ABSTRACT
This chapter examines afresh Winston Churchill's role in the creation and maintenance of what he called the Anglo-American special relationship. Churchill encouraged and manipulated some processes to present selected images of himself, Britain and Anglo-American relations to the world. Churchill's own Iron Curtain metaphor was a powerful and enduring contribution to this process and, indeed, to post-Cold War divisions and conflicts that re-cast Britain and America shoulder to shoulder. While Churchill sometimes feared their going native, and at others by-passed them in communicating with the US president and his top advisors, he nevertheless regarded Washington as the most important of all British ambassadorial appointments – a respect he held reciprocally for the US Embassy in London, which alone had direct access to Number Ten. Perhaps, therefore, Churchill's single greatest contribution to the modern special relationship was to conjure it into existence from existing raw materials and ongoing developments.
