March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 49

By Ronald I. Cohen

Reader Arthur Lee asks: “Was the Dorothy Thompson introduction in -the second American issue of Churchill’s A Roving Commission ever reprinted? “If not, it should be.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was a prominent writer and broadcaster, referred to in her heyday as “the First Lady of American Journalism.” Her three husbands included the Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. In 1939, Time
magazine named her the second most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt.

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In reissuing A Roving Commission (U.S. title of My Early Life) in 1939, it was therefore natural for Scribners to ask Dorothy Thompson to write a new introduction. The Second American issue had only two printings, and subsequent appearances of the title dropped the Thompson introduction; copies are today quite scarce, particularly in their distinctive original orange and blue dust jackets.

War had only just broken out between Britain and Germany when Thompson sat down to write, blithely ignoring the fact that American involvement in the war was hotly opposed by the bulk of U.S. opinion. Given the hour, her words were less in praise of Churchill’s masterful autobiography than of Churchill himself—brave words under the circumstances, but Scribners evidently made no attempt to tone them down. Her appraisal of Churchill is at once arresting and in some respects unique.

INTRODUCTION

A Roving Commission (U.S. title)

Second Issue, 1939, Cohen A91.5.a

It is not often that the First Lord of the Admiralty of any nation is also a writer of fine prose. Winston Churchill is one of the finest living writers of English prose. He is a stormy petrel of politics. For the past decade he has been the most pugnacious, eloquent, and scathing critic of British policy. He happens to have been right, and that is the reason he is again in the Cabinet at last.

Mr. Churchill is the kind of Englishman who cannot be classified according to his political ideas. He is too gifted and too brilliant to be disposed of by calling him a Tory—or by any other appellation. He believes with almost religious intensity that the English spirit in its finest manifestations is the world’s greatest hope for decency and freedom. He also, like Hitler, believes in the leadership principle, but unlike Hitler, he believes in noblesse oblige.

He is a doubtful democrat. His spirit is Aristotelian; he believes in aristocratic government on the wide basis of popular consent, and he would define an aristocrat as a man who is willing to take upon himself, with no thought of gain or fame, the responsibilities which the weaker shun.

He believes that leadership cannot and should not be forced. It must accrue to a man on the strength of his record. He must not usurp responsibility—the usurpation of power is gangsterism, in Mr. Churchill’s mind.

The British aristocratic tradition whereby only the oldest son inherits the lands and title has resulted in a great many younger sons who have had to use their wits—and England has profited from this. Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, became an eminent statesman. His son, although he belongs by birth to the English aristocracy, is not rich and has always had to earn his living. He has been a soldier, a journalist and a politician; he has been a perennial Cabinet Minister and Member of Parliament, is Lord Rector and Chancellor of two universities, and he is now, for the second time, First Lord of the Admiralty. But always he has been a writer, and his works include journalism, political biography and some of our best modern history.

Of a scintillating and sometimes devastating intelligence, a political maverick, a viveur with a gusty love of life and an unmitigated passion for England, Mr. Churchill is one of the most colorful figures on the international scene. Although he is now sixty-five years old, he seems cast in the mold of youth and is younger than the generation who could be his sons.

It would be impossible to imagine England without him.
—DOROTHY THOMPSON
14 OCTOBER 1939

Mr. Cohen is Churchill’s leading bibliographer and founder of the Churchill Society of Ottawa.