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.

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.

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.

In April 1995 Johnson, then a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, deplored the £12.5 million purchase of Churchill Papers for the nation. The lottery-supported National Heritage Memorial Fund, said Johnson, was frittering away money on pointless projects and benefiting Tory grandees. Johnson added: “…seldom in the field of human avarice was so much spent by so many on so little …”

The Memorial Fund replied the Churchill Papers were a national heirloom under threat of being sold outside the country. Johnson snorted that they had simply “run out of sporting and artistic projects to endow.” His “unsentimental approach to Churchill’s records may seem surprising given that in 2014 he published a eulogistic biography of the former Conservative premier,” wrote The Guardian. 

I remember the Great Churchill Papers Flap very well, having published articles about it back then. It is the same tempest in a teapot today that it was in 1995. Except that nowadays, Churchill and his memory are fair game to grunting mobs and virtue-signaling nannies. So the whole business is again somehow newsworthy.

A threat to Britain’s heritage

Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s foremost biographer, called the Churchill Papers “the largest single private repository of recent British history.” Their acquisition, he said, was “an imaginative stroke of national policy.” Among other triumphs, the Papers inform thirty-one volumes of Winston S. Churchill, the longest biography on the planet.

Scholars have long mined these fifteen tons of documents. Many individual items have been reproduced. It was the possibility that they might be sold to an overseas buyer, Gilbert explained, that focused concern on their physical future:

The first alarm involved certain specific documents, such as Churchill’s wartime speeches, which clearly constitute part of the national heritage. Photocopies and reproductions are all very well, but the actual pieces of paper are what matters. The originals alone convey the full sense of historical drama.

The idea that Churchill’s final draft of “we will fight on the beaches” would end up in a library overlooking a beach in the Pacific, or some other distant shore, was not attractive. As a result of the decision to use National Lottery money to secure the Churchill Papers, it is not only letters written by Churchill that are to be preserved in this country and guarded, as hitherto, in the specially designed archives of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Sir Martin explained that “Churchill’s Papers” are very much more than his own notes and monographs. Of course they include handwritten or typed manuscripts of books and speeches, if not copies of his own letters. He also kept every letter that he received. “These letters, written to him, constitute the real historical value of this collection.”

A great glory saved

Churchill’s original letters reside in 500 libraries and archives around the world. The Churchill Papers, however, represent the whole range British history. Sir Martin offered examples:

Here we have letters from David Lloyd George, setting out the most radical proposals for social reform before the First World War. Here we have Lord Kitchener’s letters during the early months of the First World War, including the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition. We see here the Irish leaders on both sides struggling for a compromise to end the civil war. Here, too are Labour leaders negotiating with Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to resolve the 1926 coal strike. Secretly, they visited him at a house in London to work out a compromise.

Throughout the 1930s the Churchill Papers abound in letters from civil servants, airmen and members of the intelligence community. They sent secret information, much of it from Nazi Germany, enabling Churchill to wage his campaign for greater rearmament. While his own letters consist in the main of carbon copies, it is the originals from other people that are the great glory of the papers saved for the nation.

A letter from his good friend Val Fleming (father of Ian) describes the slaughter on the Western Front. There is a letter from his brother Jack describing the first awful moments of the Dardanelles campaign. Letters from his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, are full of the political gossip of 1916. There are letters from Admiral “Jackie” Fisher urging Churchill to return from the trenches and break the government. Churchill did return, but his efforts to harm the government in debate were a dismal failure.

A rich seam of historical gold

“The Papers represent every twist and turn of British political debate,” Sir Martin continued. Every file contains gems. “Having read and edited them all, I can only conclude that the Churchill archive will provide in the future, as it is already doing, a rich seam of historical gold.”  It is the richest seam outside the Government’s own National Archives, which house Churchill’s voluminous war papers, and those of his four-year peacetime premiership.

Every VE-Day, the Churchill Papers are there to prompt remembrance of heroic times. A letter on VE-Day itself was sent to WSC from Anthony Eden: “All my thoughts are with you on this day which is so essentially your day. It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.”

And among the hundreds of letters from Churchill’s children is one from his daughter Mary, written when he was an old man long parted from power or influence: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does, Liberty itself.” For this reason alone, Sir Martin concluded, “the assurance that the Churchill Papers are to remain in Britain is to be welcomed.”

Controversy and rebuttal

Remarkably in view their importance, some historians and media were outraged that one-fourth of the Churchill Papers’ value inured to private parties. They should have been donated, they said. On which, a few observations:

1) In later years, Churchill considered how he could provide for his family. Almost his only property of significant value was his papers. A typical Victorian, he willed them to his male heirs. However, as his daughter Mary told me, “all his dependents were provided for, and all were appreciative of what he did for them.”

2) Appraisals of the papers were £40 and £32.5 million respectively. The government took the lower estimate, subtracted £10 million for anything official and £10 million for tax. That left £12.5 million. J. Paul Getty II generously put up £1 million and the Heritage Lottery Fund £11.5 million—a fraction of their value on the open market.

3) Taxpayers did not provide the £11.5 million. Lottery profits go to various sports, arts, charities and Heritage materials. Almost always, Heritage items are in private hands, so their acquisition often benefits private parties.

4) Comparisons to the post-1945 papers left to Churchill College are irrelevant. Lady Churchill bequeathed them late in life, knowing her children had been provided for. Had she been younger she could have sold them, and would have had every right to do so.

5) While the copyright was retained (to documents originated by WSC), this should be kept in perspective. Until Hillsdale College took them on, no publisher would underwrite the final document volumes. Academic publications, non-profit institutions, even hostile biographers, have used the material without charge.

Why the uproar?

The reason for the flap has nothing to do with the rights of ownership, and everything to do with making political hay and sowing scorn. Such activities have vastly multiplied in the last quarter century. The biographer William Manchester was well aware of this when he memorably wrote The Times in 1995:

The controversy over the sale of the Churchill Papers to the British nation, with proceeds going to members of his family, is bewildering. One British historian in a U.S. newspaper labeled the transaction “just tacky.” One wonders why it is even newsworthy.

When out of office, Churchill, a professional writer, supported his household with his pen. His literary estate was his property. He had every reason, both moral and legal, to expect that title to it would pass on to his survivors through the trust fund which he established before his death. The sum of £12.5 million, however raised, seems hardly excessive. The collection would sell for far more than that in the United States. But that would have raised a genuine storm, which would have been justifiable.

Some critics believe that the Papers should have been donated to the country. That has a familiar ring. Authors are forever being told that they should give their work to society—that to expect money in return is, well, tacky. The origin of this presumption lies in a misapprehension of the word “gifted.” Many believe that talent is literally a gift, which the writer should pass along. The fact is that writing is very hard work, and that here, as elsewhere, the laborer is worthy of his hire. Surely any working person should be able to understand that.

I’ve been slogging through the William Manchester Churchill trilogy, The Last Lion. How is Hillsdale’s eight volume Winston S. Churchill by Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert different? —M.A., Louisiana.

A: Profoundly, but both are invaluable

(This article is excerpted from a longer piece which can read in entirety on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.) If you are slogging through Manchester, you may find Gilbert a challenge. There is a vast difference, both writers have their advantages, but Gilbert is the source on which scholars rely.

Music by Churchill, Lyrics by Manchester

William Manchester was a stylist, a lyrical, beautiful writer. But comparing him to Gilbert, Simon Schama was critical: “Manchester’s slapdash study, with its cartoon-strip account of British politics and culture and its rhinestone-studded prose, looked particularly gaudy next to Gilbert’s.”

But let’s remember the good: William Manchester in the 1980s brought more people to Churchill than anyone at that time. Accomplished scholars who took great issue with his conclusions were often careful to credit him with that.

Manchester’s epic prologues to Volumes 1 and 2 of The Last Lion are literary works of art. For a fine analysis of how Manchester weaves his prologues, see Cole Feix, “Churchill’s Character,” on the Hillsdale Churchill website. (Volume 3, written by WM’s friend Paul Reid, is more analytical). The problem was that Manchester tended to make many detail errors, and sometimes his footnotes lead in circles, or nowhere.

Churchillians hosted Manchester at several events beginning in 1986. After I published a respectful review of his volume 1, noting many errors, he hired me to vet volume 2. I found 600 nits to pick, and he did not correct them all! For instance, his account of the crucial East Fulham bi-election of 1933 treats the vote as a Labour upset which pushed the Tories toward appeasing Hitler. In fact, East Fulham was a marginal factor.

Gilbert as Bard

Randolph Churchill, who wrote the first two volumes of the official biography, could be in parts as lyrical as Manchester, but he too made mistakes and omissions. A contemporary historian called those volumes “the case for the defense,” complaining that Churchill himself had already published his defenses through his memoirs of the two World Wars.

Martin Gilbert is virtually error-free, and very different. His is a chronological, day by day account, which puts you at Churchill’s shoulder as events unfold. Gilbert refrains from expressing his opinion, but reviewers make too much of this. His opinion is clear through his selection of material. It is mainly positive, but he does not overlook Churchill’s faults.

Together with the accompanying document volumes (twenty-three, since Hillsdale finished the job in 2019)—it is unsurpassed. A very fine review of Gilbert was by Professor Schama in 1983. It concerns Volume 6, but really applies to all the Gilbert volumes (3-8).

Schama on the “Churchilliad”

From Simon Schama’s review of Winston S. Churchill, volume 6, Finest Hour 1941-1945, in The New Republic, 1983:

The narrative simply begins: “At eleven o’clock on the morning of September 3rd 1939…” and goes on like that for another 1274 pages. It is a Churchilliad, and Gilbert is its Bard….

The great tidal wave of detail plunges the reader almost involuntarily into Churchill’s life during the first two grim years of the war. One does not so much read the life, one accompanies it….

There are unforgettable vignettes: receiving an assistant during the Blitz “wrapped only in a huge bath towel looking like one of the later Roman Emperors”: singing “Ol’ Man River” in his car after speaking in Parliament of the Anglo-American relationship that “like the Mississippi just keeps rolling along”; rapping on a front door and greeting the butler with a cheery “Goebbels and Goering here to report”; and dictating to his secretary from his flower-chintzed four-poster, chewing a cigar, sipping soda water and fidgeting his toes beneath the bedclothes….

“Like a Great Granite Cliff”

Against all odds, [Gilbert] succeeds in conveying the frightening bleakness of the spring of 1940, when Hitler seemed unstoppable and European democracy appeared to be closing down for the season. The first indispensable component of Churchill’s leadership was staggeringly and indefatigably hard work….more than any of the other war leaders, and certainly more than either Stalin or the warlords in Berlin and Rome, Churchill was in his own right a great commander. This is not to say that he did not commit blunders during the war. But he had an unerring nose for fine commanders, and he stuck by them even when they were drawing flack from their staff….

The terror of imminent extinction flickers intermittently through Martin Gilbert’s crowded narrative. But whenever it begins to rise with the tempo of accumulating disasters, Churchill’s presence, too, rises above the panic, like a great granite cliff.

I suppose that is what our forebears felt and what sustained them in the nightmare of 1940. This is a rare thing then: a vast biography in which the stature of its subject is enhanced rather than diminished with every page and every document. The only somber reflection on putting it down is the certainty that we shall not look upon his like again.

Further reading

“Gilbert and Manchester: Complementary Biographers,” 2012

“No Cutlet Uncooked”

He lies at Bladon in English earth, “which in his finest hour he held inviolate.” He would enjoy the controversy he still stirs today, in media he never dreamed of. And he would revel in the assaults of his detractors, the ripostes of his defenders. The vision “of middle-aged gentlemen who are my political opponents being in a state of uproar and fury is really quite exhilarating to me,” he said in 1952. (Yes, and the not so middle-aged, too.) Most of all, Winston Churchill would love this noble book. It peers into every aspect of a career six decades long, and not, as he once quipped, “entirely without incident.”

In 1960 General Lord Ismay, the devoted “Pug,” said an objective biography could not be written for fifty years. Andrew Roberts weighs in at year fifty-eight. The delay paid off. Roberts was able to access sources only recently available. Not least of these are The Churchill Documents—invaluable papers in print through World War II. Roberts researched the Royal Archives at Windsor, the private papers of Churchill’s family. He quotes diarists like Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador to Britain. With his gift for separating wheat from chaff, this accomplished historian boils the saga down to digestible size.

* * *

Full disclosure: This writer labored for over a year as one of Roberts’ readers, sifting every word of his manuscript. Our emails, as he kindly notes, reached four figures. Together with the tenacious Paul Courtenay, we tackled every question. We ran down facts and factoids, arguing out every conclusion. With Hillsdale’s help, we checked unpublished parts of Sir Martin Gilbert’s “wodges.”  These are documents, clippings and letters, compiled by Sir Martin, for almost every day of Churchill’s life.

Mr. Roberts, to quote his subject, “left no cutlet uncooked.” This is the first biography I’ve proofed since Manchester’s The Last Lion, so I am perhaps qualified to compare. No one will ever reach the lyrical heights of Horatius at the Gate, like Manchester did. Roberts is far more illuminating, accurate and up to date. Walking with Destiny is a masterpiece—the finest single Churchill volume you can hope to read. To paraphrase Simon Schama on Gilbert’s volumes, it is a “Churchilliad,” and Andrew Roberts is its Bard.

Seeing the Whole Man

Roberts captures the essence of his subject, beginning with courage. How many 40-year-olds, sacked from their job, go off to fight in a world war? “You must not let this fret you in the least,” Churchill nonchalantly assured his wife. Fret she did: “…you seem to me as far away as the stars, lost among a million khaki figures.” He left the trenches in 1916, Roberts notes. “He had written over 100 letters to her, which allows us to peer into his psychology better than at any other period of his life.”

Clementine Churchill never begrudged his predilections, from battle to politics, where somehow he managed to remain friends with opponents. He even socialized with them, in a club he invented for the purpose: “With Churchill there was very often a political angle to friendship. An extraordinarily large contingent of Other Club members came together to help make Churchill prime minister in several different ways, and then to serve in his wartime Government…. Churchill had built something that by 1940 was to make a very real contribution…”

The great man’s courage vied with his emotion, Roberts writes: “Lady Diana Cooper left a charming account of [a wartime] weekend at Ditchley…. ‘We had two lovely films after dinner…. Winston managed to cry through all of them, including the comedy.’ She told him that night that the greatest thing he had done was to give the British people courage. ‘I never gave them courage,’ he replied. ‘I was able to focus theirs.’” Exactly.

Canards fall like matchsticks…

 … as Roberts methodically writes them off. It was not true, as Lord Mountbatten said, that young Winston left Cuba in 1895 with a liking for siestas and cigars. He already smoked cigars, did not start his afternoon nap until 1914. Regarding his overblown spells of the blues: “Churchill was not a depressive at all, let alone a manic one.” More likely he was a hypochondriac, “a man who took his own temperature daily and believed he had a sensitive cuticle.” His references to his “Black Dog” were part of “the sheer exaggeration to which he was prone. (Amateur diagnoses of him being bipolar can be even more easily dismissed.)”

At Omdurman in 1898, “within shot of an advancing army,” Churchill exclaimed, “Where will you beat this!” Such outbursts gained him “the undeserved reputation for being a lover of war, even though he was at constant pains to point out that the warfare he was describing was a world away from the industrialized horrors of the First World War.” His exuberance as WW1 began is frequently excoriated. “But it was the exuberance of someone who had not wanted the war to break out, had offered Germany the most generous and comprehensive plan to prevent it, had nonetheless planned meticulously what his department would do if it did, and who commanded the weapon that he believed could end it.”

* * *

Another myth is that Churchill always overemphasized the interests of whichever department he headed. Yet in the 1920s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he opposed deeper naval cuts than he’d budgeted: “Any other realistic alternative chancellor—Neville or Austen Chamberlain and certainly any Labour or Liberal one—would have been much tougher on the Admiralty…Overall, the naval budget increased during Churchill’s chancellorship.” (Italics mine.)

In World War II, Roberts explodes the myth that Churchill opposed a Second Front: “The very phrase Second Front was itself a term of Soviet propaganda, because Britain had already been fighting Germany on at least five fronts before the Soviets were forced by invasion to drop their pro-German neutrality; in Northern France, the air, the Atlantic, North Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“I want to see a great shining India…”

On India Churchill was partly influenced by diehards, like Beverley Nichols, author of Verdict on India. “It certainly shows the Hindu in his true character and the sorry plight to which we have reduced ourselves by losing confidence in our mission,” Churchill reported to Clementine.

But then his prescience surfaced: “Reading about India has depressed me for I see such ugly storms looming up…. still more about what will happen if [Britain’s connection] is suddenly broken. Meanwhile we are holding on to this vast Empire, from which we get nothing, amid the increasing abuse and criticism of the world, and our own people, and increasing hatred of the Indian population, who receive constant and deadly propaganda to which we can make no reply.” (And this long before the Internet!) Uniquely, Churchill saw and predicted India’s division: “…only a Muslim-majority state in the northern part of the Indian sub-continent would protect Muslim minority rights if and when the British left.”

* * *

He was right about that—and consistent. In July 1944 he told Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, India’s representative on the War Cabinet: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, [that India produced] this vast and improvident efflorescence of humanity…. Your people must practise birth control.” Then he added (and we will never see this quoted by his Indian haters) that the old idea that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must go. Specifically he said: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” ** There is the true Winston Churchill.

** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.

Roberts Insights

Churchill famously “ratted” on the Conservatives over Free Trade—but was that his only objection? No, says Roberts: “Years later Churchill admitted that such was his reaction against the party at the time, over the harsh treatment of the defeated Boers, Army reform and the way the 1900 election victory was being exploited, that ‘when the Protection issue was raised I was already disposed to view all their actions in the most critical light.’ Churchill was spoiling for a fight with his own party.” This is fresh, excellent analysis. I have never heard his change of parties so comprehensively explained.

Had the 9th Duke of Marlborough died without an heir in 1934, Churchill would have become Duke, losing his Commons seat and any chance at the premiership, Roberts notes wryly: “He could survive a school stabbing, a 30-foot-fall, pneumonia, [nearly drowning in] a Swiss lake, Cuban bullets, Pathan tribesmen, Dervish spears, Boer artillery and sentries, tsetse flies, a Bristol suffragette, plane crashes, German high explosive shells and snipers, and latterly a New York motorist, but such was the British constitution that he also required the fecundity of a duke and duchess to allow him to be in the right place to save Britain in 1940.”

* * *

Saved by fecundity, he went on to warn the country in the 1930s. “It was a fascinating dichotomy,” Roberts writes, “that the leading appeasers had not seen action in the Great War…. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, John Simon, Samuel Hoare, Kingsley Wood, Rab Butler and Lord Halifax did not serve in the front line or see death up close.” But the anti-appeasers, “Churchill, Anthony Eden MC, Harold Macmillan MC, Alfred Duff Cooper DSO, Roger Keyes KCB, DSO, Edward Spears MC and George Lloyd DSO all had.”

Another deft comparison: In India and the Sudan, young Winston had encountered Islamic fundamentalism, “a form of religious fanaticism that in many key features was not unlike the Nazism that he was to encounter forty years later. None of the three prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain—had seen true fanaticism in their personal lives, and they were slow to discern it in Nazi Germany. [Churchill] had fought against it in his youth and recognized its salient features earlier than anyone else.”

“Never Surrender”

Churchill’s attitude towards Russia is often warped by his critics. Roberts sorts it out. “He started with profound enmity of the Bolsheviks, then by the late 1930s advocated an alliance with them. Then in 1939-40 he supported Finland in its war against them, then in 1941 he allied Britain with them overnight. In 1946 he denounced them, only in the 1950s to seek détente with them.” His view of Russia changed five times. “Yet the explanation was not in any inherent lack of consistency, as is often alleged, but what was in the ‘historic life-interests’ of Britain.”

Deftly Roberts explains the peace chatter of late May 1940. With Britain’s back to the wall, Lord Halifax clamored for an armistice brokered by Mussolini. Halifax was “the only one who understood,” nodded French Premier Reynaud’s Anglophobic aide Lt-Col. Paul de Villelume. Churchill was “prisoner of the swashbuckling attitude he always takes in front of his ministers.”

Halifax first thought Churchill welcomed a deal which preserved Britain’s independence. Then he protested that the PM believed in nothing save a fight to the finish. “This was in fact always Churchill’s line,” Roberts explains. It’s quite clear “if all five days’ discussions are read in context.”

* * *

Six weeks before D-Day Churchill was cautious. “We can now say, not only with hope but with reason, that we shall reach the end of our journey in good order. [The] tragedy will not come to pass. When the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe.”

Roberts juxtaposes two reactions. “This was the speech of an old man,” said the King’s private secretary. “Someone who clearly did not think so was Anne Frank, the Jewish Dutch teenager, who wrote in her diary from her secret attic in Amsterdam, ‘A speech by our beloved Winston Churchill is quite perfect.’”

General Sir Alan Brooke’s late night fuming about Churchill is often held to show the PM’s feet of clay—and Lord knows he had them. But Roberts shows us a different Brooke. Take when the boss arrives in France after D-Day. “I knew that he longed to get into the most exposed position possible. I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He [had said] the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Part of Churchill’s admiration for Admiral Nelson, Roberts suggests, “was for his glorious death at the moment of victory.”

Readers: Buy This Book

Space is running out and I haven’t told you the half of it. There are 78 illustrations, most of them unique even to jaded Churchillians. Roberts did his best to avoid “old chestnuts.” There are sixteen pages of clear maps. The 1950s Reader’s Union map of Churchill’s wartime journeys is worked nicely into the endpapers. The book weighs 3 1/2 pounds—don’t drop it on your foot. The page stock is thin, but well chosen to minimize bleed-through. The bibliography, attesting to its thoroughness, runs to 23 pages, the author’s notes to 37, the index to 60. Amazon offers an attractive 40% discount and a Kindle version. This is little to pay for the education you’ll receive.

Andrew Roberts has been book-touring Britain (as he soon will be in North America). His has encouraging news for all who “labor in the vineyard,” as dear Martin Gilbert always described it. “There’s an explosion of love of Churchill among ordinary people away from the London metropolitan bubble,” Roberts writes. “It’s like 1940 in terms of his popularity, whenever you get away from the smug elites. We sell out constantly. Very heartening. Sometimes one can feel down over the Internet attacks and the statue smearings. But out in rural England he’s as much loved as ever. Our life’s work has borne fruit.”

Connoisseur’s Guide

My Early Life appeared a year before the last volume of The World Crisis. The subtitle, “A Roving Commission,” is from the first chapter of Churchill’s Ian Hamilton’s March. It seems he took it from an earlier novel by G.A. Henty, one of his favorite authors. The titles changed places in the first American edition.

A wonderful treat is in store in this most approachable of Churchill’s books. Harold Nicolson in his 1930 review likened My Early Life to “a beaker of champagne.” His bubbly expression is not shy of the mark. If the reader was drawn to Churchill by his war memoirs, his autobiography will come as a revelation. The memoirs chronicle a very public struggle against national extinction. The autobiography charts a young man’s private struggle to be heard. But the same style and pace is there, the same sense of adventure, the piquant humor. We readers are enabled to peer over Churchill’s shoulder as events unfold.

Vanished Age

Of course he was born with certain advantages,” as William Manchester put it in his foreword to a 1980s edition:

…his youth was virtually incomprehensible to most people then alive. He had been born into the English aristocracy at a time when British noblemen were considered (and certainly considered themselves) little less than godlike. His grandfather was Viceroy of Ireland….These dominant forces—the class into which he had been born—were masters of the greatest empire the globe has ever known, comprising one-fourth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of the world’s population, thrice the size of the Roman Empire at full flush. They also controlled Great Britain herself, to an extent that would be inconceivable in any civilized nation today. One percent of the country’s population—some 33,000 people—owned two-thirds of its wealth, and that wealth, before two world wars devoured it, was breathtaking.

Nevertheless, Churchill had little handed to him, once family influence had placed him where he wanted to be. He could not have embarked on those thrilling war junkets abroad without the influence of his mother and other great personages. But once there he was on his own, and he acquitted himself well.

Life cycle

My Early Life begins with Churchill’s first memories at the “Little Lodge” in Dublin. Here his father lived as secretary to his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough. Winston’s description of his nurse, Mrs. Everest, is heartwarming. The accounts of the Royal Military Academy; his adventures as a war reporter in Cuba, India and South Africa; his escape from the Boers in 1899, and charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, will hold the reader’s attention to the end. Here and in his later account of entering politics and Parliament, we can see Churchill’s emerging political philosophy, studded with remarkably advanced views on British society and the Empire.

The text was not entirely fresh when the book appeared in 1930. Churchill had been writing autobiographic books since 1898. But the book melded his experiences together, added a lot, and had a huge printing over the years. There is a copy for every reader, be it a cheap paperback or a rare first edition.

It is notable that My Early Life was one of the two Churchill works excerpted by the Nobel Library—for Sir Winston’s 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill is at his dazzling best as chronicler and memoirist. Freshly entered in the political wilderness, he wrote thinking that his political career was over.

—from Richard M. Langworth, A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Brasseys, 1998, reprinted 2002).

An appreciation by Henry Fearon

Churchill’s dedication of My Early Life  “To a new generation” confesses his view that he had given a picture of a distant time. How far away those late Victorian years are now.

His account of childhood, school, the Army, and his first arrival at the House of Commons never flags in its interest or importance. Yet even at the time of its writing, Churchill could never have foreseen the enduring weight of Fortune which was to settle upon him.

Fine and interesting as the My Early Life is, there is one small drawback to seasoned readers. Just as we are expecting the author’s politics to entertain us, we are hurried backwards to tales already told in the Malakand Field Force, The River War, Ian Hamilton’s March, and his escape from the Boers in London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. Yet this is a tale well worth reading—or re-reading. My Early Life will always be, I believe, the most readable of Churchill’s books.

* * *

Mr. Fearon was a distinguished bibliophile and collector. Years ago left me a copy of his unpublished commentary on Churchill’s books. He had, I think, a way with words. His full account of My Early Life is a click away.  —RML

A 1937 article draft in the Churchill Archives supposedly proves that Churchill’s off-expressed sympathy for the Jews was hypocrisy. Churchill was, if this article is to be believed, a closet anti-Semite.

Origins of a slur

The allegations began with a 2007 article in Britain’s The Independent: “Uncovered: Churchill’s Warnings About the ‘Hebrew Bloodsuckers.’”

The 1937 draft, “How the Jews Can Combat Persecution,” had “apparently lain unnoticed in the Churchill Archives at Cambridge since the early months of the Second World War,” stated The Independent:

Churchill criticised the “aloofness” of Jewish people from wider society and urged them to make the effort to integrate themselves….Churchill says: “The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is ‘different.’ He looks different,,,thinks differently…has a different tradition and background.” He then goes on to criticise Jewish moneylenders: “Every Jewish moneylender recalls Shylock and the idea of the Jews as usurers. And you cannot reasonably expect a struggling clerk or shopkeeper, paying 40 or 50 percent interest on borrowed money to a ‘Hebrew Bloodsucker,’ to reflect that almost every other way of life was closed to the Jewish people.”

Some of this could be the words of an anti-Semite. But Churchill did not write them. Nor did he publish them. Nor did he approve of them.

Anti-Semite Marshall Diston

“How the Jews Can Combat Persecution” had not “lain unnoticed since the Second World War.” It was “unearthed” over three decades ago by the Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert. It is among the million documents in the Churchill Archives Centre. Gilbert published it in 1982 in Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, Part 3, The Coming of War: Documents 1936-1939. Today it is in The Churchill Documents, Volume 13 (Hillsdale College Press, 2009), page 670.

Gilbert reveals that the article was drafted by a British journalist, Adam Marshall Diston (1893-1956)—a follower of Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party before it became fascist, and a would-be Labour candidate for Parliament in 1935. Diston was also an anti-Semite. Churchill, Gilbert wrote, was then publishing on average an article a week—so he hired Diston to draft certain articles for his consideration. Some he published—after heavy editing. This one never was.

It is important to keep Diston’s role in perspective. Drafts for Churchill’s weighty histories, such as Marlborough and A History of the English Speaking Peoples, were prepared by distinguished historians such as Bill Deakin and Keith Feiling. Diston drafted what Churchill called his “potboilers”—articles written to help maintain his expansive staff and luxurious lifestyle. (“We loved pot-boilers,” his former secretary Grace Hamblin told me. Churned out raidfire, they went to editors after being vetted by WSC. They had none of the fastidious revision Churchill afforded his books.)

Not Churchill’s work

“How the Jews Can Combat Persecution,” continued Gilbert, “was the only serious subject Diston was asked to tackle. [And] he went over the top in the use of his language.”

When conveying the draft to Churchill, Diston recognized his excesses: “Mrs. Pearman [Churchill’s secretary] did not tell me for what paper it was wanted,” he wrote Churchill. “If it is for a Jewish journal, it may in places be rather outspoken. Even then, however, I do not know that that is altogether a bad thing. There are quite a number of Jews who might, with advantage, reflect on the epigram: ‘How odd, Of God, To choose, The Jews.’” It is impossible to describe those words as other than those of an anti-Semite.

Subsequent correspondence in the Churchill Archives, from March 1940, has Charles Eade, then Churchill’s editor for his war speeches, suggesting that Diston’s “rather provocative” article be published in the Sunday Dispatch. Kathleen Hill, forwarded Eade’s proposal to Churchill with a note:

I cannot trace that this article on the Jews has ever been published. You originally wrote it for the American Magazine Liberty about June 1937….However, the article was not published as Colliers objected to any of your articles appearing in a rival magazine. (Churchill Archives, CHAR 8/660/32.)

Churchill himself would not have himself sought to publish the article, Martin Gilbert explained: “His private office did that, and was always most efficient.” It is not clear that Churchill even read either the original or the retyped Diston article. His usually copiious red-ink corrections are not there.

Excuses and prevarications

Were Colliers’ objections the problem? Colliers was Churchill’s primary American article outlet. But that opinion was Mrs. Hill’s, not Churchill’s. While she might have remembered Colliers’ objections, Churchill had other outlets. And he was never one to fail to place a good story. Yet, after reading Mrs. Hill’s memo, Churchill himself wrote across the bottom: “better not.” Mrs. Hill duly informed Charles Eade: “Mr. Churchill thinks it would be inadvisable to publish the article.” (Churchill Archives, CHAR 8/660/31.)

Notwithstanding that it was Diston not Churchill who wrote of “Shylock” and “Hebrew Bloodsuckers,” we may be sure The Independent’s story or portions of the Diston draft will continue to surface as proof of Churchill’s anti-Semitism. There is an element today that seeks always to deconstruct time-proven institutions, societies and leaders. No matter how positive their record, their least peccadilloes prove they are no better than the villains of history: that “we” are no better than “they.” Call it the Feet of Clay School.

Leave aside Churchill’s lifelong support of Zionism. Forget his legion of Jewish friends, from Sir Ernest Cassel to Sir Henry Strakosch to Bernard Baruch, who stuck by him when it took courage to do so, often bailing him out of financial misfortune, asking nothing in return. Omit the fact that his official biographer was also a leading Holocaust and Jewish historian. Churchill championed the Jews. He deplored their persecution. “How can any man be discriminated against,” he once asked, “purely because of how he was born?”

Second and third thoughts

But Churchill was not an uncritical friend. Outraged by the 1944 killing of his friend Lord Moyne, Minister Resident in Cairo, by members of the terrorist Stern Gang, Churchill said: “If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past.” Despite his outrage, he refused to agree to a Colonial Office proposal after Moyne’s death to curb Jewish immigration to Palestine, and refused to appoint as Moyne’s successor two senior Conservatives whom he knew were opposed to Zionism.

Churchill “always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along,” wrote William Manchester. Along with his second thoughts was Churchill’s integrity. He paid no heed to “public opinion.” He would not recognize what we call today Political Correctness.

Reflecting on his four decades as official biographer many years ago, Sir Martin Gilbert said a thing about Churchill we should never forget: “I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’”

No. Not once.

Written for a colleague who asked various contributors for 300 words on the qualities of Winston Churchill they most admire.

Leadership

Few great leaders are also great writers; none who were both compare with Winston Churchill. In 1940 he saved civilization by keeping Britain in the fight until those “who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.” His historical and biographical eloquence won a Nobel Prize. Uniquely for a politician, he thought and wrote deeply about the nature of man. He hated and tried to prevent war. He fought to preserve constitutional liberty.

Judgment

Laboring forty years in the vineyard of his words, I was struck by his judgment. An eminent historian recently wrote me: “The more I learn about him, the more I think what good judgment he had, especially in the 1920s.” The 1920s? Yes. Two decades before his finest hour, Churchill helped ensure Irish independence, made some sense of the Middle East, settled war debts, took both sides in the General Strike, and wrote tax-cutting budgets.

True, he sometimes judged wrong. Yet as William Manchester wrote, “he always had second and third thoughts, 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.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, his chief biographer, who knew more about him than anyone, said: “I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’”

Humanity

Withal Churchill carried with him a joyous humanity. Asked what he admired most in him, Marshal Tito, a most perceptive man, instantly replied: “His humanity. He is so human.” I certainly agree on at least one thing with Marshal Tito.

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.

Part 3: Servants and Staff

Winston Churchill was a Victorian, with most of the attitudes of his class and time toward the common folk. “Servants exist to save one trouble,” he told his wife in 1928, “and sh[oul]d never be allowed to disturb one’s inner peace.”

Once before World War II he arrived in a violent rainstorm at his friend Maxine Elliott’s Chateau d’Horizon in the South of France. “My dear Maxine,” he said as she ushered him in, “do you realise I have come all the way from London without my man?” Never lost for words, Elliott replied: “Winston, how terribly brave of you.” (Quotations from Churchill by Himself.)

“When anyone came to his staff,” his his 1946-47 Scotland Yard bodyguard Ronald Golding told me,

Churchill treated them much as one of the family. We all know how plainly we speak to one’s spouse or children: no discourtesy is intended but there are no frills. This is how Churchill treated his staff. He just told them what he expected. His plain speaking ruffled some, but he was not being rude. It was just his way of getting the maximum done in the minimum of time. He worked his staff to the limit of endurance. When they reached the breaking point he became sympathetic and solicitous. They were gratified, and so continued beyond the limit of endurance!

Staffers who knew him only briefly and not well, like the American Phyllis Moir, who was his secretary on his U.S. lecture tour in 1931-32 and had the chutzpah to write a book about it, complained of his gruff manner. They were mistaking his single-minded intensity on the job at hand, whether it was compiling a gracious thank-you letter to a host or a major speech on Anglo-American relations.

William Manchester famously said that while Churchill’s “early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity.” This extended to servants and staffers. When Churchill stopped to realize he was being too hard on someone, he would find a way to express his regret—but never directly.

Elizabeth Layton (later Nel), a secretary during the war who wrote an excellent memoir, recalled how she once had a very bad cold and was sniveling when he sent for her and was very demanding. He dictated a brief message and then took it from her: “That’s most beautifully typed,” he told her. He thought she was sniveling because of his impatience beforehand. Shortly after she went to work for him, Elizabeth told me, she burst into tears following his rude criticism of her typing. “Good heavens, you mustn’t mind me,” Churchill told her. “We’re all toads beneath the harrow, you know.”

Ronald Golding remembered an occasion at the London Churchill home at Hyde Park Gate, when visiting dignitaries arrived to bestow one of WSC’s many Freedoms of Cities:

After the ceremony, a glass of sherry and speeches, Mr. Churchill said, “Greenshields, bring the cigars.” The butler went away and came back with a cigar box, handing them around. The civic dignitaries lighted up, as did Mr. Churchill. He took one puff, hesitated, then fixed a stony stare at Greenshields: “Not these, you damn fool!” Churchill said in a stage whisper. Poor Greenshields! The butler had made the mistake of handing round Mr. Churchill’s best cigars.

Later, Churchill complimented Greenshields on the elegance of his manner!

continued in part 4…

A reader asks for “a clear summary of Martin Gilbert’s and William Manchester’s writing styles, reminding me of the vast but complementary difference between Churchill’s two most famous biographers.

There are big differences between them, but both should be read for a full appreciation of Churchill. In 1986, as Manchester was completing Volume II of The Last Lion, he received an encouraging note from Gilbert: “Our work proceeds on parallel tracks.”

William Manchester

Manchester was a literary stylist of the first magnitude, which is quickly apparent from the sonorous, emotive, rolling phrases of The Last Lion, reflecting the skill that earlier brought us Death of a President and American Caesar, his masterpiece on Douglas MacArthur. But Manchester’s sources are more restricted.

Manchester could be careless with facts. He sometimes offers footnotes that do not jibe with the words they refer to. Other times he is simply wrong, albeit over details. As one of his proofreaders on Vol. 2, I submitted over 600 nitpicks and corrections. I never checked to see if they’d all been made! Yet there are few in Manchester’s class for sheer literary quality, and this has won him a legion of admirers.

Martin Gilbert

For exhaustive facts from every available source, however, we must turn to Sir Martin Gilbert’s official biography, Winston S. Churchill, eight main volumes with seventeen document volumes to date and six more to come. Gilbert is fastidious and detailed, putting the reader at Churchill’s shoulder as events unfold. Gilbert takes a chronological, clinical approach and rarely intrudes with his personal opinion.For this reason he has been criticized as writing just another “case for the defense,” like Churchill did in his war memoirs.

This is unfair. Gilbert’s views are evident in his selection of material; like Manchester he is generally approving of Churchill, but does not fail to illustrate cases when Churchill made mistakes, and to outline the unpleasant consequences.

The biographers on their subject

To William Manchester we owe such vital observations as:

Churchill, however, always had second and third thoughts, 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.

And only Martin Gilbert, after examining over a million documents in Churchill’s archive, and interviewing over a thousand of Churchill’s colleagues and contemporaries, could wind up by saying of his subject:

I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think, “How shocking, how appalling.”

Further reading

“Churchill’s Biographers: Manchester vs. Gilbert,” 2019

Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason.

Fair enough, but to contrast what educated people were like in the bad old days, Prof. Pinker offers this:

Heroes like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson avowed racist beliefs that today would make people’s flesh crawl.

“Generational Chauvinism”

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson may have defenders to speak for them, but I’ll take this up on behalf of Churchill. Professor Pinker is exhibiting what William Manchester called “Generational Chauvinism”—judging people of the past by the accepted better standards of today.

If he means that Churchill used words like “blackamoors” and said that certain non-white races have “a high rate of reproduction,” nolo contendere. Of course, when Churchill grew up—in the late Victorian and Edwardian era—every Briton from the Sovereign to a Covent Garden grocer said the same things about other races, and nobody’s skin crawled because all of them believed it. That may be shocking to today’s ears—but that’s the way it was.

But simply to declare that Churchill was a man of his time is to miss a feature that distinguishes him. For example, this is the same Winston Churchill who in 1899 argued for equal rights for black South Africans in a debate with his Boer jailer in Pretoria, In 1906, as Undersecretary for the Colonies, he endeared himself to Gandhi by defending the rights of Indians in South Africa. The same Churchill endorsed the concept of a Jewish national home, and praised the contributions of Jews to civilization in 1920. Churchill opposed Indian self-government in the 1930s and, when he lost, sent encouragement to Gandhi; who admired Nehru; who would admire the Indian democracy today.

He Can’t be Pigeonholed

Winston Churchill was by no means a saint, and it does him a disservice to pretend he was without faults. But he is too complex a figure to pigeonhole. We must take into account the full picture. As Manchester wrote in the first volume of his biography, The Last Lion (p. 844):

Churchill, however, always had second and third thoughts, 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.

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.