By Tracie Mauriello / Post-Gazette Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON --Christopher Sterling has made numerous trips to the
United Kingdom to visit Sir Winston Churchill's former home in Kent, the
Cabinet War Rooms in London and Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire,
where British code breakers deciphered Nazi secrets during World War II.
Soon,
Mr. Sterling, a George Washington University dean and former president
of the Washington Society for Churchill, won't have to travel 3,600
miles to study the mercurial prime minister whose wartime leadership
helped save Western civilization from the Nazis.
That's because
the Chicago-based Churchill Centre and George Washington University are
teaming up to create the only major Churchill facility in the United
States outside the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Mo., site of the
prime minister's famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech.
The National
Churchill Library and Center will be created on the GWU campus, just
blocks from the White House, in the Estelle and Melvin Gelman Library.
It is expected to be both a museum for the general public and a major
academic research center on par with similar facilities in the United
Kingdom. The center will make source material available to academic
researchers -- and celebrate the achievements and personal history of
Churchill, son of a British statesman and an American socialite.
"Winston
Churchill is a part of the story of Britain but also the story of the
world and of America becoming a great world power. He's as much a part
of American history as British," said Churchill Centre director Lee
Pollock.
