October 18, 2008

By John Kenneth Galbraith

Published in Finest Hour 57, Autumn 1987

       PUBLISHERS as all authors will tell you, regularly publish books in deep secret, and considering the quality of much of the stuff that gets into print these days, one can only be grateful. But there are occasions when this compulsive commitment to over-classification denies the public interesting reading matter, as in the case of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and, possibly, the official communications concerning Ms. Midge Costanza. The biggest loss of which I know is the 13 books of Winston Churchill’s papers, so far published in exceptionally clandestine fashion. I’ve never encountered anyone, the publisher apart, who knows about them, although there must be a fair number of students of modern British and European history who have heard distantly of the books and are sorry their library cannot afford them. The production to date costs $700 and requires around four feet of shelf space. Individual volumes can be purchased, but I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who doesn’t have access to them all. Certainly anyone of the requisite literacy who is being rewarded by the present rush of sympathy for the rich should get all the books for himself or herself.

    The production, as again I prefer to call the Official Biography, is a double-track operation consisting (so far) of seven main volumes of extracts from Churchill’s public and private letters, speeches, and official papers and from the responding communications and comment, all linked together a highly competent and readable narrative that tells where Churchill was at the time and of the political, personal, or literary context. Then on the second track are up to three companion volumes per volume, consisting of letters to and from Churchill, more of his official papers, and a great many letters and documents from the archives of contemporaries, expressing views, invariably strong and often adverse, on Churchill’s personality or judgement.

    These companion volumes I liked the best of all. Up to 1914, seven books in all, the editor was Randolph Churchill. After his death by various self-destructive assaults in 1968, the job was taken over by Martin Gilbert. The senior Churchill, wherever he is, should be reflecting on his extraordinary luck in both editors.

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    I was hooked by these volumes before they were published when Randolph Churchill showed up in Cambridge one day with the manuscripts on his father’s early parliamentary career and asked me to look at that part of his connective tissue having to do with economics. In those days, Winston Churchill was heavily involved with tariff policy – he was a deeply committed free trader – as he was later with Lloyd George in the pathbreaking first steps on social insurance and the welfare state. I read the economics parts and all the rest as well.

    Some of the fascination is in the history itself. More is in the political and bureaucratic conflict that swirled constantly around Churchill and of which he was truly a master. His mastery of these terrible arts depended partly on a very commonplace qualification: a truly fearsome certainty that he was completely right. Nothing else, I’ve often thought, is so important for winning battles in Washington. The men who wanted to bomb North Vietnam were absolutely certain that it would end the war. Those who were opposed only doubted it. Churchill’s confidence did not desert him even when he was irretrievably wrong, as in his belief that the old guard feudatories who fought the Bolshevists after the revolution -Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel, et al – were on the wave of the future and that British India was forever. Churchill lost these battles, and he also lost some when he was right. He has been greatly blamed as chancellor of the exchequer for bringing Britain back to the gold standard in 1925 at the pre-war price of gold and the pre-war parity with the dollar. British goods, coal in particular, when bought with the expensive pounds were not competitive with those of foreign producers. So British prices had to come down, and one consequence was the General Strike of the following year. Churchill, these papers show, was rightly and deeply suspicious of the official, orthodox, and establishment pressure that forced this decision. He resisted it nearly to the end and regretted later that on economics his self-assurance was not as great as on other matters. Here are his thoughts, as of 1927, on the financial mind at work, functioning (so to speak) as mostly it still does in the United States today:

    … The financial policy of Great Britain since the war ha, been directed by the Governor of the Bank of England and distinguished Treasury permanent officials who… have pursued inflexibly a strict, rigid, highly particularist line of action, entirely satisfactory when judged from within the sphere in which they move and for which they are responsible, and almost entirely unsatisfactory in its reactions upon the wider social, industrial and political spheres.

    But the greater element in Churchill’s power was his use of language as a weapon. And that, in the end, is what makes these books so wonderful. That so many millions of words came from one man in one lifetime is remarkable but not, perhaps, totally astonishing. That was because Churchill had a history-writing machine that kept on producing (and also making a great deal of money), even when he was in the most demanding of ministerial offices. He also used assistants, even for his more casual articles. What was remarkable was his ability to make things vital, to implant an air of great excitement in what he wrote himself and in what others had drafted for his amendment and revision. Partly this depended on his ability (and also, one presumes, on that of his staff) to find, select, and organize information so that even the most hostile opponent would be attracted by the instruction involved. Partly it depended on inventive, if often extravagant and sometimes reckless, use of adjective and metaphor. Partly it depended on the power, resource, and flow of the language itself. Here he is on the BBC in 1935 opposing legislation to accord greater self-government to India.

    Sir Samuel Hoare has thrust upon Parliament the most bulky Bill ever known. If it was as luminous as it is voluminous, it would indeed command respect. But what is this India Home Rule Bill? I will tell you. It is a gigantic quilt of jumbled crochet work, There is no theme; there is no pattern; there is no agreement; there is no conviction; there is no simplicity; there is no courage. It is a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies.

    In 1953, Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s hard to think of any misfortune for any politician so honored that would be as devastating as the release of his official prose. Churchill survives.

    We have all of this extraordinary writing because Churchill’s career, or much of it, antedated the political and bureaucratic use of the telephone. Politicians and public servants in his time Persuaded one another by letter and memorandum. Churchill’s telephone transcripts would not have been nearly so good. Henry Kissinger is standing himself to considerable legal costs to keep his from being published. On purely literary grounds he is probably right.