“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect,” WROTE TOM STOPPARD: “If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
Why so little of the Holocaust in Churchill's war memoirs? There were many reasons. Intelligence restrictions were still in place, war crimes trials were occurring. Churchill had an understandable reluctance to criticize American officials who had blocked his order to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. Churchill was never never one to open a quarrel with allies over the past. Also, as Lady Gilbert pointed out that it wasn't actually known as the Holocaust for years later.
"You should have fought them in 1945," the Mayor of Liepaja said. "Think of all the trouble you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.” As we stood to leave, he pulled up his shirt, showing scars across his stomach. As a boy, he and his mates would visit the barb-wired beaches after curfew, walking backwards into the water to simulate an invasion. He'd been strafed by Soviet guards. How you think about these things often depends on how you grew up.
"These simple, practical tests, are some of the title-deeds on which a new Italy could be founded." Think of the years of experience, thought, and hard political lessons that went into those basic tenets. How Churchill expressed them in only 201 words, mostly of one or two syllables. How little they are thought of today, when we try to describe certain nations as free countries.
Churchill would have backed French reoccupation of the Rhineland, but he soon gathered that the League of Nations was toothless. Churchill’s theme did not dramatically change in 1936; it merely evolved. As early as 1933 he had declared: "Whatever way we turn there is risk. But the least risk and the greatest help will be found in re-creating the Concert of Europe." The failure of a concerted response over the Rhineland was to be repeated. Each time western statesmen hoped the latest Hitler inroad would be his last.
Churchill and Palestine had a long association spanning two world wars and thirty years. It began when Arthur Balfour declared Britain's objective of a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine. Almost simultaneously, T.E. Lawrence was promising the Arabs sovereignty over lands in the Middle East ruled for nearly half a millennium by the Turks. A reluctant Britain accepted responsibility for the Mandate of Palestine after the war. East Palestine became Arab-ruled Jordan. West Palestine became the source of conflict that has now lasted over a century.
At Christmas 1932, Churchill received as a present “a huge bottle of brandy, and decided to paint it, accompanied by lesser bottles," Johnnie Churchill remembered. "He sent us children scurrying around Chartwell to find them: 'Fetch me associate and fraternal bottles to form a bodyguard to this majestic container.'"
In a flourish suitable to a great work, Paul Reid ends his story on January 30th, 1965 with the best words Lord Moran ever wrote: "The village stations on the way to Bladon were crowded with his countrymen, and at Bladon in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to English earth, which in his finest hour he had held inviolate." Bill Manchester would like that.
James Conant was a liberal. He favored admitting women and minorities, and ultimately Harvard did. I don't think he welcomed anti-Semites, although undoubtedly they existed on his campus. He was, above all, devoted to the free exchange of ideas. "Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant and venomous things that are said," as Churchill once remarked. "But on the whole we would rather lump them than do away with it."
Leaving quietly was what you did in those bygone days. Lord Halifax in 1940 proposed negotiations with Hitler; rejected by the War Cabinet, he did not offer interviews to air his grievances. Nor would such an act of public disloyalty have occurred to him. George Marshall, a great man, had many disagreements with his civilian chiefs. Offered a million dollars for his memoirs, he declined, saying, “I have already been adequately compensated for my services.”
"The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world.... Your friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged. Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected. It is very sad, but we had all better recognise it. At present our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared." —WSC
