Grand Improvisation by Derek Leebaert

Author:Derek Leebaert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

14.

CHURCHILL IS BACK

Sometimes there is a choice between being and well-being for a nation.

—Winston Churchill quoting Oliver Cromwell to Harry Truman, 1952

Early on Friday evening, October 26, 1951, King George VI received Churchill at Buckingham Palace and invited him to form a government. Churchill spent the following week doing just that, assembling his cabinet from home, 28 Hyde Park Gate, near Kensington Gardens. Reporters stood outside the cream-colored house and chronicled the comings and goings of well-known political figures such as Anthony Eden and the former minister of war transport Lord Leathers. Tailor and Cutter, the London trade journal, observed these men to be properly dressed, most in their sixties, favoring stiff white collars and bowler hats in the Edwardian manner. Churchill conducted late-morning meetings, working in bed, smoking a cigar, wearing a quilted jacket, and gesturing languidly with his small, well-cared-for hands. He told each prospective cabinet member that the country’s financial position looked dire and that the war years might have been easier. Then, within two weeks, he assured supporters that he’d seen worse. In the Commons, he saluted the memory of Ernest Bevin and stated that Britain’s place in the world would be restored no matter what.1

The men who joined him in government were intelligent, experienced, and equally confident. Anthony Eden, who became foreign secretary for the third time, expected to be molding U.S. power and foreign policy to British ends. Another incoming minister, Harold Macmillan—who’d rise to head Defence, the Foreign Office, and then Treasury, finally to become prime minister in 1957—believed that the empire could approximate American wealth and power.2 The new secretary of state for the colonies, the aristocrat-industrialist Oliver Lyttelton, anticipated that Britain would regain its pre–World War II global sway by maintaining a grip on world shipping. Another cabinet member, the science adviser Lord Cherwell, simply declared that the empire and commonwealth “in the end should dominate America.”3

On the other side of the Atlantic, having tracked opinions in Congress and the administration, Oliver Franks also felt optimistic that Britain could have a global role second to none. He wrote to the Foreign Office of “our joint leadership of the world.” Lots of Americans assumed Britain already had such a position. That’s apparent in This World of Ours: London, a popular 1951 travel documentary. In one scene the camera shows the ministries along Whitehall, and the narrator points to a solid neo-baroque building identified as the War Office—from which, he explains, England is right now “governing the lives of millions of the world’s people.”4 Yet the only way to ensure such joint leadership, Franks warned, was for Britain’s economy to be free from U.S. aid. Then his government could project great influence “out of all proportion to our power.”5 Churchill couldn’t have said it better.

Nye Bevan, of course, had his own twist on the subject. He didn’t “believe the American nation has the experience, sagacity, or self-restraint necessary for world leadership,” though he generously added “at this time.”6 As for the Russians, whom

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