Kemper Lectures
CHURCHILL – PROPHET OF DETENTE
Sir Michael Howard, O.B.E., March 25, 1990
Sir Michael Howard, O.B.E., March 25, 1990
President Saunders, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a high privilege to be invited to deliver this eighth Crosby Kemper Lecture; and with it to be honoured with a Doctorate of Letters of Westminster College. My predecessors have been scholars or statesmen of great distinction. They have all given lectures which made substantial contributions to our understanding, not only of the personality of Winston Churchill, but of the age in which he lived, and, in consequence, of the background to our own times. Cumulatively they are a hard act to follow.
You have built here at Fulton a memorial to a very great man, but you have done something more. This glorious church in which we meet is a symbol of more than Churchill’s own greatness, or even of the genius of the incomparable Christopher Wren. It is a monument, as any Englishman must recognize, to the unique qualities of the American people – your imagination in conceiving the project, your energy, your ingenuity, your technology, your craftsmanship and above all, your generosity in implementing it. These were the qualities that saved Europe in two world wars and made it possible to rebuild the Free World after the Second: qualities to which Winston Churchill himself constantly paid tribute and on which we all continue to rely – even in a world which has changed so much, and so incomparably for the better, since the dark days of 1946.
It was then, just over 44 years ago, that Winston Churchill came to Fulton on March 5th and warned his audience here that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Behind that barrier, he said, Soviet occupying forces were gradually extinguishing all elements of independent opposition and imposing totalitarian control. In front of it, and throughout the world, Communist fifth columnists “constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” The Soviet Union did not, he believed, desire war. “What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” To counter their expansion, it was necessary that the Western Democracies, especially the United States and the British Commonwealth, should stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter. “If, however, they become divided or falter in their duty, and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.”[i]