Opportunity Ahead

Save for a few jeering Irish-Americans, New York received Winston Churchill with warmth and affection. The tabloid Daily News, which has no great love for Britain, welcomed the old lion editorially. At the apartment of his old friend Bernard Baruch, Churchill received respectful visits from Governor Thomas Dewey and many another notable. One midweek morning Mayor Vincent Impellitteri escorted the Prime Minister to Brooklyn to visit the house where his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was born Jennie Jerome in 1850. As he came out of his mother's birthplace into a cheering crowd, reporters asked Churchill how the four-story brick and brownstone house compared with Blenheim Palace, the massive ancestral seat of his father's family. "I am equally proud of both," said the Prime Minister tactfully.

"A Great Pity." That evening Dwight Eisenhower came over to the Baruch apartment for his third meeting with Churchill in as many days. In the course of their long friendship. Ike and Churchill had learned to express their opinions to each other with frankness. Their conversations last week were no less frank than ever. Ike was disturbed, and said so, by the fact that despite fine speeches about European unity Churchill had offered no more practical support to the European Defense Community than had Clement Attlee (see INTERNATIONAL). Ike and his advisers were irritated, too, by Churchill's warning on the day of his arrival in New York that "it would be a great pity for the U.N. armies--or the U.S. armies--to go wandering all about this vast China." Though U.S. policies are woefully misreported by the British press--and perhaps by British diplomats--Ike felt that after so many public and private reassurances the Prime Minister ought to realize that no responsible U.S. official proposed to send an army wandering about China.

Churchill was briefed regarding the new Administration's views on Asia by Ike's Secretary of State-designate, John Foster Dulles. The American difficulty is not that Churchill has different ideas on Asia, but that his mind is open almost to the point of blankness on the very large part of the world lying east of Singapore. Dulles and Churchill could agree on at least two premises: 1) Anglo-American cooperation in Asia is essential; 2) Asia must be treated as a strategic unit, not as a hodgepodge of individual problems.

"So Premature." The day after his final conversation with Ike, Churchill flew down to Washington for his last official meeting with President Harry Truman. The Prime Minister arrived at the White House sporting shoes with zippers down the side. Always unabashed in his pursuit of comfort, he did not hesitate to keep his unusual footgear unzippered even at formal functions. In the White House, where he and Truman were joined by Administration bigwigs including Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, Churchill gravely reviewed the global struggle against Communism. Proudly he recalled to his host the 1946 speech at Fulton, Mo., in which, publicly proclaiming the breach between Russia and the free world, he had coined the term Iron Curtain. Mrs. Roosevelt, the Prime Minister remembered, had been disturbed at the somewhat bellicose tone of the speech, and much later, in an attempt to justify her objections, had told him, "Well, you didn't have to be so premature." Said Churchill, drawing himself up, "I replied: 'Mrs. Roosevelt, are not all prophets premature?' "

A few hours later Churchill was the President's host at dinner in the British Embassy. Truman came to the Churchill party from a fund-raising dinner where he had already faced seafood in aspic, petite marmite, filet mignon, stuffed artichokes, potatoes au gratin, chiffonade salad and baked Alaska. Somehow the President managed to make a respectable stab at the Embassy's consomme, Dover sole, saddle of veal, potatoes duchesse, cauliflower and charlotte pralinee. It was at this semipublic occasion--there were 16 British and American officials present--that Secretary of State Dean Acheson chose to lecture the Prime Minister on Britain's lackadaisical attitude toward the European Defense Community and toward settlement of her disputes with Iran and Egypt.

Next day, with a careful, old man's gait, Churchill clambered into the presidential DC-6, the Independence, and headed off for two weeks in the Jamaican sunshine--which was, all pundits to the contrary, the primary reason for Churchill's American trip. In Manhattan, at week's end, Dwight Eisenhower said that he had recently asked "a man who is 78 years old--one of the world's great leaders," if it wasn't time for him to retire. The statesman's answer: "My opportunity for my greater service to my country probably still lies ahead."*

* As he told this story (at a meeting of heart specialists), Ike turned to Thomas E. Dewey, an elder statesman 28 years younger than Churchill, said: "And that certainly applies to you, too."

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