It is often said that the special bond between Britain and the USA was forged in war between Roosevelt and Churchill. But the closer link in many ways was that between Churchill and Eisenhower, since it existed both in wartime 1941-1945 but also again in very different circumstances between 1951 and 1955, when Churchill was Prime Minister and Eisenhower was briefly the first Supreme Allied Commander NATO before going back to the USA to win the 1952 Presidential race and overlap in the White House with Churchill's peacetime premiership from 1953-1955. And in 1945-1951 Churchill by his speeches and Eisenhower by his tenure as first ever Supreme Allied Commander Europe were continuing to create the new and stable global world order that held until now. In other words theirs was a much longer relationship than that between FDR and Churchill, and spanning peace as well as war. And it was the Eisenhower and Churchill relationship that essentially created the world order that lasted down until current times. Churchill and Eisenhower can also be seen as a passing of the baton, from Britain as the fading superpower to the dynamic new world of the USA. Churchill's relationship with Eisenhower spans this transition perfectly and is the ideal prism through which to witness this change, in terms of how the balance between the UK and USA altered both as countries and in personal terms between the two men themselves.
Christopher Catherwood is an historian and Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow since 2010. He is also Archives By-Fellow, Churchill College Cambridge, since 2008; Visitor to the SCR at St Edmund's College Cambridge since 2010; University of Virginia Alderman Library and the OSS Archives at the National Archives in Washington DC - medal awarded 2014; Crosby Kemper Memorial Lecturer, Westminster College, Fulton MO for 2008; Marshall Lecturer, George C Marshall Center, Virginia Military Institute, 2009; and many others. He lives in Cambridge, England.
Praise for Churchill's Folly: "This compelling volume raises eerie echoes of present-day Iraq. In the aftermath of WWI, France and Britain competed for the Mideastern leftovers of the Ottoman Empire... Catherwood... sees contemporary parallels in the unlearned lessons of 'imperial overreach.' Unwanted paternalistic protectorates have a way of imploding, Catherwood notes. Churchill conceded wryly that Britain was spending millions 'for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.' In a readable historical essay stretched into a short book, Catherwood demonstrates yet again that one generation's pragmatism can be a later generation's tragedy."-- Publishers Weekly "How did things get so messy in Mesopotamia? In part, because of Iraq's founding at the hands Winston Churchill, 'undoubtedly brilliant but utterly lacking in any kind of judgment.' An impressive study on the making of modern Iraq, with all its crises and catastrophes."-- Kirkus Reviews "Catherwood is an excellent guide at cutting through the mythology that surrounds this subject."--The Guardian
