• First published as “Great Contemporaries, Pamela Harriman,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To subscribe to weekly articles from Hillsdale/Churchill, click here, scroll to bottom, and enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” We never spam you and your identity remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Pamela: she got there on her own

In 1941 at the U.S. Congress, Winston Churchill disarmed whatever remaining critics he still had by declaring:  “Had my father been American and my mother English, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.” Pamela Harriman (1920-1997) was all-English, yet rose to high American office on her own. She served as U.S. ambassador to Paris from 1993 until her death. Small-minded people, and there are plenty, belittle her lack of education, her glittery friendships with the great. All that is easy to mock, but beside the point.

Her colleague Richard Holbrooke rated her quite differently: “She spoke the language, she knew the country, she knew its leadership. She was one of the best.” President Jacques Chirac compared her to the two most notable American ambassadors, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. He awarded her a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur‘s Order of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural award. Pretty good for a girl from the sticks who left home early, determined to succeed.

Pamela Beryl Digby was born in Farnborough, Hampshire, daughter of the 11th Baron Digby. Her mother Constance was the daughter of 2nd Baron Aberdare. Her childhood home was her first Churchill connection. Minterne Magna in 1642 was the residence of John Churchill, father of the first Sir Winston.

A skilled horsewoman, Pamela competed at show-jumping including Olympia, where every fence was above her pony’s shoulders. In 1937 she was at a boarding school in Munich when she met Adolf Hitler—a dubious achievement her future father-in-law missed. Introduced by his admirer Unity Mitford, Pam never fell for whatever spell the Führer cast over Mitford.

“You are not still a Catholic?”

Pamela Digby’s first marriage, at age nineteen in 1939, was to Randolph Churchill, a decision taken on the fly. Randolph was off to war and, thinking he might be killed, anxious to produce an heir. Reportedly he had proposed to eight other women before Pamela.

Friends and family, she recalled, warned her that the mercurial Randolph was not a good long-term risk: Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, “took me for a long walk in the country and tried to dissuade me.” She replied: “If he is not killed and we do not get on together, I shall obtain a divorce.” In 1946, she was as good as her word.

Thomas Maier, author of The Churchills and the Kennedys, says the only Churchill concerned about the match was Winston. “Your family, the Digby family, were Catholic, but I imagine you are not still a Catholic?” he asked her. WSC had no religious prejudice, but as a politician always had to contemplate potential criticism.

Pamela assured him the Digbys had long been Church of England, and faithful Conservatives. “Yes, you had your heads chopped off in the Gunpowder Plot,” Churchill smiled. “That is right,” she answered—Sir Everard Digby.” (Mr. Maier notes that Sir Everard, a Catholic convert, was actually hung, drawn and quartered.)

“How great a man…”

Winston Churchill welcomed Pamela into the family. Becoming Prime Minister, he invited her to Downing Street. Pregnant with her son Winston, she recalled sleeping in a bunk bed in the bomb shelter, “one Churchill above me, another inside.” Pamela loved and admired the PM, and later did amusing imitations of him in her own deep voice.

Once during dinner amidst the Blitz, Churchill gazed around the table. “If the Germans come,” he told them, “you can always take one with you.” Pamela, all of twenty, was shocked at this. “But Papa,” she protested, “what would I fight with?”

WSC peered at her with a benignant smile: “You, my dear, may use a carving knife.” Her son Winston said she recited that vignette often, captivated by her father-in-law’s indomitable spirit. He added: “It was through her that it first dawned on me how great a man my grandfather was.”

Randolph to Averell

As friends had warned her, marriage with Randolph was not destined to be smooth. Neither were celibate in each other’s absence, and her affair with Roosevelt’s envoy, Averell Harriman, was an open secret. Winston nor Clementine never spoke of it.

Contrary to what you may hear from other sources, she fell for Averell the moment she laid eyes on him, one Blitz night at the Dorchester. There was no plot by Winston to use her. Inevitably, when he learned of it, Randolph Churchill exploded. Years later it still strained relations between father and son. But Randolph was hardly guiltless of indiscretions.

After her divorce, with little in her pocket except determination, Pamela and her young son Winston moved to Paris. She enjoyed a lavish life and romances. In 1960 she married Broadway producer Leland Hayward (renowned for South Pacific and The Sound of Music.) The marriage lasted until Hayward’s death in 1971. Six months later she married Harriman, then almost 80, caring for him devotedly. The old flame had never died, her son told this writer. “She often called Averell ‘the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.’”

“Never give in”

Through Harriman and with Churchillian determination, Pamela became immersed in American politics. In 1980 and 1984, the Democrats were in disarray following twin sweeps by Ronald Reagan. Pamela quoted Sir Winston: “In war you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.” How often he’d been counted out in politics and recovered?

At her home on N Street in Washington she hosted glamorous parties and fundraisers. “She had an ability to attract people around her, and a willingness to try to be a catalyst for the party,” said Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “Almost anybody who was asked was going to come to one of the gatherings at her spectacular house.” Her son Winston told me that politics aside, she was “one of the most conservative people I know. She would have brought the same zest had she married Ronald Reagan.”

As those two comments suggest, Pamela Harriman was admired from both sides of the aisle. She supported Clinton in 1992, and was rewarded with the Paris Ambassadorship. Yet at her confirmation hearings she was praised to the skies by the most conservative member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms.

“Darling, this is Pamela…”

She represented it seems the politics of a bygone age, a more Churchillian age. Like her first father-in-law, she saw it as a noble profession, where mutual respect was de rigueur. Years ago I published a piece on Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. As one might expect, it stressed the Fulton theme of peace through strength. Pamela Harriman wrote a rebuttal emphasizing Churchill’s Fulton title, “the Sinews of Peace.”

Paul Robinson, formerly Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Canada, read it, disagreed, and confessed that he remained among her greatest admirers. Earlier he had named Harriman and Weinberger co-vice-presidents during his chairmanship of the English-Speaking Union. “They were both superb,” he said. “And very good together—despite everything!”

Shortly before President Clinton arrived in office he proclaimed an admiration for Winston Churchill. I remember sending him, through Pamela Harriman, a blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the Churchill five-cent U.S. commemorative stamp. Delighted, she delivered it herself, and so we made her a pink version.

She telephoned to express her thanks, with the husky opening line that must have thrilled a thousand Washington insiders: “Darling, this is Pamela.” It would have been, and always was, superfluous to ask, “Pamela who?”

“Elegance itself”

Pamela lived life her way—a noble spirit devoted to friends, family and both her countries. Not many people could have journeyed so successfully and far with a formal education that ended at age sixteen.

How did she manage it? She was grace personified, at home equally in Churchill’s air raid shelter or the Élysée Palace. During her term as ambassador, Paris and Washington collided over alleged U.S. espionage, the “Europeanization” of NATO, leadership of the United Nations, peace initiatives in the Middle East, power rivalries in Africa. She handled it all with consummate skill, retaining the respect of her hosts despite those tests.

President Chirac lamented her loss: “To say that she was an exceptional representative of the United States in France does not do justice to her achievement. She lent to our longstanding alliance the radiant strength of her personality. She was elegance itself…a peerless diplomat.”

That old Francophile, her father-in-law, would have smiled.

Randolph Churchill Postwar

Out of the Army and Parliament in 1945, and divorced from Pamela in 1946, Randolph Churchill led a “rampaging existence,” his sister Mary wrote. “He always had lances to break, and hares to start.” He was loyal and affectionate, but he “would pick an argument with a chair.”

In 1948 he married June Osborne and fathered his second child, Arabella. The long-suffering June left  him in 1961.

He combined generous devotion to those he loved with an acid tongue and pen for those he didn’t. Many of the latter, I think, richly deserved what they got. But his public persona was based on the acid.

In the mid-1950s, surgery revealed that a tumor on his lung was benign. His lifelong friend, Evelyn Waugh, burst into the bar at White’s Club: “Have you heard the news? They’ve cut out the only part of Randolph that is not malignant!” Randolph responded by sending the devout Catholic Waugh an Easter card, wishing him a “Happy Resurrection.” They remained devoted to each other.

Character and Quality

His political career fizzled in part because he was unwilling to put up with local committee humbug. Thus he never gained the longed-for safe seat, where he could fight at his father’s side. In truth the Conservatives resented him. Before the war he’d battled their official candidates, splitting the vote and costing seats. Tory resentment at Winston’s rebellions was tempered by his wartime leadership, though it never really vanished. With Randolph they had no reason to hide their dislike, and after war they never forgot. It was a great loss, because his debating skills were formidable.

Randolph despised injustice. Landing in Johannesburg in the Apartheid days, he was handed an immigration form asking him to state his race. “Damned cheek!” he exclaimed, and began writing furiously, embellishing the myth of Indian blood in Churchill veins:

Race: human. But if, as I imagine is the case, the object of this enquiry is to determine whether I have coloured blood in my veins, I am most happy to be able to inform you that I do, indeed, so have. This is derived from one of my most revered ancestors, the Indian Princess Pocahontas, of whom you may not have heard, but who was married to a Jamestown settler named John Rolfe.

Then he gaily burned his press card, while a little girl watched fascinated.

Someone said that Randolph’s main feature was “generosity rather than honesty.” I feel sure he was both. Writing the biography, Sir Martin recalled, Randolph would constantly tell his staff, “I am interested only in the truth.” Bluntness brought him constant disputes with others less truthful. But no one can say that honesty wasn’t one of his great qualities.

At Stour: The Beast of Bergholt

In 1955 Randolph purchased Stour House in East Bergholt, Suffolk, in the heart of Constable Country. On the terrace wall, Randolph affixed a plaque quoting Constable: “I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor give up any time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt.” Martin Gilbert wondered:

Were we, Randolph’s researchers, “ghosts” and “paid hacks,” among the “commonplace people” when storms raged? We certainly felt as much. In September 1964 all four researchers (Michael Wolff, Andrew Kerr, George Thayer and myself ) and the four secretaries on the payroll at the time, received a collective exhortation, one of Randolph’s (and his father’s) favourite verses:

The heights of great men reached and kept,

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upwards in the night.

History was for him a feast, full of delicious morsels. And so … it became for me. Randolph’s personality, with its exhortations and eccentricities, kept the team on its toes.

Once a telegram arrived in which the address was given not as East Bergholt but Beast Bergholt. Randolph immediately announced with a broad grin that he was now “the Beast of Bergholt.” On another occasion he said, “I am an explosion that leaves the house still standing.” Sadly, the beast was the side of him most people saw.

Randolph Exploding

He honored and copied his father but nursed uneasy grievances that surfaced when he was drunk. In the late Fifties, at dinner on the Onassis yacht in the Aegean, he suddenly turned on his aged father with a stream of invective that sent Sir Winston to his cabin, pale and shaking. Onassis got rid of Randolph the next day by arranging for him to interview the King of Greece. He left the ship smiling, but in the launch, Churchill’s private secretary Anthony Montague Browne found him weeping. “You didn’t think I was taken in by that plan, do you?” he said. “I do so very much love that man, but something always goes wrong between us.”

Alas, his son wrote, “Randolph had no idea how unpleasant and offensive he could be when he was drunk. By the time he was sober he had largely forgotten or become oblivious to what had passed.”

* * *

At Stour one evening the guest was the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Donald McLachlan. Randolph was excited because the Telegraph would be serializing the biography. But in the 1930s, McLachlan had been a sub-editor of The Times. It was “an act of faith” at Stour to denounce The Times for hiding the truth about Nazi Germany. Randolph was carving the roast when McLachlan revealed inadvertently that it was he who had cut the Times’s Berlin despatches. Alarmed, Martin Gilbert glanced at Randolph:

Suddenly he turned towards the table, brandishing the carving knife, shaking and trembling, and exploded with a bellow of fury: “Shits like you should have been shot by my father in 1940.” The stress on “shits” and “shot” was fearsome to hear. Then he lunged towards the editor, who had to dodge round the table, until Randolph hurled the carving knife on to the floor and strode out of the room. We never saw him again that night. In the morning McLachlan left the house. [He stayed the night?]

Randolph Defending

When in good form, Randolph’s son continued,  “he could be the best of companions, a brilliant conversationalist, bubbling with wit and panache. A dinner hostess could be assured that whatever else might happen, the evening would not be dull if Randolph was among her guests, and in a crisis, there was no friend more loyal.”

In 1961 Harold Macmillan’s Minister of War, John Profumo, resigned amidst a sex scandal. Britain’s tabloids pounced and the Profumos were besieged by paparazzi. In strictest secrecy, Randolph offered Stour as a refuge.

Martin Gilbert showed me Randolph’s written instructions, headed OPERATION SANCTUARY and marked SECRET. Randolph would vacate the premises and the Profumos would arrive unobserved. He did not identify them, referring only to “OGs” (Our Guests).

If any reporters followed, “admission to the house or garden will be denied.” If they refused to leave the police would be called, “during which time OGs will retire upstairs. We will not stand any rot.”

Sir Martin considered Randolph’s gesture “one of real affection and goodness.” He knew that, “as a young MP, Profumo had been one of the Conservative Members who voted against Neville Chamberlain on 8 May 1940, making possible Churchill’s premiership two days later.”

Concluded in Part 3: “Randolph Churchill and the ‘Great Work'”

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

We met through the post forty-two years ago, when he became the third honorary member of the Churchill Study Unit, after his grandmother and his father. The latter had only just sent a letter of encouragement to our little group of stamp collectors when he himself died. It was June, 1968. In sending condolences, I asked Winston to take his father’s place. He accepted, adding, “It is consoling to know so many share my loss.”

And for four decades “Young Winston” was a stalwart supporter, friend and a collaborator on projects too numerous to recount. While kidding him that he was fast getting to be the “Not-So-Young Winston,” I felt he was timeless, always there for us: encouraging, prodding, donating, participating. My grief at his loss, far too soon, is deeply felt.

He gave us permission to publish his grandfather’s articles and speeches in Finest Hour. He appeared for speeches and presentations, from conferences to our Churchill Tours of England. He officiated at joint ceremonies like the commissioning of USS Winston S. Churchill, the American Veterans Center, our 2006 Churchill Lecture. When we founded The Churchill Centre in 1995, he was among the first to contribute to its endowment. He freely allowed his signature to be used on solicitations, most recently in a letter asking lapsed members to renew, which, eerily, was received by some after his death.

Like his father, he preferred to communicate by telephone, announcing himself with a cheery “Winston here!” He would call to tell of his adventures, from flying desperate medical missions for St. John Ambulance Air Wing to exploring scenes of his grandfather’s exploits—like the Malakand Pass, where he rode in an armoured car accompanied by soldiers armed to the teeth. Truly, he lived life large. In London and Washington, he knew everybody, just like his mother. As they said of Alistair Cooke: “He could reach back, reach forward, and make the connections. He was always, triumphantly, in touch.”

On one of his trips to New England, when promoting his book of Sir Winston’s writings about America, The Great Republic, we took him to visit Plimoth Plantation. There he accosted an Indian, assuring him they were related, “since my grandfather was part-Iroquois.” Back in the car I let him have it: “Winston, you’re as Iroquois as my cat!” “If you’re so smart,” he said, “prove it. Meanwhile it’s my story and I’m running with it!”

When I first visited him in London, he showed me his personal memorabilia. Here was the peerless Orpen portrait of his sad grandfather after the Dardanelles; an ornamental table once owned by John Churchill First Duke of Marlborough; a collection of WSC’s works, all first editions inscribed by his grandfather. I was a Churchill bookseller at the time, and he wanted to know what I thought of his collection. “Well,” I said, “you’ve made a good start…..”

We had several literary collaborations. When he assembled Never Give In!, his collection of Sir Winston’s best speeches, I was able to dig out some obscure ones he needed, like his grandfather’s remarks in Durban after escaping from the Boers in 1899. His writings appeared in Finest Hour, most recently in recounting the heroic contributions of Poles in World War II, in issue 145. Sir Martin Gilbert read it without realizing who wrote it: “I said to myself, wow,this is really good, I wonder who wrote it (wish it had been me!)”

Our largest “combined operation” was Churchill By Himself, the book I couldn’t have produced without his permission. Winston provided his grandfather’s words, I provided editorial notes. This, I assured him, would be “a production to rival South Pacific: music by W. Churchill, lyrics by R. Langworth.”

There were amusing adventures, like his call for “cigar quotes” for a company producing a new Churchill corona. I supplied the quotes and he asked if I wanted to be paid. “Yes,” I said, “with a box of cigars.” Sniffed Winston: “I don’t touch the dreadful things myself, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t kill yourself if you wish.” The box duly arrived with the price still on it, and I was temporarily elevated to smoking a twenty-five dollar corona, courtesy of my friend in London. (Recently I gave one to a Bahamian pal, its elaborate band sparkling with a red and gilt Churchill coat of arms. He looked as if he’d received a knighthood.)

Political labels are all too freely applied, and some labeled Winston a right-winger, but his views were too complex to be pigeonholed. True, he broke with Mrs. Thatcher by voting against sanctions on Rhodesia; he deplored the skinning-down of Britain’s armed forces; he worried publicly over unrestricted Commonwealth immigration and the muslimization of his country. But he was also pro-Europe; he strove for a more classless society. And last year, when Barack Obama’s Cairo speech was regarded by the right as a surrender, Winston hailed it as a courageous breakthrough in American foreign policy.

It is too easy to compare him to his grandfather and lament that he (or his father) were not equally great. Who was? It is most awfully untrue “that no acorn grows under a mighty oak.” There are just as many progeny of the great who did better than their parents (beginning of course with Sir Winston himself). For every “Randolph” there was a “Winston”—among the Buckleys, the Chamberlains, the Kennedys, the Salisburys, the Roosevelts, the Rothschilds, ad infinitum. It’s simply wrong to imply on this basis that his life was futile. Ultimately, most lives are.

And it is gratuitous to compare him to his female relations, since in those years, women were expected to mind their own business and perpetuate the family. The Churchill women who exceeded those roles did so through their own talent and character. Much more was expected of the Churchill men—more, perhaps, than could be expected of anyone. The onus was upon them both: Randolph, only son of Winston; Winston, only son of Randolph.

Still, with their pens, Winston and his father could reach heights matched by few. Were they great journalists? Read Randolph’s first two volumes on his father; read Winston’s biography of Randolph; read their joint book on the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War. The question answers itself.

Concerning his grandfather, Finest Hour once quoted Shakespeare’s Malvolio: “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Winston was one of those whom some tried to thrust greatness upon. He shook it off by being himself—not what some thought he was obliged to be.

His record was one on which I think he was content to be judged. Having no doubt about the verdict, it seems appropriate to conclude with another quote, by Rossiter Raymond, which adorns the tombstone of  Parry Thomas, the great Welsh racing driver: “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”