Winston Churchill spoke to joint sessions of the United States Congress on three different occasions, each time as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He made the first two speeches on Capitol Hill during the Second World War: the first in December 1941, the second in May 1943. He spoke for a third time in January 1952, soon after beginning his peacetime premiership.
While a few passages from these speeches have become well known Churchill quotations, historians have generally overlooked the importance of all three speeches. They were not merely the product of a courtesy customarily extended by Congress to a visiting head of government. In fact, the stakes were quite high. In each instance, the British Prime Minister was doing nothing less than lobbying the United States Congress about major policy decisions. Each speech, therefore, deserves to be understood in its proper context. Together, the speeches fill out our picture of a great politician at the top of his game.
Early Encounters
Before examining the three speeches, it helps to look at Churchill’s experiences in Washington prior to the Second World War. This is important, for few—if any—people on Capitol Hill in the 1940s and ’50s would have known that Churchill’s now legendary speaking style had—to a great degree—been influenced by a United States congressman.
Bourke Cockran was the first American politician that Winston Churchill ever came to know.
Born in Ireland, he immigrated to the United States and became a maverick in New York City’s Democratic party—a maverick because he had the unpolitic habit of placing principle over party.
After first being elected to the House of Representatives in 1886, Cockran’s innate honesty frequently put him at odds with New York’s Democratic party machine in Tammany Hall. As a result, he was in and out of the House over a period of thirty years.
Along the way Cockran had become friends with Churchill’s American-born mother and therefore hosted the twenty-year-old Winston when Churchill first visited the United States in November 1895.
Cockran was acclaimed by many, including Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R–Massachusetts), as America’s greatest orator, though others saw him simply as an Irishman with the gift of the gab. Either way, he greatly impressed Churchill, who went some way towards imitating Cockran’s speaking style. In the 1950s Churchill said of him: “He was my model—I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall.”1 Thus when Churchill came to speak before Congress himself, he displayed the influence that a former member of the House had upon him at an early age.
Churchill had more early encounters with members of Congress when he visited the United States for the second time in December 1900. After he was first elected to Parliament, Churchill travelled to North America to make money on a speaking tour. In New York City he spoke at the Waldorf Astoria, where he was introduced by Mark Twain. In Albany, Churchill met Governor Theodore Roosevelt, who had just become the Vice-President elect.
Churchill then travelled to Washington, D.C.
