When we first moved to the United States we bought a home in New Canaan, Connecticut that had once been owned by Bernard Baruch and used has his get-away. We were told that, as he and Churchill were friends, Churchill had been invited by Baruch to stay there and it was there he wrote his Iron Curtain speech. We were never sure whether this was true or whether it was something a local real estate agent had dreamed up. There was another house down the road where George Washington was said to have slept on his way through! —M.A.

A: Frank Clarke’s in Miami Beach

Churchill did not visit Baruch in New Canaan before the Iron Curtain speech (Fulton, Missouri, 6 March). Indeed I can find no record of his ever being there. Baruch often hosted him at his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City, and at Hobcaw Barony, his South Carolina estate, but not, it seems, New Canaan.

Except for a week’s side-trip to Cuba, Churchill’s prep for the Iron Curtain speech was done at 5905 North Bay Road in Miami Beach. It was then the home of Col. Frank Clarke, the Canadian wood pulp magnate. Clarke had hosted him at Lake of the Woods after the 1943 Quebec Conference.

I’m obliged to you for the question, though, because it put me on to a Churchill press conference I hadn’t noticed. It occurred in New York after he and Clementine arrived on the Queen Elizabeth, 14 January. I really had to write it down. His press conferences were rare, but always fun. From a book worth having: Robert Pilpel, Churchill in America 1895-1961……

At 9:30 P.M. Winston and Clementine descended the gang-plank to the sounds of cheers and applause. Churchill flashed the V sign and remarked, “I thank you for this very private reception.” He and his wife were then ushered into a large heated waiting room, and a proper press conference began:

New York Press Conference

Q. Are you available for any syndicate offers?

A. I am always prepared to accept any offer.

Q. Will you comment on the socialist program of the Labour Party?

A. I never criticize the government of my country abroad. I very rarely leave off criticizing it at home.

Q. Do you expect to eat much in America?

A. After rationing I hope to make up for lost time; I cannot say for lost weight.

Q. What is your reaction to the British White Paper fixing a quota for Jewish immigration into Palestine?

A. I am opposed to it. As you know, I am a Zionist from the very beginning of this great experiment.

Q. What is your reaction to the fact that you will be living in Florida near Al Capone?

A. Oh, you refer to the former distinguished resident of Chicago. I had not addressed myself to the problem.

Q. Are you taking a train tonight?

A. I am leaving on a train which is going out.

All Ready on the Firing Line

“And indeed he was.” Robert Pilpel continues. “He posed for a last few photographs and then announced cheerfully, ‘I’m off for Alabam’ – or thereabouts.’ He went directly to Pennsylvania Station. Next stop: Miami Beach via the Seaboard Coast Line.

The Iron Curtain speech had been long in his mind. But he drafted the text, vetted wisely by his wife, at Clarke’s. The Iron Curtain draft complete, the Churchills left Miami Beach on March 1st. Again the used a Pullman sleeper, now bound for Washington. Ahead lay another train ride with President Truman, and the historic events that followed.

A: Very. The late Curt Zoller was the first to write in depth about Bourke Cockran. This man played a vital but little understood role in forming young Churchill’s political philosophy. In 1895, Zoller wrote, when young Churchill traveled to New York on his way to Cuba,

…he was greeted by William Bourke Cockran, a New York lawyer, U.S. congressman, friend of his mother’s and of his American relatives. Winston’s Aunt Clara was married to Moreton Frewen. (The peripatetic “Mortal Ruin” would later badly edit Churchill’s first book, Story of the Malakand Field Force.) For many years Frewen had been a friend of Cockran, who would grow to become one of Winston Churchill’s lifelong inspirations.

Churchill later wrote of “the strong impression which this remarkable man made upon my untutored mind. I have never seen his like, or in some respects his equal. With his enormous head, gleaming eyes, flexible countenance, he looked uncommonly like a portrait of Charles James Fox. It was not my fortune to hear any of his orations but his conversations, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis, and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard.”

Cockran’s Influence

The New York congressman, therefore, was crucially important. Churchill based much of his domestic political philosophy, particularly his lifelong belief in Free Trade, on Cockran’s thinking. Thanks to Churchill’s his capacious memory, he was still quoting Cockran’s famous line, “the earth is a generous mother,” forty years later. In the 1950s, Churchill told Adlai Stevenson, Democrat nominee for President  in 1952 and 1956, that his model was a Democrat congressman. Stevenson had to be reminded of who Cockran was.

 

In 2007 Curt Zoller teamed with Michael McMenamin to write Becoming Winston Churchill: The Untold Story of Young Winston and his American Mentor. This excellent book is well worth a read, thorough and accurate. 

We can never know for certain how a person would have developed if one or another aspect of his life had been different. But what is clear with regard to Churchill—as his letters at the time and his writings in later years attest—is that a life which before 1895 seemed destined to yield a narrow range of skimpy achievements became from 1895 onwards a life of glorious epitomes and stunning vindications.

Credit Bourke Cockran, New York’s overflowing hospitality, the railroad journey to Tampa and back, or the rampant vitality of a nation outgrowing itself day by day. Credit whatever you will, but do not doubt that Winston’s exposure to his mother’s homeland struck a spark in his spirit. And it was this spark that illuminated the long and arduous road that would take him through triumphs and tragedies to his rendezvous with greatness.