January 17, 2011

THE toll of World War II on Winston Churchill’s health has been revealed in notes compiled by the former British prime minister’s physician.

THE AUSTRALIAN, 17 January 2011 – The previously confidential records show a leader whose work deteriorated and whose character suffered because of years of stress that left him with “an intolerance of criticism and bad temper”.

 

 

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Churchill’s decline was exacerbated because he “never nursed his physique” and failed to “listen to advice”, according to Charles Moran, his doctor for 25 years.

 

Historians believe a fitter Churchill might arguably have been able to stand up more persuasively to Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US president, on the future of Europe after the war — by keeping Poland free of Soviet domination, for example.

 

A fitter man might also have had the strength to win the 1945 general election against Labour.

Moran’s handwritten medical notes on Churchill are being released under data protection law after 60 years. They follow the publication of the physician’s memoirs in 1966, for which Moran was criticised for breaching patient confidentiality. The new records show he had been relatively discreet in his memoirs.

 

Moran’s notes cast fresh light on Churchill’s mental wellbeing after the battles to convince the government of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and then five years of war. Observing that Churchill’s “work suffers” and his “character suffers”, Moran asks: “Did his character change or did war only exaggerate (it)?”

 

The doctor states: “Work begins (to) deteriorate.” He saw him as “always wilful, opinionated, undisciplined”, adding: “When home not working, he would spend half the night talking, smoking and drinking.”

On May 17, 1945, Moran writes: “(Churchill) looked very tired. He told me that he had hardly ever worked so hard. He has been keeping shocking hours . . . going to bed at 3, 4 or 5am . . . I told him he was racing the engine and that couldn’t go on.”

 

Read the entire article here at The Australian

©The Australian


COMMENT BY THE CHURCHILL CENTRE

Good grief! This is deja vue all over again. Moran made his point decades ago. Some were offended (they put together a book of essays), some agreed, and some were skeptical. Put me in the last category. Our boy was tired, perhaps even enervated, but he never ever lost his “bulldog!” FDR had ambushed him at Teheran (right or wrong is a much different issue), and Churchill was, I assume, depressed at Yalta over Britain’s lack of leverage. But it is simply stupid and uninformed for any historian to argue as this one does:

“Historian Thomas Weber said Churchill’s deterioration ‘might well have affected how he conducted the war in its final stages and how he furthered British interests’. He said it raised the question whether, with Britain’s weak economic state in 1945 and Roosevelt sick, a ‘cold-blooded’ Churchill in vigorous health at Yalta might have dealt more effectively with Stalin. ‘A man less exhausted . . . might less easily be deluded by Stalin,’ he said.

Rubbish. Churchill was not “deluded” by Stalin, any more than was FDR. They may have drawn incorrect conclusions, but “deluded,” as in some clever ploy, hardly. The writer is the deluded one — or seeking 15 minutes of fame. Churchill soon changed his tune (unproductively, I believe), but the notion that he was so depressed and tired as to be ineffective is . . . . . ineffective.

-Prof. Warren F. Kimball

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