These were two very different and not naturally complementary personalities. Their relationship was asymmetrical. But then, how many great alliances are there between perfect equals? Among allies expediency usually out-weighs parity. Political alliances especially are known to conflate apparent friendship—which always involves a certain degree of complementarity—with the ordering and intermingling of multiple interests, or, as Stalin once put it to Churchill, “The best friendships are those founded on misunderstandings.” He might have said “mismatchings.” Such asymmetries will be familiar to American readers because they occur regularly in our history, probably because of the combination of the roles of head of state and head of government in a single office. The partnership of Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was that of a nominal superior and a subordinate—the latter an alter ego or, as was once said of Kissinger, an ego that was too big to alter.
Churchill’s own associations with his secretary Edward Marsh and friends Brendan Bracken and Lords Birkenhead, Cherwell, and Beaverbrook have been much analyzed. Each could be said to have served a purpose beyond providing friendship: as political ambassadors, emissaries, confidants, and sounding boards. Other figures—the Americans Harry Hopkins, John Winant, and Averell Harriman, for example—would augment and insulate Churchill’s position with Roosevelt. They are reminders that leaders—especially war leaders—perform collectively. In the case of Churchill, Roosevelt, and their respective chiefs of staff—Generals Alan Brooke and George Marshall—there was a “quartet of power,” as Andrew Roberts has described it, that “danced [a] complicated minuet, each fearing the potentially disastrous consequences of getting out of step with the others.” It did not perform in isolation; there were many others besides. Who were the real masters? The real commanders? Was the quartet really a prism, as Roberts has defined it? Or did it appear instead to thrive from a tension between opposites? Were they all opposites? And do opposites make for inherently stronger alliances—and leaders—than do more similar personalities? It may be better to think about them in a less mechanistic and more organic way: less as opposing or combining forces than as substances, having been treated for compatibility, mixing together in a solution.
Churchill, and to a lesser extent the king, surrounded himself with men who extended the zone of familiarity that was so important to him and who, to one degree or another, protected, charmed, and amused him. He shared intimacies frequently, but there was a certain imbalance to these friendships, since nearly all were devotees of Churchill as the central figure. There was Marsh, Churchill’s loyal and long-suffering secretary during the early part of his career; Bracken, the brash Irish-Australian publicist, known as Churchill’s “faithful chela”; Frederick Lindemann, “the Prof,” later Lord Cherwell, a half-German, half–Anglo-American scientist known for his vegetarianism and related eccentricities. Earlier there had been the American financier Bernard Baruch; the Liberal politician F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead; and the infamous, asthmatic Canadian press baron Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook—also known as the Beaver. Churchill’s loyalty to these people was strong. One of his first acts after becoming prime minister was to propose Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production and Bracken for the Privy Council. “What! Give him a peerage?” Churchill might have said mockingly about either man. “Well, perhaps, provided it’s a disappearage.” The king resisted both appointments, but Churchill would not give way.
Who were the king’s close friends? There were his siblings—especially, until the abdication, David—and his cousin Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten. There was Louis Greig, the naval doctor and equerry who accompanied him to sea and sought to toughen him, and his private secretary Alan Lascelles. But there were few real friends, and it is tempting to ask whether an abundance of true friendships is rare or even possible for any monarch. This one in any event tended to prefer the company of acquaintances and servants, reserving nearly all his intimacies for his wife and daughters. To others he could seem dull, humorless, and awkward. “But,” as Channon has written, “no one hated him—he was too neutral; hence he was a successful and even popular sovereign.”
The position of a king toward his ministers is of a different but not unrelated character. Few monarchs arrive to their positions entirely on their own merits, and while some, as we have seen, may get there unexpectedly and after having passed a series of hard tests, the position almost always exists to be filled, not to be won, bought, seized, or concocted. Ministries are the opposite. They sit at the top of Benjamin Disraeli’s greasy pole. While it is often the case that ministers are appointed for unusual reasons, prime ministers rarely are; the more successful ones, that is, the ones that tend to hold on to power by amassing it, almost never get there by chance. They tend to be ambitious, brutal, bloody-minded, versatile, nimble, malleable people. While that is all pretty obvious, less so is the quality of the interaction ministers must have with their monarchs. It is tricky, probably just as much as wooing electorates, defeating rivals, and mastering the difficult art of timing. Monarchs are fixed beings; they can only be removed with great difficulty; they generally demand deference and must not display weakness or passivity; they always require loyalty but also judgment and probably some degree of competence. One model for such an association was between Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I. It worked well, though not always happily, for nearly three decades and produced, among other things, the modern German nation. Still, it was “hard to be Kaiser under Bismarck.”
Most of today’s constitutional monarchs are charity mavens and celebrities. This was not always true, even as recently as a generation ago. It was certainly not the case for prewar Britain. The British monarchy was an imperial one, and so carried different meanings to many subjects. Its apotheosis under Queen Victoria, like the empire itself, may have been impossible to perpetuate as it was. The special achievement of this king’s father, George V, was to redefine so much of the loyalty to the monarchical and imperial idea for the twentieth century in the context of what would eventually be regarded as imperial decline by affixing to the institution an enduring affection for the royal family in public. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, and the rest had long been granted varying degrees of favor by the people, but in the twentieth century it came to be expressed more directly, maybe more intimately. For the first time their voices were heard on the radio and their faces seen in motion pictures, even on television.
The modern British monarchy was still something of a fragile flower, however. This is the main reason the abdication crisis carried so great a risk. It is difficult to name many chaste monarchs, but none—with the partial exception of George IV with Mrs. Fitzherbert, a precedent that Churchill once had the tactlessness to mention in Wallis Simpson’s presence—had ever married his mistress, let alone a twice-married foreigner.
Devotion can be malleable. Thus Churchill’s later about-face over the abdication may be explained as being consistent with his monarchism. It was said that “he venerated tradition, but ridiculed convention.” Few would have challenged its sincerity. “No institution,” he said, “pays such dividends as the Monarchy.” His wife, Clementine, referred to him as “Monarchical No. 1.” His was a form of devotion that placed a priority on institutions as well as legacies. “I was a child of the Victorian era,” he had written in 1930, “when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realization of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger.” It was to be preserved, no matter the cost.
Yet there is a distinction between the institution and the person: “Dukes tended to believe they were as good as any monarch.” Respect and deference are not always dished out in equal measure. Churchill was said by his doctor, Lord Moran, to have a “positively regal” sense of himself, which was not necessarily inconsistent with his reverence for the actual monarchy. Perhaps, like his wartime railway coaches, Churchill’s orientation was “semi-Royal,” but this at times skated along the edges of irreverence. Edward VII once growled that his initials, W.C., were appropriate for the man. That king, like his son, eventually came around to giving Churchill something in the way of support, but never unconditional trust or affection. Other royals, such as George V’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, had similar doubts about him. Lascelles could not bear him, and once even described him as “repugnant.” Churchill returned the affection by calling him Alan instead of Tommy, which he preferred. This tendency to even the score occasionally hinted at republicanism, though never seriously. One of his first decisions at the Admiralty, for example, was to name a new battleship after Oliver Cromwell. (He later reversed the decision under pressure.) These are indications of his brand of humor: neither ribald nor dry, but playful, sometimes mocking. Another example came during the war, when an American bystander asked him the name of the “elephantine shuffle” the gruff, rotund Labour politician Ernest Bevin appeared to be doing on the dance floor. “What step was this, was it some old English step or dance?” The “P.M. looked, smiled and said, ‘That’s obviously the Labour movement.’”
Having presented on opposite sides of the abdication and appeasement questions, Churchill and the king might have been expected to get off to an uncomfortable start once Churchill reentered government. This did not happen for three reasons. The king may have been the alternative to and beneficiary of his brother’s disgrace, but in fact he and Churchill were on the same side in that instance, at least in principle and in public, especially regarding the position of Wallis Simpson. The king’s real views on the appeasement policy are harder to pin down. More than anything else he seemed concerned, perhaps bemused, by it. Again, he, like many people in Britain, was desperate to forgo entering another war. Which of course is not the same thing as saying they were tolerant, let alone backers, of Nazi tyranny. Finally, it is important to remember that neither man was unknown to the other: there was a history of contact, albeit not familiarity, going back decades.
The two would settle into their new roles without a clean slate. It may have been tarnished, but it was strengthened by shared expectations. For the king this meant above all the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn. The triple formula had come from Walter Bagehot, whose classic interpretation of the place of royalty in the country’s constitution emphasized the distinction between official and personal devotion, with the moral representation of the royal family paramount. The new king grasped the point. He had studied Bagehot, and was already known for having a strong sense of duty. Robert Rhodes James has added two other important qualities: ability and luck. Both may be tempered, diminished or enhanced, as the case may be, by the nature of relations between a monarch and his or her ministers. In Rhodes James’s account, the modern British monarchy evolved during the course of the nineteenth century from one having a confrontational to a cooperative role with governments. This was a way of enhancing, maybe refining, ability and mitigating the effects of bad luck.
The next subject is bravery. The king’s bravery, unlike Churchill’s, was compensatory, since he was not naturally fearless. His had to be cultivated. They shared this “supreme quality,” the one Churchill had said, “which guarantees all others.” Churchill once recalled the encounter he had in the First World War with General John French, in which French said that he did not worry about being shot while “look[ing] over the parapet.” If he lived, he would adjust his life accordingly. Performing such a risky act on purpose was another matter. Risk for risk’s sake did not bring the same dividends. The primary measure of bravery, then, was less inherent than circumstantial. But you had to take risks, especially if you were born with the ability to avoid them. Choosing to “not mingle in the hurly-burly” did not gain a person credit in Churchill’s book.
What of other qualities: Affection? Charity? These fall under the rubric of friendship. It is a different concept. Lord Birkenhead, among others, has said of Churchill, “He has never in all his life failed a friend, however embarrassing the obligation which he felt it was necessary to honour.” Churchill revered some elements of friendship over others, chief among which was the pleasantness of another’s company, its “rich and positive quality,” as he put it. Birkenhead had this quality in abundance. He made Churchill happy.
Both the king and Churchill, however, had few real friends, or at least few who could be considered equals. They were essentially friendless. How, then, to explain their own friendship? Churchill was devoted to the king and the king came to be in awe of Churchill, and the latter may be the more significant historical fact, for it tended to deepen whatever initial devotion the minister may have felt toward his monarch. This in turn speaks to the power of their particular asymmetry. Britain breeds loads of dutiful, worthy, upright, and not very intelligent people, and the king was clearly one of them. He was neither clever nor cunning. He presented the best virtues of that British invention: the “moderate and politically uninterested London clubman,” whose gentlemanly ideal was one of “temperance, magnificence, good-temper, justice and a certain kindliness.” Mental ability and temperament are not always matched consistently. The latter, as the familiar line about Roosevelt goes—a man with a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament—can count for a great deal in a leader.
Prime ministers are generally afraid of worrying their monarchs because assuaging their fears can be time-consuming, and because having an upset monarch on one’s hands is just unpleasant, and possibly risky. In this case, the king was a born worrier, and even more so when he saw what Churchill was dealing with in the war. Churchill by contrast was not a worrier but a “despairer”: “Worry is a spasm of the emotion; the mind catches hold of something and will not let it go,” he wrote. Hence one explanation for his attention to the king. Sharing his worries may have reduced the chances of despair taking hold. The king was perpetually anxious and knew he did not know how to handle many things. Unlike his father, for example, he kept his fingers out of party politics and most questions of policy. Churchill may have occasionally regarded him like a pet, knowing that the king felt he was dealing with a superman who was clearly out of the king’s class and whose decisions he almost always accepted, even when he disagreed. This was not true the other way around. Ziegler has put the point more succinctly: “He would have died for the cause of the King if this had seemed necessary, but it would not have occurred to him to alter a detail of his budget or to shuffle the members of a ministry because he believed that to be the King’s desire.” It is tempting, then, but not entirely accurate, to call this patronizing.
Churchill extended to the king the reassurance that he needed in order to reassure the British people. The king understood and respected him for it. The result was good. Asymmetry can work two ways. It was once said of the relationship between Halifax and Churchill that they “are a very good combination as they act as a stimulus and brake on each other.” It could just as well have applied here.
Asymmetry, therefore, was one source of the alliance’s strength. A more symmetrical match might have meant a dangerous clash of wills. Asymmetry, however, is not always conducive to subordination. This is apparent from Churchill’s complex and often difficult wartime relations with his military commanders and political allies.
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Franklin Roosevelt performed his own role as commander in chief with detachment; he deferred nearly all operational decisions to General Marshall and the secretary of war, Henry Stimson. Stalin commanded, it is presumed, with a heavier hand. Only Churchill had the burden (some would say advantage) of a constant battle of wits against his senior commanders, who challenged his judgment as often as he belittled theirs. It was not war command by seminar, but it was hardly smooth, simple, or uniformly effective. Churchill took his combined ministerial role seriously, perhaps too seriously. His commanders generally praised his performance as prime minister. He held the country together, gave it hope, strengthened its resolve, and tended its alliances as well as nearly anyone else could have done. His performance as head of the Defence Ministry was another matter. And as a commander who “adored funny operations,” he was said to be dismal.
He drove some serving under him to distraction. One put it this way: “If he were a woman I could put up with him. If he were an Elizabeth I or Cleopatra. But Gloriana with a cigar I cannot stomach.” Churchill recognized the problem but cast it in a positive light. “They may say I lead them up the garden path,” he said of his chiefs, “but at every turn of the path they have found delectable fruits and wholesome vegetables.” He pushed hard, but he did so not for its own sake but to get better results, which he often got.
It is a commonplace but bears repeating: as wartime leader he was certainly dictatorial but he was no dictator. Once, he told the king “that his fellow Ministers spent all their time telling him he was wrong and that such a project could not be carried out. ‘Perhaps they’re sometimes right,’ said the king, with a smile. ‘Nine times out of ten,’ replied Mr. Churchill, unabashed.” But these were methods, not aims. Fighting a war was not the same as winning a debate, a charge the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan once leveled against him. He did not insist on his way no matter what, not all the time. His goal was not the permanent state of his own power, however indispensable he may have believed it was. Nor was it to win arguments for their own sake. His goal was victory for his country. Thus, despite the fury that he provoked in a few of those who served under him, there was less of a split between the politicians and the generals than there had been during the previous war.
Some, like John Dill, the chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS)—Britain’s senior military commander—had so much trouble working with Churchill (who liked to call him “Dilly Dally”) that he just appeared to surrender. Alas, Dill would not survive the war, which has led to the charge that Churchill “killed men who could not keep up . . . just as Napoleon Bonaparte killed horses under him.” Dill in the end was better suited to what would become his last assignment, to Washington, where he mastered a partnership with Marshall that was second only in importance to the one Churchill had developed with Roosevelt. It was that important, not only because of the deep differences between Churchill and Marshall and the other generals over strategy, but also because it was believed by some that Dill’s replacement as CIGS, Alan Brooke, had trouble working with Americans, including—partially—Churchill.
Where Marshall appreciated Dill’s thoughtful, rational nature, Churchill was dismissive. In consequence, Dill “would often relapse into tongue-tied silence” or complain, as Admiral John Fisher, Churchill’s longtime nemesis from the navy, once did, “He out-argues me.” Relations between the two were beset as much by bad chemistry as by bad luck. There was the time, for example, when they went to see a demonstration of a weapon, a kind of missile designed to seek and destroy tanks. One misfired and headed straight for Dill; another went after Churchill. He ran as fast as he could and missed being hit when the rocket landed nearby. “Damn the man!” he shouted. “I won’t speak to him for a week.”
Dill went on to perform yeoman’s service in America, as would Halifax as ambassador. Who would have guessed, in Halifax’s case, that “a great aristocrat, noted as a Master of Foxhounds, who in his political career had been closely identified with the policy of Munich, and to whom the American continent was terra incognita” would prove such an inspired choice? Not those who saw a man who, shortly after arriving in America, asked an embassy attaché, “What shall I say to them? I’ve never seen so many mayors in my life.” The attaché replied, “Quite easy. Just whinny like a stallion.”
Another who suffered from Churchill’s impatience was Archibald Wavell, the general who headed the Middle East Command. He was said to be “the luckiest general in the war.” Churchill supposedly regarded him as “‘a good average colonel’ who would make a ‘good chairman of a Tory association.’” A “‘still waters running deep’ sort of man,” Wavell could be laconic to an extreme. His silence even disturbed the king. “Why does Winston dislike me?” Wavell asked. Churchill never gave the reason. Being inarticulate had something to do with it. Halifax had a better answer: Churchill “hates doormats. If you begin to give way he will simply wipe his feet upon you.” Like Halifax and Dill, Wavell would be packed off—in his case, to India.
Others familiar to students of the war included Claude Auchinleck, “the Auk,” who was the man on the other side from Wavell on Churchill’s two fishing rods when he said, “I feel that I have got a tired fish on this rod, and a very lively one on the other.” Replacing Wavell as commander in the Middle East in the summer of 1941, Auchinleck was a charmer to whom Churchill remained too loyal for too long. He felt similarly, perhaps even more so, toward Harold Alexander, who replaced Auchinleck in the Middle East and then went on to command the Allied armies in Italy. Alexander was probably his favorite commander, although his achievements on the ground were sometimes lacking. With another prima donna, Bernard Montgomery, the issuing of praise was more complicated. Churchill tolerated but did not enjoy Monty. There was a certain clash of egos, not to mention the occasional flare of jealousy. Churchill once asked Brooke,
“Why did not the king give Monty his [field marshal’s] baton when he visited him in France?”
“[P]robably one was not ready.”
“No! . . . [T]hat’s not it. Monty wants to fill the Mall when he gets his baton! And he will not fill the Mall!” . . .
[T]here was no reason for Monty to fill the Mall on that occasion. But he continued, “Yes, he will fill the Mall because he is Monty, and I will not have him filling the Mall!”
Churchill’s tendency, when unhappy with a commander’s progress, was to drown him in memoranda. Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s principal military aide and secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, urged a commander not “to be irritated by these never-ending messages, but to remember that Churchill, as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, bore the primary responsibility for ensuring that all available resources . . . were apportioned . . . in the best interests of the war effort as a whole.”
Ismay, known as Pug, was an exception: if he got exasperated, he rarely showed it. He was a tall, solid cavalryman who had once been a polo champion:
Characteristic of straightforward and practical commonsense were his round head and square capable hands, the other side of his nature being compound in his large brilliant eyes [that] mirrored a clairvoyant foresight, a psychic perception of men’s foibles and, more often than not, a sure discernment of their true motives. They also made him a formidable cardplayer who knew the whereabouts of any card in the pack.
Ismay’s role was to be the greaser of wheels and the impartial arbiter. It required diplomatic skill. But Ismay could take a stand when one was necessary. Once when Churchill asked him what he really thought about a certain question, the answer was definite: “Do you wish me to be of value to you or not?” “Naturally . . .” “Then . . . you will never ask me that question again.”
Churchill’s relations were more strained with the man who became the most important military commander to serve him: Brooke, who replaced Dill as CIGS. Brooke was a strict, stern, dark, and dour Anglo-Irish soldier whose family had served in the army for generations. He was Britain’s top general in more than one respect: Ismay regarded him as simply the “best” of the eight chiefs of the Imperial General Staff he had known.
Having grown up in France, Brooke knew Europe as well as any of his counterparts. Like Churchill, he could be impatient—he “thought fast, talked fast, moved fast”—but unlike him, he bore grudges. “Brookie,” however, could stomach Churchill far better than Dill. His biographer and onetime editor of his diaries, Arthur Bryant, has described him as Churchill’s unrecognized “complement” who matched the man’s inspiration with the ability to perceive practicalities—and impracticalities—at all levels. The two argued over them endlessly. To his credit, Churchill took part in these arguments and allowed himself to be challenged; the only alternative would have been to dismiss Brooke, which he could have done but never did. Seeing him as an equal, or even in possession of a superior military mind, cut deeply against Churchill’s grain, not only because he had been a professional soldier himself and a self-assured one at that, but also because of the experience of the last war, when the commanders had failed their country so badly. It had a lasting effect on him and on practically every other politician of his generation. Where the king’s instinct toward the military professionals was for deference, with Churchill it was the opposite, which they in turn must have wanted to reciprocate. Thus what Churchill must have sought from his commanders was not inspiration or passion but order, or to counter the tendency, as he liked to say, to “devot[e] more time to self-expression than to self-discipline.” He had the sense to know it, in Brooke’s case, eventually.
It has been said that Churchill and Brooke represented the opposing minds of the artist and the scientist. There is some truth to this. For if Brooke understood anything, it was the calibration and the concentration of power. He was first and foremost an artilleryman. Brooke loved the artillery. He thought and wrote about it his entire life. This not only inspired an obsession with firepower that would come in useful during the war, but also an important preoccupation with careful planning as well as a faith in the ultimate value of attrition, despite the suffering it had brought during the previous war. That this time attrition came from the air rather than from the trenches seemed not to alter the basic concept. This was in marked contrast to Churchill’s antiquated fixation upon maneuver and mobility. “Why should the New Armies be sent to ‘chew barbed wire’?” His brief time in the trenches during the last war only confirmed the view. He simply hated immobility, which he equated with inaction and potential slaughter, not prudence and preparation. Churchill railed against “mountains of impedimenta.” “[S]haking his fist in the CIGS’ face, he said, ‘I do not want any of your own long term projects. . . . All they do is cripple initiative.’” Brooke later exclaimed, “I feel like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic!!”
This is another way of saying that Brooke was incorrect in claiming that he and the generals had strategy while Churchill merely had guesswork. There was more to the contrast, which in the event had mostly to do with a struggle for complementarity. And the extent to which Brooke imparted these views to the king—the above quotations appear on the same page of Brooke’s diary as a visit to Buckingham Palace, for example—cannot be known, though they probably counted. Nevertheless, to Brooke, Churchill was the essential, if impossible, man: “God knows where we would be without him, but God knows where we shall go with him!”
Tenacity was one reason why Churchill was so successful a war leader. “Whatever the P.M.’s shortcomings may be, there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose for the Chiefs of Staff and the [Foreign Office] on matters which, without him, would often be lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism or frittered away by caution and compromise.” He fought constantly against what he had earlier praised as the “common Staff brain.”
For Churchill really did understand mobile warfare; he had, after all, been one of the first to invest in experimental “landships” (tanks) and was regarded as a leading “apostle of the offensive.” Yet he also understood, or thought he understood, what Brooke knew in spades: the vital role of firepower. He may not have really understood the progress in mechanization that armies had made since the last war, and almost certainly never understood the effective management of supply lines. “When I was a soldier,” he said, “infantry used to walk and cavalry used to ride. But now the infantry require motor-cars.” There was obviously much more to modern warfare. This is the reason why he needed the constructive opposition of Brooke, and vice versa.
No military commander welcomes the meddling and second-guessing of politicians, least of all one as intellectually powerful and bloody-minded as Churchill. Brooke has drawn a contrast with the dealings of Marshall and Roosevelt in which the latter “listened” and more or less took whatever “advice” the former gave him. This was not likely to have been the case for Stalin, however, who, according to Brooke, “had a military brain of the very highest calibre.” With Churchill it was not always clear where one stood. “When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. . . . I know these Brookes—stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!” Perhaps neither man could make up his mind about the military brain. “How often have I seen Winston eyeing me carefully trying to read my innermost thoughts,” Brooke noted, “searching for any doubts that might rest under the surface.”
There were indeed times when the relationship seemed near collapse, but there is also evidence that Churchill fought the impulse to quit. When asked if he could ever reach the point of dismissing Brooke, Churchill said, “Never,” then again, after “a long pause, ‘Never.’” But just a few weeks after being appointed CIGS, Brooke wondered if he should resign in favor of another person who could better handle Churchill. Ismay reported this to Churchill, who said, “General Brooke—resign? Why no—I’m very fond of him, and I need him!” Even so, “Brooke was the only man on whom” Churchill was later seen to “deliberately and ostentatiously turn his back.” On yet another occasion Churchill blurted out, “Brooke must go! I cannot work with him. He hates me. I can see hatred looking from his eyes!” When Ismay told this to Brooke, the general replied, “Hate him? I don’t hate him. I love him. But the first time I tell him I agree with him when I don’t will be the time to get rid of me, for then I will be of no more use to him.” Ismay reported back, “The CIGS says he doesn’t hate you. He loves you! But if he ever tells you he agrees when he doesn’t you must get rid of him as no more use.” Churchill, whose eyes were said to fill with tears, said only, “Dear Brooke!” The general later concluded, “You left him with the feeling that you would do anything within your power to help him carry the stupendous burden he had shouldered.”
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Churchill’s relations with Brooke contrasted with others, notably admirals and air marshals, with whom he spent less time. One reason was that none had the same stature or ability. Much of what has been written about Admiral Dudley Pound, for example, was of how often he slept. Churchill was said to be fonder of Admiral Andrew Cunningham, who did not reciprocate, reportedly viewing Churchill as a cavalryman out of his depth on naval matters. He was even fonder of Air Marshal Charles Portal, but he has written less about him than he has about army generals. This was strange given Churchill’s deep interest in both the Admiralty and the Royal Air Force. His more strenuous military associations tended to be the more important ones, which provide a comparison to his alliance with the king: stature alone did not suffice, nor did a degree of mutual affection. There was also the mental contest.
A similar pattern was evident with regard to political allies. Churchill had some positive feeling for Anthony Eden, the man he meant to succeed him, but within limits, as Eden’s own frequent bouts of exasperation during the war—Churchill called them attacks of “Foreign-officissimus”—attest. The king was reported to think less of Eden but deferred to Churchill. Had both he and Eden somehow been killed, Churchill’s nominee for successor was John Anderson, the economic war coordinator and chancellor of the exchequer (and overseer of Britain’s atomic warfare research), but a man toward whom Churchill felt no intimacy whatever, apart from the indirect association there was with his late friend Ralph Wigram, whose widow Anderson had married.
Toward his private secretaries and other civilian aides he was mainly paternalistic, sometimes intolerable, and often generous. He could be devastating toward them; other times he could be kind and jocular. Typists were especially hard put. Churchill could be difficult to follow when they took dictation, and he was merciless with errors. But every now and then he let a mistake go without a tantrum, as when a secretary typed “lemons” instead of “Lemnos.” His aides deserve brief mention if only because a few, like Joan Astley and John “Jock” Colville, have left behind such vivid portraits.
Finally something more must be said about the men’s families. The importance of the king’s devotion to the queen and the princesses, and Churchill’s to his wife, Clemmie, has already been noted. Churchill adored his daughters, especially Mary and Sarah. However, relations with his son, Randolph, a drunkard and boaster, became bitter. Churchill was said to be afraid of him because he was so unmanageable. Toward his sons-in-law, he could be occasionally doting but never entrusted any of them, with the partial exception of Christopher Soames, with the clear expectation of succession, much unlike the role he assumed for himself vis-à-vis his own father. The king was more fortunate in his progeny. He adored his daughters and was especially close to the eldest, Lilibet, who was most like him, though her shyness, like his, mellowed with age. While she may have been “good at trying to find words for strangers . . . it is a great strain for her. Not so for Princess Margaret Rose who burbles away naturally and easily.”
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How much did various personal and private relations affect the war? It is impossible to qualify them without returning to the concept of adversity. Lord Moran has said that the “English rather like a man who hasn’t come off, anyway if he is staunch and uncomplaining in adversity.” He applied the trait to Churchill:
[I]t’s a man’s character that counts with us, not his achievements. . . . Winston seems to me to be a hundred per cent American in his feelings about failure. Unless a man has done something in life, something really worth doing, he does not interest Winston. The fact that he has not come off and is a bit of a failure merely depresses him. It is what a man does, not what he is, that counts.
At root Churchill was probably deeply afraid of failure. Moran continued, “[W]hen the sun shines his arrogance, intolerance and cocksureness assume alarming proportions.” But “[i]n adversity Winston becomes gentle, patient and brave.” He “grows in” it. Failure and adversity made each man stronger by distilling his character. To Moran adversity was “first cousin” to Churchill’s “pugnacity.” In the king it was a constant companion that sifted and sorted and reduced him to his fundamental nature. When faced with the prospect, or the consequences, of adversity or failure, most people do not triumph over them right away; first they must toss overboard all the excess baggage of character, the traits that have been acquired and honed self-consciously over the years in the luxury of happier circumstances and as representations of the people they would otherwise like to be. Real adversity forces them to face who they really are. It forces them to confront the extent of their strength and weakness. In so doing, it extends and sharpens the capacity for empathy. Knowing themselves that much more allows them to know others better, and vice versa.
Adversity has an either/or quality: it kills or it builds strength; it defeats or is overcome; it blesses by its absence or curses by its presence in people’s lives. It is, however, more reciprocal and cumulative with its function than absolute or final. It is at once a burden and a test, therefore, less than it is so much one or the other. It has every ability to destroy but not necessarily to defeat—to borrow a distinction from Hemingway—and there are many shades in between. The effects of adversity rest in the strength and nature of the character that meets it, however much that character is shaped by it in response.
That is how it works in practice. The effort and the quality of a role were at one with its effects. Of Churchill’s three classes of people—“those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death”—he and the king were determined to spare each other the fate of the first two, while the final seemed irrelevant. Both men tried hard, though not everyone else grasped the roles they played. It was said, for example, that the reason Rudolf Hess made his famous landing on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton was because Hess understood that the duke was the Lord Steward, and so may have thought the duke would be the perfect person to persuade the king to make a separate peace. “This greatly amused Churchill. . . . ‘I suppose he thinks the Duke carves the chicken and consults the King as to whether he likes breast or leg!’” In reality there was very little the Duke of Hamilton could do for Hess. The king found his persuasion elsewhere.
Of the many clichés that fill the biographical literature about the king, probably the two most tiresome refer to his need to gain self-confidence and to the favorable impression he made on first-time acquaintances. Churchill also defied certain stereotypes. There can be no doubt that he was a great man, but not “in the way Lloyd George was; but undeniably a great personality, which is another matter.” Put differently, as he liked to say, “I am arrogant, but not conceited.” Others would say that “[h]e has genius without judgment.” And there is Baldwin’s familiar quip:
[W]hen Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle bearing gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said “No one person has a right to so many gifts,” picked him up and gave him such a shake and a twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgement and wisdom.
So he was talented, indeed, but not, in the end, superhuman. He understood the value of subtlety, and was not so patently the bellicose, juvenile, exhibitionistic, uncooperative figure of popular insult. Yet just as the various presumptions about the king’s character had some basis in fact, so did those about Churchill.
Where did they come from? Churchill’s mind was “a powerful machine,” in the words of Lloyd George, “but there lay hidden in its material or make-up some obscure defect which prevented it from always running true.” The real defect was authority. There was something just slightly too unusual with Churchill; the superiority of his talent was, in the British setting, almost exotic. His tie to the king served to ground him, to temper his nature, or at least to diminish his tendency to incapacitate those around him. Their alliance, then, was about refining and selling each other’s character as much as it was about duty and prerogative, or about clarifying each other’s thinking. Churchill’s propensity to immerse himself in the tiniest details has been noted often, yet less understood perhaps is the critical role his regular meetings with the king played in helping him to settle, clarify, and order the many details in the form of a familiar tutorial or briefing. Churchill liked variety but not unfamiliarity. He had trouble with strangers or opponents and resisted them. With such people he “sidles away from one . . . looks down as he talks,” and “seems to contract, suddenly to look smaller and his famous charm is overclouded by an angry taurine look.” If demanding endless details from his subordinates was a means for expending great energy, then releasing it through recitation in the presence of the king must have performed a similar function within the familiar bounds of official duty. Doing so helped each man conquer long-standing and debilitating defects in his character, not least of which was a depressive tendency that was kept well hidden. Each man when with the other was seen to some degree as working against his own faults on behalf of the other. If true, it would go a long way toward explaining how they could strip their personal relationship down to the bare essentials in order to rebuild it with an armature of knowledge and trust. That was their mutual invention. It and the partnerships discussed above served a critical purpose for each man that spread in turn by way of their cumulative enhancement of a combined character. They, as was said about Churchill, did not “tilt at windmills . . . [or] embrace lost causes, but sought rather the very roots and sources of power, gauging with sure insight the hidden springs.” This showed that adversity’s silver lining must be polished constantly and reciprocally “till it shone after its fashion.” Nobody can be whole on his own.
That was the special role of each man for the other. For Britain already had a permanent ruler with a role to perform. The evidence suggests that most of their Tuesday “picnics”—their weekly lunches, which began in September 1940—were filled with discussions of operations, the kind of talk the king craved. Mastering the brief brought satisfaction. Churchill’s self-confidence in facts and presentation must have rubbed off. The exchange may have served an additional purpose in forcing their individual and collective minds to set the best priorities possible, as an obsession with details may do for some people who use it to tame the imagination, adjust perspective, and prevent panic over complexity.
Without having been present in the room, it is difficult to say for certain precisely how Churchill and the king underwent such a process together. The king said that the meetings were the “high points of the week.” As for Churchill, according to Rhodes James,
What particularly impressed him about the King was the latter’s total application to his job in every respect, not least in his careful and thorough reading of all documents put before him. Also, as matters progressed, and the King and Queen travelled throughout the country—far more than Churchill or his principal ministers could—they were in a better position than most to assess the public mood.
The effect of their meetings and its significance to history exist only in outline, despite all that has been written about each man. Yet the outline is suggestive and significant. The two dined alone, or sometimes with the queen, who, for all intents and purposes, was one with the king so far as knowing his character, apart from her pleasant exterior disguising a “small drop of arsenic in the centre of that marshmallow.” When the king was away, she met Churchill in his stead. The king and the prime minister served themselves at table, as there were almost never any servants present. Churchill was called a “selective listener.” The king was a selective talker. For all that Churchill liked to be the source of his own information and for all that the king did not like to volunteer it, this is probably what took place between them, and sometimes in reverse, resulting in a form of multidimensional asymmetry, if such a thing can exist. For Churchill, at least, “[n]o subject had ever been so honoured. He wanted no other reward.”
To analyze the full function of the debates happening on both sides of Churchill—above with his monarch and below with his commanders—would seem to require the training of a Gestalt psychologist. They operated as something more than a double-sided sounding board. The ideas, feelings, judgments, and facts did not merely bounce back at Churchill so as to allow confirmation or the occasional refutation of his decisions. Indeed, they may have served a more subtle purpose, which had more to do, again, with the essence of his leadership than with its exercise. They reinforced his position of authority, and his mission, as servant of the state by reminding him of the fundamental necessity of leading a consensus. Some of Churchill’s candor—in language and sentiment, especially—could taste sour in the mouths of his enemies. Yet candor and clarity did not come easily to him. He worked at them. His initial thoughts were often muddled and indiscriminate. He distilled and polished them, oftentimes out loud, until he felt they were at their best and purest. Like most literary brains, Churchill’s needed a dedicated editor. In his own way, which could sometimes seem perverse and self-defeating, Churchill sought and encouraged the tough resistance of those around him, not merely to enhance his own character or position (although this was often a by-product) but to get better results. Remove any of the elements—Parliament, the press, the chiefs, or the king—and the machine was flawed, even doomed. Churchill was as much its cog as its engineer.