Rendez-vous with history
Quebec City hosts international Churchill
Conference
By Robert O'Brien
On a spectacular late-summer weekend last
September, a delegation consisting of Dan Tisch, John Plumpton, Michael
Wilson, Charles Anderson and Robert O'Brien made a pilgrimage to
historic Quebec City to represent the Churchill Society for the
Advancement of Parliamentary Democracy at the annual International
Churchill Society Conference. For the three hundred international
delegates assembled at the Chateau Frontenac, it was a weekend of
reliving history and retracing the footsteps of Winston Churchill,
Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King, who met there for the Quadrant
Conference in August 1943 and the Octagon Conference in September 1944.
Quebec was one of FDR's favorite cities (he visited there 18 times) and
the city holds the distinction of being the only location where
Churchill and Roosevelt met twice during the war.
Two eminent Canadian historians, Jack
Granatstein and Desmond Morton, opened the conference with an engaging
overview of the significance of the Canadian connection during World War
II. The program that followed included addresses by David Woolner,
Executive Director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at
Hyde Park; Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers University (speaker at
our Churchill Society Dinner in Toronto in 2004); newly appointed
Senator Hugh Segal; and Canada's former ambassador to Iran, Ken Taylor.
Mr. Taylor was the keynote speaker at a black-tie dinner on the Friday
night, at which the Chateau chefs replicated the exact menu served to
Churchill and Roosevelt and their aides sixty-two years earlier.
History was recreated with the
introduction of Mme Brittel, whose husband had discovered the plans for
the Operation Overlord and the D-Day Invasion inadvertently left behind
by military staff in the Chateau's Rose Room. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt,
FDR's granddaughter, read Eleanor Roosevelt's radio address to the
Canadian people in 1943, in which the First Lady expressed America's
deep affection, cooperation and gratitude to the Canadian people for
their sacrifices during the war.
Churchill's only surviving child, Lady
Mary Soames, tirelessly attended each and every session during the three
days. She addressed the conference in a session relating to the role of
the Clementine Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt, and graciously fielded a
wide range of interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes controversial
questions about her father. The highlight of the weekend was a moving
and nostalgic visit to La Citadelle de Québec, the Governor General's
residence, and a group photo of the delegates against the backdrop of a
breathtaking panoramic view of the city. Lady Soames read extracts from
her diaries, recounting her recollections of accompanying her father
aboard the Queen Mary for the 1943 Conference. She shared personal
memories of the wartime leaders whom she had met sixty-three years
earlier at this very spot at the crossroads of history.
It was as if the forces of history were
realigned that weekend with the appearance of Queen Mary II in a rare
docking in the city. We left Quebec with the sense that we had
experienced our own rendezvous with destiny.
