The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Before the election, a London Times editor informed Churchill that the newspaper was about to advocate two points—that Churchill should campaign as a nonpartisan world statesman and then ease himself into retirement sooner rather than later. “Mr. Editor,” Churchill said to the first point, “I fight for my corner.” And, to the second: “Mr. Editor, I leave when the pub closes.”42

  The pub had just closed.

  Dinner at No. 10 that evening was a somewhat muted affair, Mary later wrote, but less gloomy than lunch. Uncle Jack was on hand, and Diana and Sarah, and Sarah’s friend Robert Maugham (Somerset’s nephew). Bracken attended, as did Anthony Eden, a remarkable gesture of fealty on his part given that he had learned just five days earlier that his son Pilot Officer Simon Eden, RAF, had been killed in Burma. Clementine took herself off to bed before dinner. The others tried “to say and do the right thing” for Churchill’s sake, with some success. Maugham told Harold Nicolson a few days later that Churchill had accepted his defeat with good grace. When someone at the dinner table said to Churchill, “But you have won the race, sir,” he replied, “Yes, and in consequence I’ve been warned off the turf.”43

  Sometime earlier that afternoon, Churchill composed a concession statement, which he sent to the BBC to be read during the nine o’clock news. Brian Gardner, writing in Churchill in Power, called the statement “perhaps the most gracious acceptance of democratic defeat in the English language.” Churchill:

  The decision of the British people has been recorded in the votes counted today. I have therefore laid down the charge which was placed upon me in darker times. I regret that I have not been permitted to finish the work against Japan…. It only remains for me to express to the British people, for whom I have acted in these perilous years, my profound gratitude for the unflinching, unswerving support which they have given me during my task, and for the many expressions of kindness which they have shown towards their servant.”44

  Friday, July 27, was a day for farewells at No. 10. As Churchill took his leave from the Chiefs of Staff, Alan Brooke found himself “unable to say very much for fear of breaking down. He [Churchill] was standing the blow wonderfully well.” A decade later, when Brooke—by then the 1st Viscount Alanbrooke—edited his diaries for publication, he inserted a line that stands in sharp contrast to his wartime rants against Churchill: “On reading these diaries I have repeatedly felt ashamed of the abuse I had poured on him [Churchill], especially during the latter years.” Then, as if he could not let go, Lord Alanbrooke felt compelled to remind readers that during the latter part of the war “Winston had been a very sick man… with repeated attacks of pneumonia…. This physical condition together with his mental fatigue accounted for many of the difficulties in dealing with him…. I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying in my life.” Only after enunciating his caveats did the viscount finally add the now oft-quoted tribute to Churchill: “For all that I thank God I was given an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.”45

  Eden thought the entire afternoon a “pretty grim affair.” He was the last to leave, having been called into the Cabinet Room by Churchill for a final chat. That night, Eden wrote in his diary: “He [Churchill] was pretty wretched, poor old boy…. He couldn’t help feeling his treatment had been pretty scurvy.” Before Eden left, Churchill looked about and said, “Thirty years of my life have been passed in this room. I shall never sit in it again. You will, but I shall not.”

  Eden assured Churchill that “his place in history could have gained nothing” by a return to No. 10 in the postwar years, adding, “That place was secure anyway.” Churchill accepted that, and the two men parted. As Eden left he reflected upon the six war years he had spent in that room, writing that night: “I cannot believe I can ever know anything like it again.”46

  Churchill departed No. 10 for Chequers, which the new prime minister had put at his disposal for the weekend. Chartwell was not yet reopened and staffed, and although the Churchills were interested in purchasing a London town house at 28 Hyde Park Gate, they had not yet finalized the transaction. Under other circumstances, Mary later wrote, the weekend would “have been a very cozy jolly party” but “we were all still rather stunned by the events of the previous week.” Ambassador John Winant was on hand, as was Sarah, who had decided to end their long love affair. It had always been more courtly than torrid, but it was doomed in any event by the fact that Winant was a married man and Sarah—aptly nicknamed the Mule—was a very independent woman. She later wrote that it had been an affair “which my father suspected but about which we did not speak.”47

  Colville—who now served Attlee—was on hand that weekend in order to help Churchill gather his personal effects. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—had motored out, as had Brendan Bracken. Churchill’s former bodyguards and private secretaries had gone off to Berlin with the new prime minister. No motorcycle dispatch riders roared up the drive; the phones did not ring; the Chiefs of Staff did not report in. Most noticeably, the secret boxes and Ultra decrypts did not appear. “Now there was nothing,” Mary wrote. “We saw with near desperation a cloud of black gloom descend.” To dispel the cloud, they played records on the gramophone—American and French marches, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Noel Gay tune “Run Rabbit Run.” They ran movies, too—The Wizard of Oz was a favorite. They played cards and staged a croquet match, which Churchill watched from the sidelines. The cloud lingered. On Sunday, the twenty-ninth, the clan of fifteen sat down to dinner at the great round table, where they drank a Rehoboam of champagne in a futile attempt to make merry. At some point during dinner, Churchill said “it was fatal to give way to self-pity, that the Government had a mandate” and that “it was the duty of everyone to support them.” Before retiring, they all signed the Chequers guestbook, Churchill last. Underneath his signature he wrote: Finis.48

  Churchill and Clementine took up residence at Claridge’s the next day. Two weeks later, on August 14, Churchill hosted a dinner in his Claridge’s suite for Eden and a few Conservative colleagues. Late in the evening, they learned that the Japanese had surrendered. The Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Tokyo had been silent in the days since, but now, as Eden put it, “the six years of ordeal was over.” The dinner companions adjourned to another room, where a wireless was set up. There, they listened as Clement Attlee “barked out a few short sentences, then gave the terms…. The war was over.”

  “There was a silence,” Eden wrote. “Mr. Churchill had not been asked to say any word to the nation. We went home. Journey’s end.”

  Churchill had by all rights at age seventy reached the sixth and penultimate of Shakespeare’s seven stages of life. The fields and orchards and rose gardens at Chartwell, wild and overgrown after five years of neglect, were in need of his attention, as were the fish ponds, and the fish, and the house itself. Little Winston and the other “wollygogs” needed him, as did Sarah, Mary, Diana, Randolph, and Clementine. Yet he had no intention of becoming Shakespeare’s “slipper’d pantaloon.” He considered his journey by no means over. He was the leader of the opposition, in which role he enthusiastically took his seat in the front row of the opposition bench in the Commons and proceeded to oppose. On his return to the House (still meeting in the Lords’ chamber while the bombed-out Commons was being rebuilt), Conservative MPs leapt to their feet and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Labourites countered with “The Red Flag.”

  Though England’s greatest leader led the opposition, Churchill could not reverse the Labour mandate, and knew it. Labour had pledged to nationalize the Bank of England, the coal and utility industries, railroads, and the steel industry. As Labour in coming months and years created government control boards to manage each industry, bureaucracy became Britain’s fastest-growing industry. Two years after V-E day, Churchill told the House: “A mighty army of
450,000 additional civil servants has been taken from production and added, at a prodigious cost and waste, to the oppressive machinery of government and control. Instead of helping national recovery this is a positive hindrance.” That was one of his gentler rebukes of the socialist experiment. Labour’s showcase priority was the creation of the National Health Service (which came to pass in 1948, with Aneurin Bevan installed as its first minister). Labour proposed free health care, free false teeth, free eyeglasses. Just four months after the election, Churchill told the House:

  The queues are longer, the shelves are barer, the shops are emptier. The interference of Government Departments with daily life is more severe and more galling. More forms have to be filled up, more officials have to be consulted. Whole spheres of potential activity are frozen, rigid and numb, because this Government has to prove its Socialistic sincerity instead of showing how they can get the country alive and on the move again.

  Sir Stafford Cripps, Churchill declared, “is a great advocate of Strength through Misery.”49

  Churchill, sure that the Labour tide would someday ebb, looked beyond England. He intended, with two broad objectives in mind, to transcend British politics and reinvent himself as an international statesman. He sought a special relationship (that he as yet had not explicitly defined) among the English-speaking peoples, including the Americans, and a similar but more crisply defined relationship among Western European countries—his old idea of a United States of Europe. He was, and had always been, a European patriot. Britons had sacked him, but Europeans loved him. This was political capital he began to invest. On November 16, he told an audience in Brussels that in order to prevent another “Unnecessary War” (caused in part, he said, by America’s unwillingness to join the League of Nations and confront German re-armament), “we have to revive the prosperity of Europe: and European civilisation must rise again from the chaos and carnage into which it has been plunged: and at the same time we have to devise those measures of world security which will prevent disaster descending upon us again.” He proposed a “United States of Europe, which will unify this Continent in a manner never known since the fall of the Roman Empire, and within which all its peoples may dwell together in prosperity, in justice, and in peace.”50

  Not all in the Tory leadership shared his visions for the future of Britain, of Europe, and even of the Tory party. The voters having thrown out the Conservatives, many in the Tory hierarchy felt it was time for Churchill to step down from the party leadership, to take “a long rest,” as Lord Moran framed it. Churchill should write a history of the war, as only he could. He should paint, travel, and enjoy life. “Prefaced by elaborate protestations of admiration and respect,” some of Churchill’s colleagues began to advance the theme of retirement to Moran. They no longer would tolerate Churchill’s grudging, sometimes cruel, and usually overbearing style of leadership. “In short,” Moran wrote, “with the war behind them the Tory leaders were no longer prepared to stomach [Churchill’s] summary methods.” Churchill had no intention of abdicating the Tory leadership. “A short time ago I was ready to retire and die gracefully,” he told Moran in 1946. Of the new Labour government, Churchill offered to Moran: “Now I’m going to stay and have them out. I’ll tear their bleeding entrails out of them. I’m in pretty good fettle.” It was “the Jerome blood,” Winston said.51

  During the first week of January 1946, foreign secretaries and diplomats from around the globe convened in London for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. Churchill was not among the luminaries. On January 9 he, Clementine, and Sarah boarded the Queen Elizabeth, bound for New York and a two-month vacation in Florida, Cuba, and the eastern United States. Not having yet decided to write his memoir of the war, he worked on his unfinished History of the English-Speaking Peoples during the voyage. But soon after he arrived in Miami, he read recently published essays by Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, which Butcher had based on his diary entries. Butcher’s tales of Churchill’s late nights and liquid lunches were incomplete, trivial, and not at all flattering to the Old Man, who, not about to take such “history” lying down, summoned his prewar European literary agent, Emery Reves. Butcher (and Elliott Roosevelt, with As He Saw It) helped force the decision; Churchill would write his version of the war.

  On January 22, Harry Hopkins, who been hospitalized for more than two months, wrote a short letter to Churchill, in which he signed off with, “Do give my love to Clemmie and Sarah… all of whom I shall hope to see before you go back.” Hopkins’s doctors had been treating him for cirrhosis of the liver, but their diagnosis was wrong. The terrible pain he had suffered for almost a decade was due to hemochromatosis—a metabolic disorder of the digestive tract. His letter to Churchill was the last he wrote. He died a week later. He took to the grave two firm political beliefs. The first was that Britain was the best friend America had and any attempt by America to horn in on British trade would only injure that relationship. His second was that Russia in coming years would become more nationalistic and less inclined to spread communism around the globe. But, regardless of Moscow’s intentions, Hopkins believed America’s “relations with the Soviet Union are going to be seriously handicapped” by differences over “fundamental notions of human liberty—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of worship.”52

  In early February, while Churchill took his ease in the sun, Stalin addressed his party congress and, as recollected by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “with brutal clarity outlined the Soviet Union’s post-war policy.” Russia would re-arm, Stalin declared, at the expense of producing consumer goods, because “capitalist-imperialist” monopolies guaranteed that “no peaceful international order was possible.” George Kennan, then chargé d’affaires in Moscow, wrote an eight-thousand-word policy paper for the Truman administration that later became known as the “Long Telegram.” In it Kennan predicted that Stalin’s “neurotic view of world affairs” and a tyrant’s fear of political insecurity would result in a Soviet foreign policy that would use “every means possible to infiltrate, divide and weaken the West.”53

  Kennan advised a policy of stiff resolve in the face of Soviet belligerence, in part because he believed Russians respected strength, and in part because Russia was exhausted from the war and in no position—yet—to assume a more sinister role on the world stage, other than through proxies (as in Greece and Yugoslavia). Kennan later wrote that had he sent his telegram six months earlier, it would have “raised eyebrows,” and had he sent it six months later, it would have “sounded redundant.” Fundamental to his diplomatic strategy was his belief—held since before Yalta—that Stalin would never grant to the peoples of Soviet-occupied countries such as Poland and Bulgaria democratic rights that were denied Russians. For the West to think otherwise was naive. To “act chummy” with Moscow, or “make fatuous gestures of goodwill” in hopes that Moscow would grant those rights, would gain nothing, partly because “no-one in Moscow believes the Western world” would “stand firm” against Soviet threats. Yet, Kennan also believed the military requirements needed to advance Moscow’s cause were “beyond the Russian capacity to meet. Moscow has no naval or air forces capable of challenging the sea or air lanes of the world.” Kennan’s strategy later became known as “containment” and for more than four decades, it underlay U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.54

  Kennan’s dismissal of Soviet air and naval capabilities put him in Walter Lippmann’s corner in that regard, but neither one saw (as Churchill did soon after the Dresden raid) the coming reality of long-range bombers and rockets. Bernard Montgomery also believed that the Russians were down and out militarily, noting that when “1,700 American and British aircraft” gave “an impressive display of airpower” during a post–V-E day celebration in Frankfurt, the message “was not lost on the Russians” in attendance. Months later, after a visit to Moscow, Montgomery came away believing that “the Russians were worn out” and “quite unfit to take part in a world
war against a strong combination of allied nations.” But Churchill was concerned by Moscow’s threat to Europe, not to the entire planet. And although Russia was not a worldwide naval power, neither anymore was Great Britain. Indeed, a naval vacuum existed in the Mediterranean, a vacuum easily filled by Russia if it decided to finally throttle its enemy of two hundred years, Turkey, or extort from Ankara free passage through the Dardanelles. Most worrisome to Churchill was the fact that there was no Western alliance in place to meet a Russian threat. The war was over; America was building new Packards and Chevys and Philco televisions and General Electric washing machines. “Alliance” was still a troublesome if not dirty word to many Americans, especially the Taft Republicans in Washington.55

  Three months before Churchill’s Florida vacation, he received an invitation from the president of Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a series of lectures at that school. Churchill received many such invitations, but the postscript on this letter was handwritten—by President Truman. In it, Truman reminded Churchill that Missouri was his home state, and he offered to introduce Churchill at the lectures. Truman asked Churchill—whom the president considered to be “the first citizen of the world”—if he’d like to stop off in Washington first and travel to Missouri from there with Truman aboard the presidential train. Churchill accepted the offer with enthusiasm, suggesting one lecture might be more appropriate, as a series would quite tax his speech-writing skills. He had for months sought to articulate his worldview in a speech that would reach the largest possible audience, and here now came the president of the United States with an invitation that, Churchill told Truman, was “a very important act of state.” At noon on March 4, after breakfasting with Truman at the White House, Churchill and Truman made for Union Station. A few White House aides went along on the trip, including Admiral Leahy, press secretary Charlie Ross, and General Harry Vaughan, a beefy, profane, a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking political operative and a Truman crony since the Great War. Truman’s newly appointed special counsel Clark Clifford, thirty-nine and a product of Missouri’s Washington University Law School, also boarded the presidential train for the eighteen-hour run to St. Louis. Drinks were served as soon as the train left the station—scotch for Churchill, which he took with water, telling his hosts that adding ice to liquor was a “barbaric” American custom, as was the American habit of not drinking whisky during meals.56