April 24, 2013

FINEST HOUR 150, SPRING 2011

BY RICHARD M. LANGWORTH

ABSTRACT
Barbara Leaming offers brilliant insight into Churchillʼs last decade of active politics.

Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, by Barbara Leaming. London: Harper Press, 394 pages, £20/$26.99. Member price $21.60.

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“At my time of life I have no personal ambitions, no future to provide for. And I feel I can truthfully say that I only wish to do my duty by the whole mass of the nation and of the British Empire as long as I am thought to be of any use for that.” —Churchill in a London Broadcast, 21 March 1943

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At first glance, Barbara Leaming’s book on Churchill’s last ten years of active politics is just “popular history”: under 400 pages, par- aphrases instead of lengthy quotes, no footnotes (the back pages provide line references). There is none of the clinical, chronological approach of Sir Martin Gilbert, and little that challenges his findings.

But Leaming adds a unique personal dimension that places her book well above the long array of pot-boilers—making it the most important survey of Churchill’s last active decade since Anthony Seldon’s Churchill’s Indian Summer thirty years ago. It will be particularly valuable to young people, or others new to Churchill, for its keen insight into his lifelong defiance of long odds and formidable adversaries.

In describing his last political decade, Leaming takes the measure of Churchill’s earlier experience. For example, she spots something he wrote of uniquely gifted people in 1937: “One may say that sixty, perhaps seventy percent of all they have to give is expended on fights which have no other object but to get to their battlefield.”

That, she observes, nicely describes “the arc of Churchill’s own political career. By the time he had realized his supreme ambition of becoming prime minister, in 1940, he had spent decades fighting to reach his particular battlefield. Again, after being hurled from power in 1945, Churchill dedicated an additional six years to fighting his way back” (135).

Why did he fight on after 1945? In two words: world peace. It was, he said repeatedly, “the last prize I seek.”

Churchill considered himself uniquely gifted for what he called “parleys at the summit.” At Fulton, even as he warned of the Iron Curtain, he insisted that if only the heads of government could sit down together, the danger of Apocalypse could be eased. Repeatedly he risked rupturing the special relationship he valued above all others, challenging a reluctant Eisenhower to meet with him and the Russians. Most notable, Leaming writes, was his speech of 11 May 1953, which she regards an equal to his great war speeches. “Where others heard taps,” she concludes, “Churchill heard reveille.”

Relying heavily on diaries and memoirs of the primary players (but circumspect about the non-medical views of Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran), Leaming constructs an intensely personal portrayal not only of Churchill but of colleagues and adversaries, led by Stalin and Eisenhower. And make no mistake, Eisenhower was an adversary. Rosy portraits of their relationship obfuscate Churchill’s low view of Ike as President; he deemed him short on vision, stagnant in thinking. Above all, the President was subservient to his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, “whose breath stank and whose left eye twitched incessantly and disconcertingly”—whom President Eisenhower sent at regular intervals “to try to turn Churchill from his purpose.”

The reader is at Churchill’s shoulder from page 1, where, in Berlin in 1945, he descends the stairs to Hitler’s bunker, hesitates halfway down, climbs wearily back and—when a body was burned—turns away in revulsion. Or 1946, in Miami, “seated beside a bed of red poinsettias near the pink brick seaside house,” his tropical tan suit “snugly across his stomach,” pondering what he must tell the world at Fulton. We read parallel sketches of Stalin around the same time, holidaying on the Black Sea, ailing, exhausted, paranoid, suspicious of plots against him, torturing a former doctor he believes is a spy.

Leaming’s insight is extraordinary. Why, for example, did Truman invite Churchill to Fulton, when the President was seeking to avoid confrontation with Moscow? “At a time when Truman had yet to emerge from Roosevelt’s shadow,” she suggests, “it might be difficult politically to depart from his predecessor’s Soviet policy. The Fulton speech, delivered by a private citizen who also happened to be a master of the spoken word, as well as a figure of exceptional appeal to Americans, would allow Truman, at no political cost to himself, to see if the public was ready to accept a change” (67).

Clementine Churchill is closely appreciated. She yearned for Winston to retire. In their daughter Mary’s words, she would “gladly exchange the splendours and miseries of a meteor’s train for the quieter more banal happiness of being married to an ordinary man.” Yet she wished him go on his terms, sharply replying when outsiders urged her to intervene. Asked in mid-1954 if she wanted Winston to retire, she replied: “Yes I do indeed, but I don’t wish to be told that by Mr. Harold Macmillan.”

Churchill’s Tory colleagues do not bear well under Leaming’s light. Nearly to a man, they hoped he would retire, each of them in profound self-interest. Salisbury wanted Eden, knowing he could not as easily control “Rab” Butler; Butler dangled a coalition before Labour as a way to supplant Eden as heir apparent. Macmillan first shunned the retirement cabal, hoping it would fail, paving his own way to the top, while urging Clementine and private secretary Jock Colville to tell Winston to go. Eden, ever the prevaricator, flopped this way and that over demanding Churchill quit. No wonder the wheels nearly came off the Cabinet at several junctures—in ways that remind us of politics today.

We may not have appreciated the degree of separation between Churchill and Eden—and for how long. Michael McMenamin’s “Action This Day” last issue quoted Churchill’s 1936 remark when Eden became foreign secretary: “I think you will now see what a light-weight Eden is.” Churchill Defiant reminds us of what WSC said the night before his resignation as Prime Minister in April 1955: “I don’t believe Anthony can do it.” Churchill’s judgment was on the mark. Eden, who resigned soon after Eisenhower refused to back his march on Suez in 1956, “could be a prickly and peevish character,” but was diplomatic with Churchill, Leaming quotes the historian P.J. Grigg: Eden was notorious for “bullying people who could be bullied and collapsing before those who couldn’t” (137).

The book leaves us with poignant and sorrowful realizations, national and personal. Nationally, Britain’s place in the world fell precipitously in the decade after the war. The “special relationship” proved more special to London than to Washington, and the disagreements over a summit were followed by a major rupture over Suez.

On the personal level we witness the fall of a giant. Yet even in 1943, Churchill had “no personal ambitions, no future to provide for.” He never gave in. He faced down colleagues who pressed him to resign with all his famed resolution. He gloried in battles won, as when turning somersaults in the sea for actress Merle Oberon after a great speech in Strasbourg. He despaired when he hit stone walls, like Eisenhower at Bermuda, who, when asked about the next meeting, said: “I don’t know. Mine is with a whisky and soda.”

“Never give in,” he’d told the boys at Harrow: “Never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense….” Who can say if he was right or wrong about a summit with the Russians? It was never tried. When honour and good sense told him it was time, Churchill went—convinced that a summit was beyond his declining powers.

Barbara Leaming offers no summary chapter, no list of the faults or mistakes of players in the drama. Unlike some authors, she does not suggest that her subjects individually changed history. But her opinions register throughout, and are nowhere more apparent than toward the end:

“When Churchill refused to retire in 1945, his decision had flowed from everything that was essential to his character; so had his subsequent decisions to fight on. At the beginning of 1955, the decision that confronted Churchill was different, harder. This time, rather than ride the wave of his obstinacy, he had to overcome it. He had to crush his life-long refusal to accept defeat. He had to conquer the primal survival instinct that had allowed him to spring back so many times before. This time, Churchill’s battle was not really with Salisbury, Eden, Eisenhower or any antagonist. It was with himself” (306)