Much has been written about my great-grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, and his achievements as soldier, politician, painter, Nobel Prize–winning historian, Cassandra, and war leader. These are the skills he needed to craft a grand alliance against Fascism. Without which, to quote his own words, “The whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of perverted Science.”
What is often forgotten is that Churchill was able to save the world from the scourge of Nazism in part because he had the foresight to create a network of support for Britain and the English-speaking peoples long before anyone had expected such support would be needed.
Cita Stelzer has woven the key elements into this book.
She has traced from its earliest days the source of Churchill’s deep love for America. When, as a young man about to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, he arrived in America for a short stay en route to a war in Cuba, he immediately sensed the vitality, diversity, and potential for world leadership of the country in which his mother had been born. He wrote to his brother, Jack, on that first journey: “A great, crude, strong, young people are the Americans—like a boisterous healthy boy among enervated but well-bred ladies and gentlemen.”
Stelzer has also plumbed previously neglected sources to illuminate how Churchill met and maintained contact with important Americans. Researching all the contemporary newspaper reports of his visits to America between 1895 and 1941, she has painted a picture of how he was viewed—and admired—by many Americans as he toured the country from East to West and back again.
Some of these Americans were able to support Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) as he fought to overcome the opposition of anti-interventionists to aid for Britain when it stood alone against Hitler’s mighty armies. It is not to minimize FDR’s ability to craft paths around that opposition—to trade destroyers for bases, push Lend-Lease through Congress—to say that Churchill played an important role in that process. FDR needed assurance that the aid would be well used to preserve Britain as an ally in the war that, like Churchill, he knew was coming. Successive agents of the president, including key advisers such as Harry Hopkins, Averell Harriman, and Edward R. Murrow, provided that assurance after spending time with Churchill. Not incidentally, Churchill charmed the American president when they finally met.
Perhaps most important, at least to me, Stelzer has highlighted the role of Churchill’s remarkable mother, Jennie Jerome, in making many of his extraordinary achievements possible. Jennie, of American revolutionary stock by birth, overcame the resistance of both her parents and that of my ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, to her marriage to my namesake, Lord Randolph Churchill. There is no doubt that the strong and vibrant genes of Jennie and her ancestors provided the spark that stirred the sleeping Marlborough genes upon which Churchill’s greatness was founded. The remarkable Jerome ancestry accounts at least in part for my own fondness for America and Americans.
Lady Randolph Churchill, as she would become, was beautiful and vivacious. She was multilingual; a concert pianist; editor of a sophisticated and highly regarded quarterly magazine, The Anglo-Saxon Review; and, most of all, a woman who attracted men and women of accomplishment and power. She captivated all she knew. When her two sons went to fight in the Boer War it was Jennie who would organize the SS Maine hospital ship and sail with it to South Africa to treat the wounded. All of that and more is described by Stelzer in these pages, much of it from American press reports. She then goes on to tell how Jennie deployed her network on her son’s behalf to introduce him to her important American friends, gaining him the access he needed to pursue his military and journalistic careers when still young and as yet unheralded, providing him with the books he sought to fill the gap created by his lack of university education—all the while helping the young Churchill develop his inquiring mind, his self-motivation, his disregard of authority, his respect for talent and the power of networking, and his charisma and stamina. In short, he was ambitious and audacious, and his mother was at his side.
Reading Stelzer’s descriptions of several of Churchill’s trips across America and the reception he received put me in mind of my own experiences. Always a warm and hearty welcome, always engaged and dynamic dinner companions, always dazzling receptions when, with my beloved Catherine, I toured America to address audiences interested in hearing from us about the relationship between my great-grandfather and the love of his long life, my great-grandmother. Clementine, or Clemmie, eventually Lady Churchill, was Churchill’s counsellor, as the much-missed Catherine, memorialized in this fine book, was mine.
—Randolph L. S. Churchill