldwin, warned that if he joined the UN, Butler was likely to claim the Tory leadership; once Eden made the move, there would almost certainly be no coming back.

Cranborne huffed to Conservative colleagues that if Eden took the UN job he was ‘through with him’. Typically, however, Cranborne assumed a very different posture in conversation and correspondence with Eden himself. Rather than threaten Eden, he flattered him. In his most narcotic tones, Cranborne encouraged Eden in the belief that he was indispensable to the party’s prospects. He maintained that only the designated heir could keep Conservatives together and that only he could lead them to victory in a new general election. For Cranborne, the UN episode was a flashback to the offstage tempest three years previously when Eden, already maddened by Churchill’s staying power, had considered becoming Viceroy of India. At the time, Eden had assumed that his position as Conservative heir apparent would be waiting whenever he saw fit to return. Now, as then, Cranborne, acting in his accustomed role of providing ‘the backbone to Eden’s willow’, worked hard to disillusion him. In the process, Cranborne may merely have substituted one illusion for another. He reassured Eden that Churchill’s day was finally over, that Churchill now belonged to the past, and that even he was bound to find this out. Cranborne made the case Churchill had often made himself: that Eden needed only to be patient and wait a little longer as number two.

Eden was a figure of stark contradictions. As a diplomat he was a nimble negotiator gifted with an ability to mitigate tensions and always to seem cool and composed. As a man he was also vain, touchy, and hysterical. Alcohol brought out the worst in him. When Eden arrived at St James’s Palace on 9 January, the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, guessed that he had been drinking. Immediately, Eden ripped into two of the King’s equerries as they showed him to his place at the banquet table in the William IV Room. Loudly complaining that he had been seated next to the head delegate from Nicaragua, the would-be leader of the new world peacekeeping organization made no secret of his conviction that he rated a more important dinner partner. He also seemed unhappy that he had been placed in the vicinity of Attlee.

Dinner began; the Krug 1928 champagne and other wines from the cellars at Buckingham Palace flowed; and George VI, a slight man with prominent teeth who suffered from a nervous stammer that tended to affect him when he addressed the public, spoke of the momentous tasks facing the delegates and of the need to put petty, selfish concerns aside in the interest of making the UN a success.

After dinner, the company moved to the Queen Anne Room, where the King planned to talk individually with certain guests. He was especially keen to speak to the dark-eyed, sallow-faced Russian, Andrei Gromyko (said to call to mind ‘a badger forced into the daylight’), to urge that the wartime contact between London and Moscow not be lost. George VI’s press secretary, Lewis Ritchie, brought over each of the chosen delegates, and photographs were taken at the King’s request. The bright flashes provoked a new hissy fit from Eden. Using filthy, abusive language, he protested to Ritchie that the camera lights were bothering him.

Butler, one of a small number of Opposition members present, sprang forward to apologize on Eden’s behalf, pointing out, in case anyone had failed to notice, that the man he hoped to replace as heir apparent had had too much to drink.

The next day, Lascelles drafted a stinging letter of rebuke to Eden. Realizing that he had ‘made an ass’ of himself, Eden, before he heard from the Palace, wrote an abject letter of apology. Not only had he sabotaged his candidacy for the UN job, but he had also provided ammunition to those who questioned his capacity to lead the Conservative Party.

As it happened, Churchill was asked for his thoughts on both the secretary generalship and the Tory leadership when the Queen Elizabeth docked in New York on the evening of 14 January. Flags whipped in the frosty Hudson River winds and a US Army band struck up ‘Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here’ as he descended the gangplank. Observed by the Canadian troops, whose heads stuck out of many of the ship’s portholes, Churchill made one of his dainty half-bows to a large crowd of press and American, British, and Canadian officials.

Afterwards, in a heated waiting room on the pier’s upper level, he thanked reporters for coming out on such a cold night and gamely took their questions. Clementine Churchill, swathed in black furs, helped with any words he failed to hear. In the course of bantering with reporters, Churchill addressed topics that had been the subject of speculation and gossip in London for weeks. His remarks were of particular concern to certain personally interested parties at home.

Did Churchill plan to retire from active politics? ‘I know of no truth in such reports,’ he fired back. Was he going to hand over the Tory leadership? ‘I have no intention whatever of ceasing to lead the Conservative Party until I am satisfied that they can see their way clear ahead and make a better arrangement, which I earnestly trust they may be able to do.’ Was Churchill prepared to serve as the first UN Secretary General? This question appeared to puzzle him. Churchill knew that Eden wanted the job, and before he left the country he had ‘strongly’ advised him to accept were it to be offered. (Eden, for his part, assumed Churchill wished to see him settled elsewhere so he would feel easier in his mind about staying on. Churchill similarly had counselled Eden to take the viceroyship in 1943 on the explanation that he hoped ‘to go on some years yet’.) At the time of the press conference in New York, Churchill had no idea that Eden had already torpedoed whatever chance he might have had to go to the UN. It was only now he discovered that one day previously in London some of the South American delegates had put forth the name ‘Winston Churchill’ as the latest candidate for the post. After a second’s reflection, he swatted the question aside: ‘I never addressed my mind to such a subject.’ The following day in London, Eden chaired a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet. Cranborne hovered about Eden to be sure he made better use of Churchill’s absence. In the wake of Eden’s suicidal performance at the state banquet, Cranborne was pleased to see him act calmly and effectively to consolidate his position in the party. Where Eden had bristled at suggestions that he had yet to prove himself fully, Cranborne saw the deputy leadership as a huge opportunity for their side. Whatever assurances Cranborne had previously offered to Eden in the interest of dissuading him from accepting the post of UN Secretary General, Cranborne did not really believe that Churchill would readily hand over any time soon. He did, however, hope that if the deputy leader performed well, Eden would be in a strong enough position to push Churchill out when the old man came home.

VI Winnie, Winnie, Go Away Miami Beach, Florida, 1946 (#litres_trial_promo)

Seated beside a bed of red poinsettias near the pink brick seaside house his wife had arranged to borrow from a friend, Churchill contentedly scanned the coconut palms overhead in search of a ‘paintaceous’ angle. His tropical-weight tan suit fit snugly across his stomach. The deep creases radiating from the centre button, which looked as if it was about to burst, testified that he had grown thicker since he acquired the suit in North Africa during the war. In the white patio chair beside him, Clementine Churchill wore one of her customary headscarves, big round white-rimmed sunglasses and wrist-length white gloves. After the bone-chilling cold they had had to endure in New York harbour and the rain-splashed train windows en route through Virginia and the Carolinas, she proclaimed the intense heat and sunshine on the day they arrived in Miami Beach ‘delicious’. Churchill had lately suffered his share of colds and sore throats, and in keeping with his wife’s wishes he intended to rest and to enjoy the good weather in Florida. Still, from the outset the couple had contrasting perspectives on their stay. She saw their holiday as an end in itself, he as a chance to get in shape for the main event in Missouri.

The next morning, the Churchills were unhappily surprised. The sky had darkened and the temperature had plummeted. There followed a day and a half of shivering cold and rustling palm fronds until the afternoon emergence of the sun prompted Churchill to rush off with his painting paraphernalia. He worked for hours in the shade on a picture of palms reflected in water. Despite the knitted afghan which Clementine draped around his shoulders when she brought him his tea, he caught another cold and was soon running a slight temper ature. The episode was exactly the sort of thing they had come to Florida to avoid. At a time when he was supposed to be gearing up for Fulton, the usual concerns about pneumonia plunged him into a fit of agitation. For all of his philosophy, he always found it maddening when illness threatened to get in the way of his great plans. Friends affectionately called Churchill the world’s worst patient. This time, he alternated between insisting he wanted no medicine and taking several conflicting remedies all at once.

His fever broke after thirty-six hours. The perfect weather resumed and Churchill was able to paint again and to swim in the ocean. Welcome news arrived in the form of a message from Truman that he would soon be on holiday in Florida and would be happy to dine with Churchill on the presidential yacht. The prospect freed Churchill from the need to brave any more bad weather were he to have to fly north to confer with Truman. In the meantime, Truman sent a converted army bomber to transport the Churchills to Cuba for a week of painting and basking in the sun. The President and the former Prime Minister were set to meet after that, but when Churchill returned from Havana he discovered that Truman had had to cancel his holiday because of the steel strike. Churchill insisted he would fly to him the next day.

The exceptionally rough five-hour trip proved to be an ordeal. Churchill was finishing lunch when the B-17 bomber passed into a sleet storm above Virginia. Suddenly, plates and glasses pitched in all directions and Churchill was thrown against the ceiling. Not long afterwards, the aircraft landed safely amid a swirl of ice pellets. Churchill rose amid the shattered glass that covered the cabin and relit his cigar by way of composing himself. He descended the steps at National Airport beaming and waving his hat to Lord Halifax and other official greeters as if he had just enjoyed the most tranquil of flights. After he had bathed and dined at the British Embassy, he was off to the White House to meet Truman for the first time since Potsdam.

When Churchill last saw him, Truman had recently inherited Roosevelt’s unrealistic perception of Stalin, as well as his predecessor’s tactic of dissociating himself from Churchill in an effort to win the Soviet leader’s confidence. Accordingly, Truman had had little use for Churchill’s perspective or advice. By early 1946, however, Moscow had given the President reason to reconsider. A series of speeches in January and February by Molotov and other of Stalin’s lieutenants warning of the peril of an attack from the West had culminated, the previous day, in a bellicose address by Stalin himself. A translation appeared in American newspapers on 9 February, the day Churchill flew into Washington. Stalin’s enunciation of a tough new anti-West policy was a throwback to prewar Soviet attitudes. Immediately, as Halifax pointed out, the speech had the effect of ‘an electric shock’ on the nerves of a good many people in Washington. Could this possibly be the wartime ally with whom they had been looking forward to close future cooperation?