Leaders

by Richard Nixon

  WINSTON

  CHURCHILL

  The Largest Human Being of Our Time

  WHEN WINSTON CHURCHILL was a young man, he talked to a friend about the meaning of life. His thoughts were suitably philosophical and typically candid. “We are all worms,” he said. Then he added, “But I do think that I am a glowworm.”

  Throughout his life Churchill was driven by an unshakeable sense of his own destiny. It infuriated some. It inspired many. When he was after something that he was determined to get, he did not know the meaning of the word no, no matter how often he heard it. Once he was engaged in a military battle or a political campaign, he purged the word defeat from his vocabulary.

  I first met Churchill in June 1954, when I headed the welcoming party that greeted him on his arrival in Washington for his official visit as Prime Minister. I still remember the eager anticipation, even the excitement, that I felt that day as I waited for his plane to come into view. I had already traveled extensively abroad. I had met many national and international leaders and many famous celebrities. But none matched Churchill as a larger-than-life legend. In the Pacific during World War II, I had been moved by his speeches even more than by those of President Roosevelt. Since moving into the political arena, I had come to appreciate more than ever what his leadership of Britain had meant to the world during that supreme test of courage and endurance. Superlatives hardly did him justice. He was one of the titanic leaders of the twentieth century.

  It was my good fortune that, under the protocol followed at that time, the President went to the airport to greet visiting heads of state, but heads of government first met him at the White House; thus Eisenhower would have greeted the Queen, but it fell to me to greet the Prime Minister.

  The night before, I spent over an hour preparing a ninety-second set of welcoming remarks, and I quickly reviewed it in my mind as his plane came into view.

  The four-engined Stratocruiser touched down, taxied from the runway, and finally came to a halt in front of us. The door was opened. After a moment Churchill appeared alone at the top of the ramp, wearing a pearl-gray homburg. I was rather surprised that he looked so short. Perhaps it was because his shoulders slumped and his large head seemed to rest on his body as if he had no neck at all. In fact he was five feet eight inches tall, and you would never have thought to call him a “little” man, any more than you would have thought to do so with the five-foot-eight-inch Theodore Roosevelt.

  His aides were hovering around to assist him down the steps. After quickly surveying the scene and seeing the welcoming party and the cameras down below, he rejected any assistance. Using a gold-headed walking stick, he started slowly down the ramp. He had suffered a stroke the year before, and he was very hesitant and obviously unsure of himself as he took each step. About halfway down, he noticed four Air Force men saluting him and paused momentarily to return the gesture.

  We shook hands and he said he was very happy to meet me for the first time. Like so many Englishmen, his handshake was more of a pressureless touch than a firm grasp. After greeting Secretary of State Dulles, he headed straight for the cameras and microphones. Without waiting for me to make my welcoming remarks, he proceeded to make his arrival statement. He said that he was glad to be coming from his fatherland to his mother’s land. (He was referring, of course, to the fact that his mother had been an American.) Amidst the warm applause when he concluded, he flashed his famous V for victory sign and then strode toward the black Lincoln convertible that we would use for the ride to the White House. The remarks I had so painstakingly prepared were never delivered, but neither did they seem to be missed.

  As I reread the diary notes that I dictated that day, I am amazed to find that this seventy-nine-year-old man, who had recently suffered a stroke and who had just crossed the Atlantic on an overnight propplane ride, could have covered so many subjects so well in the thirty minutes it took us to reach the White House. And all the time he talked, he continually turned to wave to the crowds that lined the route.

  He began by telling me that he had followed with interest the trip I had taken to Southeast Asia a few months before. He especially appreciated the fact that during my stop in Malaysia I had gone out into the countryside to visit the British troops who were combating the Communist insurgency there. I told him that I had been very impressed by General Gerald Templer and the other officials who were easing the transition of British colonies to independence. He quickly responded, “I only hope we didn’t give them their independence before they were ready to assume the responsibilities of government.” When I saw him for the last time four years later in London, he again expressed his concern on this same point.

  He then commented on Indochina, which I had also visited on my Asian trip. He said that at the end of World War II the French should have made up their minds whether they were actually going in to save Indochina or whether they were only going to make a halfhearted effort to do so. With his arm still waving to the crowd, he looked over at me and said, “Instead they made the decision to go in, but not to go all out. This was a fatal mistake.”

  After a few moments of smiling at the crowd, he looked back at me and said, “The world, Mr. Vice President, is in a very dangerous condition. It is essential for our two peoples to work together. We have our differences. That is normal. That is inevitable. But they are, after all, relatively small. And the press always make them seem larger than they really are.”

  This seemingly innocuous exchange in fact had considerable significance. It was clear that he was signaling to me, and through me to the administration, that he wanted to smooth some waters he had troubled two months earlier when Admiral Arthur Radford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had visited London. Radford had had a disturbing meeting with Churchill on the subject of Indochina, and the press had subsequently published rumors about it that had strained Anglo-American relations.

  Churchill had apparently been annoyed when Radford urged him to help France in its effort to keep its colonies in Indochina. Churchill churlishly asked why the British should fight so France could keep Indochina if they would not even fight to keep India for themselves. Radford, not the most diplomatic of men, observed that Congress might not be particularly happy with the British if they refused to go along with our efforts to repel Communist aggression in Asia.

  Churchill’s reply to this was blunt: “I’ll be glad when we are no longer dependent on U.S. aid.”

  Churchill was reluctant to move against the Communist Vietminh in Indochina because he feared the Communist Chinese might intervene. This, he thought, might lead to war between China and the United States, which would drag in the Soviet Union and make Europe a battlefield and Britain a target. But when Radford reported on this meeting to Eisenhower, the President was obviously surprised and shocked that Churchill, the symbol of resistance despite all odds in World War II, seemed almost resigned to defeat in Southeast Asia.

  As he continued to wave to the crowds, Churchill expressed his grave concern about the atomic bomb. He said that it was all right for us to talk about retaliating with this “terrible weapon,” but that the theory of “saturation” in connection with nuclear weapons concerned him.

  When I told him that I had just finished reading The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of his World War II memoirs, he commented that for a period of four months before Roosevelt’s death there was very little communication or understanding between Churchill and the American government. He was surprisingly direct when he added, “President Roosevelt was not himself. And President Truman did not know what he was doing when he suddenly entered upon his great office.” His face became completely serious and once again he ignored the crowds and looked at me. “That was a grave mistake,” he said. “A commander must always keep his second in command informed when he knows that he is ill and that he will not be on the scene for very much longer.”

  By now we were nearing the White House. I said that after reading his memoirs I often wondered what would
have happened if the Allies had accepted his recommendation to launch an offensive against the “soft underbelly” of Southern Europe rather than concentrating on making the D-Day invasion in Normandy. As we turned into the Northwest Gate, he lightly remarked, “Well, it would have been handy to have Vienna.”

  The private diaries of Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, give a revealing account of the British Prime Minister’s condition during this visit to Washington. Churchill at times suffered a great deal of pain but once he was on stage, no one who saw him would have known of his disability. Somehow he was always able to get “up” for big events.

  Despite the heavy schedule of official talks during this visit, Churchill seemed to enjoy thoroughly the long and, I thought, at times boring dinners held in his honor. He was one of those rare great leaders who seemed to enjoy small talk as much as the heavy discussions of world-shaking issues. Thanks to his customary afternoon naps, which he had taken even during the war years, he was at his best in the evening.

  During the state dinner at the White House, Mrs. Eisenhower, without making a big to-do about it, helped Churchill cut his meat when he seemed to have difficulty with it. She thoughtfully pointed out that the White House knives were not very sharp. When John Foster Dulles was served his usual highball instead of wine during dinner, Mrs. Nixon asked Churchill if he would also prefer one. He said no and added that he usually had his first drink of whiskey at 8:30 in the morning and that he enjoyed a glass of champagne in the evening.

  During dinner Churchill dominated the conversation by retelling stories from his past. Though he did not try to involve others in the discourse, he never appeared to be rude. Like MacArthur’s, Churchill’s monologues were so fascinating that no one resented it when he took the stage and did not yield it to anyone else. Mrs. Nixon later told me that Churchill was one of the most interesting dinner partners she had ever had. He had held Mrs. Eisenhower and her spellbound as he recounted his dramatic adventures during the Boer War.

  • • •

  The best chance that I had to observe our formidable guest was at the stag dinner at the British embassy on the last night of his visit. Once again protocol kept Eisenhower away, so I was the senior American guest.

  Churchill joined us about fifteen minutes late. He greeted all the guests and stood talking for a while, but as Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson embarked upon what was obviously going to be a rather long story, he moved deliberately over to one of the chairs and sat down. I had walked with him, and he looked up at me, grinned, and said, “I feel a little better when I’m sitting down than when I’m standing.”

  During dinner I asked him how the heavy schedule of the three-day conference had affected him. He said that except for a few “blackouts” he had felt better during this conference than he had for some time. He added, in his characteristically orotund way, “I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.”

  The conversation later turned to a discussion of vacation plans. He said that he was going to travel by sea to Morocco for a holiday. I responded that I always traveled by air because I tended to get seasick. He fixed me with a rather stern but amused gaze and said, “Young man, don’t worry. As you get older, you’ll outgrow it.” I was forty-one years old at the time.

  Churchill was remarkable not only as a maker of history but also as a writer of it. Having read almost all of his prolific writing, I have found him to be a much better writer when describing events in which he was not directly involved. His history of World War I was far better than that of World War II because in the latter Churchill’s reflections and observations often get in the way of the story. The best volumes of his account of World War I were The Aftermath, in which he recounted the Versailles Peace Conference, and The Eastern Front, which he wrote two years after he had completed the other five volumes. In neither of these books was Churchill a major participant. In both his multivolume histories, however, Churchill very effectively practiced his famous maxim “The best way to make history is to write it.”

  As a historian, Churchill’s interest in the American Civil War was always renewed when he visited Washington. This trip was no exception. At the stag dinner he observed that in his opinion Robert E. Lee was one of the greatest men in American history and one of the greatest generals of all time. He said that somebody ought to “catch up in a tapestry or a painting the memorable scene of Lee riding back across the Potomac after he had turned down the command of the Union armies in order to stay with the Southern side.”

  He said that one of the war’s greatest moments came at the end, at Appomattox. Lee pointed out to General Ulysses Grant that his officers owned their horses as personal property and asked that they be allowed to keep them. Grant said, “Have all of them take their horses, the enlisted men and the officers as well; they will need them to plow their fields.” Churchill’s eyes glistened as he looked around the spellbound group and said, “In the squalor of life and war, what a magnificent act!”

  I inquired about his views regarding talks with the Soviet leaders who had succeeded Stalin. He said that the West must have a policy of strength and must never deal with the Communists on a basis of weakness. He told me that he was looking forward to visiting Russia, but that he had no intention of making any commitments that would bind the United States.

  He mentioned that except for the wartime alliance he had opposed “the Bolsheviks” all his life and remarked that he was “sure that the people of the United States would trust me as one who knew the Communists and was a fighter against them.” He concluded by saying, “I think I have done as much against the Communists as McCarthy has done for them.” Before I could say anything, he grinned, leaned toward me, and added, “Of course, that is a private statement. I never believe in interfering in the domestic politics of another country!”

  Churchill complained bitterly to me about the vicious rhetoric of the radical firebrand Aneurin Bevan. In 1947, as Minister of Health in the Labor government, Bevan had embarrassed even some of his colleagues by remarking that the Tories were “lower than vermin.” I could not help but think that although Bevan’s remark lacked any elegance or cleverness, Churchill himself had few peers when it came to the use of cutting invective.

  Accusing James Ramsay MacDonald of lacking political fortitude, Churchill spun out the following tale:

  I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as the “The Boneless Wonder.” My parents judged that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

  He described John Foster Dulles as “the only bull I know who carries his china closet with him.”

  Lady Astor, who was the first woman to hold a seat in Parliament, once told him, “If I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee.” Churchill retorted, “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

  After a speech in Parliament by Laborite Clement Attlee, Churchill remarked, “He is a modest man with much to be modest about.”

  When George Bernard Shaw sent him two theater tickets and a note reading, “Come to my play and bring a friend, if you have a friend,” Churchill sent a reply that read, “I am busy for the opening, but I will come the second night, if there is a second night.”

  And of Aneurin Bevan, Churchill once said, “There is, however, a poetic justice in the fact that the most mischievous mouth in wartime has also become in peace the most remarkable administrative failure.”

  Churchill certainly gave as well as he received when it came to hardhitting rhetoric.

  • • •

  Churchill made a revealing comment at the stag dinner about his lifestyle. Speaking of Lord Plowden, the British atomic specialist, he said, “No man has given so much t
o the world and taken so little out. He did not eat meat; he did not smoke; he was not married.” Churchill himself loved the good life. I think he would have admitted that, while he gave a lot to the world, he also took a lot out.

  He had a certain flair for life that led one biographer to call him the “Peter Pan of politics.” In his later years, after he gave up polo, his favorite relaxation was painting. His bold strokes and bright colors seemed to release his pent-up energy. As he once said, “If it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.”

  During his visit to Washington, we compared our writing habits. I told him that I generally found that I worked best by using a dictating machine. He flashed a delightfully impish grin and said, “I much prefer to dictate to a pretty secretary than into a cold, impersonal machine.” He added that he had two “very good-looking” secretaries.

  Many years later I recounted this incident to Brezhnev during the Soviet-American summit in Moscow in 1972. The Soviet leader said he agreed with Churchill’s preference of a secretary to a machine. He then added with a wink and a broad grin, “Besides, a secretary is particularly useful when you wake up at night and want to make a note.”

  Churchill hated to do without the comforts of civilization. During World War I he always brought a tin bathtub along on visits to the front. And during an American lecture tour in the days of Prohibition, his contract stipulated that he must receive a bottle of champagne before each appearance.

  Shortly after my inauguration in 1969, one of the older White House butlers told me of another incident. President Roosevelt invited Churchill to stay at the White House during his visits and quartered him in what is called the Queen’s Bedroom, which is elegantly decorated and has a very comfortable bed. On one of Churchill’s visits, Roosevelt insisted that his guest stay in the Lincoln Bedroom so that he could say he had slept in Lincoln’s bed. The Lincoln Bedroom is decorated in the stark, rather austere style of mid-nineteenth-century America and has without question the most uncomfortable bed in the White House.