Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill

by Gretchen Rubin

  31

  CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT

  Friends as Well as Allies?

  Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt Had a Warm Friendship

  Churchill and Roosevelt were bound together by affection and respect. Each delighted to share the stage of world history with another of similar outsize abilities. As Roosevelt wrote Churchill, “It is fun to be in the same decade as you.” They shared many common interests: the war, of course; the navy, in which they had both served and which remained a particular interest for both; the study of history and biography; the pleasures of country and city. Each was an aristocrat who sought to represent the common people.

  Their relationship embodied and strengthened the bond between Britain and the United States. In 1939, even before Churchill became Prime Minister, Roosevelt initiated a remarkable correspondence that continued until Roosevelt’s death. They exchanged more than seventeen hundred messages, carried on running jokes, and even exchanged poems.

  Churchill gladly pursued the relationship with the American president; he recognized from the beginning that Britain’s victory, and perhaps even survival, depended on the United States’s support. Roosevelt, for his part, acknowledged that Britain was holding the line against Nazi Germany at a time when the American public opposed entering the war.

  Churchill’s cultivation of Roosevelt was particularly critical for Britain in the period before the United States entered the war in December 1941. In September 1940, Roosevelt consummated the destroyers-for-bases deal, in which U.S. destroyers were exchanged for use of British Atlantic bases, and in March 1941, the United States under Lend-Lease began to “lend” military equipment to cash-poor Britain—a Roosevelt policy hailed by Churchill as “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” Churchill and Roosevelt’s dramatic meeting at sea in August 1941 demonstrated to the world that the two English-speaking countries had a “special relationship.” Churchill was so determined that this first critical wartime meeting go well that, to prepare for the divine service planned for combined American and British crews, he conducted a full rehearsal aboard HMS Prince of Wales while it was on its way to the Atlantic Meeting. There, the two leaders signed the historic Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of principles and aims. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war, the two leaders became official allies.

  Naturally, Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t always agree. Despite occasional differences, however, a warm friendship bolstered their shared objectives and common ideals.

  Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt Did Not Have a Warm Friendship

  The emotional Churchill couldn’t resist the vision of the two leaders of the great English-speaking nations united as war comrades. He did feel some real affection for Roosevelt. Roosevelt, however, was more aloof, more pragmatic. He’d instantly disliked Churchill when he’d met him at the end of the First World War and was further irritated when Churchill let slip, at the Atlantic Meeting in August 1941, that he didn’t remember that first meeting.

  The two men needed each other. Both worked hard to grease their official relationship with the lubricant of camaraderie, to the point that sometimes their heartiness became treacly, as when Prime Minister Churchill signed himself “Former Naval Person” (a coy reference to his former post as First Lord, used to avoid the cold formality of his proper title and to emphasize their common ground). In truth, however, conflict shadowed their association. The two leaders clashed on important issues like imperialism, the speed of American entry into the war, Mediterranean strategy, the opening of the second front, military aid to China, and policy toward the Soviets. Roosevelt returned Churchill’s gestures of personal friendship, but at the same time, he worked unsentimentally to undermine the British Empire and to strengthen the position of the United States.

  The myth of their great friendship is due in part to Churchill’s effusive praise for Roosevelt. Desperate for American support at every stage of the war, he wooed the President with public applause—but he was harsher in private. Away from the microphones, Churchill protested of Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s plan to allow the United States to supply Britain with war materials on credit, that “we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.” His prediction was correct; the United States used Lend-Lease ruthlessly to strip Britain of its assets.

  And perhaps Churchill, for all his protestations of affection, wasn’t as fond of Roosevelt as he said, at least by the end. Without a convincing excuse, he decided not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral in the spring of 1945, nor did he broadcast to the nation on the occasion. By not attending the funeral, Churchill also lost the chance to meet the new president, Harry Truman. Roosevelt had always been the dominant partner in the special relationship, and Churchill had traveled to Washington; with Roosevelt dead, Churchill may have wanted Truman to come to him, to move the seat of the Anglo-American relations to London. At bottom, the special relationship was a means to promote national interests.

  32

  CHURCHILL’S IMAGINATION

  How He Saw History

  A biography attempts to convey a personality, with its peculiar atmosphere and impulses. Churchill’s personality, it happens, was dominated by his sense of English history.

  “The fortunate generations are the homogeneous ones,” Lytton Strachey commented, “those which begin and end, comfortably, within the boundaries of a single Age. It is the straddlers who are unlucky.” Churchill was a straddler. The past, as he imagined it, fueled his powers. He looked backward to a vanished world—the world into which he’d been born—not to the future.

  Churchill’s faith in Britain and its destiny gave him his courage, his optimism, and his ambition. However, the traditional vision of Britain that fitted Churchill for his splendid achievements also divided him from the spirit of the age, and by the end of his life, he’d outlived his own time and the version of the Island story he cherished.

  Churchill’s affinity for history sprang, in part, from the tremendous changes he witnessed in his own life. He was born in 1874, when the Civil War general Ulysses Grant was U.S. president, before the use of electricity, the phonograph, the cinema, the typewriter, the telephone, the radio, or the automobile. In 1898, at Omdurman, he fought in the last British cavalry charge to use lances as weapons. In 1900, during his American lecture tour, Churchill was introduced by Mark Twain—who introduced him then as “the hero of five wars, the author of six books, and the future Prime Minister of Great Britain.” When Churchill entered the House of Commons that year, not even a third of Britons were entitled to vote; he was forty-four years old before any woman could vote. He saw the apex of the British Empire, made strong and rich by the industrial revolution; these advances initially fortified England in its best defense, the ocean, but Churchill would live to see newer technology—first air power, then atomic power—overcome that protective moat.

  Blenheim Palace was the nation’s gift to John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, in thanks for his victories against the French in the early eighteenth century. Churchill was born at Blenheim and might have taken as his personal charge its Victory Column’s inscription,describing the great Duke:

  The Hero not only of his Nation, but of his Age:

  Whose Glory was equal in the Council and in the Field;

  Who, by Wisdom, Justice, Candour, and Address,

  Reconcil’d various, and even opposite Interests;

  Acquired an Influence

  Which no Rank, no Authority can give,

  Nor any Force, but that of superior Virtue;

  Became the fixed important Center

  Which united, In one common Cause,

  The principal States of Europe. . . .

  When raised the highest, when exerted the most,

  Rescued the Empire from Desolation,

  Asserted and confirmed the Liberties of Europe.

  Blenheim Palace was the nation’s gift to John Churchill . . .

  Photo courtesy of AP/Wide World
Photos

  To Churchill, the past seemed as immediate as the present. The places of his childhood reverberated with English history: the Vice-Regal Lodge in Dublin, Blenheim Palace, Harrow, London. “I can see myself . . . sitting a little boy,” he told Harrow students, “always feeling the glory of England and its history, surrounding me and about me.” He believed every prospective officer should read Plutarch’s Lives. To denounce the Munich Agreement, he pointed to lessons from King Ethelred the Unready’s reign. One evening in August 1940, when the Nazis threatened across the sea, Churchill told his colleagues, “I want to discuss the problems of invasion.” They met that night expecting, reasonably enough, to discuss possible German attack; instead, they probed the challenges faced by William the Conqueror in 1066. In 1944, just before D-Day, Churchill asked for all the data on weather, time, and conditions when William had landed on English shores—again, he wanted to study this last successful invasion, even if it had taken place nearly nine hundred years before. This study of history allowed him to see what others missed. Few had shared his belief in Russia’s ability to hold out against Germany in 1941; the Americans estimated that Russia would last only three months. Churchill argued he would bet that in two years’ time, Russia would still be fighting. The generals should read about Napoleon and the 1812 retreat from Moscow.

  Churchill’s historical vision gave him a reverence for the traditional symbols of British power. Despite wartime distractions, he found time to admonish:

  Prime Minister to First Lord 18.IX.40

  Surely you can run to a new Admiralty flag. It grieves me to see the present dingy object every morning.

  When the Foreign Office proposed to plan the evacuation of the royal family, the Crown jewels, and the coronation chair, Churchill flatly refused. Legend foretold that if the apes on Gibraltar ever left, British rule there would end; in 1944, when Churchill learned that the apes’ numbers were dropping, he ordered that every effort be made to keep at least twenty-four apes on Gibraltar. Apes’ names and ages were recorded on the garrison muster, with births and deaths noted in the casualty lists.

  Churchill’s strong sense of history helped him in wartime, because he saw war’s violent disruption as part of the normal progress of Britain. It also convinced him that, no matter how bleak the prospects, Britain would win in the end. So rather than mourn the loss of peace, Churchill rushed to play his part.

  Churchill studied history, and he shaped it. As a consequence, he was preoccupied not only by the achievements of earlier generations but also by how later generations would judge his achievements. To establish his version of events, he wrote voluminous memoirs. “These are my story,” he retorted to criticism of his World War II volumes. “If someone else likes to write his story, let him.” All his books, in one way or another, told his own history. His reports from the field—books like The River War, The Malakand Field Force, My Early Life—were history as he’d seen it as a dashing young subaltern. His biographies, Lord Randolph Churchill and Marlborough, recast his forebears’ records. Slightly more impersonally, in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill filtered a vast history to teach his version of the Island story. He preferred the bold and simple; his sense of the past was too romantic, too vivid, to be strictly accurate. He strove to illuminate the development of the genius of the English race, and in his mind, noble legends were as important as cold facts.

  Churchill’s most significant works, his memoirs of World Wars I and II, were history as seen by a world statesman. Churchill knew that the condition of enduring fame is harsh scrutiny, and he wrote these volumes to vindicate himself. “History will bear me out,” he declared, “particularly as I shall write that history myself.” He admitted that he exploited hindsight to “correct or bury” any mistakes, and he tweaked and even hid the truth when it suited him. Churchill ignored the contributions of those who had opposed or disappointed him—for example, he barely acknowledged the work of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, with whom he battled constantly. Of the War Cabinet’s critical decision to fight on alone during the early days of his Premiership, Churchill claimed:

  Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda. It was taken for granted and as a matter of course . . . and we were much too busy to waste time upon such academic, unreal issues.

  This is simply untrue. Why would Churchill lie to hide the War Cabinet’s debates on just that question? Out of generosity to Halifax; also, publishing this account in 1949, Churchill as Conservative leader had no reason to point out his party’s defeatism in 1940; furthermore, Churchill wanted to emphasize the world’s debt to Britain and so hid the fact that Britain had ever wavered in its high purpose. Churchill’s war memoirs were not detached accounts but rather personal testimony.

  To mold the impression of future generations, in his accounts Churchill depicted “Churchill” with the swashbuckling mannerisms and courtly language worthy of a hero. Of a 1942 visit to the desert front, he wrote, “We sallied forth early to see the prospective battlefield and the gallant troops who were to hold it.” Few contemporaries would have described their movements as sallying forth. One of his much-studied wartime directives began, “Renown awaits the Commander who first . . .” and was known among his colleagues by the opening phrase, “Renown Awaits.” His comrades-in-arms weren’t always capable of the same gallant parlance. Consider this uneven exchange during the Battle of Alamein. Churchill wrote with elaborate courtesy to Air Chief Marshal Tedder to congratulate him on the “magnificent” fighting of his men, who were “playing a glorious part” in battle. In less heroic terms, Air Chief Marshal Tedder replied that they were indeed “determined to make a job of it.” Always conscious of posterity’s eye, and with a vision of himself as a hero in the enduring Island story, Churchill described himself as he wanted to be remembered.

  Churchill worried about history’s verdict, and he appealed to history’s judgment. In July 1940, after France surrendered, and after the French naval commander at Oran refused to hand over or scuttle his warships, Churchill ordered that the British navy sink the French ships so that they could not fall to the Nazis. More than a thousand French died. This violence against Britain’s former ally shocked many, and Churchill himself wept when he announced the attack: “I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and history.” Meeting with Stalin in October 1944, Churchill handed Stalin a sheet of paper, “the naughty document,” which suggested percentages of British and Soviet predominance in Eastern Europe; Stalin ticked his approval. Mindful of future scrutiny, Churchill suggested, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.” Stalin replied, “No, you keep it.” (Far from burning it, obviously, Churchill published it.)

  By supplying his own version of history, Churchill tried to define his time—and his place in it. But although he appears to be a supreme embodiment of his age, he was also outside it. His message to General Wavell about defending Singapore rings as an anachronism; he insisted that the battle must be fought to the last man to uphold the “honour of the British Empire” and the “reputation of our country and our race.” Churchill tried to speak the timeless language of heroes and instead spoke out of the past; this heroic, histrionic language doesn’t belong in 1942. His great speeches evoked the glories and traditions of bygone days—not the promises of the future.

  Some personalities take their color from their age, while others seem to belong properly to a different one. Perhaps, with his love for airplanes, radar, and automobiles, Churchill thought himself a man of the future. He wasn’t. Churchill displayed the imperial spirit of the nineteenth century, with all its confidence, when Britain had been unrivaled.

  Straddlers are unlucky.
“Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted,” reflected Churchill. “Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.” He wrote that in 1930. The quality that the public revered in Churchill—his compelling vision of the heroic past—eventually led them to dismiss him as a historical relic. Churchill lived into an age in which the values he defended—of social tradition, soldierly glory, and British superiority—were undermined. His certainty didn’t suit his age of change and doubt. At the moment of his country’s forlorn hope, his traditional qualities, braced by his imagination, became once again necessary, and he led the country to victory. But he quickly went out of fashion again, afterward.

  33

  CHURCHILL AND HITLER

  Nemesis

  Most great figures are remembered singly—not Churchill. He’s always framed with his great adversary, Hitler. Juxtaposition highlights certain facts and obscures others, though not always in predictable ways. Consider the two men: one was cheerful, witty, and magnanimous; the other was humorless, cruel, a hypochondriac; one was polite, abstemious, austere, self-made; the other was gluttonous, bibulous, sybaritic, and born into privilege. Each believed in his military genius, artistic soul, and divine destiny as leader of his people. Each witnessed the end of the empire he’d worked his life to strengthen.

  In contrast to Hitler’s evil, Churchill’s qualities glow bright and pure. Churchill was lucky to have been pitted against one so unambiguously wicked; had history instead paired him with Gandhi, for example, he’d be remembered differently.

  In the view of history, despite the presence of other imposing figures—Roosevelt, Stalin, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Chiang Kai-shek, de Gaulle, Tojo—it is the opposition of Churchill and Hitler that captures the essence of the Second World War.