Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  Having accepted what was unacceptable to others, Churchill devoted his remarkable gifts to martial arts at an early age. His aim was always victory, but victory at the least possible cost in suffering, at the lowest price in casualties. The proper course for Britain, he reasoned, was to follow the principle of Chatham—the Elder Pitt—and hold continental enemies in the grip of English sea power, sapping their strength at the distant fringes of their dominions. In 1915 this led to the most controversial, most misunderstood decision of Churchill’s career. He meant to break the stalemate in France by forcing the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean which separates Europe and Asia, knocking Turkey out of the war and joining British and French forces with their Russian ally. Because of blunders in the field, the stratagem failed. That failure, which drove him from office and nearly ended his career, haunted him all his years. Today the wisdom of his plan then is obvious. “In the whole of the First World War,” Attlee has written, there was “only one brilliant strategical idea—and that was Winston’s: the Dardanelles.”17

  Still, in the age of nuclear weapons, which Churchill did not anticipate, even the most humane of warriors is suspect. The London Observer declared in 1951: “Any consideration of Mr Churchill’s career as a whole brings one up against the extraordinary fact that, for all its majestic scope, it remains to this day tragically unfulfilled and fragmentary. His political role has not been meteoric and disastrous, like Napoleon’s or Hitler’s. But neither has it been linked to a definite achievement, like Richelieu’s or Chatham’s, Washington’s or Lincoln’s, Bismarck’s or Lenin’s.” An American is struck by the facility with which so many British intellectuals slight the man who saved their country. In fact, Churchill was more than an exponent of Mars. His ultimate goal was the “broad, sunlit uplands” of a time when all swords became plowshares. Even in the grim days after Dunkirk he looked westward and saw hope. If the British Isles were conquered by the Germans, he said, then the struggle would continue abroad “until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.” He had faith in eventual peace, and he believed he knew how it could be achieved: by combining the might of the English-speaking peoples in so strong a defense of the United States and the Commonwealth that the rest of the world would be held at bay, as it had been held by the British Empire in the relatively quiescent nineteenth century. Then, from that absolute base, freedom would expand outward. He cherished the possibility of a world order, a kind of Renaissance pageant to be accomplished, not by emerging states squabbling on United Nations Plaza in Manhattan, but by the Americans and the great powers of Europe, including Germany but not, significantly, the Russians, whom he “always looked on,” in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s words, “as a formless, quasi-Asiatic mass.” His dreams of a tranquil global civilization in many ways resembled the exotic mysticism of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, and Joseph Chamberlain, but they never turned westward. To Churchill, the “Great Republic,” as he called it, was the key. This, as he readily acknowledged, was partly because of his origins. The blood in his veins was as American as English. His mother was a New Yorker. He always kept a cast of her hand, molded in copper, on his desk. It was an exact replica of his own.18

  He adored her and she neglected him. He later wrote: “She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.” She later told friends she ignored Winston until he grew older and became “interesting.” That was an improvement on the attitude of her husband, who didn’t even like his son, but young Winston’s happiness among his nursery toys derived from neither parent but from his nanny, Elizabeth Everest—“Woom.” He recalled: “My nurse was my confidante…. [At her death she was] my dearest and most intimate friend.” Wrenched from her while still a child, he was sent to a brutal boarding school in Ascot, where the sadistic headmaster caned him until his back was a mass of welts. His treatment at the hands of the other boys was, if anything, worse. Toward the end of his life, in halting tones, he told his doctor about it. Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby woods. This was hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made. His only weapons were an unconquerable will and an incipient sense of immortality. Already he was memorizing Macaulay’s tale of a man with two comrades barring a bridge to an army:19

  Then out spake brave Horatius,

  The Captain of the Gate:

  “To every man upon this earth

  Death cometh soon or late.

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds,

  For the ashes of his fathers,

  And the temples of his gods?”

  Beginning at the age of seven, Churchill deliberately set out to change his nature, to prove that biology need not be destiny. Anthony Storr, the English psychiatrist and author of Human Aggression, concludes that he “was, to a marked extent, forcing himself to go against his own inner nature.”20 As a Victorian, Churchill believed he could be master of his fate, and that faith sustained him, but everything we have learned about human motivation since then underscores the immensity of his undertaking. W. H. Sheldon has delineated three dominant physiques, each with its concomitant personality traits. Of the three—ectomorphic (slight), mesomorphic (muscular), and endomorphic (fat)—Churchill clearly fell in the third category. His head was ponderous, his limbs small, his belly tumescent, his chest puny. His skin was so sensitive that he broke into a rash unless he slept naked at night between silk sheets. By day he could wear only silk underwear against his skin. Endomorphs are characteristically lazy, calculating, easygoing, and predictable. Churchill was none of these. He altered his emotional constitution to that of an athlete, projecting the image of a valiant, indomitable bulldog.

  At times along the way he despaired. In 1893 he wrote, “I am cursed with so feeble a body, that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.” Yet he was determined to prove just as hardy as any mesomorph. In his teens he nearly killed himself while leaping from a bridge during a game of tag; he pitched down almost thirty feet and lay unconscious for three days. He fell again steeplechasing at Aldershot, and yet again when disembarking at Bombay, where he permanently injured a shoulder; for the rest of his active life he played polo, off and on, with his arm bound to his side. As a child he caught pneumonia. He suffered from chest ailments the rest of his life. He was allergic to anesthetics and periodically erupted in boils. Nevertheless, he refused to yield to human frailty. In his inner world there was no room for concessions to weakness. He never complained of fatigue. In his seventieth year he flew to councils of war overseas sprawled across a tick mattress on the floor of an unheated World War II bomber. During the ten years after V-E Day he suffered a heart attack, three bouts of pneumonia, two strokes, and two operations. Nevertheless, he continued to build the image of a tireless embodiment of machismo who ate, smoked, and drank, all to excess. It survives to this day. Actually, most of the stories about his alcohol intake are myth. It is true that he started each day with a scotch and soda. What is not generally known is that he made that drink last until lunch, and that the amount of liquor he put away over a twenty-four-hour day was surprisingly modest. You would never have known it to hear him talk. He wanted to be remembered as a two-bottle man, like Pitt, and he cultivated the yarns about his drinking with characteristic aplomb. Once he asked Frederick Lindemann—“the Prof,” a scientific wizard who later became Lord Cherwell—how many boxcars could be filled with the champagne he had drunk in his lifetime. The Prof replied: “Only part of one.” Churchill sighed. He said: “So little time and so much to achieve.”21

  In his most famous photograph he is seen glaring at the camera, his jaw jutting like the butt end of a ham, the incarnation of defiant Britain. The Canadian photographer Yousuf Kar
sh, who understood him, caught the expression by a trick. Just before he triggered the shutter, he reached out and yanked Churchill’s cigar from his mouth. What you really see in that picture is an endomorph rudely deprived of his pacifier. If you look closely, however, you may catch a glimpse of something else: a man ruled by his instincts. In triumphing over his physiognomy Churchill had become an aggressive extrovert, but at the same time he had developed into a rare type—C. G. Jung called it the “extroverted intuitive”—and it was that, not his surface toughness, which changed the history of the world. Jung wrote: “The intuitive is never to be found among the generally recognized reality values, but is always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud, pregnant with future promise…. Thinking and feeling, the indispensable components of conviction, are, with him, inferior functions, possessing no decisive weight: hence they lack the power to offer any lasting resistance to the force of intuition.” That, or something like it, was what C. P. Snow had in mind when he wrote: “Judgment is a fine thing: but it is not all that uncommon. Deep insight is much rarer. Churchill had flashes of that kind of insight…. When Hitler came to power Churchill did not use judgment but one of his deep insights…. That was what we needed…. Plenty of people on the left could see the danger; but they did not know how the country had to be seized and unified.” The answer was found by an extroverted intuitive. In Jung’s description of the type, “his capacity to inspire his fellow-men with courage, or to kindle enthusiasm for something new, is unrivalled.” Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Churchill’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, was constantly astonished by his “method of suddenly arriving at some decision as it were by intuition, without any kind of logical examination of the problem…. He preferred to work by intuition and by impulse.” Jan Christiaan Smuts said: “That is why Winston is indispensable.” A colleague described it as his “zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.”22

  Political genius, said Bismarck, consists of hearing the distant hoofbeat of the horse of history and then leaping to catch the passing horseman by the coattails. The difficulty is that one may hear the wrong horse, or lunge for the wrong horseman. As Jung pointed out, the extroverted intuitive lacks judgment. Churchill was right about the Dardanelles, right about Ireland, right about Munich, right about stripping England of tanks to defend the Suez Canal in 1940, and, as the Third Reich crumbled, supremely right about the menace of the rising Russian empire in Eastern Europe. However, he had not been right about fascism; at first, his conservative instincts and his allegiance to tradition had led him to apologias for strong men who posed as defenders of the established order. In 1926 he told Italian journalists that he had been “charmed… by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing.” Resisting British opposition to Franco, he recommended instead that England “send charitable aid under the Red Cross to both sides.” And while loathing Nazism, he once remarked that he “admired” Hitler for being a “champion” of his nation’s pride. As his friend F. E. Smith put it, “Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God.”23

  Despite his versatility, vitality, and fertile mind, his belligerent instincts led him to fight Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence, to oppose the abdication of Edward VIII, and, in the heat of the 1945 political campaign, to predict that a Labour party victory would bring Britain “a Gestapo apparatus.” In January 1938 he wrote: “The air menace against properly armed and protected ships of war will not be of a decisive character.” This conviction, stubbornly held, led to the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse by the Twenty-second Japanese Air Flotilla on December 10, 1941. In the opening months of the war, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, he was responsible for England’s intervention in Norway, a fiasco which was mercifully overlooked when he became prime minister. Anzio was his idea; later he admitted that “I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.” Diversionary attacks, however impractical, always had his support. Late in the war he still wanted to land in Norway. At his insistence amphibious assaults were attempted on Rhodes and other Greek islands. All failed. In 1944 he even wanted to seize the tip of Sumatra, which was wholly without strategic value. George C. Marshall said, “His planning was all wishing and guessing.” Actually, it wasn’t. Had the combined chiefs adopted his grand proposal to sail up the Adriatic and invade Europe through the Ljubljana Gap, some military historians believe, British Tommies and American GIs, not Russians, would have been the liberators of Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw, with all that would have entailed for the postwar world. But by then his stock had fallen because he had championed so many impractical schemes.24

  That had been the story of much of his public life. His career passed through three stages: from 1900 to 1915, when his star rose to a dizzy height; from then until 1940, when he achieved little and failed often; and from Dunkirk to the end, when he became a legend. The legend obscures what was a patchy record. Again and again he was rejected by his countrymen; he never won their love and confidence until they faced disaster. His following was limited to a few personal friends. He lost more elections than any other British politician of his time. Twice he switched parties, and although he wound up leader of the Conservatives, he spent three-quarters of his political life battling Tory leaders. His brilliance was recognized from the first, but he was regarded as erratic, unreliable, shallow, impetuous, a hatcher of “wildcat schemes.” In 1915, Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith observed of Churchill that “to speak with the tongue of men and angels, and to spend laborious days and nights in administration, is no good if a man does not inspire trust.” Instead, he inspired suspicion. His love of adventure, it was said, ran away with his discretion. He was put down as an opportunist, a swashbuckler, a man who was “jaywalking through life.” He was labeled a man incapable of party loyalty. In the House of Commons he wasn’t even a good listener; he “lacked antennae.” Once his mind was set, he wouldn’t budge an inch. Nor could he judge men. He was easily taken in by quacks and charlatans; in the words of Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, “Winston was a bad picker.” By the 1930s it was generally felt that the people were wise to him at last, that he was a figure from the past, out of touch with reality. A newspaper editorial described him as a “genius without judgment.” Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who watched Germany rearm and crushed all proposals for British military expenditures, said that although Churchill had a “hundred-horsepower brain,” he didn’t know how to harness it. Harold Begbie wrote: “Mr. Churchill carries great guns, but his navigation is uncertain. His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him but do not follow him. He beguiles their reason but never warms their emotions.”25

  Margot Asquith had sized him up in 1908 as a man of “transitory convictions.” Later, the Tories reached the same conclusion; they accused him of inconstancy, of veering opinions. In fact, it was the other way around. It was Baldwin and Chamberlain who were the trimmers, switching their policies when public opinion shifted. Except in the 1920s—when, as Baldwin’s chancellor of the Exchequer, he withheld criticism of some questionable policies—Churchill never changed at all. He could misjudge others, but his own principles were a rock. This, in fact, is what offended traditional party politicians. If one reads the letters he wrote as a subaltern, his dispatches as a war correspondent, his speeches as a young MP, his cabinet papers, his books, and his “Action-This-Day” memoirs of the early 1940s, it will be clear that his views, once formed, were immutable. Here and there one encounters surprises. In the Edwardian era he and David Lloyd George were the most effective champions of the working class in the cabinet. Churchill’s sympathy for workmen had been engaged by the humble circumstances of Mrs. Everest, who had given him the love his mother withheld, and by reading early sociological studies of the desperate poverty in the lower classes. Despite his wealthy friends and relatives and his allegi
ance to the Empire, he denounced “our unbridled Imperialists who have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation, and territory.” He invented the excess-profits tax. Yet more than thirty years later he bitterly fought Labour’s cradle-to-grave welfare legislation. The explanation is intriguing. He wasn’t opposed to the substance of Labour’s bills; what he found objectionable was the way the thing was being done. Labour held that the people had an absolute right to these comprehensive benefits. Churchill thought they should be gifts from a benign upper class to grateful lower classes. It was characteristic of him that in 1944, when Harold Laski proposed raising a fund as a token of the nation’s gratitude to him, he demurred, then added: “If, however, when I am dead people think of commemorating my services, I should like to think that a park was made for the children of London’s poor on the south bank of the Thames, where they have suffered so grimly from the Hun.” Subscriptions were admirable. Taxes were an affront.26

  His concept of magnanimity is among his more fascinating and, if you disregard the overtones of noblesse oblige, more endearing traits. He was always being excoriated in print or on the platform, and one of his sources of income was damage suits for libel or slander. He always won, and he always felt genuine pity for the loser. He wrote: “I have always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main till overwhelming victory, and then offering the hand of friendship to the vanquished. Thus I have always been against the Pacifists during the quarrel, and against the Jingoes at its close.” It was a pattern with him. Defeat had to precede conciliation. He refused to negotiate until his adversary had capitulated. Revenge afterward, however, was to him unmanly and ungentlemanly. It was Kitchener’s vindictiveness on the Nile, his total lack of generosity toward the routed natives, which infuriated young Churchill. After Chamberlain’s fall, which was swiftly followed by his death, Churchill rose in the House of Commons to pay him tribute. He said Chamberlain’s hopes had been foiled by events, then asked: “But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed?… They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril.” He was a ferocious enemy of Germany in both world wars, yet after each he begged the British government—in vain—to dispatch emergency shipments of food to its starving people. However high he rose, the man who as a boy had been bullied and bruised could always identify with the underdog.27