The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the
Realm, 1940–1965
By William
Manchester and Paul Reid
(Little, Brown and
Company, 1,182 pages, $40)
Winston Churchill emerged from a rather murky gene pool. His
father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant but erratic younger
son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, wrecked an initially promising
political career through a mixture of bad luck and bad judgment. He
died at the early age of 45, debt-ridden and syphilitic. Winston’s
mother, Jennie Jerome, was a bright, charming, more-than-a-little
louche American heiress. One of the great society beauties of her
day, she flirted, danced, and sometimes slept her way through many
of England’s stateliest homes. Not the least of her conquests was
Bertie, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. In middle and
old age Jennie would twice remarry, each time to a younger man. She
remained vivacious—and slightly disreputable—to the end.
Miraculously, although he started life as a shy, awkward child
and a dull pupil, young Winston seems to have inherited most of his
parents’ strengths and few of their weaknesses. Unfortunately, the
bad genes would recur with vengeance a generation later in the
person of Churchill’s only son, also—and perhaps
prophetically—named Randolph. The rotten apple of his father’s eye,
he was a mean drunk, an unmitigated cad, and an all-around loser.
Toward the end of his life, when word reached the bar at White’s
Club that Randolph had undergone surgery to remove a growth, and
that the growth was benign, Evelyn Waugh, who knew him all too
well, observed that it was a pity that the surgeon had removed the
only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant.
By contrast, in Winston Churchill, his father’s eloquence and
political daring and his mother’s indomitable will and ability to
charm (when she wanted to) combined to form a man of iron
determination, ruthless ambition, and formidable talents. It is
important to remember, however, that these qualities were always
harnessed to Winston’s exalted Victorian conviction that men of his
class were born to lead, that the empire they led was a noble,
civilizing enterprise, and that the pursuit of glory in defense of
that enterprise was selfless rather than selfish. That this lofty
conviction was more than a little deluded should in no way detract
from its remarkable positive achievements. Even today, much of what
is best in countries as different as India and Canada, Singapore
and Ghana, can be traced to the educating and modernizing influence
of the Victorians, their dedication to the rule of law, and—at
least theoretically—their respect for individuals, property,
tolerance, and due process.
Churchill was a true son of this imperial vision. Thus it is the
supreme irony of his life that while he is rightly credited with
being one of the greatest wartime leaders in history, the empire he
thought he was saving in the darkest days of World War II was
already doomed for reasons having little or nothing to do with the
war. Britain had carried out her “civilizing mission” all too well.
Succeeding generations of British-educated colonial subjects raised
on concepts of British law, liberty, and representative government
were heading—slowly but inexorably—toward independence long before
the world first heard of Adolf Hitler. World War II, its ruinous
cost, and the sacrifices it exacted from Britons and colonial
subjects alike merely accelerated a process already well underway
both at home and abroad. This helps to explain why Churchill and
his Tory party were overwhelmingly defeated in the July 1945
parliamentary elections, fresh from victory in Europe. As Churchill
himself put it, the British public had awarded him “the Order of
the Boot” for his wartime service.
He did return to power a few years later, in time to participate
in the coronation of a popular young queen and the false dawn of
what many English traditionalists hoped would be a “Second
Elizabethan Age.” But it was not to be. The empire was on its way
out for good and all. Winston Churchill had played a key role in
saving England, but the England he saved was not the England he
thought it was.
YET, FOR ALL HIS QUIRKS—and his underlying anachronism—what a
remarkable and admirable character he was. Few great men are also
great authors…and, God knows, few great authors are also great men.
But Winston Churchill was both. In the 1970s and early 1980s,
during frequent visits to London, I had the pleasure of becoming
friends with two of his literary collaborators, Maurice Ashley and
Alan Hodge. Ashley, who went on to become a respected authority on
17th-century English history, had worked with Churchill on his
monumental biography of John Churchill, the 1st Duke of
Marlborough, between the wars. Hodge, one of the two founding
editors of History Today magazine (for which Churchill had
suggested the title), had collaborated on A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples, which Churchill completed after
World War II. As a frequent contributor of articles to History
Today, I spent more than one pleasant afternoon in pubs along
the Strand listening to Alan describe the maddening but highly
amusing working conditions that Churchill collaborators had to put
up with. Alas, poor Alan, who had also collaborated on books with
the famous poet and novelist Robert Graves (who returned the favor
by stealing Alan’s wife), was such a dedicated but diffident editor
of other people’s work that he never bothered to write his own
memoirs, a great loss.
Ashley, whom I usually encountered at the Reform Club on Pall
Mall in a slightly tiddly state (him, not me), also remembered
Churchill as a severe taskmaster who loved his own creature
comforts and didn’t care much about other peoples’. But, while he
disagreed with Churchill’s politics, he was an unabashed admirer of
the great man’s brilliance as a writer and his instinctive gift for
narrative history. It is precisely because Churchill was such an
inspired practitioner of the historian’s art himself that I believe
he would welcome the long-awaited completion of his biography by
William Manchester. I suspect he would also be amused by some of
the sniper fire it has received from supposedly learned
critics.
Hell hath no fury like a professor scorned. There is nothing
that arid, overly specialized academicians—who usually attain
tenure without ever writing a readable work of interest to the
cultivated general reader—hate more than well-written popular
history. Hence the academic world’s reception, ranging from tepid
to vindictive, of the final installment of this sometimes florid
but always highly readable three-volume biography. Neither
Manchester, who died in 2004, nor Paul Reid, the able journalist
and friend whom he chose to complete the project after strokes
rendered him unable to continue, ever claimed to be an academic
historian. Far from aspiring to write an arcane revisionist tract
for a small circle of professional colleagues, they set out to
write a monumental account of a monumental life. They have
succeeded admirably. Most of the credit—for this final volume—is
due to Mr. Reid, who is responsible for more than 90 percent of the
finished text.
Inevitably, a few errors have crept into a volume that is over a
thousand pages long. For example, I couldn’t help noticing that the
German port city of Bremen is misspelled as “Breman” in an account
of wartime bombing. Bard College professor Richard Aldous, in his
New York Times review, points out that the Winchester
University referred to in the book is actually Winchester College,
and that “Stanley Baldwin, not Neville Chamberlain…appointed
Anthony Eden as foreign secretary in 1935.” And in his
Washington Post review, St. Andrew’s University professor
Gerard DeGroot bemoans the omission of academic psychobabble, such
as the late Anthony Storr’s theory that, in the days when England
stood alone against Hitler, Churchill’s “inner world of make
believe…coincided with the facts of external reality in a way that
rarely happens to any man.” But if Churchill’s inner world really
did coincide with external reality, surely it wasn’t that “make
believe” after all. Professor DeGroot at least gives Manchester and
Reid credit for producing a book which, while not his idea of
scholarly biography, is “superb” as an “adventure story,” only to
dourly add that “we need to move beyond the shining deeds of
extraordinary heroes.”
That is precisely the kind of thing that the smart young things
of the 1920s and ’30s were saying as the world hurtled toward the
abyss. But when push came to shove, it was the “extraordinary
heroes”—inspired and inspiring leaders like Churchill, Eisenhower,
and, for that matter, de Gaulle—who saved us from falling in. Mr.
Manchester and, even more so, Mr. Reid, have done a splendid job
echoing the last lion’s roar.
