March 28, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 39

By David Freeman

Defending the West: The Truman-Churchill Correspondence, 1945-1960. Edited with an introduction by G.W. Sand. Praeger, 246 pp. hardbound, $70, member price $67.

This important new work completes a trilogy of the published correspondence between Churchill and the American presidents who overlapped with his time as Prime Minister. In length this volume compares with the Churchill-Eisenhower correspondence edited by Peter G. Boyle (University of North Carolina Press, 1990), while both are dwarfed by the the three massive volumes of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence edited by Warren F. Kimball (Princeton University Press, 1984). Taken altogether, these books provide a solid, unvarnished view of Churchill’s working relationships with his American counterparts.

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Churchill’s Premiership overlapped with just the first three and last eighteen months of the Truman administration. These were critical times, however, especially those three months in the spring of 1945. Well over half the correspondence in this book comes from this period.

Churchill was naturally anxious to establish a good rapport with the man thrust into the White House following President Roosevelt’s sudden death on April 12th. Both Allied leaders wanted to meet as soon as possible, but the rush of events leading towards the German surrender combined with the state of transatlantic travel in those days—which was very demanding on a seventy-year-old prime minister—kept Churchill away from Roosevelt’s funeral and an early meeting with Truman.

It is for just these reasons, though, that we have such a detailed record of exchange. By contrast, despite their own close, wartime partnership, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are unlikely to produce anything similar in the way of written correspondence, given the state of modern communications and jet travel. Historians must be thankful, therefore, that circumstances conspired to commit so much of Churchill’s career to paper and that Professors Sand, Boyle and Kimball have worked to provide us with such well-presented texts.

Relations with the Soviet Union dominate the book’s 1945 letters. Churchill urged the new president to have Eisenhower’s forces meet up with the Red Army as far to the east as possible. Moving cautiously, however, Truman felt bound to abide by the already agreed upon zones of occupation. In later years the President came to regret that he had not followed the Prime Minister’s advice. By that time, however, the Cold War was well under way, and Truman could honestly say that the English-speaking powers had made a good faith effort in their dealings with Stalin at the end of the German war.

It also must be remembered that the atomic bomb was not yet proven, leaving American political and military leaders anxious to secure Soviet entry into the Pacific War, especially if an invasion of the Japanese home islands should prove necessary. An appearance of Anglo-American double-dealing in Europe would have provided Stalin the only excuse he would have needed to opt out of such a potentially bloody commitment. “What the correspondence confirms, however,” according to Sand, “was not that U.S. or Anglo-American policy initiated the cold war, but that Stalin’s own policies brought on the cold war” (237).

Revisionists who argue that Truman should have made more of an effort to work harmoniously with Stalin at Potsdam in July would do well to read these letters and take note of their concern for the way the Soviets so quickly abandoned the promises made at Yalta just the February before over the creation of a new Polish government.

Churchill, of course, found himself displaced as prime minister in the midst of the Potsdam Conference, leaving his correspondence with the President to continue on a private basis at a dramatically reduced pace. Still, Churchill was anxious to cultivate continued good relations with Truman, in part because he was hopeful to return to power as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding over differences between American and British copyright laws that arose as this book approached publication, Sand was unable to secure permission to reproduce verbatim and without charge Churchill’s private letters to Truman. Instead he has opted to paraphrase the relevant letters under the doctrine of “fair use.”

The private correspondence, it must be said, is fairly small in volume, has already been published to a great extent in volume VIII of the official biography by Martin Gilbert, and presumably will some day be published in its entirety. The paraphrased letters are not nearly so important historically as the official letters, falling under Crown copyright and fully reproduced herein.

The volume of correspondence expanded again when Churchill resumed office in October 1951. The dominating issue in these letters was not, as one might expect, the Korean War, but rather the Mossadeq government in Iran. Britain, the United States, oil, and the Middle East: current relevance leaps off the page. Indeed nearly the last official letter Truman had sent Churchill in 1945 was an impassioned plea to lift restrictions on Jewish immigration into Palestine—a request one suspects Churchill would have complied with had he not been replaced by a new, and tragically non-compliant government just two days later.

The sincerely amicable relationship established between Churchill and Truman while in office carried over into their retirement years. The Trumans dined at Chartwell while visiting England in 1956. The former president also tried to lure Churchill on a return visit to Missouri, in the hopes that the former prime minister “might have another ‘Iron Curtain’ speech” in his system (224). Old age, however, drew the correspondence to a close in a series of perfunctory “best wishes” notes that concluded in 1960.

The minor copyright controversy attached to this book does not detract from its scholarly significance. This is a welcome addition to the public record and should find a place in the libraries of all universities and serious students of Churchill.