August 1, 2013

Finest Hour 122, Spring 2004

Page 16

BY SIR MARTIN GILBERT CBE

CHURCHILL,BERMUDA AND THE SEARCH FOR PEACE.
KEYNOTE SPEECH TO THE 2003 BERMUDA CONFERENCE

Your Excellency, Lady Soames, Ladies and gentlemen: I am distressed not to be able to be in Bermuda at this important moment. The military historian Max Arthur has offered to read out my remarks, for which I am most grateful.

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Winston Churchill was twice in Bermuda, for the first time in 1942, while he was Britain’s war leader at the head of an all-Party coalition government; and for the second time, as Britain’s peacetime Prime Minister, at the head of Britain’s first post-war Conservative administration.

During Churchill’s first visit, which took place in time of war, his focus was on the peacetime years that would eventually follow the great sacrifices by the British and other Allied forces, predominantly those of the United States and the Soviet Union. During his second visit, which took place in time of peace but at the height of the Cold War, his urgent quest was a means to avert a future war between Britain and the United States on the one side, and the Soviet Union on the other, a war that would be fought with nuclear weapons.

During his visit here in January 1942, amid the dangers and uncertainties of war, Churchill set out his vision of the future of democracy in time of peace. His words were far sighted then, and are as relevant today, as they were almost sixty-one years ago. This is what Churchill said:

… these ideas of parliamentary government, of representation of the people upon franchise, which extend as time goes on, and in which in our country have reached the complete limits of universal suffrage; these institutions and principles constitute at the moment one of the great causes which are being fought out in the world. With all their strength, with all their faults, with all their virtues, and with all the criticism that may be made against them with their many shortcomings, with lack of foresight, lack of continuity of purpose or pressure only of superficial purpose they—these ideas of parliamentary government—nevertheless ASSERT the right of the common people, the broad mass of the people, to take a conscious and effective share in the government of the country.

These were wise words by Churchill, embodying profound sentiments. Even while, in wartime, many liberties were having to be curtailed in the desperate need to survive and to move forward to victory, Churchill never forgot, and always ASSERTED the primacy of democracy.

He also understood about suffering. He had seen action in five wars, including as a battalion commander in the trenches of the Western Front in 1916.

He was once asked why the twentieth century was called “the century of the Common Man.” He replied: “It is called the century of the Common Man because in it the Common Man has suffered most.”

Here in Bermuda in 1953, fifty years ago, Churchill sought some means to escape the impasse and dangers of the Cold War, of the division between East and West, the Free World and the Communist World, by barbed wire and harsh rhetoric and massive armaments to avoid a nuclear confrontation in which once more the Common Man would be the principal sufferer.

His vision then was to bring together the leaders of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union in a “Summit.” Three years earlier Churchill had coined that word “Summit” for what we now know so well as meetings of world leaders to try to resolve their differences.

He wanted the Bermuda Conference to be followed by a Summit between himself, President Eisenhower, and the new leader of the Soviet Union—following the death of the dreaded Marshal Stalin. Churchill hoped that Stalin’s successors would see the need for a reduction of global tension. He was so determined to work out a way forward from the current international tensions that he had gone to Bermuda after recovering from a severe heart attack. He wanted to make one last effort while Prime Minister to secure a better future for mankind.

I would like to end these few remarks with Churchill’s first words at the first Plenary Session of the conference here in Bermuda. In answer to French and American doubts that the Soviet Union was any less totalitarian under Stalin’s successors, Churchill told those at the conference that he would not be

in too much of a hurry to believe that nothing but evil emanates from this mighty branch of the human family, or that nothing but danger and peril could come out of this vast ocean of land in a single circle [the new rulers] so little known and understood.

Despite enormous efforts on his part, Churchill’s mission at Bermuda failed. But his vision became reality in the years ahead. Churchill’s confidence in the ultimate goodwill of mankind had often been put under intense strain. But, like his faith in democracy, it remains a beacon of light for all to follow in this twenty-first century.