April 17, 2013

FINEST HOUR 152, AUTUMN 2011

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

Mr. McMenamin, FH contributor, novelist, attorney and writer for Reason and other journals, assisted with research but draws a different conclusion.

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Churchill’s denial that he ever said the words William Griffin said he did rests on two main suppositions. One is that Griffin was an outspoken isolationist with a motive to manufacture embarrassing quotes by Churchill. The second is that Churchill never believed or said what Griffin claimed.

As a longtime media defense lawyer, it has been my experience that journalists sometimes slant their stories to fit their point of view, political or otherwise. I can’t imagine it was any different in the 1930s. But it has not been my experience that journalists “manufacture” quotes out of thin air to convey precisely the opposite of what their subject has said. So I’m not persuaded that a reputable journalist like Griffin who, despite his strong isolationist views, managed to get Himmler to ban his newspaper, would make up bogus quotes by Churchill. Griffin was not the first nor the last to slant a story or reword a quote to convey his point of view; Churchill was not the first or last politician to claim he was misquoted, even if he wasn’t.

If Churchill said anything even close to what Griffin wrote in 1936, he would have had no choice but to deny it forcefully in August 1939, when war was imminent and his own return to the Cabinet hung in the balance. For those reasons, motivation is a wash. Whatever motive Griffin might have had to slant Churchill’s quotes is easily matched by Churchill’s own motivation to deny it all.

Churchill had to deny the entire quotation. He couldn’t, for example, say, “I never said America should have minded her own business. But, with hindsight, quite a bad number of unintended consequences followed which wouldn’t have if America had stayed out in 1917.”

I think the essential foundation of the disputed quote is the second sentence, i.e., “If [America] hadn’t entered the war, the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the spring of 1917.” Everything which follows in the quote hinges upon this. Most historians agree that Communism in Russia, Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany were all the unfortunate and unintended consequences of the First World War generally. There is no evidence Churchill believed to the contrary. Churchill’s alleged 1936 quote to Griffin pinpoints when these consequences could have been avoided—a negotiated peace in the Spring of 1917 after the Kerensky revolution in Russia and before Germany sent Lenin into that war-weary country to take it out of the war.

Other than Griffin’s article, there is evidence that Churchill believed such a peace was possible in the Spring of 1917: in the World Crisis passage quoted in paragraph two of the preceding article: “If the Allies had been left to face the collapse of Russia without being sustained by the intervention of the United States, it seems certain that France could not have survived the year, and the war would have ended in a Peace by negotiation or, in other words, a German victory.” One of Germany’s “cardinal mistakes,” he adds, was “unrestricted submarine warfare even if it brought the U.S. into the war.” He does not say he favored such a peace. He simply observes what he believes would have happened without U.S. entry.

When Churchill wrote these words, war did not loom so large as in 1936. Churchill had far more reason to say what he did to Griffin in 1936 than he would have in the late Twenties or early Thirties, when the aggression of dictators had yet to appear.

But what would cause Churchill to say this to a stranger who was an American isolationist? Churchill thought it was an off-the-record “private conversation” of a purely “private and confidential character.” He didn’t expect it to come back and bite him in the form of Nazi propaganda on the eve of war. Griffin’s account explains how the two men came to the whole subject: Griffin provocatively raised the issue of Allied war debt to America, one of Churchill’s sore points, and—in his isolationist ignorance— said that if the U.S. hadn’t entered the war “England would probably be ruled from Berlin.” Can anyone imagine Winston Churchill hearing that and remaining silent as to what he thought would have happened without U.S. entry?

Griffin says Churchill replied that he had been “enthusiastic” about U.S. entry and “no one in England was happier” than he at this development. Then follows the disputed quote where Churchill says there would have been a negotiated settlement, much as he did in The World Crisis. In case the historically challenged Griffin didn’t get the point, WSC then added what wouldn’t have happened in Russia, Italy and Germany as a result. Griffin then says the U.S. had learned its lesson and would stay out of the next war. Churchill patiently replied that the U.S. “will be dragged in and you will find yourselves fighting shoulder to shoulder with us in defense of our common democratic institutions.” Almost all of Griffin’s account appears to be consistent with Churchill’s known views on the subjects. With one exception to which I now turn.

I don’t think Churchill began the disputed quote by saying, “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War.” I think this is Griffin’s spin and Churchill doesn’t appear have to said it anywhere else. Moreover, Churchill didn’t have to say this to educate Griffin, as he did, on what he believed would have followed had there been no U.S. entry and a negotiated peace in the Spring of 1917. But misquoting Churchill in one sentence based on what you thought the import of his speculation was is not the same as “manufacturing” the entire and sophisticated counter-speculation which Griffin says Churchill offered. Really, by his own words, it’s clear Griffin wasn’t informed enough to do that.

To ignore all the other apparently accurate Churchill quotes from Griffin and conclude that one disputed quote in a long interview is “manufactured” solely because of the first sentence, you also have to conclude that Winston Churchill never contemplated that a negotiated peace in the Spring of 1917 would have spared the world from Communism, Fascism and Nazism, and conversely that Churchill believed we would still have had all three “isms” even with a negotiated peace in Spring 1917. I can’t do that and I don’t think the record supports that.