January 1, 1970

Finest Hour 191, First Quarter 2021

Page 36

By Michael McMenamin


125 Years Ago
Winter 1896 • Age 21
He Was My Model

Churchill left Cuba early in December 1895, after covering the insurrection there on his first journalistic assignment. He did not revisit the island for another fifty years. Back in England, he continued his budding literary career by writing a series of articles on Cuba for the Saturday Review. The article in the 15 February 1896 issue is of particular importance, because he enclosed a copy of it in a 29 February letter sent to his new American friend and mentor Bourke Cockran.

In the Saturday Review article, Churchill took a dim view of both the Spanish and the rebels. A “rebel victory offers little good either to the world in general or to Cuba in particular…we should have to prepare ourselves for another firebrand republic of the South American type. This is not an inviting prospect for the outside world nor does independence offer much to the islanders themselves. All impartial residents in the island are agreed that, though the Spanish administration is bad, a Cuban Government would be worse, equally corrupt, more capricious, and far less stable. Under such a Government, revolutions would be periodic, property insecure, equity unknown.”

The letter in which this was sent to Cockran was the first in a series between the two men which, over the next five years, helped to shape the young Churchill’s political and economic views that stayed with him throughout his life. As his son Randolph wrote in the Official Biography: “Churchill at the time was twenty-one. He must already have been able, on occasions, to indicate the genius that was to flower in the next half-century. Bourke Cockran must certainly have been a man of profound discernment and judgment of character…he was the first man or woman Churchill met on level terms who really saw his point and potentialities.”

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Churchill would have agreed with his son. In 1906, Churchill privately told his first cousin Shane Leslie that Cockran had “the biggest and most original mind I have ever met. When I was a young man he instantly gained my confidence and I feel that I owe the best things in my career to him.” Forty years later in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, Churchill quoted the words of his mentor Cockran and credited the lifelong influence they had had on him. In the early 1950s, Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, asked Churchill upon whom he had patterned his political oratory. Churchill’s answer was Bourke Cockran. As Stevenson told Shane Leslie’s daughter, Anita Leslie, “Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockran’s speeches of sixty years before saying, ‘He was my model—I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall’ and quoting with terrific force.”

100 Years Ago
Winter 1921 • Age 46
Down with the Jews

Churchill became Secretary of State for the Colonies in early February. He was determined to cut the cost of maintaining the territories in the Middle East that Britain had held under the mandate from the League of Nations since the First World War. In The World Crisis, Churchill wrote that “upwards of forty thousand troops at a cost of thirty millions a year were required to keep order.” This was not sustainable, and he told Prime Minister Lloyd George that, unless they appeased Arab sentiment and arrived at good arrangements with them, Britain would “be forced by expense of the garrisons to evacuate the territories” gained during the war.

To resolve the problem, Churchill convened in March a conference in Cairo to arrange and set boundaries for what would become self-governing Arab lands. His principal advisers on Arab affairs were T. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and Gertrude Bell (“the Queen of the Desert”), who, with Lawrence, had served in British military intelligence in the Middle East during the war. The conference occurred over a nine-day period, during which the modern Middle East was shaped and the nations of Iraq and Jordan were formed. Churchill is now sometimes criticized for what the conference achieved, but the main decisions were largely shaped by advice he received from Lawrence and Bell, both of whom were trusted by the Arabs. Finally, while Churchill and Bell recommended an independent state for the Kurds, they were overruled by Lloyd George in London, who insisted that the province of Mosul be attached to Iraq.

After the Conference, Churchill left Cairo for Jerusalem. Stopping in Gaza, his party was greeted with cheers from a large Arab crowd shouting “Cheers for the Minister” and “Cheers for Great Britain.” Unknown to Churchill, however, the crowd was also shouting even more enthusiastically “Down with the Jews” and “Cut their throats.” In Jerusalem, the Arabs asked Churchill to abolish the concept of a National Home for the Jews in western Palestine promised by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Churchill told the petitioners he did not have the power to do so “nor, were it in my power, would it be my wish.”

A committed Zionist, Churchill told the Jews of Palestine, after meeting with the Arabs, that “If I did not believe that you were animated by the very highest spirit of justice and idealism and that your work would in fact confer blessings on the whole country, I should not have the high hopes I have that eventually your work will be accomplished.” Churchill observed in 1922, “Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken effective steps towards the irrigation and electrification of Palestine. They would have been quite content to dwell…in wasted, sun-drenched plains, letting the waters of the Jordan flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.”

75 Years Ago
Winter 1946 • Age 71
The Earth Is a Generous Mother

Churchill travelled to America in January to accept an honorary degree from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The invitation included a handwritten note from President Harry S. Truman. After arriving in the US, Churchill went to Cuba in February to revisit the island where he had his first great adventure (see FH 171). In March, he received a doctor of law degree from the University of Miami. Commenting on his indifferent reputation as a student and the number of honorary degrees he had received since then, he observed tongue-in-cheek “In fact one might almost say that no one ever passed so few examinations and received so many degrees.”

Churchill planned to give a major address upon the occasion of receiving his degree from Westminster, and, since President Truman would be introducing him, he took great care not to offend his host. Dining at the White House on 10 February with Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes, Churchill discussed the theme of his speech. He wrote to his successor as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, that both men had “seemed to like it very well.” On 1 March, Churchill showed a copy of the speech to Admiral William Leahy, who had served both Roosevelt and Truman as Chief of Staff. Leahy was “enthusiastic.” Travelling by train to Fulton with Truman, Churchill showed his speech to the President, who said it was “admirable and would do nothing but good, though it would make a stir.”

Although Churchill titled his speech “The Sinews of Peace,” it quickly became known as the “Iron Curtain speech.” It was widely criticized by the media, as well as by Eleanor Roosevelt and Trygve Lie, the United Nations Secretary General. Churchill was said to be a warmonger, much as he had been in the 1930s when warning against Hitler. Truman even denied having been shown the speech in advance. Churchill’s purpose, however, went far beyond warning of the threat posed by Russia. He was talking about peace and the conditions necessary to secure it. To illustrate this, he once more drew upon the wisdom of his mentor Bourke Cockran: “[T]here is no reason except human folly or sub-human crime which would deny to all the nations the inauguration and enjoyment of an age of plenty. I have often used words which I learned fifty years ago from a great Irish-American orator, a friend of mine, Mr. Bourke Cockran. ‘There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.’”

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