Forty Ways
to Look at
WINSTON
CHURCHILL
A Brief Account of a Long Life
Gretchen Rubin
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS
NEW YORK
2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2003 by Gretchen Craft Rubin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Owing to limitations of space, permission acknowledgments can be found at the back, which constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Random House Trade Paperbacks and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rubin, Gretchen Craft.
Forty ways to look at Winston Churchill : a brief account of a long life / Gretchen Rubin.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Ballantine Books, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874–1965.
2. Prime ministers—Great Britain—Biography.
3. Great Britain—Politics and government—20th century.
I. Title: 40 ways to look at Winston Churchill. II. Title.
DA566.9.C5R79 2004
941.084'092—dc22
[B] 2003069318
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-384-8
v3.0_r1
Contents
Title page
Copyright
Epigraph
Half title
Introduction
1. Churchill as Liberty’s Champion: Heroic View
2. Churchill as Failed Statesman: Critical View
3. Churchill’s Contemporaries: Whom He Knew
4. Churchill’s Finest Hour—May 28, 1940: The Decisive Moment
5. Churchill as Leader: Suited to High Office?
6. Churchill’s Genius with Words: His Greatest Strength
7. Churchill’s Eloquence: His Exact Words
8. Churchill in Symbols: Metonymy
9. Churchill, True: In a Single Word
10. Churchill’s Desire for Fame: His Motive
11. Churchill as Depressive: The “Black Dog”?
12. Churchill’s Disdain: His Dominant Quality
13. Churchill’s Belligerence: His Defining Characteristic
14. Churchill’s Time Line: Key Events
15. Churchill as Son: His Most Formative Role
16. Churchill as Father: A Good Parent?
17. Churchill the Painter: His Favorite Pastime
18. Churchill the Spendthrift: A Weakness
19. Conflicting Views of Churchill: How Others Saw Him
20. Churchill in Tears: Telling Detail
21. Churchill the Drinker: An Alcoholic?
22. Churchill in Context: Facts at a Glance
23. Churchill and Sex: Too Interesting to Ignore
24. Churchill as Husband: A Happy Marriage?
25. Churchill’s Island Story: His Myth
26. Churchill in Photographs: How He Changed Through Time
27. Churchill as the Hero of a Novel: The Imagined and the Real
28. Churchill’s Destiny: How He Saw Himself
29. Churchill the Imperialist: His Cause
30. Churchill’s Empire: How He Saw the World
31. Churchill and Roosevelt: Friends as Well as Allies?
32. Churchill’s Imagination: How He Saw History
33. Churchill and Hitler: Nemesis
34. Churchill Exposed: Missing Information Supplied
35. Churchill True or False: Challenged Assumptions
36. The Tragedy of Winston Churchill, Englishman: The Meaning of His Life
37. Churchill in Portrait: A Likeness
38. Churchill’s Last Days: How He Died
39. My Churchill: Judgment
40. Remember Winston Churchill: Epitaph
Notes
Select Bibliography
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Also by Gretchen Rubin
Quotes
Permission Acknowledgments
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, ADDRESS TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS JUNE 4, 1940
Many scenes have come & gone unwritten, since it is today the 4th Sept, a cold grey blowy day, made memorable by the sight of a kingfisher, & by my sense, waking early, of being again visited by “the spirit of delight.” “Rarely rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.” That was I singing this time last year; & sang so poignantly that I have never forgotten it, or my vision of a fin rising on a wide blank sea. No biographer could possibly guess this important fact about my life in the late summer of 1926: yet biographers pretend they know people.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, Diaries
SEPTEMBER 4, 1927
Forty Ways to Look at
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Introduction
I know exactly when my obsession with Winston Churchill began: on a plane from New York City to Anchorage, while I was reading a World War II history that described a scene at Churchill’s country house. Prime Minister Churchill, we learn, had standing orders that he was to be awakened before 8:00 A.M. only if Britain itself was invaded. Sometime after 8:00 one morning in 1941, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden answered a knock by Churchill’s valet, who presented him with a cigar on a silver tray. “The Prime Minister’s compliments, and the German armies have invaded Russia.” Churchill—what a character! Not to be disturbed in sleep even for such extraordinarily good news for Britain. And then to celebrate by sending around a cigar, with that wonderful message, “The Prime Minister’s compliments, and the German armies have invaded Russia.”
I wanted to read more. Like many people born after Churchill’s death in 1965, I knew little about him. He’d been a great Prime Minister during that war, and he’d given a famous speech about “this was their finest hour,” and after Lady Astor snapped, “Winston, if I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee,” he’d retorted, “Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.” That was about the extent of my knowledge. I dog-eared the page to remind myself to track down a Churchill biography.
But later at the library, the huge and often multivolume biographies daunted me, and when I turned instead to read Churchill himself, I faced his five-volume history of World War I, his six-volume history of World War II, and his four-volume history of the English-speaking peoples. I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to know something about Churchill but not everything about him.
But I was lucky. I made just the right choice—Churchill’s partial memoir, My Early Life. The man was a James Bond who’d actually lived, the hero of a novel that really happened. I was enthralled by Churchill’s fantastic successes and failures, by his outsize character, and by his historic vision. And his writing was so masterful—I fou
nd myself rereading passages to savor his words. “The senior officers consulted together. As so often happens when things go wrong formalities were discarded, and I found myself taking part in the discussion.” Of his obnoxious ambition as a young soldier, Churchill wrote:
The expressions “Medal-hunter” and “Self-advertiser” were used from time to time . . . in a manner which would, I am sure, surprise and pain the readers of these notes. It is melancholy to be forced to record these less amiable aspects of human nature, which by a most curious and indeed unaccountable coincidence have always seemed to present themselves in the wake of my innocent footsteps.
The book’s closing paragraph was unforgettable: “Events were soon to arise in the fiscal sphere which were to plunge me into new struggles and absorb my thoughts and energies at least until September 1908, when I married and lived happily ever afterwards.” He published this memoir in 1930.
After that first book, I read one volume after another about Churchill and by Churchill. The scope of his life and experience overwhelmed me: just consider that Churchill was born in 1874 (the American Civil War ended in 1865) and lived to age ninety, entered Parliament first in 1900 at age twenty-five, held seven Cabinet positions between 1908 and 1940, was Prime Minister twice, and finally retired in 1964, at age eighty-nine. He lived in a time of tremendous change: he fought in a British cavalry charge using lances as weapons; already a Cabinet member in 1910, Churchill urged that Britain contact the Wright brothers—he’d heard about the invention of the airplane; he died the year Malcolm X was shot.
As I plunged into his life, a truth (often noted, often overlooked) confronted me: Churchill’s portrait could be drawn in innumerable ways, all “true.” I was struck to see his biographers reach different conclusions from the same facts. Was Churchill a military genius or a meddling amateur? Was he a great defender of liberty or a reactionary imperialist? Was he a success or a failure? Once I had command of the material, I amused myself by tracing how each account exaggerated certain details, and slid over others, to support its conclusions.
Some issues are complex, so it’s unsurprising that biographers weigh the evidence differently or reach contradictory conclusions. But often even a seemingly straightforward fact takes on a different character when related by different biographers. For example, in his fascinating account The Duel: Hitler vs. Churchill, John Lukacs observes, “Churchill, unlike Hitler, was a man of unrepressed feelings. Tears, on some occasions, would come into his eyes.” This is quite an understatement. Churchill in fact cried often and abundantly—“he could have filled buckets” according to one colleague. Perhaps Lukacs didn’t feel comfortable with the notion of a weepy Churchill.
Sometimes I’d detect a biographer’s reading too much into facts—supplying motives or states of mind—without any apparent evidence. William Manchester’s engaging biography Churchill: Visions of Glory describes a photograph of Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, when she was in her late teens: “Dark, vivacious, and magnificent, she stands alone, staring boldly at the photographer, her left arm outflung, the hand atop a furled umbrella, her hips cocked saucily. It is almost a wanton pose, the posture of a virgin who can hardly wait to assume another position.” How in the world, I asked myself as I studied the picture, did Manchester come up with all that? To me, it looked like a picture of a mother and her three daughters, decked out in Victorian finery. True, Jennie had her hand on an umbrella, and true, later in her life she’d have many lovers, but her hips didn’t look cocked, and her posture certainly didn’t look wanton. This description seemed to tell more about Manchester than about Jennie Jerome.
The distortions of a writer’s viewpoint are even more apparent in a memoir. The “diary” of Churchill’s carping, self-important doctor Lord Moran is an amusing example of dramatic irony: there’s quite a gap between what Lord Moran said happened and what the reader thinks happened. Lord Moran relates a conversation with Churchill about Churchill’s fits of depression, or “black dog,” which Moran considered quite serious. Moran said:
“Your trouble—I mean the Black Dog business—you got from your forebears. You have fought against it all your life. That is why you dislike visiting hospitals. You always avoid anything that is depressing.”
Winston stared at me as if I knew too much.
Conceited Lord Moran thought Churchill stared at him as if he knew too much. I suspected Churchill was thinking “Cheek!” or “No, I don’t like visiting hospitals. Who does?”
Reading multiple biographies of a single figure underscores the range of response that a fact or an event can inspire. In John Charmley’s revisionist account Churchill: The End of Glory, he quotes from Churchill’s address to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940:
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Charmley admits that this speech, considered one of Churchill’s most inspiring and significant, was “sublime,” but, he concludes, it was “sublime nonsense.”
These examples illustrate the multiple interpretations and characterizations that can be given even to simple facts, and many issues are far more difficult. Was the Dardanelles strategy wrongheaded or brilliant—and how responsible was Churchill for that military disaster? Was Churchill an aristocratic snob or a friend of the working class? Why was he ousted as Prime Minister in 1945? Layers of facts refute one another. And there’s also the question of what facts matter. For example, does a biographer emphasize incidents like Tonypandy or Antwerp or Greece—or not? Explore Churchill’s sex life, his financial arrangements, his friendships, his diet, his religious beliefs—or not?
To make sense of the conflicting evidence, and to establish what I thought important, I decided to write a biography of my Churchill.
Churchill, of course, hasn’t lacked biographers. About 650 biographies cram the shelves, and his official biography alone runs eight volumes and more than nine thousand pages—the Guinness Book of World Records ranked it the longest biography in English. Added to this are dozens of memoirs by his friends, family, and colleagues; Churchill’s appearance in thousands of histories; and Churchill’s many accounts of his own life.
Unlike that of his other biographers, my life didn’t overlap Churchill’s. Geoffrey Best, John Charmley, Martin Gilbert, Roy Jenkins, John Keegan, John Lukacs, William Manchester, Clive Ponting, Robert Rhodes James, Norman Rose, and all the others can remember the living Churchill, but I was born after he’d died. Churchill was never a presence in my life. I’m different in other ways, too: most of his biographers are British, and as far as I can tell, they’re all men, except for a few friends and relatives.
I don’t feel apologetic, as others have claimed to do, for writing another life of Churchill. There are many, it’s true—even in 1950, Churchill said of his life to a biographer, “There’s nothing much in that field left unploughed”—but each generation must retell his life, and not only as new facts emerge. “These facts are not like the facts of science—once they are discovered, always the same,” observed Virginia Woolf, of biography. “They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as the times change.” A biographer must get the facts right, but accuracy is not interpretation—and interpretation can never be final.
I could see a Churchill towering over the pages, vivid, brave, and tragic, and I wanted to describe this Churchill, my Churchill. As I did my research, I could feel myself skipping and lingering, careful not to discover too much in my scavenger hunt through history. Would I find only what I was looking for?
To cure this, I decided to write a biography that would make my case for my Churchill but also press the opposing arguments—a biography that would convey the ambiguities of his character
and reputation as well as the elementary themes of his life. Was he a great champion of democracy, or not? Was he an alcoholic, or not? I would present both arguments. That way, the biography could give the reader a perspective usually only gained by reading ten biographies, with their contrasting viewpoints.
To capture this complexity, I elected to portray Churchill by looking at him from multiple angles. And so Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill is both about Churchill and about the problem of giving an account of Churchill. It asks the reader to look at Churchill in multiple ways and, by doing so, to consider the problems inherent in biography.
This book is divided into forty chapters, each creating a different picture of Churchill. Why forty? Historically, forty meant “many”—just as we, after inflation, use the word million: “There are a million reasons to study Churchill.” Because form is as influential as substance, Forty Ways exploits various structures, some quite unexpected, to tackle its subject. And rather than try to reconcile conflicting views, I’ve kept them distinct, so readers may decide for themselves what picture emerges.
There’s a long tradition of reexamining the same subject in multiple ways: the four Gospels, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and Monet’s Haystack and Rouen Cathedral series all demonstrate the subtleties that emerge when a single subject is viewed under different lights. Dark and bright, blame and praise, must both be included: only one with a thorough knowledge of Churchill’s character, even his faults, can appreciate his grandeur; only one who sees his inconsistencies can understand his hard core.