October 14, 2008

by Dr. Larry Arnn, President, The Claremont Institute

Proceedings of the International Churchill Societies 1990-91

    I’ll begin with certain biases that I’ll announce before I start. It seems to me that we have to read Churchill not just as a curiosity, a grand person with mannerisms that are interesting, but also as a thinker of a specific kind. There is a tradition of scholarship in the area of statesmanship, and what it tells us is that great statesmen who deal with very large events in life can teach us things that we can learn in no other way. Those things are in some sense permanent and I at least have always tried to read my Churchill in light of that: to see what he was on about over the course of his life. I think, judged by that standard, he holds up as almost no-one does.

    The great difficulty in applying a standard like this, however, is that he did so much. Churchill’s letters alone exceed the volume of Abraham Lincoln’s, including speeches, by a factor of about three. He was in politics for fifty-five years. Just about the time you’ve sorted out what he thought about Victorian policy in the Colonies, you are confronted with his views on jet aircraft. And so it presents an enormous challenge – one finds oneself lugging around great fat books all the time to just get some kind of a grip on what he was like.

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    Yet it does seem to me that there is no understanding his views on this particular subject, which he dealt with so seriously at the end of his life, unless you can do that. I don’t claim to have done it, but I’ve made a serious effort and I will relate what I’ve come up with.

    Churchill was a very paradoxical person. He suffered in the Thirties because he didn’t have a side to be on. One of the main political parties wanted to lean toward the Communists in foreign policy, and he didn’t want to do that. Another party wanted to lean toward the Nazis in foreign policy – not that either was pro-Communist or pro-Nazi, but they saw themselves as nodding in that direction over foreign policy. Churchill was always making speeches. in one of his most famous he said, “Communism and National Socialism differ as the North Pole differs from the South.” And he suffered because he had the support of neither party until very late in the 1930s.

    The controversy that Churchill had in his second premiership with Eisenhower is very much of the same character. On the surface it’s astonishing that he should have fought with Eisenhower. When Eisenhower left the command of NATO to be a candidate for President of the United States, he stopped in England and Churchill held a dinner for him. There Eisenhower said, in a public way that was recorded in the papers, that the first act he would undertake upon becoming President would be to come see Churchill. It happened the other way around. He was elected, but no message came that Eisenhower would like to come to England. So Churchill did what he always did, posting himself in Washington for the months of January and February, 1953.

    Their relations were chilly. We know from Eisenhower’s diaries that he was very disaffected with Churchill at this time. The question is, why?

    It seems to me that there are two obvious policies that one can follow toward a Soviet Union in which Stalin has died and there may be what Churchill would call a New Look. One policy is mainly a military one and the other is mainly an accommodation policy. Most people were lined up in one direction or the other. Eisenhower was very clearly of the view, as he said at the Bermuda Conference in late 1953, that not only should we guarantee that we have overwhelming military superiority, at least on the strategic plane, against the Soviet Union, but we should also engage in no discussions with them. In an international conference he compared the Soviet Union to a harlot, according to the press. He said, she’s a woman of the streets; perhaps we can drag her into the back alley, however briefly, but she’d be back on the streets again. So that was a policy, that was a clear policy.

    Then there were some people who said the Soviet Union was the hope of the future and although there have been some excesses there we must really cast our lot in that direction because that is the way things must go.

    Churchill, much as he was in the Thirties it seems to me, was in between those two positions. So for most of his second premiership on the question of Soviet foreign policy he was separate both from his own cabinet and the American administration which above all he wanted to be friends with. As Richard said earlier, his first priority in foreign policy was to remain close to the United States. And yet on this supreme question, he was constantly at odds with both those groups. The question again is, why? I think to understand that question we have to see what the troubles are with both policies.

    First of all the military policy. There is an odd thing about Churchill, if you count up the months in his political career and categorize them as to whether he was in favor of larger or smaller defense estimates than were currently being voted, most of the months he was for smaller defense estimates: a very interesting phenomenon. It seems to me that to understand this phenomenon you have to look at some things he wrote in his early career. I’m going to read one of the greatest things Churchill ever wrote, from a chapter in Volume II of The World Crisis, called “Deadlock in the West.” He wrote the chapter to justify his position on the Dardanelles: a very serious, and until later his greatest, political defeat. A beginning of the wisdom of what Churchill thought about strategy is found in that chapter.

    Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter. The theory which has exalted by battle of ‘wearing down’ into a foremost position, is contradicted by history and would be repulsed by the great captains of the past. Nearly all the battles which are regarded as masterpieces of military art, from which have been derived the foundations of states and the fame of commanders, have been battles of manoeuvre … It is because military leaders are credited with gifts of this order which enable them to ensure victory and save slaughter that their profession is held in such high honour. For if their art were nothing more than a dreary process of exchanging lives, and counting heads at the end, they would rank much lower in the scale of human esteem.

    All of his life you find in Churchill this idea that if we are going to fight, we have to be ready, and we have to follow a strategy that economizes life. Of all the great battles that his ancestor, the First Duke of Marlborough won, the one he praises most faintly, the one he actually says hard words against, is the battle of Malplaquet. In that battle British and their allies and the allies around the French simply got on a field and bloodied one another to death. Churchill was against that – even in his own ancestors.

    Now, the atomic bomb. There’s a school of strategy which says that nuclear weapons present no new features: they’re just like guns; they are morally neutral. It depends how they are used. I find it difficult to put Churchill into that line of thinking. He said in his speech, from which Richard earlier quoted a passage:

    The atomic bomb, with all its terrors, did not carry us outside the scope of human control and manageable events in thought or action, in peace or war. But when Mr. Sterling Cole, the Chairman of the United States Congressional Committee gave out a year ago – 17 February 1944 – the first comprehensive review of the hydrogen bomb, the entire foundation of human affairs was revolutionized, and mankind placed in a situation both measureless and laden with doom … Major war of the future will differ, therefore, from anything we have known in the past in this one significant respect … that each side, at the outset, will suffer what it dreads the most, the loss of everything it has known of.

    If you think back to the kind of generalship, the kind of strategy Churchill spent most of his life talking about; if you think of the broad and massive destructive power of nuclear weapons, you see that it becomes incredibly difficult – especially in the early days of nuclear weapons when they were incapable of precise application, just big bombs dropped from airplanes – in Churchill’s view of things, to use those weapons well.

    This is from the Public Record Office and I think it explains what is the basis of Churchill’s fight with Eisenhower on military grounds: The battle of Dien Bien Phu was fought in the spring of 1954. Dien Bien Phu was falling and the United States wanted to intervene. Eisenhower asked Churchill, would you join us in a statement saying that we may intervene, that we condemn the conquest of the French possession in Viet Nam and we are together on the policy of rescuing Viet Nam? Churchill replied at Chequers at a meeting with Admiral Radford, who was at that time Chief of Staff: “The British people would not be easily influenced by what happened in the distant jungles of South-East Asia [that echoes a little bit of Neville Chamberlain’s statement in 1938 about Czechoslovakia]; but they did know that there was a powerful American base in East Anglia and that war with China, who had invoked the Sino-Russian Pact, might mean an assault by Hydrogen bombs on these islands.” In the event, the United States could not commit itself at this moment, but these matters were about to be discussed at Geneva, evolving a policy that might lead by slow stages to the catastrophe Churchill envisioned.

    What seems to me true is that Churchill held the view on the military side – that the Soviet Union is a despicable tyranny and its conquest, especially of eastern Europe but also of its own citizens, is intolerable and out to be relieved, if possible, by military force. But he concluded that military force was impossible to use in these circumstances. And so you have this dilemma: Will it be limited military force or will it be accommodation if military force appears impossible?

    Richard reviewed a whole line of quotes on that side and I won’t repeat them, but Churchill’s basic position was that we must not say anything in public, or mean anything in private, that denies the fundamental fact that free government is legitimate and tyranny is not. So on that sense, not only is accommodation impossible, but we must also do everything we can, always on the military side, to make sure that these tyrannies cannot attack us.

    At a certain point in this controversy over whether to negotiate with the Soviets, Churchill reacted wide surprise to a note he got from Eden, essentially taking Eisenhower’s view of the Russians. He wrote back and said, “You don’t understand; I’m not proposing to talk to them about armaments. What they must understand with perfect clarity is that whether we talk or whether we don’t, we will have an aggressive policy of rearmament that will guarantee our safety, and we won’t talk to them about that.”

    So, the accommodation side is also impossible; and what did Churchill come up with instead? Here from the Bermuda Conference is a speech excerpt that Churchill made, recorded in the minutes:

    Contacts, infiltration, trade leading to greater prosperity, reassurance that [the Soviets] will not have another dose of Hitler – and they had a right to this – and at the same time make it clear that we do not regard the position of the satellites nor admit that such a position could be permanent or tolerable but saying that we do not intend to use world war efforts to alter this. Time and patience must play their part. Such are the ideas we would venture.

    He uses the word “infiltration.” On the 11th of April 1953 he wrote Eisenhower explaining what he meant by that term:

    Nevertheless, great hope has arisen in the world that there is a change of heart in the vast, mighty masses of Russia and this can carry them far and perhaps into revolution. It has been said that the most dangerous moment for evil governments is when they begin to reform. Nothing impressed me so much as the doctor story [the doctors who tried to kill Stalin late in his life]. This must cut very deep into communist discipline and structure. I would not like it to be thought [advising Eisenhower] that a sudden American declaration has prevented this natural growth of events.

    I’ll summarize my opinion this way. It strikes me that historiography is making a mistake in concluding that the distinction between Eisenhower and Churchill is the distinction between a practical, military realist – Eisenhower – and an old man who is a dreamer, or else overcome by vanity (which is what some people say) and wants one last great curtain call before he retires.

    What seems to be true about Churchill’s strategy in the Fifties is that he recognized that fact that whatever else is true, we do the world no good by launching a war that involves the loss of “everything we have ever known of,” in order to liberate eastern Europe. On the other hand, in the fullness of time, the continued tyrannization of eastern Europe is intolerable.

    So what do we do?…”military stalemate, infiltration by other means into the Soviet system, so that the natural processes of breakup can continue.” It seems to me that once you see that model, current events take on a new light.

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