On September 1, 1939, claiming Germany had been invaded, Hitler responded by crossing the border into Poland. The Second World War had begun. Churchill, reinstated as first lord of the admiralty, broadcast to America his view of those countries that remained neutral: “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”
In May, Churchill became Britain’s prime minister, on the same day that Hitler launched his blitz across Europe. With Holland, Denmark, and Belgium overrun and France, England’s last ally, about to sign an armistice, and with a quarter-million British troops, the country’s entire army, stranded at the French port city of Dunkirk, Churchill still refused to quit.
“Of course, whatever happens in Dunkirk,” he told his cabinet, “we shall fight on.”
Even in England’s hour of peril Churchill was brutally candid. “Even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island, or a large part of it, were subjugated and starving,” he told the British people, laying out the worst, “then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.”
No leader was ever so clear-eyed about the villains he stood against. An instinctive anti-Communist, he understood nevertheless that it was Hitler’s Nazism that posed the immediate danger. “We have but one aim, and one single irrevocable purpose,” he said after Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. “We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us, nothing. We will never parlay, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.” He said the same in private. “If Hitler invaded hell,” he told his private secretary, John Colville, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Churchill was equally alert to the post–World War II threat of Communism. At Yalta in February 1945, he alone pushed for free elections in Poland. Sick, wearied by the war, and tragically unwary of the new global menace from the left, Franklin Roosevelt felt he could rely on the old charm; he could “handle” Stalin. In his view, free elections in Poland were a “distant” concern for the United States. To Churchill, the issue of free elections remained paramount. When Stalin broke his promise to hold them, Churchill saw the writing on the wall.
He would have to do so as leader of the opposition. Once again, Churchill had to suffer the cruel indignity that democracy demands of those who seek elective office. He was called home from his meeting with Stalin and Truman at Potsdam to accept his party’s defeat at the polls.
Once again, Churchill made the best of it, offering a finer, more courageous vision from the opposition benches than the world was getting from those running the government. Accepting an invitation from Truman to visit his home state of Missouri, Churchill gave the speech at Westminster College that gave the “Iron Curtain” its name.
From his first electoral defeat in 1899 to his harshest defeat at the very hour of military victory in 1945, he lived out that defining fact of democracy: You win some; you lose some. The politician who sticks to his principles will know both. “Courage for some sudden act, maybe in the heat of battle, we all respect,” his young ally Anthony Eden observed, “but there is that still rarer courage which can sustain repeated disappointment, unexpected failure, and shattering defeat. Churchill had that too, and had need of it, not for a day, but for weeks and months and years.”
That’s what made this man, whom the British people returned to the premiership in 1951.
A Canadian pollster, Allen Gregg, once told me that there are three elements to political success in any country: motive, passion, and spontaneity. To lead you must know where you’re leading. If a politician cannot tell you on the spot why he or she is there, they shouldn’t be there.
And if a politician lacks true feeling about his country and his cause, we must wonder why he or she seeks office in the first place. As for the spontaneity factor, let’s just say that Winston Churchill would not be at home among today’s politicians. He would have kept his cigar lit in the White House, whatever the prevailing sanctions. He would have loathed the company of politicians with every position pretested and prescripted.
When other politicians would cling to office, he was never afraid to fling it away, to risk popular rejection—which came to him on so many cruel occasions—or to start all over again. He didn’t worry what his critics thought, didn’t ask what someone else’s definition of “is” was. He wrote his own speeches because no one else but him had the sentiment, the knowledge, the passion, or the wit to write for Winston Churchill.
The goal of World War II, this great man said, was “to revive the status of man.” He wanted to raise up the individual beyond the reach of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world. His life stands as an example of what a free man can be.
CHAPTER SIX
Common Ground
We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are. That is the fact.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
I will now tell you when and why I became a Democrat.
My two teenaged sons are fascinated with the sixties. Maybe it’s that their own time is too caught up in being politically correct. They have to look to my era for charismatic outlaws such as Dennis Hopper and Keith Richards. Or maybe it’s simply because they respond to the delight in my eyes, the giggle in my voice every time I reach back to those wild, intoxicating days.
How can we treasure memories from that decade of drugs and demonstrations and assassinations? The truth is, just like everyone else of my generation, I do. There was a bite in the air back then, a sweetness and a craziness. I was at the University of North Carolina, a grad student in economics, in the fall of 1967. Economics was the most practical major I could justify given the times. Everyone cool was taking philosophy or going to Yale for theology. We dismissed law school, and business school even more, as “shop,” hopelessly bourgeois. What ideas, what concepts did you deal with in those little career-builders?
It was at Chapel Hill that I heard a fellow grad student, well-groomed in a blue denim work shirt and shined combat boots, refer to “the fascists” backing the Vietnam War effort. It was the first time I ever heard anyone employ this alien-sounding word in casual conversation. He was hardly alone in such ideological self-importance. I remember some guy shouting, “No pictures” at an antiwar meeting, as if J. Edgar Hoover himself, given the necessary evidence, was poised to swoop in the door and arrest this dangerous cell of grad school types and assistant professors of psychology.
In October I made my way to the March on the Pentagon, that first big antiwar demonstration. The mall was a sea of protesters. Socialists and worse were handing out their tired appeals, screeds made suddenly more sprightly by “the movement.” This was the giant pink umbrella of which they dreamed. And everywhere there were wholesome marchers: nuns, mothers with baby carriages. Accompanying it all was this joyous sense of festivity. It was an Indian summer day with the smell of trampled grass filling the air, and what was happening was a real jamboree of popular indignation.
I was not so much a demonstrator myself as an attendee. I have a clear recollection of strolling across Memorial Bridge on the other sidewalk from the marchers. I was there to see, not to do, and I preferred to keep a useful distance. Yet, despite my studied nonalignment, I could not help meeting up with the ugly side of such a demonstration.
As the crowd reached the Pentagon lawn, regiments of National Guardsmen moved forward to meet us. In a sequence of impressive, awful maneuvers, the military force took up positions along a perimeter that put them face-to-face with the arriving throng of protesters. For the first time in my life I knew the sense of being in a mob as I found myself urging the crowd to charge. The sight of all that force amassed against us—Lyndon Johnson’s a
nswer to the country’s unrest radicalized me, if only temporarily.
The great news was that while we were marching, Eugene McCarthy was preparing to run against Johnson for the nomination. He was soon to become a household name. Every night I would troop over to the student affairs building to watch Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid narrate the ongoing saga of Clean Gene’s uphill challenge to a sitting president. When he won 42 percent compared to the 49 percent Johnson won entirely on write-ins, the press declared him the victor.
Then, Robert Kennedy joined the race, which really heated things up. You were either a “McCarthy” person or a “Bobby” person. It became an enduring intramural struggle. To this day I’m curious to know which side a person was on.
I will always be grateful to Eugene McCarthy. He was an Irish-Catholic, a politician, an intellectual, and a wit. No matter that he was incapable of leading his “children’s crusade” to victory in ’68, he deserves historic credit for having shown young people like me that someone in power cared about the consequences of that horrible war. But I also owe him something more personal. I think it must have been he who reawoke my delight in politics that had died in Dallas. He was a man of reason, of deliberation, and of maddeningly good humor. He was the kind of Democrat I could see myself becoming.
I was deep in the stacks of the UNC library in April of ’68 when a friend walked up to me to tell me that Martin Luther King had been murdered. I was visiting Montreal the night of the California primary. By then I was rooting for Bobby. I had realized McCarthy was not going to beat the prowar Hubert Humphrey. But Kennedy at least had a chance. I remember waking up at about 1:30 that morning and turning on the radio to learn that Bobby had won. But then, for some reason, the networks seemed to be replaying the horror of Dallas five years earlier. Then it hit me: This was in real time. Robert Kennedy had been shot and was in critical condition.
On the way to the airport the next morning, the Canadian cab driver kept repeating, “The giant has stubbed his toe.” The horrid act of a Palestinian nationalist had unleashed this man’s own repressed nationalism.
Back at my apartment in Chapel Hill, I was glued to the television, watching the postmortems and funeral. I can’t recall a day so grim as when that train carrying Bobby and his family rolled mournfully from New York to Washington. Jack’s death had held a certain terrible beauty, but Bobby’s was a tragedy without grace.
In August the Democratic convention in Chicago proved to be one of the great broadcast events of all time. My roommates and I watched it gavel-to-gavel. I remember Cronkite signing off one night, telling us all to get some sleep, promising he’d be back again with continuing coverage at 10:30 the next morning. It was as if Uncle Walter was tucking us all in for the night.
I had a personal interest in that convention. The Tet offensive had displayed the enemy’s unrelenting strength. In response, General William Westmoreland had asked for yet another two hundred fifty thousand troops. Since we were unable to win the war, we were going to have to sacrifice more lives just to keep from losing it.
By now my student deferment had elapsed. Johnson’s “moratorium” had given us just one year of grad school. I knew I was now 1-A, directly on the firing line.
I’d made a list of possible options inside and outside the military. The only one I liked said “Peace Corps.”
When I finished my two months of training near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I headed for my assignment in Swaziland, a newly independent kingdom in southern Africa, where I was to run a small-business development program. As I was preparing to depart for training, I went out to catch all the new movies, especially The Graduate. Remember when the family friend counsels Dustin Hoffman to think “plastics”? Laughing at that kind of crass mentality was what the sixties were all about. Ideas—and ideals—were what was important.
Of course, as I was poised to leave the country, I also needed to check my own values. Was I going to Africa because I wanted to help Africans? Or just to beat the draft? As pathetic as it may seem today, my symbolic answer was to respond to a call for a blood donation for a young African-American hemophiliac. It may not seem like a big deal, but then again, I am the kind of person who almost faints at the sight of any blood.
I was leaving the country at a moment when people my age felt that they could make a difference. The civil rights bill had just been passed. The antiwar movement was still optimistic, its demonstrators against our entanglement in Vietnam, not against America itself.
I myself was headed for the adventure of a lifetime. Remember what Ernest Hemingway wrote about spending his twenties in Paris? For the Peace Corps volunteers who served with me, Swaziland has been our “moveable feast.” I savor the memories. Before I left I voted in my first presidential election. I would never face a tougher choice. While I thought Nixon would be more effective in extricating us from the war, I also felt Humphrey deserved credit for his early commitment to civil rights. And I liked his vice-presidential running mate, the cerebral Edmund Muskie of Maine. He reminded me of McCarthy. I voted for Humphrey.
On my last day in New York, my new Peace Corps comrade, John Catanese, and I went to see Hair. It was a hot ticket, and were lucky to find seats for the Wednesday matinee. Though they were far back in the balcony, I remember seeing well enough to fall big for this seductive actress who played Sheila. Someone later pointed out that she was the only girl who didn’t take off her clothes. It was Diane Keaton. It was a nice way to leave America.
* * *
Whenever people ask me about Africa, I always start with the story of the black mamba. I had heard tales of how this incredible snake could move at thirty miles an hour, how it could catch a horse on the run. I knew that its venom attacked the nervous system, that you had about fifteen minutes once it got you. I knew that, unlike other snakes, it didn’t spiral horizontally but rather vertically. I had heard stories about the mamba jumping into the back of moving station wagons. I had heard the Swazis warn us not to let it get ahead of us in the veld because it strikes backward.
All this prepared me for that moment one hot afternoon, riding through the Grand Valley, a place that Catanese, who was stationed there as a rural development adviser, called “the Valley of the Doomed.” I was driving a British-made Ford Escort. That meant that I was sitting on the right side. Rhodes Nhumalo, head of the Swazi Chamber of Commerce, was in the passenger’s seat to my left. Gary Rowse, another volunteer, was in the backseat directly behind me.
Did I mention it was hot? Let’s just say it was the first time I ever saw heat waves rising up from a dirt highway. We were driving along when I suddenly spotted a dark line up ahead. It was about six feet long. It seemed to stretch halfway across the road. Its head was positioned right at the exact spot I was careening toward at fifty miles an hour. Suddenly, as I was about to pass it, the snake rose on its tail, reaching right to my open window. Flinching, I veered the car over to the left. All I could think was that the serpent was in the backseat.
Gary, a good friend for thirty years who died last year, had the more dramatic view. When I’d started breathing again, he told me that the force of the car whizzing past had flipped the snake backward. I never again doubted a mamba story. That thing could move!
Swaziland is a little country squeezed between South Africa and Mozambique. It’s divided into three elevations: high-veld, which is mountainous: low-veld, which is desert and looks like the Africa of Tarzan movies; and middle-veld, which is somewhere in between. Spend any time in Africa and you learn that it’s the altitude that decides the temperature. You want to be as high as possible.
Nhlangano, the old Afrikaner village where I was posted, was middle-veld. It looked like the town in a Western. Five or six buildings lined each side of the street: a post office, a Barclay’s Bank, a butcher shop, a general store, a police station.
I was escorted to Nhlangano by Simon Xhumalo, minister of commerce, industry, and mines. He gave me two explicit instructions. The first was to “develop
the province.” His second was, “You are not to eat at the hotel. You are to make your own meals.” To Simon Xhumalo, that little hotel held bad memories of colonialism—though not bad enough to keep him from having lunch there that day.
That night, my first in Africa alone, I stayed in my temporary housing, the assistant district commissioner’s house. It was very nice, having been built for young servants of the British Empire out on their first colonial posting. Though there was no electric power in Nhlangano, the house had a wood furnace, which I used to heat up a bath. As I was chopping the wood, a couple of Swazi kids came up to me and asked for a job. I think it was at about that time, grasping the remoteness of the spot, that I came to grips with how completely alone I truly was. All of a sudden I was in Africa, in the middle of nowhere, with no other Americans anywhere around.
Walking down the street later that afternoon, I came upon an older white man, Mr. Dye, who told me that he ran the hotel, the Robin Inn. He said that if I ever got lonely just to come by and say hello. But for the next several days I mainly kept to myself, listening to my shortwave radio as the sun went down, savoring broadcasts from the Voice of America and the BBC. Then, like a deus ex machina, company arrived. Cliff Sears, an architect from Chicago, had been assigned to design a community center nearby. The first thing he said was, “We are eating at the hotel tonight.” Thank God he had had none of my Catholic school squeamishness.
My attitude toward the commerce minister’s first decree was more respectful. My interpretation of his instruction that I “develop” a fourth of his country was to do what I’d been sent to do; Visit the two hundred or so small traders in the province and help them improve their businesses. But as was common with many Peace Corps programs, the host government had bit off more than it could chew. The deal was that Washington would pay our salaries, seventy-two dollars a month, and that Swaziland would provide transportation. Eventually, the four of us in small-business development received a pair of Suzuki 120 motorbikes. That meant I had to share mine with Jim Morphy, who’d been posted to another province—one hundred miles away.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 158
