Churchill, Eisenhower, and the Making of the Modern World

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 (now renamed Churchill Fellowship) Fellow since 2010. He has been one of the very few people ever to be elected an Archives By-Fellow, Churchill College Cambridge twice, with the award of his medal in 2014. He remains as an SCR Associate of the College. He has supervised modern British history for several colleges at Cambridge University. His Churchill Fellowship enabled him to study at the University of Virginia Alderman Library and the OSS Archives at the National Archives in Washington DC, and in 2001 he was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Virginia .He was the Crosby Kemper Memorial Lecturer, Westminster College, Fulton MO for 2008 and at the George C Marshall Center, Virginia Military Institute, 2009; and was the Peple Lecturer at the University of Richmond VA in 2011. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and East Anglia universities. He is the Academic Director for the Wake Forest University Cambridge program, for which he has taught for over two decades. He lives in Cambridge, England.