“Will it not be a terrible disgrace,” he asked the House, “to our name and record if, after our fourteen months’ time limit, we allow one fifth of the population of the globe, occupying a region nearly as large as Europe, to fall into chaos and into carnage?” On August 15, 1947—a date Nehru called “a tryst with destiny”—India and Pakistan gained their independence. In coming months, more than seven million Hindus fled Pakistan for India, and a like number of Muslims fled India for Pakistan. At least five hundred thousand Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered in the Punjab alone, the responsibility for which, Churchill told the House, rested with the Socialist government. In late October, India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir. On January 30, 1948, a Hindu extremist murdered Mohandas Gandhi, who shared with Churchill a vision of a united India and the end of the caste system.⁹⁷

Since the war’s end, Churchill had also advised Attlee and Bevin to reach an agreement with Burma, before it, too, bolted the Empire, which it duly did on January 4, 1948, when it exited both the Empire and the Commonwealth as an independent republic. Churchill told the House: “In Burma also my solemn warnings have been fulfilled. Burma has been cast away and is now a foreign country. It is already descending rapidly into a welter of murder and anarchy, the outcome of which will probably be a Communist Republic.” Matters were no better in Malaya, where the eleven Malayan states were reconfigured as a British protectorate in 1948. There, Churchill told the House, “the long arm of Communism, unchecked by feeble British Administration, has begun a campaign of murdering British planters and their wives as part of the general process of our ejection.” Repeatedly Churchill described Attlee’s foreign policy as a scuttle from responsibilities—in Egypt, Palestine, India, Malaya, and Burma—with a resultant loss of both honor and innocent lives. “It does not matter where you look in the world,” Churchill told the House in June 1948, “you will see how grievously the name and prestige of Britain have suffered since the British Nation fell flat upon its face in the moment of its greatest victory.”⁹⁸

By early 1948, the Western allies had ceased dismantling German factories and shipping them to Russia. In late February the Czech Communist Party, on orders from Moscow and protected by the Red Army, seized power. Eduard Beneš resigned three months later rather than protest the takeover and risk civil war. He would have gotten no military assistance from the West, which once again, as in the days of Munich, lacked the political will to influence events in central Europe. On April 17, the new American ambassador to Britain, Lewis “Lew” Douglas, reported to the State Department that Churchill had told him “now is the time, promptly, to tell the Soviets that if they do not retire from Berlin and abandon Eastern Germany, withdrawing to the Polish frontiers, we will raze their cities.” A week later, Churchill told the Conservative Women’s Conference:⁹⁹

Their lot [the Czechs] has been indeed hard. No sooner were they freed from the tyranny of Hitler’s Gauleiters than, like Poland, they were dragged down into subjugation by the Soviet Quislings…. I hear people say of the Soviet aggressions and intrigues, “Thus far and no farther.” That is no doubt a widely-held resolve. But we must not delude ourselves. There will never be a settled peace in Europe while Asiatic Imperialism and Communist domination rule over the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.¹⁰⁰

But how, other than by force, would “Communist domination” be reversed?

Ten weeks later, on June 24, the Soviets threw a road-and-rail blockade around Berlin. Britain and the United States, in order to feed and fuel their occupation zones, sent thousands of C-54s and C-47s—which had once dropped Allied paratroopers into France—along the air corridors to Berlin. Between June 1948 and May 1949, every meal consumed by Berliners in the Allied sectors, every ounce of coal they burned to heat their homes—a daily requirement of food and fuel of more than 4,500 tons—came by way of the U.S. Air Force and the RAF, which flew more than two hundred thousand flights in all. The decision on whether to go to war rested with the Russians. Were they to shoot down a British or American aircraft flying within the air corridors, even by accident, there would be war. Were the Red Army to march on the Allied sectors of Berlin, there would be war. In a display of resolve, the United States flew squadrons of Flying Fortresses into East Anglia. B-29s followed. They carried atomic weapons. The presence of the aircraft in Britain was not lost on Moscow, which responded by announcing that Soviet air forces would conduct war games over Berlin. “The City is getting panicky,” Harold Nicolson told his diary. “It seems to be the final conflict for the mastery of the world.” He added: “The Barbarians are at the gate.”¹⁰¹

In the autumn of 1948, Bertrand Russell shocked liberals on both sides of the Atlantic (including Harold Nicolson) when he stated that “we should make war on Russia while we have the atomic bomb and they do not.” The “we” of course was America, since Britain had no atomic bomb. Nicolson believed the Russians were preparing “for the final battle for world mastery,” which would result in the “destruction of western Europe” and “a final death struggle with the Americas.” Yet he thought the idea of a preemptive attack “evil,” even if it resulted in “centuries of Pax Americana—an admirable thing to establish.” He believed there might be a frail chance—“not one in ninety”—that “the danger may pass and peace can be secured by peace.” That slimmest of chances, Nicolson told his diary, should be taken. “Better to be wiped out by the crime of others…,” he wrote, “than to preserve ourselves by committing a deliberate crime of our own.”¹⁰²

On the other side of the globe, another country jointly occupied by the Russians and Americans was stumbling toward civil war: Korea, annexed by Japan in 1910 with the compliance of London and Washington. Koreans had spent thirty-five years as virtual slaves of the Japanese. Under a United Nations trusteeship, the Russians occupied the northern part of Korea, the Americans the southern, below the 38th parallel. In 1948 Stalin pulled out his troops. National elections were scheduled to take place, to be supervised by the United States. The North Koreans refused to participate. Instead, in early September 1948, the Communists in the north, with Stalin’s blessing, declared the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Both North and South Korea claimed sovereignty over the entire peninsula.

The Soviet blockade of Berlin—and the danger of war—entered its tenth month in April 1949. On April 4, President Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty, an outgrowth and expansion of the 1948 Treaty of Brussels, in which Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg had arrayed themselves as a bulwark against Stalin’s Red Army. But without America in, the Brussels treaty was a bulwark in name only. Truman’s pen stroke created NATO, and brought America in, along with Canada, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and Italy. The treaty stipulated that an attack against any one of the member nations was an attack against all, and would be met with “all necessary assistance,” including the use of military force. Yet it would be two more years before NATO’s first supreme commander was named: Dwight Eisenhower, who set to work building a true command structure. When in 1952 Hastings (“Pug”) Ismay—the 1st Baron Ismay—was made NATO’s first secretary-general, he declared NATO’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” That statement—given that containing the Reds had become settled policy in America and Britain—made for good politics, but Churchill believed then, and had believed since late in the war, that Germany must be up and armed in order to help Britain and France keep the Red Army out.¹⁰³

In 1949 Russia, not Germany, was the threat. If a war began, Berlin would be the place. In late March, just days before Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty, Churchill told guests at a New York dinner hosted by Henry Luce: “It is certain in my opinion that Europe would have been communized and London would have been under bombardment some time ago, but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States.” The best way to deal with the Soviets, Churchill proclaimed, was “by having superior force on your side on the matter in question and they must also be convinced that you will use—you will not hesitate to use—these forces, if necessary, in the most ruthless manner.” On April 1, the New York Herald Tribune ran the headline CHURCHILL DECLARES ATOM BOMB ALONE DETERS RUSSIA FROM WAR. Actually a credible deterrent could only arise from a promise to use the atomic bomb if Russia started a war. Churchill advised Truman to make such a statement. To Churchill’s satisfaction, he learned while on his way home on board Queen Mary that Truman had done just that, telling reporters that he “would not hesitate” to use atomic weapons if the peace and security of the democracies—anywhere—were at stake.¹⁰⁴

The nuclear consequences to Moscow of provoking war overrode any inclination—if there was any inclination—within the Politburo to head in that direction. Moscow could blockade Berlin, but it could not take it without suffering annihilation. On May 12, six weeks after Truman brought NATO onto the world stage, Stalin and the Politburo lifted the blockade and climbed down. Jock Colville believed an old saying still applied:

Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not.

It did not apply for long. When the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb three months later, on August 29, 1949, the world became a far more dangerous place.¹⁰⁵

It became even more dangerous in early October when the Communist Party in Russian-occupied eastern Germany—sponsored and sustained by Stalin and the Red Army—declared the formation of the German Democratic Republic, known in the West for the next forty years as East Germany. It was a puppet police state, neither democratic nor a republic.

And in the Far East, the Communist menace gathered strength in inverse proportion to the decline of the French, Dutch, and British empires. When in April 1949 Communist artillery fired on British gunboats in the Yangtze River, even anti-Communists throughout Asia hung photos of the wounded ships on their walls. On October 1, Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China after driving Chiang Kai-shek and two million Kuomintang followers literally into the sea, and to Taiwan. The bloodiest civil war in modern history—more than three million military casualties and at least twelve million civilian—had lasted twenty-two years, interrupted only by the Sino-Japanese War and World War Two, which proved even more deadly to Chinese civilians. Earlier in the year, as the Chinese Communists pressed their advantage, Churchill could not resist working a deft criticism of Franklin Roosevelt into a speech he gave in New York City:

I was very much astonished when I came over here after Pearl Harbor to find the estimate of values which seemed to prevail in high American quarters, even in the highest, about China. Some of them thought that China would make as great a contribution to victory in the war as the whole British Empire together. Well, that astonished me very much. Nothing that I picked up afterwards led me to think that my astonishment was ill founded.¹⁰⁶

Now the two old allies, China and Russia, were declared enemies of the capitalist West. “Are we winning the Cold War?” Churchill asked the New York audience. He had no answer. He saw danger in Europe, and in the Far East. All was uncertain. Yet for Churchill, at least one certainty remained—his belief that he was the man to lead Britain in these dangerous times, and would sooner or later have the chance to do so.

Churchill saw Britain’s security tied to three interlocking geopolitical circles, each separate from but overlapping the others, and each forming an association in which Britain might again flourish. Taken together, they promised safety and an honorable peace, one worthy of the sacrifice of Britons and Europeans in the late war. In June 1950 Churchill told the House: “First, there is the Empire and Commonwealth; secondly, the fraternal association of the English-speaking world; and thirdly, not in rank or status but in order, the revival of united Europe as a vast factor in the preserving of what is left of the civilization and culture of the free world.” To address the concerns of many Bevan Labourites—and Anthony Eden—who did not share his sentiments of a unified Europe, Churchill offered, “With our position as the centre of the British Empire and Commonwealth and with our fraternal association with the United States in the English-speaking world, we could not accept full membership of a federal system of Europe.” Much later, in the House, he needed only eight words to state his position on continental Europeans and their drift toward unity: “We are with them, but not of them.”¹⁰⁷

To stake out such a seemingly contradictory position took political adroitness: Britain would in some ways (not yet articulated with exactness by Churchill) be in a united Europe, but not completely in, which amounted to saying that Britain would in some ways be “out” of a united Europe. Indeed, from that time to this day, British governments have held to that policy. Although Churchill had voiced his belief in a united Europe for years, he had never addressed the details of the form and authority a European parliament might assume. This was a strategy more in line with Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to complex issues—offer few details—than Churchill’s usual blunt and clearly stated approach to all matters great and small. As Tories and Labourites debated the role of Britain, if any, in a European union, Harold Macmillan told his diary the question came down to “ ‘United Europe’ with Britain, on a loose basis of cooperation; ‘United Europe’ without Britain” (italics Macmillan). The extent of Britain’s participation in a European parliament would depend on whether that entity took the form of a “functional” body, having broad powers within strictly defined areas (coal and steel production, and tariffs, for example), or a federal model, with its authority vested in a European constitution. As Macmillan saw it, the former structure would not necessarily result in an erosion of sovereignty on the part of member nations, but the latter might, depending upon the political, economic, and military authority vested in the central government by the constitution.¹⁰⁸

For two decades Churchill approached European union much as he had played polo—first, slash and dash and drive the ball up the field to get in range, then let the details take care of themselves. Likewise, although for two decades he had championed a union of some sorts with the United States, he had not offered details of just what form that union would take. Despite the linguistic and historical bonds between London and Washington, despite Churchill’s dream of a shared currency (the dollar-sterling), and his hopes for political and economic ties that were more than “agreements,” Churchill knew that Britain would never find itself “inside” the United States. But NATO brought the United States “inside” Europe and promised security, although in 1950 its command structure—both political and military—had yet to be determined. Strengthening Britain’s relationship with the United States and developing a closer relationship with continental Europe were Churchill’s paramount objectives. “The fact that there is a grave Soviet and Communist menace,” he told the House in 1950, “only adds to its [European unity’s] value and urgency. Here surely we can find agreement on all sides of the House. No one can say with justice that we are acting and feeling in this way in prejudice to the interests of the British Empire and Commonwealth. Everyone knows that that stands first in all our thoughts.”¹⁰⁹

To the security offered by his three interlocking rings could be added the security provided by the United Nations, but, although Churchill claimed for the United Nations a central role in world affairs, he harbored doubts about its efficacy. During a Brussels conference on European unity in 1949 he declared:

But there are also fundamental defects in the structure of the United Nations Organization which must be corrected if any progress is to be made. I had always felt during the war that the structure of world security could only be founded on regional organizations…. In consequence, the supreme body has been cumbered and confused by a mass of questions, great and small, about which only a babel of harsh voices can be heard…. It is vain to build the dome of the temple of peace without the pillars on which alone it can stand.

For Churchill, Europe—led by Britain, France, and someday Germany—would form the strongest pillar and the greatest regional organization on the planet. Pointing out that numerous Eastern European nations could not send representatives to the conference, Churchill added, “The yoke of the Kremlin oligarchy has descended upon them and they are the victims of a tyranny more subtle and merciless than any hitherto known to history.”¹¹⁰

Churchill’s sole domestic political objective from 1946 well into 1951 was to push, prod, and excoriate the Attlee government on its economic performance. In 1948 he told the House, “We are oppressed by a deadly fallacy. Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Unless we free our country while time remains from the perverse doctrines of Socialism, there can be no hope for recovery.” He delivered a variation on that theme again and again, in the House, at constituent meetings, and at Conservative rallies. During one such rally at Blenheim Palace he summed up his position on Labour thus: “Since [1939] two disasters have come upon us: the Second World War and the first Socialist Government with a majority. By supreme exertions we surmounted the first disaster. The question which glares upon us today is: ‘How shall we free ourselves from the second?’ ” Labour had “squandered” first the American loan of almost four billion dollars and then the generous allotments of the Marshall Plan, with the result that “we are now dependent upon further American generosity and also eating up from hand to mouth the remaining overseas investments and assets accumulated under the capitalist system of former years.” Out of loyalty to King and country, he muted his criticism when he spoke abroad, but at home, he pressed the attack.¹¹¹

He reserved his most scathing and personal criticism for his old political nemesis, Aneurin Bevan. In July 1948, on the occasion of the launch of the National Health Service, Churchill told his Woodford constituents:

One would have thought that a man who had been only a burden to our war effort in the years of storm and who had received high office in the days of victory would have tried to turn over a new leaf and redeem his past…. We speak of the Minister of Health, but ought we not rather to say the Minister of Disease, for is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, moral disease, and indeed a highly infectious form? Indeed, I can think of no better step to signalize the inauguration of the National Health Service than that a person who so obviously needs psychiatrical attention should be among the first of its patients. And I have no doubt that the highest exponents of the medical profession would concur that a period of prolonged seclusion and relief from any responsible duties would be an equal benefit to Mr. Bevan and to the National Health Service.¹¹²

Here was Churchill in top form, and whether he was in gentlemanly form was not of any concern to him. That sort of harangue sold newspapers and would be quoted in pubs throughout the land. In times of austerity, comic relief is a balm. Churchill delivered regular doses of that relief. Attlee’s Labour colleagues spoke in bureaucratese. Churchill did not. He spoke to the common man and, more important, could speak like the common man when the situation demanded.

Between mid-1945 and early 1950 Churchill delivered more than two hundred speeches, many quite lengthy. He dictated, polished, and delivered every one of the four hundred thousand words of his addresses—enough to fill a thousand-page volume—that he sent into battle against socialism, in defense of the Empire, and for European unity. It is an extraordinary achievement given that during these years, he was also writing his memoirs and fulfilling his duties as the leader of the Shadow Cabinet.

That he could produce so much was due to the remarkable way he structured his waking hours, which allowed him to squeeze almost two days of work into each day. He spent his weekends at Chartwell, arriving on Thursday night and leaving for London Tuesday morning. At Chartwell, if breakfast was the start of his day, it began sometime after nine in the morning, later if he had dictated into the early morning hours, which he regularly did. Then, as he bid them good night—or good morning—the typists collected the day’s work and sent it off by taxi to the printers in London in order that galleys could be delivered to the Great Man by midday. He breakfasted alone, in bed. He once told a Chartwell visitor that he and Clementine had “tried two or three times in the last forty years to have breakfast together, but it didn’t work.” His bath and a tour of Chartwell’s grounds followed breakfast. Early afternoon found the typists on the day shift drifting into the library from their rooms in the village and Chartwell’s orchard cottage. There they waited while Churchill, attired now in a dark blue suit, waistcoat, and gold watch and chain, perused galleys and ordered his thoughts in his second-floor study. When he was ready to dictate, he depressed a switch on an intercom connected to the library, and announced, “Come.”¹¹³

For the typists, the terror began as soon as they sat down at the—not so silent—silent typewriters. This was the routine of a quarter century, during which the lion had not lost his roar. He dictated three, four, sometimes five drafts of his addresses. Bill Deakin and Denis Kelly fed him statistics, and transcripts of Labour speeches, and budget and banking data, and military dispositions. All was bustle. Misspellings on the part of typists were met with sighs and sharp rebukes. The omnipresent intrusion of the gramophone did not help matters. “You just typed away and handed it in and sometimes it was dreadful and he’d just scowl,” recalled Chips Gemmell. Foreign names especially tripped up the typists. Once, upon glancing at Miss Gemmell’s handiwork, the Old Man barked: “You have not got one word in fifty right.” He used a special code, known only to himself, to delineate sections of a speech—P-1 for housing, or H-3 for foreign affairs, for example. At his command, the typists scribbled the codes in at the appropriate places. At the end came “the great moment” when Churchill announced, “Now I am going to clop.” The “clop” was his paper punch; he had no use for paper clips. The pages were arranged, numbered, punched, and finally bound by a thin strip of cloth. Jane Portal^*—whom Churchill always called “the Portal”—committed a mortal sin one day when she assembled the pages in the wrong order, which Churchill only discovered while delivering the speech. She was sure she would never again be entrusted with that duty. When a few days later another speech reached the binding-together moment, Miss Portal was duly surprised—and moved almost to tears—when Churchill said, “Let the Portal do it.” “You see,” she recalled years later, “he was saying ‘I’ve forgiven you, I trust you.’ It was a small, personal instant, but it meant a great deal to me. He would do that often with people.”¹¹⁴

His humor, as with his impatience, was never far beneath the surface. George Christ (rhymes with “whist”) joined the team in 1949 and was assigned the duty of procuring official government documents from which Churchill culled salient points for inclusion in his addresses and memoirs. Churchill pronounced Christ’s name as one would the Savior’s, and delighted in ordering his typists to “get me Christ on the phone” or “get Christ down here at once.” Upon such occasions of levity, a pause and a raised eyebrow were Churchill’s signals to the typists that they were free to laugh. They were just as free to weep, as he often did while dictating passages that moved him: “I mean I would be weeping and he would be weeping,” Jane Portal recalled, “and all the while he was dictating in his marvelous voice and I’d be tap-tapping away, the both of us weeping.”¹¹⁵

His generosity was as much in evidence as his temper, his humor, and his tears. He ordered that the Chartwell gates remain open as a sign of welcome to any neighbors who might be inclined to stop by. Many did. A supply of old jackets, heavy coats, gloves, and old boots was kept near the front hall during the first bitter winters of victory, to be given to those in need. There were many. He was always willing to pay Randolph’s debts, although he would not disclose to his son the exact terms of the Chartwell Trust. He provided for Pamela after her divorce. Lord Moran had never been well off. Churchill insisted on helping him out and executed a seven-year deed of covenant for Moran’s wife, which brought her the modern equivalent of $20,000 a year tax free. Chips Gemmell recalled a trip to the races (a typist always accompanied Churchill wherever he went) during which Churchill told her he would not need her services for several hours. He sent her and the driver off with orders to enjoy themselves however they pleased and to meet him at the car after the day’s events. When Miss Gemmell climbed into the car late in the day, the Old Man passed her a racing form, on which he had circled various horses. He announced they were winners and that he had wagered one pound on each of them for her. “Well, count up what you won,” he ordered. But Chips, confused by the mathematics of odds and payouts, could not. “He was very mad that I couldn’t read the numbers,” she recalled, “and told me I had won twenty pounds, which was a great deal.” It dawned on Miss Gemmell that the Old Man hadn’t really placed any bets but had “suddenly thought in the car, poor girl, I’ll say I put money on the horses and I’ll say to her, work out how much and collect your money; it was a lovely gesture.” When his scheme derailed, Churchill pressed a twenty-pound note into her hand.¹¹⁶

One Churchillian gesture stood out above all others for Miss Gemmell. “I was the paint lady,” she recalled. “On Tuesdays, before returning to London he’d call me upstairs. ‘Miss, you’ll clean the palettes up and the paintbrushes, and see if I need paints.’ And I’d say ‘Yes sir.’ ” She found cleaning the brushes in turpentine a “ghastly business” but attended to her duties, ordered new paints, and tidied up Churchill’s studio in preparation for his return. She was thus much moved when one day he called her into the studio and presented her with one of his paintings, “a very flattering portrait.” It was a portrait of her.¹¹⁷

As he waded ahead on his memoirs and speeches, he faced a daily mountain of letters from persons great and small throughout the world. Replies to such missives did not always flow directly from the Old Man, although his tears often flowed upon reading them. Chips Gemmell was assigned the duty of composing responses on her own, for his signature. One such letter she wrote was to go off to the Massey Ferguson Company, which had sent Churchill an automated bread-making machine. Miss Gemmell composed a long and flowery thank-you note that moved Churchill to observe, “Jesus Christ, Miss, you’ve really over-egged the omelet this time. It was only a piece of farm machinery.” Such moments of silliness were inevitably followed, usually sooner rather than later, by sinister eruptions due to secretarial misfeasance of one sort or another. And so it went each day until early evening, when the staff wandered into the village for dinner and Churchill took his evening meal in the company of any family or friends who happened to be present in the house. Lord Moran was a regular guest. Jane Portal noticed that he used a pencil to scribble notes on his pure-white shirt cuffs, the better to capture the Old Man’s wisdom in the book Moran intended to write. Then, sometime after nine or ten, having returned from their meal in the village, the typists reassembled in the library and, as in the morning, awaited the summons from the Great Man: “Come.” After he took himself off to bed near midnight, with brandy and a cigar in hand, yet another summons was issued, and the early morning dictation began. Thus, he effectively squeezed almost two working days into each twenty-four hours and left himself time to feed his goldfish and provoke battles between the swans and the geese on the lower lakes.¹¹⁸

Churchill turned seventy-five on November 30, 1949. “I am ready to meet my Maker,” he told friends that day. “Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” Actually, neither was ready to meet the other. In 1874, the year of Churchill’s birth, the great Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli anointed the great Liberal leader William Gladstone—whom Disraeli had just replaced as prime minister—an “exhausted volcano.” But Gladstone, sixty-four at the time, was not exhausted and returned to that high office three more times before resigning at age eighty-four in 1894. Lord Randolph Churchill had derided Gladstone as “an old man in a hurry.” But Randolph died young, at forty-five, and therefore did not live long enough to grasp a truism known to old men. As the new decade came in—and with it the second half of the twentieth century—Winston Churchill understood that an old man had best hurry if he is to get someplace in the time remaining to him. Time, in early January, named him the Man of the Half-Century. The first half of the century had brought Europe and the world a succession of shocks and calamities, the editors wrote, with Churchill offering solutions—and suffering defeats—from within and without the British government. “That a free world survived in 1950, with a hope of more progress and less calamity, was due in large measure to his [Churchill’s] exertions.” Knowing that a British general election might soon be called, Time predicted that “[Churchill] would fight it—as he had fought all his other great battles—on the issue of freedom. Churchill likes freedom.”¹¹⁹

Not all on the western shores of the Atlantic shared Luce’s sentiments. James Reston, one of the premier political reporters at the New York Times, later wrote of a dinner party Churchill attended at the Times during his 1949 trip to America. “He [Churchill] looked considerably more rounded fore and aft…. There was a curious sort of grayness to his flesh…. He asked for a glass of tomato juice, which I thought was newsworthy, but corrected this impression when the brandy was passed around, and he complained that everybody kept him talking so much that he didn’t have time to drink.” Reston thought that Churchill “snorted and lisped more than usual, but this may have been induced by sobriety.” As Churchill left, “a little shuffly and a little bent, Dr. Howard Rush, the Times’s favorite doctor, remarked, ‘Jesus, prop him up.’ I thought his [Churchill’s] political days were over.” Reston—Scotty to his friends—had been born in Scotland and grew up with a Scots Presbyterian’s natural and ancient distrust of Englishmen. As for Churchill’s political days being over, the often-prescient Reston got it wrong this time.¹²⁰

Churchill planned to spend the first few weeks of 1950 at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira. Clementine made the trip, as did Diana. Two secretaries and Bill Deakin accompanied Churchill; it was to be a working holiday. But in early January, Attlee called for a general election on February 23. Churchill packed his kit and returned to Chartwell to chart the Conservative campaign. Clementine stayed on in Madeira for a few days before returning to 28 Hyde Park Gate, where on January 19 she received a letter from her husband: “I have not thought of anything since I returned except politics.” He and the Tory hierarchy had spent long days at Chartwell planning their manifesto. The problem, he told Clementine, was “not what to do” but “what to say to our poor and puzzled people.” He noted that Gallup polls showed the Tory lead over Labour had fallen from nine to three points, but that four hundred Liberal candidates (running as spoilers and not expected to win many seats) would invariably skewer the final results. “How many seats the Liberal ‘splits’ will cause us cannot be measured.” He thought that “at the outside” the Liberals might win seven seats. He closed with “I am much depressed about the country because for whoever wins there will be nothing but bitterness and strife, like men fighting savagely on a small raft which is breaking up. ‘May God save you all’ is my prayer.”¹²¹

By the arrival of the new decade, his arteries had further hardened and he was going deaf. His ear, nose, and throat specialist told him he’d soon not be able to hear “the twittering of birds and children’s piping voices.” Churchill’s walking stick no longer served as a fashion statement but served a practical purpose. Before the election campaign even got under way, Churchill summoned his doctor, Lord Moran. Everything had suddenly “gone misty,” Churchill told Moran, and he asked, “Am I going to have another stroke?” Moran tried to reassure him by offering that he was likely experiencing “arterial spasms” when very tired. The patient looked up sharply and said, “You mustn’t frighten me.” It was Moran who was frightened, telling his diary, “This is a grim start to the racket of a General Election.”¹²²

Roy Jenkins, at the time the youngest MP—the Baby of the House—later wrote that Churchill conducted a more restrained campaign than in 1945. Churchill had the good sense to make no mention of a socialist Gestapo. And although he harangued the Labour Party and its cabal of intellectuals on their nationalization schemes, such topics as coal, steel, and railroads do not lend themselves to flights of oratorical fancy. On the foreign policy front, Churchill was more or less in agreement with Attlee and Bevin, who championed closer ties to the United States, the re-armament of Germany, and a containment policy toward the Soviets. Ignoring his doctor’s advice to not stump the country, Churchill delivered eleven campaign speeches in cities and towns throughout the island, including Cardiff, Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds, and three in his constituency of Woodford. The election was a family affair: Duncan Sandys, Christopher Soames, and Randolph were standing for office as well, and the Old Man campaigned for them. He kept bile out of his message, and instead reverted to humor and metaphor to skewer Labour. It was during this campaign that he coined the term “Queuetopia.” In Cardiff on February 8 he reduced Labour’s stultifying jargon to silliness:

I hope you have all mastered the official Socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word “poor”; they are described as the “lower income group.” When it comes to a question of freezing a workman’s wages the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of “arresting increases in personal income.”… There is a lovely one about houses and homes. They are in future to be called “accommodation units.” I don’t know how we are to sing our old song “Home Sweet Home.” “Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, there’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.” I hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips.¹²³

In Edinburgh on February 14, he told the audience that “by one broad heave of the British national shoulders the whole gimcrack structure of Socialist jargon and malice may be cast in splinters to the ground.” In his second campaign broadcast, delivered in London on the seventeenth, he again advised his countrymen to free themselves with one heave of their shoulders, and warned that they might not get a second chance to do so. Then he offered the parable of the Spanish prisoner who, after years of bondage, “pushed the door of his cell—and it was open. It had always been open. He walked out free into the broad light of day.”¹²⁴

In Leeds he warned:

Remember also that, as a Socialist Prime Minister working for the establishment of a Socialist State, Mr. Attlee and his party are alone in the English-speaking world. The United States at the head of the world today vehemently repudiate the Socialist doctrine. Canada repudiates it…. Remember also there is no Socialist Government in Europe outside the Iron Curtain and Scandinavia. It seems to me a very perilous path that we are asked to tread, and to tread alone among the free democracies of the West.¹²⁵

It was during the Edinburgh address that Churchill made his most important foreign policy statement of the campaign, and in so doing not only coined the term “summit meeting” but outlined a belief that would underlie his relations with both America and Russia for the remainder of his political life. First came a warning: “The Soviet Communist world has by far the greatest military force, but the United States have the atom bomb; and now, we are told that they have a thousand fold more terrible manifestation of this awful power.” Although the United States had lost its monopoly on atomic bombs, it had a great many in its arsenal. “When all is said and done it is my belief that the superiority [in numbers] in the atom bomb… in American hands is the surest guarantee of world peace tonight.” Then:

Still I cannot help coming back to this idea of another talk with Soviet Russia upon the highest level. The idea appeals to me of a supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds, so that each can live their life, if not in friendship at least without the hatreds of the cold war. You must be careful to mark my words in these matters because I have not always been proved wrong. It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit, if such a thing were possible. But that I cannot tell.¹²⁶

He repeated the theme a few days later during his London broadcast: “It is only by the agreement of the greatest Powers that security can be given to ordinary folk against an annihilating war with atomic or hydrogen bombs or bacteriological horrors. I cannot find it in my heart and conscience to close the door upon that hope.” This was his first mention of “hydrogen bombs.” In Edinburgh he had referred only to weapons a “thousand fold” more powerful than atomic bombs. Indeed, the power of thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs) is reckoned in megatons versus kilotons for atomic bombs, and in this new calculus Churchill beheld the horrifying difference between the two weapons. One could destroy cities, the other civilization. Five years earlier he had seen the A-bomb as merely the biggest bomb in the arsenal. No more. The Americans were yet two years away from exploding an H-bomb, but in early 1950 Churchill saw—the first world leader to do so—that the enormity of that weapon must preclude its use. Churchill’s vivid imagination, not cold logic, drove his thinking on the matter. He had seen London burn once; he could now shut his eyes and behold the entire nation in flames, the entire world. The conclusion was obvious: world wars could still be fought, but could no longer be won.¹²⁷

On Election Day, February 23, Churchill told some Tory cronies that he’d drop into the Savoy later that evening to stand a round of drinks if the early returns showed promise. He never appeared, but rather closeted himself at Hyde Park Gate to listen as the BBC reported the early returns from the larger cities. Labour was holding its own. By late in the morning of the twenty-fourth, town and country returns evidenced a shift to the Tories. But it wasn’t enough. Labour saw its great majority of 1945 all but erased, a stunning turnaround and a defeat by any other name, but Attlee and his government survived, barely. The final results showed Labour held 315 seats (13,331,000 votes); the Conservatives 298 seats (12,415,000 votes); and the Liberals 9 seats (mostly in Wales, 2,679,000 votes). That gave Labour an overall majority of six. Churchill, Christopher Soames, and Duncan Sandys fared well, but not Randolph, who for the fourth time in four contested elections was rejected by voters. In a sense, Labour had lost the election—certainly it had lost its mandate—but the Conservatives and Churchill had not won it.

Churchill was seventy-five. He complained to his doctor of tightness in his shoulders and he feared another stroke. Time was now the enemy. But in one regard time was also his ally. Turmoil among the leadership of the Labour party, any internal Labour dissent on matters of budgets, banking, or defense, would lead to a vote of no confidence. In America Churchill would have had to wait four years before another shot at the top, but in Britain—especially in Attlee’s Britain, that year—another general election might be called within months. Although Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, and Harold Macmillan each aspired to higher status within the party leadership (and ultimately the leadership itself), Churchill’s position as leader was secure. Under his command, the Conservatives had retrieved 85 of the seats they had lost in 1945, and Labour had lost 78. Those Tories who had wanted Churchill to take a long rest in 1945 would have to wait their turn. They could not throw over the man who had brought them this far, in war and in peace. Churchill, therefore, though disappointed by the election results, was not shattered. He believed that his day would yet come. He returned to Chartwell to continue work on his memoirs—only two volumes remained. He prepared, too, for the new Parliament and the battles sure to be fought there. Late one night not long after the election, while dictating a section of his memoir, he turned to Jane Portal and announced, “I know I’m going to be Prime Minister again. I know it.”¹²⁸

One among the family was not shattered in the least by the election results: Clementine. Chartwell was her safe haven; the guest list included children and grandchildren and old friends. In 1945 she believed Winston should have retired, and she believed so still. Increasingly afflicted with neuritis, streptococcal infections, and by a bout of lumbago later in the year, she was ready for a pacific retirement at Chartwell. It was not to be.

On March 6, the new Parliament opened with the traditional Gracious Speech, the King’s message to the Houses of Lords and Commons. The next day, March 7, the first day of debate, Churchill made clear his intent to press his attacks on the socialist experiment: “The basic fact before us is that the electors by a majority of 1,750,000 have voted against the advance to a Socialist State, and, in particular, against the nationalization of steel and other industries which were threatened. The Government, therefore, have no mandate.” He moved that a full debate of all issues “be accorded us in the next fortnight or so.” Hansard transcripts record the following exchange:

Mr. H. Morrison [Speaker of the House] indicated dissent.

Mr. Churchill: It will take more than the oscillation of the Lord President’s head in this Parliament necessarily to convince us that our desires must be put aside; I ask for a full Debate.¹²⁹

He pressed his attacks for the next twenty months. Debates (and Questions) in the House of Commons are far livelier affairs than business conducted in either the Senate or House of the United States, where long and often boring statements are read into the Congressional Record by members (often to an empty chamber), and where oral interruptions are considered breaches of decorum. In the British House of Commons “Rubbish” and “Nonsense” are oft-heard rejoinders. Laughter—and its cousin the snicker—is a weapon. Members mumble and rustle papers in shows of displeasure at an opponent’s words (or mumble and rustle papers in agreement with their party colleagues). Churchill came to do battle. His political nemesis Aneurin Bevan described Churchill’s approach to the House thus: “He had to wheel himself up to battle like an enormous gun.” When Churchill fired a salvo, his opponents knew it.¹³⁰

Labour MPs once jeered Churchill as he was leaving the chamber; he turned and blew them kisses. No barb could go unanswered. When Churchill castigated Labour for the fiscal hardships Britons lived with, a Labour MP called out, “Why don’t you sell your horse?” Churchill looked up, and replied, “I was strongly tempted to sell the horse, but I am doing my best to fight against the profit motive.” A nod of dissent, a derisive grunt, were gauntlets thrown down. When a member mumbled, “Rubbish,” to one Churchill pronouncement, the Old Man replied, “That may be what the right honourable and learned Gentleman has in his head, but it does not carry conviction.” When a member called out, “Rubbish,” after Churchill claimed Czechoslovakia had become a pawn of Moscow, the Old Man replied: “The right honourable Gentleman seems to have nothing in his head but rubbish.” Interrupted during one debate on Moscow’s geopolitical intentions, Churchill shot back, “I think the Communist Members and fellow travelers have a pretty good run in this House.” Here was an incendiary claim that even the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, would not make on the U.S. Senate floor. But Churchill could toss out such a retort without causing an uproar, because all knew he was without guile. As well, wrote Tory MP Earl Winterton (who in 1950 was the Father of the House, its longest-serving member), Churchill could read the mood of the House: “Winston Churchill is steeped in its atmosphere and traditions; he is familiar with all its varying moods… he has an instinctive understanding of what it will accept and what it will not accept.” The British House of Commons was populated by agile minds and quick wits, and after almost fifty years, Winston Churchill was still one of the most agile and quick-witted. Indeed, at about that time, Winterton called him “the greatest living parliamentarian.”¹³¹

Another colleague, Sir Alan Herbert, the Independent MP for Oxford University, called Churchill “the greatest living British humorist.” When giving lectures on the topic of humor, Herbert cited the usual suspects: P. G. Wodehouse, Noël Coward, Nat Gubbins, even Aneurin Bevan. But Herbert’s top choice was “Winston Churchill, who, at any time, in any conditions, in any company, on any subject, with never a fault of taste or tact, can make laughter when he wills.”¹³²

Not all agreed. Roy Jenkins believed Churchill’s humor was sometimes “not… wise… or gracious” as a result of “one of Churchill’s narrownesses”—his hostility to left-wing intellectuals. Churchill believed incorrectly that Labour’s leading lights were all products of Winchester College, which he considered a breeding ground of the casuistry he saw and detested in certain intellectuals. Indeed, Hugh Gaitskell and Stafford Cripps, among several other Labour leaders, had come out of Winchester. As a result, Jenkins wrote, Churchill made “constant not very funny anti-Wykehamical [anti-Winchester] jokes in the House.” He did, but one’s man’s humor is another man’s poison. Churchill, responding to a Labour claim: “We suffer from the fallacy, deus ex machina, which, for the benefit of any Wykehamists who may be present, is ‘A god out of the machine.’ ” On another occasion: “I do not know whether they learn French at Winchester.” And during a June 27, 1950, debate on British participation in a European coal and steel community, Churchill tossed out: “In this Debate we have had the usual jargon about ‘the infrastructure of a supra-national authority.’ The original authorship is obscure; but it may well be that these words ‘infra’ and ‘supra’ have been introduced into our current political parlance by the band of intellectual highbrows who are naturally anxious to impress British labour with the fact that they learned Latin at Winchester.” In fact, the word “infrastructure,” a perfectly good Latin-derived word, had come out of France, but Churchill never missed a chance to ridicule his political enemies.¹³³

The “supranational authority” under discussion was known as the Schuman Plan, proposed on May 9 by French foreign minister Robert Schuman, who called on European nations to join together in a community dedicated to shedding tariffs and sharing resources—coal and steel, to start with—in order to regain a competitive edge in the international marketplace and, most significant, to eliminate the resource monopolization that inevitably ended in European wars. Schuman called for talks in Paris. The Attlee government refused to participate, a decision Churchill denounced as “a squalid attitude at a time of present stress.” He was not advising a blanket acceptance of the Schuman Plan, but merely a willingness to discuss it. He added that if asked, would he “agree to a supra-national authority which has the power to tell Great Britain not to cut any more coal or make any more steel, but to grow tomatoes instead?’ I should say, without hesitation, the answer is ‘No.’ ” What he opposed, he said, “is State ownership and management—or mismanagement as it has proved so far—of the industry.” He pointed out that under Schuman’s proposal, private ownership of industry remained unaffected, adding, “We see no reason why the problems of the British steel industry should not be discussed in common with the problems of the other European steel industries.”

And he pointed out the ultimate beauty of the plan: it would bring France and Germany together in mutually beneficial enterprises. It would be “an effective step,” Churchill told a meeting of Scottish Unionists, “in preventing another war between France and Germany and lay at last to rest that quarrel of 1,000 years between Gaul and Teuton. Now France has taken the initiative in a manner beyond my hopes.” He told the House during the debate of June 27 that to reach this day was why Britain had refused to quit in 1940:

We fought alone against tyranny for a whole year, not purely from national motives…. It was not only our own cause but a world cause for which the Union Jack was kept flying in 1940…. The Conservative and Liberal parties declare that national sovereignty is not inviolable, and that it may be resolutely diminished for the sake of all the men in all the lands finding their way home together.

He predicted the consequences if Attlee refused participation in the talks about the Schuman Plan:

The absence of Britain deranges the balance of Europe. I am all for a reconciliation between France and Germany, and for receiving Germany back into the European family, but this implies, as I have always insisted, that Britain and France should in the main act together so as to be able to deal on even terms with Germany, which is so much stronger than France alone. Without Britain, the coal and steel pool in western Europe must naturally tend to be dominated by Germany, who will be the most powerful member.¹³⁴

Attlee stood firm; he would not send any ministers to Paris.

Schuman held his meetings without the British. Almost a year later, in April 1951, France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Paris and by so doing created the European Coal and Steel Community. The six states pledged to create a “common market” for steel and coal. Here, then, was the first step on the road to the European Economic Community and, ultimately, the European Union. May 9—the date Schuman first read his proposal in the French National Assembly—is now celebrated by European Union member nations as Europe Day. (The Council of Europe, which Churchill championed, is not part of the European Union; its member states do not transfer any national legislative or executive sovereignty to the body, which acts through international legal conventions.) The evolution of Schuman’s concept into the European Union is a long and fascinating story, but it is not Churchill’s story. Events on the other side of the globe that June week in 1950 changed the trajectory of Churchill’s thinking, and the final years of his career.

On June 25, the Cold War turned hot. On that day, 230,000 North Korean soldiers, supported by more than 250 Russian-made T-34 battle tanks (the best tank on the planet) and as many pieces of heavy artillery, drove south across the 38th parallel and into South Korea. South Korean forces were outnumbered by more than two to one in men. They had no tanks. On the twenty-seventh, the day the Commons debated the Schuman Plan, the United Nations passed Security Council Resolution 83, calling on member states to offer military support to South Korea. Moscow did not vote, having boycotted the Security Council for six months. The next day, the South Korean government fled Seoul. Within four weeks, the North Koreans had bottled up the South’s army and the American Eighth Army in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula, near Pusan. Given that the North Koreans were clients—proxies—of Moscow, Churchill and the West had to entertain the very real possibility that with the attention of the United States drawn to Korea, Moscow might strike in Europe. If that came to pass, Europe west of the Iron Curtain was virtually defenseless.

Overnight, Churchill’s Europeanism became far more narrowly focused. Coal and steel matters could wait. There was now only one priority: the creation of a unified European defense force. By the same token, Churchill’s Atlanticist vision, too, became more narrowly focused: America, which had all but abandoned Europe in 1945, had to be brought back into the European picture, in force.

In June 1950, the NATO treaty of 1949 was backed up by nothing more than the paper it was printed on. In 1945, more than 2.8 million American soldiers and almost 300,000 airmen served in Europe. By 1946, 90 percent of both had gone home. By mid-1950, only 80,000 American troops and 20,000 airmen remained, and many of those were support troops.

In late July, based on figures supplied by the Attlee government, Churchill outlined to the House the situation in Europe. The Russians fielded 40,000 tanks; how many were deployed in Europe was unknown, but Stalin had little reason to deploy tanks east of the Urals. The Americans and British each possessed about 6,000 tanks; America’s were sitting in America but for a couple of hundred in Europe. Soviet troop strength stood at least at 175 divisions, including 25 or more armored divisions, versus a total of a dozen French, American, and British divisions, of which only two were armored. The East Germans had been allowed by Moscow to create a defense force of 50,000, even though the Red Army provided more than enough men to defend East Germany. That was the status on the ground.¹³⁵

When it came to the air, nobody in HMG seemed to know how many aircraft the Soviets had, perhaps as many as 19,000. And how many of them were stationed within range of Britain? Again, nobody knew. Churchill hammered away at the Attlee government’s decision to sell one hundred jet fighters to Argentina, which claimed sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, and another 110 to Egypt, which was blocking Israeli ship traffic in the Suez Canal. What British air forces were available, he asked, to protect those American bombers in East Anglia? If the Soviets had only fifty atomic bombs, he told the House, and if Moscow dropped some of them on Britain, “It would not be pleasant.” The Soviets had captured the German rocket works at Peenemünde, he reminded the House, and had learned enough to launch devastating guided missile attacks (armed with conventional warheads) against Britain. And on the seas—or under them—the Soviet U-boat menace appeared to be “far more severe than was the German U-boat force in 1939 and 1940.” The European situation was beginning to look like the mid-1930s again, with an existential threat in the East, and Britain unprepared to defend itself. Churchill began again to sound like the voice from the 1930s wilderness. He warned the House that if the Soviets threw only half their strength against the West, the West would be outnumbered by at least eight to one. He added: “If the facts that I have stated cannot be contradicted by His Majesty’s Government, the preparations of the Western Union to defend itself certainly stand on a far lower level than those of the South Koreans.”¹³⁶

Ever since Fulton, Churchill’s hopes for world peace had rested with the deterrent of the atomic bomb. The Americans now stationed 180 “atomic bombers” in East Anglia. Moscow was aware of that figure because Attlee had announced it in the Commons. But Churchill sought—demanded—a British atomic deterrent. For four years he had pressed the Attlee government to reveal its progress, if any, in building a British atomic bomb, and for four years Attlee had disclosed nothing. His government was, in fact, hard at work building a bomb, for the same reason Churchill would have pursued the matter: to guarantee British sovereignty. Attlee was as determined as Churchill that British foreign policy and defense not be held hostage to the whims and wishes of the U.S. State Department or White House. Attlee’s refusal to discuss his atomic plans was proper; Churchill led the opposition, not HMG. Some in Britain concluded that the fourteen inscrutable men in the Kremlin had no design on Western Europe for the simple reason that Moscow could take it with impunity if it so desired, and since it had not, ergo, it had no desire to do so. This was the sort of convoluted logic—peace through trust—that infuriated Churchill. His position was clear, and he had stated it repeatedly since 1945, including to his New York hosts months earlier: “It is certain in my opinion that Europe would have been communized and London would have been under bombardment some time ago, but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States. That is my firm belief and that governs the situation today.” As for trusting to the goodwill of Stalin after the experience of trusting Hitler, who had claimed too many times that his appetite for geography was satisfied, Churchill added: “Well, once bit, twice shy.”¹³⁷

In July, shortly after the North Koreans invaded the south, and with his stances on the need to re-arm and build a British atomic bomb in mind, he told a Plymouth audience, “The fourteen men in the Kremlin are not drifting with events. They work on calculation and design. They have a policy the aim of which we can see; but the execution and timing of their ambition for Communist world government we cannot predict.” He told a London audience: “We have always to be very careful nowadays—we politicians, if we take an interest in military matters, or are held to have accumulated some knowledge and experience about them—lest we should be described for electioneering purposes as warmongers.” In fact, Labour and many in the press slapped that label on him now on a regular basis. Yet, if the state of Western arms (other than the atomic bomb) was the measure, he was correct. France, which in 1940 sent 140 divisions against Hitler, now fielded fewer than ten. Britain had difficulty assembling a token force of one brigade to send to Korea in support of the Americans. Harold Macmillan told his diary: “It seems that to scrape together 3000 men and their equipment for Korea will take two months!… What have they done to the war equipment? It would appear that they have thrown it into the seas.”¹³⁸

On July 27 Churchill moved that the House go into secret session—“I spy strangers”—in order to address the status of the British atomic bomb. His motion lost by a single vote, 295 to 296. But if Churchill continued to push for divisions—votes—the day would come when Labour would lose one, and then another. The day would arrive when Attlee would have to call a general election. “Mismanagement” was the word Churchill now introduced into almost every critique of the Attlee government: “the mismanagement of the housing problem”; “the mismanagement in civil and domestic affairs”; “the mismanagement of our defence forces.” And this, directed at Attlee in the House: “The Prime Minister has appealed to us for national unity on Defence. That does not mean national unity on mismanagement of Defence.”¹³⁹

His message—and the phrases he used to deliver it—recalled the previous decade: “We must never despair. We must never give in,” he told the House. “Our scientific and technical ability is unsurpassed. We may well have time to reorganize and develop the mighty latent strength of Britain surrounded by her Commonwealth. But I warn the House that we have as great dangers to face in 1950 and 1951 as we had ten years ago.” The next day Harold Nicolson told his diary that the “state of public opinion after Winston’s grim speech… is one of paralyzed shock…. We are in a position of blind and dumb dread.”¹⁴⁰

The next week, in early August, the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe met for the second time in Strasbourg. “Consultative” was the operative word: motions passed by the Assembly were nonbinding on the governments of member nations. Schuman was there to present his plan. Paul Reynaud, now France’s defense minister, was on hand. The Germans sent two contingents, one of Socialists and one made up of members of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, whose leader, Konrad Adenauer, had been elected in 1949 the first chancellor of the Federal Democratic Republic of Germany—West Germany. British socialists led by Hugh Dalton were in attendance, as were Duncan Sandys, Harold Macmillan, and Winston Churchill for the Conservatives. On August 11, Churchill addressed the Assembly. He welcomed the Germans, and called for “a real defensive front in Europe” formed by a continental army made up of “large forces” of Americans, Britons, the French, Greeks, Italians, the Scandinavian countries, and the Low Countries. He forgot to mention the Germans, but his intent was clear. It would take compromise and sacrifice, he warned, and then he added words that anticipated the inaugural address of a young American president a decade later: “Those who serve supreme causes must not consider what they can get but what they can give.” He ended by offering a motion calling for “the immediate creation of a unified European Army subject to proper European democratic control and acting in full co-operation with the United States and Canada.”¹⁴¹

Macmillan thought the speech masterful, delivered with power and touches of humor that found their mark. “It is really more like a broadcast than a speech,” he told his diary. “But then the trouble is that WSC’s broadcasts are speeches.” Churchill staked his reputation on his motion; defeat could end his long crusade for some sort of federal European structure, and certainly would mean the end of the idea of collective European security. He had addressed no details of command and control of such a European army, knowing that offering details might undermine the whole edifice. The French were wary of the Germans. The Germans were afraid of re-arming, believing that any German army would be large enough to provoke the Russians but not strong enough to repel them. The German General Staff had been abolished; Germans who served in a European army would therefore serve under the command of other nationalities. Macmillan, fearing that German volunteers would likely be former Nazis, preferred an army of conscripts—that is, if the Germans agreed to an army of any sort. The members of the Assembly pondered all of this and more before taking their vote. “No one is quite sure what turn the debate will take,” Macmillan wrote.

The vote came in at 89 for the motion, 5 against, with 27 abstentions (including most of the British socialists). “It is strange,” Macmillan wrote that week, “how, abroad as well as at home, what Churchill puts forward one year as a daring paradox, becomes an accepted truism a year later.” Macmillan dined with Churchill the night of the vote, and found the Old Man “to be very pleased and very excited.” Given that the object of the Europeanists was to bring about reconciliation between Germany and France, Churchill had “a right to be pleased. Without his immense personal prestige, which he has thrown quite recklessly into this campaign, it might not have been achieved.”¹⁴²

In mid-September two divisions of U.S. forces under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur staged an amphibious assault at Inchon, in northwest South Korea. The invasion was a stunning success; within two weeks the Inchon forces and the Pusan armies met and then drove the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel. Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, was liberated, “the first Communist capital to be liberated by the forces of the free world,” crowed Time. By late October, UN forces were chasing the North Korean army up the peninsula toward the Yalu River, the border with China. MacArthur declared that the boys might well be home by Christmas. In mid-November MacArthur informed George Marshall—the new secretary of defense—that he was launching a general offensive by the U.S. Eighth Army northward to the Yalu, to detect how many, if any, Chinese might be in North Korea, and to secure the peninsula once and for all. In defiance of the most basic military doctrine, MacArthur divided the Eighth Army into four separate columns. MacArthur had earlier told President Truman that at most three hundred thousand Chinese might get into the fray but that he did not believe the Chinese would send in any forces. But they did. The Eighth Army had almost reached the Chinese border in northwest North Korea when, on November 25, one million Chinese troops smashed into the American lines, into the flanks, even into the rear of some forces. The Chinese armies, hidden on both sides of the Yalu in deep mountain passes, had gone completely undetected by the Allies. By the end of the year, UN forces—mostly American—had been driven back over the 38th parallel, and in the weeks that followed, driven eighty miles south of Seoul, which again was lost. It was the longest retreat in American history.¹⁴³

On November 30, Churchill’s seventy-sixth birthday, President Truman told reporters that the UN would not abandon its mission in Korea. He followed that with a promise to “take whatever steps are necessary” to meet military objectives. A reporter asked if the atomic bomb might be one such step. Truman replied that use of the atomic bomb was under “active consideration.” That statement, Dean Acheson later wrote, and a false news report that MacArthur might be given authority to use the bomb, threw the Attlee government into a panic, and resulted in Attlee’s “scurrying across the ocean” to meet with Truman. Macmillan saw Truman’s remark as a typically “diplomatic” response, “a cliché as a synonym for doing nothing.” Attlee saw it as a step toward atomic war. The prime minister, in Macmillan’s words, “bolted, like a rabbit, from his hole, and is off to Washington (what a picture and what a contrast to the great Churchill days).”¹⁴⁴

Macmillan and Churchill did not know—and would not learn for another year—that Attlee had good reason to fret about the American position. The previous year Attlee had agreed to abolish the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff organization. That body had been critical to Churchill’s plans for continued Anglo-American military cooperation. Attlee shared Churchill’s desire for a continuation of the Anglo-American partnership, but whereas Churchill had always badgered the Americans for a real role in that relationship—even in 1944, when Britain was clearly the junior partner—Attlee had willingly assumed the subservient role. He had twice in 1950—in secret—assured Washington that if American air forces commenced bombing operations in China, Britain would commit her air forces to the cause. In doing so, he had written Washington a blank check. Now, with Truman mumbling about the possibility of using the atomic bomb in Korea or China, Attlee had to either stop payment or secure guarantees from Truman that Britain would be consulted if any such measure was taken under consideration. Thus, Attlee went to Washington in early December with hopes of resurrecting the gentleman’s agreement on the use of the atomic bomb that Churchill and Roosevelt had forged in 1943, which stipulated that neither country would use the bomb without the approval of the other, but which the McMahon Act of 1946 had effectively quashed. In this, Attlee failed utterly. Truman flatly refused to “consult” with the British, or anyone, on how America would defend itself. Truman offered to keep Attlee “informed” as a courtesy, but there’d be no “consultation.”

Dean Acheson, by then secretary of state, let Attlee down gently by explaining that any agreement made between the president and another leader was considered by the U.S. Senate to be a treaty, and therefore subject to Senate approval. As the talks progressed, Acheson realized Attlee had arrived with other items on his agenda, including the need to negotiate with—and mollify—China. More than 60,000 British and Commonwealth troops served in Korea during that war, including legendary regiments such as the Black Watch, the Royal Canadian Regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and the Royal Irish Fusiliers. But the Americans sent 450,000 men, and the prospects of those now on the ground appeared bleak. Presuming more defeats were imminent, Attlee proposed that Truman offer a cease-fire in order to pull out the troops. Acheson told Attlee that to negotiate with the Chinese after taking “a licking” was the absolute wrong policy. State Department policy was based on George Kennan’s belief (shared by Churchill) that to negotiate with Communists from a position of weakness was to invite disaster. “To cut and run,” Acheson later wrote, “was not acceptable conduct.” Attlee also proposed that the time was right to give the Communist Chinese government a seat in the UN. He was hoping, as Tories saw it, to detach China from Moscow through kindness. Nothing, he told Truman, was more important than relations with China, to which Acheson replied “acidly” that “the security of the United States was more important.” Attlee was in an appeasement frame of mind. “Clement Attlee,” Acheson later wrote, “was a far abler man than Winston Churchill’s description of him as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ would imply, but persistently depressing.”¹⁴⁵

When the House of Commons adjourned in December for the winter holidays, it did so from its rebuilt chamber, where it first met in late October. It had been almost ten years since a German bomb had obliterated the old chamber. Clement Attlee generously named a surviving stone arch the Churchill Arch. The new chamber was built to hold only two-thirds of the members, a design Churchill had suggested, such that if only half the members showed up, the room would appear almost full. The decision to build the chamber so, Churchill told the House, confused many around the world who “cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.” He offered, “I am a child of the House of Commons and have been here I believe longer than anyone. I was much upset when I was violently thrown out of my collective cradle. I certainly wanted to get back to it as soon as possible.” Five years after V-E day, the House of Commons had been restored to its prewar splendor, but Britain had not been, and the Empire never would be.¹⁴⁶

In London that December, the weather turned depressing, and snow and ice and low temperatures persisted through the New Year. This was Churchill’s travel season. He left mid-month for five weeks in Marrakech, where Clementine was to join him in early January. On Christmas Day he wrote his wife a short note from the Hotel La Mamounia, where he spent his days painting and his evenings dining on champagne and Marennes oysters. He asked after all the animals at Chartwell—the golden orfes, the Black Mollies, the black swans, and Rufus. He had no distractions, and was hard at work on the sixth and final volume of his memoirs. Of Korea, he wrote: “Much depends on the coming battle.”¹⁴⁷

In London, there was talk of an Eastern Munich. Harold Nicolson now regretted his switch to the Labour Party and its failing socialist experiment. On New Year’s Eve Nicolson told his diary: “So ends a horrible year with worse to come…. We are all oppressed by a terrible sense of weakness and foreboding…. The year closes in a mist of anxiety. We shall be lucky if we get through 1951 without a war…. It is sad to become old amid such darkness.”¹⁴⁸

Harold Macmillan began expressing similar sentiments to his diary and continued to do so well into the late summer. In January: “The British Govt has almost ceased to function. The P.M. doodles or talks platitudes; the Foreign Secretary has pneumonia; there are no rearmament plans, no economic plan, and now—no coal!” As in 1947, Britons stoked their fires and pulled on another sweater in anticipation of a long, cold, lonely winter. On January 22 Macmillan wrote: “It is tragic that at such a moment we should have Attlee and Bevin…. Churchill is still painting in Marrakesh!”¹⁴⁹

He was. But if he was to fight his final battle against Attlee and for the premiership, he needed his rest and his strength, which he nourished over eight days with numerous picnics, long evening meals on his veranda, and painting. Still, he managed to proof eight chapters of volume 6 of his war memoirs as well as work on the final draft of the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club edition of volume 5. He daubed, dictated, and dined until January 20. He returned to London by way of Paris, where on the twenty-second he dined with Madame Odette Pol-Roger, the beautiful socialite whose company and champagne he thoroughly enjoyed (he later named one of his racehorses for her). Churchill arrived in London on the twenty-third, and set to work to bring down the Attlee government.

Britain by then was losing prestige along with the Empire. It could not mediate the Kashmir border dispute. It could not protect Malayan rubber plantations from roving bands of Communist guerrillas. The news from Korea only worsened. In April, the 1st battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment was surrounded by Chinese forces and annihilated—704 of 750 men were killed or captured. The news from the Middle East became increasingly worrisome. The Egyptian government denied passage through the Suez Canal to British oil tankers bound for the refinery at Haifa, this in abrogation of international agreements.

Then, in late April, the Iranian parliament elected Mohammad Mosaddegh—Churchill called him Mousy Duck—prime minister. The Shah, whom the British and Americans had put on the Peacock Throne a decade earlier, appointed Mosaddegh premier. On May 1, Mosaddegh nationalized the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, including its refineries at Abadan. The Attlee government pledged to not abandon the Abadan complex, but failed to explain whether it would meet that pledge through force or negotiation. It resorted to neither.

In February, Labour won a no-confidence vote by a majority of 9. A vote on steel nationalization went to Labour by 10 votes. Remarkably, almost the entire House showed up for these sessions, and divided strictly along party lines, with the Liberals sometimes splitting their few votes. The Times speculated that if an influenza outbreak that was then spreading through the land kept enough Labourites from appearing in the Commons, the government might fall. Macmillan told his diary he hadn’t seen such attendance—and such partisanship—since the General Strike of 1926. On the day following the steel vote, Labour won a referendum on meat rationing by eight votes. Macmillan scribbled in his diary: “The people do not go into little shops every weekend to buy a piece of steel. But they do grumble every weekend about their minute portion of meat.”¹⁵⁰

The Attlee government hung on, but just. When Labour came to power in 1945, the party was led by the Big Five: Attlee, Ernest Bevin (Foreign Office), Herbert Morrison (leader of the House), Sir Stafford Cripps (Board of Trade), and Hugh Dalton (Exchequer). By the end of 1947, Dalton was out, having been driven from the Exchequer for the egregious offense of leaking vital parts of HMG’s budget to a reporter, before the House saw the budget and while the stock market was still open. Cripps took over at the Exchequer, where he raised taxes and forced a reduction in consumer spending, in order, he hoped, to raise exports. He failed. Morrison, who according to Colville “was not short of ambition,” sought to maneuver Attlee out of the party chairmanship and himself in. Bevin, a bitter enemy of Morrison, refused to accede to that notion. After five years of marshaling nationalization schemes through the House, Morrison took over the Foreign Office when Bevin finally resigned due to ill health in March 1951. He was dead a month later. Bevin had always been on the opposite side of the House from Churchill, but like Churchill he was a great English patriot. Attlee, who was in the hospital with a duodenal ulcer, could not even pay tribute to Bevin in the House.

Cripps, too, had departed the scene. Plagued by severe digestive distress that his vegetarian diet failed to ameliorate, he resigned from Parliament and the cabinet in 1950, and took himself off to a Swiss sanatorium. He died two years later. Hugh Gaitskell, who also had his eye on the party leadership, succeeded him at the Exchequer in October 1950. When in early April 1951 Gaitskell announced plans to reel in costs associated with Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service by forcing Britons to pay half of their of eye care and dental expenses, and to contribute one shilling (about twenty-five cents) to their prescription costs, Bevan resigned in protest. Two days later, the head of the Board of Trade resigned. When Harold Macmillan heard the news, he told his diary, “If this is true, the Government must fall, and a general election follow.”¹⁵¹

By the summer of 1951, in contrast to the fractious and disputatious Labour leadership, the Conservatives, led by Churchill, in harness with Eden, Lord Woolton, Oliver Lyttelton, Rab Butler, Duncan Sandys, and Harold Macmillan, presented a unified opposition front, with Churchill firmly in the role of party leader.

By then, House debates, sometimes lasting all night, regularly descended into bitter shouting matches, with Churchill often being the object of the invective. But he gave as good as he got. When the minister of defence, Emanuel Shinwell, muttered his disagreement over re-arming Germany, Churchill shot back, “Oh shut up. Go and talk to the Italians; that’s all you’re fit for.” That outburst resulted in one hundred Labour MPs signing and sending an apology to the Italian government, which in turn demanded an apology from Churchill, who gave one. During a May debate on the matter of the Attlee government continuing to sell Malay rubber and other raw materials to China over the strident objection of the United States (Churchill opposed the sales), a member shouted, “Do not write down [criticize] your country all the time.” Churchill replied: “Will the honourable Member yell it out again?” The member did just that. “Sit down!” “Untrue!” “Get out!” and “Give way!” were regularly yelled from both benches. When Churchill once averred that he only wanted to do what was best for Britain, a member called out, “Resign!” An extraordinary exchange took place during a July debate on the handling of the Suez and Iranian crises, when Herbert Morrison, recently elevated to foreign secretary, interrupted Churchill with “They are laughing at the right honourable Gentleman behind him.” Churchill replied, “I expect that the right honourable Gentleman wishes that he had such cordial relations with his own back-benchers.” But Churchill could not leave it there, for Morrison had recently told an audience of coal miners that Churchill and the Tories sought war in both Egypt and Iran. Morrison, Churchill declared, “shows to all the world that his main thought in life is to be a caucus boss and a bitter party electioneer.” Churchill added, “It is tragic indeed that at this time his distorted, twisted and malevolent mind should be the one to which our Foreign Affairs are confided.”¹⁵²

That night Macmillan told his diary that Churchill’s performance was “one of his most devastating and polished efforts.” Under a mass of Labour “chaff and invective,” Churchill “thus established a complete ascendancy over the party and indeed over the House.” He had, but although he had recovered from his hernia operation and had experienced no minor strokes for two years, such exertions took an increasing toll on his health. House debates were trying, and sessions sometimes lasted until morning, an ordeal even for a younger man. Lord Moran told his diary that if Churchill “goes back to No. 10, I doubt whether he is up to the job… he has lost ground and has no longer the same grip on things and events.” And Moran, worried about Churchill’s mental health if he did not go back to No. 10, told his diary, “When the struggle for power is at an end, and his political life is over, Winston will feel there is no purpose in his existence. I dread what may happen then.”¹⁵³

All now expected Attlee to call for a general election, with polling likely to take place in October, after the late summer vacation season.

Although Clementine wanted nothing more than to retire from political life, she did not discourage Winston in his quest for No. 10. Yet neither did she encourage him. She believed that his reputation could not be enhanced by another term at the top, and would most likely be damaged. She preferred that husband and wife live out their days at Chartwell, where she had finally found happiness. Their neighbors accepted the family now, whereas in the past they had considered Churchill something of an enfant terrible, and local merchants had considered the family a poor credit risk. All had changed, Mary later wrote. Neighbors were proud of having the Churchills in their midst, and the Churchills for their part became more outgoing and welcoming. Winston and Clementine now opened the Chartwell gardens four times each summer, admission was charged, and the proceeds donated to local charities.

Clementine, though ten years her husband’s junior, lacked his energy and was easily exhausted—mentally and physically—by the strains of the political life. In May she had undergone a hysterectomy; in July she continued her convalescence near Biarritz, on the Bay of Biscay, in the company of Mary. In mid-August, with Parliament in summer recess, Churchill (and two secretaries, his valet, and Christopher Soames) set off for Paris to rendezvous with Clementine and Mary. From Paris the party traveled to the Rhone Alps region, where they planned to spend two weeks in the sun at Lake Annecy, near the Swiss border. But the sun failed to shine. Instead, a cold rain fell for a week, at which time Clementine and the Soameses returned to London, while Churchill prepared to take himself and his retinue off to Geneva by train, and from there to Venice, where he expected the bathing on the Lido would be more enjoyable. Told that the French train to Geneva did not stop at the Annecy station, Churchill instructed one of his secretaries to inform the stationmaster that Winston Churchill wishes that the train be stopped in order for Winston Churchill to board. The train was stopped. Churchill and party boarded, along with fifty-five suitcases and trunks and sixty-five smaller articles.¹⁵⁴

On September 20, a week after Churchill returned to London, Attlee sent him a short note: “My dear Churchill,” it read. “I have decided to have a general election in October.” He added that he would issue a formal declaration after that night’s nine o’clock news. The elections were set for October 25.¹⁵⁵

Churchill, at seventy-six, knew that this was his final chance to attain his lifelong goal of being sent to No. 10 Downing Street by a vote of the English people. Defeat would mean retirement to the Weald. In a Tory defeat he’d likely retain his Woodford seat, but he would very likely lose the party leadership to a younger man, most likely Anthony Eden. But Eden, at fifty-four, was no longer a young man, nor with his recurring stomach ailments was he a healthy man. The results of a Gallup poll had reached Churchill in Venice: a majority of Conservatives and Liberals favored Eden over Churchill for party leadership. This general election would be Churchill’s last as the Tory leader, win or lose. He had formed two governments, in 1940 and 1945, neither with a public mandate. Now, he would stake the reputation he had earned over fifty years on the final campaign. He had the nerve and sinew for the fight. Most of all he had the lion heart. All who knew him knew also that a loss would leave Churchill with little to hold on to.

The general election campaign of 1951 was a Hobbesian affair—not brutish, but nasty and short. Churchill began his campaign in early October, delivering eight speeches and two broadcasts in the three weeks up to polling day, October 25. Churchill’s overall theme was the “melancholy story of inadvertence, incompetence, indecision and final collapse, which has… marked the policy of our Socialist rulers.”

Foreign affairs offered him rich fields to plow. In late September, after Iranian prime minister Mosaddegh demanded that all British employees in Abadan leave Iran, Britain pulled its personnel out. Churchill, having negotiated the Persian oil concessions in 1914, once again, as during the war, saw events in the Middle East as not only threats to British national security but also personal affronts. During one House debate on the Iranian crisis, he managed to denigrate both the Attlee and the Iranian governments in the same sentence:

If I may digress for a moment, it would seem that the Government have an advantage in their task in Persia in having so much in common with the Persian Government. They, like them, are holding on to office by the skin of their teeth and, like them, they are persevering in a policy of nationalization without the slightest regard for national interests.¹⁵⁶

Thus, the campaign’s first week found Attlee acceding to Mosaddegh’s demand that the British leave Abadan. Mosaddegh, known for fits of public weeping and the occasional swoon, had actually rattled his saber. And Attlee had stood down, leading Churchill to tell a Liverpool audience that Britain had “fled the field” and had “been ejected” from Iran after “fifty years of British enterprise and management.” He added a charge of appeasement: “Mr. Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, and his party associates no doubt hope to cover up their failure by saying that the Tories want war, while they are for peace at any price.”¹⁵⁷

Indeed, painting the Tories as warmongers, Churchill foremost among them, formed the core of Labour’s strategy. Labour did not fight the election on the merits of socialism, Macmillan told his diary, but on fear—fear of unemployment, reduced wages, fewer social benefits, and, the greatest fear of all, war. During the first week of the campaign, the socialist Daily Mirror, with a circulation of four million, introduced a slogan that encapsulated the message: “Whose finger do you want on the trigger, Churchill’s or Attlee’s?” Churchill pointed out that the finger might be American, or Russian, but it could not be British, as Britain had no atomic bomb because its “influence in the world is not what it was in bygone days.” All knew that to be true; and all asked, how does Churchill intend to reclaim that influence? By war, answered Labour.¹⁵⁸

On the domestic front, Churchill let the Labour record speak for itself. He had stated his case for months, with feeling, but with little exaggeration. Britain’s plight would have been hard to exaggerate. The country was stumbling toward financial disaster. Labour had imposed the highest tax rates in the free world. During that fourth quarter of 1951, Britain was hemorrhaging from its gold and dollar reserves at a pace never before seen in its history. At the current rate, the reserves would disappear sometime around mid-1952. The Iranian crisis meant that future oil purchases might have to be made in American dollars, a further drain of three hundred million on Britain’s dollar balances. The pound had lost one-third of its value since the war ended. Internal inflation had been creeping up for six years, and was now accelerating as the Attlee government undertook to re-arm, a policy Churchill agreed with. Now, with America beginning its second year on a re-armament spending binge, worldwide commodity prices were spiraling upward, and Britain’s finances were out of control. Britain was still the world’s second-wealthiest country, a distant second behind the United States, but it clung to that status only because the economies of France, Germany, and Japan were just climbing out of the ruins of war. Churchill could not know it then, but that year’s inflationary spike (12.5 percent) would reverse itself within months as the world’s largest economies settled into the new order of the consumer society. America’s new economic model, based on ever-increasing defense and consumer spending, soon begin to lift Britain from its economic mire, as a rising tide lifts all boats. It was a process that neither Attlee nor Churchill had much control over.¹⁵⁹

On domestic issues, Churchill chose to tread a mostly metaphorical path during the election campaign. He gave Britons few precise details of Tory economic plans, as he told Moran: “We propose to give the people a lighthouse not a shop window.” During one broadcast he averred: “The difference between our outlook and the Socialist outlook on life is the difference between the ladder and the queue. We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait in his place till his turn comes.” He nebulously pledged to slow the nationalization of steel and coal. Yet he did make two specific promises, which at his insistence were included in that year’s Conservative manifesto. He pledged to build three hundred thousand houses, and in an adroit reading of the public mood, he proposed an excess profits tax be levied on corporations. Britain was re-arming, and would re-arm even more were he to win. Profits were being made on the stock exchanges and in boardrooms, the type of profits the common man did not partake in. Churchill, too, knew how to play the fear card. Ever unable to resist a shot at Bevan, he told an audience at Woodford: “It is certain that a vote for Bevanite Socialism is in fact, whatever its intention, a vote which increases the hazard of a world catastrophe.” A return to power of the socialists, he said, would deal “a real blow to our hopes of escaping a Third World War.”¹⁶⁰

Several Tory and Liberal candidates volunteered not to run against each other in constituencies where a divided vote might throw the seat to Labour. One such was at Huddersfield, where Lady Violet Bonham Carter—daughter of the great prime minister H. H. Asquith—ran as a Liberal. She and Churchill had been best of friends since first meeting at a dinner party in 1906, when he was thirty-two and she nineteen. She later wrote that Churchill “seemed to me to be quite different from any other young man I had ever met.” Churchill did not appear to notice her at first. When he did, he abruptly asked her age. She gave it. “ ‘And I,’ he said almost despairingly, ‘am thirty-two already, younger than anyone else who counts, though.’ Then savagely: ‘Curse ruthless time. Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram in.’ ” He then proceeded on a long discourse on the shortness of human life and the vast potential for human accomplishment, at the end of which he announced, “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By the end of the dinner Bonham Carter was convinced he indeed was, “and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed.” Now, speaking on her behalf at Huddersfield, Churchill reminded the crowd of his two decades as a Liberal, his service to Asquith, and his role in bringing unemployment insurance and old age pensions to Britons. He told the audience: “ ‘All men are created equal,’ says the American Declaration of Independence, ‘All men shall be kept equal,’ say the British Socialist Party.” He added, “Now is the time to break with these follies.”¹⁶¹

Speaking in Plymouth on Randolph’s behalf two days before polling day, he denounced Labour and Communist charges of warmongering as “a cruel and ungrateful accusation.”

It is the opposite of the truth. If I remain in public life at this juncture it is because, rightly or wrongly, but sincerely, I believe that I may be able to make an important contribution to the prevention of a Third World War and to bringing nearer that lasting peace settlement which the masses of the people of every race and in every land fervently desire. I pray indeed that I may have this opportunity. It is the last prize I seek to win.¹⁶²

Max Beaverbrook predicted a Tory majority of at least one hundred. Max was well informed, but not always accurately informed, as borne out by the margin of error of his predictions in the last two elections. Moran advised Churchill not to put too much stock in Max’s rosy prognostications. Churchill replied that since Max’s papers were read by millions, “he must know what he’s talking about.” Max may be right, Moran told his diary, but on all sides Tories were worried, not only about the election results but by Churchill’s age and his penchant for neither asking for nor taking advice. Churchill told Macmillan that he hoped for a majority of ninety but would settle for fifty. Macmillan also learned from Brendan Bracken that the Old Man, if victorious, planned to hold office for just one year, perhaps eighteen months at most. Churchill alluded to his planned retirement during a campaign address when he told the audience, “Mr. Eden will carry on the torch of Tory democracy when other and older hands have let it fall.” Eden, though ill, was eager, his arms outstretched, to catch the torch.¹⁶³

But Churchill was not prepared to let the torch pass until he claimed his prize—a summit at the top. That was what he sought; it was almost all he sought. Truman was still in the White House, Stalin still in the Kremlin. An election victory would turn the clock back to July 1945, to Potsdam, where the last meeting of the Big Three had been interrupted by the election.

On polling day, Thursday, October 25, the Daily Mirror accompanied its slogan—Whose finger on the trigger?—with a large photograph of a chubby man in half silhouette, holding a cigar. The man in the photo was not Churchill. By staging the shot, the Daily Mirror crossed the line. Churchill soon filed a lawsuit, and was rewarded with a full, if insincere, apology wherein the editors expressed regret if their words and photos implied in any way that Churchill did not dislike war. But the question asked by Tories on polling day was, how effective had the Daily Mirror been in its underhanded campaign? The answer to that question arrived overnight as the votes were counted. The Tories won, but just. Churchill did not get his hoped-for majority of 100, or even 50, but only 18, over all parties. The Conservatives finished with 321 seats, Labour with 295, the Liberals only 6. In fact, Labour, with 13,866,000 votes, outpolled the Conservatives by 229,000 votes. The results did not in any way resemble a mandate for Churchill. By noon on October 26, Attlee knew he was beaten. Early that evening he motored to Buckingham Palace to hand King George the seals of office. An hour or so later Churchill made his journey to the palace, where for the third time since 1940 he was asked by King George to form a government. Once again, as in 1939, when he was called back to the Admiralty, the signal went out worldwide: Winston is back.

The King was a very ill man, recuperating from lung surgery to remove a cancer. Weeks earlier, Churchill, shocked by the King’s appearance and always anxious about all things medical, pressed Moran for details of the King’s ailment and his chances for recovery. It was then that Moran understood that Churchill’s anxiety had to do with his own decline, about which he received regular reminders by way of spells of dizziness, bouts of forgetfulness, numbness in his shoulders, and increasing deafness. And it was then that Moran concluded that Churchill had lost much ground along with his grip on things, and if he returned to No. 10 would not be up to the job. Clementine braced herself for the pending ordeal. Shortly after the election, she wrote a short note to Ronald Tree: “I do hope Winston will be able to help the country. It will be up-hill work, but he has a willing eager heart.”¹⁶⁴

Pug Ismay, happily retired from public affairs, had gone to bed early on the night of October 26. Late that night the telephone on his bedside table jangled to life. The familiar ring had heralded the invasion of the Low Countries, the death of Roosevelt, and the surrender of the German armies. Ismay lifted the receiver; a voice on the other end of the line asked him to stand by for the prime minister. A moment later: “Is that you Pug?… I want to see you at once. You aren’t asleep are you?” Ismay explained that in fact he had been. “Well,” said Churchill, “I only want to see you for five minutes.” Ismay put his head under a cold tap, dressed hurriedly, and within fifteen minutes arrived at 28 Hyde Park Gate. There Churchill told Ismay, a career soldier, that he wanted him to take the office of secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, a political post for which Ismay considered himself totally unqualified. “I thought the cold tap had failed to do its job,” Ismay later wrote, “and I was still dreaming.” He accepted the position, “overjoyed at the prospect of serving under Churchill again.”¹⁶⁵

Jock Colville’s summons arrived the next morning, as he and his wife were enjoying themselves at the Newmarket races. A steward of the Jockey Club found Colville in the crowd and told him that the prime minister was on the line and wished to speak to him. “Whatever he asks you to do,” warned Colville’s wife, “say no.” Colville had returned to the Foreign Office after his two years in service to Princess Elizabeth and was content to finish his career there. But it was not to be. When Colville picked up the phone in the Jockey Club, the prime minister apologized for any inconvenience, and asked if Colville might be willing to meet in person. “Tomorrow?” Colville asked. “No,” replied Churchill, “this afternoon.” When they met, Colville asked Churchill how long he thought he’d stay on at Downing Street. The question stemmed from Colville’s concern that another prolonged absence from the Foreign Office would derail his career. One year, Churchill replied. Colville signed on.¹⁶⁶

At Chartwell over the next four days, the Old Man reassembled his old team. Eden would again lead the House and head the Foreign Office, the very same dual role that had exhausted him during the war. Colville came aboard as joint principal private secretary, sharing those duties with David Pitblado, an Attlee appointee. Rab Butler would go to the Exchequer, Oliver Lyttelton as colonial secretary, and Lord Woolton as lord president of the council. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—was to be paymaster general. Harry Crookshank, a party lesser light, was to take on the Ministry of Health. Harold Macmillan was to be minister of housing, with a mandate from Churchill to build the three hundred thousand houses he had promised during the campaign. When Macmillan asked Churchill what that might entail and how to go about it, the Old Man answered, “I haven’t an idea.” Churchill’s sons-in-law were brought in, Duncan Sandys as minister of supply, Christopher Soames as parliamentary private secretary. But the nepotism did not extend to Randolph. Randolph, who had served his father during the war as adviser without portfolio and minister of provocation, no longer even served in those capacities. Churchill had grown weary of the knockdown political arguments that Randolph precipitated with regularity. Such verbal jousts had on occasion stimulated the Old Man during the war; now they tired him. One appointment raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. As he had in 1940, Churchill named himself minister of defence. “It is just folly for Churchill to become Minister of Defence,” Macmillan told his diary. “It almost justifies the Daily Mirror…. This is a major blunder.”¹⁶⁷

During those autumn weeks, Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of NATO, set about organizing his NATO headquarters in Paris. Eisenhower sought something along the lines of his World War Two SHAEF arrangement, that is, allied countries would put their armies under NATO command in the event of war, but they would otherwise maintain sovereign control over their forces. The French Assembly and Robert Schuman, however, advocated the creation of a European Defense Community, something of a supranational military version of Schuman’s Coal and Steel Community. The European army, as outlined by then–French premier René Pleven in 1950, would exist separately from the armies of the nations that contributed soldiers to it. De Gaulle, still in self-imposed exile from French politics, saw the EDC as an abdication of French sovereignty. The Scandinavian countries feared Franco-German domination if the EDC succeeded, and a German threat if it did not. Political cartoonists throughout Western Europe panned the plan, citing the absurd problems of command and control inherent in trying to guide brigades and divisions—let alone an entire army—made up of a dozen or more nationalities, all speaking different languages and carrying different weapons. The Bevan wing of the Labour Party opposed the EDC on the grounds that a European army, especially one containing Germans, would provoke Moscow. Eisenhower, too, was wary of bringing German forces into the mix, and remained so for three years. Britons were largely apathetic toward Europe, Dean Acheson later wrote, and, like the French, feared a re-armed Germany. America and NATO were where Britons beheld their salvation. For many Britons, including Churchill, the Atlantic was narrower than the English Channel.¹⁶⁸

On December 6, Churchill imparted to the House his thoughts on the matter in an address that marked another milestone in the European journey toward unity, and Britain’s role in that journey. Churchill told the House he foresaw “a European Army, containing a German contribution of agreed size and strength, [that] will stand alongside the British and United States Armies in a common defensive front. That, after all, is what really matters to the life or death of the free world.” Then came the seeming paradox from the man who had argued for almost two decades for a united Europe: “As far as Britain is concerned, we do not propose to merge in the European Army but we are already joined to it. Our troops are on the spot.” As with any future European economic union, Britain would be in and out simultaneously. But it wasn’t a paradox. Unlike de Gaulle, whose loyalty was to France alone, Churchill was loyal to Britain first. It had always been so. He ended his address by declaring that the progress toward a European Defense Community (discussions Attlee had refused to join) amounted to “an enlightened if not an inspiring tale.” Noting that the EDC had not yet taken its final shape, he announced that he would not make a final decision on Britain’s role until it did.¹⁶⁹

But the EDC never took its final shape. Churchill mocked the EDC weeks later in the private company of Truman and Acheson. The EDC talks dragged on until 1954, when France, by then losing a war in Indochina, pulled out. But by then Germany had re-armed, and NATO—including Greece and Turkey—had assumed the command structure that Eisenhower had envisioned, and had formed the defensive cordon for Western Europe, largely funded and manned by Churchill’s American cousins, which was exactly what Churchill had sought since 1945.

By late 1951, Churchill had reached his goals also regarding the political and economic elements of European union. In February 1949, he had told a council of European ministers meeting in Brussels that their duty, and his, was to return to their respective countries and impress upon the leaders of their governments the wisdom of European unity: “We may even, in the form of an active, enlightened and ever more dominant public opinion, give them the fuel they need for their journey and the electric spark to set all in motion.” It was now in motion.¹⁷⁰

So, too, was the British atomic deterrent, another lynchpin of Churchill’s European defense strategy. During the December 6 address, Churchill outlined the essence of that strategy. Having learned upon taking office that the Attlee government had been in the process of building an atomic bomb, Churchill pledged to bring it to fruition. Doing so, he warned the House, “adds to the deterrents against war, but it may throw the brunt on to us should war come.” The Russians, upon learning of the American atomic bombers in East Anglia, had called Britain an “aircraft carrier.” Britain, therefore, was a prime target. Yet, Churchill added, “We shall not flinch from the duty Britain has accepted.”¹⁷¹

With the atomic deterrent in hand, he could then proceed to the prize he now saw as the culmination of his career; world peace brought about by a summit meeting between the American president, himself, and Joseph Stalin. He believed still that men of honor keep their word. He shocked one of his private secretaries when he declared that Stalin had never broken his word. Of course Stalin had broken his word, leading to the current state of world affairs. Churchill the romantic was overruling Churchill the statesman and ignoring Churchill the historian.

In early November, while reiterating the dangers posed by a nuclear world, he told the House: “But our great hope in foreign affairs is, of course, to bring about an abatement of what is called ‘the cold war’ by negotiation at the highest level from strength and not from weakness.” He then read to the House the letter he had sent Stalin in 1945, in which he had warned of a dangerous world with Communists drawn up on one side against the English-speaking nations and their allies. “It is quite obvious,” he had told Stalin, that such a “quarrel would tear the world to pieces and that all of us leading men on either side who had anything to do with that would be shamed before history.” It had all come to pass, he told the House, “with horrible exactitude.” Thus, a summit at the top, Churchill believed, was the only way to avert the ultimate catastrophe of World War Three. He also believed that only absolute Anglo-American solidarity could bring the Soviets to the table. As he put it to President Truman, the Kremlin feared a strong Anglo-American friendship, and would try to drive a wedge between Americans and Britons. But if the Soviets grew to fear the unshakable Western alliance enough, they might then see friendship with the West as more advantageous than enmity. In 1942 he told Americans, “If we are together, nothing is impossible, if we are divided, all will fail.” He believed that yet.¹⁷²

To that end, on the final day of 1951, Churchill and his retinue—including Colville, Lord Moran, Pug Ismay, Dickie Mountbatten, and the Prof—once again, as during the late war, embarked for the United States on board the Queen Mary. At midnight they convened in Churchill’s cabin for a champagne toast and a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Churchill had turned seventy-seven a month earlier. Bob Boothby, who had been drummed from office in 1940 over alleged financial improprieties, had dined with him that month after the Old Man asked Boothby to lead the British delegation in talks on a united Europe, an act of magnanimity that resurrected Boothby’s career. Boothby was an old, but false, friend of Churchill’s, and he never forgave the Old Man for not coming to his defense in 1940. Yet on one matter Boothby shared the opinion of many of Churchill’s colleagues. Boothby reported to Harold Nicolson that Churchill was getting “very, very old, tragically old.” Secretary of State Dean Acheson later wrote that during the Washington meetings, he found Churchill to be “still formidable and quite magnificent,” but noted, “the old lion seemed to be weakening.”¹⁷³

Acheson later wrote that the French seemed always to arrive in Washington bearing demands, while the American press believed the British did likewise, and in fact ran roughshod over American leaders. But Acheson understood that the British and Churchill had come only in search of friendship. In his third address before the U.S. Congress, an unprecedented honor for a foreign leader, Churchill made clear he had not come “to ask you for money to make life more comfortable or easier for us in Britain.” Rather, he came to pledge his support for American policies in Asia, the Middle East, and in Europe. Speaking in a sense to the Kremlin, he declared, as he had many times since 1945, that Britain sought nothing from Russia. Although he regularly called Communists and communism sinister and malignant, he did not do so now. Nor did he refer to the Communists as “godless” or “atheists,” as was the wont of many Americans in high office. The words, in fact, do not appear in any of his public addresses delivered between 1940 and 1961. His battle was fought not over Christian dogma, but over liberty. He ended with his favorite Bismarck quote: “Bismarck once said that the supreme fact of the nineteenth century was that Britain and the United States spoke the same language. Let us make sure that the supreme fact of the twentieth century is that they tread the same path.”¹⁷⁴

Harry Truman, who was not running for reelection in 1952, deferred to his successor any decision on a possible summit. That turned out to be Dwight Eisenhower. Churchill’s New Year’s 1952 Atlantic crossing was the first of four journeys to Washington and Bermuda that he undertook over the next three years, each one a quest for his summit prize. Implicit in that is the fact that Churchill did not leave office in a year or so as he had told his colleagues he would. Instead, he stayed on for almost four more years, in pursuit of his prize, which in the end eluded him. He never flagged in that pursuit, even as pneumonia and then a terrible stroke hobbled him, even as his colleagues, driven in part by their concern for his health, and in part by their own ambitions, sought to ease him out of Downing Street, even as Stalin and his successors rebuffed him after the ogre’s death in 1953. President Eisenhower did likewise.

Truman often told Dean Acheson that Churchill was the greatest public figure of their age. Acheson thought that an understatement. Churchill’s greatness, Acheson wrote, “flowed not only from great qualities of heart and brain, indomitable courage, energy, magnanimity, and good sense, but from supreme art and deliberate policy.” These elements, Acheson believed, fused into a style of leadership “that alone can call forth from a free people what cannot be commanded.” One would have to go back almost four hundred years, to Queen Elizabeth I, Acheson believed, to find Churchill’s equal. Churchill’s final battle, to bring the Americans, Soviets, and British to the conference table, fought into his eighties, was as dogged as any he ever fought. And yet, tragedy is the wasting shadow always cast, sooner or later, by towering heroism.

Jock Colville later wrote that Churchill’s “return to power seemed to many to presage the recovery of hopes tarnished by the dismal aftermath of the war.” Those hopes fell short of complete fulfillment during the three and one-half years of Churchill’s last administration, but during those years, the austerity programs and rationing disappeared, the standard of living rose, if modestly, and Europe remained at peace, albeit an uneasy peace. The first year under Churchill remained bleak: rationing was severe, and coal still scarce. Then King George VI died on February 6, 1952. Colville found Churchill in tears that morning, staring straight ahead, reading neither his official papers nor the newspapers. The Old Man feared he could not work with the new Queen, as he did not know her and “she was only a child.” But he pledged to stay on as prime minister until her coronation in mid-1953.

Here was the first delay in his promised departure; there would be more. It was much the same tactic he had used when he delayed the second front during the war: pledge support for an outcome but keep moving the timetable back. Had he announced in early 1952 that he might stay on until 1955, he’d have sparked a palace revolt by Eden, Butler, Macmillan, and most certainly by Clementine, who wanted him out of Downing Street and home in Kent.¹⁷⁵

On April 24, 1953, the Queen summoned Churchill to Windsor Castle, where she conferred on him the Order of the Garter. He had declined her father’s offer of the Garter in 1945. At that time, the law held that the prime minister must approve the monarch’s nomination. Churchill, as prime minister, refused his own knighthood. But the law had been changed; the decision was now the Queen’s alone to make. And so Churchill became Sir Winston Churchill, K.G.

The young Queen heralded a new era of youthful optimism as the old order and the old wars receded into Britain’s collective memory. In early June 1953, twenty million Britons watched Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on live television, mostly in pubs, but the new TV experience led to a doubling of television sales in Britain. America watched, too. For the young, a golden future beckoned, rich with promise.

But not for the old. For some weeks before the Queen’s coronation, Churchill had once again, as during the war, been acting foreign minister after Anthony Eden was forced to undergo a third operation for his debilitating stomach ulcers. In his role as acting foreign minister, the P.M. concluded that the Soviets had changed their stripes following the death of Stalin in March, felled by a stroke, although rumors coming out of Moscow had it that he had been poisoned by the murderous head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, the man responsible for the Katyn forest massacres. Indeed, Beria was arrested in June. Churchill had sent friendly greetings to Stalin’s apparent successor, Georgy Malenkov, who responded in kind. It was all simply diplomatic dancing in the dark, but Churchill believed the moment had arrived to “grasp the paw of the Russian bear.” He had told Britons since 1950 that the goal of sitting down with the Russians was to work toward a nuclear disarmament treaty, always stressing that any such treaty must include provisions for international inspections and enforcement. Now, believing the moment had arrived, he sent preliminary feelers to Eisenhower, suggesting that they meet in order to plan the big summit. Eisenhower tentatively agreed; Bermuda was to be the place, the date not yet confirmed.

Then, on June 23, just two weeks after the Queen’s coronation, Churchill went to rise from the dinner table at No. 10 and instead collapsed into his chair, unable to walk, his words slurred. Colville at first thought the Old Man had had too much to drink. Colville, Christopher Soames, and Clementine managed to get Churchill to bed. They summoned Lord Moran, who took only a few minutes to conclude that his patient had suffered a stroke. When Churchill, pale but mobile, chaired a cabinet meeting the next morning, no one present thought anything amiss. Moran moved him to Chartwell that afternoon. The next day the symptoms grew more severe, so severe that by the following day, his doctors believed the end might come within days. He lost feeling on his left side and then the ability to make a fist. Moran concluded that the “thrombosis is obviously spreading,” but did not tell Churchill in so many words. The doctor ordered bed rest—no cabinet meetings, no Questions in the House, and no Bermuda. Moran drew up a medical bulletin that referenced a “disturbance of cerebral circulation.” That phrase was axed by Rab Butler and Churchill. The edited bulletin simply stated the P.M. needed respite from his arduous duties. So began an almost two-month news blackout of a sort that would be impossible to pull off in this age of total media. Churchill’s health improved slowly during those months. During one low point, he told Colville that he’d resign in October, as he no longer had “the zest” for the work and thought the world was in “an abominable state.” He was depressed, he said, by thoughts of the hydrogen bomb.¹⁷⁶

Then he changed his mind on the matter of resigning. With logic only Churchill could conjure, he told all those who believed he should resign due to his ill health—Clementine, his cabinet colleagues, and Lord Moran—that the time to leave office was not when he was weak but when he recovered. To speed that process, he informed Moran that he had given up brandy, substituting Cointreau instead, and that he had switched to milder cigars. He read a great deal: Jane Eyre, Trollope, Candide, Wuthering Heights, 1984, Phineas Finn, C. S. Forester. He edited his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He banged croquet balls about on the lawn, more from frustration over his condition than from any love of the game.¹⁷⁷

Churchill’s spirits were boosted in early July by the prospect of Eisenhower’s visiting Britain, an idea that apparently had germinated in Churchill’s imagination. In fact, Eisenhower followed in the footsteps of presidents Truman and Roosevelt, footsteps that never led to London. Bitterness was Churchill’s response as it dawned on him later in the month that Eisenhower was not coming to Britain and did not see eye to eye with him on a thaw in relations with Russia. The Democrats should have won the election, the Old Man told Colville, adding that Eisenhower was “both weak and stupid.”¹⁷⁸

Slowly, he regained his gait and powers of speech. He was cheered by the news on July 27 that the armistice was signed that day ending the Korean conflict. But there would be no V-K day celebrations; the West had not won, and the Chinese or North Koreans might at any time violate the treaty. That night he told Moran that the opportunity for peace had been within reach before the stroke, “if only, Charles, I had the strength. I’m a sort of survival. Roosevelt and Stalin are both dead. I only am left.”¹⁷⁹

Eden, himself frail, paid a visit to Churchill in August. By then Rab Butler was exhausting himself filling in for both Eden and Churchill. Colville noted that Eden seemed to come with one burning thought in mind: “When do I take over?” Yet it dawned on Eden that he would not be moving up to No. 10 until and unless his health improved considerably. Eden’s was a family visit, in that the previous year he had married Jack Churchill’s daughter, Clarissa, which made him Churchill’s nephew-in-law. But the familial bonds did not guarantee a warm relationship. Churchill was growing increasingly resentful of Eden’s transparent ambition. The Old Man told Colville that the more Eden tried to hustle him out, the longer he’d stay.¹⁸⁰

Churchill ran only three cabinet meetings over three months, and kept his visits to No. 10 at a minimum. By late August he was on his way back. Still, one consulting physician, the aptly named neurologist Sir Russell Brain, told Lord Moran that he doubted Churchill could ever again give speeches or answer Questions in the House.¹⁸¹

Churchill proved Sir Russell’s diagnosis dead wrong in early November, when, on the third, he made his first parliamentary speech since the stroke. Other than members of Churchill’s cabinet, no one in the chamber knew he had been ill. Yet rumors of a stroke had percolated through the press. The Daily Mirror had repeated the rumor running in the American press that he had been struck down, was expected to recover, and then resign. The eyes of the world were therefore upon him that day. He covered a plethora of domestic and international matters before arriving at the root of the matter: defense. He declared that two dominant events had taken place since 1951—the shift of hostilities in Korea from the battlefield to the conference table, and the death of Stalin. He wondered aloud if the death of Stalin had ushered in a new era in Soviet policy conducive to détente, a “new look.” He had no ready answer but told the House he believed all nations act in their best interest and that the Soviets might have “turned to internal betterment rather than external aggression.” How could the West encourage such behavior? His proposed solution was to be found in the third dominant event of the last two years:

I mean the rapid and ceaseless developments of atomic warfare and the hydrogen bomb. These fearful scientific discoveries cast their shadow on every thoughtful mind, but nevertheless I believe that we are justified in feeling that there has been a diminution of tension and that the probabilities of another world war have diminished, or at least have become more remote. I say this in spite of the continual growth of weapons of destruction such as have never fallen before into the hands of human beings. Indeed, I have sometimes the odd thought that the annihilating character of these agencies may bring an utterly unforeseeable security to mankind.

Churchill was unaware at the time that the United States had exploded an H-bomb on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok in November 1952. The device was far too large—seventy tons—to fit inside an airplane. The Americans were now at work perfecting a smaller though far more powerful version. The Russians had followed in August 1953 with their own H-bomb test in Kazakhstan. Both tests had so far remained state secrets. But Churchill and the world were well aware that a hydrogen bomb would soon be exploded, somewhere, by someone, most likely the Americans.

He developed his remarkable “odd thought” further, and in doing so became the first world leader to articulate what later became known as the policy of MAD: mutually assured destruction.

It may be that… when the advance of destructive weapons enables everyone to kill everybody else nobody will want to kill anyone at all. At any rate, it seems pretty safe to say that a war which begins by both sides suffering what they dread most—and that is undoubtedly the case at present—is less likely to occur than one which dangles the lurid prizes of former ages before ambitious eyes.¹⁸²

Churchill left the House under his own power, strolling to the smoking room, where he drank brandy for two hours (having abandoned his experiment with Cointreau). The speech was the final hurdle, he told Moran, to restarting the Bermuda talks. Churchill fully expected to soon be meeting with Malenkov, after gaining Eisenhower’s approval. He was ebullient, telling Moran, “I’m thinking of substituting port for brandy.” That night, Moran said this of Churchill in his diary: “I love his guts. I think he’s invincible.” Macmillan committed similar thoughts to his diary: “Indeed, he [Churchill] was complete master of himself and the House. It seems incredible that this man was struck down by a second stroke at the beginning of July.”¹⁸³

Within the week, Eisenhower agreed to an early December meeting with Churchill in Bermuda, with the purpose of discussing a unified approach to the Russians, preparatory to an Anglo-American-Soviet summit. The French would attend the Bermuda meeting as well, in their role as the third Western power. Indeed, the conference had been postponed not only because of Churchill’s summertime hiatus, but because the turnover in French ministers had been so great for so long that the French government at times had no one to send to conferences. Neither the P.M. nor Eden believed the French would add anything of value to the discussion. The Bermuda talks would be fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, always a concern to foreign ministers when their heads of state are doing the flying. Churchill’s belief that Russia was ready to talk was a result, Moran believed, of Churchill existing “in an imaginary world of his own making.” On December 2, Churchill, Eden, Moran, and Colville boarded the pressurized Stratocruiser Canopus for the seventeen-hour flight to Bermuda by way of Gander, Newfoundland. For much of the journey—a far cry from the days of rattling and unheated B-24s—Churchill read C. S. Forester’s Death to the French, an unfortunate choice if he was seen carrying it into the conference.¹⁸⁴

Clementine did not accompany Winston to Bermuda. She was in Stockholm that week to accept on Churchill’s behalf the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded for Churchill’s war memoirs. The prize was £12,500, tax free, a sum that Churchill in a note to his wife declared was “not so bad!” She likely would not have made the trip to Bermuda in any event. “Her heart had never been in this second term of office,” her daughter Mary later wrote. She was tired, and prone to agitation, especially around her husband, to whom she made clear that his soldiering on as P.M. imposed great burdens upon her. She was mistress of Chartwell and the Hyde Park Gate house, as well as hostess at No. 10 and Chequers, where the constant entertaining and steady streams of visitors were a strain. For Clementine, the present held no joy and the future promised only more worries.¹⁸⁵

Britain had tested its first atomic bomb a year earlier. It deployed its first atomic weapons days after Churchill’s November 3 address. Yet the hydrogen weapon, not the A-bomb, obsolete now in Churchill’s opinion, lay at the core of Churchill’s strategy to bring the Russians into disarmament talks. Soon after the Bermuda meetings began, he learned that Eisenhower did not believe likewise. As if to prove the risks inherent when heads of state sit down to talk, Churchill supported Eisenhower—in turn seconded by his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles—without hesitation when the president declared he felt “free to use,” indeed was prepared to use, atomic bombs in North Korea if the Chinese violated the armistice. Eisenhower added that he intended to say just that in an upcoming speech at the United Nations, a copy of which he gave Churchill to look over. Eden was shocked, and told Churchill so in private. Churchill began to grasp Eden’s point: any such declaration by Eisenhower would not help to bring the Russians to the conference table. Churchill dispatched Colville to Eisenhower’s quarters at the Mid-Ocean Club with a brief note in which he suggested the president temper his language by changing “free to” to “reserved the right to” use atomic weapons. Eisenhower agreed to do so, and offered as well to call for the creation of an international atomic regulatory agency.

The president then told Colville that “whereas Winston looked upon the [hydrogen bomb] as something new and terrible,” he believed it to be simply the latest “improvement in military weapons.” The president implied, Colville told his diary, that “there was in fact no distinction between ‘conventional weapons’ and atomic weapons.” Churchill had once believed likewise, in 1945, but no longer did. After Churchill at one of the plenary sessions outlined at length his “double dealing” approach to the Soviets—an atomic bomb in one hand, the other extended in friendship—Eisenhower responded with a harangue of a sort none around the table had ever heard at an international conference. As for the Soviets’ “new look,” Eisenhower compared Russia to a whore wearing a new dress but “it was surely the same whore underneath.” The French, predictably, leaked all of this to the press.¹⁸⁶

Yet Eisenhower had to step with care. Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was riding high that year, and riding roughshod over the State Department, which for three years McCarthy had alleged was rife with Communists. When, during a private lunch in Bermuda, Churchill asked Eisenhower about McCarthy’s influence in America, the president suggested he pay no attention to McCarthy, just as Americans paid no attention to Aneurin Bevan. It was not an apt comparison; Bevan might be a socialist gadfly, but he was not a dangerous presence in British politics. Many Americans presumed the British Foreign Office and the British intelligence services were likewise infested with Reds, a conclusion drawn in part by the defections to Moscow by Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in 1951, although their exact whereabouts were not ascertained until 1956. It would not do for Eisenhower to encourage the notion that the British and Churchill had bullied him into glad-handing with the godless Communists in the Kremlin. Churchill could not bring himself to condemn his old wartime colleague for bowing to anti-Communist fury. Instead, he shifted blame onto John Foster Dulles, to whom he had taken an immediate and visceral dislike the previous year. “It seems that everything is left to Dulles,” Churchill told Moran. “It appears that the president is no more than a ventriloquist’s doll.” In any case, Churchill went home to London without his prize. There would be no Anglo-American-Soviet summit anytime soon.¹⁸⁷

Soon after Churchill’s return from Bermuda, the Daily Mirror began calling for his resignation. One Mirror piece, under the headline SHADOW OF A GIANT, quoted the New York Times: Churchill “was only the shadow of the great figure of 1940.” The Daily Mirror’s attacks got under Churchill’s skin, Moran told his diary, but an article and cartoon in Punch hit the Old Man harder. The article, titled “A Story Without an Ending,” was written by Malcolm Muggeridge, then the editor of Punch. It was an allegorical tale of a fictitious Byzantine ruler who had served his nation well but had lost his once-splendid faculties to old age and decrepitude. Accompanying the piece was a cartoon that depicted Churchill with a slack jaw, the left side of his face flaccid, as if from his stroke. Churchill’s hands as depicted in the cartoon—“podgy, shapeless,” in Moran’s description—peered out from white cuffs. Churchill held his hands up to Moran. “Look at my hands,” he said, “I have beautiful hands.” Then he offered that, as Punch goes everywhere, he must resign. Years later Muggeridge declared that statement showed that Churchill “was totally out of touch with the contemporary situation,” because by 1954 Punch did not go everywhere. It once did, Muggeridge declared, “but only in the 19th century.”¹⁸⁸

On March 1, 1954, the Americans detonated a hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. Three months later, on June 16, Churchill convened a secret session of the Defence Policy Committee at which he and his defence ministers agreed to a dramatic new atomic policy: Britain would build its own hydrogen bomb. The decision was so secret that not even the cabinet was informed. A week later, on June 24, Churchill departed by air for Washington.¹⁸⁹

It was his last official trip to the United States, his final chance to garner Eisenhower’s support for a summit. The usual group attended to his needs—Eden, Moran, Colville, and Christopher Soames. His mood aboard the Stratocruiser was at first somber. To Moran he lamented the changes wrought by the Wright brothers. The world had grown smaller: “It was an evil hour for poor England.” But the mood passed, and at ten in the morning British time, he told the steward to remove his whisky and bring on the champagne and caviar. Knowing that Eisenhower, guided by John Foster Dulles, would not agree to a three-party or four-party summit, Churchill arrived in Washington with a new proposal—to conduct a two-party summit, himself and Malenkov.¹⁹⁰

Thus his mood improved exponentially when on Friday, June 25, shortly after arriving at the White House, Eisenhower voiced no objection to Churchill’s holding bilateral talks with the Russians, and did so before Churchill had even presented his case, which he had thought would be a long and complicated process. The objective of talks with the Russians, as Churchill saw it, was to buy ten years of “easement” in relations with Moscow, such that America, Russia, and Britain could divert their monies and scientific research away from catastrophic atomic bombs and into fruitful, peaceful endeavors. Eisenhower agreed, and even suggested that he and Churchill, along with the French and Germans, hold preliminary talks in London before Churchill went off to engage the Russians. Colville noted that Dulles tried to squelch the Russian initiative, without success. Eisenhower hosted a small dinner on Sunday, described by Colville as “very gay,” with Churchill and Eisenhower agreeing that Germany must re-arm, even if over French objections. The French, Eisenhower declared, “were a hopeless, helpless mass of protoplasm.” In fact, within weeks, the EDC died in the French Assembly and the tri-party occupation of West Germany was lifted, and within ten months, Germany was welcomed into NATO. Another cause for cheer had been Eisenhower’s reaction when Churchill told him of the British decision to build a hydrogen bomb: Eisenhower had made no objection. Churchill could return to London a victor. As well, with a summit in mind, if not in hand, he now had another reason to stay on at No. 10.¹⁹¹

This he imparted to Eden on the return voyage to Britain, aboard the Cunarder Queen Elizabeth, named for the queen’s mother, consort of George VI. When asked by Eden when he might resign, he set September 21 as a tentative date. This was important, because British law called for a general election to be held at least every five years. That meant October 1956 at the latest. If Churchill stayed on well into 1955, Eden would have precious little time to chart the course of his new government before the election. Churchill understood that well. Yet he would not go before he met with the Russians.

On that front, while on board the Queen Elizabeth, Churchill dictated a telegram to Soviet foreign minister Molotov in which he proposed direct talks between himself and the Soviet leaders, talks in which the United States would not participate. When Eden objected, pointing out correctly that such a message could not be sent without cabinet approval, Churchill dismissed his rationale as “nonsense,” telling Colville that if the cabinet objected, he’d resign. That, Colville told the P.M., would split the Tories and the country “top to bottom.” Churchill was practicing blackmail of a sort, and it worked. Eden backed off. Churchill’s approach to Eden, Colville noted, had been “ruthless and unscrupulous.” Eden finally agreed under Churchill’s relentless pressure to inform the cabinet that he approved of the message. The telegram to Molotov was duly sent. The Russians waited three weeks to reply, and when they did, their proposal, by its absurd demands, effectively killed any chances of bilateral talks. They demanded a thirty-two-party all-European conference, with NATO withdrawal from Germany topping the agenda. Eden had been correct: by shooting off the message, Churchill had confused the Russians, angered Eisenhower, and alienated his cabinet. They all now questioned his wisdom. Of Churchill’s crusade for a summit, Macmillan told his diary: “It was his last passionate wish—an old man’s dream—an old man’s folly, perhaps, but it might have saved the world.”¹⁹²

Churchill admitted defeat during the cabinet meeting following the arrival of the Soviet message. There would be no talks. Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, needed only a few words to close this chapter of the Great Man’s life: “Churchill’s last great foreign policy initiative was at an end.”¹⁹³

By all rights, so, too, should have been his premiership. But he held on, in part to secure cabinet approval on making a hydrogen bomb, which he duly gained on July 8; four days later he told the House that decisions had been made regarding atomic weapons, but he gave no details. Earlier in the year, he had proposed to leave in June, then July, then September. In August he decided against September. As summer gave out to fall, Eden and Harold Macmillan increased their efforts to move him out, to no avail.

In late July, Macmillan approached Clementine on the matter, a tactical mistake. He should have gone directly to Churchill, but perhaps did not, knowing well the Old Man’s blunt style of debate. Churchill summoned Macmillan in order to discuss the matter. Colville feared an eruption. Macmillan was ushered into Churchill’s study to find the Old Man engaged with Colville in a game of bezique. Churchill offered Macmillan a whisky and cigar, and continued his game. Then he insisted the score be tallied and that he pay Colville the monies owed. They disputed the exact amount. Churchill’s checkbook was sent for and a pen. The pen arrived, the wrong pen. Macmillan meanwhile was allowed to fidget for the better part of a half hour. Finally, Churchill asked if Colville would be so good as to leave the room, because it appeared Mr. Macmillan “wanted to talk about some matter of political importance.” The meeting did not last long; it took Churchill only a minute to make his point, which was that he was staying, although he told Macmillan that the party leaders had the authority to replace him as leader. Macmillan knew full well that given Churchill’s popularity, a coup by the Tory leadership would spell their doom, not Churchill’s. “I cannot understand what all the fuss was about,” Churchill told Colville after Macmillan’s departure. “He [Macmillan] really had nothing to say at all. He was very mild.”¹⁹⁴

In early August, Macmillan told his diary: “His [Churchill’s] present mood is so self-centered as to amount almost to mania. It is, no doubt, the result of his disease [his stroke].” Were Churchill a king, Macmillan wrote, he’d be deposed. When pressed by Butler, Macmillan, and Eden, Churchill replied, “You cannot ask me to sign my own death warrant.” Yet by not going he was signing theirs. “All of us, who really have loved as well as admired him,” wrote Macmillan, “are being slowly driven into something like hatred.”¹⁹⁵

Churchill’s treatment of Eden became shabby. During one luncheon, he told Eden that it would all be his by the time he was sixty. For Eden, that birthday was three years away. Colville wrote that Churchill had begun “to form a cold hatred of Eden, who, he repeatedly said, had done more to thwart him… than anybody else.” That was a cruel and untrue assessment. Of Churchill during these final months in office, Colville wrote: “And yet on some days the old gleam would be there, wit and good humour would bubble and sparkle, wisdom would roll out in telling sentences and still, occasionally, the sparkle of genius could be seen in a decision, a letter or a phrase.” But Colville asked himself, was Churchill still the man to negotiate with the Soviets and nudge the Americans to a less militant attitude toward Russia? “The Foreign Office thought not; the British public would, I am sure, have said yes. And I, who have been as intimate with him as anybody during these last years, simply do not know.”¹⁹⁶

Churchill turned eighty on November 30, 1954, the first prime minister since Gladstone to hold that office at that age. He was now the Father of the House and the only MP then sitting who had been elected during Queen Victoria’s reign. Parliament, to mark his birthday, presented him with the portrait painted by Graham Sutherland, for which Churchill had sat throughout the autumn. He loathed it. In public he declared that it “certainly combines force with candor.” In private he called it “malignant.” Clementine thought it hideous, and soon banished it to the attic, and sometime later had it burned. It portrayed him as old, which he was, and his face as coarse and cruel, which it was not. The royal family sent a birthday gift of four silver wine coasters engraved with the signatures of those who joined in giving it. On Churchill’s birthday, Clement Attlee, who now led the opposition, delivered a long and generous tribute on the floor of the House, during which he declared that Churchill’s wartime speeches reflected both the will of Parliament and of the nation.¹⁹⁷

Churchill replied to Attlee’s address the next day:

I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar. I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right places to use his claws. I am now nearing the end of my journey. I hope I still have some services to render.¹⁹⁸

His nine grandchildren and four children were on hand for the holiday season. During a family celebration that season, his daughter Diana expressed wonderment of all that he had seen and done in his life. He listened and said, “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”¹⁹⁹

Churchill pondered his exit during the Christmas holidays and into the winter. Colville later wrote that during the long winter months, “alone with him at the bezique table or in the dining-room, I listened to many disquisitions of which the burden was: ‘I have lost interest; I’m tired of it all.’ ” During a mid-March dinner with Rab Butler, he proclaimed: “I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.” Finally, in late March, he told Colville that he’d leave just before the Easter recess. Easter fell on April 10 that year.²⁰⁰

Churchill made his last major address to the House of Commons on March 1, 1955, on the subject of that year’s defence white paper, wherein his government announced for the first time the decision to build a hydrogen bomb. Churchill understood that Britain was indefensible against such weapons, yet he was determined that other countries—Russia—be made indefensible as well. The bomb could not help England regain its former glory but it might just offer England the means to survive. He titled his speech “The Deterrent—Nuclear Warfare.” “There is no absolute defence against the hydrogen bomb,” he told the House, “nor is any method in sight by which any nation, or any country, can be completely guaranteed against the devastating injury which even a score of them might inflict on wide regions.” He went on to ask, “What ought we to do?”

Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not matter so much to old people; they are going soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind. The best defence would of course be bona fide disarmament all round. This is in all our hearts.²⁰¹

He took care to speak of the “Soviets” and “Soviet communism,” telling the House that he was avoiding the term “Russian” because he greatly admired the Russian people “for their bravery, their many gifts and their kindly nature.” It was the Communist dictators who posed the threat to human survival, not the Russian people. He declared, “There is only one sane policy for the free world in the next few years.”

That is what we call defence through deterrents…. These deterrents may at any time become the parents of disarmament, provided that they deter. To make our contribution to the deterrent we must ourselves possess the most up-to-date nuclear weapons, and the means of delivering them.

Entire continents, not simply small islands such as Britain, were now vulnerable and would become more vulnerable as the Soviets developed new means to deliver atomic bombs:

There is no reason why, however, they should not develop some time within the next four, three, or even two years more advanced weapons and full means to deliver them on North American targets. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that within that period they will.

A “curious paradox has emerged,” he declared. “Let me put it simply. After a certain point has been passed it may be said: The worse things get, the better.” He still believed that, as he told the House, “mercifully, there is time and hope if we combine patience and courage…. All deterrents will improve and gain authority during the next ten years. By that time, the deterrent may well reach its acme and reap its final reward.” After forty-five minutes, his voice still strong, he came to the end, and his valediction to the House and to his countrymen:

The day may dawn when fair play, love for one’s fellow-men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.²⁰²

Churchill’s powers, declared that week’s Sunday Times, “as he has so brilliantly demonstrated, are still of the highest order.” The next day, as the defence debate continued, Aneurin Bevan accused Churchill of allowing America to dictate Britain’s foreign policy, declaring that Churchill had canceled his 1953 Bermuda trip because he knew Eisenhower would not accede to a request to hold talks with the Russians. Churchill’s reply stunned the House, for he revealed for the first time in public that he had not gone to Bermuda because “I was struck down by a very sudden illness which paralysed me completely. That is why I had to put it off.”²⁰³

Moments later he tucked his reading glasses into a jacket pocket, gathered up his notes, and departed. He delivered two minor speeches in the House during his final month in office, the last a tribute to Lloyd George on March 28. Though he remained the member of Parliament from Woodford for nine more years, Churchill never again spoke in the House of Commons.

On April 4, Winston and Clementine hosted their last dinner at No. 10. Some fifty guests attended, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The other grandees present, Colville wrote, included high government officials, members of Churchill’s family, and several dukes and duchesses, including the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, soon to chair a special top-secret government committee code-named Hope Not and vested with the task of planning Churchill’s state funeral. Randolph Churchill attended, and predictably got drunk, at one point haranguing his cousin and Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, over a nasty article he had written about Eden for Punch. Sir Winston presided over all, attired in his Garter, Order of Merit, and knee breeches. His after-dinner speech took the form of a long toast to the Queen: “I used to enjoy drinking during the years when I was a cavalry subaltern in the reign of your Majesty’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.” At the end, he raised his glass “to the Queen.” Later that night, after the last guests had left, Jock Colville escorted Churchill up to his bedroom. The Old Man sat on his bed, and for several minutes did not speak. Colville imagined Churchill was “contemplating that this was his last night [as P.M.] at Downing Street. Then suddenly he stared at me and said with vehemence, ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’ ”²⁰⁴

The next evening, Churchill donned his top hat and the frock coat he reserved for such formal occasions and went to Buckingham Palace to resign. Ever since the nineteenth century, an earldom had been the traditional path to the peerage for retired prime ministers who aspired to such titles. But Churchill had no peers, and deserved something more. Thus, the idea of offering him a dukedom was floated, although the Queen was not enthused at creating the first nonroyal duke in eighty years. The most satisfactory outcome for the Palace would be for the offer to be made and for Churchill to decline it. Days earlier, in fact, Churchill had told Colville that if the Queen offered him a dukedom, he would not accept it. Colville passed this information along to the Palace. The Queen indeed made the offer, and Churchill, after a moment’s temptation, indeed declined. The Commons was his home, not the House of Lords. He later that night told Colville that he had declined the dukedom because to accept it would have ruined Randolph’s political career, for as a Lord, Randolph could not sit in the Commons, from where the sovereign chose the prime minister. In fact, after his 1951 defeat, Randolph Churchill never again stood for office. Of his father, Randolph once said, “Nothing grows under the shadow of a great tree.” To the end, the father did what he could to help the son, although Churchill once told one of his private secretaries, “I love Randolph, but I do not like him.”²⁰⁵

On Wednesday, April 6, Winston and Clementine hosted a tea party at No. 10 for about one hundred of the staff. Late in the afternoon, Churchill left for Chartwell. Clementine, with much to arrange at their London house, stayed behind. Churchill arrived at Chartwell in the gloaming, Mary later wrote, but appeared “in quite good form.” A small crowd of neighbors and reporters had gathered outside the house. As Churchill made for the front steps, a reporter called out: How does it feel not to be prime minister?²⁰⁶

Churchill replied, “It’s always nice to come home.”