News & Press Releases
Symposium explores the friendship between Churchill and Roosevelt
An Atlantic alliance
By FRED BROWN, March 19, 2006
The University of Tennessee and Churchill College of Cambridge, England, will explore the long and war-tested alliance between the United States and Great Britain in a conference that has all the earmarks of making history itself.
In something of a first for the region, political luminaries such as former secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Lawrence Eagleburger, in addition to Winston Churchill, grandson of the famous English prime minister, will be featured among other political stars lined up for the conference.
The two-day symposium, open to the public, will be at UT's Howard Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy in the Carolyn P. Brown University Center on March 29-30. The participants will frame their discussions around the theme of "The United States and Great Britain: The Legacy of Churchill's Atlantic Alliance."
A gala fund-raising dinner, which will be split by UT and its partner in the conference, Cambridge University, is March 29 at the East Tennessee Historical Center auditorium.
The conference, which has received commitments from some of the world's present and former political authorities, is being co-hosted by the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College.
Part of the conference's mission is also to create British and American student and scholar exchanges.
Participants will learn of the great friendship between Sir Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who were the best of friends in the worst of times. Together, they fought the dark clouds of tyranny.
As the world flung outward into the black hole of world war, Roosevelt, who had been president for two consecutive terms and was entering his third, and Churchill, Britain's prime minister, who had not won an election so much as he was simply the man elevated from Parliament to save his nation, together became the era's greatest statesmen and politicians.
FDR owned Washington like no other U.S. president and eventually seemed like a father to the American nation, trying to dig out of the depths of the Great Depression. Churchill had been in Parliament so long it was as if he had invented the place.
When Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain tried and lost in his appeasement policy toward Hitler, the king of England turned to the man he knew would not only stand up to Nazi tyranny but also defeat the threat.
After Chamberlain was forced to step down, King George VI asked Churchill to form a government in 1940. Churchill was 65 years old, probably at the peak of his power and popularity.
Asking the House of Commons for its confidence in his small War Cabinet, Churchill said: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
Which was precisely what England and Europe needed.
Thus began the age of FDR and Churchill, two men in the middle of Europe's dark storm blowing in from Germany.
Theirs was not a time of peace. The day Roosevelt took office, his nation could not rub two nickels together and was scrubbing the bottom of the economic barrel. When Parliament opened the way for an ever-eager Churchill, his nation was about to be drowned in a rain of bombs from Nazi bombers. The word "blitz" was to become a topic at the dinner table as well as the pub.
In a unique bonding, FDR and Churchill united not only to save the world but also to become the best of friends who wrote each other weekly, sometimes daily, and who delighted in each other's company. When FDR died just before the end of World War II -- the war he as much as anyone helped end -- Churchill cried for the loss of his friend and said the world had lost its greatest leader. Ever.
More books have been written about the two men individually and their contributions to World War II together and separately than any other politician of any time. Each year, new books arrive on both men as more and more material from World War II comes to light.
A new book, written by Knoxville's Debbie Brezina, is to be published in March by Avalon Press of Murfreesboro that looks at Churchill's leadership and the American alliance during World War II. Brezina's book aims to inspire the youth of the world.
Brezina, married to Knoxville Field Office HUD Director Mark Brezina, is a key player in helping the University of Tennessee put together a spectacular conference on the U.S. and British alliance and its importance to the last century, this century and the centuries to come.
Brezina's "The Spirit of Churchill" is a biography of Churchill. But, she said, it also is a history of World War II, a tie-in to the current situation in the world, and a book on the character and values of great leaders.
While the book keeps one foot in history, it also has an eye on inspiring "this generation that, if they follow the example of the life of Churchill, with his unbelievable highs and unbelievable lows, they can aspire to heights of historical greatness, too."
Brezina's book is the catalyst for the conference. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Brezina said she wanted to find a way to move the nation in a way that Churchill had motivated England and the world at the start of World War II.
"I wanted to inspire and encourage young people and adults by the heroic example of Sir Winston Churchill -- a man who never gave up, who had indomitable courage to stand alone for what he believed was right, who only considered victory in the face of defeat, and whose life proved failure is not final," she said.
During a book research trip with her husband to the United Kingdom in 2002, she was able to visit Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace. This led to a session with Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Center at Cambridge.
Packwood is custodian of the Churchill papers and is one of the world's leading authorities on Churchill. Packwood was intrigued with the idea that Brezina wanted to write a book to rouse young people. Packwood agreed to read the manuscript and liked the tie-ins with World War II and the war on terror.
Brezina says she and Packwood formed a friendship, and later she and her husband were appointed to a U.S. advisory board the Archives Centre formed. The board has sought to raise the center's profile in America. The Baker Conference also aims to raise both profiles and then play a leading role in exchanging scholars and students between England and UT.
The Brezinas began pushing the idea of a conference that would raise the public profile of both centers.
"We felt is was a phenomenal match, not only because of UT but really because of the Baker Center, whose mission is (the same as) that of the Archives Centre ... . With the Baker Center on the grounds of UT and the Archives Centre on the grounds of Cambridge, it was a nice parallel," said Debbie Brezina.
"How many great universities have such a premier institution so closely associated with it? Also, because of Oak Ridge and its natural alliance with the Second World War and Churchill, we felt there was a true triad of linkage."
A conference of this magnitude has seldom, if ever, been seen in Knoxville -- or East Tennessee, for that matter.
And for this, the region can thank its resident political icon, former U.S. Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., who lives in Huntsville, Tenn., and his far-ranging interests on public policy. The center, which bears his name, already has held outstanding conferences, and with this one with Great Britain, it sets a new standard of excellence.
Already committed to speak are Kissinger, the man who guided America through the tricky waters of peace negotiations with North Vietnam during the 1970s; Churchill, grandson of the former prime minister and a former member of Parliament; Eagleburger, outspoken former secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration; Jon Meacham, who wrote a defining book about the friendship of FDR and Churchill ("Franklin and Winston,"); as well as Lord Charles David Powell, former private secretary and foreign policy and defense adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; Sir John Dixon Ikle Boyd, headmaster of Churchill College, which is part of Cambridge; Allen Packwood, who was here last month to set the stage for the conference and the Churchill Archives of Churchill College, which he directs; and a host of other political and scholarly luminaries.
The Legacy of Churchill's Atlantic Alliance, open to the public, would no doubt please both of the men being honored. It was that alliance, after all, stood in the storm and beat back the darkness of despotism.
Copyright 2006, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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