Finest Hour Autumn 2019

Churchill’s Cold War Thirty years ago the Berlin Wall “came tumblin’ down.” The largely peaceful end to the Cold War came “quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly,” as Churchill once described the end of the First World War, to the relief of a world that had long lived in fear of nuclear war. Churchill did not begin the Cold War— as early as 1943 Stalin was directing his armies with an eye towards building his Iron Curtain—but it was Churchill’s famous speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 that alerted the world to the situation that had developed. Timothy Riley tells the story of how Churchill’s remarks at Westminster College were subsequently complemented by those of Mikhail Gorbachev in the aftermath of the Cold War. Edwina Sandys then explains how she conceived the…

22 March 1955 WASHINGTON—Dear Winston, The last sentence of your letter, with its implication that you are soon to withdraw from active political life, started, in my memories, a parade of critical incidents and great days that you and I experienced together, beginning at the moment we first met in Washington, December 1941. Since reading it I have been suffering from an acute case of nostalgia. First I recall those late days of 1941, when this country was still shuddering from the shock of Pearl Harbor. I think of those occasions during the succeeding months when I was fortunate enough to talk over with you some of the problems of the war, and I especially think of that Washington visit of yours in June of ’42, when we had to face the…

In July 1945, while on a fishing holiday on Minnesota’s North Star Lake, Westminster College President Franc L. McCluer, had a casual conversation with his wife Ida Belle. Though the scene was tranquil, McCluerknown by the nickname “Bullet” for his rapid-fire debating style—was consumed with thoughts about the college’s John Findley Green Foundation Lectureship. After a three-year hiatus, when the all-male college saw reduced enrollment due to the war effort, McCluer hoped to revive the fledgling but promising lecture series that previously had brought international luminaries to his Fulton, Missouri campus. The endowed lectureship was established in 1937 by Mrs. Eleanor I. Green of St. Louis to honor the memory of her husband, a Westminster alumnus. The aim of the Green Foundation Lectureship was then, and remains today, to present lectures…

“May we dedicate ourselves to hastening the day when all God’s children live in a world without walls, that would be the greatest empire of all.” President Ronald Reagan, 9 November 1990, Fulton, Missouri Thirty years ago on 9 November 1989 along with the rest of the world, I was glued to the television screen, watching the Berlin Wall crumble and fall. The souvenir hunters immediately started chipping away. It was, however, only when I learned that the East Germans had removed long stretches of the Wall intact and were selling them that an idea came to me. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” I thought, “to get a piece of the wall, make a sculpture out of it, and then place it at Westminster College?” This would forever link the Berlin Wall with my grandfather…

Winston Churchill presided over Britain’s finest hour in 1940 and celebrated victory over the Axis Powers in 1945, but was then unceremoniously turned out of office by the British electorate. In opposition, he was only able to watch as victory gave way to Cold War, and his much-vaunted Special Relationship with the US declined in intimacy and substance. Thus, when opportunity beckoned with success in the General Election in the autumn of 1951, he determined to inject new purpose into British foreign policy and was quick to tend to the “intimate relationship with the United States, which had been a keynote of his policy in the war….” For Churchill that meant above all establishing a close relationship with President Harry S. Truman in order to emulate the successful and rewarding…

In 2013, a short fragment from a British Royal Family home-movie came to light. Dating from October 1952, the silent footage shows the young Queen Elizabeth II enjoying a family fishing expedition at Balmoral in Scotland. Also prominent is the unmistakable figure of Winston Churchill, returned as Britain’s Prime Minister the year before; he can be seen sitting on the riverbank chatting to Prince Charles.1 He is relaxed, but he is not off-duty. His thoughts, we now know, were focused on the Montebello Islands, a barren outpost of the Commonwealth eighty miles off the north-west coast of Australia. It was there that the United Kingdom’s first atomic bomb, a plutonium weapon, was about to be tested. Much rested on the success of “Hurricane,” as the test was codenamed, not least the…