housekeeping note um you will be welcome to ask questions at any time throughout
our speakers we'll be keeping an eye on that and the
chat as well and uh we'll go ahead and and ask those
towards the end of this hour so on that note welcome everyone and i'll hand it
over to crosby great thank you elizabeth good afternoon
from fulton missouri the national churchill
museum from the institute of museum and library services in washington dc from
an undisclosed location near london and
from my basement in kansas city for the imls this is the
first in a series of conversations about the importance of the arts and
humanities our shared heritage shared ideals shared
experiences in the life of libraries and museums and the importance
of libraries and museums in the cultural civic
and communal life of our nation uh we welcome to you to this
conversation about winston churchill and a museum and
memorial honoring him and a particular speech he
gave 75 years ago uh exactly 75 years ago on march
5th 1946 the iron curtain speech as it's come to be known or sinews of peace
as he entitled it with me are as you've heard
tim riley the director of the national churchill museum and andrew roberts one
of our most eminent historians the author of masters and commanders the
storm of war uh prize-winning biography of lord
salisbury biography of lord halifax who almost
became prime minister instead of churchill and importantly for us
uh churchill
walking with destiny which has been called in fact it was called
earlier today by george will uh the best one volume biography or the best
biography of winston churchill and is indeed one of the best
biographies in uh recent history so welcome gentlemen thank you so much
for being here and i i'd like i'd like to start uh by asking tim a
question about how how did this get to fulton how
did churchill get to fulton with the president of the united states
what's the background of the story you know it's the question we're asked daily
here at america's national church and museum at westminster college and i
guess the simplest way to answer is we asked um you know in the in the wake
of world war ii after ve day there was a general election
um in july of 1945 and winston churchill who famously helped
lead the allies to victory in war his party
lost an election and arguably the most famous figure most
recognizable voice in the world was no longer prime
minister uh it was in this environment that churchill received a
typewritten letter from westminster college
here in fulton and inviting churchill to come and give a speech
now i'm convinced that letter would have been given to a secretary politely and
said thank them very much i can't possibly
save for a handwritten note at the bottom of the page
that said this is a wonderful school in my home state uh
if you come i'll introduce you hope you can do it
harry truman and when president truman wrote that note
uh churchill took note and knew that even though he had been defeated in the
general election he had more to say and if he was on
stage with the president of the united states
as as churchill said in his speech here it would
magnify and dignify the occasion and it did
uh so because the the the the college asked uh churchill um
received that note which was endorsed by the president uh a very important
note and uh he accepted the invitation and that launched
a series of scrambling really for two and a half months uh at westminster
college a small small college 212 students at the time
all men's college so many of the students were away at war um and
uh they scrambled to to make this momentous world event happen that's the
short answer to the great question put the fulton and
westminster college on the on the map and and andrew why would why
would churchill i mean obviously the president
of the united states asks him that that's something but he's a private
citizen at this point uh and has lost the
election etc why would he want to come what's the
purpose of this what's the background the world background for this
well he was a bit more than a private citizen in that he was leader of the
opposition of course leader of the conservative party and so
this was a marvelous way of putting the labour government in its place
that the president of the united states invites the leader of the opposition
to come and speak that that doesn't happen um
that's the first thing the second thing really is it all goes back to yalta
at yalta in february 1945 so only a year beforehand 13 months beforehand
stalin had lied to churchill and president roosevelt
and told them that he was going to give freedom independence um integrity
the uh the right to free elections to poland and uh and eastern europe and
it was quite clear at least to churchill by the march of
1946 that stalin had never had any intention
to do any of that at all and that he was going to impose soviet
imperialism on eastern europe and so you have this sense of of anger
that he had been lied to and at the same time nobody else was
saying it and so there's always been for me at
least there's always been a huge emperor's clothes aspect to
the fulton speech in that nobody had the guts
until churchill to point out that um they were living in a fool's paradise
and the west was wrong to continue to think that
uncle joe as uh stalin was nicknamed was overall a
beneficial and positive figure but it was in fact um a
a a conqueror and a leader of an ideology which um threatens
to try to establish world domination
key words in the in the speech of course are are about
he says the speech is about war and tyranny and to and
and stalin is stalin is the tyranny
but it's also a a an important it turns out to be an important moment isn't it
because uh they were ready to hear this truman
was ready to hear this burns the secretary
of state was was ready to hear this the canons canons long telegram had come a
few days before two weeks before i wonder whether well
if they were ready to hear it um they weren't publicly ready to hear it
in any way uh the secretary general of the united nations denounced the speech
editor roosevelt announced the speech dean atchison who had already accepted
an invitation to go to a reception for churchill in new
york um in new york uh failed to turn up um 93 labour mps
wrote a early day motion in the house of
commons church was denounced in the congress
and in the press of both parties of both countries
not just the chicago sun but also in the times and so on
and so actually although people might have been um
might have been might have appreciated i suppose in a way that someone was
willing to to uh to break the ice and tell the
truth actually at the time it was a tremendously unpopular speech
and people were very angry it was only over the next two years when
every single thing that churchill had predicted came true uh that people
appreciated that yet again just as he had before the second world war
he had uh used the fulton speech to um uh to be incredibly prescient about the
danger of totalitarianism and i mean to to follow up on what
you've just said of course truman got a look at the speech and they're on
the train from washington to uh to ultimately to
fulton and and any and he read the speech and
he talked to churchill about it even before
before that and and uh burns had seen uh almost everyone had seen it and and then
he denied truman because of the firestorm after the the
speech the editorials and whatnot denied that he'd read it um it's
it's really it's not harry truman's finest allies
really at that point he did deny the put the pressure was enormous as i say the
sort of outcry against these words that churchill had said but the thing the
wonderful thing of course was that churchill had such an extraordinary
moral courage and also by that stage such standing in the world
because of the second world war that he um didn't mind in the slightest it was
all complete water off a duck's back yeah he joked about it almost
immediately afterwards and and but another in another sense it
is the right moment because truman and uh and and burns and of
course ultimately atlee and bevin is as well in england in in great britain
are are are watching the the following
things which you you you've mentioned not not only the police states the art
the iron curtain uh that uh is falling across eastern
europe but specifically in in in turkey and
greece and and in persia they're they're the the soviets are making uh
demands uh uh in in fact just about the moment
of the of the speech uh there are soviet tanks within 20 miles
of tehran and there are agreements that are being being broken and also of
course there's concern about oil and and that sort of thing and burns
is sending telegrams on again roughly the
same day as the uh as the speech about turkey the
borders that that the soviets want to change and the
warm water port that they've always wanted etc etc
so so it's a it's an important it does change
things that moment changes things it's it's key
and and you mentioned only uh bevin the uh the foreign secretary at the time
of all of the people who did not denounce
the fulton speech ernest bevin stands up there a few others but ernest
bevin stands out uh because he knows that what churchill has said is true
and he's one of the other sort of little boys who's willing to point to the
to the emperor and and and say he has no clothes and he's there for
um a key figure and later of course he goes on to be a key figure in the
founding of nato so so the labor um minister the labour
prime secretary ernest bevin actually is one of the few people who comes out
extremely well from this uh from this whole in brodio
and you know i think it's important to also recognize you gallup the gallup
poll recently this week published or republished the results of
their poll from 1946 after the speech and i had not seen it
before but roughly 60 percent of of americans at
least polled um favored churchill's message
of not appeasement not appeasement we must do something
however they did not feel comfortable uh with the rhetoric
of of of of a of a special relationship of military alliance
there was a certain amount of feeling um with the american public according
gallup at least that that that americans wanted didn't
want to go back to war uh and that that that that war mongering
uh uh message that that perhaps some
perceived from the speech not churchill at all but that was that was it so it
was mixed there was certainly an agreement general agreement um that
uh that churchill and communism was was something that should be dealt
with but not a comfortability necessarily going
going to a military uh action that's that's that's that's quite quite
fascinating to me and actually it's very interesting in
that speech that it's not just about about russia and stalin
the first part of it is about the united nations
uh how it should be a a proper body not just the tower of babel
as he says but it should be a reality rather than a sham
so that's an important opening side to the speech
then he comes on to the fraternal association of the english speaking
peoples and um and that is something that he
wanted to take on to the next level when tim was talking about the military
alliance he really wanted for britain and america
to be able to use each other's bases around the world for example
so he wanted to really put teeth into the special relationship
a phrase that he had come up with a couple of years earlier in
um three years earlier in the harvard speech
and then and only then did he talk about the iron curtain having fallen across
europe and he pointed out something that he'd
been saying about the soviet union really ever since the 1917 revolution
which is that they respect strength and they despise weakness
especially military weakness and i think that is a i'm sure we're
going to be coming on later to the legacy of the speech but that is
something that i think did get through to the public uh both in
the united states and in britain and he he makes the point and george
will actually talked about this a little earlier today he makes the the
point in the speech that there there are moments when
you you have to act with clarity uh in order to display strength uh and
and and and he alludes to he said he says in in the speech had we had that
clarity and uh before the war the war wouldn't
have happened uh and and so he he make he makes that
analogy it's the east war in the world that uh
to have avoided he says in the speech you know that is
um and that can you imagine what that must have felt like to the parents of
of young lads who've gone over and uh and fought and many of them died in the
second world war the idea that they didn't need to have died
was something that would have been incredibly powerful
uh painful as well to have heard and yet so necessary to say that if you fear
that there's another war um around the corner and so instead
of being a warmonger somebody who warns about war and who's
saying that they need strong defenses to avoid one
is the exact opposite of a war monger and yet he was still being attacked as a
war monger and not just by the soviet press which
you take for granted but by the western press as well well and i
think it's important to recognize that you know churchill himself
addressed he didn't call it the iron curtain speech at all you know that's
history knows it is there in good speech but the title that churchill gave it was
sinews of peace um and you know we have in the museum
here the last minute uh edits that churchill
did to the speech before he got on the train
he was in washington in the embassy putting the final rhetorical
flourishes on the speech and you know the section where he says in the speech
i have entitled this the sinews of peace was really the 11th
hour i mean he put that into the notes the night before
um in fact we have in the archives here a great letter
uh the president of westminster college is trying to to pin down churchill about
a month before saying you know what's the title of your speech going to be
uh and churchill said i don't know it's going to be something of great import
perhaps world peace uh in fact the program
from 75 years ago today that was issued for the john finley green
foundation lecture simply says winston churchill
world peace so you know this is you're absolutely right andrew in that
you know it was not a warmongering speech at all but it was um
sending a signal of the strength that is necessary to preserve the peace and
that's a very chilean notice not notion and
the the other thing in the speech and the content of this of the speech that
that gets relatively little notice and seems to be very important and and
there's a series of speeches he gives a speech to the belgium belgian
parliament uh before this uh before the iron
curtain speech in a speech he gives afterwards at harvard
where he talks about the same things and that is he talks about the heritage of
the english-speaking people some of which you could
translate also into the heritage of western europe or european civilization
that has to do with the rule of law a lot of it has to do with the rule of law
so he mentions in the iron curtain speech magna carta
trial by jury uh habeas corpus the the
uh bill of rights um and and ends with the declaration of independence of
course and and and th this list of things of
the the rights and the freedoms uh and and
and aspects of justice and the rule of law
he repeats in virtually all the speeches he gives from about 1938
uh into the into the late 40s the highlight being i think the iron curtain
speech but it's all about defending
civilization because civilization represents these democratic rights
uh and and law and it and it therefore of course automatically sets what the
western nations are trying to do and trying to build on the settlement
of the post-war world um completely at odds with um communism because soviet
can have no magna carta it can have no um inherent bill of rights in the same
way that we have in 1689 and you have uh in the united
states because uh because marxism leninism
can't allow the individual to have those kind of rights freedom of speech
and association and and uh religion and so on and otherwise it goes
to the it destroys the um the power of the
state which marxism leninism is all about
so so by concentrating first as you say this goes back to the 1930s
back to before the second world war um because the nazis
couldn't allow those kind of liberties and freedoms
either um so by uh ideologizing if there's such a
word the struggle between totalitarianism on
one side and freedom and democracy on the other
he made it absolutely clear by the time of fulton
that there was a you know to use a phrase iron curtain
between the two and it wasn't just the physical iron curtain that
went from setting in the baltic to trieste in the adriatic
it was an actual ideological iron curtain about
how human beings behave how the human soul is allowed to
flourish everything really that we believe
civilization to be about absolutely he draws a line essentially
between barbarism and civilization uh that that that's
what the iron curtain is it's a line a line between the two yeah you you end
uh your own continuation of uh churchill's
history of the english speaking uh peoples
this this would be your continuation
some words that that seem to me uh to represent this that
um uh you talk you talk about the human race should
should we lose these values would would mourn the passing of
the most decent honest generous fair-minded and
self-sacrificing imperium so i it particularly the words
decent and fair-minded seemed to me to reflect what what churchill said in the
iron curtain speech there's decency and fair mindedness on this side of the iron
curtain there's barbarism on the other side of
the iron curtain so we we've talked about the reaction
but you know there's one person in particular
uh for whom the reaction uh is really important
historically world historically and that's stalin's reaction
uh to the speech and he's apoplectic uh is he not i mean he
he he organizes an interview with pravda to denounce churchill
and and and and accuses churchill of uh endorsing
racial theories like hitler he accuses accuses churchill of being hitler-like
uh for opposing uh uh the the russian designs on iran
and turkey and greece and all of eastern europe
as you'd expect i mean straight out of the of the soviet playbook and
indeed actually funnily enough straight out of goebbels playbook as well which
was also to go on the offensive um and to
hype up the whole thing as much as possible to
to make sure that you can try to undermine the central message of
your opponent um i'm afraid it's it's
straight out of the playbook of a loss of um
political pr um even nowadays really uh it doesn't need to be taken at uh
face value frankly the revisionist historians who claim that
churchill started the cold war with um fulton the fulton speech are
completely wrong because what he was actually doing was to
draw attention to the fact that a cold war had already started
and that the west was losing it um when one looks at what
stalin did from the moment that the red army entered poland
through to the fulton speech and beyond with the arrest of
bishops and the and the um closing of opposition parties the arrest of
of um editors and journalists and so on you know
as from fulton onwards and certainly by the time of the
iron berlin airlift and so on one recognizes that it was all part of a
parcel of um of what stalin had intended to do
probably years beforehand but certainly by the time of the end of the second
world war yeah it's interesting uh to me that
stalin when a beatle smith became the
ambassador to to russia and he's called it midnight
into stalin's office for for his first interview stalin and and
uh and i think ramiko yeah and uh
uh the first thing that stalin asks him is
uh uh does does truman agree with a churchill speech
in fulton and and of course smith you know assumes of course that must be
must be the case and and and it's sort of the last moment
that that stalin uh uh keeps his designs on
on iran they're they're already removing the troops
but your point about the revisionist historians i was reading for the re uh
lead up to this i was reading the cambridge uh history of the cold war the
first volume the cambridge history of the cold war
and the author's name i i forget right now who's writing about that particular
moments talked about the uh attempt of stalin to have a moderate
influence uh on the iranian government this is the iranian government
whom he placed tanks 20 miles uh away from it that's
moderating uh influence it it had to be the cambridge
um i might i went to cambridge myself but i have to say
cambridge at the moment is not covering itself with glory when it comes to
for reasons i'm sure that uh lots of your listeners will remember with the uh
recent attacks at churchill college on uh
uh on church on winston churchill you know cambridge university is uh
let's just say not the historical force that it was when i was an undergraduate
uh academic malpractice i think that attacked the
uh that that attack um and it is interesting that uh i was reading some
speeches and and i was reading his speech in
in the house of commons on italian uh invasion of ethiopia
in which he says the italians have reduced uh
the ethiopian empire to a primordial state the
the he completely reverses the racial what
what he's accused of having uh the racial views of
uh by attacking the italians uh for just destroying a civilization
in uh in ethiopia um so the uh
the speech becomes an important moment in the history of the
the cold war um and so tim it it's been memorialized as such
and it's been memorialized particularly with the churchill memorial in fulton
now the national churchill museum and and the extraordinary moment in in
that history is a decision uh on the part of uh
raised in in london and uh uh and responded to in
in fulton to move the the saint mary alderman very church
uh the christopher wren church i think the picture is up on on
on on the website right now um a 1670s christopher wren church
that had been bombed during the war tell us about how that came about how the
memorial was created well it's a remarkable story but you
know picking up on something andrew said as a preamble to that you know about
revisionist history and and looking back you know the museum
museums and libraries um in this case in particular uh house
objects that are eyewitnesses of history there's nothing like going to the
primary source you know the speech we had up earlier um
let's see what churchill had to say about some of these issues um let's look
directly at the writings let's look at the artifacts let's look at the memos
that were written in the day as as our launching point and i think
that's incredibly important the kind of work that andrew and other historians
do to use those primary sources at the jumping off point uh
are critical and something that we do here uh remarkably you know as you say
crosby you know the the the largest work in the collection is this christopher
wren church that was established in london as early as the
12th century saint mary the virgin alderman barry
was destroyed in the great fire of 1666 uh and rebuilt by christopher wren in
the 1670s it stood proudly in london for 300 years until december 29 1940
when the luftwaffe was doing an air raid over london the
blitz dropped twenty thousand incendiary bombs
and and gutted aldemonbury stood in rooms in london for 20 years
until westminster college very much like they you know the earlier
15 20 years earlier had invited churchill had a bold idea
well let's bring a bombed out church from london uh to mid
missouri and erected as a memorial to the speech
that churchill gave on the westminster college campus and they did so and i
think having physical monuments and items and
artifacts in the museum setting that are eyewitnesses to history the church for
instance is a great history that goes back to
shakespeare shakespeare lived a block away
from this church london john milton was married in this church
uh you know for for current audiences to to go back again to the primary
source uh to experience history uh using those
artifacts in this case architecture uh with great stories is is most
important and something that um we do with with with great aplomb of
course you know you saw in a photograph earlier
not only do we have the christopher wren church but just down the
road within eyesight is the piece of the berlin wall
the concrete manifestation of the iron curtain that churchill warned about had
not been built of course in 1946 um it was as andrew said earlier uh you
know an analogy but but there it is after it
comes down in in 1989 relocated
to fulton uh and reflected as a sculpture by edwina sands churchill's
granddaughter who uh who transformed the wall this
formidable barrier not just a symbol of a barrier between
ideologies is broken through if you look at the
photograph you see these abstract human figures the male and female and today
on campus there's no greater uh history lesson than to look at this side
of the wall which would be the west side graffiti
clad full of freedom and expression and the other side uh which is cold
stark gray concrete you know the the the the the difference
couldn't be clearer and for students uh young people for
whom the cold war it could be the peloponnesian war i mean
it could be a long time ago to see a monument like this firsthand
and see the difference between one side and the
other is a powerful powerful reminder of this chapter in our history
and the museum is is is is is a great rule uh and serves a great
purpose in teaching those lessons and it seems to me the two physical
structures really they they they unite to to very
disparate as you said a lot long distance in time
moments that reflect the importance of the iron curtain speech
in the speech he talks about churchill talks about christian civilization about
the defense of christian civilization and and the ren church is a
representative that you don't i think have to be
a christian or or a believer to understand the civilizing aspects
the church itself is is such a it's a magnificent beautiful
uh object and then the berlin wall i mean
to get back uh andrew to uh the effects of the speech
essentially the coming down of the berlin wall is the end of the cold war
um and uh and and the the the moral uh which he talks which
churchill also talks about the spiritual and moral values
of western civilization are really what sustain
uh uh the the west in its opposition to communism and
are what really triumph it's not the armies the triumph it's really the
values the triumph is that fair more than fair it's
absolutely right and uh and when you look at the berlin wall
which of course went up in 1961 during churchill's lifetime
um churchill said to jock colville his private secretary i'm not going to see
the um victory over european communism but
you will um and actually uh jock um colville died
in 1987 so only two years before the fall of the
berlin wall so he was almost right on on that but um
what i love at fulton amongst many other things that i love at fulton
is the juxtaposition of these two these two
buildings you have the the clean classical
architecture of sir christopher wren the greatest british
architect somebody who although he was building
in the late 17th century nonetheless was an enlightened uh
figure an enlightenment architect um and so he was looking forward to
to really the best that um that civilization had to offer in the west
and uh and then right next to it with complete um
juxtaposition uh you have this this monstrous architecturally
foul piece of concrete that was put up solely in order to split people um apart
and to and to stop families from being together effectively
a terrible terrible um thing to have done the soviet um union to have
stuck it up with the help of course of the warsaw
pact and the east germans um and then uh edwina who has done
such a wonderful job in um in showing the power of the human spirit
in breaking through the um in breaking through the walls so
so next to one another you have um you have the enlightenment you have
civilization you have this appalling um ugly piece of
um of barbarism um and that you also have turning it into a
work of art uh the hope that is um inherent
in the power of the human soul to um to break through
so i mean it really is fulton has got it all there
and there's the wonderful graffiti all over all over the wall you know the
the demonstrations uh uh that were created in 1989 around
around the wall the breaking down of the wall and all the
graffiti that happened i remember tim there was at one point there was a
debate about whether or not after the wall had been up for a while
in fulton about whether or not to restore the graffiti
an important art historical moment about whether or not the graffiti which was
fading and i think aguina came down on the on
the side of restoring the graffiti to keep the color
well yes as an art historian as a museum professional you know we take
conservation very seriously and in fact we did the the sunlight the missouri sun
has not been kind um so we had a series of conservators
it's a great image to see these gentlemen
and lab coats white coats and tiny little brushes touching up
the graffiti as they do uh stark contrast to i'm sure
on how the paint was initially supplied but we do take good care of it
great
[Music] whatsoever for another couple of hundred
years [Laughter]
so of course why churchill was constantly in the south of france
invading you're evading your weather
or morocco or morocco um so andrew uh before we go to to questions and
i do i do want to talk about the influence of the
uh and the lessons really of the the speech for today
i think and i think you've you've written about this and in fact you've
written about this as recently as this morning in the
the express in in london but um the speech in in one part of the speech
we've mentioned uh he he he alludes to what they could have done
in the late 30s to stand up with clarity to churchill
do we have another isis to hitler sorry um
do we have another moment like that the record essence of the
uh of the russian bear uh uh putin uh in in syria and all over the
all over the world the the iranians and the north koreans
causing immense amount of trouble not only in their neighborhoods but
elsewhere and then of course the rise of china uh
itself a communist power um it is is does the iron curtain speech
mean even more today uh it does yes i'm afraid the resonances
and the echoes are so powerful today probably more today than they have been
for some time um the at the time that
we've been talking about um came down we many of us um hoped that uh as
francis fukuyama put it you know it was the end of history
that um we would have a long period where
um where democracy in social democracy um
and various other kinds of democracy was the accepted
understood best form of of government across the world
and of course uh you americans and the rest of the world were
were um uh rudely um awakened from that hope and dream on 9
11. um and now we're being even more shaken
up really by uh by the rise of china and the rise of
totalitarianism um and the slow withdrawal of democracy
in in country after country and it strikes me that
um what churchill said about how the russians didn't want
war but they did want the fruits of war and um the only way to prevent that he
thought was for the west and primarily the english-speaking peoples
uh to um be together to to be allied and close
and prevent the fruits of war from being given to totalitarian powers
and it strikes me that today um that's still the case that if your country and
mine are able to stay together if we're able
to create a um a global alliance of countries and
there are many around the world who don't um
who are worried about the rise of totalitarianism and of course they are
um but what it does require is leadership and as we mentioned earlier
you know churchill wasn't prime minister at the
time that he made the iron curtain speech um but he did make
speech and it required people to stand up and
to be counted and if i truly believe that if enough
people uh do that and do that today um
then uh then we will be able to create the sinews of peace all over again
because it's not it's not that china wants war of course
it doesn't but it does want the fruits of war
the world situation today with britain leaving the
the european union uh with certain parts of the european union
uh they're not exactly at war but they're certainly in
uh dark discussions um amongst themselves about the hungarians
for instance uh and and the polls who who don't like
everything the the the the eu is doing and the eu the rest the
other members of the eu don't like some of the the eliminations of uh of of
traditional freedoms uh in in those countries in particular in
hungary today um are we are we in danger of uh
fragmentation of the uh uh anglo-american
and the uh and the western alliances generally of nato
uh et cetera just the wrong moment um no i think it's the exact opposite
crosby i really do um uh i think that um brexit has gone
has given america a fantastic opportunity
uh whereby britain is not going to be sucked into the more of this great
european super state which as we've seen with
um the uh eu deals brussels deals with china
and actually has got not got the west's best interests at heart certainly hasn't
got america's best interests at heart what they've been doing with huawei what
they've been doing with the nordstream 2 gas pipeline from russia frankly is
is directly in the um opposed to american best interests
and uh and britain hasn't gone along with those and won't
and so this is actually a good opportunity for doing exactly what
churchill called for for for recreating the
fraternal association between britain and america so i think it's a moment to
be uh grasped by the american
administration at the moment um the biden administration thinks of
brexit as being a bad thing uh for the united states i hope soon
they'll appreciate that actually a free sovereign and
independent britain is a good thing for america
well on on that note uh perhaps uh we can we can check and see if there are
some questions uh from uh from the audience
um elizabeth do we have do we have some questions is there anything in the chat
that you can give us yes thanks crosby um there
was one question um a bit earlier in time asking about
uh churchill's heroes and mentors in the early years of his life
the context of this um much much earlier great question uh well could i could i
answer that one tim and maybe we'll have a go afterwards uh the fact
is he was replete with heroes because he read history so
much uh he had any number of heroes he
admired napoleon who he used to quote an awful lot and whose books he had bound
and you can see them at churchill college cambridge
he loved um pitt the younger many of his wartime speeches you can hear that the
younger uh speaking through he attended clem
also georges club also's speeches in 1917 and uh and
a lot of churchill's second world war leadership can be seen
um as uh using klim also as a prism really um he had
a uh of course admired wolf of quebec and so on
um but you also have a uh so he he was he was quite eclectic in his historical
sense of being able to take heroes from from lots of different uh parts of
history if you look at the um history of the english-speaking
peoples that he wrote in the first volume
alfred the great when he writes about alfred the great he's essentially
writing about himself i think and and he's and he's projecting
on to alfred the great various uh capacities and talents that
that he knew he had um and so uh so yes there are there are
there are many his own father was a hero to him his own father wasn't
very nice to him frankly and and often treated him with contempt
but nonetheless he still saw his father uh as being a hero he took the views and
the um the political stance of um benjamin
disraeli um the basis of tory democracy really
comes from the israelian social conservatism and um uh and
uh his views from that so i think you'll you'll um uh be inundated
really when you're looking for um he had a lot of family pride and so that
you know the biography of his father he he wrote and also also marlborough
the first talk of me absolutely the first duke of morbid i should have
probably mentioned him first in fact he wrote a wonderful full volume
biography of his great ancestor the first yokomorba as well and
having been born in uh blenheim palace uh of course the uh
the um influence of the first duke was something that was always going to be
very important to him
one american to the list as far as a hero that you know churchill of course
his mother was from brooklyn and and relished in his
american side of the family and he mentions that hero uh at least a
rhetorical hero in the speech and that's bert cochrane you know the great
new york congressman uh who had a a wonderful way with words and
churchill as a young man knew cochran and studied
his speeches as he studies his own father's speeches
uh in fact in the iron curtain speech credits burke cochrane incites him um
as as a great rhetorical hero and i think you know that's also something not
only were these great you know world leaders and military
strategists um and and heroes of politics but there
were heroes of the written word too which influenced churchill greatly and
you can see it made manifest in the iron curtain speech in a remarkable way and
bert cochran would add should be an american should
be on the list um as should abraham lincoln in fact um
because of course he he also when you see i think it's the
volume three of the history of the english-speaking
peoples he admires abraham lincoln enormously as well both as a
speech maker but also obviously as a moral figure
so i want you because you are a biographer of napoleon which i did not
mention i believe at the top uh you've written one of the
great biographies of of napoleon andrew i i have never fully
understood i think i understand churchill pretty
well and i've read a lot and i've read most of his writing i don't
understand napoleon the love for napoleon because i
i've always felt that napoleon in some ways
represented the tyrannical aspects of european history
now okay well fire away
no what churchill recognized quite rightly was that what napoleon did was
to save the best bits of the french
revolution um equality before the law meritocracy
uh freedom of religion and so on and get rid of the
mad bits and the evil bits like the gill and mass guillotinings and
of the terror um but also the 10-day weak and the cult of the supreme being
and various other sort of nutty parts of the revolution uh
he also was an extraordinary law giver who created tool intents and purposes
the the framework of of the french state
he had a reputation as a war monger as churchill did with certain people as
we've discussed earlier but he wasn't one of the seven wars of
the coalitions that were declared against france between 1792 and 1815
napoleon was only responsible for two of them
the peninsula war and the um and the 1812 war against russia
both of whom of course disastrous for uh for france
but it was reacting to the empires of the um
of uh austria and russia and to an extent britain
and uh prussia that uh brought him down and they
they were going to bring him down because he represented
this revolutionary fervor okay um so elizabeth more
more questions we do we have um four more questions so far so there's
plenty to keep you occupied i wanted to circle back um to what you
were saying before about on his american side of things
the question is um what do you believe churchill's assessment
of the state of american institutions at the time
uh would be today given recent events and and how
would this affect the anglo-american relationship
today um is that one for me i have my i i always hate to tiptoe into
domestic american politics as of course churchill also
tried to keep out of it as uh as much as possible um and
also mary soames winston churchill's daughter um
told me never to assume that i know what uh papa would have said
under any circumstances um let alone the uh the extraordinary circumstances that
you have in your uh country at the moment uh domestically politically
um but i do know that one of the things that churchill did
uh in british politics at least was to try to
uh get beyond the partisanship of uh of day-to-day politics he uh
he set up the other club for example where he ensured that
members of the liberal party and members of the conservative party uh sat
um next to one another at a dinner and although they were allowed to um in
fact in his phrase nothing was to interfere
with the asperity of party politics actually the very getting together
around a table and being able to discuss everything
uh in a friendly and uh and give-and-take
charming intellectual manner was in and of itself
an attempt to get beyond the asperity and ranker of party politics and uh
i suspect that were um churchill alive today he would want to try to
recreate that in the american domestic political
environment it's always seemed to me andrew really
remarkable i mean the iron curtain speech is a good
good moment to to look at this that churchill could accuse during the 1945
election accused the labor party of essentially becoming the gestapo i mean
he uses that word gestapo and and then
he and atlee are getting along i mean of course atlee was part of his government
too as he's saying this um and and then
after after the election he licks his wounds
and he and atley sit down and and concoct this foreign policy essentially
together yes the um he always admired actually
enormously in fact when he was asked who was the best labor uh minister and
everybody was expecting him to say ernest bevin in fact he said clement
atlee and of course it was clementi in may 1940 who uh who went into the
war cabinets who entered the national government who allowed churchill to
to to knock together his own government effectively you know
even though atlee could have insisted on various places and and positions being
given to various labour people um it was uh
it was a really uh i suppose in many ways the best example
of bipartisanship in uh politics that we've ever had in
the united kingdom and so he saw the advantage of it this
did not stop him as you mentioned from uh from going hammer and tongs it
actually across the dispatch box and in the public speeches and so on
uh that was that was all fair game but when it came to actually trying to
come together to make decisions that were going to make the
country stronger he always found that he and athlete could could talk eye to
eye
elizabeth moore yes um so this is a question for tim
and uh wanted to bring up the lovely room he's sitting in we have another
um photo of that we want to share here um so question for tim is
on is there a relationship between this museum and the truman presidential
library given this special relationship between
truman and uh and churchill is there churchill materials there is there some
kind of relationship that you have yes in fact
this morning we launched our 75th anniversary commemoration broadcast
with a joint session with edwina sands who is churchill's granddaughter we
mentioned her earlier and also clifton truman daniel truman's grandson from
here and the truman library so as early as this morning
we we reaffirmed that special relationship between institutions
um and we continue to work together i know that
next week maybe a plug for them uh they're doing a a wonderful webcast i
think crosby you're participating i'm a analyst with uh candace millard
and david vondrele the washington post columnist and also himself a good
historian uh we'll be moderating it uh uh so you know for those of you who
cannot get enough of the 75th anniversary of the
uh iron curtain speech there's more there is
and and and to this room that uh the photograph was and i'm sitting is the
clementine spencer reading room named in honor of winston
churchill's longtime and beloved wife clementine we have here
all of andrew roberts books
and a few by churchill um uh uh compendium of materials
uh that clementine herself endorsed uh and
and knew about when when she was alive and so it's a great reading room
research people who visit the museum researchers
who who use our papers to study the speech
um come to this room and and use it as a reading room
another question got about five more minutes i think
yeah we do have one that might not fit into just a few minutes but i'll go
ahead and pose it anyway there's a question from some westminster
students and they're asking what churchill's
greatest failing was over his long career and uh and or
his greatest triumph gosh well there are i think there are an awful lot of um
failures frankly they they he made blunder after blunder he
got the gold standard wrong he got the
abdication crisis wrong uh he got the um
there's just so many um the blackened hands in ireland
i think the most serious one he got to women's suffrage
badly wrong i think the most serious one though was the gallipoli
campaign of 1915 which uh was a brilliant idea as a brilliant
concept to try to get the royal navy through the straits of
the dardanelles into the um sea of marmara and thereby to have
knocked the turks out of the first world war had it come off
it would have been one of the great strategic coups of the
um of world history frankly military history
but it didn't and ultimately it led to the killing or wounding of 147
000 allied troops so i think that has got to go down as as his biggest failure
as far as his biggest success is concerned
i think it would um either be keeping i'd be interested to see what uh what
tim and crosby think about this will be either uh keeping britain in the
war um between may 1940 and june 1941
where allowing the rest of the world especially america to rearm
in that key uh year uh not making peace with hitler after dunkirk
or possibly um his contribution to the creation of
an allied ground strategy from 1941 to 1945
onwards and to have created or helped create along with george
marshall and the pentagon the um the mediterranean strategy and
then the cross-channel uh attack that took place in on d-day in
1944. yeah i i would agree with you uh
the war itself obviously um uh but i would say i would drill down to a
specific moment john lucas uh did did this and and uh and others
have have followed as well but the five days
in london the the the five days in in may that
uh uh uh halifax and others in in the cabinet were willing to treat
through mussolini uh with uh uh with um uh hitler
um and and uh create a uh a compromise end of the war which of
course wouldn't have ended the war which churchill
realized and and uh and he may briefly have realized it alone
chamberlain came in if i remember correctly to to support him ultimately
in that and he convinced the cabinet um uh to
to back him but that that there's a moment that hangs in the balance i think
i mean i'd be interested in your view of that yes yes i agree what about
you tim what do you think well i guess one of my i don't know
about churchill's greatest um trial but perhaps one of the
one of the one of the um the least finest hours is that we don't
have more time uh to have this discussion i think we're
almost out of time here to answer that question and more but you
know i think that the iron curtain speech itself was one of his finest
hours and we can't lose sight of that 75 years on
in that he uses his position uh and says it we mentioned earlier
it's the last time he saw it coming and no one would listen
uh and here he is 75 years ago on this day saying
surely ladies and gentlemen we must not let this happen again and
whatever we think of the cold war um it it was not a hot war um a flagrant war a
global conflict uh and to agree that churchill
and his words and observation using his prescience and vision
here 75 years ago uh to to to through his rhetoric and his words just
as he had done uh in 1940 uh mobilize the english language
uh and send it into cold war battle uh is is one of his finest hours
absolutely absolutely um so as uh as tim points out we are
about two minutes um there's two minutes remaining
so we'll do a maybe a quick wrap-up um from crosby and andrew as well
and uh before we do that just a quick plug there are
um some other events going on uh today and tomorrow is to mention so i
encourage you to to check those out we also have another
conversation with crosby uh coming up on march
24th uh with david thompson british film critic
and you can find more information about that at our website
imos.gov so back over to crosby and andrew
so andrew is some last words about about the speech in churchill's legacy
i'd like to repeat those words that he used to a young american who was
crossing the westminster hall on the day of the
coronation luncheon in 1953 when he said study history
study history for therein lies all the secrets of statecraft
and it strikes me that what you're doing at fulton and what you've been doing for
years and with this beautiful gorgeous ren church
and uh and keeping up the gymnasium of course where the speech was given
and the archives you have in the museum you have
all of those things uh directly go to what churchill wanted to have
happen which was that people were going to be
able to study history and learn from it all the secrets of
statecraft congratulations on what you do
well thank you you're here thank you uh andrew roberts for a great
conversation and tim riley for participating in the
conversation too and for uh to echo what andrew just said
for for for running what is really a
treasure of western civilization uh the the
national churchill museum in uh fulton missouri so thank you all and
thank thanks everyone for for uh listening to us watching us
thanks for joining we're going to go ahead and stop the recording now um
we again will make this available on the website thanks everyone
and have a great weekend
so andrew did we are did we do okay