Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  Thus, among the members of the Churchill Society, a group of buffs who meet for weekends of patriotic oratory in the cities of the South and the Midwest, were to be found in 1988 John Lehman, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, and Sam Nunn, the Georgian chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Among conservative columnists, who form a kind of corps of unacknowledged legislators in public life, George Will, William F. Buckley, and William Safire have very frequent recourse to admonitory or hortatory Churchillisms. A computer survey of Mr. Satire’s columns found that he made reference to Churchill once in every four articles on average. The same survey unearthed 1,200 allusions to Churchill in leading American newspapers between April and December in 1984, a period selected at random.

  The extent and degree to which Churchill has been absorbed by the American political culture (for modern American politicians and editorialists do not make references or allusions to historical figures unless they have some clear assurance about their “name recognition”) may also be gauged in another way. Churchill is the resort of choice for a politician who is on the ropes. Gordon Liddy, as we saw, used him as an exculpatory inspiration. So did his boss, in a celebrated television interview in April 1988. Former President Richard Nixon, invited to ruminate on the workings of fate, recalled:

  1972, as you know, was a very big year. A lot of things were going on. Winston Churchill once wrote that strong leaders usually do the big things well, but they foul up on small things, and then the small things become big. I should have read that before Watergate happened.

  This wry gift did not desert the disgraced Nixon when he turned to the election then in progress:

  Winston Churchill has said that there’s no part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections. George Bush has had a very good education in that respect. Coming back from the defeat in Iowa, he has wiped out the opposition, and he’s developed that inner strength and toughness that was certainly not there beforehand.

  Both of these statements were greeted respectfully. At the time of the Iran-contra scandal, Admiral John Poindexter quoted Winston Churchill to the effect that, in wartime, truth is so precious that it must be safeguarded by “a bodyguard of lies.” The United States was not at war at that time, but the admiral was seconding an aperçu offered by George Shultz, who had said exactly the same thing a few months previously about the administration’s “disinformation campaign” concerning Libya. While recuperating after his suicide attempt and before the congressional investigation of the Iran-contra network that had precipitated it, Robert McFarlane said: “I suppose it’s a pretentious thing to say, but I have to think about people who have overcome apparent near-catastrophic difficulty, from Jefferson to Churchill.” When Senator John Tower’s nomination as Secretary of Defense was foundering, more on his alleged inebriation than on his political shortcomings, his supporters protested that Churchill had thrived on a diet of alcohol. In early 1990, when Vice President Dan Quayle was continuing to warn of the Russian threat and to stress the need for a larger Star Wars budget, he gave it out that he had been impressed by William Manchester’s biography of Churchill, and was therefore wary of another Munich. His literary preference until this time had been for Tom Clancy.

  In all these instances, the use of Churchill is totemic and is supposed to bring a reverent and attentive response. A glance at the references above, which is a mere sample from the relatively recent past, is enough to illustrate the point. Scarcely less arresting than the image of Caspar Weinberger as Disraeli (when did Reagan first call him that?) is the notion of Churchill the solvent of Watergate, Churchill the moral and political tutor of George Bush, Churchill the posthumous licensee of a mercenary foreign policy.

  One way of viewing the Churchill cult is to see it as the residue of a half-forgotten transition whereby the strategic majority of the American Establishment crossed over from isolationism to interventionism. In many ways, Winston Churchill was the human bridge across which this transition was made. But not until the very end of his career was he, or could he be, praised for his contribution to this crucial evolution.

  Churchill’s first contact with American affairs was a distinctly tangential one, though it has a bearing on the critical year of 1898. A few years before that historic “expansionist” moment, the young scion of an English nobleman and an American heiress found himself chafing for lack of what John Hay would shortly call “a splendid little war.” As a young officer, tired of listening to old campaigners, he wrote:

  All my money had been spent on polo parties, and as I could not afford to hunt, I searched the world for some scene of adventure or excitement. The global peace in which mankind had for so many years languished was broken only in one quarter of the globe.

  That quarter was Cuba, long a place of arms between the European and American powers. Churchill took ship there in 1895, to observe how the Spanish Empire was faring against the rebels and to lend the Spanish occupiers a hand. Having had some tinge of romantic sympathy with the insurgents, he was surprised to find that the Spanish officers regarded the war not as a mere colonial affair but as a contest for the integrity of Spain itself. Translating this conviction back into the colonial language most easily available to him, Churchill recorded: “They felt about Cuba, it seemed, just as we felt about Ireland. This impressed me much.” Shortly after reaching this conclusion, he got his wish. “The thirtieth of November was my 21st birthday, and on that day for the first time I heard shots fired in anger, and heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air.”

  He came out of Cuba unscathed and soon afterward found that “the danger—as the subaltern regarded it—which in those days seemed so real of Liberal and democratic governments making war impossible” was, as ever, an illusion. Making perhaps the same subliminal connection as Admiral Mahan was later to make, he took part in the South African war even as American soldiery was engaging itself on San Juan Hill and at Manila Bay, and in 1899 was taken prisoner by the Boers during the wreck of an armored train. He made a spectacular escape from captivity, which helped propel him forward both as a journalist and as a politician. In 1900, like any new celebrity, he embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, making an imperialist case for the Chamberlain government and meeting with a decidedly mixed response. Of the American audiences who came to hear him, “a great many of them thought that the Boers were in the right, and the Irish everywhere showed themselves actively hostile.”

  None of these experiences was the equal, for the young Churchill, of an encounter with the moving spirit of the Anti-Imperialist League, whose eloquence was already being overborne by the flashier poetry of Budyard Kipling:

  My opening lecture in New York was under the auspices of no less a personage than “Mark Twain” himself. I was thrilled by this famous companion of my youth. He was now very old and snow-white, and combined with a noble air a most delightful style of conversation. Of course we argued about the war. After some exchanges I found myself beaten back to the citadel, “My country right or wrong.” “Ah,” said the old gentleman. “When the poor country is fighting for its life, I agree. But this was not your case.”

  Twain then inscribed one of his own books to young Churchill, remarking pithily on the flyleaf: “To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble.”

  Churchill would spend much of the next half century trying to enlist the aid of the United States for a British Empire which, whether right or wrong, was passing its zenith. He sought to do so in ways which, while they would incur a debt to America, would nonetheless preserve British and imperial freedom of action. His final failure to do this is set out in Chapter 8. But in the course of the struggle, he helped both directly and indirectly to unlock the imperial potential of the United States.

  He played a pivotal role in the great drama of the Lusitania, which more than any other single incident prepared United States public opinion for a war on the terrain of old Europe. On May
7, 1915, this British Cunard liner of 30,000 tons was hit by a single torpedo from the German submarine U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walter Schwieger. Of those 1,195 civilians who perished in the chilly waters off southern Ireland, 140 were American citizens.

  Anybody who had made the least study of the Spanish-American War knew that it had “started,” for all public and political purposes, with the blowing up of the USS Maine in Havana harbor. In spite of the fact that the Spanish authorities gave Havana’s best cemetery in perpetuity for the burial of the dead, looked after the injured, and proposed a joint Spanish-American inquiry into the calamity, all conciliation was rejected. Compensation and an acceptance of responsibility, as well as political concessions, were demanded. The demand was backed up by an extraordinary public hysteria, in which the words “Remember the Maine!” became a loyalty oath and a war cry combined. As Geoffrey Perret recounts in his history A Country Made by War: “There was no escaping it. Even the journal of sober-minded New England literati, the Atlantic Monthly, succumbed, putting Old Glory on its cover.” Congress eagerly voted President McKinley all the powers necessary for war. Not until 1976 did the U.S. Navy admit that the Maine had exploded because of a fire.

  Any student of psychological warfare and American politics would therefore understand at once the importance of a single dramatic atrocity. As it happened, the British Admiralty in 1915 possessed a department operating under the direct command of Winston Churchill. It was called “Room Forty,” and its job was that of intelligence and deception.

  As with the Maine, the evidence of the cause of the disaster had to be rearranged. The Lusitania had broken up and sunk in an extremely short time, after being hit by only one torpedo. It therefore had to be found that more than one torpedo had struck her. This task was performed by a pantomime court of inquiry headed by Lord Mersey. It had then to be denied that the Lusitania was carrying any munitions of war. This denial was made repeatedly and strenuously by every organ of the British government. In fact, unknown to the civilians who had booked passage on her, the ship had been carrying 1,248 cases of shells, six million rounds of ammunition, and eighteen cases of percussion fuses. These were part of J. P. Morgan’s contribution to the Western Front, financed discreetly by Morgan Grenfell.

  Given that both elements in the official story were outright lies, it has to be asked how such a valuable cargo came to be put in jeopardy. Later scholars have been able to view evidence that was unavailable to public opinion at the time—public opinion at the time having been falsely told that the German barbarians had struck a Lusitania medal to reward the crew for drowning civilians.

  In his pathbreaking book Room Forty, which is a standard history of British Naval Intelligence during the First World War, Patrick Beesly makes a highly scrupulous forensic analysis of the Lusitania affair. As a former serving Naval Intelligence officer and staunch patriot, he finds his own conclusion as unwelcome as it is inescapable. U-20 was known to be in the same waters as the Lusitania and had sunk several vessels in that area in the preceding days. Yet Winston Churchill’s Admiralty conveyed no warning to the ship, and none of the customary evasive precautions, already well established, was put into operation. Escort vessels were actually deployed away from the scene of danger. After elucidating all this, Beesly points out that negligence—the only alternative explanation—would have had to be kept up studiedly for ten whole days. This places a greater strain on credulity than can be borne. Beesly was also impressed by the fact that the relevant files “went missing” from the British Admiralty archives just as he began his inquiries, His eventual finding is the more convincing, perhaps, to a post-Maine and post-Tonkin Gulf generation, and more persuasive for being distasteful to him:

  For my part, unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.

  If we take conspiracy here to have its adult and realistic rather than its paranoid meaning—in other words, “a secret agreement for prearranged ends”—we can see that Beesly makes an excellent case. He establishes a motive and a causative chain where more strain and artifice are required to believe in coincidence than in the “agreement.”

  In elucidating Churchill’s own frame of mind, it is instructive to leap forward a quarter of a century to July 15, 1941, when the British were again striving to end American neutrality. Admiral Little, then head of the British Admiralty delegation in Washington, wrote to Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord, saying that “the brightest hope for getting America into the war lies in the escorting arrangements to Iceland, and let us hope the Germans will not be slow in attacking them. Otherwise I think it would be best for us to organise an attack by our own submarines and preferably on the escort!” Churchill himself, who had quit the Admiralty to become Prime Minister, told Pound at a time when the Bismarck’s consort Prinz Eugen was being tracked in the Atlantic: “It would be better for instance that she should be located by a US ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, then providing the incident for which the US government would be so grateful.” When they spoke or joked in confidence, the veterans of the British Admiralty certainly seemed to have what might be called a Lusitania mentality

  Having acted with flamboyance at a critical juncture in the enlargement of the Great War, Churchill went on to try to enlist the United States in the prolongation of it. As a boy taken to Remembrance Day services in England (which invariably featured Churchillian inspiration), I was at first puzzled by the fact that some war memorials were inscribed with the names of the fallen in “The Great War 1914-1918” and others with the identical inscription except for “1919” as the closing date. The notion that hostilities ended at the memorable eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 is so convenient and so solemnized that its untruth is often overlooked.

  In fact, British and American troops—together with the forces of many other nations—continued to make war after the Armistice was signed. They were fighting in Russia against the Bolshevik regime, ostensibly because it had made a separate peace with Germany but also to prevent the spread of revolution in Europe and Asia. The policy of military intervention was preeminently a British policy, and within the British government it was preeminently the policy of Winston Churchill.

  Determined to continue the wartime alliance of convenience with the United States, the British government made efforts to persuade the ever-squeamish Woodrow Wilson to commit American forces to the strategy of armed containment. Arthur Balfour secured a promise from Wilson’s aide Colonel House that the United States would aid the “White” General Aleksei Kaledin, with the aid distributed through British and French outlets to preserve what would now be called “deniability.” There were some interesting misgivings expressed about the necessity of cooperating with Japan, which had also taken advantage of the Revolution and the Civil War to land troops at Vladivostok. Spring-Rice, in Washington, expected Secretary of State Robert Lansing to object to this show of expansion by a power usually regarded with suspicion. But no, said Lansing, the Americans should not deny to Japan a right that the United States had claimed in Mexico and might need to claim again. Imperial thinking was becoming easier—Lansing was more sanguine than Lord Curzon, the former viceroy with the dollar-princess wife. He had misgivings about playing the Japanese card, because the use of yellow men against Russians would “enormously enhance the prestige of Asiatics against Europeans, and would consequently react upon the attitude of Indians towards the British.”

  Churchill’s plan had been to set up a government based in Siberia under the control of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. Kolchak was a Czarist diehard with a fondness for absolutism in the running of his own affairs, but Churchill and his military nominee in the area, General Alfred Knox,
considered him the mainstay of their policy. This led to a quarrel between Knox and Major General William S. Graves, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia and found himself under what was in effect British command. He did not like the company that he and his troops were keeping. “I doubt,” he wrote in his candid memoir of what he called the American “adventure” in Siberia, “if history will show any country in the world during the last fifty years where murder could be committed so safely, and with less danger of punishment, than in Siberia during the regime of Admiral Kolchak.” General Graves was in no doubt as to the source of this unwise and morally questionable policy. He noted grimly in his book that Winston Churchill had admitted, in the House of Commons, that the Kolchak regime was a puppet. He had said: “The British government called it into being, for our own aid, at a time when necessity demanded it.” To General Graves, this was a clear violation of the letter and the spirit of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and meant that Churchill had deceived the American forces in telling them that their mission was to safeguard dumps of Allied supplies or to rescue demobilized Czech prisoners of war—the two principal excuses on offer at the time. For his scruples, he received a great deal of calumny from the British:

  The Chief of Staff told me, after my return from the Far East, that I would never know half the pressure the British brought in Washington to have me relieved. I have other information equally reliable that they did not stop until they reached the President.

  The British commander, Knox, actually wrote to Graves saying that the Americans were aiding the Communists not only objectively but also subjectively. “There is a widespread propaganda,” he said slyly, “to the effect that your countrymen are pro-Bolshevik. I think in the context of Allied solidarity, and of the safety of Allied detachments, you should try to contradict this.” One of Knox’s subordinates, Colonel John Ward, also protested that “out of sixty liaison officers and translators” with the American staff, “over fifty were Russian Jews.” To this Graves replied that he never inquired whether a soldier was Jewish or not but that