Nov. 30 marks the 140th birthday
of the famous British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965),
whose leadership during World War II made him unforgettable to
Americans. This excerpt from “When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the
Kennedys,” by Thomas Maier (Crown), helps explain why his memory
endures.
Mark
Twain, the longtime bard of the Mississippi, introduced Winston
Churchill to a crowd of wealthy Americans packed inside New York’s
Waldorf Astoria hotel ballroom in December 1900—one of those rare
meetings of historic figures that occurred so often in Churchill’s life.
“I was thrilled by this famous companion of my youth,” Winston recalled
of Twain, a literary inspiration. “He was now very old and snow-white,
and combined with a noble air a most delightful style of conversation.”
Winston
expected to be lionized by Twain but instead had his tail tweaked. The
twenty-six-year-old celebrated British war correspondent was on a
lecture tour, picking up handsome fees to talk about his bloody
adventures and headline-grabbing writings on imperial conflicts around
the globe. By contrast, Twain, at age sixty-five, loathed the
chest-beating of war—especially the jingoistic, romanticized accounts of
farm boys ground up and left for dead on the battlefield. Twain feared
his nation might someday become an empire like Great Britain. The
night’s verbal swordplay between the old American and the young
Englishman reflected so many differences between the Crown and its
former colony.
Within no time, Twain whittled Churchill down a peg
or two. Although his friendly introduction wasn’t a tar-and-feathering,
Twain made plain how wrongheaded Churchill had been about the British
Empire pestering those poor indigent people in places like India and
South Africa. Churchill “knew all about war and nothing about peace,”
Twain told the standing-room-only audience, many of whom seemed to agree
with him. As an account of the evening by the
explained,
“War might be very interesting to persons who like that sort of
entertainment, but he [Twain] never enjoyed it himself.”
Graciously,
Twain ended this battle of wits by proclaiming he’d always favored good
relations between England and the United States. He even touted the
night’s guest speaker as a product of such amity. “Mister Churchill by
his father is an Englishman, by his mother he is an American—no doubt a
blend that makes a perfect match,” Twain declared. “England and America,
we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more
to be desired.”
Churchill’s encounter with Mark Twain appears in the former’s 1930 autobiography,
My Early Life, certainly
one of his most revealing books. On display in it are the conflicting
themes of Winston’s life: his tortured relationship with his famous
father, whose legacy he strove to exceed; his sense of being
half-American despite an unswerving loyalty to the British Crown; and
his fascination with war, both as an adventurer-writer and a
statesman-politician who deeply understood the power of words.
While
war and peace provided a backdrop for his 1900 lecture tour, commerce
remained Churchill’s frontline concern. He had been elected recently to
Parliament, but without a steady source of income. A seat in the House
of Commons then didn’t pay any salary, and Churchill depended on his
writing assignments for a living. An agent convinced him he could earn a
tidy sum by lecturing in America. “I have so much need for money and we
cannot afford to throw away a single shilling,” he confided to his
mother.
America always held a special affinity for Churchill. Five
years earlier, he had visited his mother’s New York cousins and been
mightily impressed by the young nation’s restless energy. “Picture to
yourself the American people as a great lusty youth—who treads on all
your sensibilities and perpetrates every possible horror of ill
manner—whom neither age nor just tradition inspire with reverence—but
who moves about his affairs with a good hearted freshness which may well
be the envy of older nations of the earth,” Churchill described to his
brother in a note echoing Alexis de Tocqueville. In New York, he met
Congressman William Bourke Cockran, an Irish American friend of his
mother’s and a riveting public speaker, upon whom Winston modeled his
own rhetoric. “You are indeed an orator,” Churchill told Cockran. “And
of all the gifts there is none so rare and precious as that.” Winston
learned to argue convincingly rather than divisively, to persuade rather
than condemn.
Although British at heart, he described himself as
“a child of both worlds.” His mother, Jennie Churchill, grew up the
multi-talented daughter of Leonard Jerome, a Wall Street speculator and
racetrack operator (his initial fortune made in Rochester, New York,
publishing the newspaper house organ for the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing
Party). In describing the aggressive tycoon Jerome, Churchill
biographer Roy Jenkins later said “there was a touch of Joseph P.
Kennedy about him.” Jennie wed Lord Randolph in Paris after an abrupt
romance that produced Winston’s premature arrival eight months later, on
November 30, 1874.
Friends such as Violet Bonham Carter thought
of Winston as half-American—both “an aristocrat and yet our greatest
Commoner.” This potent cross-Atlantic combination of genes seemed a key
to Churchill’s compelling personality, what the British historian A. L.
Rowse called “the strength of the two natures mixed in him—the
self-willed English aristocrat and the equally self-willed primitive
American—each with a hundred-horsepower capacity for getting his way.”
Winston
was amused by those who traced his American roots to the Iroquois or to
America’s 1776 Revolutionary leader against the British. “It certainly
is inspiring to see so great a name as George Washington upon the list,”
Winston said of one published genealogy. “I understand, however, that
if you go back far enough everyone is related to everyone else, and we
end up in Adam.”
* * *
Winston
Churchill’s American lecture tour in 1931 appeared a great success, as
many enjoyed this visiting Englishman’s wit and speaking style. “Some of
his epigrams, so it is wickedly asserted by his enemies, are carefully
prepared in advance, and even practiced before a mirror,” declared a New York Times editorialist.
“But their sting and point are nonetheless delightful.” On December 13,
1931, though, the Churchill bandwagon came to a screeching halt. That
evening, Winston planned to go to bed early at the Waldorf Astoria, his
Manhattan hotel. Instead, at nine o’clock he received a telephone call
from Bernard Baruch, inviting him to his home on Fifth Avenue to meet
with two mutual friends. Into the night, Churchill took a taxicab. Along
the way, he realized he didn’t have Baruch’s precise home address, only
a general idea of its location from an earlier visit. At one point,
Churchill bounded out of the cab toward the sidewalk. He looked left but
not to the right. When he turned, he saw “a long dark car rushing
forward at full speed.” The driver hit the brakes, but too late. In a
lingering split second, Churchill, then fifty-seven, thought to himself,
I am going to be run down and probably killed. He
fortunately wasn’t—another near miss in a life lucky enough to rival
any cat’s. His heavy fur-lined coat seemed to cushion some of the blow.
But the automobile took its toll, smacking Churchill’s head to the
pavement with “an impact, a shock, a concussion indescribably violent,”
and dragging him for several yards. “I do not understand why I was not
broken like an eggshell,” he later observed. In the middle of Fifth
Avenue, a boulevard of American ambition, Churchill lay prostrate,
bleeding and in pain, as police and a crowd rushed to his aid.
“A man has been killed!” someone cried.
While being picked up and carried away by rescuers, this fallen stranger was asked for his name.
“I am Winston Churchill, a British statesman,” he moaned.
By
the time he arrived at Lenox Hill Hospital, Churchill felt sharp pain
yet realized he would survive. Baruch and Clementine soon stood at his
bedside. “Tell me, Baruch, when all is said and done, what
is the number of your house?” he uttered, a sure sign he’d get well and that his quick wit never needed a crutch.
This
almost-deadly car crash derailed Churchill’s lecture tour, which he
needed most urgently to pay his bills at home. Instead, he spent the
next several weeks mending, and mulling over his future. “You will find
me, I am afraid, a much weaker man than the one you welcomed on December
11,” he wrote to Randolph, back in England. Clementine conceded to her
son that Winston had suffered “three very heavy blows” in recent years,
leaving him without either political power in Parliament or much of his
personal savings on Wall Street. “The loss of all that money in the
crash, then the loss of his political position in the Conservative
Party, and now this terrible injury—He said he did not think he would
ever recover completely from the three events,” Clementine wrote. The
prospect of a diminished life seemed more unbearable to Winston than if
he had been killed on the street. It marked the darkest period in his
“wilderness years,” an agonizing time when he felt pushed aside from his
countrymen and good fortune.
By February, Churchill had recovered
enough to travel and fulfill most speaking engagements in the United
States. His loyal circle of friends and patrons rallied to his cause,
deciding to buy him a Rolls-Royce “to celebrate his recovery” and
deliverance from oblivion. “We think there is a certain appropriateness
in the presentation of a motor car to a man who has been knocked down by
a taxi-cab!” wrote Brendan Bracken to Baruch. Though his career seemed
over in England, Churchill’s popularity among Americans stayed intact.
Some in the press pondered if Winston, born to an American mother, would
ever consider running for president. “I have been treated so splendidly
in the United States that I should be disposed, if you can amend the
Constitution, seriously to consider the matter,” he joked.
* * *
Old
Glory and the Union Jack draped the streets of Jefferson City,
Missouri—the perfect symbolism for a 1946 visit by President Harry
Truman and the man who Truman said had saved Western civilization.
In
an open-air limousine convertible, Winston Churchill sat beside
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successor while thousands of Missourians waved
and greeted them at the train station. The two grinning politicians were
surrounded by dour security agents (standing guard on the running
boards) as the limo drove through the state capital on March 6, 1946.
After a long train ride from Washington, the seventy-one-year-old former
British prime minister was careful not to exert himself too much. When
asked that year about his secret of success, the old warhorse advised,
“Conservation of energy—never stand up when you can sit down, and never
sit down when you can lie down.”
Only months after being turned
out of high office, Churchill journeyed to a college gym in nearby
Fulton to give one of the most significant speeches of his career. With
the American president’s blessing, his clarion call for Anglo-American
resistance to the Soviet Union’s “Iron Curtain” (his metaphor for the
spread of communism dividing up Europe) would launch the decades-long
Cold War. But this address in Fulton, entitled “The Sinews of Peace,”
also provided another turning point in Churchill’s long life. Instead of
retirement, he chose vigorous, almost defiant engagement. Rather than
fade away with his glorious victories of the past, he decided to
embrace, almost prophetically, the future of the postwar world with its
atomic dangers. He would reinvent himself once again as a world
statesman, his voice both familiar and brand new.
Not everything
about this trip was high stakes, however. On the ride to Missouri,
Truman and Churchill demonstrated their personal diplomacy with a card
game.
“Mr. President, I think that when we are playing poker I will call you Harry,” Churchill announced.
“All right,
Winston,” Truman replied.
For more than an hour, they played with a handful of aides and reporters aboard the
Ferdinand Magellan, the
specially made presidential train car with a thick concrete floor to
protect against explosions. Churchill’s pile of chips dwindled as he
lost each hand, downing sips of drink along the way. When the former
prime minister, wearing one of his siren suits, excused himself for a
momentary bathroom break, Truman quickly issued an executive order.
“Listen,
this man’s oratory saved the western world,” Truman commanded the
group, which included a young reporter named David Brinkley. “We are
forever indebted to him. We’re not going to take his money.”
“But, Boss,
this guy’s a pigeon,” cried one of the players, Harry Vaughan, the president’s military aide.
The
president wouldn’t allow anything to trump this special relationship.
As if a matter of national security, the card sharks were defanged.
Winston’s fortunes suddenly turned for the better, Brinkley recalled
years later, after “Truman ordered us to let him win.”
Before the
evening aboard the presidential train ended, Winston displayed his
considerable understanding of American history and wondered aloud about
fate. “If I were to be born again,” he mused, he wished to become a
citizen in “one country where a man knows he has an unbounded future.”
Truman’s entourage asked what nation that might be.
“The USA,” Churchill declared solemnly. . . even though I deplore some of your customs.”
Puzzled, the Americans wondered what Yankee habit so appalled him.
“You stop drinking with your meals,” Winston replied.
Mark Twain, Winston Churchill (Credit: Wikimedia/AP)
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