Lukacs J. Churchill Visionary. Statesman. Historian

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[74] Churchill and Eisenhower

us.” “Foster” now appeared in nearly every message, long or

short, important or cursory, that “Ike” or “Ike E.” sent to

“Winston.” On 7 November: “Foster will not return to Wash-

ington until the afternoon of Sunday, November 8th, the earli-

est.” Churchill would have to wait. “This will give me the op-

portunity to consult with Foster.” Next day Eisenhower ﬁnally

agreed to a Bermuda date “because this will enable Foster to

be with me.” Churchill was relieved that a date was set. “All

the same,” he wrote, “I am, as I said last time in Parliament,

hoping that we may build bridges, and not barriers.” In Ber-

muda Dulles prevailed. There would be no top-level meeting

with the Russians, only a meeting of foreign ministers on the

subjects of Germany and Austria.

By early 1954 Churchill knew that his efforts to convince Ei-

senhower were nearly useless. Eisenhower’s language in his

message to Churchill on 9 February 1954 was revealing. Pro-

claiming “the propaganda feast the enemy enjoys at our ex-

pense,” Eisenhower cited a need to “throw back the Russian

threat and allow civilization, as we have known it, to continue

its progress. . . . Unless [we] are successful . . . there will be

no history of any kind, as we know it. There will be only a

concocted story made up by the Communist conquerors of the

world.” This was the language, and the view of the world, of

the McCarthyites at the time (and of the American “conserva-

tives” and of the “neoconservatives” since that time).

At the end of June 1954 the seventy-nine-year-old Churchill

came to Washington. He looked tired. His visit coincided with

the height of the crisis of the Army-McCarthy hearings. At ﬁrst

Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to Churchill’s proposal for a

Churchill and Eisenhower [75]

summit, but then he changed his mind. Then Churchill gath-

ered his strength. On his way home aboard the Queen Mary

he drafted and sent a message to Molotov, proposing a meet-

ing, with or without the American president. Molotov an-

swered instantly in the afﬁrmative. Churchill sent the letters

to Eisenhower.

“You did not let any grass grow under your feet,” an obvi-

ously irritated Eisenhower reacted. “When you left here, I had

thought, obviously erroneously, that you were in an undecided

mood about this matter. . . . I shall of course have to make some

statement of my own when your plan is publicly announced. I

hope you can give me advance notice. . . . I probably shall say

something to the effect that while you were here the possibility

of a Big Three Meeting was discussed; that I could not see how

it could serve a useful purpose at this time; that I said that, if

you undertake such a mission, your plan would carry our

hopes for the best but would not engage our responsibility.”

He continued in a tone that was, at least in one sense, accu-

satory: “The fact that your message to Moscow was sent so

promptly after you left here is likely to give an impression

more powerful than your cautioning words that in some way

your plan was agreed at our meeting. . . . As to the content of

Molotov’s message as related in your cable, I can only observe

that it must be almost exactly what you would have expected

in the circumstances.”

Churchill answered instantly. “I have made it clear to Molo-

tov that you were in no way committed. . . . Much grass had

already grown under our feet since my telegram to you of 4

May 1953. . . . I have never varied, in the fourteen months that

[76] Churchill and Eisenhower

have passed, from my conviction that the state of the world

would not be worsened and might be helped by direct contact

with the Russia which has succeeded the Stalin era. . . . I

thought Molotov’s reply was more cordial and forthcoming to

what was after all only a personal and private enquiry than I

had expected. . . . I was struck by the fact that they did not

suggest a meeting in Moscow but respected my wish to leave

the time and place entirely unsettled.” (Later in this letter

Churchill wrote: “It is my hope that an increasing detachment

of Russia from Chinese ambitions may be a possibility, and

one we should not neglect.”)

Eisenhower would not budge. He did not think that he was

wrong “in my conclusion that the men in the Kremlin are not

to be trusted.” Churchill wrote him instantly: “I accept full

responsibility as I cannot believe that my American kinsmen

will be unanimous in believing that I am either anti-American

or pro-Communist.” On 12 July, Eisenhower returned to “your

proposed trip.” He wrote that Americans would consider

Churchill’s effort to meet with the Russians “as Hoover is sup-

posed to have said of Prohibition, ‘a noble experiment.’ ”

There was an element of impertinence in this phrase. And now

Eisenhower went further. He engaged in an attribution of

Churchill’s motives. On 22 July he wrote: “I am certain that

you must have a very deep and understandable desire to do

something special and additional in your remaining period of

active service. . . . I am sure that some such thought of your

conscious or subconscious mind must be responsible for your

desire to meet Malenkov.” (This was addressed to the Chur-

chill who a few months before had said that he was willing

Churchill and Eisenhower [77]

to talk to the Russians even at the risk of “harm to my rep-

utation.”) Then Eisenhower the psychoanalyst reverted to

Eisenhower the ideologue, declaring “my utter lack of conﬁ-

dence in the reliability and integrity of the men in the Krem-

lin.” Taking his time, Churchill answered on 8 August: “I am

not looking about for the means of making a dramatic exit or

of ﬁnding a suitable Curtain,” he wrote. “I am however con-

vinced that the present method of establishing the relations

between the two sides of the world by means of endless discus-

sions between Foreign Ofﬁces, will not produce any decisive

result. . . . Even when the power of Britain is so much less

than that of the United States, I feel, old age notwithstanding,

a responsibility and resolve to use any remaining inﬂuence I

may have to seek, if not for a solution at any rate for an ease-

ment. Even if nothing solid or decisive was gained no harm

need be done.”

But now the tempo of the exchanges diminished; and

Churchill was preparing for his retirement. On 7 December

he wrote: “I still hope we may reach a top level meeting with

the new regime in Russia and that you and I may both be pres-

ent.” Eisenhower replied: “I cannot see that a top-level meet-

ing is anything which I can inscribe on my schedule for any

predictable date.” Eventually such a meeting—the ﬁrst cold

war summit—would take place in Geneva in June 1955. It was

inconclusive, a useless summit.

Churchill’s expectations about a meeting with the Russians

in 1953 and 1954 may or may not have been exaggerated. But

he was not often wrong about the Russians. In 1944 and 1945

he was ahead of many Americans, including Eisenhower, in

[78] Churchill and Eisenhower

gauging the dangers of the Russian advance into Europe.

From 1952 to 1955 he was ahead of Eisenhower, and of all of the

cold warriors, in gauging the inevitability of Russian retreats.*

Indeed, by 1955 some of these retreats had begun. The Rus-

sians withdrew from Austria, in exchange for a reciprocal re-

moval of Western troops and a state treaty guaranteeing Aus-

trian neutrality; they gave up their naval bases in Finland;

Khrushchev was about to pay a remorseful visit to Stalin’s en-

emy Tito in Yugoslavia. Well before that Churchill had be-

come convinced that the appeal of Communist ideology had

grown feeble, and that the bloated Soviet empire in Eastern

Europe would not last.

The Churchill-Eisenhower correspondence of 1953–1955

* Henry Luce, the owner and editor of Time-Life-Fortune, was instru-

mental in Eisenhower’s presidential nomination and election. In

1944–1945 Time and Life had been sharply critical of Churchill’s anti-

Communist intervention in Greece. Eight years later, in Triumph and

Tragedy, Churchill wrote modestly: “If the editors of these well-

meaning organs will look back at what they wrote then and compare

it with what they think now they will, I am sure, be surprised.” In

the Life serialization of Triumph and Tragedy in 1953 this sentence was

omitted. In 1946 Life wrote warily of Churchill’s Iron Curtain warnings

at Fulton; Time presented Churchill as half-potted (“Downed ﬁve

Scotch highballs . . . ﬁddled with his speech. . . . His valet slipped him

a slug of brandy to reinforce him” (Time, 18 March 1946). Eight years

later Time presented him as half-doddery. “Flapping his thick arms for

emphasis ...Hehadnotabsorbed the lesson of Berlin . . . His burst

of nostalgia. . . .” In a column of less than ﬁve hundred words the

adjectives “old,” “older,” “senile,” “senescent,” “nostalgic,” occurred

nine times (Time, 8 March 1954).

Churchill and Eisenhower [79]

provides ample evidence for the need to revise the lately fash-

ionable academic approbation of Eisenhower’s statesmanship.

A sentence in Eisenhower’s last letter to Churchill in 1955

should be sufﬁcient to demonstrate this: “The Communist

sweep over the world since World War II has been much faster

and much more relentless than the 1930’s sweep of the dicta-

tors.” He wrote this on 29 March 1955, when the Russian re-

treats from Austria and Finland had already been announced;

when the Russians recognized the West German government

without demanding that the Western powers recognize the

East German one; when the ﬁrst evidences of a serious split

between Russia and China had occurred; almost two years

after the ﬁrst popular revolt in East Berlin, and a year before

the uprisings in Poland and Hungary would justify Churchill’s

beliefs about the indigestibility of the Russians’ Eastern Euro-

pean domains.

In his introduction to the Churchill-Eisenhower correspon-

dence, Boyle, a lecturer in American history at the University

of Nottingham, emphasizes the cordial tone of most of these

letters. Yet their reading does not justify his conclusion that

“many of the long letters to Churchill provide conclusive evi-

dence to repudiate the view that Eisenhower was a weak, ill-

informed president who abrogated responsibility to others

such as John Foster Dulles.” They do not. Their conclusive

evidence is that of a man obstinately self-satisﬁed with his re-

cently acquired ideological view of the world, and extraordi-

narily dependent on the often wrong, and at times even sinis-

ter, advice and inﬂuence of John Foster Dulles.

We have a few scattered phrases of Churchill’s contempt

[80] Churchill and Eisenhower

for Dulles. Telling are those recorded by Churchill’s personal

physician Lord Moran the night of 7 December 1953, after an-

other conference with Eisenhower in Bermuda:

“It seems that everything is left to Dulles. It appears that the

President is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll.”

He said no more for a time. Then he said:

“This fellow preaches like a Methodist Minister, and his

bloody text is always the same: That nothing but evil can

come out of meeting with Malenkov.”

There was a long pause.

“Dulles is a terrible handicap.” His voice rose. “Ten years

ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been

defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own

decay. Ah, no, Charles, you have done all that could be done

to slow things down.”

When I turned round he was in tears.*

A terrible sadness breathes from these words. In them sits

the air of an old man’s self-knowledge. Churchill was tired

and worn and depressed. About this his recent biographer Roy

Jenkins is wrong, when he writes that Churchill “seemed curi-

ously unfazed by [Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s] display of insen-

sitivity verging on brutality.” “Unfazed” he was not. But he

could no longer inﬂuence these Americans; and this was not

the ﬁrst instance of that.

We must, however, round out the story of Churchill’s Last

Attempt. His wish—and vision—to seek some kind of adjust-

* Cited in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Boston, 1988, 8: 936.

Churchill and Eisenhower [81]

ment with Russia was long-standing. Unlike Americans, and

many others in the Western World, he understood that the

Russians were weak as well as strong. His inclination to ap-

pease them was there even in the last years of Stalin’s life. As

early as February 1950 Churchill spoke in Edinburgh, sug-

gesting the desirability of a parley at the “summit” (that was

his word), “a supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the

two worlds, so that each can live their life . . . without the

hatreds of the Cold War.” In December 1950 he wrote to Ei-

senhower (who was not yet a presidential candidate): “Ap-

peasement from weakness and fear is . . . fatal. Appeasement

from strength is magnanimous . . . and might be the surest

way to peace.” Negotiation from strength, from the obvious

strength of the American alliance system, is what he wished

to achieve, surely after Stalin’s death in March 1953. With Ei-

senhower and Dulles he got nowhere. It was the two Dulles

brothers—the Secretary of State and his brother Allen, head

of the CIA—who set the course of the giant American ship of

state, while Eisenhower sat in the captain’s seat. Eisenhower

kept repeating: Russians never change. (At Bermuda he said,

“Russia is a whore.”)

Still we must consider that Churchill’s idea of a new ap-

proach to Russia had been rejected as early as in January 1953

by President Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson

in Washington. Moreover, Churchill’s attempts to contact

Moscow in 1953 and 1954 were also strenuously opposed by

people in his own Cabinet, including Eden and Salisbury, not

to speak of Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany, who saw

in these attempts not much more than the wish of an old man

[82] Churchill and Eisenhower

to close his career with a—historic, even more than diplo-

matic—triumph: a dangerous and headstrong attempt, pro-

pelled by vanity. That element, or factor, probably existed. But

there was more than that. Knowing some things that we know

now (including some evidence from Russian memoirs and pa-

pers), we may safely state that Churchill’s vision, whether pro-

pelled by an old man’s vanity or not, was not altogether wrong.

Churchill was a statesman, not an ideologue. Oddly enough,

it was Eisenhower who was the ideologue of the two—the

same Eisenhower, I repeat, who regarded Churchill as un-

duly dangerous because anti-Russian in 1944–1945, now regard-

ing and treating him as dangerously senile and unduly pro-

Russian in 1953–1955. Now consider that an ideologue is not

necessarily a fanatic. What he does is adjust most of his ideas

to circumstances, without recognizing the opportunism latent

in such ideological adjustments. The opportunism of a great

statesman, on the other hand, rests on his principles. What

John Morley once wrote about Edmund Burke may be applied

to Churchill: “He changed his stand; but he never changed his

ground.” Or what the aged Metternich once wrote: that an idea

is like a ﬁxed gun in a fortress, ready to ﬁre and to hit error

in one straight direction; but a principle is like a gun mounted

on a ﬁxed but revolving base, capable of ﬁring at error in all

possible directions. What mattered for Eisenhower were cur-

rent ideas. What mattered for Churchill were certain princi-

ples. Eisenhower’s view of the world, and of its inhabitants,

was political. Churchill’s was historical. They may have seen

their opponents differently: but underneath all of that lay the

difference in their characters.

Churchill, Europe, and appeasement

Much has been written about Churchill and “appeasement,”

not much (except indirectly) about Churchill and “Europe.” It

is my contention that these two themes—two preoccupations

of his mind in crucial times—were not only connected but in-

separable. He would not accept a British acquiescence in Ger-

many’s dominating Europe. He saw that prospect earlier than

had others, whence his strident struggle against the appease-

ment of Hitler’s Third Reich during the 1930s. That is not

arguable. What is arguable is his attitude toward Europe

throughout his life. After all, Britain’s alliance with the United

States was often his priority. After all, he—like most of his

countrymen—thought, at least often, that the Channel was

wider than the Atlantic. After all, he hoped for, and tried to

promote, some kind of a unity among the English-speaking

peoples, but not a British association, let alone a confedera-

tion, with a European union.

But that was not all. Certainly he was no British isolationist.

In 1889 Lord Salisbury said: “There is all the difference in the

world between good-natured, good-humoured effort to keep

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