WINSTON CHURCHILL ONCE CASTIGATED HIS BUTLER—and when the butler complained, Churchill apologized, saying: “You must remember I’m a great man.” The great man was in danger of being forgotten for some years after his death in 1965, but over the last decade what amounts almost to a book-writing industry has emerged to remind us. This year alone has featured three new biographies of the prime minister. The biggest—the most Churchillian, at seven hundred pages—is by Roy Jenkins. Back in the 1960s and 1970s Jenkins was a rising star in the British Labour party, often named as a future prime minister. But he fell afoul of Labour’s drift to the far left, especially its opposition to European integration, which Jenkins supported. After a brief fling as leader of the Social Democratic party in the early 1980s, Jenkins withdrew from politics and began to indulge again his passion for writing history and biographies. His earlier books had included a highly regarded life of Herbert Asquith, the prime minister in the early days of World War I, as well as a biography of an eccentric nineteenth-century radical, Sir Charles Dilke. His post-political books consist of his enormous account of the life of William Gladstone, which appeared in 1995, and now Churchill: A Biography. Both the Gladstone and the Churchill volumes are good reads, but they add little to our knowledge or understanding. With Churchill, at least, the problem is that his personality and temperament are so alien to Jenkins. A Tory democrat, a patriot and an imperialist, and a lover of military affairs, Churchill had a mindset diametrically opposed to that of Jenkins, a leftwing intellectual and honors graduate of Oxford’s Balliol College. Churchill believed himself a man of destiny. This sense fueled his restless ambition, his self-confidence, and strength of will. Back in the 1880s, Dilke recorded in his diary that Lord Roseberg was the most ambitious person he ever met. Some years later, on rereading his diary, Dilke crossed it out and wrote: “That was before I met Winston Churchill.” Jenkins is good on the lengths that Churchill went to as a young man to succeed. Although often subject to the fits of depression he called his “black dog,” Churchill never lost sight of his goal of a successful political career. JENKINS’S BIOGRAPHY EFFECTIVELY TRACES how diligently Churchill sought to make a name for himself as a young man. He served as a war correspondent covering a revolution in Cuba and saw action in military campaigns in India, the Sudan, and South Africa. He was captured by the Boers, made a daring, well-publicized escape, and found himself famous in England. Churchill believed the way to call attention to himself was to write about his adventures. Jenkins shows how Churchill trained himself to be a writer by developing a unique prose style that was half Macaulay and half Gibbon. His books about his early adventures were commercial successes that made him at thirty one of the best known writers in England. In 1905 for his biography of his father, Churchill received an advance estimated at over $400,000 in today’s dollars. The fame from his writing enabled Churchill to begin a political career that saw him switch political parties three times. Jenkins argues that Churchill did not really fit in any one party but was instead an Edwardian Liberal who sought the betterment of the lower classes from a sense of noblesse oblige. His political maneuverings and beliefs, Jenkins argues, were always secondary to his desire to exercise power. Churchill achieved ministerial office in 1906 when he was just thirty-one, joining Asquith’s government as undersecretary for colonial affairs. He quickly made a name for himself and was moved to the cabinet, first to the Board of Trade, then to the Home Office, finally becoming first lord of the admiralty on the eve of World War I. This record was remarkable for a man not yet forty. Churchill was not afraid to act. In the opening stages of World War I, he ordered the British fleet mobilized when others in the government hesitated. Churchill was responsible for the only imaginative, if flawed, British action of the early stages of the war, the landing in the Dardanelles designed to knock Turkey out of the war and link Britain and France with Russia. This campaign—for which Churchill bore heavy responsibility—cost him dearly, although its failure was not his fault alone. He eventually lost his position in the cabinet and gained a reputation for rashness that took him a decade to overcome. Jenkins is good on Churchill’s early years, perhaps because he is covering ground he wrote about in previous books, especially the Asquith biography. Then, too, the issues that Churchill dealt with in the years before World War I at the Board of Trade and Home Office—unemployment, crime, pensions—are the kinds of social questions that interest Jenkins. It took Churchill almost a decade and another switch of parties from Liberal to Conservative to recover political power. In 1924 he was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, a post his father had held in the 1880s, by the rising star of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin. The office, comparable to our secretary of the Treasury, was unsuitable for Churchill, who had little understanding of money except how to spend huge amounts of it. (At least he knew more about economics than his father, Lord Randolph, who, on being briefed about financial matters, was supposed to have pointed to the decimal points and asked, “What are these damned dots?”) Jenkins traces how in the 1930s Churchill was alienated from his Conservative allies and the English public in general. He opposed greater autonomy for India, took up the unpopular cause of Edward VIII in the abdication crisis of 1936, and began as early as 1932 to call for rearmament in the face of growing German militarism. His outspoken role in these issues cemented the opinion that he was a warmonger and lacked judgment. By the mid-1930s Churchill was, in the words of one of his contemporaries, “a busted flush.” WORLD WAR II SAVED HIM. His long opposition to the appeasement of Nazism vindicated him. He had been right, and the English political establishment wrong, about Hitler. The reluctant Neville Chamberlain was forced by alarmed public opinion to bring him back to the admiralty in September 1939, and Churchill was in his element. He was one of the few forces for action in the opening months of what was known as the “Phony War” or Sitzkrieg. The British navy cleared the seas of German surface raiders, kept trade between the Empire and Great Britain open, and ferried the British army to France without a loss. When Hitler launched his massive attack in the West in May 1940, Chamberlain, who had taunted Hitler for “missing the bus,” fell from power. At sixty-five years old, Churchill was parliament’s reluctant choice for prime minister. But the fall of France and the subsequent Battle of Britain proved that he was the right man for the job. Later he would say that 1940 was his annus mirabilis, the year he would choose to relive if he could. CURIOUSLY, JENKINS IS WEAK on Churchill’s unique role in the dangerous summer of 1940. His treatment in three short chapters of those weeks when England’s fate was in the balance is perfunctory and unrevealing. Churchill’s bulldog-like sense of defiance and his almost irrational belief that England would prevail are beyond Jenkins’s imagination. For a sense of that remarkable time a reader should turn to two books by the American historian John Lukacs, The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler (1993) and Five Days in London, May 1940 (1999). Jenkins is better on the diplomatic side of the war. He makes a case that the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship was less warm than people believed. At one level Churchill the romantic admired Roosevelt, but the American president kept people at a distance and lacked the personal warmth to which Churchill always responded. When Roosevelt died, Churchill, an avid traveler, didn’t come to
America for the funeral. According to Jenkins, Churchill’s morale sagged as victory approached, primarily because he became concerned about the rising threat of the Soviet Union, which he described in his famous Iron Curtain speech, delivered in the United States in March 1946. Churchill’s warnings about the Soviets were rejected by many in the mainstream American press, particularly by the New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, to say nothing of left-wing political journals like the Nation, which were still enamored of Stalin. Churchill wasn’t worried. He predicted that American public opinion would come around to share his view in a matter of months. He was right. In the last hundred pages of his biography Jenkins shows how Churchill dominated the international political scene in the postwar decade. Despite defeat at the polls in 1945, he retained his zest for politics. He became the first major European statesman to endorse the idea of a United Europe, even though Great Britain’s role was unclear. His Zurich speech in November 1946, in which he called for Europe to act together to avoid another war, Jenkins argues was as important as his call for opposition to Soviet communism. If Churchill had been listened to, Great Britain would have led the United Europe movement instead of having to beg for entry to the Common Market a generation later. Churchill returned to power in 1951 and remained in office for four years. He was seventy-six at the time, tired, in failing health, and he had a serious stroke in 1953. During what some have called his Indian summer, Churchill still managed to confront issues that most politicians avoided. Throughout his last premiership, he pressed for a summit meeting to talk about thermonuclear weapons, and his ideas for normalizing relations between the West and the Soviet Union foreshadowed, for good and for ill, the Kissinger-Nixon concept of détente. WHEN, AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM, Time magazine ran a poll of the most significant figures of the twentieth century, Churchill came in sixteenth, trailing Elvis Presley and Madonna. Such is fame in modern America. But Churchill’s stock has been rising again as a new generation begins to discover what a unique figure in modern history he was: statesman, Nobel prize-winner in literature, fine amateur painter, and first-class bricklayer who built many of the garden walls at his home, Chartwell. Jenkins’s Churchill: A Biography is flawed, but his subject is great enough to shine through anyway. John Rossi is a professor of history at LaSalle University.
