I listened with appreciation to your recommended podcasts of “Uncancelled History” by Douglas Murray. Particularly fascinating was his conversation on Thomas Jefferson with the historian Jean Yarbrough. Did Churchill have anything to say about this extraordinary, complex and learned Founding Father? —R.F., Connecticut

A: Yes, but first a digression…

Your question reminds me of a dinner for Nobel Prize Winners at the  White House, 29 April 1962. President John F. Kennedy declared them welcome:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet. Whatever he may have lacked, if he could have had his former colleague Mr. Franklin here, we all would have been impressed.

Not even Churchill, I believe, paid a greater compliment to Jefferson than President Kennedy. Likewise, Uncancelled History is a font of Truth emerging from the Bodyguard of Lies that surrounds her in the present age.

Andrew Roberts on Churchill vies with Allen Guelzo on Washington as my favorite Uncancelled History episodes. And Jean Yarbrough’s Jefferson emerges from the blue distance of time as the truly sterling character her was. (Incidentally, the Sally Hemmings story is exploded as the slanderous myth it is. Watch it and decide for yourself.)

Hamilton and Jefferson

Churchill contrasts Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in The Age of Revolution, Volume 3 of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. We all learned about them in school—well, at least those of us “of a certain age.” What Churchill offers is the view of a fellow statesman, 150 years removed. And Churchill lived a life and experiences few—but certainly Jefferson—could claim.

Hamilton, writes Churchill,  “symbolises one aspect of American development, the successful, self-reliant business world. He distrusted  “the collective common man…’the majesty of the multitude.'” But Hamilton exhibited little of “the idealism which characterises and uplifts the American people.” Jefferson was “the product of wholly different conditions and the prophet of a rival political idea.” Churchill continues:

The outbreak of war between England and France was to bring to a head the fundamental rivalry and conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson and to signalise the birth of the great American parties, Federalist and Republican. Both were to split and founder and change their names, but from them the Republican and Democratic parties of today can trace their lineage.

Churchill on Jefferson:

He came from the Virginian frontier, the home of dour individualism and faith in common humanity, the nucleus of resistance to the centralising hierarchy of British rule. Jefferson had been the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and leader of the agrarian democrats in the American Revolution.

He was well read; he nourished many scientific interests, and he was a gifted amateur architect. His graceful classical house, Monticello, was built according to his own designs. He was in touch with fashionable Left-Wing circles of political philosophy in England and Europe, and, like the French school of economists who went by the name of Physiocrats, he believed in a yeoman-farmer society.

He feared an industrial proletariat as much as he disliked the principle of aristocracy. Industrial and capitalist development appalled him. He despised and distrusted the whole machinery of banks, tariffs, credit manipulation, and all the agencies of capitalism which the New Yorker Hamilton was skillfully introducing into the United States.

He perceived the dangers to individual liberty that might spring from the centralising powers of a Federal Government…. It was not given to him to foresee that the United States would eventually become the greatest industrial democracy in the world.

Churchill deeply respected Jefferson’s deeds and thought. His further remarks are in The Age of Revolution, Book 9, Chapter 17.

On education: Jefferson’s warning

President Kennedy’s awe of Jefferson, and Churchill’s generous appreciation, led us to a matter of current moment: education. In revising the laws of Virginia in 1778, Jefferson offered “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge.” Its preamble speaks volumes on the need for a better educated electorate.

Jefferson believed the American Constitution protected the individual’s natural rights. Nevertheless, he observed, those “entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” That, he continues, must be prevented. The best preventive is education. Possessed of “the experience of other ages and countries,” educated citizens will recognize “ambition under all its shapes.” They will exert “their natural powers to defeat its purposes.”

A people will be happiest “whose laws are best, and are best administered…. If those who “form and administer” those laws are “wise and honest.” Education produces people “worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens…without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance.” It is therefore more important that children “should be sought for and educated at the common expense of all, than that the happiness of all should be confided to the weak or wicked.”

Jefferson today

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich looks at Jefferson in a very thoughtful podcast.  He shows, I think, how Jefferson’s thoughts remain evergreen—and ever more important today:

Now, if you go back and re-read that, you realize our current situation: Schools that don’t teach. Teachers that don’t educate. Avoidance of history. Dumbing down of mathematics. Giving people passing grades so they feel good even if they know nothing. You can sense that we have arrived at a counter-Jeffersonian moment, when everything Jefferson feared, in terms of ignorant people giving up their freedoms, is far too close to becoming a reality. That’s why Jefferson is always worth revisiting, and thinking about.

The Virginia House of Delegates rejected Jefferson’s Bill in 1778 and 1780. His friend  James Madison presented it repeatedly while Jefferson was serving in Paris as Minister to France. In 1796 a revised version finally passed as “Act to Establish Public Schools.”

Further reading

“Reflections on the Birthday of George Washington,” 2023

(Updated from 2014.) After meeting Churchill on the Onassis yacht Christina in the mid-Fifties, where he appeared in a white dinner jacket, John F. Kennedy allegedly asked his wife, “Well, how did I do?”  Jacqueline Kennedy replied, “I think he thought you were a waiter, Jack.” When and where was this? Did Churchill snub Kennedy out of his dislike for his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the defeatist former U.S. Ambassador to Britain?” —R.S., Vermont

A: No

According to Martin Gilbert in Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 8 (1174), Churchill first met Onassis when the latter was invited to dinner at La Pausa on 16 January 1956. Onassis worshipped Churchill. (WSC to his wife: “He kissed my hand!”) La Pausa was the home of Emery Reves, Churchill’s literary agent and frequent host in the south of France after retiring as prime minister in 1955.

1958

Jack Kennedy deeply admired Churchill and read his books as a boy. His chance to meet his hero came in 1958, according to my friend Barbara Leaming, whose books I recommend: Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1965; Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman; Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years). Barbara Leaming writes:

The actual source of the Jackie quote is William Douglas-Home’s oral history at the Kennedy Library. William was Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home’s younger brother. He was a longtime friend of JFK from the period of his father Joe Sr.’s ambassadorship.  He was one of the many young boys in that set who were besotted by Jack’s sister Kick (Kathleen).

Both William and Jackie say the meeting of JFK and Churchill took place when JFK and Jackie, and William and his wife, shared a vacation house in the South of France. See page 219, Caroline Kennedy’s Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. Here Jackie says that during this visit, the Agnellis took them, before a dinner, to meet Churchill on Onassis’s yacht.  Jackie dates this as 1958.*

That date makes sense in terms of both JFK’s trips and Jackie’s, as well as for Churchill’s presence in the South of France. 1956 is impossible:  Jackie did not accompany Jack to Europe that summer after he lost the VP nomination because she was about to have a baby. The baby was stillborn and JFK had to be called home.

1959

Churchill rarely nursed a grudge. Though Joe Kennedy had upset him with his defeatism when the war began, he quickly forgot. He sent flowers to the funeral of Kathleen Kennedy and admired JFK from what he read about the young man and heard from mutual acquaintances. Happily, they were destined to meet again.

Kennedy never actually cruised with Onassis, nor did Churchill before September-October 1958. But they met again more auspiciously after WSC’s second cruise in February-March 1959. When Christina moored at Monte Carlo. JFK was invited on board. Sir Winston had expressed a wish to meet “young Kennedy.”

According to Willi Frischauer’s Onassis (229), Kennedy chatted with Churchill about his presidential ambitions, citing his Catholicism as a problem. (Churchill replied: “If that’s the only difficulty, you can always change your religion and still remain a good Christian,” prompting a laugh by Kennedy.) By this time, for sure, Sir Winston knew exactly who John F. Kennedy was.

One thing is certain: Churchill never snubbed Jack Kennedy because of his father. Churchill was not a hater. He sent a wreath to the funeral of Jack’s sister Kathleen in 1948. He expressed admiration of JFK on several occasions, and congratulated him after his election.

Endnote

* The Agnellis of course ran the Fiat car dynasty. I ran into them in researching my book on Kaiser-Frazer. At one point Henry J. Kaiser had the idea that he would buy Fiat. He had a talk with Gianni Agnelli. He soon realized that if any buying was done, it would be the Agnellis buying Kaiser Industries….

Jacqueline Kennedy offered a touching and durable vision of Churchill’s legacy at the White House ceremony on 9 April 1963—now “Churchill Day” in America. It was when President Kennedy bestowed honorary U.S. citizenship on Sir Winston.

Aged 88, Churchill was represented by his son Randolph, who was a bundle of nerves. In the Oval Office beforehand, the First Lady recalled, “Randolph was ashen, his voice a whisper. ‘All that this ceremony means to [Randolph and the President],’ I thought, ‘is the gift they wish it to be for Randolph’s father.’”

“Randolph stepped forward to respond: ‘Mr. President.’ His voice was strong. He spoke on, with almost the voice of Winston Churchill, speaking for his father.”

Legacy and Liberty

Churchill’s message, so ably delivered by his son at that ceremony fifty-six years ago, calls to us again across the years, amidst fresh challenges to liberty.

In this century of storm and tragedy, I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples…. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands.  Nor has our partnership any exclusive nature: the Atlantic community is a dream that can well be fulfilled to the detriment of none and to the enduring benefit and honour of the great democracies.

Those words testify to why the legacy of Churchill still matters. They explain why, after the most critical attacks against any statesman of the recent past, his reputation survives. We still heed and quote him. Churchill’s legacy endures because of his ability to crystallize the convictions and aspirations of free men and women. No one spoke them better.

Legacy and Longevity

That legacy also involves longevity. From the last great British cavalry charge at Omdurman to the nuclear age, Churchill was there. Most politicians are prominent for ten or twenty years. Churchill stood at the apex of events for half a century. Read about him and you’ll find he was more than a fleeting figure in a war long ago.

Thoughtful people know Churchill’s story offers much more than the courageous figure of 1940. More than ordinary politicians, he reflected seriously on the nature of democracy, on the proper role of the state. He thought repeatedly about how to maintain peace without resort to war. Always he nursed a determined optimism that in the end “all will come right.”

It is easy today for the uninformed to portray Churchill as a grotesque—even the opposite to what he really was. Did he make mistakes? Certainly. Did he contradict himself? Frequently. But he “always had second and third thoughts,” as William Manchester wrote,

and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity. Given time, he could devise imaginative solutions.

As he reflected upon his honorary American citizenship he concluded: “Our past is the key to our future, which I firmly trust and believe will be no less fertile and glorious. Let no man underrate our energies, our potentialities and our abiding power for good.”

That is his legacy. We seek to learn by his experience and wisdom. Today as always, it is eerily relevant.

The most touching and durable vision left by Mr. Maier comes toward the end of this long book: the famous White House ceremony in April 1963, as President Kennedy presents Sir Winston Churchill (in absentia) with Honorary American Citizenship—while from an upstairs window his stroke-silenced father, Joseph P. Kennedy, watches closely, with heaven knows what reflections:

Whatever thoughts raced through the mind of Joe Kennedy—the rancor of the past, the lost opportunities of his own political goals, and the tragic forgotten dreams he had once had for his oldest son, could not be expressed. His weak, withered body, with its disfigured mouth, no longer served him…could say nothing in his own defense.

This is a readable book, elegantly written, which commits some errors. It contains much known information, except perhaps for encyclopedic revelations of which Churchills and Kennedys were sleeping with whom. In some ways one is reminded of a description applied by Warren Kimball to Volume 3 in the Manchester Churchill trilogy The Last Lion: “A nice cruise down a lengthy river you’ve sailed before.”

Meetings and consequences

The biographies surround occasions when the two families meet (or collide): 1933, 1935, 1938, and so on. Much of what we read about John F. Kennedy’s remarkable affinity for Churchill has been recorded earlier, by Barbara Leaming, in Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (2006).

Along the way are interesting takes. Churchill’s interest in secret intelligence, for example, is traced to the Boer War, when young Winston “performed a bit of reconnaissance work, posing as a civilian riding a bicycle” in the Boer capital of Pretoria. Mr. Maier tracks the Joe Kennedy-Churchill relationship thoroughly, establishing that it began in 1933 (five years before JPK became Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Britain), when he and Churchill did some joint business involving the liquor trade. This, he suggests, might today be termed influence peddling—but Churchill held no office from 1929 to 1939.

Mr. Maier gets quite a few Churchill points wrong. There’s an incomplete account of the scandal involving Lord Alfred Douglas, who in 1916 libeled Churchill (“short of money and eager for power”), accusing him of manipulating war news to benefit his mentor Sir Ernest Cassel. Maier might have added that Churchill sued and won…or that in 1941, when Douglas published a sonnet praising the now-prime minister, Churchill forgave him on the spot, saying, “Time ends all things.”

Balanced criticism

Perhaps it is hard nowadays to credit many people with kindness and altruism, like Sir Henry Strakosch, who took over Churchill’s portfolio and preserved WSC’s dwindled finances. Maier calls this a “bailout plan…considered more a gift than graft by Churchill and his benefactors….” But graft is “the unscrupulous use of a politician’s authority for personal gain.” Strakosch never made one demand of Churchill. He acted only in appreciation for the man and the leader.

Churchill the imperialist is not ignored. “Winston showed little enthusiasm for the revolutionary spirit of independence among those living in former colonies of the British Empire such as India, South Africa, Kenya, or even neighboring Ireland,” Maier writes. Not so fast! What about his post-1935 encouragement to Gandhi and Nehru; his loyalty to Smuts, who opposed Apartheid; praise of locally-ruled Kenya in 1908; his instrumental role in the 1921 Treaty that brought independence to Ireland? Against such omissions, the canard that Churchill wanted to use “poison gas” against Iraqi tribesman stands in some contrast.

In World War II, Maier writes, “when the Communist guerrillas threatened to take control of Yugoslavia, Churchill underlined his concern by sending his only son.” No: Churchill had determined that Tito’s Communists were “killing more Huns” than the royalists, and sent his son to aid Tito. And Tito was not a “Soviet puppet.”

Kennedys and Winston

Maier says Joe Kennedy “blamed Roosevelt and Churchill for the death of his son Joe Jr.” No specific evidence exists for this.

A media kerfuffle was raised by the book’s report that after the war, WSC told Senator Styles Bridges (R., N.H.) that America should nuke Moscow before the Russians got their hands on the bomb. This was perfectly legitimate to record, but raised shock headlines among the ignorant media. As noted elsewhere, the story is not new. Churchill often voiced apocalyptic notions to visitors to observe their reaction. He never made that proposal to any plenary U.S. authority. As Graham Farmelo wrote in Churchill’s Bomb: “This was the zenith of Churchill’s nuclear bellicosity.” He soon softened his line, telling Parliament in January 1948 that the best chance of avoiding war was “to arrive at a lasting settlement” with the Soviets. Maier doesn’t acknowledge Churchill’s change of view until 1952. He adds that Churchill “would drop the bomb if he could.” That is simply unproven. And unlikely.

* * *

Other basic errors include the assertion that Winston’s father never visited him at school, that Churchill’s war memoirs comprised four volumes, that the Munich Agreement was in 1939, that Egypt was a former British colony (508). Among the trivial are mis-titling a Churchill article and identifying “Toby” the green parakeet as Churchill’s “white canary.”

Churchill’s description of Munich as a “choice between War and Shame” was not said in Parliament; “MBE” does not stand for Member of the British Empire. Lord and Lady Churchill, Lady Nancy Astor or “Sonny” Marlborough never existed. Tw0 nannies are misnamed: Elizabeth Everest (not “Everett”) and Marriott Whyte (not “Madeleine White).”

Fathers and sons

The book finishes with thoughtful reflections. Jack and Bobby got on much better with their father than Randolph with his, Maier suggests. Yet the Kennedy sons were far from their father in outlook and policy. After Joe’s stroke, “Jack and Bobby interacted with their father as they always did, as if he might suddenly talk back to them.” But poor Randolph Churchill just talked back. “I do so very much love that man,” Randolph says in tears, after being pointedly ejected from the Onassis yacht following a flaming attack on his aged father, “but something always goes wrong between us.”

Did Winston spoil Randolph to the point of disaster? Or did he subconsciously communicate a wish that Randolph could never be his equal? Did Joe Kennedy accept early on that great political prizes would not be his, but  for his sons? Mr. Maier leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions. His summary well crafted summary:

This legacy between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the eternal questions about families and fate, and our lasting impression of greatness, were all part of the shared experience between the Churchills and the Kennedys. In the twentieth century, no two families existed on a bigger world stage…. With courage, wit, and unforgettable determination, both Winston S. Churchill and John F. Kennedy helped define and save the world as we know it today.

That is a bit of overreach: comparing the lengths of their careers and the scales of the two salvations. But save it they did.