June 20, 2015

Finest Hour 100, Autumn 1998

Page 46

Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt got off to a thoroughly bad start, according to Robert Pilpel’s excellent Churchill in America 1895-1961 (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1976); the author has presented the rights to The Churchill Center, and we hope to arrange republication.

Churchill journeyed to Albany in December 1900 to meet vice president-elect Roosevelt, who had charged up San Juan Hill just two months before Churchill had charged at Omdurman. Pilpel writes: “…in their vitality, their energy, their lust for adventure, the two men had other things in common as well. It was a case of likes repelling. ‘I saw the Englishman, Winston Churchill here, and…he is not an attractive fellow/ Roosevelt confided to a friend after the meeting, and this negative impression proved as enduring as the parallelism of careers—both Churchill and Roosevelt were to shift their political allegiances from the parties of their youth; both were to achieve the highest political office on two occasions; and both were to be awarded a Nobel Prize.” (37-38)

In 1906, “the reception accorded Lord Randolph Churchill was friendly and its sales were good; only the incumbent President still dwelling on what must have been a truly disastrous first encounter more than five years earlier… ‘I have been over Winston Churchill’s life of his father/ TR told Henry Cabot Lodge. ‘I dislike the father and dislike the son, so I may be prejudiced. Still, I feel that, while the biographer and his subject possess some real farsightedness…yet they both possess or possesed such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants.’

“To historian George Trevelyan, Roosevelt wrote of ‘Winston Churchill’s clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar life of that clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar egoist, his father.’

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“To TR, Jr.: ‘[Lord Randolph] is an interesting book…but I can’t help feeling about both of them that the older one WAS a rather cheap character, and the younger one IS a rather cheap character.'” (pp 60-61)

In 1908, TR, planning a trip to Africa, read with delight Churchill’s My African journey. To US Ambassador to Britain Whitelaw Reid he wrote, “I should consider my entire African trip a success if I could…find the game as Churchill describes it.” Six weeks later TR wrote Reid, “I do not like Winston Churchill but I supposed I ought to write him. Will you send him the enclosed letter if it is all right?” The letter was a thank-you for “the beautiful copy of your book” in which TR hoped that “I shall have as good luck as you had.” (63)

After war broke out in 1914, Roosevelt wrote a friend: “I have never liked Winston Churchill, but in view of what you tell me as to his admirable conduct and nerve in mobilizing the fleet, I do wish that if it comes your way you would extend to him my congratulations on his action.” (69)

During his 1929 visit to the USA, Churchill attended a dinner party where he was seated next to TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Pilpel: “Despite her lineage, Mrs. Longworth seems not only to have taken to him but even to have engaged in a little flirtation as well. When he asked her to state her opinions about Prohibition, for example, she leaned over and murmured, ‘I would rather whisper them to you.’ (Of course, this may simply have been because bad language from a lady was still unacceptable in polite society.)” (110)

Pilpel’s final reference to TR also testifies to the sheer span of Churchill’s political life. In 1961, on WSC’s last visit to America, President Kennedy telephoned him, offering to send a special plane to New York for a flying visit to the White House, but Clementine was unwell and WSC was anxious to get back to her: “He had spoken to his first President, William McKinley, in 1900, and now, after Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Hoover, FDR, Truman and Eisenhower, he had spoken to his last.” (273)