January 1, 1970

Introduced by Richard M. Langworth

Speaking in at the 1988 Churchill Conference, the legendary news correspondent, Alistair Cooke, traced his memories of Churchill from his youth, explaining why it was so difficult for Churchill to get his warnings across about the Nazi threat in the 1930s:

‘It is very hard now, thanks to television and the abolition of front-line censorship, to imagine what those terrible events conveyed … It is today impossible to get used to the idea that we could lose 200,000 men in one week. Our knowledge of the tremendous drama to come makes us see Churchill in the 1930s as a rejected giant, a lonely, stubborn hero. Most of us would like to think that, had we been in Britain in 1934–36 we should have been on his side. In fact I don’t think ten percent of us would have been with him … Even by the 1930s, the country was exhausted. There were two slogans going around: “Peace at any Price” and “Against War and Fascism”— surely two of the silliest slogans. One might as well be “Against Hospitals and Diseases”’.

Read the full article by Alistair Cooke here: ‘Churchill at the Time: A Retrospective’, Churchill Proceedings 1988-1989 (text only).