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Alistair Cooke, Churchill at the Time (Part 2): Politics and Principle
- By ALISTAIR COOKE KBE
- | September 8, 2022
- Category: Resources Understanding Churchill
Churchill at the Time: 1927-1965
Alistair Cooke KBE
Concluded from Part 1
© Cooke Americas, LLC, reprinted by kind permission
Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, whenever Winston Churchill came up, we all assumed the man had gone as far as he was going. He never seemed of great Parliamentary importance in peacetime politics. But now he was distrusted by the Tories, alienated from the Liberals, execrated by the Socialists. He was simply a failed professional politician.
If, in 1927, 1929, or 1932, you’d ever have suggested that Winston Churchill might one day be Prime Minister, two years ago, that Michael Dukakis would be the Democrat nominee for President of the United States. Or—come to that—thinking, two weeks ago, that Dan Quayle might ever be Vice President of the United States.
Now we can see what mischief—very well-meaning mischief—has been contrived through selective mining of Churchill material, and especially through the films and the television docudramas: how we have tended to build up an inevitably dramatic figure. Of course his own account of his “wilderness years” is itself dramatic—Churchill is nothing if not a dramatic writer. But the figure of politics was not dramatic. If anybody asked us then, “Where’s Winston Churchill?” we’d say: “He’s in the House, but not doing very much, because he’s had his day.”
“War, politics and himself”
The following passage was written by a journalist who signed himself, “Gentleman with a Duster.” Few people knew his real name: it was Harold Begbie. An old friend of mine described him as “The man who did God for the Westminster Gazette.” Begbie was famous for his character sketches, which had intensity and eloquence of a kind we don’t see today. He wrote this, astoundingly, in 1921, but it could have been written ten years later:
With the fading exception of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Winston Churchill is perhaps the most interesting figure in the present House of Commons. There still clings to his career an element of promise and also of unlimited uncertainty. From his youth up, Mr. Churchill has loved with all his heart, his soul, his mind and strength three things: war, politics and himself. He loved war for its dangers, he loves politics for the same reason, and himself he has always loved for the knowledge that his mind is dangerous. Dangerous to his enemies, to his friends, to himself.
I can think of no other man who would so quickly and so bitterly eat out his heart in Paradise. And happily for himself, and perhaps for the nation, Mr. Churchill lacks the unifying spirit of character which alone can master the antagonistic elements in a single mind. Here is a man of truly brilliant gifts, but you cannot depend upon him. His love for danger runs away with his discretion…. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but they do not follow him…. It is not to be thought that Mr. Churchill is growing a character which will emerge and create devotion in his countrymen.
“He must be carried away by some great ideal”
That sounds today rather savage. It wasn’t really, but it does sum up the way people of all parties felt about him. Begbie, however, was not satisfied with so resigned a view of Churchill. He ended with a startling premonition….
His faults are chiefly the effects of a forcible and impetuous temperament. They may be expected to diminish with age, but character does not emerge from the ashes of temperament. All Mr. Churchill needs is the direction in his life of a great idea. That is to say that to be saved from himself, he must be carried away by some great ideal, so much greater than his own place in politics that he is willing to face death for its triumph.
At the present Mr. Churchill is in politics as a man is in business, but politics for Churchill, if he is ever to fulfill his promise, must have nothing to do with Churchill. It must have everything to do with the salvation of mankind.
“Anything to get rid of Hitler—except fight him”
This takes us into the 1930s, my memories of which are much the same as those of you old enough to have lived through that time. Those years, especially, have been over-dramatized, because our knowledge of the tremendous drama to come. It makes us see Churchill as a rejected giant, a lonely, stubborn hero, who in the end was right. I imagine that most of us here would like to think that, had we been in Britain in say 1934 or 1936, we should have been on Churchill’s side. We’d have said: “Yes, it’s true about the German air force.” In fact I don’t think ten percent of us would have been with him.
He was a ranting nuisance. Out of power, he had two obsessions: India and Hitler. When he got up to speak, he would carry on about India as the “Jewel in the Crown,” or about the imminent peril of Hitler.
We must remember that even by the 1930s the country was exhausted still from the enormous slaughter of the First World War. In politics two slogans were going around: “Peace at any Price” and “Against War and Fascism.” Surely two of the silliest expressions. One might as well be “Against Hospitals and Diseases.” But these contradictory slogans were accepted because at that time most people in Britain felt they would do anything to get rid of Hitler—except fight him. And that was what they perceived Churchill wanted to do.
Churchill himself denied this. He said truthfully afterwards that there was “never a war easier to prevent” than the Second World War. But from exhaustion and wishful thinking, the people did not believe in his mission of “peace through preparedness.”
Out of fashion: personal memories
He was regularly booed in the House of Commons. “Here he comes again,” they’d say, “with his German air force estimates.” Which, oddly, were not spectacularly different from the Prime Minister’s own estimates.
It is important also to realize that his oratory, his style of writing, was very much out of fashion: florid, archaic and, it seemed, irrelevant. If, in this age of television, he came back and used that kind of language, it would again seem so. It wouldn’t match the intensity or the scale of the crisis happening to the nation. Now, for any imaginable crisis, the Churchillian oratory is a dead form.
Two things stand out in my memory of the Thirties. One was 1936. 1 covered the Abdication six times a day for ten days for NBC. I didn’t get much sleep. One of the weirder, more eccentric events was the rumor (unfounded but persistent) of Churchill trying to form a “King’s Party.” It was a silly notion, but it suggested an extraordinary blindness to the British Constitution. If there had been a King’s Party it could have produced a social upheaval short of civil war. The idea had few proponents. But here was yet another alleged failure of Mr. Churchill’s politics.
The other thing I particularly remember, moving on to 1938, was Churchill’s obsession with the Nazis in the air. Contrary to our imaginative recall, most of the time he did not excite the House of Commons—he bored it.
Then came Munich and his speech of lamentation. There was no applause when he got up and said, “We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat.” Everybody was weeping and cheering the sainted Chamberlain.
The only choice for the job
On into 1939-40 and the “Phony War.” Still nobody was thinking of Churchill as prime minister. Then came the cataclysm: 10 May 1940, when the Nazis invaded the Lowlands—Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium. Now the war was truly on. And as we all know, within 12 hours Chamberlain was out and Churchill was in.
But Churchill was not in, as one now likes to think, because of a belated surge of popular emotion. On the contrary, it was quite a surprise. Chamberlain, of course, had to go, after the Norway fiasco (for which Churchill was as responsible as anyone). After the German break-out, Chamberlain wanted Lord Halifax to succeed him.
The people who put Churchill in power were three men in Eastbourne, where the Labour Party was holding a conference: Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin.
Chamberlain phoned them to say, “We are forming a Coalition government.” He discovered that they wouldn’t serve under him. So he told them he would propose that Lord Halifax be prime minister. But Halifax declined, saying the very thought gave him a stomach ache. Churchill was the only one. Thus he became prime minister—to the great regret of George VI, who had also hoped for Halifax.
“Half-breed American”
Even the day after Churchill went to Downing Street, “Rab” Butler, an undersecretary of state who later became a sometime friend and professed admirer of WSC, said: “The country has been abandoned to the greatest adventurer of modern political history, a half-breed American.” John Colville, under the British system, went in one day from being Chamberlain’s private secretary to Churchill’s. He wrote in his diary that he went out and bought a new suit, “cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.” Colville, too, learned to change his mind.
During these memorable years I ceased to be a boy and became a citizen onlooker. As a reporter I covered Churchill whenever he came to the United States—if so formidable, darting and elusive a figure could ever be covered. During that time, we learned a great deal of his life and habits from friends and associates. We learned of his ferocious industry by night and day, which produced nervous breakdowns in a lot of young men in the Services.
Prime Minister’s prayers
I knew some people in Naval Intelligence. One man, I think, didn’t get over it for years:
We were all in our 30s. We’d get to sleep at midnight, and at quarter to three in the morning the telephone would ring. It was the Prime Minister. He would say, “Pray discover and draft for me the soundings in the bay of Rio de Janeiro.” So we’d stay up all night working on these tasks, which we called “the Prime Minister’s prayers.” Every other night we’d start work at three o’clock in the morning.
We learned from all the people who worked with him how inconsiderate he was of secretaries and all servants. John Colville wrote about this after he’d worked with Churchill for a few months. He came “more and more to see this man as lovable, exasperating, kind, irascible, brutal and generous, with the inexplicable facility of reaching the right decision, upon faulty logic, and against all the best advice.”
Churchill and the Russians
There’s one other preconception, another picture we’ve retained, about the postwar years. A young reporter asked me today: “If Churchill were still around, would he feel the same way about Communism?” I said, “What way did he feel?”
After the 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Churchill became the great pet of right-wingers the world over. It seemed he was saying, “These Bolsheviks mean to conquer the world; they, must be opposed at all costs.” But what is little known or much written about is the main reason why he retired when he did.
Of course, toward the end of his second administration, he was exhausted, physically and mentally. But he had hoped to lead in politics long enough to achieve a postwar meeting with the Soviets—as he put it, “at the summit.” He had a new and unshakable conviction that the only hope for a stable peace lay in an ultimate agreement with the Russians. Neither his own party nor the Eisenhower Administration was for it. When he saw that it wasn’t going to happen, he resigned.
Nuclear specter
Probably the bitterest memory of his last days in office was the almost violent opposition of President Eisenhower to any meeting, or accommodation, with the Russians. At the Bermuda meeting in December 1953, John Colville recorded in his diary this disillusioning scene: “…whereas Winston looked on the atomic weapon as something entirely new and terrible, [Eisenhower] looked upon it as just the latest improvement in military weapons…. All weapons in due course became conventional weapons.”
“Atomic” was not the key word. Churchill told Colville, after the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, that “we were now as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow.” For the next two years, Churchill maintained, with little support, that a series of meetings with the Russians was crucial to our survival. So much for the established reputation of the Fulton warmonger.
“The largest human being of our time”
What, in the end, have we left for this extraordinary man? What can we shore up from the floods of memoirs, and documents and studies that have been done of him? I’m afraid I cannot do better, by way of a peroration, than the one I wrote five years ago as the tail piece to a review of Mr. Manchester’s splendid first volume of The Last Lion.
What we have, In the end, is the phenomenon of an impenitent Victorian who, while never ceasing to yearn for the high noon of imperial Britain, had—at a critical time—an intuitive feel for the next lurch of history and was able, with the old weapon of his deeply-felt oratory, to goad a sleeping nation to meet it.
Some of his convictions, early and late, are now embarrassing to read about. He took a contemptuous view of Gandhi (although he modified it later). As a youth he abhorred the “unnatural” idea of the women’s vote (although that too evolved and changed). He passionately loved war and tolerated even its grisliest aspects. (The rodents in the trenches of the First World War “played a very useful role in eating human bodies.”) But much of this embarrassment is the shame of seeing a man out of his own time, like finding a strong vein of hypocrisy in Jefferson’s protestations about liberty from the fact of his owning slaves.
* * *
Along with much Victorian cant, Churchill had, and carried from early manhood into the conduct of the Second World War, Victorian virtues that exhilarated or exasperated his colleagues and overawed his subordinates: an inexhaustible industry; a relentless attention to the details of politics and military action; an impatience with small talk; the assumption that 24 hours a day are hardly enough for the discovery of the marvels of the world we live in.
To these he added formidable virtues of his own: the acceptance of humiliating defeats as episodes natural to the wielding of power; a tough but generous relation with political rivals; immediate magnanimity toward a defeated enemy; a willingness to experiment beyond the accepted wisdom of the professional (to invent the tank; to suggest floating landing piers, to declare common citizenship with the French). Above all, in the supreme crisis of national survival, there was his absolute refusal—unlike many good and prudent men around him—to compromise or surrender.
From all this, there is, I think, enough powerful evidence to support Isaiah Berlin’s judgment of him as “the largest human being of our time.”
For listeners
An Epic Ends, Another Dawns: 17 January 1965
Alistair Cooke on Churchill’s Stroke and Johnson’s Inauguration