Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Read online

  One of Churchill’s best targets for his humor was himself. In 1944, when asked not to repeat mistakes made after the First World War, he replied, “I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated; we shall probably make another set of mistakes.” He made good fun of his French: in November 1944, he began a speech by warning: “Be on your guard, because I am going to speak in French, a formidable undertaking and one which will put great demands on your friendship with Great Britain.” After the war, he addressed a French audience in English: “I have often made speeches in French, but that was wartime, and I do not wish to subject you to the ordeals of darker days.”

  Whether exploiting his lofty or common style, Churchill was a brilliant writer. He produced innumerable articles, books, and speeches and threw off quotable lines in practically every conversation. Reading a newspaper account of an elderly man arrested for making improper advances to a girl, in icy weather, Churchill said, “Over 75 and below zero! Makes you proud to be an Englishman!” He’d been sharpening his rhetorical skills since his youth; although schoolmasters couldn’t make him work, Churchill decided, in his twenties, that he needed an education. During the long, dull afternoons of army life in India, Churchill absorbed the works of Macaulay, Adam Smith, Darwin, Plato, and his greatest influence, Edward Gibbon’s monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And he didn’t merely learn by reading, but set himself to writing his own speeches on political events of earlier generations, to compare to what William Gladstone or Benjamin Disraeli had actually said.

  Many people have been brilliant writers, and many people have been brilliant speakers. What distinguishes Churchill was his ability to rouse—and indeed, create—the dauntless Britain in which he believed.

  Churchill denied that it was he who transformed the nation during the war. At the triumphant hour of May 8, 1945, Churchill cast the glory to the British people: “In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this.” At his eightieth birthday party a decade later, where he was called “the lion,” he gave credit to the people: “It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” In the same vein, a member of his wartime staff wrote, “His great speeches that thrilled the nation in 1940 expressed in matchless form what the men and women of Britain were feeling inarticulately.”

  That may have been true, but the men and women of Britain were “feeling inarticulately” many warring impulses. They felt defiant and courageous, yes. But they also felt fearful, confused, and desperate for peace. How many would have said they didn’t want another war, or they didn’t want to get mixed up in matters on the Continent, or they didn’t care about fighting for the Poles or the Jews? At one of the most dangerous points in the war, just after he’d become Prime Minister, Churchill told the Cabinet, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” The Ministers jumped up, shouted their agreement, rallied. But would they have said the same thing themselves, before Churchill had said it? Churchill found them courageous, but had conciliatory, peace-seeking Lord Halifax been Prime Minister, as many would have preferred, he might have discovered a very different mood. (Churchill once said, “Halifax’s virtues have done more harm in the world than the vices of hundreds of other people.”)

  Many people don’t know their own opinions until they hear them voiced by someone else. They’re at the mercy of leaders, who, by articulating half-formed beliefs and fears, give them force. “The stronger man is right,” said Hitler. Churchill said, “We shall never surrender.” Churchill led the British people by reminding them of their history of liberty and courage; his courtly language conjured up their dead heroes. Hitler led the German people by giving voice to their fears, their ancient grudges, their cruel impulses, their rash eagerness for order and prosperity. Hitler told the Germans that they were a humiliated people, who would seize and destroy to gain their rightful first place; Churchill told the British that they were a valorous people, who would sacrifice everything in glorious defense of their island and of freedom.

  Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions, wrote Samuel Butler. Churchill was a rare figure who rose to the level of events. He spoke the timeless speech of a hero, which he was; and also the daily talk of a common man, which he was as well. His power of expression was his greatest strength.

  7

  CHURCHILL’S ELOQUENCE

  His Exact Words

  With his genius for expression, Churchill could convey his ideas in phrases that burned themselves into people’s minds. Eloquence matters: we cannot persuade others where we cannot voice our own thoughts. Decades after his death, Churchill remains one of the most frequently quoted figures in history.

  Of a controversy that arose in 1894 about the proximity of bars to music halls, Churchill recalled: “I had no idea in those days of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom.”

  In 1897, Churchill wrote: “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. . . . Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable.”

  When Churchill was running for office for the first time, he went door to door to ask for votes. He knocked on the door of an irritable man who, when Churchill introduced himself, said, “Vote for you? Why, I’d rather vote for the devil!”

  “I understand,” answered Churchill. “But in case your friend is not running, may I count on your support?”

  “I would rather be right than consistent.”

  As Undersecretary for the Colonies, in 1907, Churchill went to Africa with his private secretary, Eddie Marsh. After marching more than a hundred miles, he declared, “So fari—so goodie!” On the same trip, a colonial governor told him of the alarming spread of venereal disease. Churchill nodded, “Ah, Pox Britannica.”

  Before the first night of Pygmalion, playwright George Bernard Shaw wired Churchill: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.”

  Churchill replied: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.”

  “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

  In a speech given in 1908, Churchill proclaimed:

  Socialism seeks to pull down wealth, Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests—Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference.

  “Very few men are able to make more than one really bad mistake.”

  When, in 1911, Churchill came under fire for his performance as First Lord of the Admiralty, he struck back by describing his critic as “one of those orators who before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.”

  “Megalomania is the only form of sanity.”

  “Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right than responsible and wrong.”

  “All newborn babies look like me.”

  On the problems of deploying a fleet during the First World War, Churchill observed, “Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.”

  Of World War I, Churchill wrote, “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilised, scientific Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”

  In the 1922 election, the Liberals—and Churchill—suffered massive defeat. During the election, Churchill had his appendix removed, and he declared he awoke from his operation
“without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.”

  When Churchill met Hitler associate Putzi Hanfstaengel in Munich in 1932, he warned, “Tell your boss that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it’s a bad sticker.”

  After touring the United States in the 1930s, Churchill was asked whether he had any criticism of America. He answered, “Toilet paper too thin! Newspapers too fat!”

  Churchill appeared to be asleep in his seat in the House of Commons. “Must you fall asleep when I am speaking?” asked a fellow MP. “No,” said Churchill, “it is purely voluntary.”

  “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

  A new barber asked Churchill how he’d like his hair cut. “A man of my limited resources cannot presume to have a hairstyle. Get on and cut it,” answered Churchill.

  In 1935, when Clement Attlee, then Lord Privy Seal, took a misstep and fell to the floor of the House of Commons, Churchill admonished: “Get up, get up, Lord Privy Seal! This is no time for levity.”

  When, in 1935, Anthony Eden was appointed Foreign Secretary under Baldwin, Churchill wrote Clementine: “I expect the greatness of his office will find him out.”

  “It is wonderful how well men can keep secrets they have not been told.”

  On November 12, 1936, as the Nazi threat grew, he spoke to the House of Commons on the subject of defense:

  The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat.

  “There is never a good time for a vacation, so take one anyway.”

  In 1936, Churchill criticized Stanley Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

  “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotation. . . . The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.”

  In 1938, a colleague compared Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to convince Clement Attlee to support the Munich appeasement to a “snake dominating a rabbit.” Churchill snorted, “It’s more like a rabbit dominating a lettuce!”

  “Never stand when you can sit and never sit if you can lie down.”

  In 1938, during a heated argument, his cousin Lord Londonderry, a pacifist, tried to drive home a point by asking, “Have you read my latest book?”

  “No,” replied Churchill. “I only read for pleasure or profit.”

  Observing an elderly MP listening to Stanley Baldwin through an ear trumpet, Churchill asked, “Why does that idiot deny himself his natural advantage?”

  “We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”

  “Where there is a great deal of free speech there is always a certain amount of foolish speech.”

  On October 1, 1939, in his first wartime broadcast, First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill observed, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

  On the same day, in the House, Churchill declared about the heroic defense of Warsaw: “The soul of Poland is indestructible. . . . [S]he will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock.”

  In October 1939, Churchill’s twenty-eight-year-old son Randolph married nineteen-year-old Pamela Digby—because of the war, just weeks after their engagement. To those who said the couple couldn’t afford to marry, Churchill replied: “What do they need?—cigars, champagne and a double bed.” (Pamela Digby, later Pamela Harriman, would one day be the U.S. ambassador to France.)

  In January 1940, in a BBC broadcast warning the neutrals of the consequences of not confronting Hitler, Churchill admonished: “They bow humbly and in fear to German threats of violence, comforting themselves meanwhile with the thought that the Allies will win. . . . Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

  At a dinner party, guests answered in turn the question, “If you could not be who you are, who would you like to be?” When Churchill’s turn came, he turned to Clementine and said, “Mrs. Churchill’s second husband.”

  One evening in 1940, Churchill relaxed after dinner by tinkering with, then testing, a model bomb. He observed to a colleague, “This is one of those rare and happy occasions when respectable people like you and me can enjoy pleasures normally reserved to the Irish Republican Army.”

  With words uncannily matched to horrific events of later days, in 1940 Churchill broadcast to the nation about Hitler’s bombing of London—on the resonant date of September 11:

  These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler’s invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians . . . that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty imperial city. . . . Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners . . . who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives. This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed.

  In October 1940, discussing a general who was widely disliked, Churchill observed, “Remember, it isn’t only the good boys who help to win wars; it is the sneaks and the stinkers as well.”

  Describing Hitler: “a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German people in their bewilderment have worshipped as a god.”

  Before the war, Churchill had strenuously opposed Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policy. It was Chamberlain who, after meeting Hitler, decided “here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.” But once Churchill joined his government, he became Chamberlain’s loyal servant, and he continued to treat Chamberlain with courtesy after he’d replaced him as Prime Minister. True, Churchill needed Chamberlain, but so often a gloating victor refuses to put aside grudges and blame—even in self-interest. Expediency alone doesn’t account for Churchill’s magnanimity. When Chamberlain died in 1940, Churchill gave a tribute to Chamberlain that honored his life while acknowledging his mistakes:

  It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. . . . Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with most perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. . . .

  Herr Hitler protests with frantic words and gestures that he has only desired peace. What do these ravings and outpouring count before the silence of Neville Chamberlain’s tomb?

  “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never . . . never give in, except to convictions of honor or good sense.”

  Despite repeated warnings from Britain and the United States, and in violation of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Soviet Russia was surprised by a German attack on June 22, 1941. For years, Churchill had denounced Communism, with its contempt for individual freedom, the rule of law, property rights, and the sovereignty of other countries. Churchill broadcast that night:

  The Nazi régime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. . . . It excels all forms o
f human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will un-say no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away. . . . Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.

  In a lighter mood, he remarked, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

  Churchill wrote of his emotions upon hearing that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941:

  No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. . . . Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. . . . We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. . . . As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.