Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (25 page)

E
PILOGUE

I
was never fortunate enough to have had dinner with Winston Churchill. But during the five years I have spent working on this book, I have come to see aspects of his
character
and personality – humanity, humour, curiosity, zest and resilience – that were revealed at the dinner table to an extent not explicitly noted in many of the biographies that rightly concentrate on his enormous impact on world affairs. Churchill was capable of a toughness of the sort displayed in his decision to tell Stalin, face to face, that there would be no second front in 1942. But that necessary toughness should not obscure his basic humanity. He cared deeply for
the people of Britain, admired their morale and
steadfastness
in the face of almost unimaginable adversity, and
understood
their daily lives in ways that most politicians only profess to comprehend. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that Churchill’s support of free trade, which early in his career caused a break with the Conservatives, was “a social rather than an economic issue”.
1
Protectionism, he said, meant “dear food for the million, cheap labour for the millionaire”.
2
That lifelong concern for the welfare of the British people was again manifested in his development of the rationing plan instituted during the Second World War, with its emphasis on ensuring that the less-wealthy were as much as possible treated as well as the better-off, and that vital shipping was diverted to maintaining adequate food supplies. Indeed, Churchill’s humanity extended to fallen enemies, as the now-famous statement that precedes each volume of his history of the Second World War – “In victory, magnanimity” – shows. As we have seen, he was overcome with compassion for the plight of the “haggard”
bombed-out
Berliners he saw during his tour of the German capital during the Potsdam Conference.

This consideration infused not only his policies, but his personal treatment of people. Yes, he could be impatient at times, and at times less than sensitive to the needs of his dinner companions to call the evening to a close. But he also saw to it that his gardener received the unused tobacco from his cigars to use as pipe tobacco, that Bernard Baruch’s desire for privacy when attending a dinner party was respected, and that an old friend and comrade-in-arms, General Jan Christiaan Smuts, would not be demoted to the second spot at his wartime
dinner
table, even though Churchill had good strategic reasons to put General Eisenhower, also attending, on his right.

The Churchillian humanity extended, as I discovered, to animals. I am encouraged in applying that word to his
concern
for cats, dogs, pigs, bees, geese and turtles – creatures that reappear throughout this book – by the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as “disposition to treat human beings and animals with consideration and compassion, and to relieve their distresses”. Churchill could not bring himself to carve a goose (“You’ll have to carve it, Clemmie. He was my friend.”) at one of his dinner
parties
, diligently fed the fish at Chartwell; and paused to do the same for the fish at his Moscow dacha en route to an important meeting with Stalin. That did not stop him from enjoying the goose once carved, and beef properly cooked, of course, but those were instances in which his compassion was trumped by his zest for life.

So deeply did he enjoy food, champagne and cigars that I had to prepare separate chapters on these items. It is true that he was “easily satisfied with the best”, but it is also true that he heartily enjoyed a humble shepherd’s pie when
visiting
the front, and picnic fare in the company of his
generals
. If Pol Roger was not available, Caucasian champagne would do – no complaints. Only when it came to his cigars did his ability to do with less than the best fail him: witness his rejection – a quiet rejection, no tantrum – of the cheap cigars offered to him by the Americans when his own supply inexplicably ran out at the Casablanca meeting.

That zest was not confined to food, champagne and
cigars
. It extended to the baths he so enjoyed, to battles as far away as Cuba and India, and to the challenge of debates in the House, where his enthusiasm for combat enlivened the proceedings. “When he gets up to go,” noted Woodrow Wyatt, a Labour Member and opponent whose service
partially 
overlapped Churchill’s, “the vitality of the House goes with him. It subsides like a reception after the champagne is finished.”
3

One cannot spend years with Churchill without also
coming
away with an admiration for his humour, his playfulness. He most often seemed to find a way to wrap a devastating riposte in humour to remove some of its sting, and used humour as one of the weapons with which to dominate a dinner table, whether in the presence of friends and admirers, or of the glowering Joseph Stalin. Invited to drinks by a very angry dictator after a particularly tense meeting, Churchill reports: “I said I was in principle always in favour of such a policy.” I hope that jest survived its translation.

Even a reader only casually acquainted with the life of Churchill will have been exposed to the retelling of his bons mots, retorts, quips and jokes. The House of
Commons
cheered when, accused of sleeping during a
members
speech, Churchill quickly shot back: “I wish I were.” Such comebacks diffused criticism and cheered his
supporters
, and quickly spread through Whitehall. His staff, at the Admiralty, Downing Street, Chequers and elsewhere
benefited
from the tension-diffusing effect of his touches of
playfulness
amid serious events.

He never played the clown or buffoon, or told jokes as we generally use the term. His humour always had a point. When he nicknamed Harry Hopkins “Lord Root of the Matter”, he did so to convey Hopkins’ importance and his inclusion on Britain’s side in the war effort. And when
confronted
in Adana by the Turkish Foreign Minister’s
recitation
of how difficult life was in Britain, part of the
Minister
’s effort to demonstrate that Britain might well lose the war, Churchill countered tales of rationing by taking out the
largest cigar anyone had ever seen, and remarking with a pixie-like grin: “And we are down to the tiniest cigars”, with the stress on the word “tiniest”.
4

Often his humour, not unexpectedly, was based on
language
and wordplay. And not always in English –
occasionally
in French, albeit fractured French. Whatever the language, Churchill’s humour “lightened the burdens of the dispirited and were quoted as the words of a champion”, writes a late editor of
The Washington Post
.
5

His dinner table companions relished and repeated Churchill’s witticisms. That is one reason why we have
records
of so many of his conversations and quips today. Some of these tales are verifiable, others are plausible, still others fabricated, with Richard Langworth regarded as an expert on what Churchill said or did not say.

I also came to realise that the dinner table was the perfect venue for the display of another Churchill characteristic: a boundless curiosity. Every aspect of life attracted his interest, which extended from floating harbours to bath taps, from dining-room chairs to plovers’ eggs, from sugar for bees to maritime rights. Dinner companions were often chosen for their ability to satisfy his wide-ranging curiosity as to how things worked, how people lived, what opponents were
planning
.

Churchill also satisfied his curiosity by using his many wartime travels to visit places and people not
necessarily
essential to the war effort. When in Teheran en route to Moscow, he lunched with the Shah. When in Washington in 1941 to meet with Roosevelt, he found time for a visit with a cousin and dinner with leading administration figures. When in Cairo, he visited the sphinx, and made arrangements to conduct a tour of the pyramids for President Roosevelt, and
to arrange for the wheelchair-bound President to be brought to a vantage point to view the Atlas Mountains, still another example of his consideration for the circumstances of others and a desire to share a good thing with a friend.

Finally, the sheer resilience of the man is a wonder. He could maintain his composure at a dinner at the White House after being informed of a series of devastating military
setbacks
, and doggedly return to his wooing of the President. He could recover quickly from pneumonia and set off on an arduous trip across the Atlantic to meet and dine with Franklin Roosevelt. He could recover from a stroke and
immediately
head to a meeting with President Eisenhower in Bermuda, hoping his dinner-table talents would outweigh the intransigence of John Foster Dulles. And, in the end, he could leave a failed meeting in Bermuda, rebuffed in his
desire
for a summit meeting with the Russians, and almost
immediately
resume planning for just such a meeting.

I do not mean to be so besotted with the subject of this book as to suggest Churchill was a paragon. He was not. But he was humane, funny, curious and resilient – not
inconsiderable
virtues. As one historian put it, Churchill was “quiet simply, a great man”.
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D
INERS

US Secretary of State, 1949–53. As Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of State during the Second World War, Acheson played a key role in framing policies ranging from Lend Lease to plans for the post-war financial order at the Bretton Woods conference. First as Truman’s Under-Secretary and then as his Secretary of State, he proved a forceful advocate of containing the further spread of Soviet power and was instrumental in establishing NATOTO. He strongly encouraged Truman to intervene in the Korean War and to support French efforts in Indochina. He died aged 78 in 1971.

Labour politician who succeeded Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Born in 1885, the son of a blacksmith, he left school at 13 and served in the Artists’ Rifles in the First World War. In the post-war Labour government he served as Minister of Defence and Labour leader in the House of Lords. He died in 1965.

Leader of the Labour Party, 1935–55 and Prime Minister, 1945–51. Attlee served as Churchill’s Deputy Prime Minister in the War Cabinet, putting aside political differences in a successful
partnership. He enjoyed Churchill’s respect and also endured his occasional jibes. He was a former public schoolboy who fought in the First World War and whose social conscience was shaped by witnessing poverty in the East End of London where he was a local mayor and MP. His wife was a closet Tory. He died in 1967, two years after Churchill.

Amassed a fortune on Wall Street. Baruch (1870–1965) was a financial adviser to various US presidents, including Roosevelt during the war. He was also a long-standing friend of Churchill, offering personal financial advice and generous hospitality.

Press magnate and Minister of Aircraft production, 1941, Minister of Supply 1941 and Lord Privy Seal, 1943–5. Born Max Aitken in Canada in 1879, he was the son of a Scottish minister. He bought the
Daily Express
in 1916, turning it by the 1930s into Britain’s best-selling newspaper. Beaverbrook supported appeasement but was also considered a crony of Churchill. During the war he built a popular reputation because of his perceived energy in improving armament production. He contrived to combine a firm belief in the British Empire with repeated calls for more help for the Soviet Union and the early opening of a Second Front in Europe.

Stalin’s interpreter at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences. In retirement he remained loyal to Stalin’s memory though when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 he moved to California, where he died in 1998. One of his sons wrote to Ronald Reagan asking if he could defect; another became interpreter to Boris Yeltsin.

Born in Russia and trained as an international banker, Birse was fluent in Russian and an expert in Russian affairs. During the war, he served in the Intelligence Corps in Cairo, achieving the rank of major in the British Army. He was later appointed to the British embassy in Moscow. He was asked to translate for Churchill at Teheran, Moscow in 1944 and at Yalta. In 1945, he acted at Churchill’s interpreter. He also interpreted for Eden, Attlee and Bevin

The diplomat “Chip” Bohlen (1904–74) was working at the US embassy in Tokyo when Pearl Harbor was attacked and thereafter endured six months in a Japanese internment camp. After his repatriation to Washington he advised Harry Hopkins and President Roosevelt on Soviet affairs. He travelled with Roosevelt to the Teheran and Yalta Conferences, where he served as an interpreter, a role he revived at Potsdam for Truman. Alongside his friend George Kennan, Bohlen helped shape the policy of Soviet containment, and he succeeded Kennan as Ambassador in Moscow in 1953. Rethinking some of his earlier conciliatory overtures, Bohlen concluded that “anyone who started with too many illusions about the Soviets came out disillusioned”.

Daughter of the Liberal Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith and stepdaughter of Margot Asquith, Violet Bonham Carter lived in Downing Street between the ages of 21 and 27 and knew many of her father’s contemporaries, marrying his Principal Private Secretary. She was a close friend of both Winston and Clementine Churchill. Created Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury, she remained
active in Liberal politics in the House of Lords. She wrote
Winston Churchill as I Knew Him
in 1965, and died in 1969. Her diaries containing many revealing anecdotes were published in 1996.

Churchill’s most loyal supporter in the House of Commons. Born in 1901, the son of an Irish Fenian activist and partly educated in Australia, Bracken arrived in England in 1919 and began a rapid social and political advancement by impressing the editor of
The Observer
, J.L. Garvin. Elected a Conservative MP, aged 28, he became a press magnate of financial newspapers and helped Churchill to survive his own money problems on the eve of the Second World War. He was Churchill’s parliamentary Private Secretary from 1939–41 and a successful Minister for Information from 1941 to 1945. During the war, he lent his Swedish cook to the Downing Street Private Office mess in the Annexe. His last years were spent actively in establishing Churchill College, Cambridge. Died 1958.

Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange, 1945–70. A firebrand socialist, campaigner for women and family issues and member of Labour’s National Executive. She was known by admirers and opponents alike as “Battling Bessie”.

Personal assistant to Sir Hastings “Pug” Ismay, the Deputy Secretary to the War Office. She handled the British administrative arrangements of six foreign wartime conferences from Quebec to Potsdam. Before the war she had turned down a job offer to go to Germany to teach English to Rudolf Hess’s family.

Prominent Civil servant. Deputy Secretary to the War Cabinet, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Reconstruction, 1943–5. He took the title Lord Normanbrook in 1963 and died four years later, aged 65.

Alongside Churchill, the primary architect of Britain’s wartime strategy. Born in 1883, Brooke fought on the Western Front during the First World War and again in France in 1940. Appointed Chief of Imperial General Staff in 1941 and chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Brooke admired Churchill but was frequently exasperated by his meddling. Promoted to Field Marshal, 1944. On elevation to the House of Lords in 1945, he took the title Lord Alanbrooke. Away from the killing fields, he was a keen ornithologist. Died 1963.

Churchill’s Private Secretary from 1952 until Churchill’s death in 1965.

British Minister in Teheran 1939–1946, later Ambassador.

Senior Conservative politician. Supported appeasement and adopted a defeatist attitude to Britain’s chances of survival in 1940. Butler’s Education Act of 1944 – introduced when he was President of the Board of Education – was widely acclaimed for improving the scholastic opportunities for the post-war generation. Despite holding high office in the Conservative cabinets of the 1950s and
early 60s, he twice failed in his bid to become Prime Minister in 1957 and 1963. He believed in Bismarck’s dictum that politics was “the art of the possible.” Died 1982.

US Secretary of State, 1945–47. A South Carolina senator prior to serving as a judge in the US Supreme Court, he was a close associate of Roosevelt during the war and accompanied the ailing President to Yalta and, as Secretary of State, went with Truman to Potsdam. As Secretary of State, he reversed his previous appeasement of the Soviet Union and argued for the reintegration of West Germany into a Western power bloc. Personal differences with Truman led to his resignation in 1947.

British diplomat. Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, 1938–46. In 1971, two years after his death, his diaries were published, providing an illuminating insight into wartime diplomacy.

Prime Minister, 1937–40. A determined driver of Britain’s policy of appeasing Hitler, he nevertheless declared war on Germany when it invaded Poland. He appointed Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty. He was accused of lacking a coherent and determined plan to pursue the war. When Churchill succeeded him as Prime Minister in May 1940, Chamberlain continued as leader of the Conservative Party and used his position to offer Churchill vital support in resisting pressure for peace talks. He remained in Churchill’s cabinet as Lord President of the Council until he was overcome by ill-health and died in November 1940.

Churchill’s wife. Born Clementine Hozier in 1885, she was eleven years Churchill’s junior. She married him in 1908. Thereafter, she stood steadfast throughout his tumultuous life, despite a strong temperament and a determinedly independent streak of her own. She enjoyed outdoor pursuits and travel. She served as President of the YWCA Wartime Fund and Chairman of Red Cross Aid to the Soviet Union Fund. Died, aged 91, in 1977.

Churchill’s youngest daughter. Born in 1922, she served with the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the Second World War and accompanied her father on many of his journeys. In 1947, she married the future Conservative politician, Christopher Soames and wrote a biography of her mother. Now Lady Soames.

Churchill’s mother. Born Jennie Jerome in New York State in 1854, she married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874. She was noted for her beauty and her attraction to a variety of men. She was unresponsive to Churchill’s pleas for attention while he attended boarding schools but later used her charm and wide-ranging social skills and contacts to advance his career. She died in 1921, aged 67, when Churchill was Colonial Secretary.

Churchill’s father. Ambitious politician and exponent of populist “Tory democracy” before destroying his career by an
opportunistic
resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886. Died, disappointed, in 1895 when he was 45 and his son 21.
An indifferent parent, who did little to justify his son’s lifetime affection and regard.

Churchill’s only son. Born in 1911, he left Oxford without taking his degree and became a journalist. Fought and lost six election campaigns, but took advantage of the “wartime truce” to serve as Conservative MP for Preston during the war. He served in the army in North Africa and Italy and was part of the British mission to Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia. He wrote the first two volumes of the official biography of his father, but his career was blighted by the burden of high expectations, drink and an irascible temper. He died in 1968, only three years after his father.

Churchill’s second daughter. She was born two months into the First World War. She became a dancer – performing with, among others, Fred Astaire – and an actress. In 1936 she married the popular entertainer, Vic Oliver, who divorced her in 1945. She died in 1982.

Churchill’s Assistant Private Secretary 1940–45 and his Joint Principal Private Secretary 1951–55. Churchill inherited “Jock” Colville as his prime ministerial Assistant Private Secretary from Neville Chamberlain, whom Colville had loyally served. Churchill and Colville enjoyed a warm rapport and Colville’s diaries are a major source for the period and are held at Churchill College, Cambridge – an institution he helped endow. He died in 1987.

Conservative politician, diplomat, socialite and historian. An opponent of appeasement, Duff Cooper resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty over the Munich Agreement in 1938. During the war he was Minister of Information from 1940–1, British Representative in Singapore in 1941 (prior to its surrender) and back in the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1941–43. He was Ambassador to France from 1944 to 1947 and wrote an admired biography of Talleyrand.