October 18, 2008

Published in Finest Hour 64, Third Quarter 1989

    The official biography has ended (though thanks to Wendy Reves and ICS, the document volumes go on). Herein we distill the essence of the most important reviews, and offer our own review of the latter.

    ENCOUNTER

    The biography has been meticulously and lavishly undertaken, and is a true monument to Churchill. For Gilbert’s assiduity and attention to detail one can have nothing but praise and gratitude. It is a remarkable personal achievement.

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    Randolph Churchill, and Martin Gilbert after him, took as their theme the words of Lockhart upon Scott: “He shall be his own biographer.” The problem with this was twofold. First, Lockhart had not followed this theme at all – at least, not a outrance. But, second, Winston Churchill had already been his own biographer, at very considerable length and in many volumes, from his childhood to the end of the Second World War. No public man in modern history has written more about himself or made so much money from doing so. The World Crisis and The Second World War were, as Churchill robustly said, “the case for the defence.” This was absolutely fair and justifiable

    Volume I virtually wrote itself, [being based largely on] the private papers of Lord Randolph, his correspondence with his wife, and all the letters on his elder son. Volume II, however, was a disaster. Randolph was increasingly unwell, and unsure of himself. There were evident examples of bias . . . What we were getting was another version of the case for the defence, and in the process the man himself, with his fire, brilliance, fun, erratic judgment, humanity, genius, and human fallibilities had gone, to be replaced by an all-wise automaton incapable of error, a giant among pygmies, tirelessly dedicated to the delivery of speeches, prescient memoranda, and much vision.

    [After Randolph’s death) the mistake was to keep the original format. Everything would be included, often mercilessly so. It would still be “the case for the defence.” The first example of this was the treatment of the Dardanelles Campaign, where there was, to put the matter mildly, very good cause seriously to challenge Churchill’s own account in The World Crisis and his evidence to the Dardanelles Commission, but we had the complete Churchillian version once again. This set a pattern.

    It would indeed be difficult, in reading Gilbert’s six volumes, to appreciate that Winston Churchill was a deeply ambitious, egocentric, often abominably selfish, difficult, and ruthless man with very few friends and supporters, and whose judgment – as, for example, over the Russian Civil War, Ireland, de Gaulle, and India – could be so appallingly wrong.

    But I understand very clearly, and very sympathetically, why Martin Gilbert venerated Churchill and was determined to serve him well. And so he has. I cannot think of any contemporary historian who could have done half as well, or would have been prepared to dedicate himself more devotedly to a great cause. For these and other merits he deserves unstinted praise and gratitude. Still, the great lesson is that when a family next decides on the biography of a great personage it should get its first choice right, and should learn from this example that when a large ship is pointed in the wrong direction it is very difficult indeed to induce it to change course – let alone to make it reverse. – ROBERT RHODES JAMES

    THE NEW YORK TIMES

    I must admit that I approached “Never Despair” in a spirit of duty rather than with any very keen anticipation of pleasure. Within a page or two, however, the book had begun to cast its spell. Churchill imposes his own sense of drama; and once your attention has been captured, there is no substitute for the precise context and the exact detail.

    He had his faults, and he made mistakes – Mr. Gilbert doesn’t try to conceal them. In knitting together his material, Mr. Gilbert has once again done an admirable job. He has been criticized by some reviewers in Britain, where the book has already appeared, for not having rounded it off with a grand summation of Churchill’s character and career. But such an exercise would have been out of place in a work whose primary purpose has already been to set down the facts as fully as possible, clearly laid out but unadorned. – JOHN GROSS

    THE OBSERVER

    After [the previous seven volumes] it might be thought that there was nothing further to be said and that this last volume could achieve little more than the completion of a set upon the shelves. This is not the case. What Dr. Gilbert has achieved is a remarkable paradox. The pressures of time make it almost impossible to read his book without skimming (otherwise it would occupy virtually every working hour of two weeks), but the compulsion of the narrative makes it almost equally impossible to jump; gems of interest may be concealed in any fold. The book is extremely difficult to hold (because of its brutal size) and has to be put down for quite frequent wrist-reading, but it is even more difficult not to take up again. At the beginning I thought that I knew almost everything about Churchill that I wanted to, but rapidly discovered this was not so.

    Dr. Gilbert rarely judges. In some ways this is a virtue, particularly as he rarely suppresses either, and selects more to get the order right than to exclude. The result is a rich weave which does not falter throughout the acres of tapestry. – THE RT. HON. THE LORD JENKINS

    ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

    Churchill was arguably less important than Lenin or Hitler, but when the total breadth of his skills is considered, his claim to first place is less controversial. Moreover he was, as these books frequently demonstrate, a fine, decent man, possessing qualities of compassion and understanding his rivals for eternal distinction notoriously lacked. If anyone deserves devoted biographical treatment certainly Churchill does.

    The biography lacks the imaginative potential that writers like Morgan and Manchester employ, but on the other hand nobody will be able to ignore the depth of research. Altogether, it is a magnificent tale, told laboriously but with power. Churchill changed courses in his career, shifting parties and causes but not principles. He worried about problems as they developed, so that his attitude toward Germany and Russia, for example, altered quickly. More quickly than others could accept; he was too early but not usually too hasty. Anyone deeply interested in the history of our century must read these books. – JOSEPH LOSOS

    THE TIMES (LONDON)

    What [Dr. Gilbert] has achieved is the detailed record of a life rather than a rounded biographical study. Almost without exception his comments on Churchill are eulogistic; he praises, but does not appraise. It is quite a shock when, on page 32 of the present book, Churchill’s first election broadcast in 1945 (in which he said that a Labour government “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo”) is described by the author as “injudicious”. But even such mild impiety is never repeated.

    Much of the detail is fascinating, and it is good to see extensive use made of Lord Moran’s Winston Churchill The Struggle for Survival, to which guardians of the Churchill shrine gave very rough treatment when it appeared. Clearly Churchill employed Moran not only as a doctor but also, knowingly, as a potential Boswell. Unfortunately, not all that Dr. Gilbert quotes in the book is of the same quality as the Moran extracts. Too much is banal and a waste of space, such as routine messages of congratulations or family greetings.

    Unlike Hitler and Stalin, Churchill was a witty and humorous man, saying for instance of his religious position that he was “not a pillar of the Church but a buttress – [he] supported it from the outside.” He also said of John Foster Dulles that he was “clever enough to be stupid on a rather large scale.” A similar paradox applies to Churchill himself: he was good enough to be bad (when he was bad) on a rather large scale. Either way he was a genius, and his genius is stamped on almost every page. – JOHN GRIGG

    THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

    There is a short-range difficulty in the literary marketplace for the last two volumes of this work. By the end of the war, it was clear that Churchill, in his “finest hour,” had become a giant of history. There naturally followed a flood of diaries and reminiscences by those who had known and worked with him. These, combined with Churchill’s own memoirs, left Mr. Gilbert little “new” material to bring forward.

    But the whole of Mr. Gilbert’s art in narrating the story is more than the sum of these parts. An example is the story of Churchill’s physical struggle to recover from his stroke in June of 1953 and [to] remain in office. The diary of his physician Lord Moran is a moving account of this battle. Mr. Gilbert quotes liberally from the Moran diaries throughout. But his own flat, factual recitation, which places the recovery in the context of all the political pressures and decisions Churchill faced, as well as the impression he left on several others, builds the drama even higher. This volume is not a new story. But it is the full story. – NEIL ULMAN

    THE JERUSALEM POST

    Excellent use has been made of the previously published diaries of Lord Moran, Sir John Colville, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. But Gilbert has also chased less well-known sources and has evidently gone to immense trouble to locate and interview practically every surviving person who knew, met or even glimpsed Churchill. The result is a triumph of research and of narrative history.

    It is not the author’s fault if an air of bathos hangs over this final volume. These were not Churchill’s finest hours . . . But beyond this painstaking (and at times painful) portrait of Churchill in decline, the reader is throughout conscious of the greatness that went before.

    And one interesting point, highlighted again and again by Gilbert, is his consistent and forthright support for Zionism and the state of Israel; dozens of documents quoted in this book attest to this.

    This is a splendid and fitting conclusion to the greatest life -and perhaps the finest political biography – of our time. Happily its author, having already been prolific enough for several lives, remains at the height of his powers … what can he possibly do next? – BERNARD WASSERSTEIN

    THE WASHINGTON POST

    Sad to say, the final massive volume runs to quite the opposite extreme [from Manchester’s “Last Lion”]: Scrupulously composed and documented, it is distinguished by a striking reticence of judgment. It is an event of note when Martin Gilbert permits himself an adjective. Churchill once said that “the secret of narrative is in chronology,” but Gilbert, to whom all hats must be tipped for his archival labors, has carried the chronological principle to bizarre lengths. “Never Despair” comes closer to chronicle than to biography or history in the usual sense. And it is a jerky, discontinuous chronicle, mere sequence being for great stretches the only guiding thread.

    Scores of puzzling discontinuities result. We learn through a minor aside in a quoted letter that a Nobel Prize may be in the offing for Churchill. But then all is silence again for some 20 pages, when we finally read that Lady Churchill went to Stockholm to collect the Prize. And this is reported as matter-of-factly as if she had walked to the greengrocers for a package of tea.

    The resulting impression, which owing to the subject and scale is not without a certain grandeur, is of a spacious tapestry with a thousand threads dangling loose, lacking proportion or hierarchy of design. A typical paragraph hops and skips through five or six random topics, merely because they happened to fall on the same day. Humdrum party politics claim equal space with grand occasions illumined by Churchillian wit and eloquence. Brilliant bon mots flutter into a dreary compost of cabinet minutes and maneuvers of little or no lasting consequence. The personal and political are interlaced as arbitrarily as the fat and lean of a slab of bacon.

    With its forbidding lengths and textbook design the official biography seems destined in the main for the shelves of Churchill specialists. The coming generations, who will have no direct memory of Churchill or his time, but no less need than we of his example, will have to look for his spirit elsewhere. – EDWIN M. YODER, JR.

    THE GUARDIAN

    I said [to Martin Gilbert] that I could remember no comment of his own anywhere. He said all historians commented in their selection of material, but he hadn’t felt that his opinion had much to add to the narrative. He had, however, tried strongly to counter the impression, left by Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, that Churchill in his last years as prime minister was gaga and past it. He had gone out of his way to show that Churchill retained a clear and far-sighted grasp of events. That whole approach was a comment. But he had not made a running commentary of approval or disapproval. “You, the reader, should say, ‘Goodness me, how wise, how witty, or how stupid.’

    I said how Churchill had loathed what he called the clattering down of the British Empire. To this Mr. Gilbert replied that he would also draw attention to Churchill’s remarkable decision not to oppose the Indian Independence Bill, when many Conservative members wanted him to. “Churchill took the statesmanlike view that the independence of a country should not be in the gift of either party and should not be given in a divisive way. The clattering down of the British Empire was painful. Nevertheless, he had the vision not to allow his personal feelings of bitterness and sadness to impede the Act itself, which many of his supporters would have done, to harass the Labour government.”

    He will be a dull reader of this biography who is not delighted by the vigour of Churchill’s language. When in 1946, under the new Labour government, there was a threat of bread rationing, something which had not been imposed even in wartime, he said, “Now I’m going to stay and have them out. I’ll tear their bleeding entrails out of them.” About the same time he remarks that “the Socialist ideal is to reduce the country to one vast Wormwood Scrubbery.”

    And as Mr. Gilbert says: “I liked writing about this because it seemed to me he took authorship very seriously, although in a way it didn’t take up too large a percentage of his time. He had a love of the written word of course, a love of presenting it. . .1 think his way of working with his researchers was fascinating.

    “Some of their recollections are among the most charming, and most descriptive of Churchill. There’s that marvellous moment, you remember, when Denis Kelly [a researcher; see his “The Dream” in Finest Hour 62] had prepared the draft for the final volume of the war memoirs. There is some phrase like, ‘Germany had been defeated and partitioned.’ Churchill put his finger on it and said, ‘The word you want is crushed.’ – TERRY COLEMAN

    THE NEW REPUBLIC

    Gilbert’s method draws our attention to the pertinacity of [Churchill’s] personal relationships. On the day after the German surrender, Churchill found time to telegraph to three former French prime ministers, to Leon Blum, Edouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, his congratulations on their liberation. No one would have blamed him if he had held at least the last two partly responsible for France’s collapse in 1940. And later in that year he sprang to the defense of a fourth, Pierre Etienne Flandin, who was being tried for treason for collaborating with the Vichy government in its early days. The court was stirred when Churchill’s letter was read; the serious charges were dropped, and Flandin was released from custody.

    The volume ends as it must, with the funeral. For once I wish Gilbert had abandoned his severity. It is totally plausible that Churchill planned his own funeral . . . nobody but him could have thought that his body should be taken by barge, like a Tudor sovereign, from a pier near to St. Paul’s Cathedral to a pier near to Waterloo Station, where it would be borne by train to the burial plot near Blenheim. In the event, however, the most heraldic feature was none of Churchill’s doing. As the barge progressed down the Thames, the dockside cranes all dipped as it passed.

    The sight of these bowing cranes moved a nation (and me) to tears. For dockers, stevedores, are a nation’s most Bolshie workers. In Britain, certainly, none of them ever could have voted for Winston Churchill. Yet they, these proud proletarians, by their own bidding, on a day off, and not on the orders of their employers, lowered their cranes like guardsmen making an arch of their swords over the passing of a monarch. – HENRY FAIRLIE

    END OF AN EPIC: REVIEWING THE REVIEWS

    The trouble with reviewing the Official Biography is that it does not end itself to the traditional cut-and-dried appreciation or scathing dismissal. Yet many reviewers seem determined to tackle it in the orthodox way. They are defied by the fact that Churchill obviates the safe, the routine, the conventional. Nobody else spent both World Wars in high national office; nobody else wrote about his experiences with such flair; no other statesman experienced the common tragedy of the Century of the Common Man yet retained his sense of humor and humanity; no other had such innate decency. The Man of the Century deserved the Biography of the Century. And he got it.

    Read as a whole, the reviews leave the reader with more questions than answers. Does Gilbert make judgments, or does he not? Does the work consist only of “the case for the defence,” or are Churchill’s errors also cited? What the reviewer concludes seems to depend to a large extent on whether or not he approves of Winston Churchill, or Martin Gilbert, or even Randolph Churchill. The only way to find out is to read the biography yourself.

    I was most impressed by Martin Gilbert’s remark to Terry Coleman of “The Guardian:” “You, the reader, should say, ‘Goodness me, how wise, how witty, or how stupid.’ ” Let me cite some examples of how Gilbert’s method leads us to think for ourselves, instead of merely to accept what the biographer tells us.

    Volume VII, “Road to Victory,” made me reconsider my belief that the Churchill-Roosevelt invasion argument had mainly been over the “soft underbelly” (Sicily, Italy) versus “Overlord” (Normandy). Not at all. In fact, the American chiefs of staff, and Eisenhower, wanted to go right across the Mediterranean once the Germans were cleared out of North Africa. The only argument at that point was whether the first hop should be to Sardinia instead of Sicily–an idea backed by Ike at one point because the Germans had “two divisions” in Sicily. But document after document proves that Churchill saw Sicily-then-Italy as the dominant theater in that instance; and that he convinced Eisenhower to accept Sicily as the obvious first hop.

    The real break came over the diminishment of the Italian campaign for the sake of a south-of-France landing (“Anvil,” later “Dragoon”) which, though in the end useful, was never more than a sideshow, Now all the pro-Roosevelt biographers either didn’t read or were unable (because of secrecy laws) to read the “Enigma” decrypts, which conclusively proved that Hitler was stupidly planning to throw everything he had into the Italian front. Churchill read them–and correctly argued that if the Allies pressed on in Italy, they would have given “Overlord” far greater support (by drawing off many more German divisions) than “Dragoon” possibly could. And he was right.

    Nor does this Gilbert ever lose the ability to astonish–as when we find Roosevelt suggesting that he and Churchill “lay their cases [about the second front] before Uncle Joe” for resolution! The naivete of that suggestion–even knowing what we do now about the dying President– boggles the mind. Only Churchill seemed to realize at that stage why “Uncle Joe” wanted the main Allied thrust to come across France. Of course we know Stalin’s reasoning, through hindsight. Churchill knew it at the time.

    Volume VII also explodes the idea that Churchill was against “Overlord. ” It is going to be hard for the next revisionist to revive that one, in the face of Gilbert’s monumental documentary evidence to the contrary. From February 1944 on, for example, Churchill was chairing a weekly problem-solving committee on Overlord, and writing sheaves of memos to break up logjams and get on with it. His only caveat was that the military climate in France when “Overlord ” was launched must be such (in the opinions of the joint chiefs) as to warrant success. The so-called architect of Gallipoli was against creating “a sea of corpses.” Who can blame him?

    Volume VIII, “Never Despair,” is laden with revelations: that post 1952 Churchill was not “gaga,” for example, as everyone who disagreed with his policies insisted. But my conclusion from Volume VIII was that Churchill’s case for detente with Stalin’s successors was unconvincing, and mainly wishful thinking. This may not be your conclusion, but the point is that the biographer has laid the evidence at our feet for us to accept or reject as we see fit. Why shouldn’t we, instead of the biographer, draw our own conclusions? To paraphrase what Churchill said about democracy, Gilbert’s biography is the worst form of biography ever invented, except for all the other forms.

    One prominent reviewer seems to want it both ways. He says Gilbert shuns opinion–and then he says the Official Biography is just another “case or the defence.” Come again?

    Churchill, this reviewer reminds us, has already presented his defense in his books–as if the voluminous Churchill papers and Gilbert’s assiduous interviewing and culling from other people’s papers didn’t matter. If indeed Churchill himself has largely written his own defense, his analysts pro and con have written a good deal more.

    Already we have: a splendid one-volume biography (Pelling’s “Winston Churchill”); a workmanlike two-volume biography (Broad’s “Years of Preparation/Years of Achievement“); a lyrical though in many details inaccurate three volume biography, with one volume still unpublished (Manchester’s “Last Lion“). We have an excellent scholarly critique (Rhodes James’s “Churchill: A Study in Failure“); a political attack (Emrys Hughes’ “British Bulldog“); a strong criticism by a former intimate, Desmond Morton (via R. W. Thompson’s “Yankee Marlborough” and “Churchill and Morton“); an attack on Churchill’s military judgments by Alanbrooke (his diaries edited by Bryant, “Turn of the Tide” and “Triumph in the West“). We also have equally good defenses: (Colville’s “Fringes of Power,” Wheeler-Bennett’s “Action This Day,” Ismay’s “Memoirs.”) We even have psycho-physical analyses by doctors (Anthony Storr, Lord Moran). Gilbert himself has added a ground-up single-volume biography, “Churchill: A Life,” which adds new information discovered since publication of the original volumes. And still we want more.

    Having reviewed my share of books I share and recognize the reviewers’ culpability: the need to prove to our readers that we’ve really read the work. Thus we develop a lemming-like need to find something to criticize. But in the process we sometimes say the silliest things.

    One reviewer (whose own multi-volume biography of Lloyd George seems permanently stalled) praises the many quotes from Lord Moran’s useful but flawed Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, and actually believes “Churchill employed Moran not only as a doctor but also, knowingly, as a potential Boswell.” Personally I think Gilbert gives undue weight and coverage to the peripatetic doctor’s windy and speculative diaries. As Jock Colville pithily said, “Lord Moran was never present when history was made, but he was sometimes invited to lunch afterwards,”

    Many reviewers take pains to hit all the simplistic anti-Churchill buttons. WSC was wrong, one says, about: the Russian Civil War (had Churchill’s ideas prevailed, would the world have been more miserable, or less?); Ireland (Churchill was the only statesman in history ever to get both Republicans and Unionists to agree to a treaty); de Gaulle (whoever was “right” about de Gaulle?); and India (much of what Churchill predicted following independence came true, including a bloodbath).

    Another critic is amazed that Gilbert is not more censorious over Churchill’s reference to a Labour “Gestapo.” Yet only last year a socialist friend in England commented to me that the tactics of certain radical Labour councils in Britain precisely reminded her of the Gestapo.

    A reviewer of the traditional school says the biography is a “jerky, discontinuous chronicle” with “puzzling discontinuities, ” and is aghast to find the first reference to the Nobel Prize 20 pages ahead of the event. I have read the kind of biographies he likes, where a single event–perhaps crucial, perhaps not, like Churchill’s flash trip to Antwerp and offer to command its defense in 1914–is subject to a mountain of analysis out of all proportion, while the biographer digresses for a chapter to suit his or her particular hang-up. That’s quite all right for conventional biography; but this is the official biography of Winston Churchill. Those who refer to it will certainly want to know what else was going on–personal, military, political–when Churchill went to Antwerp. Gilbert’s method absolutely assures that you will find, at any juncture, all the happenings in Churchill’s life, to weigh, consider, accept, reject, forget or remember.

    Most reviewers have rightly avoided the uneducated view that “all has been said” about Winston Churchill. There is still room for a lot more, including studies on his many faceted journalistic career, to cite one lightly-trod area. Well, fair enough. But to have more we must have a foundation.

    May I propose, then, the 9.2 million words, eight biographic volumes and fifteen companion volumes already published, and the eight companion volumes still to come, 31 volumes in all, as the foundation required, even at the risk of adding substance to the saying that a bore is somebody who tells everything?

    AN EXCERPT FROM THE UNOPINIONATED AUTHOR

    Churchill was indeed a noble spirit, sustained in his long life by a faith in the capacity of man to live in peace, to seek prosperity, and to ward off threats and dangers by his own exertions. His love of country, his sense of fair play, his hopes for the human race, were matched by formidable powers of work and thought, vision and foresight. His path had often been dogged by controversy, disappointment and abuse, but these had never deflected him from his sense of duty and his faith in the British people.

    In the last years, when power passed, to be followed by extreme old age with all its infirmity and sadness, Churchill’s children expressed to him in private the feelings which many of his fellow countrymen also felt . . . From his daughter Mary had come words of solace, when at last his life’s great impulses were fading. “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father,” she wrote, “I owe you what every Englishman, woman & child does – Liberty itself”. – MARTIN GILBERT