INTRODUCTION

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

After the end of the Second World War, Emery Reves took what one observer called ‘the biggest gamble in the publishing business’ when he purchased the rights to publish Winston Churchill’s war memoirs outside Britain before one word had been set to paper, and set up the business arrangements accordingly. Later, he did likewise with Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. which had seen its first draft before the war as a one-volume book, but was ultimately published between 1956 and 1958 in a much broader, four-volume format. “Some people,” his widow Wendy recalls, “thought Emery was taking a huge chance.”

Emery Reves knew he was not gambling. He had known Churchill since well before the war, indicating his newspaper articles throughout Europe; he appreciated the prodigious journalistic energy that had produced Marlborough, The World Crisis, My Early Life, Thoughts and Adventures and Great Contemporaries. He knew Churchill would write the crucial memoir of the late war and, he knew he would bring that memoir to the world. From Brazil and Mexico to Yugoslavia and Israel, The Second World War was published in the languages of a score of peoples, most importantly, of course, in the United States (by Houghton Mifflin) and Canada (by Thomas Allen) all through the efforts of Emery Reves. Again with Churchill’s History, it was Emery who made the arrangements with Dodd, Mead in New York and McClelland & Stewart in Toronto, and with many other publishers around the world, which gave Sir Winston’s last major work such enormous circulation.

But Emery Reves was much more than the loyal colleague who spread Churchill’s word. A powerful thinker in his own right, author of the acclaimed Anatomy of Peace and a champion of liberty, he was one of the few people in whose company Sir Winston was always comfortable, whether they were in conversational mood or simply lost in silent contemplation. They shared an almost subliminal relationship, thought many who observed them together: not the least Wendy herself, who knew Emery best, and Sir Winston in his declining years as his devoted hostess. There is no better opportunity than the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Churchill Centre to tell the story in Finest Hour.

RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

ON THE first of April 1933, a day of infamy in Berlin, the day of the boycott of all Jewish shops and offices, Nazi storm troopers entered an office to seize its contents and its owner. The office was a centre for the distribution of newspaper articles upholding democracy. It was wrecked. Its owner was Emery Reves. “I had to flee from Germany in the clothes I stood in,” he later wrote, “just saving my life.” Reves was then twenty-nine years old.

Reopening his office in Paris, the young man circulated to an ever-widening public throughout Europe the views of the leading anti-Nazis, and the leading democratic statesmen, including Paul Reynaud, Leon Blum, Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee (later Britain’s second Labour Prime Minister). In 1937 he met Winston Churchill.

Reves quickly became one of the giants in Churchill’s life. Small of stature but large of mind, he made it possible for Churchill’s writings, and most importantly his opinions, to become far more widely known than even Churchill expected. The spread of Churchill’s influence, his ideas about the world and its destiny, gained enormously from the work that Reves did across three decades. “I can speak from personal experience of his altogether exceptional abilities and connections,” Churchill wrote to Lord Reith, the British Minister of Information, in February 1940. To Cecil King, one of the press barons of the time, Churchill described Reves as “a most brilliant writer” who “holds our views very strongly.”

Four months later, when Churchill was Prime Minister, and only two weeks after the fall of France, when Britain was being portrayed in the world as beaten, he wrote to the new Minister of Information, Alfred Duff Cooper: “I have long thought very highly of Mr. Reves’ abilities in all that concerns propaganda and the handling of the neutral press.”

As a result of Churchill’s letter to Duff Cooper, Reves was asked by the British Government, on 9 July 1940, to go to New York and help build up the British propaganda organisation in both North and South America. It was a task of great delicacy and importance.

His aim, Reves wrote to Churchill shortly before his departure, would be to persuade those in the New World “that Hitler is directly menacing the American nations, and he will conquer them one by one, just as he conquered Europe.'” To this end he would seek to persuade the people of the United States “that principles like ‘neutrality,’ ‘isolation,’ ‘non-intervention,’ ‘defence of the national territory but no war’ were principles which also Great Britain has followed until she was plunged into war, and which also have been the principles of some twenty European nations until they were conquered one by one are principles of a lost world, which lead every nation to the abyss.”

Churchill knew that Reves would be an effective instrument of the democratic message, with its call to a recognition of the need for vigilance and cooperation (‘Cooperation’ was the name of Reves’ bureau in Paris before the war). The clarion calls for a unified defence policy which Churchill published every two weeks in England in the Evening Standard (until they disapproved of his anti-appeasement stance and said his views were no longer required, whereupon he was taken up by the Daily Telegraph), were given extraordinarily wide circulation in Europe solely as a result of Reves’ efforts at syndicating them.

Among the newspapers that published Churchill’s articles in 1938 and 1939, thanks to Reves, were those in Brussels, Copenhagen, Riga, Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Warsaw, Cracow, Kaunas (in both the Lithuanian- and Yiddish-language newspapers) and Tallinn (Estonia).

Beyond Europe, Reves placed these same articles in cities as far afield as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Perth, Sydney, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Nairobi, Cairo and Jerusalem. In all, an average of thirty newspapers reprinted the articles every two weeks, an annual total of 750 different outlets. This was a formidable achievement by Reves and a remarkable gain for Churchill.

The key to understanding Churchill, wrote his Principal Private Secretary in 1940, Eric Seal, was “Liberty”: a devotion to, and determination to defend the concept of freedom of the individual, and the efforts of the State to uphold that individual’s place of honour. Reves shared this ideal and, from the moment they met in 1937, recognized Churchill’s power to give effect to it both in his writings and in his political activities. For this reason, every one of Churchill’s articles which Reves placed before the war in a European newspaper, or beyond Europe, was a powerful plea for the maintenance and supremacy of the rights of the individual, and for the energetic defence of the democratic process, then under such massive attack.

On the eve of the Munich conference in September 1938, as Britain was preparing to allow Hitler to annex the German-speaking Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia, Reves encouraged Churchill to make a special journey to France, to show the French political leaders that there was another voice in England beside that of fear and appeasement. At the time of the German occupation of Prague in March 1939, Reves took down with him to Chartwell one of the leaders of Czech democracy, and came away with an article by Churchill that was a clarion call for the unity of the threatened nations of Europe, before it was too late.

When, in the summer of 1939, Reves wrote to Churchill to explain that several countries no longer wanted the articles, Churchill wrote to him: “I am indeed sorry to hear that the net is closing round our activities, through fear of Germany. Luckily, you have already called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old.”

Churchill knew that Reves was a full and committed democrat. “I am 100% individualist,” Reves wrote to Churchill in October 1939, “and hate with my whole heart any form of collective regime, under which I could not exist. I think my whole life and career is indisputable proof of that.”

I first met Reves when, shortly after Churchill’s death, he came to see Randolph Churchill, for whom I was then working. Within only a few minutes of meeting him, I remember how struck I was by the depth of his thought, and by his devotion, not to Churchill’s literary sales or receipts (which he had so greatly enhanced), but to Churchill’s philosophy, and to the need even in 1965 (and how right Reves was) to make that philosophy as widely known as possible.

I later had the chance of several long talks with Emery Reves: at Randolph’s funeral three years after our first meeting, at his home in the South of France, and at Montreux in Switzerland, very shortly before his death in 1981. He was a man whose devotion to Churchill and Churchill’s ideals was total. He kept no disagreeable diary and told no prurient stories about the man he admired and helped, and saw so much of.

Because of the importance of Reves in Churchill’s story, I have been preparing, for several years now, at the request of Wendy Reves, a comprehensive collection of the Reves-Churchill correspondence. I have woven into the documentation a note of every time the two men met. Although this note of their meetings has taken a long time to compile, it is I think a unique exercise in writing about the relationship of two people.

We are told so often that X or Y or Z knew Churchill well and saw a lot of him, only to find that the two hardly met, if at all. But in the case of Emery Reves, he was a frequent visitor to Chartwell, to Morpeth Mansions before the war, and to Hyde Park Gate after it, quite apart from the long periods of time that the two men spent together between 1956 and 1960 at the Villa la Pausa, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

The new Churchill document volume, At the Admiralty, opens with a dedication “to the memory of Emery Reves, who helped carry the books of Sir Winston Churchill to the world.” This is a simple statement, but a true one, strengthened by its simplicity. Not only was Reves active in the negotiations for the publication of Churchill’s books, he was equally active, and influential, in advertising on the structure of the books, and made certain that they went into languages and countries that would not have translated them but for Reves’ efforts.

Churchill knew how much Reves’ life had been scarred by the slaughter of almost all the members of his close family by the Nazis. One of the research assistants at Chartwell, Denis Kelly, once recalled to me the grim look on Churchill’s face as he passed on what Reves had told him of their terrible fate: civilians murdered by an insatiable tyranny. No wonder that Reves saw Churchill as a saviour: had Britain not taken up arms against Nazi rule in 1939, and persevered despite great odds throughout 1940 and 1941, and then led the coalition against Hitler until the Nazi system was totally destroyed, how many more millions might not have perished is a question, not for doubt, but for arithmetic.

In May 1945 there were two million Jews left alive in Europe who, like Reves’ murdered relatives, would certainly have been killed had Nazism not been destroyed. Three million Polish civilians had already been murdered: how many more might have been shot, had Nazi rule continued, is again a matter, not of speculation but certainty. The gypsies, many of whom lived in Reves’ native Hungary, were likewise already victims, and marked out for further killing.

Reves, knowing all this from his inner soul, recognised (as one or two recent writers seem to ignore) how great was Churchill’s contribution, not only to the survival of Britain, but also to the survival of liberty and democracy in Europe and beyond.

The fall of the Iron Curtain in our time is another tribute to Churchill’s tenacity of belief. “Captive peoples need never despair,” he said in 1949, recognizing what he called the “spark of hope” that could never be extinguished in the human spirit.

Reves understood and supported Churchill’s vision from his vantage point of experience, suffering and effort. His most outstanding achievement was in making as widely known as possible the two great postwar pillars of Churchill’s thought, the six-volume Second World War and the four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. This achievement was recognised by Churchill at the time and by his official biographer; it will be recognised in the final (1955-65) Churchill document volume; and it will be shown in all its glory in the Reves-Churchill Correspondence. I am proud to be associated with each of these efforts.