Back in London, Churchill faced a harsh reality. On his American tours he was a celebrity, a hero of several wars recounted in his own books (which were widely reviewed and read in America), hailed in the press as “the British statesman” and “versatile leader,” with a “fine disrespect for established authority,” the “stormy petrel of British politics.”1 He had a network of American supporters that eased his passage around the country, many of whom were positioned to have influence in what would certainly be a post-Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt administration.
Unfortunately, the return to Britain was not the beginning of a happy time for Winston Churchill, the receipt of a new Daimler notwithstanding. These next several years were to be his Wilderness Years,2 an MP out of ministerial power, denied access to ministers’ red boxes and forced to develop his own sources of information on foreign affairs.
He would be engaged in disagreeable wars with his party over the questions of Indian self-rule, King Edward VIII’s insistence on marrying the twice-divorced American woman he loved, and Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler. On August 2, 1935, the Government of India Act, opposed vehemently by Churchill, received Royal Assent. On December 11, 1936, Edward VIII abdicated after a bitter battle in which Churchill involved himself,3 which he later regretted.4 The final battle, over appeasement versus confrontation with Hitler, ended on May 10, 1940, when King George VI asked the sixty-five-year-old Churchill to form a new government as prime minister.
During those Wilderness Years, Churchill did not abandon his American network even as he remained politically active in Britain, speaking frequently both in the House of Commons and across the country. Charlie Chaplin came to visit, as did Bernard Baruch, who remained a close friend through this dreary period and thereafter. Churchill always seized opportunities to reciprocate that friendship, and arranged a dinner in honor of Baruch at Claridge’s on September 8, 1933. The thirty invitees included several of the people who had been helpful to Churchill either in putting together his network or in solving financial and family problems. These included Sir Henry Strakosch, the Daily Telegraph’s Lord Camrose, Louis Levy, Admiral Grayson,5 and, as part of a continued effort to influence American opinion, U.S. senator Carter Glass. Senator Glass had been secretary of the U.S. treasury from 1918 to 1920 and might have met Churchill then. In 1938, the senator from Virginia, while staying at London’s Ritz, accepted Churchill’s invitation “to meet with Bernard Baruch” with pleasure. Years later, Churchill would thank the senator for “the very excellent cigars” he had arranged to send to the prime minister.6 Not all accepted, among those who declined was Lord Camrose, who “is yachting and will not be back in time.”7
On May 8, 1932, Churchill reestablished contact with the American audience he had left behind when he returned to Britain a few months earlier. He converted his February speech at the New York Economic Club into his first broadcast to the United States. “Speaking to thirty millions of Americans,” he repeated his view that the depression was caused by unresolved monetary issues. He again called upon the U.S. and the U.K. to balance their budgets “strictly” and to work together to find a solution to “these absurd nightmare years.”8 Unity of the English-speaking peoples, he reminded his listeners, was important to peace and prosperity.
Ira Nelson Morris, a diplomat and part of the Chicago meat-packing family and fortune, was chairman of the International Radio Forum, meant to foster peace among nations. Daniel Willard, whom Churchill had added to his American network on both his 1929 and 1932 trips, was a member of the American committee of Morris’s International Radio Forum. Churchill thanked Morris in his opening remarks on the radio broadcast and went on to describe “the marvelous new advantages of the wireless—or do you say radio? (I believe that is becoming quite fashionable).”9 Morris termed the broadcast “a great success,” and along with a thank-you note from Paris, he sent “a bottle of very unusual cognac which I obtained in France, and which I hope you will find good.”10
Churchill’s response announced the safe arrival of the cognac and his pleasure that Morris was “satisfied with the broadcast.”11 Churchill again repeated his message of the need for Anglo-American unity to Americans with greater urgency, a month after the Munich Agreement ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. He warned that the “abandonment” of Czechoslovakia meant “the lights are going out” and that the English-speaking peoples must “join hands together over land and sea” to preserve the peace.12
He remained in touch with his American network in other ways. Baruch was a guest at Chartwell, and a frequent one.13 On one visit, the financier Baruch brought along a delegation of Americans eager to express support for Churchill’s anti-appeasement position.14
When Churchill’s Marlborough, Volume I,15 was published in October 1933 after a feverish bout of work to complete it, he used it as a reminder to his network. Churchill often deployed those volumes to initiate lengthy correspondence with recipients such as the influential Senator Robinson, who in a graceful thank-you note, recalled their pleasant days together in Washington.16 Churchill also directed the publisher to send copies of the first volumes of what would become a four-volume work, with his signature affixed, to Baruch,17 Charles Schwab, William Crocker, William McAdoo, Donald McLennan, William McCormick, William Randolph Hearst, Daniel Willard, and the Huntington Library that had granted important access to its archives. And ever grateful, he included on this list Dr. Pickhardt, who had tended to his wounds and his medicinal needs, Prohibition notwithstanding, after his accident in New York.18 There were several others on the list of recipients who were not then in Churchill’s American network, including Franklin Roosevelt.19 The president’s copy was accompanied with a note that read, “With earnest best wishes for the greatest crusade of modern times,”20 a reference to the New Deal’s program to cope with the Great Depression.21 As I have noted throughout, this aristocratic Tory was always more comfortable with the Democrats he linked together in his network. In one of his many Collier’s articles, “The Bond Between Us,” published on November 4, 1933, Churchill wrote, “I am an ardent admirer of the main drift and impulse which he [Roosevelt] has given to the economic and financial policy of America.”22
Churchill remained compelled by the unhealthy state of his finances to deploy his pen on behalf of Clemmie, his children, himself, his creditors, and the tradesmen and clerical staff on whom he relied to provision and service Chartwell. Celia Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, recalls that her grandfather’s financial circumstances “meant a frenzy of writing to repair his finances, and for both him and Clementine, some economies.”23 Churchill always understood that writing was hard work. Long before he created his enormous literary output, Churchill advised Beverley Nichols, an aspiring writer, “if you sit waiting for inspiration, you will sit there until you are an old man. Writing is a job like any other job… discipline yourself, kick yourself. Irritate yourself but write. It’s the only way.”24
Some thirty-two years earlier, at the chronological age of twenty-three, Churchill had presciently written to his mother, “The literary sphere of action may enable me in a few years to largely supplement my income. Indeed, I look forward to becoming sooner or later independent. We shall see. I have in my eye a long series of volumes which I am convinced I can write well…. I may perhaps make a classic.”25
In addition to his need for current income, there was the small matter of a £10,000 advance received for the biography of Marlborough, “to be written at a time stated by yourself,” a clause that permitted Churchill to pursue currently remunerative assignments and defer completion of his great ancestor’s multivolume biography while staff already hired to assist with the research went to work.26 Marlborough might have been the “classic” Churchill foresaw, but its sales were meager27 and did nothing to relieve the financial pressure on him to earn substantial sums for his magazine and newspaper articles from outlets both in Britain and the U.S. The American publications served not only to add to the family’s finances, but also to remind American readers, including those linked to his network, that he remained active, though temporarily politically sidelined.
Collier’s, whose editor Churchill had first met while he was recuperating in a New York hospital, was to be an especially important outlet for Churchill’s views as well as a source of income. By one count it was perhaps the most important of the thirty-four American magazines in which Churchill-authored articles appeared.28 Churchill and the Collier’s editors engaged in an extensive correspondence on the many possible topics for his articles. One Collier’s proposal was that Churchill prepare an article titled “Eating American.” The editors believed their readers would be interested in knowing his favorite foods, which American dishes he liked or “detested,” and in having his opinion on the different foods he tasted on his tours across America. Churchill’s wise answer to the magazine editor was “I should feel some delicacy because of the many people who have entertained me so pleasantly who might think I was criticizing their hospitality. Still, I think this is a possible subject, especially if it were incorporated with a comparison of American and British audiences. I must tell you that I have become a great admirer of your people, and have developed many extremely cordial sentiments toward them during my travels.”29
More sensibly, the Collier’s editor proposed, “It seems certain that the isolationist ideas embodied in the slogan ‘America for Americans,’ will be extremely popular this year…. Your thoughts on whether America can restore herself independently of Europe would be interesting.”30
In the event, Churchill produced cover stories for Collier’s that covered a wide range of subjects (see Appendix C). One laid out the difficulties America would have in defending the Philippines in the event of a Japanese attack and attempt to take over the islands31—this, nine years before their attack on Pearl Harbor proved his point, before also proving a few months later that the same vulnerability existed for Singapore. Another article gave his impressions of several American cities, including Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the nearby Civil War battlefield at Chickamauga.32
Although he was writing during the worst days of the Great Depression, he retained his belief in America’s future. A keen student of Churchill’s attitudes toward America summarizes “his central conclusion about American civilization” as follows: “…it is a great experiment, a trail blazer, in so many ways the leading nation of the world and the carrier of the hopes of mankind.”33
Cosmopolitan magazine, owned by William Randolph Hearst, was another favored outlet, one to which he had been contributing even before the Wilderness Years. Churchill provided it with articles ranging from his description of his pre–First World War visit to the Kaiser while the German army was on maneuvers34 to essays on Leon Trotsky35 and George Bernard Shaw.36
In his spare time he painted, built a butterfly house, tended to his ducks, bees, and swans, and laid bricks and built walls. As he described it, “…at Chartwell I divided my days between building and dictating.”37 He also continued to enjoy a bit of popular music, in this case the American recording of Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” sent to him by Lord Beaverbrook.38
In the Wilderness, in addition to “building and dictating,” Churchill delivered some 424 “major speeches” during the decade of the 1930s, while also intervening frequently in Parliamentary debates.45 Much of that activity was based on information provided by a network of what would later be called leakers, men who risked careers to provide data about the state of Germany’s rearmament efforts and its intentions, which Churchill used to pummel Neville Chamberlain and the pro-appeasement wing of the party, “blind and obstinate men” as he labeled them at dinner with a colleague.46
All of this activity was no substitute for power. In the late summer of 1938 Baruch was traveling back to America after the financier had visited Europe at Roosevelt’s request to assess the strength of the French, English, and German armament situations. Churchill went to see his friend and Baruch recalled Churchill remarking a bit wistfully, “Well, the big show is going to be on pretty soon. You’ll be in the forefront of it over there, and I’ll be on the sidelines here.”48 Another Churchill forecast gone wrong. In a year he would be in thick of it, back at the Admiralty, and in another year in Downing Street directing Britain’s war effort.
When Churchill returned to the Admiralty on September 3, 1939, on the outbreak of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, it was President Roosevelt’s turn to congratulate him, as Churchill had earlier congratulated the president. On September 11, 1939, FDR sent Churchill a letter inviting a partnership that would bypass diplomatic channels, most especially the State Department, for which the president had little use. The president wrote: “I want you to know how glad I am to know that you are back again in the Admiralty…. I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch. I am glad you did the Marlboro [sic] volumes before this thing started—and I much enjoyed reading them.”49
Several writers note the misspelling and suggest it might have meant that Roosevelt had not really read Marlborough, but was merely being polite. That might well be, although for our purposes the president’s comment is nevertheless significant. It shows that Churchill was wise to have sent the new president the volumes years earlier as part of his continuing campaign to keep his American contact list up to date. Its receipt provided Roosevelt an opportunity to add the Marlborough comment to his letter, a personal note to Churchill. A personal note that Churchill must have known was a signal that the president’s frosty attitude had been replaced with an offer of intimacy.50
In a bow to protocol, Roosevelt had sent a similar letter to Prime Minister Chamberlain, but it seems clear that by dipping into the Cabinet, and making the same offer to Churchill, the president was drawing on impressions of Churchill he was beginning to develop. That impression came from several sources. The first was the favorable press coverage generated by his American tours, and the equally favorable reaction of the thousands who had been exposed to Churchill’s wit, charm, and policy arguments. Practicing politicians notice such things, especially when the tour included several receptions in Washington, hosted and attended by the capital’s elite, and a successful visit to the Congress arranged and attended by a powerful Democratic politician, Senator Joe Robinson.
The president’s second source of information about Churchill was the reports and comments FDR was inevitably receiving from the men I have called links in Churchill’s American network. These men had been exposed to Churchill’s special talent at articulating the necessary unity of the English-speaking peoples, an exposure that in some cases solidified pro-British views already held. They had Roosevelt’s ear, and many held or were soon to hold important positions, formal and informal, in President Roosevelt’s administration. Baruch, of course, was a key adviser to whom Roosevelt assigned important chores, including assessing the military capabilities of the nations preparing for war. Senator Robinson, Democratic leader in the Senate from 1923, became majority leader in 1933 and “proved remarkably adept at passing legislation through a usually slow-moving Senate.”52
McAdoo backed FDR over Al Smith in 1932, which undoubtedly gave him access to the president when he served as a senator from California in 1933–1938. Averell Harriman was a financier who would later become a politician and diplomat. He met Churchill when the chancellor of the exchequer was vacationing in the south of France In 1941, Harriman was seen as “the most important American in England,” and was relied on by the prime minister to minimize any frictions with the president.53
Harriman would become Roosevelt’s representative on shipping and supply.54 At Churchill’s request, Roosevelt reversed his initial refusal to allow Harriman to accompany the prime minister on his visit to Moscow to confront Stalin with the unwelcome news that there would be no Second Front in 1942.55
On December 7, 1940, after three months during which Britain endured the Blitz, Churchill delivered the president a carefully drafted report on the state of the war. It included a plea for 2,000 airplanes, munitions, ships, and “commodities” for which Britain could not pay without being “stripped to the bone… regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to the achievement of our common purpose.”56
A few days later, after reading and rereading Churchill’s letter (sent as a telegram) while on the presidential yacht, FDR devised his plan for Lend-Lease. There seems little doubt that Churchill’s cabled letter of December 7, 1940, prompted the president to decide about aid to Britain that would require congressional approval, unlike the smaller destroyers-for-bases deal that had been accomplished by a presidential executive order.
“The concept was the President’s own invention,” Churchill said in a later speech. John Maynard Keynes called it one of Roosevelt’s “brain waves,” and secretary of the treasury Morgenthau called it one of Roosevelt’s “brilliant flashes.”57 Roosevelt likened the plan to lending a neighbor your garden hose if his house were on fire.
On November 10, 1941, in London’s Mansion House speech, Churchill called Lend-Lease “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” And he repeated that praise in a speech to the House of Commons after Roosevelt’s death. On that occasion he said: “[President Roosevelt] devised the extraordinary measure of assistance called Lend-Lease, which will stand forth as the most unselfish and unsordid financial act of any country in all history.”58
Now came the battle for public support and congressional approval, and the marshalling of groups assembled by Churchill in his network and publisher Henry Luce.