In 1899, Churchill made his first campaign for a seat in the House of Commons—and suffered his first of many defeats. After losing, he retreated to South Africa to report on the Boer War and was almost immediately captured. Abandoning companions who’d planned to escape with him, Churchill bolted from the prisoner-of-war camp and fled to safety. With his instinct for the spotlight, Churchill exploited the potential of his escape. He telegraphed ahead with news of his adventure so he could be greeted with a hero’s welcome, which he acknowledged with a well-prepared “impromptu” speech. As he’d planned, the press eagerly picked up the story.
Back in England, his carefully managed stature as a war hero helped him win election to Parliament (barely) in 1900. Churchill waited a mere four days after taking his seat to make his maiden speech; the Daily News reported that “address, accent, appearance do not help him.”
Four years after being elected as a Conservative, he decamped to join the stronger party, the Liberals, which rewarded this desertion with an important appointment. Churchill would use the turncoat trick again, in 1924, to “re-rat” to the Conservatives when that party was again in power.
Although no one denied his intelligence, responsible people considered Churchill a reckless and conceited opportunist. Switching parties won him enemies each time, of course. He also infuriated colleagues in every position he held. He interfered in other people’s responsibilities, exceeded the bounds of his authority, and failed to set sound priorities. He overworked his staffs and diverted them to work on his pet projects. “He was hated, he was mistrusted, and he was feared” was how even a close friend characterized Churchill’s reputation. Even his own family disliked him. The dowager Duchess of Marlborough admonished the new wife of the ninth Duke: “Your first duty is to have a child and it must be a son, because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke.”
Churchill was a gifted speaker when properly prepared, but he couldn’t think on his feet and rarely said anything in public he hadn’t memorized. His speeches were plotted right down to stage directions—“pause; grope for word”; “stammer; correct self”—meant to give the impression he was extemporizing. Although his speeches read well today, he often failed to persuade his actual audiences because he couldn’t adapt his prefabricated pieces to the mood of the situation.
Churchill made his career in Parliament but had some trouble with elections. When he lost in 1908, “What’s the use of a W.C. without a seat?” was a joke that made the rounds. In 1922, Churchill lost and was rejected three times by the voters before he finally got himself elected in 1924.
Despite the widespread suspicion he aroused, and despite the elections he lost, Churchill managed to attain several high offices in the 1910s and 1920s. That period is dominated, however, by the debacle of 1915, when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill forced through his plans for the disastrous Dardanelles campaign. Unrealistic in his goals, unwilling to consider his colleagues’ grave misgivings, Churchill pressed for commitment of British forces. The result: a catastrophic slaughter of troops that led to the fall of the government. Churchill loudly withdrew to the trenches on the Western Front but stayed fewer than six months—fewer than three months in frontline conditions. He soon managed to rejoin the government as Minister of Munitions, but the grim question “What about the Dardanelles?” would dog him for the rest of his life.
Consistency of policy was not Churchill’s hallmark. Although in the 1930s Churchill would castigate the government for Britain’s lagging military might, during the 1920s he himself worked to enfeeble British armed forces. As Secretary of State for War and Air, he cut Royal Air Force plans for 154 squadrons to a mere 24, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he fought to shrink defense spending. Also as Chancellor, in what he himself later called the “biggest blunder in my life,” in 1925 Churchill ignited a monetary crisis when he returned Britain to the gold standard, a policy that led to deflation, unemployment, and industrial unrest.
Churchill supported a large family and a lavish lifestyle on his earnings, and as a result, his finances were always shaky. In 1929, he lost his savings in the Wall Street crash and kept out of ruin only through his efforts as a writer. Churchill’s major works were all about himself, to greater or lesser extent—his personal experiences, his family, or at most remove, his view of his country. He churned out material and somehow managed to keep afloat.
From 1929 to 1939, shunned by Conservatives and Liberals alike, Churchill was excluded from executive office and influence. Much of his isolation was due to his vehement resistance to Indian independence; while most Britons supported a policy of gradual concession, he insisted that independence would mark the downfall of the British Empire and would reduce India to despotism.
Also during the 1930s, safe on the sidelines, Churchill had the luxury of criticizing the government’s policies regarding Nazi Germany without having to grapple with the practical limitations of a tight budget, a weak economy, and pacifist public opinion. His grim warnings about Hitler were blunted by the lurid prophecies he’d made about the threat posed by Indian independence, by the Bolsheviks, by the trade unions, and by the “Socialists,” as he called the Labour Party. His arguments about Germany were often ill informed—for example, he exaggerated German strength—and he proposed impractical measures. Nevertheless, Hitler’s menace was real, and Churchill’s position strengthened as the Nazi peril grew.
When Britain declared war on Germany, on September 3, 1939, Churchill joined the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. He became Prime Minister in May 1940, after the failure of the British operation in Norway—one for which, incidentally, Churchill bore most responsibility—led to the fall of Chamberlain’s government. Many didn’t want him as Prime Minister; his long-windedness, theatricality, ill judgment, habit of meddling, and also his heavy drinking, were notorious. However, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, the more favored candidate for Prime Minister, refused to accept the position, and so it settled on Churchill.
Once in office, to secure complete power and without seeking parliamentary approval, Churchill made himself Minister of Defense. Within two months, he controlled the government, the armed services, and Parliament. His friend and colleague Lord Beaverbrook admitted, “Churchill on the top of the wave has in him the stuff of which tyrants are made.” Despite the enormity of his responsibilities, Churchill inserted himself into every process down to the size of the jam ration, misspellings in government telegrams, and the fate of bombed zoo animals.
All who knew Churchill agreed he was rude and egotistical. He interfered, he wasted time with his harangues and wild schemes, he refused to listen. Working with Churchill during the war, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff described him as “temperamental like a film star, and peevish like a spoilt child.” In flagrant disregard of severe wartime rationing, Churchill smoked, drank, and ate to excess. Ordinary Britons were grateful for one egg and a few ounces of meat each week; Churchill’s breakfast often exceeded a schoolchild’s weekly protein consumption. At a time when George VI monitored the royal bathtub to limit hot water to five inches, Churchill’s aide arranged for a back-up system in case of power outage at Chequers, to ensure that the Prime Minister wouldn’t miss his daily hot bath, filled to the brim. Churchill’s selfish habit of working late into the night—at times until 4:00 A.M.—exhausted those working around him. He raged at the typists who struggled to keep up with his torrent of words and rarely bothered to learn the names of his servants and secretaries.
Imagining himself to be the new Marlborough, weeping openly at patriotic scenes, proclaiming on the wireless, and most important, truckling to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Churchill led Britain with little hope of victory until the entry of stronger nations, the Soviet Union and the United States, in 1941. Churchill and Roosevelt had a much-photographed “special relationship,” but beneath the surface, Roosevelt opposed Churchill’s reactionary ideas and doubted his enthusiasms. “Winston has fif
ty ideas a day,” Roosevelt observed, “and three or four are good.” He was also exasperated by Churchill’s windy discourses. At one meeting, when Churchill began to speak, Roosevelt passed a colleague an irreverent note, “Now we are in for one-half hour of it.”
As the war ground on, national support for Churchill changed to criticism. No one doubted his ability to inspire, but what about his other duties? In 1942, the Tribune asked bluntly, “How long can we afford a succession of oratorical successes accompanied by a series of military disasters?” The lack of a successor protected him. One officer noted that Churchill “is virtually dictator, as there is absolutely no one else to take his place. . . . I am sure [he] has a silent chuckle when he reminds the House that he is entirely their servant.”
In time, however, Britain’s allies shoved Churchill to the sidelines, and after 1942, effective direction of the war slid from his grasp. Churchill’s sentimental trust in the United States, and in his friendship with Roosevelt, blinded him to the United States’s determination to dismantle the Empire by forcing Britain to exhaust its wealth in the war effort and by requiring Britain to adopt pro-American trade policies.
Ignoring some of his wisest advisers, Churchill threw every possible resource into the war effort, and by doing so, he assured the British Empire’s liquidation. The war’s heavy human, financial, and material demands exacerbated the strain on the already overextended Empire to the point that, after the war, the depleted Britain could no longer stand as a great power.
Churchill refused to recognize the Empire’s vulnerability. He also refused to acknowledge the changing mood in Britain—the spread of egalitarian feeling and the longing for peaceful prosperity. His ignorance of the people’s hopes and his bitingly partisan campaign—as when he argued that British Socialists inevitably would use some form of “Gestapo”—offended the public. Two months after Germany’s surrender, the British people voted Churchill out of office.
Two years later, Churchill lost a battle he’d considered one of the most important of his life, when Britain granted India its independence. Over the next few decades, the Empire would be dismantled; once India was gone, maintaining most of the rest of the British Empire in Africa and Asia was unnecessary and unworkable.
In 1951, at the age of seventy-seven and to the dismay of his long-suffering heir apparent Anthony Eden, Churchill returned as Prime Minister. In June 1953, he had an incapacitating stroke, which, in a shocking deception, he hid from Parliament and the press. In 1955 he reluctantly resigned. He visited the House of Commons for the last time in 1964; he stayed only forty-five minutes and never returned. He died the next year, at age ninety.
During his life, Churchill had seen the Empire at its greatest, and, as he well recognized, he participated in its decline.
Mirroring his public life, Churchill’s personal life was scarred by repeated failure. Three women rejected his marriage proposals before Clementine Hozier accepted him. Even Clementine considered backing out of the engagement, until her brother reminded her that she’d already broken off two engagements and that she couldn’t humiliate a public figure like Winston Churchill.
Even in the earliest days of their marriage, Churchill made no attempt to hide his true priorities from his wife: he was talking politics with Lloyd George even before he and Clementine had left the church after their wedding ceremony. During their marriage, Churchill’s relentless demands, extravagance, and disreputable associates drove Clementine to spells of depression. Eventually, she preferred not to spend too much time with her husband.
Most of Churchill’s children didn’t lead successful or happy adult lives.
His eldest daughter, Diana, born in 1909, wanted to be an actress but met with little success. She was twice divorced, suffered from depression, and died from a pill overdose in 1963.
Churchill’s son, Randolph, born in 1911, was a journalist and failed politician. He was universally considered an overbearing, egotistical snob—in fact, one club’s constitution stipulated, “Randolph Churchill shall not be eligible for membership.” Drunken arguments, broken marriages, and unfulfilled ambitions marred his life.
Churchill’s daughter Sarah, born in 1914, scandalized her parents first by going on the stage, then by marrying a vaudeville comedian, whom she soon divorced. She suffered from alcohol problems and unhappy romances.
His youngest daughter, Mary, born in 1922, had the most settled existence and lived with her family near her parents.
Of the solid virtues specially prized by the English—modesty, steadiness, dignity, composure—Churchill lacked all. He was loud, pushy, self-advertising; he thundered and wept. He worked hard but often fruitlessly. One historian noted, “Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence, and for an ‘anti-Socialist’ vision of Britain. By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second was dependent solely upon America, and the third had just vanished in a Labour election victory.” Churchill had a long career in British politics—in which all his greatest efforts failed.
3
CHURCHILL’S CONTEMPORARIES
Whom He Knew
Throughout his ninety years, Churchill crossed paths with the great or future great. This was partly the result of England’s class distinctions, public-school network, and small, concentrated population; partly the result of the fact that Churchill had always been a man to meet. Even so, the astonishing range of his acquaintances illustrates the scope of a life that spanned many years (1874–1965) and many accomplishments. One person whom Churchill never met was Hitler.
Churchill Met:
Ethel Barrymore Rupert Brooke
Bernard Baruch Maria Callas
Cecil Beaton Austen Chamberlain
Gertrude Bell Joseph Chamberlain
Irving Berlin Coco Chanel
Isaiah Berlin Charlie Chaplin
Prince Charles Somerset Maugham
Chiang Kai-shek Richard Nixon
Winston Churchill, André Maurois
American novelist Laurence Olivier
Kenneth Clark Aristotle Onassis
Clark Clifford Emmeline Pankhurst
Buffalo Bill Cody George Patton
Michael Collins John Profumo
Noël Coward Eleanor Roosevelt
Albert Einstein Franklin D. Roosevelt
Dwight Eisenhower Theodore Roosevelt
Margot Fonteyn Lord Rothschild
Greta Garbo Vita Sackville-West
Billy Graham Siegfried Sassoon
Haile Selassie Charles Schwab
Pamela Harriman George Bernard Shaw
(née Digby) Joseph Stalin
William Randolph Hearst Adlai Stevenson
Alger Hiss Tito
Herbert Hoover Harry Truman
·Ismet ·Inönü Mark Twain
Henry James Consuelo Vanderbilt
Helen Keller Beatrice Webb
Grace Kelly Chaim Weizmann
Joseph Kennedy H. G. Wells
John Maynard Keynes
Rudyard Kipling
Lawrence of Arabia
Henry Luce
4
CHURCHILL’S FINEST HOUR—MAY 28, 1940
The Decisive Moment
We search in a biography for the subject’s decisive moment, the one that sums up a life’s meaning or changes its direction. Churchill’s life was starred with turning points: escaping from the prison camp, winning his first election, fighting for his reputation after the Dardanelles disaster, becoming Prime Minister, proclaiming victory in 1945, losing the election in 1945.
However, one period—the end of May 1940—stands out from the rest. It was at this dangerous time that Churchill showed himself most fully and used his gifts with greatest effect.
In a life crowded with dramatic moments, Churchill’s most decisive hour fell in the late afternoon of May 28, 1940. He’d become Prime Minister just eighteen days before.
How had he got there? Though he’d made a spectacular start, his political career had
sputtered to a halt over the last decade. Many in responsible positions considered him, however brilliant, to be unreliable, erratic, a self-advertiser, a warmonger. The people as well as the government ignored his warnings about the Nazis: the British ruling class, he’d protested to no effect, continued “to take its weekend in the country,” while “Hitler takes his countries in the weekends.” Working against Churchill: pacifist sentiment rooted in World War I’s destruction, belief that Germany had legitimate grievances, fear of the bomber, hope that a strong Germany would restrain Communism, and the weak British economy.
However, Hitler’s actions proved Churchill’s prophecies to be hideously accurate, and war erupted on September 3, 1939. That very day, Churchill returned as First Lord of the Admiralty, and when Chamberlain’s government fell eight months later, Churchill became Prime Minister.
His premiership hadn’t been a certain thing at all. Not Churchill but Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary since 1938 and a proponent of appeasement, was the establishment’s candidate to succeed Chamberlain. Churchill was a less obvious choice. Aged sixty-five, he qualified for an old-age pension. He was short, fat, and bald, with a forward stoop and jutting jaw. He drank constantly, cried frequently, painted pictures, didn’t get out of bed until late morning, and recited poetry at the slightest encouragement. More significant, he’d made bitter enemies in his long parliamentary career. But at a small, quiet meeting on May 9, Churchill had been recognized as the man to lead the battle against Hitler.
Politically, he was weak. True, he’d supplanted Chamberlain as Prime Minister, but Chamberlain was still the leader of the Conservatives, who dominated the House of Commons. Politically, Churchill had no choice but to include in his five-member War Cabinet two men, Chamberlain and Halifax, who had never believed in pursuing total war against Germany. Churchill hadn’t yet proved himself in office, and his reputation—as a reckless adventurer—clung to him. Many predicted he wouldn’t last long in office.