The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (5 page)

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olitical genius, said Bismarck, consists of hearing the distant hoofbeat of the horse of history and then leaping to catch the passing horseman by the coattails. The difficulty is that one may hear the wrong horse, or lunge for the wrong horseman. As Jung pointed out, the extroverted intuitive lacks judgment. Churchill was right about the Dardanelles, right about Ireland, right about Munich, right about stripping England of tanks to defend the Suez Canal in 1940, and, as the Third Reich crumbled, supremely right about the menace of the rising Russian empire in Eastern Europe. However, he had not been right about fascism; at first, his conservative instincts and his allegiance to tradition had led him to apologias for strong men who posed as defenders of the established order. In 1926 he told Italian journalists that he had been “charmed… by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing.” Resisting British opposition to Franco, he recommended instead that England “send charitable aid under the Red Cross to both sides.” And while loathing Nazism, he once remarked that he “admired” Hitler for being a “champion” of his nation’s pride. As his friend F. E. Smith put it, “Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God.”
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Despite his versatility, vitality, and fertile mind, his belligerent instincts led him to fight Gandhi’s campaign for Indian independence, to oppose the abdication of Edward VIII, and, in the heat of the 1945 political campaign, to predict that a Labour party victory would bring Britain “a Gestapo apparatus.” In January 1938 he wrote: “The air menace against properly armed and protected ships of war will not be of a decisive character.” This conviction, stubbornly held, led to the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
by the Twenty-second Japanese Air Flotilla on December 10, 1941. In the opening months of the war, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, he was responsible for England’s intervention in Norway, a fiasco which was mercifully overlooked when he became prime minister. Anzio was his idea; later he admitted that “I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.” Diversionary attacks, however impractical, always had his support. Late in the war he still wanted to land in Norway. At his insistence amphibious assaults were attempted on Rhodes and other Greek islands. All failed. In 1944 he even wanted to seize the tip of Sumatra, which was wholly without strategic value. George C. Marshall said, “His planning was all wishing and guessing.” Actually, it wasn’t. Had the combined chiefs adopted his grand proposal to sail up the Adriatic and invade Europe through the Ljubljana Gap, some military historians believe, British Tommies and American GIs, not Russians, would have been the liberators of Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw, with all that would have entailed for the postwar world. But by then his stock had fallen because he had championed so many impractical schemes.
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That had been the story of much of his public life. His career passed through three stages: from 1900 to 1915, when his star rose to a dizzy height; from then until 1940, when he achieved little and failed often; and from Dunkirk to the end, when he became a legend. The legend obscures what was a patchy record. Again and again he was rejected by his countrymen; he never won their love and confidence until they faced disaster. His following was limited to a few personal friends. He lost more elections than any other British politician of his time. Twice he switched parties, and although he wound up leader of the Conservatives, he spent three-quarters of his political life battling Tory leaders. His brilliance was recognized from the first, but he was regarded as erratic, unreliable, shallow, impetuous, a hatcher of “wildcat schemes.” In 1915, Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith observed of Churchill that “to speak with the tongue of men and angels, and to spend laborious days and nights in administration, is no good if a man does not inspire trust.” Instead, he inspired suspicion. His love of adventure, it was said, ran away with his discretion. He was put down as an opportunist, a swashbuckler, a man who was “jaywalking through life.” He was labeled a man incapable of party loyalty. In the House of Commons he wasn’t even a good listener; he “lacked antennae.” Once his mind was set, he wouldn’t budge an inch. Nor could he judge men. He was easily taken in by quacks and charlatans; in the words of Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, “Winston was a bad picker.” By the 1930s it was generally felt that the people were wise to him at last, that he was a figure from the past, out of touch with reality. A newspaper editorial described him as a “genius without judgment.” Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who watched Germany rearm and crushed all proposals for British military expenditures, said that although Churchill had a “hundred-horsepower brain,” he didn’t know how to harness it. Harold Begbie wrote: “Mr. Churchill carries great guns, but his navigation is uncertain. His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him but do not follow him. He beguiles their reason but never warms their emotions.”
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Margot Asquith had sized him up in 1908 as a man of “transitory convictions.” Later, the Tories reached the same conclusion; they accused him of inconstancy, of veering opinions. In fact, it was the other way around. It was Baldwin and Chamberlain who were the trimmers, switching their policies when public opinion shifted. Except in the 1920s—when, as Baldwin’s chancellor of the Exchequer, he withheld criticism of some questionable policies—Churchill never changed at all. He could misjudge others, but his own principles were a rock. This, in fact, is what offended traditional party politicians. If one reads the letters he wrote as a subaltern, his dispatches as a war correspondent, his speeches as a young MP, his cabinet papers, his books, and his “Action-This-Day” memoirs of the early 1940s, it will be clear that his views, once formed, were immutable. Here and there one encounters surprises. In the Edwardian era he and David Lloyd George were the most effective champions of the working class in the cabinet. Churchill’s sympathy for workmen had been engaged by the humble circumstances of Mrs. Everest, who had given him the love his mother withheld, and by reading early sociological studies of the desperate poverty in the lower classes. Despite his wealthy friends and relatives and his allegiance to the Empire, he denounced “our unbridled Imperialists who have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation, and territory.” He invented the excess-profits tax. Yet more than thirty years later he bitterly fought Labour’s cradle-to-grave welfare legislation. The explanation is intriguing. He wasn’t opposed to the substance of Labour’s bills; what he found objectionable was the
way
the thing was being done. Labour held that the people had an absolute right to these comprehensive benefits. Churchill thought they should be gifts from a benign upper class to grateful lower classes. It was characteristic of him that in 1944, when Harold Laski proposed raising a fund as a token of the nation’s gratitude to him, he demurred, then added: “If, however, when I am dead people think of commemorating my services, I should like to think that a park was made for the children of London’s poor on the south bank of the Thames, where they have suffered so grimly from the Hun.” Subscriptions were admirable. Taxes were an affront.
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His concept of magnanimity is among his more fascinating and, if you disregard the overtones of noblesse oblige, more endearing traits. He was always being excoriated in print or on the platform, and one of his sources of income was damage suits for libel or slander. He always won, and he always felt genuine pity for the loser. He wrote: “I have always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main till overwhelming victory, and then offering the hand of friendship to the vanquished. Thus I have always been against the Pacifists during the quarrel, and against the Jingoes at its close.” It was a pattern with him. Defeat had to precede conciliation. He refused to negotiate until his adversary had capitulated. Revenge afterward, however, was to him unmanly and ungentlemanly. It was Kitchener’s vindictiveness on the Nile, his total lack of generosity toward the routed natives, which infuriated young Churchill. After Chamberlain’s fall, which was swiftly followed by his death, Churchill rose in the House of Commons to pay him tribute. He said Chamberlain’s hopes had been foiled by events, then asked: “But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed?… They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril.” He was a ferocious enemy of Germany in both world wars, yet after each he begged the British government—in vain—to dispatch emergency shipments of food to its starving people. However high he rose, the man who as a boy had been bullied and bruised could always identify with the underdog.
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I
n a profound sense, he himself always remained the underdog. All his life he suffered spells of depression, sinking into the brooding depths of melancholia, an emotional state which, though little understood, resembles the passing sadness of the normal man as a malignancy resembles a canker sore. The depressive knows what Dante knew: that hell is an endless, hopeless conversation with oneself. Every day he chisels his way through time, praying for relief. The etiology of the disease is complex, but is thought to include family history, childhood influences, biological deficiencies, and—particularly among those of aggressive temperament—feelings of intense hostility which the victim, lacking other targets, turns inward upon himself. Having chosen to be macho, Churchill became the pugnacious, assertive fighter ready to cock a snook at anyone who got in his way. That was why he began carrying a Bren gun in his car when he became prime minister, then took bayonet lessons, and insisted that his lifeboat on the wartime
Queen Mary
be equipped with a mounted machine gun. But in peacetime he often lacked adequate outlets for his aggression. The deep reservoir of vehemence he carried within him backed up, and he was plunged into fathomless gloom.

Depression is common among the great; it may balance their moods of omnipotence. Among its sufferers have been Goethe, Lincoln, Bismarck, Schumann, Tolstoy, Robert E. Lee, and Martin Luther. To these should be added Churchill’s father and five of the seven dukes of Marlborough, his ancestors, for it should be remembered that genes, too, play a depressive role. The personality traits are unmistakable; it is impossible to imagine Franklin Roosevelt offering blood, toil, tears, and sweat, but the expression would have come naturally from Lincoln. We first encounter Churchill’s awareness of his illness in a letter, written when he was twenty, complaining of “mental stagnation” and a “slough of despond.” The note is sounded again in his second book, a novel. The hero drops into a chair and asks himself: “Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what?” Later, “a sense of weariness, of disgust with struggling, of desire for peace filled [the hero’s] soul. The object for which he had toiled so long was now nearly attained and it seemed of little worth.” An echo of this is heard more than a half-century later. It was Churchill’s birthday. Glasses were raised to honor his accomplishments. He muttered to his daughters Diana and Sarah: “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”
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“What a creature of strange moods he is,” Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, wrote, “always at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.” In times of disappointment, rejection, or bereavement, feelings of hopelessness overwhelmed him. Thoughts of self-destruction were never far away. He told his doctor: “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.” He also disliked sleeping near a balcony. He explained: “I’ve no desire to quit this world, but thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into the head.”
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To a remarkable degree he coped successfully with “Black Dog,” as he called his depressive spells. He sought flamboyant, stimulating, zestful company. He avoided hospitals. And like Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, he found solace in incessant activity. He told Violet Asquith
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that unless he was perpetually active he relapsed into “dark moments of impatience and frustration.” Sir George Riddell wrote in his diary in January 1915 that Churchill “is one of the most industrious men I have ever known. He is like a wonderful piece of machinery with a flywheel which occasionally makes unexpected movements.” He would tell his family, “A change is as good as a rest,” and then set about laying bricks at Chartwell or painting landscapes at Marrakesh. After the Dardanelles he crossed into France, fought in the trenches as a battalion commander, and set up his easel just behind the front line. And he always pursued acclaim. Depressives, more than most people, are dependent upon external sources of self-esteem. Churchill was never bashful about soliciting applause. As a youth, mailing a manuscript to his mother, he sought from her what she had not given him in childhood. He wrote: “Write to me at great length about the book and be nice about it. Don’t say what you think, but what I… should like you to think.” If friends suggested that this book or that speech might be improved, he reproached them: “You are not on my side.” He expected total, uncritical loyalty. And he reciprocated. Brendan Bracken, one of the few who stood by him in the 1930s, said: “He would go to the stake for a friend.”
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