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.
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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.
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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 fri
ends 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 o
f 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.”
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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.
Leaders Page 4
