WASHINGTON — The year 2012 is about to expire. It was a blank in
my judgment — poof and it is gone. We have the same sorry vacuity
in the White House, bereft of a clue as to how to run the
government. Just now he is off to Hawaii to loll in the sun, having
left town leaving behind only questions as to how to avoid our
“fiscal cliff.” Yes, he wants to raise taxes on the two percent,
but how do we reduce the deficit and finish off the tax bill? He
has headed for the beach — and practically no one remarks on the
amateurism of it. The president is a poseur.
Not much more can be said for the rest of the leadership in
Washington, in Congress, in the media, strutting down the halls of
government. As year chases year, I have come to the conclusion that
this whole town is abundant with poseurs or worse. There is a
blandness to the Washington-New York City scene that is maddening
to anyone familiar with American history, a history filled with
great figures.
That is why I am lost in the personae and drama of
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the
Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester, deceased, and Paul
Reid, very much alive. The story chronicles Churchill waging World
War II, alone at first but with enough Americans and other
English-speaking people almost from the start to make it a book
about great Americans, great English-speaking people, and an
assortment of mediocrities, rogues, and heinous dictators to remind
readers of how lucky we are to live in lands where the love of
freedom keeps us civilized.
Halfway through the 1,182-page tome I encountered the estimable
Brian Lamb on C-SPAN the other night interviewing Paul Reid, the
unconventional author of Defender of the Realm.
Manchester, author of the first two volumes of The Last
Lion, got off to an enviable start with this Churchill trilogy
but went into physical decline before doing much more with the
third volume than elementary research. He did pick his friend Reid
to finish off the work, and we can be glad Manchester had an eye
for talent. Reid has done Manchester proud.
In his interview Reid serves up a tempting outline of his book
— watch it and my guess is you will want to read the book. Reid
has made minor mistakes in his laborious work, for instance,
calling Winchester College a “university” and saying the Welshman,
Aneurin Bevan, was the “administrator” of Britain’s National Health
Service. Nonetheless, I shall say it here and not be ashamed.
Though Reid is not a professional historian he has rounded out the
portraits of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin more
completely than any other writer I have read. Moreover, he does the
same with lesser figures, George Marshall, Admiral Ernest King,
Anthony Eden, in fact almost the whole cast of characters who lined
up with Churchill to fight World War II. And I am not leaving out
the idiot Dr. Goebbels and the fumbling Hermann Goering, Hitler’s
propagandist and air marshal respectively. Never again will I
perceive them in the one-dimensional way they come off in
conventional historiography.
How Reid succeeds in this I can only speculate. He has read
widely and chosen quotes with an eye for their vividness. Perhaps
he was unfettered by a professional historian’s strictures and uses
quotes with especial attention for what they will tell readers
about, say, Churchill or Roosevelt. It is a gift, a literary
gift.
Thus we all know that Roosevelt was a great leader, but he was
also petty and could be inexplicably petty, even cruel. At the
Tehran conference he insisted on keeping Churchill out of private
conferences with Stalin for no apparent reason. Later he was much
amused when Stalin, the butcher of Katyn forest, playfully
bedeviled Churchill, causing FDR’s friend, Averell Harriman, to
recall later that the President “always enjoyed other people’s
discomfort…. It never bothered him much when other people were
unhappy.” Churchill is portrayed convincingly as tough and even
ruthless, especially to his sorely pressed staff. Yet in Cairo, as
he waited for an enthusiastic Roosevelt to join him in an outing to
the pyramids, he told his daughter Sarah — his “eyes bright with
tears” — “I love that man.”
Both men had their fatherly embarrassments. Churchill was
indulgent toward his repulsive and drunken son Randolph. He took
him to international conferences and sent the unreliable fellow on
high-level missions. Not to be out done, Roosevelt took his son
Elliott abroad with him, and at Tehran had to sit by while the
drunken Elliott gave a toast committing the American army to what
would have amounted to atrocities. Elliott meant it as a joke,
friendly to Stalin and aimed at Churchill.
It is rare to read a book that portrays one or another of these
great men so completely and convincingly. To have so many great
figures portrayed so fully in one book is amazing. Go out and buy
Defender of the Realm and see if I am not right.
