February 23, 2011

by Alistair Cooke, KBE

Keynote Speech, Churchill Society International Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 27 August 1988. From Proceedings of the International Churchill Society, 1988-1989 (published 1990).

Copyright © 1988 the Estate of Alistair Cooke

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I think it is a happy thing that you are holding this anniversary meeting in New Hampshire, where, as you all know, Winston Churchill spent the last fifty years of his life.

I refer, of course, to the eminent novelist whose fame was so considerable that when the young Winston Spencer Churchill decided to publish a book, he wrote to Winston Churchill in New Hampshire saying he did not wish to trade on his fame or mislead the reading public. Thus the young, unknown, English author would henceforth publish his books under the byline, “Winston S. Churchill.”

No doubt most of you knew that, but I thought it would interest the few who-out of praiseworthy but mistaken devotion-today, I’m told, made a pilgrimage to Cornish, New Hampshire, which was where Winston Churchill lived and died.

I must say I’m glad that Richard Langworth gave a boost to my credentials because a lot of you must have wondered what I’m doing here. When I look through the list of all the very eminent scholars and Churchillians who have spoken to you; and when I think that since the 1960s there have been over two hundred books on Winston Churchill, all of which you’ve devoured, I feel almost as intimidated as Churchill did himself when he appeared as the guest of honor at the American Association for the Advancement of Science at M.I.T., on March 22nd, 1949. (It requires no great feat of memory to recall the date, since it happened to be the day my daughter was born.)

He looked out at an audience of Nobel Prize winners, the cream of scientific expertise from universities in North America and Europe. And he “confessed” that they not only intimidated but frightened him. “I myself never had the privilege of going to a University. I simply-er-had to pick up-ah-a few things as I went along.” Then he spent the next two hours instructing them in the future of science and all its applications in war and peace.

I can only say my main credential is that I was alive and sentient and interested in life, and politics, for the last forty to fifty years of Churchill’s life. I also have a Churchill library, modest but substantial, which includes one treasure that (my vanity hopes) nobody here possesses. It is a physically beautiful book, an edition of Churchill’s My Early Life. What makes it unique, I think, is that opposite the title page, in the scrawl of a very old lady, it says: “Inscribed by Clementine Churchill and presented to Alistair Cooke, whose broadcasts gave so much pleasure to the author.”

What I should like to do is to retrace Churchill’s reputation, his public reputation-not from the view of historians or insiders, but as it appeared at the time to the ordinary people who lived through those years. I hope this will serve to correct or to modify the picture that we have formed of Churchill from television documentaries, and especially from the new, insidious form of docu-drama. It’s true also, I think, of many recent biographies, that suffer from the innate curse of the biographical form: which is to pretend that the subject was at the focal center of the world or of his country, and that all the life of the time swirled around him.

So, I should like to follow Churchill’s public life step by step, not to review it by hindsight. Hindsight is the historian’s weapon, whereby, having known what happened, he is always able to pretend that things were bound to come out the way they did come out. Or, in the more brutal aphorism of Justice Holmes, “History is what the winner says it is.”

I’ll start which my very first memory. I was on the verge of eight years of age and I saw in The Daily Mail a very strange picture. It was a picture of Major Churchill, in uniform. I said to my father, “Why is he in uniform?” He replied, “Because of the Dardanelles.”

This didn’t mean very much to me at the time but it very soon did. I don’t need to tell you about the enormous tragedy of Gallipoli, but believe me, if you lived in Britain then, even as an unquestioning boy of eight, it was one of the great disasters. The other was the Battle of the Somme in which, in three nights, the British lost 160,000 men and the Germans lost about the same.

It is very hard now, thanks to television and the abolition of front line censorship, to imagine what those terrible events conveyed at the time. Today we see a war on the nightly news and say, “What are we doing there?” when we get a casualty list of 1000 in a week. It is today impossible to get used to the idea that we could lose 200,000 men in one week.

The Dardanelles was very well reported in the beginning, because it was such a tremendous adventure. Then the many months went by, and when it was over we heard that 8000 men had tip-toed out one night, and then 9000 and then 10,000. Soon the papers blared with the headline, “The Miracle of Gallipoli”-the evacuation. It’s ironical to recall now that Churchill should have been so involved, when twenty-five years later, after Dunkirk, he would remind the House of Commons, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

But the Dardanelles had been Churchill’s preoccupation. We did not know at the time that it was also, as Clement Attlee would say, “the only great strategic idea of the First World War.”

What we knew then was that it was all over; that the casualty lists went on for pages; that half a million men on both sides had died or been wounded for nothing. We knew that Churchill, disgraced, had gone to France to fight in the trenches. But he was so dishonored that he could not obtain a suitable command. Later, he wrote to Lord Kitchener and asked to be relieved from his military duty. Kitchener gave him permission, but told him he must never again go back to the military. So Churchill, still a Member of Parliament, returned home in the spring of 1916, again to take part in House of Commons debates.

A month or so later, I was, after school, going to pick up my mother, who had volunteered for work in a nurses’ laundry. It was the sixth of June, 1916. A steady rain had ended, a shaft of sunlight was breaking through the clouds, always a pleasant surprise in the murky Manchester climate. She came out to meet me, and on her face was an expression I had never seen. I’m shocked to realize now that she was in her late thirties. To me then she looked suddenly old, grey, startled, yet not wanting to frighten me. She took my hand and said, “Kitchener has died.” (His ship, carrying him on a mission to Russia, struck a German mine.)

Even at that age, I felt the sky had fallen in on us. Kitchener had seemed an Eisenhower-Montgomery-Nimitz, all rolled into one. He wasn’t, but we thought he was. We didn’t know then that his power was declining, drastically; or that he was more than anyone morally responsible for the failure of the Dardanelles: he would not support the original expedition-would not produce the manpower or the materiel.

But as you may have noticed, the death of a famous leader, especially by assassination, confers a halo. Kitchener was drowned and he got the halo. Churchill got the blame.

I should explain to you why this is so vivid to me. Of course the Australians and New Zealanders took the worst beating at Gallipoli-and the Canadians. But of all the British regiments, the people who were hardest hit (I won’t say decimated because there were a great deal more than one in ten killed) were in the Lancashire regiments. I was born in Lancashire, and I was in Manchester at the time. I remember the effect on a little boy: The Dardanelles was the greatest failure of the war. I began to notice that in our street and the next street, and the one after that, suddenly every other young woman was wearing black.

My father was a Manchester Liberal. I cannot think what that would be in an American translation today. Liberal Republican? Conservative Democrat? I don’t know. But until the day he died he was a Manchester Liberal, bearing up with cheerful stoicism under the fact that his wife always voted Conservative. On election day she would finish up the breakfast things and- say, “Let’s get dressed and out and to the polls, so we can cancel out each other’s vote.” It is what they call democracy.

Though my father was a gentle, a touchingly sweet man, he was embittered, and said so, about the Dardanelles-and about Churchill. After all, he had been a young man during what he always said were Winston’s great years – from 1904 to 1910, during the memorable Liberal Parliament, when the two great radicals, Lloyd George and Churchill, embarked on the reform of British society.

This strange alliance – the poor country boy and the aristocrat – abolished sweatshops and gave the miners an eight hour day. They had set up the labour exchanges that led to unemployment insurance. In fact, what Roosevelt later called the “New Deal” was really started in Germany by Bismarck-where Lloyd George sent a colleague to study Bismarck’s system. To Americans, it is Franklin Roosevelt, the inventor of memorable phrases, who has gone down as the man who invented the New Deal.

If you were an English Liberal, 1904 through 1910 were very stirring years. Here on one hand you had the crackling, sarcastic, brilliant Lloyd George; and on the other the witty, devastating Churchill, following each other like a great vaudeville team up and down the country. Churchill at one point even spent a week on the road begging-pleading-for the abolition-of the House of Lords: “This second chamber as it is, one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee.” (It is still there, though shorn of all power.)

But after the Dardanelles, all this was forgotten. In 1917, Lloyd George brought Churchill back into the Government as Minister of Munitions, against much opposition, especially in the press. And from then until 1923, Churchill could not go before a British audience, especially during an election, without thirty or forty people suddenly starting the chant, “What About The Dardanelles?, What About The Dardanelles?” He had a very rough time.

In 1924 came a trade agreement between the incumbent Socialist Government and the Soviet Union. The Liberals withdrew their support from Labour, saying they were not going to throw Britain into the arms of Russia. The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had to go to the country. Eight days before the polls there appeared the so-called Zinoviev Letter, purportedly written by a high member of the Comintern to the British Communist Party-an election bombshell.

I think it was Robert Graves who said at the time that the British Communist Party was as rich and powerful as the Flat Earth Society. There must have been all of 187 Communists then. But the Zinoviev Letter asked them to foment strikes and disrupt the factories, overturn the constitution. The newspapers picked this up, and it terrified and petrified the middle class. Even before the election the letter was shown to be a very crude forgery, but it worked. I remember a cartoon in Punch the week of the election, which showed the then stereotypical Russian, with a leather cap, hairy face, shaggy clothes, leggings and a bomb behind his back, wearing a billboard which said, “Vote for MacDonald and Me.” There was, consequently, a Tory landslide.

Now at this point, Churchill, who was ready to jump the aisle (something he’d done once already), contemplated forming a center party with old Asquith Liberals and some-it’s hard to say-“left-leaning” or “center-leaning” Conservatives. It simply didn’t work. The most important thing, from his point of view in 1924, was it was the end of the Liberal Party as the party of Opposition.

What then does Churchill do? He decides to become a Conservative. Suddenly he appears in the Baldwin cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer!

That astounded people. I remember another cartoon in Punch, showing Churchill, who had sniped away at past Conservative budgets, patrolling what was labeled the “Exchequer Woods” with a gun, the caption reading simply, “Poacher into Gamekeeper.”

He admitted, as he stood up to present his first budget, that he knew nothing about high finance or economics. He said that he thought economists talked Persian [sic], but he did know that two and two make four. What came out of it was Britain’s return to the gold standard, which proved quite fatal. It overvalued sterling, produced an enormous slump in exports, provoked the owners of the coal mines to reduce the miner’s pay and increase their working hours. They struck, and that led to the General Strike in 1926.

As you know, Churchill’s role there was to get out a government newspaper called the British Gazette. He was actually sympathetic to the miners, and if the quarrel had been with them alone he probably would have helped to settle it. But what he could not abide was the action of the Trades Union Congress in calling sympathetic strikes and, in the end, for a General Strike of the entire nation.

We lived through that, too. I was then, by the way, 17, and my father felt worse than ever about Churchill because of his tremendously chauvinist, flag-waving British Gazette, talking about the miners and the T.U.C. as the enemy of the people. Baldwin restrained him. (The day after appointing Winston Chancellor, Baldwin had said to a Cabinet colleague, “Winston is a tiger, and he’s likely to tear the Party apart. We must watch him and tame him.”)

So now, consider Churchill’s parlous position. He is a member of the Conservative cabine-but warily looked on, distrusted. He is totally apart from the Liberals, having rejected them. He has entered, for all time the Socialist demonology. He has nowhere to go and no support from anybody.

I would say that through the 1920s and into the 1930s whenever his name came up, we all assumed that this man had gone as far as he was going. He was never of great Parliamentary importance in peacetime, but now he was distrusted by the Tories, alienated from the Liberals, execrated by the Socialists. He was simply a failed professional politician. If, in 1927, 1929, or 1932, you’d never have suggested that Winston Churchill might one day be Prime Minister of Great Britain, it would have been about as wild a thought as thinking, two years ago, that Michael Dukakis would be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Or-come to that -thinking, two weeks ago, that Dan Quayle might ever be Vice President of the United States!

Now we can see what mischief-very well-meaning mischief-has been contrived through selective mining of the Churchill material, and especially through the films and the television docu-dramas: how we have tended to build up an inevitably dramatic figure. Of course his own account of his going “into the wilderness” is itself dramatic, since Churchill is nothing if not a dramatic writer. But the political figure was not dramatic. If anybody asked us then, “Where’s Winston Churchill?” we’d say, “He’s in the House, but not doing very much, because he’s had his day.”

The following passage was written by a journalist who signed himself, “Gentleman with a Duster.” Few people knew his real name: it was Harold Begbie. An old friend of mine described him as “the man who did God for the Westminster Gazette.” Begbie was famous for his character sketches, which had intensity and eloquence of a kind I don’t think we see today. He wrote this, astoundingly, in 1921, but it could have been written ten years later:

With the fading exception of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Winston Churchill is perhaps the most interesting figure in the present House of Commons. There still clings to his career an element of promise and also of unlimited uncertainty. From his youth up, Mr. Churchill has loved with all his heart, his soul, his mind and strength three things: war, politics and himself. He loved war for its dangers, he loves politics for the same reason, and himself he has always loved for the knowledge that his mind is dangerous. Dangerous to his enemies, to his friends, to himself. I can think of no other man who would so quickly and so bitterly eat out his heart in Paradise. And happily for himself, and perhaps for the nation, Mr. Churchill lacks the unifying spirit of character which alone can master the antagonistic elements in a single mind. Here is a man of truly brilliant gifts, but you cannot depend upon him. His love for danger runs away with his discretion. I am not enamoured of the logic of consistency; on the other hand, who can doubt that one who appears this moment fighting on the left hand and at the next moment on the right creates distrust in both armies? His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but they do not follow him.

 

His faults are chiefly the effects of a forcible and impetuous temperament. They may be expected to diminish with age, but character does not emerge from the ashes of temperament. All Mr. Churchill needs is the direction in his life of a great idea. That is to say that to be saved from himself, he must be carried away by some great ideal, so much greater than his own place in politics that he is willing to face death for its triumph. .

At the present Mr. Churchill is in politics as a man is in business, but politics for Churchill, if he is ever to fulfill his promise, must have nothing to do with Churchill. It must have everything to do with the salvation of mankind … It is not to be thought that Mr. Churchill is growing a character which will emerge and create devotion in his countrymen.

That sounds today rather savage. It wasn’t really, but it does sum up the way people of all parties felt about him.

This takes us into the Thirties, my memories of which are much the same as those of you old enough to have lived through that time. Those years, especially, have been over-dramatized, because our knowledge of the tremendous drama to come makes us see Churchill as a rejected giant, a lonely, stubborn hero, who in the end was right. I imagine that most of us here would like to think that, had we been in Britain in say 1934 or ‘35 or ‘36, we should certainly have been on Churchill’s side. We’d have said, “Yes, it’s true about the German air force.” In fact I don’t think ten percent of us would have been with him.

He was a ranting nuisance. Out of power, he had two obsessions: India and Hitler. When he got up to speak, he would carry on about India as the “Jewel in the Crown,” or about the imminent peril of Hitler. We must remember that even by the 1930s the country was exhausted still from the enormous slaughter of the First World War. There were two slogans going around: “Peace at any Price” and “Against War and Fascism.” Surely two of the silliest slogans. One might as well be “Against Hospitals and Diseases.” But these contradictory slogans were accepted because at that time most people in Britain felt they would do anything to get rid of Hitler-except fight him. And that was what they perceived Churchill wanted to do.

Churchill himself denied this. He said truthfully afterwards that there was “never a war easier to prevent” than the Second World War. But from exhaustion and wishful thinking, the people did not believe in his mission of “peace through preparedness.” He was regularly booed in the House of Commons. “Here he comes again,” they’d say, “with the German air force and its growth estimates.”

Which, oddly, in the beginning were not spectacularly different from the Prime Minister’s own estimates.

It is important also, I think, to realize that his oratory, his style of writing, was then very much out of fashion: florid, archaic and irrelevant. If, in this age of television he came back and used that kind of language, it would again seem so-because it would not match the intensity or the scale of the crisis happening to the nation. And by now, for any imaginable crisis, the Churchillian oratory is a dead form.

Two things stand out in my memory of the Thirties. One was 1936. I covered the Abdication about six times a day for ten days for NBC; I didn’t get much sleep. One of the weirder, more eccentric things that happened was the rumor (unfounded but persistent) of Churchill trying to form a “King’s Party.” Of course it a was silly notion, but it suggested, during a very difficult and historic time, an extraordinary blindness to the British Constitution. If there had been a King’s Party it could have produced a social upheaval short of civil war. But it recruited few members. Here was yet another alleged political failure of Mr. Churchill.

The other thing I particularly remember, as we’re moving from 1936 on to 1938, was Churchill’s obsession with the Nazis in the air. Contrary to our imaginative recall, most of the time he did not excite the House of Commons-he bored it.

Then came Munich and his speech of lamentation. There was no applause when he got up and said, “We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat.” Everybody was weeping and cheering the sainted Chamberlain.

On into 1939-40 and the “Phoney War.” Still nobody was thinking of Churchill as Prime Minister. With the cataclysm of the 10th of May, when the Nazis invaded the Lowlands-Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium-the war was truly on. And as we all know, within twelve hours Chamberlain was out and Churchill was in.

But Churchill was not in, as one now likes to think, because of a belated surge of popular emotion. On the contrary, it was quite a surprise. Chamberlain, of course, had to go, after the Norway fiasco (for which Churchill was as responsible as anyone). After the German break-out Chamberlain picked Lord Halifax to succeed him.

The people who put Churchill in power were three men in Eastbourne, where the Labour Party was holding a conference: Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin.

Chamberlain phoned them to say, “We are forming a Coalition government.” He discovered that they wouldn’t serve under him, so he told them he was going to propose to the King that Lord Halifax be Prime Minister. But Halifax declined, saying the very thought gave him a stomach ache. Churchill was the only one. So he became Prime Minister (to the great regret of King George VI, who had hoped for Halifax).

Even the day after he went to Downing Street, “Rab” Butler, an undersecretary of state who later became a sometime friend and professed admirer of Churchill, said, “The country has been abandoned to the greatest adventurer of modern political history, a half-breed American.” John Colville who, under the British system, went in one day from being Chamberlain’s private secretary to becoming Churchill’s, wrote in his diary that he went out and bought a new suit, “cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.” He, too, learned to change his mind.

During these memorable years I ceased to be a boy and became a citizen onlooker, because as a reporter I covered Churchill whenever he came to the United States—if so formidable and darting and elusive a figure could ever be covered. During that time, we learned a great deal of his life and habits from friends and associates. We learned of his ferocious industry by night and day, which produced nervous breakdowns in a lot of young men in the Services.

I knew some people in Naval Intelligence, I remember one man who, I don’t think, got over it for years. He said, “We were all in our thirties, late thirties. We’d get to sleep at midnight, and at quarter to three in the morning the telephone would ring. It was the Prime Minister. He would say, ‘Pray, discover and draft for me the soundings in the bay of Rio de Janeiro.’ So we’d stay up all night working on these tasks, which we called ‘the Prime Minister’s prayers.’ Every other night we’d start work at three o’clock in the morning.”

We learned from all the people who worked with him how inconsiderate he was of secretaries and all servants. As John Colville came to write, after he’d worked with Churchill for a few months he came more “and more to see this man as lovable, exasperating, kind, irascible, brutal and generous, with the inexplicable facility of reaching the right decision, upon faulty logic, and against all the best advice.”

There’s only one other preconception-or, perhaps, post-conception-I’d like to correct about the postwar years: another picture we’ve retained. A young reporter asked me today; if Churchill was still around, would he feel the same way about Communism? I said, “What way did he feel?”

After the “Iron Curtain” speech or Fulton address, Churchill became the great pet of right-wingers the world over because it seemed he was saying, “These Bolsheviks mean to conquer the world; they, must be opposed at all costs.”

But what is little known or much written about today is the main reason why he retired when he did. Of course, toward the end of his second administration, he was over the hill, physically and mentally. But he had hoped to stay in office long enough to achieve a postwar meeting with the Soviets-as he put it, “at the summit.” He had a new and unshakable conviction that the only hope for a stable peace lay in an ultimate agreement with the Russians. But neither his own party nor the Eisenhower administration was for it. When he saw that it wasn’t going to happen, he resigned.

Probably the bitterest memory of his last days in office was the almost violent opposition of President Eisenhower to any meeting, or accommodation, with the Russians. At the Bermuda meeting in December, 1953, John Colville, the Prime Minister’s private secretary, recorded in his diary this disillusioning scene: “Whereas Winston looked on the atomic weapon as something entirely new and terrible, [Eisenhower] looked upon it as just the latest improvement in military weapons… all weapons in due course became conventional weapons.”

“Atomic” was not the key word. Churchill told Colville, after the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb, that “we were now as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself from the bow and arrow.” For the next two years, Churchill maintained, with little support, that a series of meetings with the Russians was “crucial to our survival.” So much for the established reputation of the Fulton warmonger!

What, in the end, have we left for this extraordinary man? What can we shore up from the floods of memoirs, and documents and studies that have been done of him? I’m afraid I cannot do better, by way of a peroration, than the one I wrote five years ago as the tail piece to a review of Mr. Manchester’s splendid first volume of The Last Lion.

What we have, In the end, is the phenomenon of an impenitent Victorian who, while never ceasing to yearn for the high noon of imperial Britain, had-at a critical time-an intuitive feel for the next lurch of history and was able, with the old weapon of his deeply-felt oratory, to goad a sleeping nation to meet it. Many of his convictions, early and late, are now embarrassing to read about. his contemptuous view of Gandhi (although he modified it later); his abhorrence of the “unnatural” idea of the women’s vote (although that too evolved and changed); his passionate love of war and tolerance of it in even its grisliest aspects. (The rodents in the trenches of the First World War “played a very useful role in eating human bodies.”) But much of this embarrassment is the shame of seeing a man out of his own time, like finding a strong vein of hypocrisy in Jefferson’s protestations about liberty from the fact of his owning slaves.

Along with much Victorian cant, Churchill had, and carried from early manhood into the conduct of the Second World War, Victorian virtues that exhilarated or exasperated his colleagues and overawed his subordinates: a habit of inexhaustible industry; a relentless attention to the details of political and military action; an impatience with small talk; the assumption that twenty-four hours a day are hardly enough for the discovery of the marvels of the world we live in. To these he added some formidable virtues of his own: the acceptance of humiliating defeats as episodes natural to the wielding of power; a tough but generous relation with political rivals; immediate magnanimity toward a defeated enemy; a willingness to experiment beyond the accepted wisdom of the professional (to invent the tank, to suggest floating landing piers, to declare common citizenship with the French). Above all, in the supreme crisis of national survival, there was his absolute refusal-unlike many good and prudent men around him-to compromise or surrender.

From all this, there is, I think, enough powerful evidence to support Isaiah Berlin’s judgment of him as “the largest human being of our time.”

Copyright © 1988 the Estate of Alistair Cooke