Conclusion

Abstract

On 9 April 1963, Churchill was made an honorary citizen of America; an honour never before having been bestowed on a foreign national by a President of the United States. Primarily due to his ailing health, Churchill could not attend in person but it had been hoped that he would be able to take part in the ceremony via a television relay station located in Cornwall. When the time came for the relay station at Goonhilly to transmit, however, it failed to do so. But Churchill had already written to thank President John F. Kennedy, and America, for the honour. Fittingly therefore, Churchill relied upon the written word. He wrote that Kennedy’s action had illuminated ‘the theme of unity of the English-speaking peoples’ to which Churchill had ‘devoted a large part’ of his life.¹ Churchill would sometimes joke that he had in fact started this course of action by being born to an American mother and an English father — that he was ‘proud’ to be the ‘natural product of an Anglo-American alliance; not political, but stronger and more sacred, an alliance of heart to heart’.² Without a doubt, he certainly had devoted a large part of his life to this theme, and he had also committed a significant portion of his writing to this theme — such as his six-volume history of the Second World War, approximately two and a half million words.³ Seemingly unable to pass up the opportunity, Churchill emphasised how the history of Britain and America was so intertwined that their past was the key to their future; and it was a future in which Britain and the Commonwealth should not ‘be relegated to a tame and minor role’.⁴ As always, he believed that history laid the path of the future.