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In the hour of victory after World War II, a grateful people was ready to give Churchill any honor he might choose. He chose instead the one reward the nation was not prepared to give—further service. Above all, war-weary Britons craved a better life. They voted for Labor and the social revolution glowingly outlined by Labor's Clement Attlee. Wounded by defeat, Churchill settled into a new job as leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Tirelessly castigating welfare-statism as "strength through misery," he demanded: "What is the use of being a famous race and nation if at the end of the week you cannot pay your housekeeping bill?" He was a devastating critic of the Socialist ministers who were busily dismantling Empire and clamping grey austerity on the land: "Attlee ("A modest man, and I know no one with more to be modest about"), Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps ("There, but for the grace of God, goes God"), and of course Health Minister Aneurin Bevan ("Minister of Disease").
Pax Americana. Though out of office, Churchill was seldom out of the limelight. And in 1946, speaking as a private citizen in a foreign country, he returned to his old role of Cassandra to issue a challenge that ranks as one of his greatest feats. At Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., Churchill warned the Western world in his "Sinews of Peace" speech that the time had come to close ranks once more against a threat as sinister as any the century had seen: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."
Americans, summoned by Churchill to discharge their "awe-inspiring accountability to the future," heeded and acted. Perhaps no other man on earth could have commanded such a response. In years to come, the U.S. unquestioningly supported NATO, the Marshall Plan, and a succession of international responsibilities that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. Though often and unfairly characterized as a warmonger, Churchill on his return to power in 1951 saw that his warning had taken effect, and was convinced that the West could now bargain from strength with the Communist world. His hope of a realistic détente, like his vision of British membership in an integrated Europe, was left to others to pursue. Nonetheless, when he surrendered office in 1955. the world was as tranquil as it had been at any time in the 40 years since Churchill's Grand Fleet steamed into action against imperial Germany.
In a lifetime spanning the Industrial Revolution and the Space Age, the Empire he set out to defend had evaporated. Pax Britannica had become a Pax Americana, sustained by a weight of resolve and physical might that Churchill had fruitlessly implored his own countrymen to accept as the price of peace. His words, his example, his courage were indelibly engraved on the minds of free men. With his passing. the world was diminished and felt it. Amid all the public outpourings of tribute and grief, no words struck a nobler note than the heartsick message that Winston Churchill broadcast to the people of defeated France in 1940: