WHEN WINSTON CHURCHILL was a young man, he talked to a friend about the meaning of life. His thoughts were suitably philosophical and typically candid. “We are all worms,” he said. Then he added, “But I do think that I am a glowworm.”
Throughout his life Churchill was driven by an unshakeable sense of his own destiny. It infuriated some. It inspired many. When he was after something that he was determined to get, he did not know the meaning of the word no, no matter how often he heard it. Once he was engaged in a military battle or a political campaign, he purged the word defeat from his vocabulary.
I first met Churchill in June 1954, when I headed the welcoming party that greeted him on his arrival in Washington for his official visit as Prime Minister. I still remember the eager anticipation, even the excitement, that I felt that day as I waited for his plane to come into view. I had already traveled extensively abroad. I had met many national and international leaders and many famous celebrities. But none matched Churchill as a larger-than-life legend. In the Pacific during World War II, I had been moved by his speeches even more than by those of President Roosevelt. Since moving into the political arena, I had come to appreciate more than ever what his leadership of Britain had meant to the world during that supreme test of courage and endurance. Superlatives hardly did him justice. He was one of the titanic leaders of the twentieth century.
It was my good fortune that, under the protocol followed at that time, the President went to the airport to greet visiting heads of state, but heads of government first met him at the White House; thus Eisenhower would have greeted the Queen, but it fell to me to greet the Prime Minister.
The night before, I spent over an hour preparing a ninety-second set of welcoming remarks, and I quickly reviewed it in my mind as his plane came into view.
The four-engined Stratocruiser touched down, taxied from the runway, and finally came to a halt in front of us. The door was opened. After a moment Churchill appeared alone at the top of the ramp, wearing a pearl-gray homburg. I was rather surprised that he looked so short. Perhaps it was because his shoulders slumped and his large head seemed to rest on his body as if he had no neck at all. In fact he was five feet eight inches tall, and you would never have thought to call him a “little” man, any more than you would have thought to do so with the five-foot-eight-inch Theodore Roosevelt.
His aides were hovering around to assist him down the steps. After quickly surveying the scene and seeing the welcoming party and the cameras down below, he rejected any assistance. Using a gold-headed walking stick, he started slowly down the ramp. He had suffered a stroke the year before, and he was very hesitant and obviously unsure of himself as he took each step. About halfway down, he noticed four Air Force men saluting him and paused momentarily to return the gesture.
We shook hands and he said he was very happy to meet me for the first time. Like so many Englishmen, his handshake was more of a pressureless touch than a firm grasp. After greeting Secretary of State Dulles, he headed straight for the cameras and microphones. Without waiting for me to make my welcoming remarks, he proceeded to make his arrival statement. He said that he was glad to be coming from his fatherland to his mother’s land. (He was referring, of course, to the fact that his mother had been an American.) Amidst the warm applause when he concluded, he flashed his famous V for victory sign and then strode toward the black Lincoln convertible that we would use for the ride to the White House. The remarks I had so painstakingly prepared were never delivered, but neither did they seem to be missed.
As I reread the diary notes that I dictated that day, I am amazed to find that this seventy-nine-year-old man, who had recently suffered a stroke and who had just crossed the Atlantic on an overnight propplane ride, could have covered so many subjects so well in the thirty minutes it took us to reach the White House. And all the time he talked, he continually turned to wave to the crowds that lined the route.
He began by telling me that he had followed with interest the trip I had taken to Southeast Asia a few months before. He especially appreciated the fact that during my stop in Malaysia I had gone out into the countryside to visit the British troops who were combating the Communist insurgency there. I told him that I had been very impressed by General Gerald Templer and the other officials who were easing the transition of British colonies to independence. He quickly responded, “I only hope we didn’t give them their independence before they were ready to assume the responsibilities of government.” When I saw him for the last time four years later in London, he again expressed his concern on this same point.
He then commented on Indochina, which I had also visited on my Asian trip. He said that at the end of World War II the French should have made up their minds whether they were actually going in to save Indochina or whether they were only going to make a halfhearted effort to do so. With his arm still waving to the crowd, he looked over at me and said, “Instead they made the decision to go in, but not to go all out. This was a fatal mistake.”
After a few moments of smiling at the crowd, he looked back at me and said, “The world, Mr. Vice President, is in a very dangerous condition. It is essential for our two peoples to work together. We have our differences. That is normal. That is inevitable. But they are, after all, relatively small. And the press always make them seem larger than they really are.”
This seemingly innocuous exchange in fact had considerable significance. It was clear that he was signaling to me, and through me to the administration, that he wanted to smooth some waters he had troubled two months earlier when Admiral Arthur Radford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had visited London. Radford had had a disturbing meeting with Churchill on the subject of Indochina, and the press had subsequently published rumors about it that had strained Anglo-American relations.
Churchill had apparently been annoyed when Radford urged him to help France in its effort to keep its colonies in Indochina. Churchill churlishly asked why the British should fight so France could keep Indochina if they would not even fight to keep India for themselves. Radford, not the most diplomatic of men, observed that Congress might not be particularly happy with the British if they refused to go along with our efforts to repel Communist aggression in Asia.
Churchill’s reply to this was blunt: “I’ll be glad when we are no longer dependent on U.S. aid.”
Churchill was reluctant to move against the Communist Vietminh in Indochina because he feared the Communist Chinese might intervene. This, he thought, might lead to war between China and the United States, which would drag in the Soviet Union and make Europe a battlefield and Britain a target. But when Radford reported on this meeting to Eisenhower, the President was obviously surprised and shocked that Churchill, the symbol of resistance despite all odds in World War II, seemed almost resigned to defeat in Southeast Asia.
As he continued to wave to the crowds, Churchill expressed his grave concern about the atomic bomb. He said that it was all right for us to talk about retaliating with this “terrible weapon,” but that the theory of “saturation” in connection with nuclear weapons concerned him.
When I told him that I had just finished reading The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of his World War II memoirs, he commented that for a period of four months before Roosevelt’s death there was very little communication or understanding between Churchill and the American government. He was surprisingly direct when he added, “President Roosevelt was not himself. And President Truman did not know what he was doing when he suddenly entered upon his great office.” His face became completely serious and once again he ignored the crowds and looked at me. “That was a grave mistake,” he said. “A commander must always keep his second in command informed when he knows that he is ill and that he will not be on the scene for very much longer.”
By now we were nearing the White House. I said that after reading his memoirs I often wondered what would have happened if the Allies had accepted his recommendation to launch an offensive against the “soft underbelly” of Southern Europe rather than concentrating on making the D-Day invasion in Normandy. As we turned into the Northwest Gate, he lightly remarked, “Well, it would have been handy to have Vienna.”
The private diaries of Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, give a revealing account of the British Prime Minister’s condition during this visit to Washington. Churchill at times suffered a great deal of pain but once he was on stage, no one who saw him would have known of his disability. Somehow he was always able to get “up” for big events.
Despite the heavy schedule of official talks during this visit, Churchill seemed to enjoy thoroughly the long and, I thought, at times boring dinners held in his honor. He was one of those rare great leaders who seemed to enjoy small talk as much as the heavy discussions of world-shaking issues. Thanks to his customary afternoon naps, which he had taken even during the war years, he was at his best in the evening.
During the state dinner at the White House, Mrs. Eisenhower, without making a big to-do about it, helped Churchill cut his meat when he seemed to have difficulty with it. She thoughtfully pointed out that the White House knives were not very sharp. When John Foster Dulles was served his usual highball instead of wine during dinner, Mrs. Nixon asked Churchill if he would also prefer one. He said no and added that he usually had his first drink of whiskey at 8:30 in the morning and that he enjoyed a glass of champagne in the evening.
During dinner Churchill dominated the conversation by retelling stories from his past. Though he did not try to involve others in the discourse, he never appeared to be rude. Like MacArthur’s, Churchill’s monologues were so fascinating that no one resented it when he took the stage and did not yield it to anyone else. Mrs. Nixon later told me that Churchill was one of the most interesting dinner partners she had ever had. He had held Mrs. Eisenhower and her spellbound as he recounted his dramatic adventures during the Boer War.
• • •
The best chance that I had to observe our formidable guest was at the stag dinner at the British embassy on the last night of his visit. Once again protocol kept Eisenhower away, so I was the senior American guest.
Churchill joined us about fifteen minutes late. He greeted all the guests and stood talking for a while, but as Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson embarked upon what was obviously going to be a rather long story, he moved deliberately over to one of the chairs and sat down. I had walked with him, and he looked up at me, grinned, and said, “I feel a little better when I’m sitting down than when I’m standing.”
During dinner I asked him how the heavy schedule of the three-day conference had affected him. He said that except for a few “blackouts” he had felt better during this conference than he had for some time. He added, in his characteristically orotund way, “I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.”
The conversation later turned to a discussion of vacation plans. He said that he was going to travel by sea to Morocco for a holiday. I responded that I always traveled by air because I tended to get seasick. He fixed me with a rather stern but amused gaze and said, “Young man, don’t worry. As you get older, you’ll outgrow it.” I was forty-one years old at the time.
Churchill was remarkable not only as a maker of history but also as a writer of it. Having read almost all of his prolific writing, I have found him to be a much better writer when describing events in which he was not directly involved. His history of World War I was far better than that of World War II because in the latter Churchill’s reflections and observations often get in the way of the story. The best volumes of his account of World War I were The Aftermath, in which he recounted the Versailles Peace Conference, and The Eastern Front, which he wrote two years after he had completed the other five volumes. In neither of these books was Churchill a major participant. In both his multivolume histories, however, Churchill very effectively practiced his famous maxim “The best way to make history is to write it.”
As a historian, Churchill’s interest in the American Civil War was always renewed when he visited Washington. This trip was no exception. At the stag dinner he observed that in his opinion Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest men in American history and one of the greatest generals of all time. He said that somebody ought to “catch up in a tapestry or a painting the memorable scene of Lee riding back across the Potomac after he had turned down the command of the Union armies in order to stay with the Southern side.”
He said that one of the war’s greatest moments came at the end, at Appomattox. Lee pointed out to General Ulysses Grant that his officers owned their horses as personal property and asked that they be allowed to keep them. Grant said, “Have all of them take their horses, the enlisted men and the officers as well; they will need them to plow their fields.” Churchill’s eyes glistened as he looked around the spellbound group and said, “In the squalor of life and war, what a magnificent act!”
I inquired about his views regarding talks with the Soviet leaders who had succeeded Stalin. He said that the West must have a policy of strength and must never deal with the Communists on a basis of weakness. He told me that he was looking forward to visiting Russia, but that he had no intention of making any commitments that would bind the United States.
He mentioned that except for the wartime alliance he had opposed “the Bolsheviks” all his life and remarked that he was “sure that the people of the United States would trust me as one who knew the Communists and was a fighter against them.” He concluded by saying, “I think I have done as much against the Communists as McCarthy has done for them.” Before I could say anything, he grinned, leaned toward me, and added, “Of course, that is a private statement. I never believe in interfering in the domestic politics of another country!”
Churchill complained bitterly to me about the vicious rhetoric of the radical firebrand Aneurin Bevan. In 1947, as Minister of Health in the Labor government, Bevan had embarrassed even some of his colleagues by remarking that the Tories were “lower than vermin.” I could not help but think that although Bevan’s remark lacked any elegance or cleverness, Churchill himself had few peers when it came to the use of cutting invective.
Accusing James Ramsay MacDonald of lacking political fortitude, Churchill spun out the following tale:
I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as the “The Boneless Wonder.” My parents judged that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.
He described John Foster Dulles as “the only bull I know who carries his china closet with him.”
Lady Astor, who was the first woman to hold a seat in Parliament, once told him, “If I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee.” Churchill retorted, “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”
After a speech in Parliament by Laborite Clement Attlee, Churchill remarked, “He is a modest man with much to be modest about.”
When George Bernard Shaw sent him two theater tickets and a note reading, “Come to my play and bring a friend, if you have a friend,” Churchill sent a reply that read, “I am busy for the opening, but I will come the second night, if there is a second night.”
And of Aneurin Bevan, Churchill once said, “There is, however, a poetic justice in the fact that the most mischievous mouth in wartime has also become in peace the most remarkable administrative failure.”
Churchill certainly gave as well as he received when it came to hardhitting rhetoric.
• • •
Churchill made a revealing comment at the stag dinner about his lifestyle. Speaking of Lord Plowden, the British atomic specialist, he said, “No man has given so much to the world and taken so little out. He did not eat meat; he did not smoke; he was not married.” Churchill himself loved the good life. I think he would have admitted that, while he gave a lot to the world, he also took a lot out.
He had a certain flair for life that led one biographer to call him the “Peter Pan of politics.” In his later years, after he gave up polo, his favorite relaxation was painting. His bold strokes and bright colors seemed to release his pent-up energy. As he once said, “If it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.”
During his visit to Washington, we compared our writing habits. I told him that I generally found that I worked best by using a dictating machine. He flashed a delightfully impish grin and said, “I much prefer to dictate to a pretty secretary than into a cold, impersonal machine.” He added that he had two “very good-looking” secretaries.
Many years later I recounted this incident to Brezhnev during the Soviet-American summit in Moscow in 1972. The Soviet leader said he agreed with Churchill’s preference of a secretary to a machine. He then added with a wink and a broad grin, “Besides, a secretary is particularly useful when you wake up at night and want to make a note.”
Churchill hated to do without the comforts of civilization. During World War I he always brought a tin bathtub along on visits to the front. And during an American lecture tour in the days of Prohibition, his contract stipulated that he must receive a bottle of champagne before each appearance.
Shortly after my inauguration in 1969, one of the older White House butlers told me of another incident. President Roosevelt invited Churchill to stay at the White House during his visits and quartered him in what is called the Queen’s Bedroom, which is elegantly decorated and has a very comfortable bed. On one of Churchill’s visits, Roosevelt insisted that his guest stay in the Lincoln Bedroom so that he could say he had slept in Lincoln’s bed. The Lincoln Bedroom is decorated in the stark, rather austere style of mid-nineteenth-century America and has without question the most uncomfortable bed in the White House.
About a half hour after Churchill retired for the night, the butler said that he saw Churchill wearing an old-fashioned nightshirt and carrying his suitcase as he walked tiptoe from the Lincoln Bedroom to the Queen’s Bedroom across the hall. Churchill was not about to spend a night in an uncomfortable bed no matter what its historical significance. After hearing this story, I remembered that in 1954 when Mrs. Eisenhower offered Churchill a choice of the Queen’s Bedroom or the Lincoln Bedroom, he promptly chose the former, leaving the Lincoln Bedroom to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.
Churchill was also a connoisseur of fine wines. Recently I visited Château Lafite Rothschild, which produces what many consider France’s finest wine. My host told me that Churchill had once visited the château, and in his honor they had opened a bottle of 1870 Lafite Rothschild, which was the greatest vintage of the nineteenth century. After dinner Churchill wrote in the guest book, “1870—Not a good year for French arms but a great year for French wines.”
• • •
As I observed Churchill during those three days in Washington, I often thought back to the time when I had first become aware of him. It was in 1936, after I came east to law school. He had become highly visible and controversial, partly because of his support of King Edward and Mrs. Simpson in the abdication crisis but mainly because of his insistence that Britain must rearm and the democracies must unite to resist Hitler.
America in those days was isolated as well as isolationist. Today I know people who get impatient if the Concorde takes off twenty minutes late. But in the 1930s the fastest way to get to Europe was several days on an ocean liner. None of the people I knew in California or North Carolina liked Hitler, but few were willing to go to war to get rid of him. I suppose his comic appearance and his outrageous bombast led people not to take him seriously enough. And we knew that even in England, Churchill was widely considered to be sort of a bellicose gadfly. His rhetoric seemed overblown and exaggerated, and most of us sympathized with what we knew of Neville Chamberlain’s determination to avoid war and admired the patience and dignity with which he absorbed Hitler’s abuse. I can remember the relief everyone felt when Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference and announced that he had brought back “peace for our time.”
It was only in 1939, when Hitler finally made it clear that he would never be satisfied with anything short of conquering Europe, that we began to realize how wise and how prophetic Churchill had been all along. Amidst the shocking suddenness of Europe’s collapse, Churchill’s colorful personality and dramatic oratory became the stuff of instant legends. Churchill perfectly captured his role when he said, “It was the nation and the race dwelling round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”
From the very beginning of the war he paid special attention to the United States. He knew that as the “arsenal of democracy,” only our support—and preferably our intervention—would enable Britain to survive. He was especially well suited temperamentally to this role because his mother had been born an American: Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn. He even claimed with pride—and some melodrama—that the Jeromes had Iroquois Indian branches on their family tree.
Born in Blenheim Palace in 1874, he was the eldest son of Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill. His parents had an intense impact on his early years. He loved and worshiped them. But the sad fact was that neither of them had much time or much use for him.
Lord Randolph was a brilliant but highly volatile politician who gambled his whole career on one roll of the dice and lost: He resigned from his cabinet office in protest against a government policy, believing that the Prime Minister would refuse his resignation. Instead, it was accepted, and Lord Randolph never again held cabinet office. Coincidentally his health began to decline as the result of a venereal disease he had contracted some years earlier. Wrapped up in his own problems, Lord Randolph had little interest in his son, who was mainly a nuisance because he did poorly in school and because he added expenses to their already strapped household.
Politics fascinated Winston more than his schoolroom subjects did. He longed to be able to talk to his father about the political events and personalities of the day. But Lord Randolph rebuffed his every attempt. Winston later wrote, “If ever I began to show the slightest idea of comradeship, he was immediately offended; and when once I suggested that I might help his private secretary to write some of his letters, he froze me into stone.” Lord Randolph’s early death at the age of forty-six ended any chances of a close association between them.
Winston wrote that his mother “shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.” In fact Lady Randolph was essentially a frivolous beauty for whom marriage had little effect on her fondness for the flattery and company of men. Her liaisons were well known despite the well-bred discretion of the time. Not least among them was the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII.
I happen to think that most of the so-called new “science” of psychobiography is pure baloney. For example, in a book he coauthored with former Ambassador William Bullitt, Sigmund Freud suggested that Woodrow Wilson, who worshiped his father, subconsciously hated him and that this hatred contributed to his arbitrary rigidity in dealing with those who disagreed with him on foreign policy. This strikes me as so outlandish as to be downright silly.
I would agree, however, that if one wants some insight into how an individual thinks and feels as an adult, it makes common sense that his family background and early years will often provide a clue.
In Churchill’s case it does not appear that the emotional deprivation of his early life had any serious effect on him. He was enormously proud of his father and defended his memory and many of the causes for which he had fought. Lady Randolph lived long enough to see her son become a famous soldier, author, and politician. Like MacArthur’s mother, she used her extensive social connections with powerful men to further her son’s career. In her later years she became genuinely fond of Winston and quite dependent on him.
It is well known that Churchill, like Einstein, was a mediocre student in his early years. One of his tutors observed, “That lad couldn’t have gone through Harrow, he must have gone under it.” In China or the Soviet Union he would not have been selected as one of the elite who are sent on for higher education and given an important position in government or industry. On one of my trips to Peking a Chinese educator told me with pride that all children in China are guaranteed a free elementary education. When they finish grammar school, he went on, they are given a comprehensive examination, and only those who pass are allowed to go on to the higher grades. Those who fail are sent to work in the factories or on the farms. He then added, somewhat wistfully, “Under our system we provide better education for the masses, but we lose our Churchills.”
A perceptive scholar would have detected in Churchill a unique ability that a mass examination would not. He was a genius in English. He hated Latin and the natural sciences, and his poor marks in those subjects pulled his overall average down below the norm. His grades placed him in Harrow’s lowest class, where the curriculum emphasized learning to write English. “Thus,” he later wrote, “I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.” He soon fell in love with the English language, and that love affair enriched his life and that of the English-speaking peoples for generations.
Because the normal route to a political career via Oxford or Cambridge did not seem right for Churchill, it was decided that he would become a cavalry cadet at Sandhurst, Britain’s West Point. He enjoyed his military training, and his grades showed it: He was graduated near the top of his class.
Young Churchill now surveyed the world scene, searching for any place that offered adventure. He went to Cuba as a newspaper correspondent to report on the guerrilla war between island rebels and the Spanish colonial administration. He later wrote that he felt “delicious yet tremulous sensations” when he espied the outline of Cuba on the horizon. “Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something certainly would happen. Here I might leave my bones.”
He soon returned to Britain to prepare for his first military assignment: an eight- or nine-year stint in India. He viewed this prospect with dread, writing to his mother that “you cannot think how I would like to sail in a few days to scenes of adventure and excitement . . . rather than to the tedious land of India—where I shall be equally out of the pleasures of peace and the chances of war.”
At his post in Bangalore, Churchill had long periods of free time and resolved to put them to good use. He practiced polo for hours and became an excellent player. He also started to give himself the education he had never acquired at school. His approach was typically broad and methodical. He asked his mother to send him a complete set of Annual Registers. These were yearly almanacs of politics from Britain and news from around the world. He read them carefully, took notes, and gradually mastered the wealth of facts and information they contained. Before reading summaries of the major parliamentary debates, he would carefully outline his personal view on the particular issue and then compare his own opinion and analysis with those of the actual participants.
He also asked his mother to send him the writings of some of the great prose stylists of the English language, particularly the historians Macaulay and Gibbon. While his comrades napped through the blistering Indian afternoons, Churchill absorbed the words and the rhythms of these books.
Before long he began sending back war reports to a London newspaper. This was a very unconventional practice for a young officer, and many of his colleagues and most of his superiors did not approve of it. When his reports on the fighting in the North-West Frontier Province were published as a book, it was sarcastically suggested that it be titled A Subaltern’s Hints to the Generals. This kind of attitude pursued him throughout his life—and he could not have cared less about it.
Churchill never believed in observing conventions that would curb his individuality. He had no use for people who preserve their positions by stifling the creativity of others. He was driven crazy by the pettifogging bureaucratic mentality that reduced life to its lowest common denominator, drew a line there, and forbade anyone to cross over it. He despised the psychology of what Kipling called the “Little Folk”—petty officials “too little to love or to hate” who would “drag down the State!” When Churchill ran up against examples of the “Little Folk,” he would often go so far as to recite Kipling’s poem aloud.
In America over the recent decades, we have added a new twist to this old problem. While many of the Little Folk in our own bloated bureaucracy are institutionally lethargic and are concerned solely with protecting their jobs, there are also many who are politically active for liberal causes. Thus, while it is always difficult to get the bureaucracy to move on anything, it is now almost impossible for a conservative cabinet secretary, agency director, or even President to get it to move on anything with which it disagrees politically.
Churchill ruffled many feathers by going right to the top for something he wanted rather than wasting time on people lower down who would be fearful of making decisions outside ordinary channels. After World War I there was a story told in London about Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Churchill. The three died and one by one arrived outside the pearly gates. Clemenceau got there first and knocked to be let in. Saint Peter came and asked Clemenceau to identify himself so that he could consult the records and determine what eternal reward would be his. The same thing happened with Lloyd George. Then Churchill arrived. He also knocked. Saint Peter answered and asked Churchill to identify himself so that he could consult the records and let him know his eternal reward. Churchill replied, “Who the hell are you? Get God.”
While still on duty in India, Churchill marshaled all the influence his and his mother’s contacts could muster to convince Lord Kitchener to allow him to accompany British forces going after the dervishes in the Sudan. Thus it was as a war correspondent that he took part in what turned out to be one of the last cavalry charges in history at the battle of Omdurman.
In 1899 Churchill left the army and ran for Parliament from the Oldham district of Manchester—the same one his father had represented. He was defeated. The loss was a blow. After this first political defeat he wrote that he felt “those feelings of deflation which a bottle of champagne or even soda water represents when it has been half emptied and left uncorked for a night.” But he was young, and a new adventure soon beckoned.
He went to southern Africa as a war correspondent to cover the Boer War. Only two weeks after his arrival, while heroically defending a train from a Boer attack, he was captured and became a prisoner of war. He escaped from his Boer captors and they offered a twenty-five-pound reward for him—dead or alive. Years later he kept a framed copy of the wanted poster in his study and would remark to visitors, “Is that all I’m worth? Twenty-five pounds?”
While he was still in Africa, a romantic adventure novel he had written was published in New York and London; three months later his book on the Boer War and his exploits in it was published to good reviews and brisk sales.
When he returned to England two months later, he was a national hero. Eleven constituencies asked if he would do them the honor of running to represent them in Parliament. But he chose to run again for Oldham, and this time he was elected.
• • •
Winston Churchill loved the House of Commons the way few men love anything in this world. From the first time he took his seat there in 1901, it was his spiritual home in the deepest sense. Through his father’s family and with his own romantic sense of history, he felt himself a living part of the House and its traditions. It is fascinating to read his speeches about his determination to rebuild the House exactly as it had been before German bombs destroyed it during World War II. These are not the words of a man talking about a building. This is a man talking about a deeply passionate personal relationship with history.
He was well received by his new colleagues. Many of them had served with his father, and there was almost a protective feeling for the young Churchill. He wrote and polished and practiced his maiden speech until, as he later wrote, he could have started it anywhere and picked it up without a hitch.
A superb public speaker, he could hold thousands spellbound in a hall, or millions with a broadcast microphone. He combined a brilliant mastery of the English language with a sure instinct for showmanship. But even more important, he was inspiring because he himself was inspired by the ideals for which he fought. As Australia’s former Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies once observed, Churchill’s wartime speeches were as stirring as they were because he had “learned the great truth that to move other people, the speaker, the leader, must first move himself; all must be vivid in his mind.”
But public speaking did not come easily to him. At the beginning of his career he wrote and memorized every speech, working on the gestures in front of a mirror and even trying different ways of using his lisp for greater effect.
At the Republican convention in 1952, I met Churchill’s son Randolph for the first time and I told him how impressed I was by his father’s brilliant extemporaneous speeches. He laughed and said, “Well, they ought to have been good. He spent the best years of his life writing and memorizing them.” As I talked with Randolph, I sensed how difficult it is to be the son of a great man. I found him to be highly intelligent, interesting, and witty, but anyone would have suffered by comparison with Winston Churchill. This was doubly true for someone who happened to be his son.
As a brilliant and well-connected young member of Parliament, Churchill was on top of the world with seemingly unlimited possibilities spread out before him.
Then he suddenly began attacking some of the positions taken by the leaders of his party. A major crisis arose when he advocated a policy of free trade in direct contravention of the official Conservative party stand, which favored the imposition of tariffs to protect British goods. Such breaking of ranks by junior members was totally unacceptable, especially if they had ambitions of advancing to the cabinet.
In 1904 Churchill took the bold step. He “crossed the floor” of the House of Commons. He changed his party from Conservative to Liberal. There are times in politics when you have to take a big risk. The stakes are as high as they can possibly be, and the results will be remorselessly clear: success or failure. People outside the political arena, or newcomers to politics, frequently do not understand the unique qualities of political risk taking. In business risk taking can be nerve-racking, but at least there are scientific tools to predict the parameters of the possible results. But in politics, risk taking means riding on pure guts, intuition, and the ability to be decisive at the right time.
Today the whole protectionism debate seems remote and lifeless. One has to wonder whether Churchill did not make a mistake by risking so much for such a cause. But Churchill saw the issue of free trade in its broadest terms, including its direct relation to domestic employment and the British standard of living. At a time when many Britons lived uncomplainingly in conditions that would not have been out of place in one of Dickens’s bleaker novels, Churchill understood that the quality of life of the average British citizen was going to be the major issue facing the British government in this century.
He was appalled, not just by the economic unfairness of British society, but also by the spiritual toll it inevitably took. One day as he was walking through the streets of his Manchester constituency, he said to his assistant, “Fancy living in one of those streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savory—never saying anything clever!”
I am often asked by young people to name the qualities an individual must have to succeed as a candidate for office. Intelligence, instinct, character, and belief in a great cause all come to mind. But many have these qualities; very few have the indispensable quality for political success—the willingness to risk all to gain all. You must not be afraid to lose. This does not mean you should be rash. But above all you must be bold. If a potential candidate tells me that he will run only if he has the guaranteed financial and political support of the party organization and if polls show he is sure to win, I say to him flat out, “Don’t do it. You will be a lousy candidate.” Throughout his career, Churchill was always bold, and he was sometimes rash. But he was never afraid to lose.
The shock waves from Churchill’s change of party were tremendous. Many of his friends publicly accused him of being an ingrate opportunist who had used people to advance his career and then turned on them by joining a party that sought to subvert the entire class structure of British society. He pushed for electoral reforms that went far beyond what they saw as the prudent and slight expansion of the number of people eligible to participate in the process of governing. Churchill had joined the forces that were going to open the floodgates of popular democracy and let the rabble in.
Feelings ran strong and bitter. He indulged in British understatement when he later wrote, “I did not exactly, either by my movement or my manner, invite any great continuing affection.” Churchill became a pariah in many of the circles in which he had recently been touted as a young man with brilliant potential and an unbounded future. He was labeled “the Blenheim rat” and suddenly found he was no longer welcomed at many of the most fashionable houses in London. Nor were the resentments born in this early period soon forgotten. Eleven years later the Conservatives tried to make it a condition of their participation in a wartime coalition government that Churchill not be given a cabinet post.
It was not so much that the animosities eventually died as that the people who held them did. There is a saying that runs, “Living well is the best revenge.” In politics it might be paraphrased to say, “Living longer than anyone else is the ultimate revenge!”
The social ostracism Churchill was subjected to would have crushed many politicians. Many people enter politics because tbey enjoy receiving public acclaim. It takes a different temperament—not necessarily a better one—to be willing to put up with the unpopularity, the bitterness, and the sheer hassle of becoming a controversial political figure.
In my thirty-six years of public life I have seen many able young men and women give up their political careers and return to private life because they did not want for themselves—or for their families—the kind of pressure and isolation that go with public controversy. The difference between politics before and after Watergate is striking in this regard. Today the chances of receiving much approval or esteem for accomplishments in public life are slim. The risks of glaring invasions of privacy are much greater, and the kinds of sacrifices and disclosures required for entering politics in the first place have simply become prohibitive for many. This is bound to affect detrimentally both the quality and the number of men and women who are willing to present themselves for public office.
• • •
By 1906 Churchill received a cabinet post in the first Liberal government at the age of thirty-two. Over the next several years he held half a dozen cabinet offices. To each of them he brought his voracious curiosity and his enormous energy. As President of the Board of Trade, Churchill provided the legislative leadership for initiatives that laid the foundations of modern Britain. Among many other things and as head of the Home Office, his innovations gave coal miners an eight-hour day and required that safety equipment be installed in the mines; he stopped underground employment of boys under fourteen, made rest breaks mandatory for shop workers, established a minimum wage, set up labor exchanges throughout the country to help reduce unemployment, and instituted major prison reforms.
These achievements were, in fact, the beginning of today’s British welfare state. But even as he enacted these reforms, Churchill drew a sharp line between socialism and liberalism. In a speech that Churchill considered to be one of his best, he said, “Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. . . . Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks monopoly.”
His legislative record was substantial. He was creative, cajoling, and controversial, but on first impression he often seemed rude and tactless. He made many enemies where he needed friends. In some cases if people got to know him better, the damage could be repaired. But frequently the first impression was the one that stuck. As one of his closest friends said, “The first time you see Winston you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
People with high-strung tempers and temperaments like Churchill used to be fairly common in politics. When I first came to the House of Representatives in 1947, it was filled with powerfully prickly personalities and some marvelous eccentrics. But since then the growth of television has led to a homogenization of political personalities. In homogenized milk the cream does not come to the top. The same is true of homogenized politics.
In times past we tended to admire the political leader who had the courage to be different—not only in ideas but also in style. But today, in order not to pale from overexposure or to seem excessive or unbalanced, most politicians either have or pretend to have an essentially bland and inoffensive manner. “Don’t make waves” seems to be the guideline of most of the new breed.
I am not suggesting we need kooks or crazies in government. But we could do with a few more original thinkers and risk takers. Our young generation of political leaders needs to learn that if you want to succeed, there is only one thing worse than being wrong, and that is being dull. I sometimes wonder whether the great originals like Churchill or de Gaulle would be able to survive the constant barrage of trivial coverage our political leaders are subjected to today.
• • •
Churchill paid a heavy price for his high-handedness. He had few close friends and many enemies. According to C. P. Snow, even Lloyd George, who had great personal affection for Churchill, thought that he was “a bit of an ass.” While he was successful, everything was fine. But the botched execution of his bold—and, I believe, brilliant—plan to shorten World War I by landing an attack force at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles gave his critics the weapon they needed to cut him down to size. He was put out to pasture in an honorary position.
He could not stand it—not because he minded the controversy or because his ego was bruised. And certainly not because he doubted that the Dardanelles expedition would have succeeded if it had been carried out according to his plan. It was losing the ability to shape events that really got him. As his assistant put it, “The worse things go, the braver and serener he gets—it was the feeling of being condemned to inactivity that was so terribly depressing to him.”
It was at this time that Churchill first began to suffer from what he called “Black Dog”—periodic debilitating bouts of depression that could immobilize him for weeks at a time. It probably gave him no comfort that another master of British prose, Samuel Johnson, the author of the first English dictionary, had suffered from the same affliction. As painful as these periods must have been for him, they were probably the way his otherwise optimistic and energetic soul recharged itself to prepare for future battles.
One constant source of peace and satisfaction was his marriage. In 1908 he married Clementine Hozier, and as he later wrote, they “lived happily ever afterwards.” Because the marriage was happy does not mean that it was always uncomplicated. Mrs. Churchill was her husband’s strongest supporter and fiercest partisan, but she never liked politics as a profession. Nor could she tolerate many of his political friends and cronies. Since he could not give up his political career, they had to reach some accommodations. They spent much time apart, he on official business and she on holidays in France or at their house in the country outside London. Churchill never indicated any interest in other women, and they wrote to each other often and at length. Those letters are a perfect reflection of the depth of their love and trust.
By the beginning of the 1920s, events seemed to have passed Churchill by. He was only forty-seven years old, but many of the new generation of politicians were already thinking of him as an old man. He had had a distinguished, if checkered, career, and it seemed unlikely that he would ever rise higher. Some of the residual distrust over his switch of parties still pursued him, and he could not shake the bitter recriminations from the Dardanelles expedition.
He hit the lowest of a number of low periods in 1922 when an emergency appendectomy prevented him from campaigning for reelection. Without being able to apply his exceptional powers of personal persuasion, he was defeated. It was the first time in twenty-two years that he was not a member of the House of Commons. As he lightly quipped, “In the twinkling of an eye I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party, and even without an appendix.” But his spirits were very far from high. One of Lloyd George’s former assistants who saw Churchill at this time reported that “Winston was so down in the dumps he could scarcely speak the whole evening. He thought his world had come to an end—at least his political world.”
Talleyrand once said, “In war one dies only once, in politics one dies only to rise again.” Churchill’s career certainly bears out the truth of this observation. But an adage is precious little comfort for the man who has just lost an election. Having lost a couple of them, I know how it feels. Friends tell you, “Won’t it be great to have no responsibility and to be able to travel, go fishing, and play golf anytime you want?” My answer is “Yes—for about one week.” Then you have a totally empty feeling that only one who has been through it can understand.
The immediate aftermath is not so bad because you are still numbed by the exhaustion of the campaign, and you also are still operating with a high level of adrenaline. Weeks or months later the realization hits you that you have lost and that there is nothing you can take back or do differently to change the outcome. Unless you are wealthy, there is also the necessity of beginning another career in order to pay the bills that keep coming in every week regardless of how you feel.
This was certainly the case with Churchill. He resumed writing newspaper articles to bring in an income. He tried twice to get back into Parliament but failed. He showed the world a brave and resilient face, but I am sure that each defeat was a bitterly frustrating and humiliating disappointment. But defeat is not fatal in politics unless you give up and call it quits. And Churchill did not know the meaning of the word quit.
By the mid-1920s the Labor party had almost completely eclipsed the Liberal party. The few remaining Liberals were joining with the Conservatives. Running as a born-again Conservative, Churchill was finally returned to Parliament in 1924.
One month later Churchill had a bit of good fortune that turned out to be a stroke of bad luck. Through a fluke he suddenly found himself appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second highest member of the cabinet after the Prime Minister himself. Ironically Neville Chamberlain was responsible for this unexpected event.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was planning to make Chamberlain Chancellor of the Exchequer and appoint Churchill Minister of Health. But at the last minute Chamberlain unexpectedly said that he wanted to be Minister of Health. All the other positions had been allotted, and Churchill was waiting in the anteroom. Baldwin just reversed plays and bowled Churchill over by asking him if he would like to be Chancellor. Churchill jumped at the chance.
Churchill’s four years as Chancellor have always been controversial. It was an impossible job in many ways. Britain was still economically weak as a result of World War I. All the prominent economists urged further tightening of the fiscal belt in order to put the economy on a sound basis for real recovery. The military called for enormous new expenditures in all the services to recover from the devastation of the war and to reassert Britain’s military supremacy.
There were few voices raised on behalf of the expensive social welfare programs—such as a national pension plan and insurance for widows and children—that Churchill was determined to enact. He introduced a bold scheme for contributory pensions and used several novel changes in the tax codes to ease the burden on middle-class taxpayers and to increase employment by stimulating productivity and investments.
I think Churchill’s reputation as Chancellor may have suffered from the same problem that blackened the image of Herbert Hoover. Both had the misfortune to be in power when worldwide depression struck in 1929. Who else could be held responsible for this catastrophe if not the men in power? Unlike Churchill, Hoover did not have the appealing, warm personality that would have enabled him to let the people know how deeply he cared about their plight. When I came to know Hoover decades later, I found that beneath his rather stiff, cold exterior was a shy, sensitive, and warmhearted man. During his presidency, only his closest friends and the members of his family saw him when tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke of the suffering of the unemployed.
A stroke of unexpected luck had raised Churchill very high; now forces beyond his control had cast him down. Another long, lonely, and frustrating period in the political wilderness began. The Black Dog of depression was frequently unleashed. Churchill wrote despondently, “Here I am discarded, cast away, marooned, rejected, and disliked.”
During this period he wrote several books, including his six-volume Marlborough and Great Contemporaries, and numerous magazine articles. Many literary critics today scoff at Churchill’s style as being too florid and even bombastic. But I believe that his books are second only to his wartime leadership as his greatest legacy.
He did not help himself by taking a number of stands that added to his reputation for maverick undependability. He strongly opposed the government’s plan to make India independent. He resigned from Stanley Baldwin’s shadow cabinet over this issue, thus putting an almost unbridgeable distance between himself and any possible return to power. He broke party ranks again by siding with King Edward VIII in his attempt to find an arrangement by which he could retain the crown while marrying the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson. And he also began his campaign to alert Parliament to the danger of Germany’s rapid rearmament.
Whatever the merits of his stands on India and the abdication, his warnings about Germany made him the prophet of truth in a landscape of dangerous self-deception. Churchill was able to play the role of Cassandra as effectively as he did because he regularly received inside information from civil servants in the military departments who were worried about the blindness of their superiors. In a very real sense this handful of men, whose identities have only recently become known, made Churchill’s role possible. Without their facts and figures, he would have been dismissed out of hand as a bellicose blowhard.
Until human nature itself changes, people will leak information in order to accomplish their ends. In most cases those ends are individual self-advancement. In some cases, however, people are concerned about the dangers of a policy they consider to be wrong. Some would argue that it is inconsistent for me to honor the men who leaked information about German rearmament in the 1930s while condemning those who leaked documents about the Vietnam War to the press in the 1960s and 1970s. But the two cases are totally different. In the latter we were at war. When The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, over forty-five thousand Americans had already died in Vietnam, and scores were being killed every week. We were engaged in highly sensitive negotiations to try to end the war. The torrent of leaks—including many others besides the Pentagon Papers—jeopardized our negotiations and, rather than shortening the war, prolonged it. I am certain that this was not the intention of the people who leaked the documents, but nonetheless it was the consequence of their actions.
The leaks to Churchill were made selectively and enabled him to phrase telling questions about government policy in parliamentary debate. Churchill’s sources would never have dreamed of giving their raw information to a reporter for publication. I am certain that Churchill would have considered the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during wartime to be treasonable.
Churchill’s warnings were proven right with tragic suddenness when the Nazi juggernaut rolled over Poland in the summer of 1939. Chamberlain immediately called Churchill back as First Lord of Admiralty—the same job he had held twenty-five years before. The famous signal was sent from London to the entire British fleet: “Winston is back.”
It was clear that the discredited Chamberlain could not stay long as Prime Minister. But neither he nor the King wanted Churchill to replace him. They preferred Lord Halifax. On May 10, 1940, only after it had been reluctantly decided that there could not be a Prime Minister from the House of Lords, was Winston Churchill, at the age of sixty-five, finally offered the position. He wrote that, “as I went to bed at about 3 A.M., I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”
• • •
I suppose one can find a kind of parlor-game fascination in speculating about what might have happened if Churchill had been passed over for Prime Minister and left at the Admiralty to run the war at sea. But I do not know of any leader who spends much time thinking this way. You can become totally immobilized by thinking about the “what ifs” of life.
In America, what would have happened if Robert Taft rather than Eisenhower had been elected President in 1952? Taft died of cancer ten months after the election. What if Churchill had died in 1939? He would have been considered one of a number of picturesque failures in British history. His epitaph would have been “Like father, like son.” But what happened happened. And once again Churchill’s luck, persistence, ability, and longevity paid off.
In his first speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, Churchill said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” He could well have added leadership to the list. Had it not been for his leadership, Britain might not have survived, Western Europe might not be free, the United States might now be an embattled island in a hostile world. To paraphrase one of his most memorable wartime statements, “Never has one man done so much for so many.”
Churchill treated Neville Chamberlain with great generosity when their positions were suddenly reversed. Churchill insisted that Chamberlain stay in the government and continued to include him in all meetings. Churchill did not publicly criticize Chamberlain; rather, he spoke kindly about the nobility of his predecessor’s intentions. This kind of magnanimity is typical of the best of politics in any country. Franklin Roosevelt showed no such generosity as President. Never once during the thirteen years of his presidency did he invite the Hoovers to the White House for any occasion. It brought tears to Hoover’s eyes when one of the first things Harry Truman did as President was invite him to a meeting in the Oval Office.
The Second World War gave Churchill a backdrop commensurate with his larger-than-life abilities and personality. It seems a sad fact of life that great leadership seems most evident only under the terrible conditions of war.
One of the greatest British Prime Ministers was Sir Robert Peel, who made the tough decision to repeal the Corn Laws. But he is not as widely remembered as Disraeli or the other Prime Ministers who lived in 10 Downing Street during wartime. In the United States the same could be said of James Polk, who probably ranks among our top four or five Presidents in ability and accomplishments. Eisenhower is another example. He ended a war and kept the peace for eight years. But many consider him not to have been as strong or decisive as President Truman, who by an accident of history gave the order to drop the atomic bomb in August 1945. It seems that waging wars, rather than ending or avoiding them, is still the measure of greatness in the minds of most historians.
Despite the total defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the outcome of World War II was hardly victorious as far as Churchill was concerned.
It was C. P. Snow who observed that Churchill’s famous statement “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire” was wonderfully dramatic but at least a little disingenuous, for that is clearly what anyone who became Prime Minister in 1940 was going to have to oversee. Even without FDR’s determination to free all colonial peoples after the war, the momentum toward independence was already growing irresistibly from within the British Empire itself. For Churchill to try to resist it would have been like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in as it lapped higher around his legs.
Even the defeat of Germany involved ironic consequences for the British. Churchill knew that Germany would have to be rebuilt if there was to be any counterbalance to the Soviet monolith and any stability on the Continent. He also knew that rebuilding from the total devastation from which Germany had to recover was ironically preferable to Britain’s partial crippling. When Germany was rebuilt, a modern industrial plant replaced the one that had been bombed to smithereens. Britain, though victorious, had to make do with what had been a largely obsolete industrial infrastructure even before the war. As a result, the defeated nation became richer and stronger than the victor.
The British people also had to live with the continued privations of rationing and with the nagging realization that, despite all their efforts, pain, and sacrifice, Britain would never again play the leading part in world affairs to which it had been accustomed.
Anglo-American unity had been one of Churchill’s principal interests long before the war began. In the postwar years it became a demanding obsession. In the 1930s he sought it as a means of increasing the prosperity of both nations; in the 1940s it was the prerequisite for Britain’s survival; by the late 1950s he saw it as the only way to hold the ring against the expansion of Soviet communism in Europe and around the world; and by the 1960s I suspect he perceived it as the only way for Britain to retain influence in world affairs.
Churchill had to swallow many bitter pills to preserve Anglo-American unity in the postwar years. The British had held the line against Hitler at a very dear price for two hard years before we entered the war after Pearl Harbor. Great as our casualties were, theirs were far greater in both World War I and World War II. They were deeply grateful for our efforts because without us they would not have survived. But they had to feel that without them we might not have survived against a Europe totally controlled by Hitler. Now they found it necessary to defer to American attitudes and opinions.
The torch of leadership had passed to us, not because we had a greater ability to lead, but because we had greater power. I do not mean to imply that Churchill was openly envious or resentful. But deep down, the British must have had the nagging thought: “With all of our centuries of experience in foreign policy and the great affairs of the world, don’t we really know better how to lead than these Americans?” In my meetings and conversations in 1954 I could sense that the British officials, including Churchill, seemed to have a rather resigned, almost hopeless attitude.
Although the United States has many able foreign service people, I have found in my travels to countries in which the British were influential that their diplomats have often been far more knowledgeable and better qualified than ours. I believe that American policymakers today can profit from actively seeking the advice of their European counterparts before making major decisions, rather than just “consulting” and informing them afterward. We must keep in mind that those who have the most power do not necessarily have the most experience, the best brains, the keenest insights, or the surest instincts.
Even though Churchill felt that U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union immediately after the war was dangerously naive, he did not push things to a breaking point. Instead he continued to flatter us while he tried to educate us. Many people forget that the central point of his famous Iron Curtain speech was to urge Anglo-American unity as the best means to resist Soviet expansionism. This prophetic speech was highly controversial at the time. Eleanor Roosevelt said she thought it was dangerous. One hundred members of Parliament denounced it as trash.
When Churchill warned the world about the threat from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, many refused to face up to it. With the launching of the United Nations at the end of the war, many hoped and prayed that a new era of peace and goodwill among nations and peoples had arrived. When they heard Churchill’s warning about the dangers of Soviet expansionism in the late 1940s, again many refused to believe him. But once more he was right. Once again he was ahead of his time, leading public opinion rather than following it.
During the war Churchill had been prepared to accept any help necessary for defeating Hitler. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill welcomed Stalin into the anti-Hitler camp. Many critics chided him about the 180-degree turnaround in his attitude toward Stalin. He replied, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I think I would find a kind word to say about the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Churchill got along well with Roosevelt, his other principal ally. The American President once wrote to Churchill, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” And Churchill once said of Roosevelt, “Meeting him was like opening your first bottle of champagne.”
But the two often strongly disagreed on policy. Churchill considered FDR’s insistence on unconditional surrender by Germany to be disastrous and thought the Morgenthau Plan for turning postwar Germany into an agricultural nation was ludicrous. Most importantly, they disagreed on what their policy toward the Soviet Union should be. At least from the time of the Katyn massacre in 1940—when it was learned that ten thousand anti-Communist Polish officers had been murdered by the Soviets—Churchill realized that Stalin might be as rapaciously unappeasable after the war as Hitler had been before it. Meanwhile Roosevelt seemed to be more suspicious of the imperialism of Britain than of Russia. “Winston,” he once said, “this is something you just are not able to see, that a country might not want to acquire land somewhere even if they can get it.”
As Henry Grunwald wrote in 1965:
Churchill found himself increasingly isolated from Roosevelt, who did not want America and Britain to gang up on “Uncle Joe” and instead tried to play the moderator between Churchill and Stalin. Thus began a series of disastrous agreements which, among other things, resulted in the loss of Poland to the Communists and brought Russian participation in the war against Japan . . . by giving the Russians territorial and economic concessions in Asia, concessions which played their part in China’s fall to the Reds.
Events would have turned out much differently if Churchill had been able to prevail over Roosevelt.
He was worried by FDR’s increasing willingness to trust Stalin, and attributed it to the President’s failing health. After Roosevelt’s death, he feared that Truman, who had been kept poorly informed by FDR, was being influenced by a naively pro-Russian State Department.
Churchill was convinced that it was important to prevent the Soviets from occupying all of Eastern Europe because he was afraid they would never give it up. He wrote to Eisenhower at the beginning of April 1945 to urge him to send American troops into Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. “I deem it highly important,” he stated, “that we should shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible.” But Eisenhower held his troops in their positions as the Russians rolled westward.
Two months later Churchill sounded another warning in a message to Truman, pressing him to hold the Potsdam Conference as early as possible. It was in this message that he first used the phrase that would become emblematic of the coming Cold War: “I view with profound misgivings the retreat of the American Army to our line of occupation in the central sector, thus bringing Soviet power into the heart of Western Europe and the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward.”
Churchill considered Eisenhower largely responsible for letting the Soviets overrun Eastern Europe. Eisenhower was not Churchill’s kind of general. The Allied commander’s firm but, in Churchill’s view, unimaginative style of command and his easygoing personality may have accounted for the remarkable amity that characterized the collaboration within the Allied command. That alone was an indispensable contribution to winning the war. But Churchill later speculated that if MacArthur had been the Supreme Commander in Europe, America would not have sat back and watched Eastern Europe succumb to Soviet domination.
Eisenhower considered Churchill to be a great leader. Shortly after Churchill’s death he wrote, “Through my wartime association with him, the whole globe seemed to be an exercise ground for a mind that could, almost in the same instant, wrestle with an immediate problem in the deployment of air and land and sea forces and probe into the far-off future, examining the coming peacetime role of the embattled nations, shaping for his listener the destiny of the world.”
While this statement is evidence of his great respect for Churchill, Eisenhower had his differences with Churchill and seldom spoke about him in our meetings at the White House. On one of the rare occasions when he did, he told me that Churchill was one of the most difficult people he had to deal with because he became so emotionally involved in whatever he was doing. “You know, Dick, he would even cry while arguing his case,” he said. I can just picture Eisenhower sitting there uncomfortably while Churchill’s eyes overflowed with tears!
This is not an unusual trait among leaders. Khrushchev and Brezhnev, for example, sometimes were on the verge of tears as they tried to make a point to me. With them, however, I wondered how much of it was really felt and how much was an act for my benefit.
I do not doubt that Churchill was capable of manufacturing a few tears at the right moment or of getting carried away by his own oratory. But he was a genuinely emotional man. Lord Moran’s diary records that Churchill was moved to the verge of tears when he learned that after his stroke he might not be able to continue in leadership. And his secretary reported that he was sobbing like a child when he dictated the peroration of one of his most famous speeches in the dark days of World War II: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
• • •
The growing realization that the end of the war would bring major new problems for Britain must have been tremendously painful for Churchill. But the biggest blow was yet to come.
On July 25, 1945, Churchill left Stalin and Truman at the Potsdam Conference and flew back to London for the counting of the votes in the first postwar general election. He woke up that night with a stabbing pain in the stomach, a portent of the impending news. The results struck Churchill—and the rest of the world—like a bolt from the blue. Labor won in an overwhelming landslide. The Conservatives were thrown out of office. Clement Attlee was Britain’s new Prime Minister.
It is not unusual for successful wartime leaders to be rejected once the peace has been secured. This happened to de Gaulle as well. One reason is that the qualities that make a man a great leader in war are not necessarily those that the people want in peace. The successful soldier-statesman—Wellington, Washington, and Eisenhower—is the exception, not the rule.
How could this be? Churchill must have asked himself as, numbed, he sat taking in the results. Was this the thanks he should receive for the victory he had not only promised but delivered? As usual he had a quip to hide the pain. When his wife told him, “It may well be a blessing in disguise,” he replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” Ironically it was Churchill himself who had noted just ten years earlier in his Great Contemporaries, “It is the brightest hours that fade away the fastest.”
The humiliation of the general election, the realization that the British Empire was not going to survive intact, the knowledge that the United States had supplanted the United Kingdom as the world’s greatest power, and the difficulties in maintaining Anglo-American unity in the onset of the Cold War must have made Churchill very unhappy during this period. Some thought that he might take this opportunity to retire and rest on the laurels of his wartime accomplishments. When I went to England in 1947 as a freshman congressman, no one I spoke with expected Churchill to return to power. After all, he was seventy-two years old and had recently suffered a stroke.
But no one who really understood Churchill thought that he would bow out under ignominious circumstances. Instead he persevered in the House of Commons as the leader of the opposition for six years until, in October 1951, the Conservatives were returned to power and he was once again Prime Minister. Even in a Hollywood movie such a return to power would have seemed like make-believe. But what would have been make-believe for others was real life for Winston Churchill.
As the seventy-six-year-old Churchill again took on the responsibilities of Prime Minister, it was widely assumed that he would delegate power more broadly than he had before. It was also assumed that after consummating his triumphal return he would turn over the reins to his chosen successor, Anthony Eden. But for most it is very hard to give up power. For an old man, it can be the same as giving up life itself.
I talked to President Tito’s wife about this when I was in Belgrade in 1970. She told me about her husband’s last meeting with Churchill. As Tito entered the room, Churchill comically growled at him, “You know, I didn’t like you during the war, but now that you have taken the position you have vis-à-vis the Russians, I find that I like you better.” In fact the two old World War II veterans apparently hit it off quite well.
Churchill, who was in his eighties and had finally retired from politics, was being strictly rationed on his cigars and his alcohol. The still-vigorous Tito puffed away on a big Churchillian cigar and drank his quota of scotch and Churchill’s quota as well. Churchill looked at Tito rather wistfully and said, “How do you keep so young?” As anyone who met him could see, Tito looked so young partly because he dyed his hair. Without waiting for Tito to answer, Churchill said, “I know what it is. It’s power. It’s power that keeps a man young.”
If an older political leader does not suffer from any serious ailments, he will usually make up in wisdom and judgment for what he may lack in stamina, vigor, and mental quickness. When I saw Zhou Enlai in 1972 he was seventy-three; de Gaulle in 1969 was seventy-eight; Adenauer in 1959 was eighty-three. They were still in power because they were stronger and abler than the younger men in their governments.
Churchill simply could not bring himself to give up power voluntarily. He kept putting back the date of his retirement. First he said he would stay until Queen Elizabeth’s coronation; then it was to be until she returned from a trip in Australia; then it was to be until Eden fully recovered from a major intestinal operation; then until after the upcoming Geneva conference. Years passed and Churchill was still firmly planted at 10 Downing Street. Finally he could not ignore his own infirmities or his colleagues’ importunings. He quipped, “I must retire soon. Anthony won’t live forever.” He resigned on April 5, 1955.
• • •
Even at the age of eighty, retirement was not a happy time for this man of action. When Eisenhower returned from the Geneva summit in 1955, he told me of a letter he had received from Churchill. The retired British leader wrote that while he was in some ways relieved not to have responsibility, he felt a sense of “nakedness” when an important diplomatic conference went ahead without him.
I saw Churchill for the last time in 1958 when I went to London for the dedication of the memorial to the American dead in World War II at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I hesitated to ask for an appointment with Churchill because I knew he had not been well. But his aide felt that it would be good for him to talk to someone about problems other than his own physical condition. I had learned long before never to ask a sick man how he feels, because he may tell you. But many, and this is especially true of leaders, want to talk about the world rather than about themselves. When I called on John Foster Dulles in his last months when he was dying of cancer at Walter Reed Hospital, I always asked him for his opinions on current foreign policy problems rather than dwelling on how he was feeling. Mrs. Dulles, his nurse, and his secretary all told me that my visits gave him an enormous boost because they lifted him out of his own desperate troubles.
At the arranged time I went to Churchill’s house at Hyde Park Gate. When I was ushered into his room, I was shocked to see how his physical condition had deteriorated. He was in a reclining chair with his eyes half-closed. He looked almost like a zombie. His greeting was barely audible. He weakly held out his hand. He asked his aide for a glass of brandy and, when it arrived, drank it in one swallow. Then he almost miraculously came to life. The light came back into his eyes, his speech was clear, and he became interested in what was going on around him.
I had read in the morning newspapers a report from Africa that Ghana was considering annexing Guinea. I mentioned it to Churchill and asked what he thought about it. “Well, I think Ghana has enough to digest without gobbling up Guinea,” he growled. With surprising forcefulness he went on to remark that Roosevelt had forced Britain and the other imperial powers to give their colonies independence too soon. These countries, he said, took on the responsibilities of government before they were ready to do so and were worse off than before. In this he echoed a point he had made as we were driving to the White House at our first meeting four years earlier.
I asked for his analysis of East-West relations. He still held firmly to the view that only if free men are strong can they preserve peace and expand liberty throughout the world. He emphasized that there could be no détente without deterrence.
After about sixty minutes I could see that he was tiring. I knew that I would not see him again so I tried—somewhat ineptly, I fear—to tell him that millions in America and throughout the world would be forever in his debt. I just could not find the right words to express my feelings.
As I rose to leave, he insisted on escorting me to the door. He had to be helped out of his chair and he could only shuffle along the corridor with an aide supporting him at each side.
When the front door was opened, we were blinded by a glare of television lights. The effect on him was electric. He straightened up, pushed the aides aside, and stood alone. I can see him now: his chin thrust forward, his eyes flashing, his hand raised in the famous V for victory sign. The cameras whirred and the bulbs popped. A moment later the door was closed. Right to the end his star shone most brightly when the cameras were trained on him. Old age could conquer his body but never his spirit.
• • •
What would Churchill’s message to the free world be today?
Though he was a superb leader in war, Churchill was profoundly committed to peace. He prepared for war in order to avoid it. He waged war with only one goal in mind: to build a world in which a just peace could prevail. He was for peace but not at any price.
On the one hand, he would insist that the only way to keep the peace is to maintain strength. He would continue to warn the West about the dangers of Soviet expansionism and, unlike some present European leaders, would consider Soviet thrusts toward the sources of the industrial world’s mineral and oil resources to be as great a threat as tanks rumbling across the central plains of Germany.
He would applaud Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s concern about Soviet adventurism in the developing world. And while he would not follow every American foreign policy initiative, he would denounce with withering rhetoric the tendency in Europe to consider the United States and the Soviet Union as equal threats to peace.
On the other hand, Churchill would give life to the rather tired and trite cliché “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” He would urge the free world to negotiate with its adversaries in order to reduce conflict where possible and to make the ultimate conflict of war less probable. He expressed his attitude about negotiating with the Soviets in the House of Commons in May 1953: “It would, I think, be a mistake to assume that nothing can be settled with Soviet Russia unless or until everything is settled.”
Despite his awareness of the dire perils we face, Churchill was at heart optimistic—about himself and about the world in which he lived. I believe that his message to today’s world would also reflect the buoyant hopefulness of the last great foreign policy speech he made in the House of Commons, on November 3, 1953. After expressing his concern about the destructive power of nuclear weapons, he said, “I have sometimes the odd thought that the annihilating character of these agencies may bring an utterly unforeseeable security to mankind. . . . There is no doubt that if the human race are to have their dearest wish and to be free from the dread of mass destruction, they could have, as an alternative . . . the swiftest expansion of material well-being that has ever been within their reach, or ever within their dreams. . . . We, and all nations, stand, at this hour in human history, before the portals of supreme catastrophe and of measureless reward. My faith is that in God’s mercy we shall choose aright.”
• • •
Shakespeare wrote that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” During his long life and career Winston Churchill provided examples of all three. Unlike leaders who seek power for its own sake or who find self-definition in possessing it, Churchill sought power because he honestly felt he could exercise it better than others. He believed that he was the only man who had the ability, the character, and the courage to handle some of the great crises of his time. And he was right.
He had the good judgment to be right on most of the things he fought for, and he had the luck to live long enough to be on the scene when his country finally needed the experience and leadership that only he could provide in 1940.
Of the scores of excellent books on Churchill’s life and times, a passage in the last paragraph of a tiny thirty-nine-page volume by Isaiah Berlin describes him best: “a man larger than life, composed of bigger and simpler elements than ordinary men, a gigantic historical figure during his own lifetime, superhumanly bold, strong, and imaginative, one of the two greatest men of action his nation has produced, an orator of prodigious powers, the savior of his country, a mythical hero who belongs to legend as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time.”