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 tra
de 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!”
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