April 15, 2015

Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004

Page 33

By RICHARD LANGWORTH & BILL IVES


Encounters with the famous, and opportunities for chance discussions with them, are frequent at Churchill Conferences. Both of us had such a chance with Bill Manchester in 1995 at Boston, and we both asked him which of his books was his favorite.

We had read his Pacific war memoir, Goodbye Darkness, and thought he might select it. He did. It was, he said, uniquely personal: about his own feelings, not involving his usual detailed research. In contrast to his other writings, the book reflected what he felt and recalled.

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Beginning with his youth in Massachusetts, the son of a wounded World War I marine, Goodbye Darkness describes how Manchester followed his father’s path by enlisting in the Marines for World War II. He fought on Okinawa, where he was wounded on 5 June 1945, and his last paragraph settles any question about whether he was a great writer: “This, then, was the life I knew, where death sought me, during which I was transformed from a cheeky youth to a troubled man who, for over thirty years, repressed what he could not bear to remember.”

His lyrical and majestic planned trilogy, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill was the book that brought Manchester to our conference in Boston. His first two volumes, Visions of Glory 1874-1932 and Alone 1932-1940, are exemplary of the Manchester corpus. He did not hesitate to accuse Churchill of bad judgment or bad politics; but, he wrote, “one of the virtues of Churchill was that he always had second thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along.” Manchester’s verdict was hugely positive, for he like we knew that Winston Churchill had, at that key moment in 1940, stood alone for liberty: “until those who had hitherto been half-blind,” in Churchill’s words, “were half-ready.”

Manchester made some mistakes, of fact and interpretation. When FH criticized some of these in its review of his first volume, he hired its editor to proofread his volume II, which arrived in a box a foot high. He received 600 corrections, which he pursued to his satisfaction.

He claimed to be only a “literary historian,” and scholars quickly fixed on his errors. But at our first academic panel during the 1988 conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, each scholar present agreed that Manchester had brought more people to Churchill than anyone except perhaps Churchill himself. Sir Martin Gilbert, who brought WSC vast legions himself, once wrote to Manchester: “Our work proceeds on parallel tracks.”

He produced three brilliant books on John F. Kennedy, the first of which, Portrait of a President (1962) was his breakthrough as a writer. But it was The Death of a President which earned him his reputation for magisterial prose: “The nub of the matter was that Kennedy had met the emotional needs of his people. His achievements had been genuine. His dreams and his oratory had electrified a country grown stale and listless in a world drifting toward Armageddon.”

His account of the assassination shunned conspiracy theories, which Manchester later blamed on “that dreadful Oliver Stone movie” (JFK). He simply believed that people couldn’t accept the obvious: “If you put the murder of the president of the United States at one end of the scale, and you put that waif Oswald on the other end, it just doesn’t balance. And you want to put something on Oswald’s side to make it balance. A conspiracy would do that beautifully. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever of that.”

His books—eighteen in all—ranged from biographies to poetry and essays. Among the high points were The Arms of Krupp (1968), on the German arms-maker; The Glory and the Dream (1972), a history of the U.S. from the New Deal on; and American Caesar (1978), his biography of MacArthur, whom he’d begun loathing but ended an admirer. Manchester’s output proves the old adage, “a man never dies so long as he is remembered.”

For years one of the chief questions The Churchill Centre receives every week has been: “When will William Manchester publish his third Churchill volume?” There were many false starts, beginning with his own: in 1995 he told us that so much previously classified material had now been released that he had shredded his first 100,000 words of manuscript. Finally, only a month before his death, it was announced that Paul Reid, his friend and a writer for the Palm Beach Post, would take on the assignment. Our guess is that volume III, subtitled Defender of the Realm, will not now be long delayed. It is simply too valuable a property for the publisher to ignore.

Sadly, it had long been evident that Bill Manchester would not be able to write it. In his last years, darkness again became his companion. His wife was gone. Strokes had robbed him of his ability to think and to write beyond a few sentences at a time. He was frail and tired. In a very real sense, he was no longer William Manchester.

Finest Hour 109 published one excerpt from volume III, on the Battle of France. In his memory next issue, we publish the second: “Undaunted by Odds,” his account of the Battle of Britain. He is mourned by the many thousands who were deeply influenced by his work and were honored to know him.

With a poignancy and timing that Bill Manchester could appreciate, his death came on June 1st, just as the United States World War II Memorial was being dedicated in Washington. So it was that, when in his own words he crossed “that dark river to the far shore where all voyages end and all paths meet,” William Manchester once again bid goodbye to darkness.

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