He also produced a jolt in Moscow, though the Soviets waited several days to speak out. Churchill was in Washington preparing to go on to New York when the news broke that Pravda had run a front-page editorial headlined ‘Churchill rattles the saber’. The piece denounced him for calling for an Anglo-American military alliance directed against the Soviet Union. A similar assault ran in the newspaper Izvestiya the following day. The day after that, Moscow radio broadcast a blistering attack by Stalin himself.
Speaking to an interviewer, Stalin called Churchill a ‘warmonger’, compared him to Hitler, and accused him of seeking to assemble a military expedition against Eastern Europe. He seized on Churchill’s address as an opportunity to put a face on the danger from the West which he had evoked in his speech of 9 February to the Soviet people. George Kennan characterized Stalin’s comments as ‘the most violent Soviet reaction I can recall to any foreign statement’. In a curious way, Churchill had actually done Stalin a favour. The potential aggressor that Stalin had set himself up to defeat need no longer be an abstraction; Churchill was the threat personified. As Molotov later said, the Fulton speech made it impossible for Stalin to retire.
Stalin in turn gave Churchill a boost when he attacked him. Bypassing the elected leaders of Britain and the US, Stalin portrayed the emerging East–West conflict as a personal contest between Churchill and himself. At a moment when the news of Soviet troop movements in Iran and of US protests to Moscow over its actions not only there but also in Manchuria and Bulgaria were heightening public fears about Soviet intentions, Stalin drew Churchill into a debate that conferred upon him the unique status of the voice of the West. When Stalin pounced on what were after all the remarks of a private citizen, he ratcheted up the drama as Churchill could never have done alone.
On 14 March, after a stack of evening newspapers with articles about the Stalin interview had been delivered to Churchill’s twenty-eighth-floor suite at the Waldorf Towers, he sent word to reporters in the lobby that he would make no statement – yet. He was, however, set to speak at a banquet in his honour the following night in the hotel’s grand ballroom, and he let it be known that he believed his comments would be of world interest.
Friday, 15 March, proved to be foggy, rainy, and windy. In spite of the downpour, Churchill insisted on sitting on top of the back seat of an open touring car at the head of a twelve-vehicle motorcade which advanced at a walking pace. On both sides, a row of raincoated policemen flanked the car, provided by the city of New York, which flew an American flag above one headlight and a British flag above the other. The rain flattened Churchill’s few remaining wisps of ginger-grey hair and streamed down his snub nose and jutting lower lip. Confetti clung to his blue overcoat as he held up a soggy black homburg to New York.
That evening, double rows of as many as a thousand demonstr a -tors, dubbed ‘Stalin’s faithful’ by the local press, formed outside Churchill’s hotel two hours before the banquet. Protestors carried picket signs, chanted, ‘GI Joe is home to stay, Winnie, Winnie, go away,’ and distributed reprints of a Communist Daily Worker cover showing a military cemetery with the headline, ‘Churchill wants your son’. Mounted police maintained order, especially near the revolving doors where invited guests, including the Mayor, the Governor, and numerous ambassadors and other diplomats, were to enter. (The Soviet Ambassador, notably, had sent last-minute regrets.) Inside, police detectives dressed in evening attire guarded the grand ballroom where four orchid- and carnation-laden daises had been set up in tiers on stage. A tangle of microphones marked the spot where it was widely expected that Churchill would reply to Stalin.
As the hour of Churchill’s talk drew near, Manhattan bars and restaurants filled with people eager to hear him. One midtown restaurant promptly lost much of its business when its radio failed to work at half past ten. The proprietor of another East Side spot marvelled that he could not recall a broadcast listened to by so many people or with such avidity since late 1941. Churchill came on the air twelve minutes later than scheduled, and the ovation he received at the Waldorf kept him from starting for an additional minute. At last, the familiar dogged, defiant voice on the radio answered Stalin’s challenge to the Fulton speech by saying, ‘I do not wish to withdraw or modify a single word.’
Churchill was back at the centre of great events, where he loved to be, but the exertions required to get there had cost him dearly. On the night of the broadcast he was in splendid form, but in the days that followed he experienced dizzy spells. Once or twice, as he rose from a sitting position he began to fall forward and had to steady himself by grabbing his chair. He later said that acting as a private individual rather than a prime minister had been like ‘fighting a battle in a shirt after being accustomed to a tank’.
VII Imperious Caesar Southampton, England, 1946
A fur coat draped over his bowed shoulders, Churchill waited in the disembarkation shed at Southampton for his car to be brought round. During his nine weeks abroad, the political landscape at home had altered subtly but significantly. It was a measure of how much had changed that, two days before, when Stalin announced plans to withdraw from Iran he had felt the need to tell the world that his decision had not been prompted by anything Churchill had said in America.
On the other hand, much in political London remained the same. The Edenites were hoping to oust Churchill; Macmillan and Butler, perceiving elements of dissatisfaction with the interim Tory leadership, were jockeying to undermine Eden; and Eden himself was intent that that night, 26 March 1946, was the night when he would finally (in Cranborne’s words) ‘grasp the nettle’ and make a forceful case to Churchill about why it would be best if he retired.
At a moment when Churchill had begun again to feel his power, he was coming home greatly alarmed by how physically weak he felt. The dizzy spells had persisted, and there was concern that they could be the precursors of a stroke. At the Southampton quayside, he deflected questions about when he would next appear in the House of Commons by saying that he did not yet know the state of business in the House. He would have more information as soon as he had dined with his deputy.
A soupy fog in the English Channel had caused Churchill’s ship to dock two hours late, so Eden was already waiting for him at Hyde Park Gate. On various prior occasions Eden had struggled to suggest that Churchill stand down in his favour. At the last minute, something had always caused him to hesitate. This time, he was confident things would be different – not because of any change in himself, but because Churchill’s circumstances had changed. Initially Eden had taken a cynical view of the Fulton speech. He had remarked in private that he feared Churchill might actually be willing to set off another war in the hope of regaining the premiership. In the three weeks since Fulton, however, Eden had begun to sense that all the attention Churchill had been getting of late could prove useful to those who wished to force him out as Tory leader. In the past, Churchill had resisted any suggestion that he abandon power. But given his egotism and love of the limelight, might he not now be inclined to concentrate on his headline-making Soviet crusade and leave the conduct of party affairs to Eden?
Despite the long wait, Eden was in a hopeful mood when Churchill arrived at nine, but his plans quickly went awry. Before Eden could bring up the subject of Churchill’s retirement, Churchill caught him by surprise. He, too, had a proposal to make this evening. Concerned about his waning strength, Churchill had devised a plan to allow him to hold on to the Conservative leadership without overtaxing him -self. Just when Eden was about to ask the old man to step aside, Churchill asked Eden to help make it possible for him to keep his job. Churchill wanted Eden to take over for him officially in the House of Commons, as well as to assume the day-to-day work of running the party, while Churchill retained the overall party leadership. As he was aware that Eden was financially pressed, he had already asked James Stuart, the Chief Whip, to see if a way might not be found to pay Churchill’s salary as Opposition leader to Eden instead. He went on to assure Eden that the arrangement