Macaulay wrote in  Lays of Ancient Rome: “Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate.” That was William Manchester’s kind inscription on my volume 2 of The Last Lion. It reminds me that Bill was himself for many of us “Captain of the Gate.” His death in 2004 bid fair to deprive us of finale of the most lyrical Churchill book ever written. Would the story end with his second volume, on the brink of 1940? Not quite. Twenty-four years on, Little Brown published the third and final volume.

The first two volumes of The Last Lion were the most celebrated Churchill works of their time. More than twenty years in the writing, Volume 3 was completed by his friend Paul Reid. It was a faithful portrait, positive but not without criticism. Reid was particularly revealing on Churchill’s thinking about the Second Front and Allied strategy in the Second World War.

On a personal level, too, Reid was sound, correctly portraying Churchill as enjoying alcohol but no alcoholic, no megalomaniac, no victim of the overblown “Black Dog.” Last Lion 3 correctly evaluated WSC’s mental state. As Jim Miller wrote in The New York Times Magazine:

After studying Mayo Clinic mental-health protocols and consulting other experts about Churchill’s probable state of mind, Reid came to a conclusion at odds with Manchester’s opinion that Churchill suffered from mental illness. He just lived in stressful and depressing times. “I don’t know why Manchester imparted that dark side to Churchill,” he says. “Every writer puts some of himself into his story. My take on the issue of depression is vastly different than Bill’s was.”

Beyond his brief

Paul Reid also did something William Manchester never intended. He extended the book beyond 1945, to a period Bill told me was superfluous. He insisted all that was a mere coda to the epic of the Second World War. Paul pondered this and decided to take the story to its end. He provided a little (though not a lot) on Churchill’s scintillating performance as leader of the opposition (1945-51), his second premiership (1951-55), and his noble, fruitless quest for a permanent peace. Frankly, those later years were better covered by Andrew Roberts’ equally seminal biography, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (2018).

Churchill himself said: “Nothing surpasses 1940.” Last Lion 3 begins there, just after he became prime minister. Britain and its Commonwealth stood alone against the might of undefeated Germany. The Churchill conjured up by Reid is a man of indomitable courage, compelling intellect and irresistible will. He explains how the Prime Minister organized Britain’s defense and worked “to drag America into the war.”

Here is the “never surrender” ethos that helped earn the victory. Here too is the rapid shift of world power to America and Russia. “I have not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” he said. He did not; others did that. Yet he saw the end coming quite early, and towards the end he was resigned to it—not without a proud nostalgia.

Manchester and Reid

William Manchester was a hugely successful popular writer with a unique, inspiring style. His books include his memoir of the Pacific War, Goodbye Darkness (his personal favorite); A World Lit Only by Fire; The Glory and the Dream; The Arms of Krupp; American Caesar; and The Death of a President.

His description of climacterics in these books are classics. Recall his telling of MacArthur’s valedictory address at West Point. Or Churchill during the Fall of France: “Another bloody country gone west.” Or Lee Harvey Oswald with his gun in the schoolbook depository at Dallas: “Ready on the right, ready on the left; all ready on the firing line.” Manchester’s passages will be recalled as long as English is spoken.

Paul Reid of North Carolina, a longtime feature writer for the Palm Beach Post, was an award-winning journalist. What matters too is that he was Manchester’s friend. In 1998, in the midst of research for Volume 3, Bill suffered two strokes that left him with mental faculties but unable to write. In October 2003, he asked Paul to complete the volume, saying: “I wanted a writer, not a historian.” It was an informal conversation, Paul Reid recalls, “sealed with a handshake.” In April 2004, two months before Bill’s death, they signed a formal agreement.

A great work

Paul Reid completed the research and transformed more than forty tablets of Manchester’s notes—“clumps” as he called them—to produce Last Lion 3. With others, I had the joy to be called on to vet his manuscript, as I had Bill’s Last Lion 2. The reviews assured Paul of a variety of opinions and reduced the chance of minor errors of fact that crept into the previous volumes. (I found quite a few in volume 2 and not all of them were fixed.) Manchester fans will find much of Bill’s trademark pace and cadence in this last installment of a classic. Last Lion is a mesmerizing journey through what Lady Soames called “The Saga.”

In a flourish suitable to a great work, Paul Reid ends his story on January 30th, 1965 with the best words Lord Moran ever wrote:

The village stations on the way to Bladon were crowded with his countrymen, and at Bladon in a country churchyard, in the stillness of a winter evening, in the presence of his family and a few friends, Winston Churchill was committed to English earth, which in his finest hour he had held inviolate.

Bill Manchester would like that.

Over 400 readers asked when we would see the third and final volume of William Manchester’s Churchill biography. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm 1940-1965 was last sequeled in 1988. Answer: Amazon was shipping copies in 2012—only twenty-four years since Volume II!

Mr. Reid kindly asked me to proof the manuscript for Volume III, as did Mr. Manchester for Volume II.

This will be good news to the many Manchester fans who have waited for years. Paul Reid’s volume is written in the Manchester style, as dramatic and gripping as the first two volumes. Read comments below for more details.

From a review by Warren Kimball:

Reid’s narrative skills are obvious. At his best he is succinct and enlightening. At his less than best, he rambles on about details that matter little to the big picture. Does naming British regiments really matter? (The King’s this or the Queen’s that? Or, even sillier, the 2nd Sherwood Foresters or various Hussars?)

Nazi reactions are exaggerated. Josef Goebbels’ diary seems quoted almost as often as Churchill’s war memoirs. Battle details are spelled out like case studies at Sandhurst or West Point. For the most part, this is a narrative about the Second World War. Winston Churchill plays the lead role. And the war threatens to overwhelm the narrative.

Martin Gilbert has already given us a meticulous, good-to-the-last-detail chronology of Churchill during the Second World War (cited less frequently than I expected). We have a surfeit of broad surveys of the war viewed from the top. What does this book add?

Cruising down the river

Paul Reid has not written a biography, but rather an old-style “life & times” narrative with guns and bullets, political conniving, oft-repeated (but worth repeating) anecdotes, lovely touches of the personal, and the most important asset—a hero. It is a nice cruise down a rather lengthy river that you’ve sailed before.

There is nothing new or exciting; it is reassuring rather than challenging. Still, it is a lovely and literate view of familiar territory that massages old stories, nurtures legends, and points gently to miscalculations and mistakes of the hero—who flawed though he was, remains a hero.

Reid chose, or was forced, to pretend ignorance of the dogged efforts of a multitude of academics who, in the last four decades, pushed forward the frontiers of scholarship and intellectual inquiry into the history of the Second World War.

Not only is his historical isolationism rude; it is a shame, particularly since he is a superb writer. He makes a familiar history come alive, though you’ll have to manage a huge cargo of extraneous material in a book this long (with strikingly narrow margins) that takes Churchill only from 1940 until his death.