William Manchester was a lyrical writer who brought more fans to Churchill than anyone save Martin Gilbert (and, nowadays, Andrew Roberts). It was my privilege to know him and even to work with him, vetting his manuscript for the second volume of his trilogy, The Last Lion. (The third and final volume was completed by Paul Reid.)

Bill made many detail mistakes, but nobody could top him for magisterial prose. Except possibly Sir Winston himself. We also have him to thank for confirming with a reliable witness a famous quotation long considered apocryphal. (And, for perpetuating another one, which Churchill didn’t originate, but definitely used with relish.)

Clem and Winston in the Gents

The late great columnist Charles Krauthammer liked to cite the amusing encounter between Churchill and socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee in the Gentleman’s Convenience in the House of Commons, circa 1951. Attlee is standing over the trough as Churchill enters on the same mission. Observing Attlee, Churchill shuffles as far away as possible.

Attlee: “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?”

WSC: “Every time you socialists see something big you want to nationalise it.”

I labeled this a misquote, consigning it to the “Red Herrings” appendix in my quotations book, Churchill by Himself.  But Christian Schneider of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel led me to a reliable attribution. Mr. Schneider advised that he had the quote from William Manchester’s The Last Lion, vol. 1, Visions of Glory 1874-1932, page 35.

The reference is to a 21 October 1980 interview Manchester conducted with Sir David Pitblado (1913-1997). A civil servant, Pitblado was principal private secretary to both Attlee and Churchill. Moreover, he was a reliable source. So, with great delight, we may restore this one to the ranks of the genuine.

Huns at your throat or feet

Bill Manchester had an eye for the stellar quotation, and many famous Churchill lines bedizen his biography. One of these—only six pages into his first volume, was about the Germans. “The Hun,” exclaimed WSC, “is always either at your feet or at your throat.”

That has been around a long time. Some time ago the National Memo’s Joe Conason criticized Joe Scarborough’s ambivalent attitude toward a certain politician by misquoting Churchill: “It’s what he said about the Hun, which is: They’re either at your feet or at your throat.”

“You’ve compared me to a Nazi,” Scarborough retorted. “No, I didn’t,” said Conason. “Churchill wasn’t talking about the Nazis, he was talking about The First World War. [Those Huns] were not Nazis.”

Now it’s true that all Huns were not Nazis. (The original Huns go back to the Fourth Century.) But Churchill often referred to Nazis as Huns. What a joyful combination of Red Herrings this is!

Scarborough and Conason were both wrong. Churchill first quoted the line during the Second, not the First World War. It occurred in his second speech to Congress, 19 May 1943. But by identifying it as a “saying,” it was clear he was crediting it to somebody else:

The proud German Army has once again proved the truth of the saying, “The Hun is always either at your throat or your feet….”

A great line, but no cigar for originality. So this one remains among the “Red Herrings” in the upcoming expanded edition of Churchill in His Own Words, working subtsitle, An Encyclopedia of His Greatest Expressions. It is coming in 2024 from Hillsdale College Press.

Further reading

“All the Quotes Winston Churchill Never Said”: An up-to-date list, 2024.

“An Empty Taxi Arrived and Clement Attlee Got Out,” 2012.

“Clement Attlee’s Noble Tribute to Winston Churchill,” 2018.

“Manchester and Reid: The Last Lion, Defender of the Realm,” 2023.

“McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee: A Vanished Age of Political Respect,” 2019.

Churchill by Himself, my encyclopedia of Winston Churchill’s most quotable remarks, is to be republished. (If the publishers can ever agree about what form and substance they will allow each other to produce.) To the the original 4000 quotes I’ve added so far 600 new ones.

The “Red Herrings” appendix of misquotes has also grown apace. That, however, is always kept up to date online. You can look it up:

All the “Quotes” Churchill Never Said

Misquotes Part 1: Accepting Change to European Union

Part 2: Fanatic to Liberty

Misquotes Part 3: Lies to Sex

Part 4: Sexism to Ypres

A trove of misquotes

The original “Red Herrings” appendix (2008) contained about 80 misquotes. Since then, with new discoveries it has more than doubled to 175. This is not surprising, since Churchill continues to engage the public interest. A browser search for “Winston Churchill” yields 87 million hits. (Abe Lincoln still comfortably leads with 144 million.) Since 2008, 270 new books about Churchill have been published, never under 14 per year. The recent record is 34 in 2015. So we should not be surprised that misquotes have grown apace.

Verification methods have never varied, although the research tool is improved. This is a digital file constantly expanded by new publications by and about Churchill. Yes, there are still “new books by Churchill”—if you consider his private letters and writings. These comprise The Churchill Documents, published through 2019 by Hillsdale College Press. The last half-dozen of these giant references add another five million words to the 20 million-word Churchill canon. Add another 80 million words about him by historians, biographers, contemporary diarists and memoirists. Of course, this is not every word he ever uttered. But if we can’t find a quote there, or in a valid source elsewhere, we file it as “unattributed.”

Ear-witness: “Every time you see something big….”

New research sometimes causes us to change a quotation’s status. Long regarded among misquotes, is this famous exchange of urinal humor: Clement Attlee, in a House of Commons washroom, as Churchill shuffles away from him: “A bit stand-offish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill replies: “Every time you socialists see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

This was long regarded as sheer fiction. But we finally noticed that a former Churchill private secretary, David Pitblado, claimed to have been an ear-witness. Pitblado’s account, to William Manchester, is in The Last Lion, vol. 1, page 35. Manchester oftentimes played fast and loose with facts, but Pitblado was not known for embroidering them. So we moved this exchange to the ranks of the genuine.

Among the misquotes: “Bring a friend, if you have one…”

Alas, a world-famous exchange between Churchill and Bernard Shaw has now joined the ranks of misquotes.

Shaw supposedly writes WSC: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.” Churchill supposedly replies: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”

Alas for quoters, Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, blew the story apart. In the Churchill Papers he found a set of letters (CHUR 2/165/66,68) in which both Shaw and Churchill denied the exchange. The play in question was “Buoyant Billions” (1948).

Fresh fodder for misquotes…

…constantly appears in new Churchill quote books. Most entries lack attribution, even a date—which makes them immediately suspect. A recent example is The Smart Words and Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (2017). Hilariously, even the title is not original: The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill (2001) was another highly inaccurate compilation.

Reviewing the former, William John Shepherd found 28 entires, 11% of the book, unrelated to anything Churchill said by all the resources we could muster. A dozen were credited to other persons, like: “There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst is that half of them are true.” (Churchill said this, crediting a “witty Irishman.”)

Smart Words furnished another 20 brand new misquotes for our “Red Herrings” department. They range from the banal (“You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer”) to the vulgar (“At Harrow they taught us not to piss on our hands”)  to Yogi Berra-style (“It is never necessary to commit suicide, especially if you live to regret it”).  They contain a number we wish Churchill had said, but cannot verify: “If I could not be who I am, I would most like to be Mrs. Churchill’s second husband.”And: “A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality.”

All of these add to the growing store of Churchill non-quotations. The misquotes industry—what Nigel Rees called “Churchillian Drift“—is going strong.

Memory: “The stars still shone in the sky”

Lost in the pell-mell rush to denigrate his memory was the 8oth anniversary of Churchill becoming Prime Minster, 10 May 1940. I thought of his words as I read the ignorant, ill-informed, false attacks on his character. They occurred amid protest over a tragic event that had nothing to do with him. He wrote at the end of Their Finest Hour:

And now this Britain, and its far-spread association of states and dependencies, which had seemed on the verge of ruin, whose very heart was about to be pierced, had been for fifteen months concentrated upon the war problem….With a gasp of astonishment and relief the smaller neutrals and the subjugated states saw that the stars still shone in the sky….

And now his defenders in far-spread association have concentrated on the slur problem. The battle for accurate information is still being fought. Who’d have thought his memory would ever be in jeopardy? Many faithful colleagues have joined the effort. The work goes on, the cause endures.

Letters to the Editors

“Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill, and the comparison is ludicrous.” John Ivison, National Post, 4 June 2020.

Mr. Ivison correctly writes that the comparison is ludicrous. Then he proceeds to state that Churchill was “massively flawed.” He says “Churchill ‘signed off’ on terms at the Yalta Conference that consigned tens of millions to Soviet Rule.” At that time Soviet troops occupied almost the whole of Eastern Europe. The only alternative for Churchill would have been to start a third World War. Next: “Churchill was prime minister at the time of the Bengal famine in 1943 when an estimated three million people died. His only possible defence was that he was preoccupied by the war in Europe.” The fact is that on 8 October 1943 Churchill sent an order to Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India, on the “actual famine,” saying “every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes to deal with local shortages.” —Terry Reardon, International Churchill Society Canada

Churchill as Racist

“Was Churchill a racist? Yes, but he still deserves respect.” —Max Hastings, The Sunday Times 14 June 2020.

Max Hastings writes that Winston Churchill’s decisions at the time of the 1943-44 Bengal famine were “the gravest blots on his lifetime reputation.” In fact my great-grandfather felt strongly the responsibility of empire and saw himself as bound in duty to advancing the well-being of its indigenous peoples.

Of course Britain did not meet all requested food deliveries in the famine: not only was Japan in control of the Bay of Bengal at the time, as well as Burma, Thailand and Malaya, but as Dr. Tirthankar Roy, of the London School of Economics, wrote: “The war cabinet . . .  believed what the Bengalis told it: there was no shortage of food in Bengal.” And as Arthur Herman, nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his book Gandhi & Churchill, concluded: “Absent Churchill, India’s 1943 famine would have been worse.”  —Randolph Churchill, Kent

Bengal: What Did Gandhi Say?

A week later a reader quoted Viceroy Wavell that Churchill didn’t answer him about food relief, so I had a go. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel…

Mr MacShane should educate himself on what Gandhi not Churchill did about the Bengal Famine. As did Arthur Herman, Pulitzer nominee for Gandhi and Churchill: “For all his reputation as a humanitarian, Gandhi did remarkably little about the emergency. The issue barely comes up in his letters.” In February 1944, Gandhi finally brought himself to reply to British anxieties about food relief, writing to Wavell: “I know that millions outside are starving for want of food. But I should feel utterly helpless if I went out and missed the food [i.e. independence] by which alone living becomes worthwhile.” Which of them was the humanitarian?

India (again)

“How Has Winston Churchill Become a Central Figure in the British Black Lives Matter Debate?” —Alex Hudson, Newsweek, 17 June 2020. 

Since Churchill was manifestly not “a man of his time,” you incorrectly represent his racial attitudes. From his twenties to his eighties, his views on the rights of native peoples marked him as a dangerous radical to the establishment of the day. Most of his alleged slurs of Indians, for example, are hearsay from Leopold Amery, who crammed more racist epithets into one of his personal diaries than Churchill ever imagined. Churchill  meanwhile praised “the unsurpassed bravery” of 2.5 million “Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu [and] the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers,” in World War II. —Richard M. Langworth

Africa

“The Churchill factor: Boris Johnson would rather everyone talked about Winston.” —Otto English, Politico, 15 June 2020.

Castrating people is a new Churchill outrage, and I thought I’d heard them all. Churchill did not advocate for Boer War concentration camps. In his maiden speech (18 February 1901) he complimented the Boers’ “unusual humanity and generosity” in the war and urged a generous peace. He did fruitlessly argue with his Boer jailer about equal rights for native Africans. He did say dreadful things about Gandhi, though the elephant crack is pure fiction. And he also said: “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” (Gandhi replied with a “good recollection” of Churchill and “that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”) Gandhi took a regrettably detached view of the 1943 Bengal famine; Churchill didn’t. Arthur Herman, biographer of them both wrote: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine would have been worse.”

The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya had more native opponents than supporters. Both it and the local government indulged in atrocities, though the Mau Mau’s were worse. If Mr. English would consult the cabinet minutes, however, he would find only two instances where Churchill mentioned the Mau Mau. In one he was concerned over loss of life. In another he warned against “mass executions.” Jomo Kenyatta, father of modern Kenya, said: “Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” —RML

Ireland and the Jews

“What Churchill’s legacy means for the country now.” Jessica Baldwin, Camden News Journal, June 18th.

Ms. Baldwin says it is immoral to look at the “reality” of Churchill “and still believe him to be unsullied.” Of course he was sullied. She correctly notes his support for the Dardanelles/Gallipoli operation and the Black and Tans. As to the rest of her catalogue, Churchill once said: “…it would hardly be possible to state the opposite of the truth more compendiously.”

Churchill didn’t “partition” Ireland. He negotiated the Irish Treaty which gave the Republic independence. Tanks to Tonypandy? They hadn’t been invented yet. In cabinet he spoke of the Mau Mau twice, once to warn against “mass executions.” Bengalis starved from several factors, despite Churchill’s efforts. (What was Gandhi’s position on the famine? Detached and non-committal.)

Britain didn’t go to war “to save the Jews” but to save liberty. Churchill jailed Britain’s leading fascist Oswald Mosley—an odd act for an alleged fascist. The colonial war effort was often cited by Churchill. He praised “the unsurpassed bravery” of 2.5 million “Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu.” Serious inquiry will show that Churchill believed people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of his country to protect those rights.

We can believe Churchill was always right, and we can believe with Ms. Baldwin that we’ve been “fed a line.” Churchill himself offered a middle approach: “It seems to me, and I dare say it seems to you, that the path of wisdom lies somewhere between these scarecrow extremes.” —RML

“Nuking the Maralinga people”

In March I published a modest glossary,  “Churchill Derangement Syndrome: A is for Aryans, R is to Racism.” How far “CDS” has progressed since may be seen by a correspondent who replied: “N is for nuking the Maralinga people.”

I seriously investigated this charge, which was new to me.  I carefully read the link above, and about Australians who witnessed and remembered the 1952 nuclear tests. The Churchill Documents and several scholars offer accurate data. Conclusions:

(1) You can’t have nuclear weapons without testing whether they work. (2) Australian permission for testing in the uninhabited Monte Bello islands was sought in 1950 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee. (3) Churchill had replaced Attlee when the tests occurred: two on the islands in 1952, two in the Great Victoria Desert in 1953.

* * *

Moral considerations were considered, but they involved wildlife, not people. On 21 May 1952 Lt. Col. Lipton (Lab., Lambeth Central) questioned Churchill over the destruction of animal life. Churchill replied, trying to be humorous:

The report of a recent special survey showing that there is very little animal or bird life on Monte Bello Islands was one of the factors in the choice of the site for the test of the United Kingdom atomic weapon. I should add, however, that an expedition which went to the  islands fifty years ago reported that giant rats, wild cats, and wallabies were seen, and these may have caused the Hon. Member some anxiety. However, the officer who explored the islands recently says that he found only some lizards, two sea eagles and what looked like a canary sitting on a perch.

Emrys Hughes (Lab., South Ayshire) was not amused: “There are still civilized people in this country who are interested in bird and animal life.” This finally produced a mention of humans—by Mr. Churchill: “Certainly I think everything should be done to avoid the destruction of bid life and animal life and also of human life.” Churchill may been referring to his well-known belief that the bomb’s apocalyptic nature might discourage its use.

* * *

(4) The next tests occurred in 1956, on the Monte Bellos and Australian mainland. These did produce fall-out exposure for some people (the numbers are uncertain). The buck stops with the Prime Minister, but the PM was now Anthony Eden. Churchill was over a year retired. (5) Therefore, Churchill did not “nuke the Maralinga people.”

(6) Massive deserts and uninhabited islands are obviously the best places for nuclear testing. (7) Sixty years later, some Australian veterans who witnessed the original tests developed cancer. Their opinions were divided as to why they contracted it.

(8) The tests led to the nuclear umbrella Britain and America provided Australia, close to two expansionist communist states. (9) The Soviet Union’s last nuclear test was in 1990, the UK’s in 1991. America stopped in 1992, France and China in 1996. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996 placed a de facto moratorium on testing. India (twice), Pakistan (twice) and North Korea (six times) have since violated the moratorium.

“Subsidiary craters spouting forth”

Churchill said when attacked by the son of a harsh critic: “Isn’t it enough to have this parent volcano continually erupting in our midst? And now we are to have these subsidiary craters spouting forth the same unhealthy fumes!”

To Arthur Herman’s truths about the Bengal Famine, a reader asked about Japan’s post-invasion plans for India, on which I had offered the Japan’s occupation of the Philippines:

A better example would be Malaya where there was a large resident Indian community. How many Indians did the Japanese slaughter there? And how could the Japanese have topped the British record for allowing famines in its colonies? While you’re at it, could you please present any evidence that Japan had actually intended to conquer India? Did it have the capability to do so without compromising its main objective in China?

This is easily answered: Imperial Japan sought to change Malaya’s official language to Japanese. Malayans were expected to bow to Japanese. Chinese fared particularly harshly, but Malays and Indians were not exempt. The 11/43 Greater East Asia Conference did not include Malaya because the Japanese military wished to annex it. Japan’s plans for India are well detailed. Of course, in 1941, Imperial Japan believed it could do much that turned out to be a little optimistic.

The occupations moderated when Japan started to lose the war. Thanks, in part, as Churchill said, “to the unsurpassed bravery” of 2.5 million “Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu [and] the response of the Indian peoples.” As Arthur Herman wrote, in the 20th century in peacetime, the Raj “handled famines with efficiency.” For balanced pros and cons on Britain’s role in India see Dr. Tirthankar Roy, How British Rule Changed India’s Economy.

In the splintering crash of this vast battle the quiet conversations we had had in Downing Street faded or fell back in one’s mind. However, I remember being told that Mr. Chamberlain had gone, or was going, to see the King, and this was naturally to be expected. Presently a message arrived summoning me to the Palace at six o’clock. It only takes two minutes to drive there from the Admiralty along the Mall. Although I suppose the evening newspapers must have been full of the terrific news from the Continent, nothing had been mentioned about the Cabinet crisis. The public had not had time to take in what was happening either abroad or at home, and there was no crowd about the Palace gates.

I was taken immediately to the King. His Majesty received me most graciously and bade me sit down. He looked at me searchingly and quizzically for some moments, and then said, “I suppose you don’t know why I have sent for you?” Adopting his mood, I replied, “Sir, I simply couldn’t imagine why.” He laughed and said, “I want to ask you to form a Government.” I said I would certainly do so. —Winston S. Churchill, “The Gathering Storm,” 1948

Churchill explained that his commission did not extend to creating a national government. But in the crash of events, and Germany’s invasion in the West, he believed a coalition was essential. He had always favored coalitions in grave times. Now he would call upon members of all parties to “stand by the country in the hour of peril.”

The Grand Coalition

The Labour Party leader Clement Attlee shortly arrived, with Arthur Greenwood. Would they join a coalition under his leadership? They would. Both entered the Cabinet, Attlee as Lord Privy Seal. Churchill received a similar commitment from Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Party, who became Air Minister. Magnanimity prevailed. Defying criticism from Chamberlain friends-turned-enemies—he made Chamberlain Lord President of the Council.

It was a remarkable collection of talent and former critics. Chamberlain’s stalwart ally Lord Halifax remained Foreign Secretary. Anthony Eden went to the War Office, A.V. Alexander to the Admiralty. It was probably the easiest task Churchill would have for many months. He reflected that in the recent past, he had come “far more often into collision with the Conservative and National Governments than with the Labour and Liberal Oppositions.” Churchill himself remembered his chief past failure, over the Dardanelles. Then he had attempted to direct “a cardinal operation of war” without plenary authority. Not this time: “I assumed the office of Minister of Defence, without however attempting to define its scope and powers.” Churchill continued:

Thus, then, on the night of the 10th of May, at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.

Honor to them all, heroic figures from “all parties and all points of view,” who came together and, eventually, prevailed. On this night of the 10th of May, raise a glass to Old Excellence.

Comments

Any thoughts from readers will be posted here. An old friend, escaped from the Nazis to Belgium, got out in time to America, had a distinguished academic career, and  is still going strong…

I still vividly remember waking up on this day 80 years ago in Antwerp and hearing thunder but seeing no clouds. My mother told me that war had begun, and I felt joy about not having to go to school. Only later did I learn that this day was important for Mr. Churchill as well. A truly unforgettable day, almost a century ago. All through the years I always felt relief that things had gotten better than that day. For the first time now, I lack that confidence. -M.W.

My grandfather was a housemaster at Winchester College in 1940. Then as today, Winchester has no central dining. Boys eat in their boarding houses. One day in the summer term of 1940 Phil, a small boy in my grandfather’s house was walking back to his house, late for lunch. Phil loved my grandfather dearly, and told me this story at least twice. As he walked, he was behind two elderly housemasters. Both had fought in World War I and one had been a POW. Neither knew he was behind them. One said, “I really don’t see any choice. We are going to have to surrender. There’s no possibility of our surviving otherwise.” The second agreed. After lunch the worried Phil asked my grandfather: “Is it really true Sir? Are we going to have to surrender?” My grandfather didn’t pause: “Of course we are going to win!” Phil replied, “But Sir, how do you know?” My grandfather said: “Churchill says so, and that’s good enough for me!”  From that moment Phil never doubted that we would win the war. -R.B.

Whether invented by the President or his scriptwriters, some of Trump’s nicknames were very effective. “Low-energy Jeb” torpedoed Governor Bush‘s 2016 presidential campaign better than any debate gaffe. “Mini-Mike” didn’t help Mayor Bloomberg‘s in 2020. But except in extreme cases like Hitler, Churchill’s name-calling was more effective and less wounding. Especially when he rather admired certain qualities in opponents. (He called Lloyd George a “cad” in his youth, but ever after praised the “Welsh Wizard.”)

* Asterisks indicate nicknames not used in a public setting. Churchill, after all, had some discretion. But I leave them in for fun. 

Nicknames: Admiral Row-Back to Can’t Tellopolus

Admiral Row-Back: Admiral Sir John Roebuck (1862-1928), Royal Navy officer. Commanded the initial Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915. Having nearly succeeded, he turned back after losses to mines, incurring Churchill’s permanent loathing and censure and an appropriate nickname.

*Block: Herbert H. Asquith (1852-1928), Liberal Prime Minister, 1908-16. He let Churchill dangle in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli debacle, which sent WSC packing as First Lord of the Admiralty. This was a private nickname between Churchill and his wife. It may refer to Asquith’s frequent role as a block to Churchill’s proposals.

Bloodthirsty Guttersnipe: Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), German Chancellor and Führer, 1933-45. First publicly declared in a broadcast after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. It wasn’t the first Churchillian jab, nor by any means the last.. There is no shortage of insulting nicknames in Hitler’s case; but this is as good an example as any. (See also “Corporal Schicklgrüber,” in comments below.)

Boneless Wonder: James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929-35. A devastating comparison to a circus attraction, applied in 1931. Churchill was ridiculing Ramsay Mac’s lack of principle and wavering domestic policies. In private he considered MacDonald a servant of Crown and Parliament. But only in private.

Canting Bus Driver: Frank Pick (1878-1941), headed London Passenger Transport Board 1933-40. “Never let me see that-that-that canting bus driver again.” Churchill wrote this in red ink on a memorandum from Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper when Pick resigned.

*Can’t Tellopolus: Panagiotis Kannelopoulos (1902-1986), Minister of Defense, Greek exile government in Cairo, 1942-45. Churchill was impatient with his indecision about Greek resistance to the occupying Germans. Alexander Cadogan, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, heard these “mutterings from Churchill’s bathroom, between the splashings and gurgles.”

Chattering Cad – Green-Eyed Radical

*Chattering Little Cad: David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Liberal Prime Minister 1916-22. Said in 1901, when Churchill was still a Conservative. After he switched to the Liberals in 1904, his attitude changed. He rarely spoke ill of Lloyd George afterward, despite many provocations. WSC’s wife regarded LG as treacherous. He duly refused to join the Churchill coalition in 1940.

*Coroner: Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). Conservative Prime Minister, 1937-40. Originally coined by Brendan Bracken (also “Ironmonger” for Baldwin), this remained in the family lexicon. In 1961, Lady Diana Cooper introduced young Martin Gilbert to Randolph Churchill by saying “he hates the Coroner.” (A bit strong—he surely didn’t hate Chamberlain).

*Dull, Duller, Dulles: John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, 1952-60. After Stalin’s death, Churchill argued for a “settlement” of the Cold War, but Dulles (and Eisenhower) were obdurate. “Ten years ago I could have dealt with him. Even as it is I have not been defeated by this bastard. I have been humiliated by my own decay.” —Churchill at the Bermuda Conference, December 1953.

Green-eyed Antipodean Radical: David Low (1891-1963), New Zealand cartoonist. Churchill had a certain affinity for the left-wing cartoonist whose attacks he admired. He called Low the greatest of modern cartoonists. There was mutual respect despite political differences, and Low drew a beautiful cartoon tribute on WSC’s 80th birthday.

Half-Naked Fakir – Llama

Half-Naked Fakir: Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948, Indian independence leader. The worst sobriquet attached to the Great Mahatma, when Churchill thought Gandhi an upperclass Brahman posing as a champion of the downtrodden. Yet they both nursed a private respect for each other and, in the end, were more forgiving. See “Welcome, Mr. Gandhi” herein.

Holy Fox: Edward Wood, 3rd Viscount Halifax (1881-1959, Foreign Minister, 1938-40, Ambassador to Washington, 1940-46. Verified by Halifax biographer Andrew Roberts, who writes: “It was a Churchill family nickname, of course a reference to his High Church beliefs as well as his love of hunting. And a certain amount of political foxiness….”

*Home Sweet Home: Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995), British Prime Minister 1963-64. Neville Chamberlain’s “eyes and ears” in Parliament, he always maintained that the Munich deal had saved Britain by giving it an extra year to prepare for war, ignoring the fact that it also gave Hitler an extra year, and he prepared far more rapidly. (His name was pronounced “Hume,” but that didn’t stop Churchill.)

*Llama: Charles de Gaulle ( 1890-1970 ), French General and President. Lord Moran wrote: “Was it true, [Lady Limerick] asked, that he had likened de Gaulle to a female llama who had been surprised in her bath? Winston pouted, smiled and shook his head. But his way of disavowing the remark convinced me that he was in fact responsible for this indiscretion…”

Limpet to Prince Palsy

Lion-hearted Limpet Leader: Clement Attlee (1883-1967), Labour Prime Minister 1945-51. Many disparaging cracks about Attlee (arriving in an “empty taxi”) are apocryphal. But this was an April 1951 jibe at Attlee and Labour MPs clinging to power. Churchill and the Conservatives turned them out in a general election the following October.

Minister of Disease: Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Minister of Health 1945-51, founder of the National Health Service. One of the rougher nicknames, applied in the Commons, 1948. “…is not morbid hatred a form of mental disease, and indeed a highly infectious form?” Churchill asked. He also called Bevan a “squalid nuisance.”

Old Grey Tabby: Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Conservative Prime Ministers, 1902-05. After he succeeded Churchill at the Admiralty in 1915, WSC feared the “Old Grey Tabby” would dissolve the Royal Naval Division. (Balfour did resemble a tabby cat in old age, but Churchill continued to admire him, and memorialized him in Great Contemporaries.)

Pink Pansies: Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and his friends. Member of Parliament, 1935-45. I am aware this violates P.C. decorum and will no doubt be added to Churchill’s “sins.” True, Nicolson was bisexual, but a) Churchill was emphatically not homophobic, and b), the reference (Parliament, late 1945) was to non-combative young Tory MPs.

Prince Palsy: Paul of Yugoslavia (1893-1976), Prince Regent of Yugoslavia, 1934-41. His palsied hand signed a treaty with Hitler. This  assured German occupation, the end of his Regency, and Churchill’s disdain. Exiled in Kenya, he appealed for refuge in Britain, but Churchill considered him a traitor and war criminal.

Scheming Prelate to Turnip

Scheming Prelate: Damaskinos Papandreou (1891-1949), Archbishop of Athens, 1945-49. Churchill, mediating the Greek civil war in late 1944, allegedly asked if he was “a man of God or a scheming Mediterranean prelate?” Assured that he was the latter, Churchill supposedly said, “Good, he’s just our man.” (Not verified)

Snub-nosed Radical: Liberal heckler, 1887. Aged only twelve, young Winston was attending a pantomime where he heard a man hissing a portrait of his father. He burst into tears, then turned on the perpetrator: “Stop that row, you snub-nosed radical!” This may be Churchill’s first political zinger.

Spurlos Versenkt (Sunk without a Trace): Sir Benjamin Smith (1879-1964), Labour Minister of Food, 1944-46. After he resigned from Parliament, Churchill searched “for the burly ‘and engaging form of the Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has departed ‘spurlos versenkt,’ as the German expression says—sunk without leaving a trace behind.”

Turnip: Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), Conservative Prime Minister, 1925-29, 1935-37. Baldwin made Churchill Chancellor in 1925, but later kept him out of the Cabinet. After his final resignation, “S.B.” appeared in the House of Commons smoking room. Churchill quipped, “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

Useless Percy to Wuthering Height

*Useless Percy: Eustace Percy, First Baron of Newcastle (1887-1958). Board of Education President, 1924-29. At the Exchequer 1924-29, Churchill tried to lower the defense budget. Percy and Minister of Health Chamberlain  were opposed. “Neville is costing £2 millions more and Lord Useless Percy the same,” WSC wrote his wife on 30 September 1927.  “…these civil departments browse onwards like a horde of injurious locusts.”

Whipped Jackal: Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Italian Prime Minister, 1922-43, Duce of Fascism, 1943-45. Churchill praised him briefly before the war, but after joining Hitler he became a “whipped jackal… frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph!”

Wincing Marquess: Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne (1845-1927), House of Lords, 1886-1927. Churchill, 1909: “he claimed no right…to mince the Budget, [only] the right to wince when swallowing it. Well, that is a much more modest claim…. If his Party are satisfied with the Wincing Marquess, we have no reason to protest.”

*Wuthering Height: John Charles Walsham, 1st Baron Reith (1889-1971),  BBC Director General, 1923-38. The towering Reith was briefly in the wartime Coalition Cabinet. But he’d kept Churchill off the air in the 1930s, and no love was lost between them. WSC rejoiced to have seen “the last of that Wuthering Height” around 1940.

The McKinstry Epic

Leo McKinstry’s book 738 pages—twice the size of the previous Attlee-Churchill book and is riveting from cover to cover. Scrupulously fair, McKinstry tells the story, backed by a voluminous bibliography, extensive research and private correspondence. Thus he captures Churchill’s generosity of spirit, and Attlee’s greatness of soul.

“Sometimes turbulent, often fruitful, theirs was a relationship unprecedented in the annals of British politics,” McKinstry concludes. It was partly “a reflection of Churchill’s greatness, and partly of Attlee’s patience.” Attlee was the longest-serving party leader of the 20th century, Churchill one of the longest-serving prime ministers. In 1940-55, one of them was always PM.

There have been other great rivalries, but the bond between them was unique, especially for persons with such opposite views. One spoke for liberty and a “minimum standard” guaranteed by the State. The other declared himself a socialist, but practiced a far milder form of socialism than dialectic Marxists. In the war, Churchill had but one goal: defeating Hitler. Attlee, as Deputy Prime Minister (a position Churchill created expressly for him) ran the country. In doing so, he set himself up for his own premiership.

Contrasts and similarities

Churchill lived luxuriously; Attlee mowed his own lawn and cleaned his roof gutters. Churchill drank champagne and spirits; Attlee went to bed with a cup of cocoa. Churchill holidayed in Monte Carlo, Attlee in Frinton. WSC had an exalted lineage, was hailed as a genius and pronounced a future prime minister. “No one,” says McKinstry, “ever discerned such a prospect for Attlee.” Clementine Churchill once called him “a funny little mouse.”

Both wrote autobiographies, but Churchill’s My Early Life is a triumphal progress compared to Attlee’s As It Happened. The latter was described as “lamely written, clumsily constructed…as boring as the minutes of a municipal gas undertaking…. Not [exactly] Alcibiades or Churchill.”

Both were devoted to wives who were much alike: “fiercely loyal but often exhausted by the strain of public life.” Clementine suffered from neuritis, Violet from sleeping sickness. Clemmie was a lifelong Liberal. Vi only joined Labour five years after her husband became party leader.

Independent thinkers

Attlee and Churchill were Conservatives in their youth, and soon disillusioned with the Conservatives. H.G. Wells inspired Churchill’s belief in the need for the State to act as reserve employer and provide welfare assistance. But while Churchill joined the Liberals, Attlee joined Labour. Churchill became a crusading reformer, Attlee a welfare worker and activist in London’s East End. There he helped implement Churchill’s labor exchanges and National Insurance. Deciding that East Enders were “decent people who had been denied fair opportunities,” Attlee began questioning the whole organization of society. “The seeds of his socialism had been sown.”

Attlee and Churchill were patriots with faith in Britain and the Empire. Both fought in World War I, Churchill in Belgium, Attlee in Gallipoli. The latter always approved of that campaign. “I have always regarded the strategic conception as sound [but] it was never adequately supported,” Attlee said in 1960. Gallipoli made Attlee admire Churchill as a strategist. This paid dividends when they worked together a quarter of a century later.

Nailed to their respective masts

By the time the India issue arose in 1930, Churchill had returned to the Conservatives. Attlee believed in Britain’s role in India, but supported the reforms of the India Act, which Churchill stridently opposed. From across the aisle, Attlee offered a sympathetic appraisal. “Trouble with Winston: he nails his trousers to the mast and can’t climb down.”

Neither were they of the same mind about rearmament—particularly air power. Calling Churchill a “brilliant erratic genius,” Attlee referred to a Churchill book, The Aftermath. In it, he said, Churchill’s “brilliant imagination” envisioned control of military air power by the League of Nations! Churchill snorted that the Nazi threat demanded a national response. “I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany.”

But Attlee had to mollify his left, which considered Churchill an “uncompromising right-winger.” Meanwhile, Absent Eden and Duff Cooper, McKinstry writes, “only Churchill was ready to stand with Labour.” But “that just emphasized how badly isolated he still was from the Tory political mainstream.”

The Great Coalition

World War II threw them together. McKinstry accurately describes the fateful May 1940 meeting when Attlee refused to join a national government under Neville Chamberlain. This effectively made Churchill prime minister. Attlee took criticism from his left, but responded: “I never believed that Winston had been hostile to the working-classes.”

“They jousted constantly,” writes McKinstry, “though Churchill, with his quicksilver tongue, usually had the last word against the leaden Attlee.” They frequently dined together. Yet Churchill did not invite Attlee to join The Other Club, saying he was not really “clubbable.” Politically, McKinstry explains, Attlee had “to perform a balancing act between the left of the party,” but would do nothing to undermine the Coalition. “I am sufficiently experienced,” he told the outspoken socialist Harold Laski, “to know that a frontal attack with a flourish of trumpets, heartening as it is, is not the best way to secure a position.”

Critic in chief

Their confrontations were pointed, but amusing. Once Churchill told the Cabinet: “Well, gentlemen, I think we can all agree on this course.” Attlee shot back: “You know, Prime Minister, a monologue by you does not necessarily spell agreement.” Sir David Hunt, a private secretary who served both, said Attlee would accept the explanation, “This is the way we have always done it.” But “you wouldn’t dare say that to Churchill.” He would instantly reply, “That is a very good reason for doing it differently this time.”

Attlee was not averse to telling off the PM in the bluntest language, albeit privately. By himself, he once banged out a letter on his battered typewriter. Churchill’s habits at meetings were disruptive, he complained. He was often unprepared, refusing to read the relevant documents. “I would ask you to put yourself in the position of your colleagues [and ask yourself whether] you would have been as patient as we have been.” Instead of blasting back, Churchill consulted his “familiars.” They all said Attlee was right. Clementine wrote: “I think that’s very brave of Mr. Attlee and I’m sure he’s representing the views of the Cabinet…and indeed all your friends and well-wishers.”

Tactics and strategy

They were united on the big things, but sometimes differed in detail. Early on, Attlee urged Churchill to repeal the 1927 Trade Disputes Act, which Labour hated. Churchill as Chancellor had helped pass it. He was sympathetic, but resisted, because he knew it would never get by the Tory-dominated House of Commons. In 1941, Attlee wanted to dismiss Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s appeasement toady, as head of the Civil Service. Churchill calmly passed. He let Wilson retire gracefully in 1942—reversing the usual image of an impulsive Churchill vs. a careful Attlee.

McKinstry correctly represents (this writer is honored to be quoted) that it was Attlee, not Churchill, who authorized the fire-bombing of Dresden. He cites Stalin’s first question to Churchill at Yalta: “Why haven’t you bombed Dresden?” Attlee, McKinstry writes, had advocated mass bombing since 1940. He “had few qualms about this decision,” but later believed concentrating on specific targets would have been better.

By the last wartime summit conference in Potsdam, the election was on. Votes would be counted before the meeting ended. Churchill, confident of victory, courteously invited Attlee to accompany him. By the way, would Attlee like the services of one of his valets? McKinstry writes: “Attlee, socially conventional if politically radical, felt no guilt about accepting the offer.”

Attlee’s triumph

Before Potsdam in a campaign broadcast, Churchill said a Labour government would need to enforce its programs with “a kind of Gestapo.” The country disapproved of that language and Attlee took advantage. His responses contrasted Churchill the war leader and Churchill the party leader.

Attlee’s election victory shattered Churchill. Yet his basic decency triumphed over moroseness. “We have no right to feel hurt,” McKinstry quotes him. “This is democracy.” To a private secretary he advised: “You must not think of me anymore; your duty is to serve Attlee, if he wishes you to do so.” The secretary wept.

Like Churchill, Attlee had no compunctions about using the atomic bomb to end the war. He also consulted with Churchill over Anglo-American joint nuclear research. From Lake Como, nursing his regrets after the election, Churchill wrote Attlee: “My concern…is what the Americans will do. I apprehend they will be increasingly shy of imparting further developments.”

In the 1950s

Ardent socialists were not content with Attlee’s mild, businesslike leadership. Soon they were attempting to replace him. Attlee quietly pushed on with social restructuring and nationalization. Like Churchill, he supported the foundation of the State of Israel and opposed British membership in any form of federal Europe.

After the 1951 election Churchill returned to Downing Street. He regarded the Labour domestic record “a mess,” but would brook no criticism of his old deputy. Once at Chartwell, a local MP referred to “silly old Attlee.” Churchill thundered: “Mr. Attlee is a great patriot. Don’t you dare call him ‘silly old Attlee’ at Chartwell or  you won’t be invited again.” His rival reciprocated—and then some. Churchill, Attlee said, was “the greatest leader in war this country has ever known, [who] stood like a beacon for his country’s will to win.” Once, after a 1962 Royal Academy dinner, Harold Nicolson recorded that Churchill, aged and feeble had almost to be carried out: “‘We may never see that again,’ said a voice behind me. It was Attlee.”

Ave atque vale

Attlee was in the Lords when Churchill died. Aging and enfeebled, he stood to address the House. “We have lost the greatest Englishman of our time,” he said. McKinstry quotes the Daily Mail: “Emotion choked Earl Attlee’s voice to near inaudibility as he described the tears rolling down Sir Winston’s cheeks when he spoke of the Nazi atrocities.”

Attlee and Churchill raises a question worth considering. Must politics always be a vicious cycle of name-calling and vituperation? Churchill and Attlee declare otherwise. They flung political charges back and forth, but never insulted each other. Whether on the same or opposite side, they went out of their way to share their views. They didn’t use the media to bludgeon each other—and likewise the media didn’t use them. Courtesy and respect do not mean surrender. We may learn from their example. We have a way to go.

Further reading on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project 

Clement Attlee, “The Churchill I Knew,” Part 1.
Clement Attlee, “The Churchill I Knew,” Part 2.
Bradley P. Tolppanen, “Two Views of Churchill’s Relationship with Clement Attlee”

Your book Churchill By Himself is a treasure to which I frequently refer. I am a retired professor who recently lost his wife. I am preparing a memorial to her and found Churchill’s words as quoted in Andrew Roberts’ recent biography to be perfect. The sense of his words is that his wife Clementine was was a frequent, strong and fair critic of his writings, always helpful. I know that is not much to go on but I would appreciate corroborating information.  —M.S., via email

A: “Here firm, though all be drifting”

I will have to ponder your question, because his remarks about Lady Churchill are mainly tributes to her as wife, friend and advisor, not literary critic–although of course she was that too. I don’t think she vetted many of his books. An exception perhaps is The World Crisis, which she experienced personally, often painfully. “Here firm,” he often said of her in those harder days, “though all be drifting.”

Her counsel was more frequently sought over his speeches, but was sometimes rejected. In 1945, for example, she warned him not to say the Labour Party would have to rely on “some form of Gestapo” to enforce their programs if they were elected. Aside from the injudicious comparison, voters had a hard time seeing Clement Attlee, the mild-mannered Labour leader, as a stormtrooper. (I can’t resist a note: In the 1980s a London friend, lifetime Labour voter, said the activities of certain London Labour councils “indeed remind me of the Gestapo.” Whoops!)

“…shaking her beautiful head [over] some new and pregnant point I am developing…”

There are probably many instances where she closely influenced his compositions. We must look out for them. (I am compiling a new, extended and revised edition of Churchill by Himself.) Her role as critic was noted by many beside her husband. One such was  Lady Diana Cooper, quoting WSC in on page 512 of my book. I will elaborate on that by supplying some of the surrounding words:

Calm she also had, with a well-balanced judgment of people and situations—consistent and reliable. She often knew the sheep from the goats better than Winston did. “Clemmie sits behind me on the platform, shaking her beautiful head in disagreement with some new and pregnant point I am developing,” I remember his saying, with pride in her stable Liberalism, after some Tory meeting. Her devotion never subjected her to becoming a doormat or to taking the easier way with her high-powered Hercules.

Lady Diana’s tribute to CSC is beautiful. You can read it in a few minutes, and you should. Her son, Lord Norwich, did not know it existed until we wrote him for reprint permission. The full text (elaborated somewhat with excerpts from her other writings) is on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project website.

“Warm summer sun, Shine kindly here…”

I will keep your request in mind and add anything I find to this page. Baroness Spencer-Churchill died on 12 December 1977, outliving her husband by over a dozen years. After cremation, her ashes were placed in Churchill’s grave at Bladon at a private family service on 16th December.

My sympathies on your loss. I cannot imagine that myself, and always hope I shall go first. This was Churchill’s luck. It is, I realize, selfish. On wifely tributes, my favorite, from Mark Twain to his wife Livvy, also applies to to Clementine:

Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light.
Good night, dear heart,
Good night, good night.

A great joy of reading The Churchill Documents is their trove of historical sidelights. Volume 22 (August 1945—September 1951, due late 2018) covers the early Cold War: the “Iron Curtain,” the Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift and Korean War. It reminds us of the political battles swirling around the Anglo-American “special relationship.” The issues seem very clear in hindsight. Seven decades ago, the future was unknowable. Take Governor Dewey and the question of America’s commitment to world security.

The Dewey Lament

In late 1950, Churchill received a letter from twice-unsuccessful presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. The New York governor took issue with his fellow Republican, former President Herbert Hoover:

I have hesitated for a long time about burdening you with this [but] I am taking the liberty of imposing upon you…. Mr. Hoover made a speech night before last, the implications of which are appalling to me. The press reports today it has had wide and unhappy repercussions in Great Britain and on the Continent.

I am still not quite sure why I ran again [for president in 1948] but in any event, having no ambitions or expectations of having any other office I am free to proselyte to the limit of my capacity for the point of view expressed in my speech and intend to do so. [Churchill, a lover of concise English, must have blanched at that.]

If you find any spot on the horizon more cheerful than I do, I should appreciate hearing of it. The world is filled with gloom and almost in extremis.¹

Not “another man or dollar…”

Probably a lot of people beside Dewey wondered why he had run again (he had lost to FDR in 1944).  But to me, the surprise was to find Dewey, a former Republican nominee, taking issue with Hoover the last Republican president. They certainly didn’t like each other. Hoover reportedly said Dewey had “no inner reservoir of knowledge on which to draw for his thinking…. A man couldn’t wear a mustache like that without having it affect his mind.”

I asked Professor George Nash, Hoover’s biographer, what Dewey was referring to. Dr. Nash referred us to Hoover’s broadcast of 20 December 1950, the text of which he sent. He also helped us compose a footnote to Dewey’s note to Churchill:

On December 20, Hoover gave a speech to advocate a Western-hemisphere-oriented “Gibraltar” geopolitical strategy, a buildup of American air and naval forces, but not of its army, focused on defending the Western Hemisphere and the free island nations on the Pacific and Atlantic rims, like Taiwan and the UK “if she wishes to cooperate.” Hoover would also refuse to send “another man or dollar” to continental Europe for its defense until​ the non-​communist nations there strengthened their own military forces. His advice (denounced by his critics as isolationist) differed from President Truman’s plan, announced just the day before, to send more U.S. troops to western Europe to assist in NATO’s defense preparations.²

“Some great common bond…”

As World War II had wound down, America’s attitude toward the postwar defense of Europe was a major concern of Churchill’s. The Churchill Documents contain many examples of this. ³ Churchill’s worries continued after Roosevelt’s death. What would be the attitude of the new president? In May 1945 Churchill wrote Truman, asking for a “standstill order” on the movements of U.S. forces. Truman replied, “I must not have any avoidable interference with the redeployment of American forces to the Pacific.”⁴

To Churchill’s relief, Truman adopted a robust attitude toward Soviet aggression. The President tacitly (though not publicly) approved of Churchill’s forceful 1946 message about the Iron Curtin. He responded vigorously to communist challenges in Greece and Turkey. When the Russians seemed to hesitate in withdrawing troops from Iran, Truman sent a naval task force led by the battleship Missouri into Sea of Marmara.⁶

In 1948, Stalin threatened to cut off Allied access to Berlin. Truman and Prime Minister Attlee defied him with the Berlin Airlift. In the House of Commons, a jubilant Churchill congratulated Labour with gusto.⁷ He even hoped for “some great common bond of union, like we had in 1940.”⁸ It was typical of Churchill’s lifelong preference for coalitions at times of crisis.

“We cannot buy [Europe] with money…”

Hoover was not proposing American isolation. He wanted America armed to the teeth, able to repulse any challenge. Like Churchill, he voiced “the need to preserve Western Civilization on the Continent of Europe [and] our cultural and religious ties to it.”⁹

They diverged in two critical areas. The first was the atomic bomb, which the Soviets had by then acquired. Hoover said the bomb was “a far less dominant weapon than it was once thought to be.”¹⁰ Churchill differed profoundly. “It may well be,” he had declared in 1946, “that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread, and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.”¹¹

Hoover also balked at helping a Europe that refused to help itself. “The test is whether they have the spiritual force, the will, and acceptance of unity among them by their own volition. America cannot create their spiritual forces; we cannot buy them with money.” Churchill was doing his best to create unity of purpose and collaboration, but this view was anathema to him. With the best spiritual will and unity, he declared again and again in those years, Europe could not defend itself. It was America’s obligation to do everything to help.

Otherwise, however, the Hoover and Churchill theses run parallel. Hoover like Churchill favored peace through strength. He advocated a joint naval and air strategy, a unity of minds between the United States and the British Empire and Commonwealth. That is what Churchill had worked for most of his life.

“I would denounce such a plan scathingly”

Churchill’s 1950 reply to Dewey was brief: “It is a comfort to me that you felt Hoover’s speech was ‘appalling.’ I think that your own declarations are of far more consequence.”¹² But two years later Eisenhower was elected. And Eisenhower, like Hoover, seemed betimes to regard the atomic bomb as just another weapon.

Oddly or ironically, Dewey now proposed a defense posture much like Hoover’s. He and Churchill met in New York in January 1953, before Eisenhower took office. They were joined by John Foster Dulles, about to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of State.

The details of that meeting will appear in the final volume 23 of The Churchill Documents. We already know much of it from Never Despair 1945-1965, Martin Gilbert’s final Churchill biographic volume. On 7 January Churchill cabled his Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Chancellor of the Exchequer R.A. Butler:

Dewey proposed a scheme for a Pacific Treaty between all Pacific powers including the Philippines, Formosa [Taiwan], and the like, excluding (repeat excluding) Great Britain. I said I would denounce such a plan scathingly. Dulles then gave a long account of the negotiations leading up to the Anzus Treaty, and how the Labour Government had made no objection to it at all.

I explained our point of view. Dewey, who is thoroughly friendly, then said that if I objected so strongly, he would let his baby, i.e. the Pacific Treaty, die. In fact I could consider it dead. On the spur of the moment he said that an alternative plan might be for the United Kingdom and the United States to make a joint declaration (comparable to our guarantee to Poland in 1939) that if Communist China attempted to occupy Indo-China, Burma or any other countries in the Pacific Area, we and the Americans would declare war.¹³

“Great Slab of a Face”

Jock Colville and Christopher Soames, respectively Churchill’s private and parliamentary private secretaries, were present during this chilly interview. Dewey suggested that Churchill “could cast a spell on all American statesmen and that if he were directly associated with the economic talks, the fears of the people and of Congress would be aroused to such an extent that the success of the talks would be endangered.” Colville continued:

Winston took this very reasonable statement ill, but Christopher and I both took pains to assure Dulles afterwards that we thought he was absolutely right. Irritated by this, Winston let fly at Dewey after dinner and worked himself into a fury over certain Pacific Ocean questions. Christopher and I again applied soft soap subsequently. We told Dewey that a sharp debate was the PM’s idea of a pleasant evening…. But…Winston was really worked up and, as he went to bed, said some very harsh things about the Republican Party in general and Dulles in particular…. He said he would have no more to do with Dulles whose “great slab of a face” he disliked and distrusted.¹⁴

So it was that Thomas Dewey reversed himself, but Churchill’s views remained consistent. He went away with grave doubts about Foster Dulles, who would confirm his misgivings by his attitude toward a Soviet summit at the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower the following December.

“I tell you all this,” Churchill concluded in his cable to Eden and Butler, “to show you the rough weather that may well lie ahead in dealing with the Republican Party who have been twenty years out of office; and I feel very sure we should not expect early favourable results. Much patience will be needed.”¹⁵

And that indeed is another story—one that The Churchill Documents 1951-1965 shall relate.

Endnotes

¹ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 22, August 1945-October 1951 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming).

² See Herbert Hoover, “Our National Policies in This Crisis,” Broadcast on 20 December 1950, in Addresses Upon the American Road 1950-1955 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1955), 3-10. Online at http://bit.ly/2NQXOs2.

³ Larry P. Arnn & Martin Gilbert, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, The Shadows of Victory, January-July 1945 (Hillsdale College Press, forthcoming, October 2018.)

⁴ WSC to Truman, 12 May 1945; Truman to WSC, 21 May 1945, ibid.

N.B. Material referred to in footnote 5 is omitted in this excerpt.

⁶ Churchill to Attlee and Bevin, 7 March 1946, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁷ Winston S. Churchill, “Foreign Affairs,” House of Commons, 10 December 1948, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁸ Churchill, speech at Leeds, 4 February 1950, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

⁹ Hoover, “Our National Policies,” 4.

¹⁰ Hoover, ibid., 5.

¹¹ Winston S. Churchill, Zurich, 19 September 1946, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill By Himself (London: Ebury Press, 2012), 315.

¹² Churchill to Thomas Dewey, 30 January 1951, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 22.

¹³ Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 791.

¹⁴ John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1940-1955, 2 vols. Sevenoaks, Kent: Sceptre Publishing, 1986-87, II 320. Note: It is widely reported, but without attribution, that Churchill also said Dulles was “the only bull who carries his china shop with him.”

¹⁵ Gilbert, Never Despair, 791.

___________

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project is rapidly completing final volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the official biography. (The name is somewhat of a misnomer; no one has ever censored any material.) Suitably, all thirty-one volumes will be complete by June 2019: the 75th Anniversary of D-Day. It will be fifty-six years since Randolph Churchill and his “Young Gentlemen” including Martin Gilbert began their work. Coinciding is a Hillsdale College cruise around Britain. A fitting climacteric.

After World War II,  The Churchill Documents offer testimony to Churchill’s vast preoccupations. Volume 22 (August 1945-October 1951, due late 2018) brings the stark realization of a new threat to liberty. Urgent messages flew across the ether between Washington, London, Ottawa, Paris. Speeches were made, partisans quarreled, editorials raged. There were communist incursions in the Balkans. The Red Army stalled on removing its troops from Iran. There was Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, a coup in Czechoslovakia. The Berlin Airlift was won, China was lost. War broke out in Korea.

These critical papers, amassed  by Sir Martin, represent every day of Churchill’s life. Woven between the weighty issues are lighter interludes. Documents of small importance—except to Churchill, his family, his colleagues, scholars. They round out our picture of a the man in a unique and personal way.

One of these was written by a Labour Member of Parliament. He became Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, KG OBE PC FRS (1916-1995).  He served thirty-three years in the Commons. His first cabinet position was the same as Churchill’s: President of the Board of Trade. By canny electioneering, he became prime minister in 1964-70 and 1970-76.

Wilson fancied himself part of the “soft left.” No one could ask for a more partisan advocate. And yet there was this deep collegial respect between him and the veteran Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Churchill.

Early on Wilson supported socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Health Service. But in April 1951, the Labour government introduced NHS medical charges to meet the financial demands of the Korean War. In protest, Wilson, Bevan and John Freeman resigned from the government. Churchill, leading the opposition and smelling an election, trumpeted the split. Privately, however, there was this interlude. I post it as bait, for there is much more like it to come in The Churchill Documents. Order them today.

Harold Wilson: Recollection

(A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers, pages 267-68)

Winston Churchill was, above all things, a Parliamentarian. He loved the House, he had dominated it over the years. In its most degenerate days it had refused to listen to his warnings and had treated him with disdain and hostility. His loyalty to Parliament, and his obeisance to the courtesies of an almost forgotten age, caused him to take personal initiatives which the world of today might find it hard to understand.

When Aneurin Bevan and I resigned from the Attlee Government in April 1951, because we could not accept the unrealistic arms policy forced on the Government—and in Bevan’s case its consequences for the National Health Service—Winston came up to us. He expressed sympathy with us: we were facing a situation which had been much familiar to him, though, as he pointed out, we would never be obsecrated as he had been. We had gone out with honour, but, he added with a twinkle in his eye, he and his party would make the most of the situation which resulted.

* * *

That evening Brendan Bracken sought me out. He had been charged, he said, “by the greatest living statesman, for that is what Mr. Churchill is,” to give me a message to convey to my wife. First, Mr. Churchill wanted me to know, he had been “presented” to my wife, otherwise he would not presume to send her a message. The message was that whereas I, as an experienced politician, had taken a step of which he felt free to take such party advantage as was appropriate, his concern was with my wife, an innocent party in these affairs, who would undoubtedly suffer in consequence.

He recalled the number of occasions his wife had suffered as a result of his own political decisions. Would I therefore convey to her his personal sympathy and understanding? Thanking Bracken, I went home about 1 am…. I conveyed the message, which was greeted with gratitude and tears. I was enjoined to express her personal thanks. On leaving home the next morning I was again enjoined to see “the old boy” and make sure I delivered the message.

* * *

In the early evening I saw Winston in the smoke-room. I went up to him and told him I had a message from my wife…. I expressed her thanks. Immediately—and with Winston this was not a rare event—tears flooded down his face, as he expatiated on the way that wives had to suffer for their husbands’ political actions, going on to recall a number of instances over a long life.

When I reached home it was 2 am, but she was awake. I was asked if I had seen the old boy and thanked him. I had, and recounted the interview. She burst into tears, and I was moved to say that whereas two days earlier I had been a Minister of the Crown, red box and all, now I was reduced to the position of a messenger between her and Winston Churchill, each of whom burst into tears on receipt of a message from the other. Of such is the essence of Parliament, or at least of bygone Parliaments, But this was the essential Winston Churchill.

Days past

What must strike the reader is this sheer affection between the idealistic socialist and dominant Tory. Would President Trump offer condolences if Senator Schumer resigned? Will Adam Schiff when Paul Ryan leaves as Speaker of the House? Yet as recently as 1981, Tip O’Neill prayed by the bedside of a stricken Ronald Reagan. Politics have changed. Not for the better.

Of course, Churchill was quick to assure Wilson he would take political advantage. And he did. As The Churchill Documents report, he was soon hard at it. Wilson and his colleagues had “rendered a public service,” he said, “by exposing to Parliament the scandalous want of foresight in buying the raw materials upon which our vital rearmament programme depends.”

“Of such is the essence of Parliament,” Harold Wilson mused, “or at least of bygone Parliaments.” And not just Parliaments.

* * *

In his book Lord Wilson also reprised what he said in 1965 after Churchill death. Naturally he remembered that kind action fourteen years before. Politicians today might ponder his sentiments:

For now the noise of hooves thundering across the veldt; the clamour of the hustings in a score of contests; the shots in Sydney Street, the angry guns of Gallipoli, Flanders, Coronel and the Falkland Islands; the sullen feet of marching men in Tonypandy; the urgent warnings of the Nazi threat; the whine of the sirens and the dawn bombardment of the Normandy beaches; all these now are silent. There is a stillness. And in that stillness, echoes and memories.

To each whose life has been touched by Winston Churchill, to each his memory…. Each one of us recalls some little incident—many of us, as in my own case, a kind action, graced with the courtesy of a past generation and going far beyond the normal calls of Parliamentary comradeship. Each of us has his own memory, for in the tumultuous diapason of a world’s tributes, all of us here at least know the epitaph he would have chosen for himself: “He was a good House of Commons man.”

_________

Learn …

Who was Winston Churchill? Why, half a century since his death, is he the most quoted historical figure? Scholars know the answers. Do you? Why does it matter?

It matters because Churchill continues to offer guidance and example today. His indomitable courage, his ability to communicate, his knowledge of history, his political precepts, are as valuable now as they were in his time.

Courage and resolution

Churchill himself said “nothing surpasses 1940.” We must look there for to learn of his greatest accomplishment. Without him the world today would be unrecognizable: dark, impoverished, tortured. Churchill didn’t win the Second World War. That took more than he alone could offer. His triumphant achievement was not losing it.

Churchill did that in two ways: pursuing the paramount goal to the exclusion of all others; and communicating that goal to a baffled and frightened world.

The great movements that underlie history are the development of science, industry, culture, social and political structures, wrote Charles Krauthammer:

These are undeniably powerful, almost determinant.  Yet every once in a while, a single person arises without whom everything would be different…. The originality of the 20th century surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror—a breathtaking catalog of political creativity. And the 20th is a single story because history saw fit to lodge the entire episode in a single century. Totalitarianism turned out to be a cul-de-sac. It came and went. It has a beginning and an end, 1917 and 1991, a run of seventy-five years neatly nestled into the last century. That is our story.

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon? Yes, it was the ordinary man and woman, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. True, it was America and its allies. Indeed, it was the great leaders: Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

Learn more: Winston Churchill’s War Leadership, by Martin Gilbert; Churchill and War, by Geoffrey Best.

Right and freedom

Almost all his life, Churchill’s quarrel was with tyranny. But singularly among politicians of his time, he saw the future—and its implications for good or ill. Churchill predicted today’s age of instant communications. He foresaw the nuclear age, the mobile phone, social media, genetic engineering. He feared the challenge to free government through what he called “Mass Effects on Modern Life.” It is useful to learn how he expressed these warnings, which still apply.

As early as 1908, Churchill’s ideas, speeches and legislative accomplishments produced pioneering reforms in the social structure. His aim was to reform what was bad and to preserve what was good, without disrupting the enterprise that produces the wherewithal to make life worth living. That is still a worthy goal.

* * *

At the same time, Churchill foresaw the all-powerful administrative state. Many an advance in science, technology and communication, Churchill argued, “suppresses the individual achievement.” He deplored the rise of the collective at the expense of the individual: “Is not mankind already escaping from the control of individuals? Are not our affairs increasingly being settled by mass processes? Are not modern conditions—at any rate throughout the English-speaking communities—hostile to the development of outstanding personalities and to their influence upon events; and lastly if this be true, will it be for our greater good and glory?” Today such questions merit examination by thoughtful people.

The newspapers do a lot of thinking for us, Churchill wrote. Substitute “media” for “newspapers” and he could be speaking today. He particularly worried about the superficiality of media. True, it provides “a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial.” Such a process, taken to its ultimate ends, would produce “standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party.”

These considerations alone, writes Larry Arnn,

offer ample practical reasons to know Churchill’s story; but there are other reasons beyond the manifestly practical. Justice and the duty to pursue it are central to true statesmanship. It is certainly worth our time to consider how Churchill, who held to that idea as strongly as any, understood his and his country’s purposes and navigated toward them.

Learn more: Churchill’s Political Philosophy, by Martin Gilbert; Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Challenge to Free Government, by Larry P. Arnn.

Magnanimity and generosity

Another quality worthy to learn was Churchill’s magnanimity. He was not a hater. “I have always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main till overwhelming victory,” he said, “and then offering the hand of friendship to the vanquished.” He proved this repeatedly.

As a young statesman Churchill fostered a generous peace with the Boers after their defeat in the Boer War. In 1918, he urged (vainly) that shiploads of food be sent to blockaded Germany. He fought the 1926 General Strike, then argued for redress of strikers’ grievances. His hate for the Germans in World War II “died with their surrender.”

* * *

He held the same attitude toward individuals—something we can only wish for among today’s politicians. Admiral Fisher nearly destroyed his career in 1915; a year later Churchill advocated Fisher’s return to the Admiralty. In 1945 the socialist Clement Attlee inflicted his greatest political defeat. Yet when confronted with jokes at Attlee’s expense, Churchill refused to be drawn into lampooning a man he described as a “gallant servant of his country.” In the 1930s he fought a bill granting India greater independence, and then urged the Indian leader Gandhi to “make the most of it,” and promised to see that India would get “much more.”

His eulogies to Neville Chamberlain and Lloyd George were masterful in their generosity, Andrew Roberts wrote: “He did not believe in vengeance against domestic political opponents, but rather in what he called, ‘A judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.’”

This was a rare quality, even then. It remains an example worth imitating. To those who had wronged him in the past Churchill would say, “time ends all things,” or “the past is dead.” In 1940, having finally risen to the pinnacle, he warned critics of his predecessors: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present we shall find that we have lost the future.”

Learn more: Churchill as Peacemaker, James W. Muller, ed.; Great Contemporaries: Churchill Reflects on FDR, Hitler, Kipling, Chaplin, Balfour, and Other Giants of His Age, by Winston S. Churchill.

“A man of quality”

We do tend to be discouraged about how things are going—although in our time, they haven’t gone all that badly. The fall of the Soviet Union, the prevalence of free market economics, were not things people would bet on forty years ago. Churchill saw them coming twenty years earlier than that. He was always the optimist. Humanity, he believed, was not going to destroy itself.

“In every sphere of human endeavour, Churchill foresaw the dangers and potential for evil,” wrote Martin Gilbert:

Many of those dangers are our dangers today. He also pointed the way forward to our solutions—for tomorrow. That is why it is useful to learn about his life. Some writers portray him as a figure of the past, an anachronism, a grotesque. In doing so, it is they who are the losers, for he was a man of quality: a good guide for our troubled decade and for the generations now reaching adulthood.

“No doubt where the right lay”: 1940-95

Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky was a “Bollinger Bolshevik” who mixed support for Communism with a love of Western luxury. Friendly to Churchill, he knew the Englishman hoped to separate Hitler and Stalin, even after World War II had started.

But Maisky tended to see what he wished to see. In December he recorded: “The British Government announces its readiness to recognize ‘de facto’ the changes in the Baltics so as to settle ‘de jure’ the whole issue later, probably after the war.” There was no such announcement.

“The Russian danger…”

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Churchill broadcast: “the Russian danger is therefore our danger.”  Why then not recognize the Soviet occupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia? The question came now, not only from soft-liners like Cripps and Halifax, but from close Churchill associates like Eden and Beaverbrook. But de jure recognition was one thing Stalin would never get get.

When Eden, now foreign minister, visited Moscow in December 1941, he implored Churchill to modify his stance. It was Eden’s first major foreign policy assignment. Temperament, ambition, anxiety for victory impelled him. American opinion influenced Churchill too, and the USA at that time remained opposed to recognizing a Soviet Baltic.

While Eden was in Moscow, Churchill was in America. Eden urged him and Roosevelt to recognize immediately the Soviet Baltic. “Stark realism” demanded it. The Anglo-Americans could not stop the Russians from getting their way.

Churchill still demurred. The 1941 Soviet conquests, he replied,

were acquired by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic States to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause….there must be no mistake about the opinion of any British Government of which I am the head, namely, that it adheres to those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter.

“The Ireland of Russia”

In February 1942 the War Cabinet discussed alternatives to outright recognition. Eden proposed agreeing to Russia’s Baltic military bases. Halifax proposed quasi-independence, with Russian control of Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian defense and foreign policy. Churchill opposed both.  In Washington, Halifax mentioned recognition to Roosevelt. The President was interested, but Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles told FDR it would epitomize “the worst phase of the spirit of Munich.” In another thrust, Beaverbrook asked: “How can it be argued now that territory occupied then by the Russians—Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia—is not the native soil of the Russians?” Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians could offer some arguments.

The pressure of events wore on the Prime Minister. The Russians were holding down 185 German divisions on a thousand-mile front. On 7 March 1942, Churchill sent a feeler to Roosevelt:

The increasing gravity of the war has led me to feel that the principles of the Atlantic Charter ought not to be construed so as to deny Russia the frontiers she occupied when Germany attacked her. This was the basis on which Russia acceded to the Charter, and I expect that a severe process of liquidating hostile elements in the Baltic States, etc. was employed by the Russians when they took those regions at the beginning of the war.

* * *

Churchill’s suspicions were correct. Latvia’s President Karlis Ulmanis had been arrested and deported; he died in 1942. Konstantin Päts of Estonia spent years in prisons or “psychiatric hospitals,” finally dying in 1956. Lithuania’s Antanas Smetona, the first Baltic president to institute an authoritarian regime (1926), fled, ultimately to the USA, where he died in 1944. From June 1940, politicians, teachers and intelligentsia—anyone who seemed a threat to the Soviet rule—was deported.

On 8 April 1942, the War Cabinet approved British recognition of the 1941 Soviet borders. But now Roosevelt objected. The United States, he said through Secretary of State Hull, “would not remain silent if territorial clauses were included in the [Anglo-Soviet] treaty.” Eden conveyed this to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov who, surprisingly, accepted.  Thus it was that American, not British diplomacy that forestalled de jure recognition of the Soviet Baltic in 1942. But Martin Gilbert maintained that this was actually “to Churchill’s relief.” Alexander Cadogan, a Foreign Office official who shared Churchill’s views on the Baltic, wrote, “We must remember that [recognition] is a bad thing. We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.”

Baltic “Ostland”

There matters rested while the Germans, first hailed as liberators, conducted another violent ethnic clensing. Over 300,000 Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians—one out of ten—were executed. They slaughtered Jews in hastily-built death camps. The Gestapo and a few quislilngs ruled the Nazi colony “Ostland.” With the Red Army’s return in 1944 came a third holocaust. An Estonian remembered: “The Germans were brutal, the Russians worse.” Clearances of Baltic citizens continued under Stalin’s successors. Ethnic Russians moved in while natives were shuttled out. To this day, native Latvians form barely a majority in their country.

At the Teheran conference in late 1943, Roosevelt abandoned his non-recognition policy—but not openly. With remarkable cynicism, he explained to Stalin that he did not wish to lose the votes of the six or seven million Polish-Americans, or of the smaller, though not negligible, number of voters of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian origin.

How easily Roosevelt surrendered the liberties he had so strongly defended a year earlier. “Moral postures in the harsh world of power politics may acquire a certain nobility in their very futility,” wrote David Kirby. “But when tainted by a history of compromise and failed bargains, they tend to appear somewhat shabby.”

* * *

But Teheran also left Churchill with a softer attitude toward Stalin. His feelings had changed, he wrote Eden, tempered by hard reality on the ground:

The tremendous victories of the Russian armies, the deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian State and Government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin—these have all had their effect. Most of all is the fact that the Russians may very soon be in physical possession of these territories, and it is absolutely certain that we should never attempt to turn them out.

Churchill was a politician depending on the support of a majority, and no politician could remain blind to that reality. But in judging Churchill, must consider his complete record. And for him, the subject remained.

To his War Cabinet in late January Churchill said the “ideal position would be to postpone any decision about frontiers until after the war, and then to consider all frontier questions together.” Nevertheless, the Red Army was  “advancing into Poland.” Churchill knew he was caught in a shocking compromise of proclaimed principle. What were they to say to Parliament and the nation, he asked Eden, about the idealistic principles declared in the Atlantic Charter?

The March of Fate

As the Red Army swarmed west in 1944, surviving Balts had the unpalatable choice of siding with one barbarian or the other. More fought with the Germans than the Russians. Stalin expended half a million men vainly trying to storm the “Courland Pocket,” declaring that the imperialist West would try to prevent reestablishment of Soviet authority. But the West had no such intentions. Instead, Balts faced tanks bearing American white stars. They were U.S. Shermans, thrown into battle without their new red stars. But the Baltic fighters gave up only with the German surrender.

In 1950, Churchill sadly summarized the tragedy of the Baltic States:

Hitler had cast them away like pawns in 1939. There had been a severe Russian and Communist purge. All the dominant personalities had been liquidated in one way or another. The life of these strong peoples was henceforward underground. Presently Hitler came back with a Nazi counter-purge. Finally, in the general victory the Soviets had control again. Thus the deadly comb ran back and forth, and back again, through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. There was no doubt however where the right lay. The Baltic States should be sovereign independent peoples.

In the end, the United States, along with Britain, Australia, Canada and a few other countries, never recognized the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Baltic gold remained safe in London, and their embassies continued to function. But Balts fortunate enough to escape, and their children, have long memories. They did not look kindly on Roosevelt, nor, one has to say, on Churchill.

What we can learn

It is useful to study Churchill and the Baltic for what it can teach us today about powerful aggressors and the fate of small nations. In wartime negotiations, the Soviets were consistent. They made the most extreme demands, offering little in exchange. Meet their demands and more followed. Whenever the other side said they would not agree, an eleventh-hour shift by Moscow would result. Even this was not a defeat, since the democracies were often so grateful for evidence of good will that they would struggle to meet the next round of Soviet demands. The perceptive Churchill once told Eden, “do not be disappointed if you are not able to bring home a joint public declaration.”

Churchill frequently repeated the Boer expression, “All will come right.” By 1992, when I made my first visit, the Baltic was free. In 1995 with three friends, I bicycled the Latvian coast from Lithuania to Estonia, and presented a Latvian translation of Churchill’s The Dream to President Guntis Ulmanis.

The British ambassador had arranged for us to meet local officials along the way. I will never forget the words of Teodors Eniņš, Mayor of Liepaja. He raised the question of why the Anglo-Americans hadn’t fought Russia to free Eastern Europe in 1945. We said the American and British public would have never countenanced it. “You should have done it anyway,” Mayor Eniņš replied. “Think of how much trouble you would have saved yourselves—not to mention us.”

Attlee was the first prime minister of a socialist government with an outright majority (1945-51). In 1940-45, he had served Churchill’s wartime coalition government, chiefly as deputy prime minister. Attlee presided over the cabinet whenever Churchill was abroad (which was a lot). In early 1945, it was he who gave the fateful order, later much regretted, for firebombing Dresden. In May 1945, on behalf of his party, Attlee told Churchill that Labour was withdrawing from the coalition. Churchill, who wanted it to last until the Japanese surrender and end of World War II, was deeply distressed. In the ensuing election of July 1945, Churchill’s Conservatives were routed, and Attlee took over as the head of British government.

Churchill regarded his wartime Labour associates with gratitude and admiration. In the dark days of 1940, when he thought it might come to some grim last stand against the onrushing Germans, he said he had thought to fight it out with a triumvirate of Lord Beaverbrook and another Labour colleague, Ernest Bevin.

Domestically, Attlee and Churchill agreed on nothing significant. But both had fought as soldiers in the deadliest war in history. And both had governed together in the worst war in history. The respect and collegiality they shared is a model for our time. Or any time.

The supposed Attlee gags—”an empty cab drew up and Mr. Attlee got out”; “He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing”—do not track to Churchill. He did say, when President Truman said that Attlee seemed a modest man, “he has much to be modest about.” But that was a private remark, which someone on Truman’s staff overheard and repeated. When confronted with the other Attlee barbs, Churchill would vehemently deny them. Sometimes he would say, “Mr. Attlee is a gallant and faithful servant of the Crown and I would never say such a thing about him”—or words to that effect.

No wonder, then, that Mr. Cohen and I appreciate what Attlee said. He was truly, in the words of the old song, one of the Giants of Old. It why so many, Churchill friends and opponents alike, found Attlee’s speech deeply moving.

The Rt. Hon. The Lord Attlee

My Lords, as an old opponent and a colleague, but always a friend, of Sir Winston Churchill, I should like to say a few words in addition to what has already been so eloquently said.

My mind goes back to many years ago. I recall Sir Winston as a rising hope of the Conservative Party at the end of the 19th century. I looked upon him and Lord Hugh Cecil as the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party. Then, with courage, he crossed the House—not easy for any man. You might say of Sir Winston that to whatever Party he belonged, he did not really change his ideas. He was always Winston.

The first time I saw him was at the siege of Sidney Street, when he took over command there, and I happened to be a local resident. I did not meet him again until he came into the House of Commons in 1924. The extraordinary thing, when one thinks of it, is that by that time he had done more than the average Member of Parliament, and more than the average minister, in the way of a Parliamentary career. We thought at that time that he was finished.

Not a bit of it. He started again another career, and then, after some years, it seemed again that he had faded. He became a lone wolf, outside any party; and yet, somehow or other, the time was coming which would be for him his supreme moment, and for the country its supreme moment. It seems as if everything led up to that time in 1940, when he became prime minister of this country at the time of its greatest peril.

* * *

Throughout all that period he might make opponents, he might make friends; but no one could ever disregard him. Here was a man of genius, a man of action, a man who could also speak and write superbly. I recall through all those years many occasions when his characteristics stood out most forcibly.

Not everybody always recognised how tender-hearted he was. I can recall him with the tears rolling down his cheeks, talking of the horrible things perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany. I can recall, too, during the war his emotion on seeing a simple little English home wrecked by a bomb. Yes, my Lords, sympathy—and more than that: he went back, and immediately devised the War Damage Act. How characteristic: Sympathy did not stop with emotion; it turned into action.

Then I recall the long days through the war—the long days and long nights—in which his spirit never failed; and how often he lightened our labours by that vivid humour, those wonderful remarks he would make which absolutely dissolved us all in laughter, however tired we were. I recall his eternal friendship for France and for America; and I recall, too, as the most reverend Primate has said already, that when once the enemy were beaten he had full sympathy for them. He showed that after the Boer War, and he showed it again after the First World War. He had sympathy, an incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world.

* * *

I think of him also as supremely conscious of history. His mind went back not only to his great ancestor Marlborough but through the years of English history. He saw himself and he saw our nation at that time playing a part not unworthy of our ancestors, not unworthy of the men who defeated the Armada, and not unworthy of the men who defeated Napoleon.

He saw himself there as an instrument. As an instrument for what? For freedom, for human life against tyranny. None of us can ever forget how, through all those long years, he now and again spoke exactly the phrase that crystallised the feelings of the nation.

My Lords, we have lost the greatest Englishman of our time—I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time. In the course of a long, long life, he has played many parts. We may all be proud to have lived with him and, above all, to have worked with him; and we shall all send to his widow and family our sympathy in their great loss.

Since President Trump has taken office, the public has quickly learned to get its political news from a novel source—namely, the President’s Twitter account.

The move to this platform represents a shift in the nature of politics, both for good and for ill. Trump might be among the first political leaders to use this medium to attack opponents or make major announcements. He is certainly not the first to utilize the kind of brevity the platform requires to make his points.

Such brevity also characterized the rhetorical style of Winston Churchill, whose wit, humor and insight complemented his decisive and effective political leadership. If Churchill tweeted, we’d be reading very different tweets from those we read from the president and other political leaders. I don’t suggest what he would say. No one can know that. But I do know how he would go about it. His methods offer an excellent example for today’s leaders. (I am speaking of public exchanges with political opponents, not enemies in wartime.)

Humor and Irony

First, Churchill avoided repaying vilification in kind. Instead he used humor, irony, plays on words. This lowered the temperature and took the sting out of debate. For instance, an opposition Member of Parliament, William Paling, called him a “dirty dog.” Churchill grinned: “May I remind the honorable member what dogs, dirty or otherwise, do to palings?”

Another irate MP charged that the Prime Minister never listened. Churchill responded: “I am afraid I did not hear what he said. Would he mind repeating it?”

Blunting insults with humor let Churchill off the hook. In the ensuing laughter, people forgot that he’d never responded to the accusation. “I have to measure the length of the response to any question by the worth, meaning and significance of that question,” he said to an angry inquisitor—which avoided any answer at all.

Avoiding Personal Attacks

Second, Churchill rarely attacked someone personally in public, though he didn’t hesitate to lampoon their well-known traits. (I refer to Parliamentary opponents, not villains like Hitler, who were fair game. Labeling Ramsay MacDonald “the boneless wonder” was more an exception than a rule.)

During a loquacious speech by an MP who questioned his veracity, judgment and even morals, Churchill interrupted: “I can well understand the honorable member speaking for practice, which he badly needs.”

Presented with long, disparaging editorial he took a similar tack: “I find [your paper] eminently readable. I entirely disagree with it.” And: “I like the martial and commanding air with which the gentleman treats facts. He stands no nonsense from them.”

Soon after regaining power in 1951, Churchill was asked why he was accomplishing so little, having promised so much in the campaign – a familiar accusation in our current moment. His response? “I did not get the power to regulate the way in which the affairs of the world would go,” he said. “I only got the power to preside over a party which has been able to beat the opposition in divisions [votes] for eighteen months.”

Korea was a problem in 1952, as today. “Is the Prime Minister aware of the deep concern felt by the people of this country at the whole question of the Korean conflict?” an MP asked. “I am fully aware of the deep concern felt by the honorable member in many matters above his comprehension,” Churchill replied, again using wit to avoid an unanswerable question.

What’s more, sometimes, in avoiding jibes, he did not even defend himself. The defense would come later, in a carefully worded statement at a time of his choosing.

Allegorical Parries

Third, Churchill would often use interesting allegories or images rather than vicious barbs when confronted with opponents. Several U.S. presidents in a row have been dogged by the contrarian Senator Rand Paul, and his father, Representative Ron Paul before him. A similar father-and-son team targeted Churchill simultaneously. “Isn’t it enough to have this parent volcano continually erupting in our midst?” Churchill asked. “And now we are to have these subsidiary craters spouting forth the same unhealthy fumes!” Using the pronoun “we” instead of “I” suggested subtly that everybody felt as he did.

Collegiality and Respect

Lastly—and perhaps most importantly—even though the political divide was as wide in his time as in ours, Churchill fostered respect and collegiality. Intrinsic to his methods was an underlying respect for opponents. To him they were not enemies, merely honorable people who were mistaken.

In the 1930s, demanding rearmament against Nazi Germany, Churchill was kept out of office by the pro-appeasement Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin. On the floor they were enemies, off it they were colleagues. Amateur painters, they were invited to address the Royal Academy. Churchill’s allusion to Baldwin’s lethargy on defense got his views across without insult: “If I were to criticize him at all I would say his work lacked a little in color…Making a fair criticism, I must admit there is something very reposeful about the half-tones of Mr. Baldwin’s studies.”

The Labour Party’s mild-mannered Clement Attlee was Churchill’s deputy in the wartime coalition government, then ousted Churchill as prime minister in 1945. He was the butt of many Conservative jokes; Churchill would have none of them. Mr. Attlee was a devoted servant of country and party, he would say, whenever he heard a barb aimed at his successor. (“Sheep in sheep’s clothing,” though funny, is not traceable to Churchill.)

Churchill’s greatest antagonist in later years was Labour’s Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Health Service, who excoriated Churchill at every opportunity. Bevan would call Churchill a plutocrat exploiter of the workers, and Churchill would respond by naming Bevan “Minister of Disease.”

When Bevan died in 1960, Churchill shocked his fellow MPs by launching into an impromptu eulogy: “A giant in his party, a great advocate for socialism, a resourceful debater….” Then, stopping in mid-sentence he looked around: “Are you sure he’s dead?”

Tweet – Ready Churchillisms

Below are some of Churchill’s most Twitter-worthy ripostes – all within the platform’s 140-character limit and all characteristically clever, direct and humorous.

“Damned old fool!” shouted an opponent, who then apologized. Churchill shrugged: “The damned old fool accepts the apology,” repeating the insult while disarming its author.

During uproars following a contentious 1947 remark, he invoked Ecclesiastes: “The crackling of thorns under a pot does not deter me.”

Five years later: “The spectacle of a number of middle-aged gentlemen…being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me.”

When one worked himself into such dudgeon that he became tongue-tied, Churchill observed: “My honorable and gallant friend must really not develop more indignation than he can sustain.”

Some said Churchill waffled, leaving his administration in disarray. A colleague asked why couldn’t he make up his mind. “I long ago made up my mind,” Churchill responded. “The question is to get other people to agree.” (Thus encouraged, his colleagues stopped squabbling. There’s a lesson there.)

A member of his own party said the PM never thought seriously about important issues. Churchill responded: “That would be a rather hazardous assumption on the part of the honorable gentleman, who has not, so far as I am aware…distinguished himself for foresight.” This was about as personal as Churchill’s ripostes got.

Time for a Revival?

One of his arch-opponents famously accused the Prime Minister of “cheap demagogic gestures” – an all-too-familiar accusation these days. “I think X is a judge of cheap demagogic gestures,” replied the PM, “but they do not come off when he makes them.”

Winston Churchill’s principles of debate and response—and his prevailing respect for the other side – are crucial values that have, in large part, vanished from the Twitterverse, if indeed they were ever there in the first place. It is time for a revival.

Q: Another new movie, A United Kingdom,  saddles Churchill with racism. It’s the story of Seretse Khama of the Bechuanaland royal family and heir to the throne. After studying in England, he meets and marries a British woman, Ruth Williams. The South African government, which is adopting Apartheid, is troubled by the interracial marriage. It presses the Attlee government in Britain to exile Khama, which they do. Churchill is not a character in the film, but we are told that he supports Khama and will restore him if Churchill’s party wins the 1951 election. Churchill does win, but now we are told he has exiled Khama for life. The movie as usual compresses history and tells us at best a version of the truth. I am wondering if the Churchill part of the story is accurate. —P.L., Richmond, Va.

______

A: It is not. I heard about this and bounced it off others, because I am a bit busy fending off nonsense about Churchill in “Viceroy’s House,” “The Crown,” and other Drama that Goes Bump in the Night. A colleague replies: 

The Labour government exiled Khama in 1951, when he returned to England where he had been a Law student. In 1956 he was allowed to return as a private citizen before entering politics in 1961. As for the charge of racism, you can’t compare today with the 1950s. It was a different world.

Contrary to the film, Churchill did not promise to end Khama’s exile if elected, then withdraw it and exile him for life. Commonwealth Relations Minister Lord Ismay warned the incoming Churchill cabinet that his return would provoke South Africa’s racist government. They would resort to economic sanctions and demand annexation of Bechuanaland, kept out of their hands since the Union of South Africa in 1910. (The Churchill Documents, Vol. 23, 34.) Khama and Ruth returned home in 1956. In 1966 he was elected first president of independent Botswana. Under Khama (1966-80), Botswana developed one of the world’s fastest growing economies. It boasts a record of uninterrupted democracy. Their son Ian was Botswana’s fourth president, serving 2008-18.

Racism?

Another Churchill scholar, author of a recent book on Churchill’s thought, challenges even the “different world” excuse. by responding as follows. This is certainly something to think about. Anyone reading this may do so. Note particularly the bold face:

Of course, and you can quote Abraham Lincoln in precisely the same sense, and also most of America’s founders (who abolished slavery in two-thirds of the Union during their lifetimes). The remarkable thing is not that any of them, or Churchill, had the standard view of questions like intermarriage. There was almost no experience with that and the prejudice against it was universal or nearly so.

The remarkable thing is that Lincoln, for the slaves, and Churchill, for the Empire, believed that people of all colors should enjoy the same rights, and that it was the mission of their country to protect those rights.

Therefore to say that Winston Churchill was “a man of his time,” or that “everyone back then was a racist,” is to miss the singular feature.

We spend a lot of time arguing that Churchill was remarkable. Then when something comes along that we do not like, we excuse it or explain it as typical of the age. I do not think Churchill was typical of the age on this question, if the age was racist.

Another thing to remember was that Lincoln and Churchill were political men. Also they were democratic men. They needed, and thought it was right that they needed, the votes of a majority. If they lived in an age of prejudice (and every age is that) then of course they would be careful how they offended those prejudices.

See also “Churchill as Racist: A Hard Sell”

There are many current anniversaries (Dardanelles 1915, VE-Day 1945, funeral 1965; Atlantic Charter and Pearl Harbor next year). So one-man Churchill plays are multiplying. I saw one recently in New Hampshire—and left grumbling. I will not criticize the actor, who made a passable attempt at impersonation. But his play script left much to be desired.

Who writes these scripts? Do they do any research? Typically, this one vacuums every famous quote it can cram into 90 minutes and gets so many wrong that one loses count. This is not new. Why meddle with Churchill’s immortal words—which are famous for way he expressed them? Why do writers, actors and politicians insist on misquoting him?

Mangled quotations mount up fast. The great speeches—Munich, Holiday Time in America (1939), Blood Toil Tears and Sweat, Fight on the Beaches—are sometimes convincingly delivered. But every one is spoiled by detail edits that occur willy-nilly. Example: it was “victory in spite of all terror,” not “all hardship.” Churchill was too good a writer to use “hardship” when he meant terror.

Setting’s Off

This presentation is set in the Cabinet War Rooms in April 1955. Churchill has gone there to ponder his decision to resign. But Churchill despised the War Rooms, spent only a few nights there during the Blitz. He left them, never to return, in 1945. Why not stick to the facts, and set the scene at Downing Street? Moreover, the date should be February or March, since he had long made his decision to resign by April—and did so on April 5th.

Churchill did not hesitate to go because of doubt about his successor, as the play suggests (though he later wondered privately whether Anthony Eden would succeed). He decided to leave after failing to engineer a summit conference with Eisenhower and the Russians. Curiously, one of the Russians mentioned is Gorbachev—who was 24 and just graduating from university in 1955.

As in many one-man plays, Sir Winston reviews his life, which in this play was nicely paced but full of errors. Lord Randolph Churchill did not die of syphilis. Nanny Everest was three years dead when Winston’s first book appeared. Omdurman was not the final charge of British cavalry. He became prime minister on May 10th not May 4th 1940, thirty not thirty-five years after 1910, and so on.

The play correctly suggests that Churchill held Prime Minister Baldwin, not Chamberlain, chiefly responsible for Britain’s insufficient rearmament in the 1930s, and repeats WSC’s private reflection that it would have been better had Baldwin never lived. But it misattributes Churchill’s 1938 remark “embalm, cremate and bury”—which referred to avoiding risks in national defense, not to Mr. Baldwin.

More Misquotes

More lines he never uttered: “if you’re going through hell, keep going”; “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”; and the famous exchange with G.B. Shaw over Shaw’s play (“Bring a friend, if you have one….I’ll come the second night, if there is one”). To be fair, it was only recently learned that Shaw and Churchill both denied that exchange. But it’s long established that Lady Astor threatened to poison F.E. Smith’s coffee, not Churchill’s. The famous Bessie Braddock encounter (“tomorrow I’ll be sober”) and the Attlee urinal crack likely did occur, but are so edited as to deprive them of their rapier impact.

There is no record that Churchill ever said God created France for its beauty and Frenchmen to balance it, or that Roosevelt told Churchill he used a cigarette holder to stay away from cigarettes. It is nowhere believed that the United States was “pro-Nazi” before Pearl Harbor. It is untrue that in 1955 Churchill was fretting over the costs of Chartwell (it was purchased by his friends for the National Trust in 1946, providing he could live out his life there); or that Churchill planned his own funeral.

What we watched in New Hampshire was a reasonably convincing portrayal, bringing out many of Churchill’s admirable characteristics, including magnanimity and appreciation for political opponents. But the counterfactuals and misquotes, together with the impossible setting, spoil this presentation for anyone with a little knowledge of the story.

It’s too bad, because the facts are broadly known, and a writer has only to run his screed past any one of a score of Churchill institutions or scholars, who would probably be happy to vet it for free. Get it right!

John Andrews in “Who needs a Governor, anyway?”  (Denver Post, 26 February 2012) writes about former Prime Minister Attlee:

“An empty taxi drove up to 10 Downing Street,” joked Winston Churchill about the man who defeated him for prime minister in 1946, “and out of it stepped Clement Attlee.” Droll, but Attlee laughed last. Nothing succeeds like success.

Attlee not

Andrews not only indulges in a Churchill red herring, but he gets the usual wording wrong—and the date wrong. Attlee’s Labour Party defeated Churchill’s Conservatives in July 1945.

Though it’s all over the Internet, Churchill never said this about Clement Attlee, and quoting Churchill to this effect considerably misses his attitude toward political opponents.

Queried about the remark, Churchill replied to the effect that Attlee was an honorable and gallant* gentleman and that he, Churchill, would deprecate any such remark.

The remark is listed in several Churchill quotation books, always without attribution–because there is none.

_______

*In Parliamentary parlance, “gallant” refers to a Member of Parliament who has served in the forces.

Further reading

Review of Leo McKinstry’s excellent Churchill and Attlee. Excerpt:

Leo McKinstry’s book 738 pages—twice the size of the previous Attlee-Churchill book and is riveting from cover to cover. Scrupulously fair, McKinstry tells the story, backed by a voluminous bibliography, extensive research and private correspondence. Thus he captures Churchill’s generosity of spirit, and Attlee’s greatness of soul.

“Sometimes turbulent, often fruitful, theirs was a relationship unprecedented in the annals of British politics,” McKinstry concludes. It was partly “a reflection of Churchill’s greatness, and partly of Attlee’s patience.” Attlee was the longest-serving party leader of the 20th century, Churchill one of the longest-serving prime ministers. In 1940-55, one of them was always PM.

There have been other great rivalries, but the bond between them was unique, especially for persons with such opposite views. One spoke for liberty and a “minimum standard” guaranteed by the State. The other declared himself a socialist, but practiced a far milder form of socialism than dialectic Marxists. In the war, Churchill had but one goal: defeating Hitler. Attlee, as Deputy Prime Minister (a position Churchill created expressly for him) ran the country. In doing so, he set himself up for his own premiership.

LONDON, APRIL 29TH— If the Great Man woke up from his “black velvet—eternal sleep,” perhaps to enjoy a cigar and a cognac during the pageantry in London, he might have felt a sense of satisfaction, and invoked his favorite Boer expression: Alles sal reg kom—“All will come right.” The words he spoke sixty-four years ago at another Royal Wedding have stood the test of time. “We could not have had a better King,” he said in 1953: “And now we have this splendid Queen.” The road has indeed been hard these six decades of her reign, but “unerring graciousness and human simplicity” have marked her every step along the path. We join in wishing Prince William and his bride a happy life. Live long, and prosper.

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.

What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).

In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill

equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies. Churchill cost himself the election because he didn’t realize he was overplaying an issue that people were already damned serious about.

Er…not exactly, Mr. O.

Churchill did not use the “Gestapo speech” to oppose Labour’s national health plan, which, in general at least, he supported (see next post). He used it to describe—in what was later thought to be a poor analogy—the kind of compulsion citizens might expect under a socialist government:

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip? I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed.

It is an article of faith in “enlightened” circles that Churchill made a bad mistake by comparing the 1945 Labour Party, led by the kindly, self-effacing Clement Attlee, to Hitler’s political police. Maybe so.

But it strikes me as interesting when a friend in England, a confirmed Labour supporter, likens the tactics of certain modern Labour town councils in Britain precisely to those of the Gestapo: in their suppression of free speech; in their attempt to destroy those who disagree with them; in their vitriolic hatred of opposition media.

If Churchill’s words don’t put you in mind of certain recent developments in America, read on.

Olbermann now switches to the Churchill of 1936, who, he says,

made the greatest argument ever for government intervention in health care only [sic] he did not realize it. He was debating in Parliament the notion that the British government could not increase expenditures on military defense unless the voters specifically authorized it, just as today’s opponents of reform are now claiming they speak for the voters of today, even though those voters spoke for themselves eleven months ago.

Churchill’s argument was this: “I have heard it said that the government had no mandate….Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility [of Ministers] for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.”

And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life, of each citizen? We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us. But we can try dammit and government’s essential role in that effort facilitate it, reduce its cost, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours, seems, ultimately, self-explanatory. [sic]

We want to live. What is government for if not to help us do so? Indeed Mr. Churchill, the responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!

Leave aside the question of whether the current healthcare proposal would expand or shrink access to healthcare. To equate it with a threat to a nation’s existence is quite a stretch. But let’s start by quoting all of what Churchill said, on 12 November 1936:

I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact the prime object for which Governments come into existence. The Prime Minister had the command of enormous majorities in both Houses of Parliament ready to vote for any necessary measures of defence.

“The responsibility for the public safety is absolute.” Indeed so: the safety of the nation against those who would snuff it out. That is, inarguably, “the prime object for which Governments come into existence.” They do not come into existence to pass out largess until the public till is exhausted and the currency debased. The American government was not created to force every citizen to buy a good or service—which is part of the current healthcare proposal, but nowhere authorized by the United States Constitution. And has never before been mandated in history.

True, the President does have “the command of enormous majorities.” Yet he seems unable to make them “vote for any necessary measures.” Why?

It would behoove him, and the Congress, and the rest of us to ask. Is it, for example, because 75% of citizens are happy with their healthcare? Or because they prefer piecemeal solutions that are more easily monitored—tort reform and portability, for example—to a comprehensive plan that would inevitably lead to massive spending and rationing? Or because a large majority fear that like Medicare, which will go broke inside a decade unless altered, this amplification of Medicare will also go broke—or exclude many for whom Medicare is now accessible? Or because it will require punitive taxes? Or because they can see no example of anything run efficiently by government, from the Postal Service to the war in Afghanistan? All these are legitimate objections, and people are not Nazis to express them.

Salon.com, which agrees with Mr. Olbermann about health reform, says he did nothing to advance their cause: that his argument is self-defeating:

[He dug] up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people’s well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn’t remotely modeled on Britain’s National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform.

In the narrow sense, that’s a rejection of Olbermann’s argument. In a broader sense, Salon is also right. Churchill is dead. This is not 1936 or 1945. Lady Soames is often wont to remark: “You must never suggest what my father would do or say about any modern issue—after all, how do you know?”

What her father said about liberty never goes out of fashion, and here is the most memorable sentence in  his “Gestapo speech” of 1945: “I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual.”

Of course, Churchill’s times are often paralleled in ours. That’s the value of studying history—how Churchill reacted to challenges which may seem familiar to thoughtful people. And, since Mr. Olbermann likes to tell us what reminds him of Hitler, let me say what reminds me of Hitler.

It is people who think it appropriate to offer an email address where Americans can report anything “fishy” they might see or hear emanating from the thoughts and opinions of other Americans. That reminds me of the Gestapo.

It is a teacher who makes little schoolchildren chant, “Mm, mmm, mm! He said that all must lend a hand, To make this country strong again, Mmm, mmm, mm!
He said we must be fair today, Equal work means equal pay….Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
 For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say hooray!”—set to the music of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

That reminds me of the Hitler Youth.

Commentator Mark Whitting writes: “This is going beyond the beyonds, as this writer’s Irish granny used to say.”

That, Mr. Whitting, is putting it mildly.

If we are going to draw anything from Churchill’s “Gestapo speech” that bears on our current situation, it might be what Churchill said about gathering “all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

“And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?”