Churchill and America

I did not stay for all of the presentation and question period at Politics and Prose this afternoon, when Martin Gilbert spoke about his new book, "Churchill and America", but did hear a good deal of it. The book seems worth reading.

Churchill clearly loved and disliked America. He mother was American, and he had admiration for it physically and for its people. He thought however, that if the US had entered World War I earlier, had backed the League of Nations, or if it had joined with Britain in the mid-1930s to face up to Hitler, things would have been very different.

On the other hand, he had no question, once Pearl Harbor was attacked, that America would stick in the fight and become allied with Britain until the war was won.

America and Britain have never had a formal alliance, but there was a secret agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, never to use atomic weapons on the other.

Churchill met three American presidents, McKinley and the two Roosevelts. He was close to FDR, but he argued with him over various matters sometimes on a weekly basis, sometimes on a daily basis.

He toured the western United States in the 1890s; he was in New York City in 1929, the day the market crashed. He fell in love with Ethel Barrymore, who refused his proposal (he had an uncertain future).