Most everybody has an inkling of who Winston Churchill was. But how many know of his son Randolph? How many British schoolchildren do you think have heard of him? Do they know that Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who some think was a real person? They should, Sir Arthur was a great writer. Like Randolph Churchill, who founded the longest biography ever written. In the words of Dean Acheson, he was “present at the creation.”

In his autobiography Randolph wrote, “I was born in London on 18 May 1911 at 33 Eccleston Square, of poor but honest parents. Born within sound of Bow Bells, I was a Cockney and, until I was forty, was destined to spend more than half my life in London.”

He was written off recently as “a violent drunk marred by scandals, divorces and infirmity of purpose.” In 1953 he was called a “paid hack.” He sued for libel, won, and published a book about it, What I Said about the Press. What he said about the press is interesting. He said they all had the same opinions, mouthed the same lines, and never criticized each other, because as he put it, “Dog don’t eat dog.” Does that sound familiar?

Randolph Churchill as writer

Paid hack and infirmity of purpose are not charges that stick. Randolph’s career in journalism lasted thirty-six years. He wrote hundreds of articles, edited seven volumes of his father’s speeches, and published fifteen books, including the first seven narrative and document volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the official biography.

After the cruise, we celebrated Hillsdale College’s completion of what Randolph began long ago. He always called it “The Great Work.” If he were here, he would ask, “What took you so long?”

Randolph planned five narrative and perhaps ten document (“companion”) volumes. Sir Martin Gilbert, who joined his staff in 1962 and later succeeded him, found much more material—“lovely grub,” Randolph called it. Sir Martin published eighteen volumes through his death in 2015. Hillsdale College Press began republishing all prior volumes in 2006 and has now added six new document volumes edited by Larry Arnn, who long ago was Martin’s research assistant.

Randolph Churchill was the subject of four books. The first was collection of tributes, The Young Unpretender (The Grand Original in USA), compiled by Kay Halle, the Washington socialite most responsible for advancing Sir Winston’s honorary U.S. citizenship. It’s the kind of book you’d wish your friends would write about you. He is the subject of three biographies. The best is His Father’s Son, by Randolph’s son Winston, in 1996..

Breaking bad

Randolph was what we parents describe as a handful. He went through several nannies, and was troublesome at Sandroyd School in Wiltshire, where he was sent in 1917. At home he was rambunctious. During a visit to Chartwell by Churchill’s friend Bernard “Barney” Baruch, Randolph, aged about 12, positioned a gramophone in an upper story window. As Baruch stepped from his car, Randolph let fly with a recording about a popular cartoon character, “Barney Google, with the Goo-Goo Googly Eyes.”

Baruch laughed, but Randolph’s father stormed up to his room, removed the offending platter, and broke it across his knee.

A friend wrote: “If [Winston] had not been a great man, he would have been a perfect father—building a tree house, helping Randolph with his homework, counseling and encouraging.” Winston spoiled him by inviting him to political dinners with the leading figures of the day. After dinner, Winston would hold up his famous cigar for silence while Randolph held forth.

Randolph thus became a superb extemporaneous speaker, quicker off the cuff than his father. But there was a down-side. He learned to drink hard, in the company of famous cronies like F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead. Much to his parents’ consternation, he was drinking double brandies at the age of 18. His father never drank spirits neat, but Randolph never practiced such moderation.

His outspoken, sarcastic and often boorish manner alienated his mother, and their relations were often frosty. Clementine Churchill lived for Winston and Winston was full-time work. Once she reprimanded Randolph for taking a fancy to an older woman. He shot back, “I don’t care…She’s maternal and you’re not.” What few appreciated, his cousin Anita Leslie wrote, was “Randolph’s craving for affection. He had to hide his sensitivity, not realizing either that others could be as sensitive as he.”

“Randolph, Hope and Glory”

At Eton, Randolph wrote, “I was lazy and unsuccessful…and unpopular.” At Oxford in 1929, he took little interest in studies. His father warned: “Your idle and lazy life is very offensive to me. You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence…. do not value or profit by the opportunities Oxford offers…. You add an insolence toward men and things which is rapidly affecting your position outside Oxford and is certainly not sustained by effort or achievement.” This is a remarkable parallel to the demoralizing letter Winston’s father wrote him around the same age, warning that he was in danger of becoming a “social wastrel.”

Randolph apologized, promised to do better, and campaigned for his father in the May 1929 election. The Conservatives lost and Winston began his decade in the political wilderness. That summer Winston, his brother Jack and their sons Randolph and Johnny toured North America. There Randolph met more of the good and the great. Their Hollywood hosts included Charlie Chaplin, William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies, Louis B. Mayer and Spencer Tracy.

In October 1930 Randolph quit Oxford and began a lecture tour of America, hoping to recoup his depleted finances. He began writing for the press and was apparently the first British journalist to warn about Hitler in print. In Munich in 1932, he tried to arrange for his father to meet Hitler—size up the enemy, so to speak. But that interesting prospect didn’t come off.

Aiming (very) high

Predicting in print that he would make a fortune and become prime minister, Randolph ran for Parliament as an independent Conservative in Wavertree, Liverpool in 1935. This embarrassed his father, for Randolph split the Tory vote and handed a safe seat to Labour. But Winston rarely let the sun go down upon his wrath, and when Randolph’s idleness ended in lectures, writing and more political campaigns, he lent encouragement.

Randolph was rebuffed twice more before getting in for Preston, Lancashire. Because of the wartime political truce he was unopposed, but in the 1945 election he lost decisively. After the war he was twice beaten by Labour’s Michael Foot, while practicing his father’s celebrated collegiality. The two candidates would fling invective at each other in public, then meet for a drink afterwards. Foot later told Martin Gilbert, “You and I belong to the most exclusive club in London: the friends of Randolph Churchill.”

Lady friends

With his good looks and affection, Randolph had many romances. He almost married Kay Halle, a lifelong friend who never doubted her decision to refuse him. His 1939 marriage to Pamela Digby, later Harriman, was a failure from their wedding night, when Randolph floored her by reading aloud from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He hoped to produce an heir before the war took him, and in 1940 Pamela gave birth to their only child, duly named Winston.

Few of his lady friends could handle him, but those who did, like Natalie Bevan, the last and greatest love of his life, were indispensable to him. Like Kay Halle, Mrs. Bevan never married him or lived with him, but they were very close in later years. Martin Gilbert wrote: “It was Natalie who, on so many occasions, raised both our spirits and his; or, in raising his, raised ours.”

I well remember the London launch of Martin’s last narrative volume of the official biography, in 1988. There was Natalie Bevan, still beautiful at 79, quietly enjoying Martin’s, and Randolph’s, triumph.

Second World War

World War II found Randolph in North Africa, performing sensitive intelligence assignments with skill and discretion. Like his father he was absolutely fearless. Anxious for combat, he talked his way into Fitzroy Maclean’s British mission to Tito. He parachuted into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, where his exploits were heralded.

In 1944 Randolph’s father met Tito in Naples, saying he was sorry he sorry he was too old to land by parachute; otherwise he would have been fighting with Tito’s partisans. Tito replied: “But you have sent us your son.” Tears glittered in Churchill’s eyes. He always declared a “deep animal love” for Randolph, while adding sadly: “every time we meet we seem to have a bloody row.”

Continued in Part 2: Randolph Postwar

After resigning as Secretary of State (1947-49) owing to ill health, Marshall recovered long enough to be President Truman‘s Secretary of Defense (1950-51)—the only uniformed military officer ever to hold that position. In 1953 he headed the U.S. delegation to the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth II, and became the only career U.S. army officer to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, largely for the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Act) that helped Europe revive after the war.

Alistair Cooke always sniffed and told me that the Marshall Plan should really have been called the Acheson Plan, for all the work Dean Acheson put into it. But Harry Truman insisted it be named for his Secretary of State. In part through Marshall’s efforts and prestige, it passed Congress with bipartisan support—not something transformative Acts of Congress seem to do nowadays.

Thomas E. Ricks has a good brief review of “Marshall VII” in Foreign Policy. “He had his faults, but he was a thoughtful, well-balanced man, and that comes out even in his minor exchanges. Again and again, I am struck at how well he handled Congress. He was clear and honest. Yet he also took very political steps.” Ricks calls Marshall “a decent man, not always treated decently.”

Marshall and Churchill

As soon as we were in the air I addressed myself to the Russian communiqué. As I found it very hard to make head or tail of the bundle of drafts, with all our emendations in the President’s scrawls and mine, I sent it along to General Marshall, who two hours later presented me with a typed fair copy. I was immensely impressed with this document, which exactly expressed what the President and I wanted, and did so with a clarity and comprehension not only of the military but of the political issues involved. It excited my admiration. Hitherto I had thought of Marshall as a rugged soldier and a magnificent organiser and builder of armies—the American Carnot. But now I saw that he was a statesman with a penetrating and commanding view of the whole scene. I was delighted with his draft, and also that the task was done. I wrote to the President that it could not be better, and asked him to send it off with any alterations he might wish, without further reference to me.

Scott Johnson of Powerline (“Why We Dropped the Bomb,” 13 April) kindly links an old column of his quoting an old one of mine with reference to President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima and the atom bombing of Japan.

Johnson links a lecture by Professor Williamson Murray, which is worth considering, along with Paul Fussell’s classic essay in The New Republic, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” which makes you think, though some consider it a rant. Fussell wrote:

John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, “a difference, at most, of two or three weeks.” But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7000 per week. “Two or three weeks,” says Galbraith.

Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you’re one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the destroyer escort Underhill was lost.

That’s a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.

Bombing and Churchill

But back to Churchill. What did he think about the bombing? Need you ask. Churchill wrote in his war memoirs, Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (1953, chapter 19):

British consent in principle to the use of the weapon had been given on July 4, before the test had taken place. The final decision now lay in the main with President Truman, who had the weapon; but I never doubted what it would be, nor have I ever doubted since that he was right. The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.

Some historians have cited a minor official in the Foreign Office who argued that Japan would surrender without the bombing, if the Allies promised she could keep her emperor; it was never proven that this ever reached the plenary level. Others quibble that the first bomb (Hiroshima) was perhaps necessary, but surely not the second (Nagasaki) only three days later, after the effects of the first were not even assessed. But the Japanese cabinet was divided still on the question of surrender after Nagasaki. Churchill continued:

I had in my mind the spectacle of Okinawa island, where many thousands of Japanese, rather than surrender, had drawn up in line and destroyed themselves by hand-grenades after their leaders had solemnly performed the rite of harakiri. To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that of British—or more if we could get them there: for we were resolved to share the agony.

Now all this nightmare picture had vanished. In its place was the vision—fair and bright indeed it seemed—of the end of the whole war in one or two violent shocks. I thought immediately myself of how the Japanese people, whose courage I had always admired, might find in the apparition of this almost supernatural weapon an excuse which would save their honour and release them from being killed to the last fighting man.

Truman never shrank from decisions, and in this one he was right. Six years of war (ignorant Americans always forget and say four) was enough. In 1953, Acheson placed Churchill “on trial” for dropping those bombs, in a perhaps inappropriate banter, but with more serious implications.

*****

Wars are declared on nations, not those who lead them, which is one reason why declarations of war have gone out of fashion. In our more “enlightened” age we are repelled by the suffering war inflicts on ordinary people. Unfortunately, you can’t declare war on an individual.

In introducing Alistair Cooke at the 1988 Churchill Conference, I quoted the words of that caring and generous man on the 25th anniversary of the bombing, which I had long since committed to memory:

Without raising more dust over the bleached bones of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I should like to contribute a couple of reminders: The first is that the men who had to make the decision were just as humane and tortured at the time as you and I were later. And, secondly, that they had to make the choice of alternatives that I for one would not have wanted to make for all the offers of redemption from all the religions of the world.