Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Page 17
The essence of tragedy is not sorrow but solemnity: the remorseless progress of the world. That which bore Churchill up, crashed him down. Having pledged to defend the glory of England at all costs, he must pay the heavy price: the end of the Empire he was so determined to preserve. Having chosen to resist the Empire’s destruction, he must feel its loss more profoundly than anyone else. Having managed to seize power yet again at the end of his long career, he must confront the brutal reality that his world had vanished beyond his ability to restore it. Having been given the gift of great vitality, he must bear long life and the knowledge it brought.
37
CHURCHILL IN PORTRAIT
A Likeness
Recognizing they’re at the mercy of their portraitists, most leaders keep images of themselves under the strictest control possible. Like Alexander the Great, who permitted only a few trusted artists to depict him, and John Kennedy, who surrounded himself with admiring writers, Churchill recognized that a portrait could illuminate his character in dangerous ways.
In a painted portrait, the full weight of a personality can be seen, with an extra dimension not captured in a photograph. This wild element worried Churchill, who aimed to control his image in history. He was painted many times, but the portrait that reveals most about Churchill is the portrait he hated.
In a unique honor, for Churchill’s eightieth birthday, both Houses of Parliament presented him with a portrait of himself painted by Graham Sutherland, one of the finest contemporary artists. Because Parliament commissioned the birthday portrait, Churchill had no control over the choice of artist or the painting.
At first, all had gone well with the gift. Churchill and Clementine liked Sutherland and his wife, and Churchill enjoyed the sittings. With his love for pomp, uniform, and tradition, he’d wanted to be portrayed wearing his robes of the Garter, but Sutherland insisted that Churchill forgo the resplendent blue velvet mantle and the velvet hat with its sweeping ostrich plume to wear his working-day black coat and bow tie instead.
When Churchill saw the completed portrait, he felt betrayed; Sutherland had depicted him as a “gross & cruel monster.” Churchill loathed the picture so much he considered declining to accept it. In the end, he didn’t refuse the painting, but at the presentation ceremony, he didn’t say he liked it, either. “The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art,” he said with obvious irony to the audience, which erupted in laughter and sympathetic applause. “It certainly combines force and candour.” Privately, he called it “filthy” and “malignant” and said it made him look like “a drinking sot.”
Photographs from the presentation ceremony emphasize the contrast between the living Churchill and the Churchill portrait. Standing on the dais, the eighty-year-old Churchill appears filled with energy and humor. He gestures energetically and sets the crowd laughing. Behind him, on display, is a different Churchill. No smile, no cigar, no noble determination: he appears not as a dashing war hero or serene statesman but as an old, stubborn man, weighed down by mortal bulk, with a bald head, fleshy nose, and mouth turned down at the corners. The portrait doesn’t hint at Churchill’s famous wit or magnanimity but reveals all his grim determination, pride, and frustration. Churchill sits braced against some onslaught, wearily ready as always to fight again. He looks heavy and yet somehow strangely insubstantial, at least in reproduction—and that’s the only way to see the portrait now.
The portrait no longer exists. Clementine secretly destroyed it sometime in 1955 or 1956. Churchill’s hatred of the picture, and his resentment at how he’d been portrayed, preyed on his mind so much that Clementine promised him it would never be seen again.
Was it the portrait’s untruth, or its truth, that caused Churchill so much anguish? Around the same time he received it, just before his final resignation as Prime Minister, he said of himself, “I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.” Sutherland had seen this, too.
Churchill, portrayed by Graham Sutherland.
Churchill, portrayed by Graham Sutherland.
Photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos
Churchill and his portrait, photographed during the eightieth-birthday celebration.
Churchill and his portrait, photographed during the eightieth-birthday celebration.
Photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos
38
CHURCHILL’S LAST DAYS
How He Died
How a great figure like Churchill died is one of the most interesting facts of his life. Few choose when or how they die, yet death, however it comes, always seems somehow characteristic; though involuntary, it makes a dramatic flourish that influences our interpretation of the life. Joan of Arc’s martyrdom, Napoleon’s captivity, Lincoln’s assassination, Oscar Wilde’s exile—different deaths would have changed the emphasis of their lives. The story of Churchill, his life and significance, would have been different had he died by an assassin’s bullet, on the battlefield, or in a plane crash. Instead, he died quietly in his bed, in 1965.
No one more than Churchill would have wanted to write his own death—a hero’s death, at the height of his powers. Of Roosevelt, who died just before victory, Churchill said, “He died in harness. . . . What an enviable death was his!” In a 1945 letter, General Sir Alan Brooke observed that Churchill seemed determined to risk his life, and certainly a wartime death would have satisfied Churchill’s love for the bold and dramatic. Clementine believed the war would finish off both of them. “I never think of after the war,” Clementine said in 1944. “I think Winston will die when it’s over. . . . You see, he’s seventy and I’m sixty and we’re putting all we have into this war, and it will take all we have.” Instead, Churchill lived on for two decades.
Ambition had always fueled his terrific energy, and he fought on to achieve a second stint as Prime Minister, after his loss in 1945. After his retirement in 1955, however, his characteristic vitality dropped. Churchill once observed that “the wielding of power keeps men young,” and when he stepped down from office for the last time, he became slower, more deaf, without focus. He spent hours listening to recordings of his speeches on a portable record player. As in a fairy tale, one of Fortune’s greatest gifts to Churchill—his indestructibility—twisted itself into an affliction. “Blessings become curses,” he said to his doctor. “You kept me alive and now . . .” Churchill hung on in Parliament until 1964, aged eighty-nine, but by then, he’d sunk into the melancholy of old age. “I’ve got to kill time till time kills me.” He said to his daughter Diana, “My life is over, but it is not yet ended.”
Churchill finally died on January 24, 1965, at age ninety. The date is significant. Jock Colville recalled a remark Churchill made one morning in the early 1950s: “Today is the twenty-fourth of January. It is the day my father died. It is the day that I shall die too.” And in fact, after his final stroke, Churchill lay unconscious for many days until he died on January 24, seventy years to the day of his father’s death.
His last words were, “I’m so bored with it all.”
His death came as a shock to his countrymen. For most of them, Churchill had been a presence—a name in the newspaper, a caricature in the cartoons, a voice on the radio, a face on the screen—for their entire lives. After all, he’d thrust himself into the public eye in 1898, with his first book, and had become a national hero in 1899, when he escaped from the Boer military prison.
And Churchill? Did a pageant of memories console him as he lingered on those last silent days, to die on the day he’d chosen, the same day as his father had died? Perhaps his life slid backward from the present day, with its iron curtain and hydrogen bombs; back from his finest hour, the Second World War; and back from the First World War and the horror of the Dardanelles, and from his daring escape from the Boers, and the dash and glamor of the Indian campaigns; back, back, to his lovely mother, like the Evening Star with diamonds in her hair, and to his disdainful father, whom he
admired so much; back to Nanny Everest and his earliest memory, the sight of scarlet soldiers on horseback. And through it all was his Island, the precious stone set in the silver sea. He might have remembered all this and more as he waited for his appointed hour.
It was all finished now. Throughout his career, responsible people agreed that Churchill, for all his brilliance, lacked judgment. He thrust himself forward, he interfered, he was mistrusted, feared, disliked.
But Churchill had his sights fixed on history. He strove to earn his place there. His greatest dread was being shut out of responsible position, unable to direct the course of events. Asked what year of his life he’d choose to relive, he instantly replied, “Nineteen-forty every time, every time.”
When Churchill died, flags flew at half-mast all over the country. Big Ben was silenced. His body lay in state in Westminster Hall for three days, and despite the bitter cold, hundreds of thousands of people filed past the coffin. Television networks all over the world broadcast the procession and service. By tradition, the monarch attends only funerals of members of the royal family, but Queen Elizabeth broke with precedent and attended the funeral. Actor Laurence Olivier read from the great speeches. Reflecting Churchill’s love for military pomp, the funeral featured multigun salutes, an RAF fly-past, and the playing of “Rule, Britannia.”
Churchill’s body was taken up the Thames and then by train to Oxfordshire, then buried in the Bladon village churchyard, near Blenheim Palace. He had planned to be buried at his beloved Chartwell, but changed his mind in 1959: he wanted to be buried alongside his father. This ceremony was simple, with only two wreaths: “To my Darling Winston, Clemmie” and “From the Nation and Commonwealth. In grateful remembrance. Elizabeth R.”
In Westminster Abbey rests a marble tablet inscribed “Remember Winston Churchill.”
39
MY CHURCHILL
Judgment
Every biography raises questions of judgment, because without judgment, the life lacks significance.
Now you must arrive at your own verdict, must decide how to balance faults against virtues and successes against failures, what to pardon because of changing standards, how much to be swayed by sentiment, how to weigh the evidence. The facts mount up, but what is true?
Here is my Churchill. Others look at this history and see a different “Churchill,” but this is mine. It’s a bold and simple view, which is, after all, how he saw the world himself and how he sought to be remembered.
Now time’s lens pulls back to reveal more of the whole, less detail. Only the most significant people and events remain visible; small incidents blur and vanish. My Churchill comes into view—not in shades of gray, only brilliant colors—embodying a few bright themes. His noble tragedy is part of history now.
It’s a relief to consider Churchill, so true, so bold, with his heroic values, his exaltation of raw ambition into his country’s larger good, his immense energy and insight. His certainty and grandiosity—even his whiskey and cigars—light up our modest age. He held to a single conviction: Naught shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true. What was the source of his greatness? Not his predictions or his strategies, but his determination to fight on, whatever the cost, for everything that mattered most.
He pushed his way through the changes that engulfed his Victorian world. There he was, the fighting spirit of Britain: the grandson of a Duke, a mongrel half-American, a self-advertiser, a drinker, an imperialist, in debt—dressed in his siren suit and waving a cigar. He cried, he sang, he called Hitler “that Bad Man,” he decorated his signature with drawings of pigs. He had nothing to explain or excuse. He didn’t pretend to pay attention to other people, or accommodate himself to popular positions, or even trouble about his own dignity. He imagined himself the romantic hero in the Island story—and it was true, he was that hero.
The time-bound Churchill possessed contradictions and faults that diminished him; his tremendous virtues were tainted by his flaws. He did not rise above many of the limitations of his age or his character. But let that history fall away now. Time passes, and although his faults aren’t forgotten, from our distant vantage point, we can remember Churchill as he wanted to be remembered.
At the end, he believed his struggles had failed: “The Empire I believed in has gone.” But had he lived longer, he would have seen that he’d won after all. He hoped to see a world led by English-speaking people, united by the English language, fighting for English ideals. All this has happened. The Island story he loved has changed, but not ended.
Now my Churchill can emerge, more forceful, more true, than that other Churchill, who lived and died. He’s taken his place in the finest hour of the glorious history he imagined—a history of an ancient race, thatched cottages, noble battles, and a father who loved him.
There he is, my Churchill, braced on the quarterdeck of HMS Prince of Wales, cigar in his hand, surrounded by British and American sailors. For the moment, the urgencies of war have quieted the restlessness and ambition that dog him. His powers, too strenuous for peacetime, at last suit the hour.
Now he addresses the troops. “We shall go on to the end,” he promises; “we shall never surrender.” Flags snap in the breeze, and Roosevelt’s wheelchair creaks its way across the deck, and Churchill leads everyone, Britons and Americans together, in singing. In all his long history he will never see a greater day than this. Tears are running down his cheeks, tears not of sorrow but of wonder and admiration.
This isn’t everyone’s Churchill, but it’s my Churchill.
It all happened long ago and far away, but I can see Winston Churchill more clearly than I can see the page on which I write.
40
REMEMBER WINSTON CHURCHILL
Epitaph
It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Statue of Winston Churchill in the snow.
Photo © Bettman/CORBIS
NOTES
Introduction
Prime Minister Churchill . . . Russia.” Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 254–55.
“this was their finest hour,” David Cannadine, ed., Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat: The Speeches of Winston Churchill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), 178.
“The senior officers . . . discussion.” Winston Churchill, My Early Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 144.
The expressions “Medal-hunter” . . . footsteps. Ibid., 162.
“Events were soon . . . afterwards.” Ibid., 372.
“Churchill, unlike Hitler . . . eyes.” John Lukacs, The Duel: Hitler vs. Churchill: 10 May–31 July 1940 (London: Phoenix Press, 1990), 7.
“he could have filled buckets” Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, vol. 2, The War Years, 1939–1945, ed. Nigel Nicolson (New York: Atheneum, 1967), November 14, 1944.
“Dark, vivacious, and magnificent . . . position.” William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1983), 100.
“Your trouble . . . much. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966), 180. Diary entry of August 14, 1944; footnote omitted.
We shall go on . . . nonsense.” John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1993), 411.
“There’s nothing much . . . unploughed.” Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill: The Era and the Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), vii.
“These facts are . . . change.” Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953), “T
he Art of Biography,” 226.
“The lay reader . . . equanimity.” Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Vintage, 1993), 175.
“Another bloody monkey mind! . . . shut up.” Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 90.
“This book does not . . . view.” Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1956), viii.
1: Churchill as Liberty’s Champion
“There was a . . . end.” Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, Their Finest Hour (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), 100.
“Let us therefore . . . hour.’” David Cannadine, ed., Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat: The Speeches of Winston Churchill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), 177–78.
“In all our . . . this.” Winston Churchill, War Speeches, vol. 5, Victory (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), 167.
“The Englishman will not . . . are.” Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 221.
“From Stettin in the Baltic . . . Continent.” Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (New York: Hambledon and London, 2001), 278.
“I want to die in England.” Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 957.
“We shall fight . . . surrender.” Churchill, Their Finest Hour, 118.
2: Churchill as Failed Statesman
such as those by . . . colleague. Several of Churchill’s colleagues underwent name changes as a result of receiving titles; they are referred to throughout by the name most likely to be familar to readers. Thus, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff is called “General Sir Alan Brooke” in the text, though his diary, reflecting the title he was later given, is published under the name “Lord Alanbrooke.”