Kemper Lectures
Churchill – Prophet of
Detente - continued
Sir Michael Howard, O.B.E., March 25, 1990
This was not what his audience wanted to hear. The war was over. The boys, in their hundreds of thousands, were coming home. Barely nine months had passed since the Allied Leaders had met, to all appearances amicably, among the enemy ruins at Potsdam. Their Foreign Ministers were busy in London and Paris thrashing out the framework of a peaceful new order under the auspices of the United Nations. What was this call for a new entangling alliance against America’s wartime ally? “The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation” editorialized the Wall Street Journal.[ii] President Truman had to deny that his presence on the platform in any way indicated official endorsement of Churchill’s remarks. And in England, 93 members of Parliament (including future Prime Minister James Callaghan) tabled a vote of censure against their former Prime Minister on the grounds that his proposals were “calculated to do injury to a good relations between Great Britain, the USA and the USSR and are inimical to the cause of world peace.”[iii]
We all know what happened. In 1947 the disintegrating economies of Western Europe provoked the imaginative generosity of Marshall Aid. In 1948 the Soviets consolidated their rule with the coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade. And in 1949, four years after Churchill had delivered his warning here at Fulton, the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating exactly that alliance for which Churchill had called; an Alliance for mutual support, threatening no one, but pledged to uphold the peaceful principles of the United Nations Charter.
And now, Mr. President – now? Within a period of barely six months, the Iron Curtain has dissolved. The captive peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are free once more – free, most of them, for the first time in 50 years. The two halves of Germany are coming together under a government which, however it may be constructed, will be firmly democratic as no government of a united Germany has been since 1933. The Soviet Union itself has entered on a period of turbulent and open-ended transformation that is likely to make it, for the time being at least, a cooperative partner on the international scene. Could any of us have foreseen this a year ago? Could you, Mr. President, have possibly known, when last July you invited me to deliver this lecture, what today we would be celebrating? I understand that you have also invited President Gorbachev, when he visits the United States later this year, to come here and formally proclaim the end of the dark era whose opening was heralded in this place 44 years ago. I hope he will come, for there could be no more appropriate messenger for such good news; unless it could have been Winston Churchill himself.
Sir Michael Howard, O.B.E., March 25, 1990
This was not what his audience wanted to hear. The war was over. The boys, in their hundreds of thousands, were coming home. Barely nine months had passed since the Allied Leaders had met, to all appearances amicably, among the enemy ruins at Potsdam. Their Foreign Ministers were busy in London and Paris thrashing out the framework of a peaceful new order under the auspices of the United Nations. What was this call for a new entangling alliance against America’s wartime ally? “The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation” editorialized the Wall Street Journal.[ii] President Truman had to deny that his presence on the platform in any way indicated official endorsement of Churchill’s remarks. And in England, 93 members of Parliament (including future Prime Minister James Callaghan) tabled a vote of censure against their former Prime Minister on the grounds that his proposals were “calculated to do injury to a good relations between Great Britain, the USA and the USSR and are inimical to the cause of world peace.”[iii]
We all know what happened. In 1947 the disintegrating economies of Western Europe provoked the imaginative generosity of Marshall Aid. In 1948 the Soviets consolidated their rule with the coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade. And in 1949, four years after Churchill had delivered his warning here at Fulton, the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating exactly that alliance for which Churchill had called; an Alliance for mutual support, threatening no one, but pledged to uphold the peaceful principles of the United Nations Charter.
And now, Mr. President – now? Within a period of barely six months, the Iron Curtain has dissolved. The captive peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are free once more – free, most of them, for the first time in 50 years. The two halves of Germany are coming together under a government which, however it may be constructed, will be firmly democratic as no government of a united Germany has been since 1933. The Soviet Union itself has entered on a period of turbulent and open-ended transformation that is likely to make it, for the time being at least, a cooperative partner on the international scene. Could any of us have foreseen this a year ago? Could you, Mr. President, have possibly known, when last July you invited me to deliver this lecture, what today we would be celebrating? I understand that you have also invited President Gorbachev, when he visits the United States later this year, to come here and formally proclaim the end of the dark era whose opening was heralded in this place 44 years ago. I hope he will come, for there could be no more appropriate messenger for such good news; unless it could have been Winston Churchill himself.