The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (209 page)

Chamberlain preferred agreements with Germany and Italy to America’s goodwill. And he and those around him saw the foreign secretary as an obstacle to this policy. This is somewhat puzzling. To the British and American publics, Eden later came to be regarded as a shining figure overshadowed only by Churchill. Actually, he was more cautious than ambitious; until late in the decade there was little difference in principle between him and the prime minister whose friendship and confidence he had enjoyed. With Hitler threatening Austria, he told the cabinet, he did not want to put himself “in the position of suggesting a resistance which we could not in fact furnish.” Nevertheless, Chamberlain persuaded Hankey that Eden had been “swayed by a lot of sloppy people in the F.O.” In Rome, Lady Ivy Chamberlain, Austen’s widow, proudly wearing a new Fascist party badge, reported that Eden was regarded there “with strong dislike and distrust.” The prime minister was turning to people like her for private diplomacy, or sending messages abroad over his own name, thus bypassing and humiliating the foreign secretary. Why? The likeliest explanation is that Chamberlain, as Eden had told a friend, had a certain sympathy for dictators, “whose efficiency appealed to him.”
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The climax came in late February. Hitler had browbeaten Schuschnigg on a Saturday. Eden’s turn came the following week. He had invited the Italian ambassador to England, Dino Grandi, to confer with him at the Foreign Office. Acting on instructions from Rome, Grandi refused and asked for a meeting with Chamberlain to discuss the Führer’s insistence on further concessions from Schuschnigg. The prime minister agreed and sent Eden instructions to join them when they met on Friday, February 18. Thus the British foreign secretary was in the extraordinary position of facing a de facto alliance between the envoy of a potential enemy and his own prime minister, which, as Telford Taylor suggests, “must be well-nigh unique in diplomatic annals.”
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British intelligence had informed Eden that Hitler had decided to seize Austria by force and Mussolini had agreed not to intervene. Grandi, prompted by the P.M., denied that there was any such understanding and added that unless Britain were sympathetic toward Mussolini’s policies, Italian hostility toward His Majesty’s Government would harden. After Grandi left, Eden wrote in his diary: “N.C. became very vehement… and strode up and down the room saying with great emphasis ‘Anthony, you have missed chance after chance. You simply cannot go on like this.’ ” After following the star of appeasement for five years, Eden had found it to be tinsel. Only a week earlier he had promised an audience in Birmingham that he would agree to “no sacrifice of principles and no shirking of responsibilities merely to obtain quick results,” that peace could be preserved only “on a basis of frank reciprocity with mutual respect.” Now, unless he broke that vow, he had to quit. On Saturday the prime minister told his cabinet that he had decided to open direct negotiations with the Duce. Eden resigned in disgust the next day, and his under secretary quit with him.
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Halifax, appointed to succeed him, was delighted. Chamberlain was relieved, and no one in Parliament was surprised. Chamberlain filled the under secretary’s void by appointing R. A. (“Rab”) Butler. Butler called at the German embassy, described his close relationship with Sir Horace Wilson, told Hitler’s diplomats that his primary objective was “close and lasting cooperation” with the Reich, and said he would “do all I can” to promote it. The embassy, which had reported to the Wilhelmstrasse that Wilson was “decidedly pro-German,” now sent word that Butler also “has no prejudices against us.”
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Readers of
The Times
were under the impression that anyone who spoke out in Eden’s behalf would be a lone voice. Actually, the country was more divided than Dawson acknowledged. As England’s most eminent journalist, he came under fire in Oxford. A young Fellow asked him why the FO, with
The Times
’s approval, devoted so much space to Mussolini and other Fascists when “It isn’t they who are the danger. It is the Germans who are so powerful as to threaten all the rest of us together.” Dawson revealed the depth of the void left when honor had been abandoned: “To take your argument at its own valuation—mind you, I’m not saying I agree with it—but if the Germans are so powerful as you say,
Oughtn’t we to go in with them?
”
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Winston had reservations about Eden—he thought him weak at times and capable of unsound judgment—but he knew he had been a brave officer in France and would never compromise England’s honor in the name of a sham peace. Later he described the impact of the news on him:

He sent Eden a note, advising him on what line to take in his resignation speech and urging him not to “allow your personal feelings of friendship to yr late colleagues to hamper you in doing full justice to yr case.”
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Hurt and angry, Eden spoke to the House on February 21: “I should not be frank if I were to pretend that it is an isolated issue. It is not.” Without actually mentioning the rebuff to Roosevelt or Hitler’s designs on Austria, he said slowly: “
Within the last few weeks upon one most important decision of foreign policy which did not concern Italy at all the difference was fundamental
.” His peroration was a paraphrase of the speeches Winston had been delivering for over five years: “I do not believe that we can make progress in European appeasement if we allow the impression to gain currency abroad that we yield to constant pressure…. I am certain in my own mind that progress depends above all on the temper of the nation, and that temper must find expression in a firm spirit. That spirit I am confident is there. Not to give voice to it is I believe fair neither to this country nor to the world.”
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Churchill spoke the next day. Citing recent “acts of bad faith” by Fascists and Nazis, he said he thought “this was an inopportune time for negotiations with Italy.” Furthermore, “the dictator Powers of Europe are striding from strength to strength and from stroke to stroke, and the Parliamentary democracies are retreating abashed and confused.” All in all, he said, “This has been a good week for the Dictators. It has been one of the best they have ever had. The German Dictator has laid his hand upon a small but historic country, and the Italian Dictator has carried his vendetta to a victorious conclusion against my right Hon friend the late Foreign Secretary…. All the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire was no protection to my right Hon friend. Signor Mussolini has got his scalp.” The prime minister’s contempt for Americans was widely known. Churchill foresaw the time when the United States might be desperately needed as a British ally. But after this disgraceful episode, “millions of people there who are our enemies have been armed with a means to mock the sincerity of British idealism, and to make out that we are all Continental people tarred with the same brush.” That, he said, was a staggering blow. Britain’s old policy, he noted, had been to build up the League of Nations. Chamberlain openly scorned the league. Churchill asked: “Is the new policy to come to terms with the totalitarian Powers in the hope that by great and far-reaching acts of submission, not merely by sentiments and pride, but in material Factors, peace may be preserved?” He reminded them of Britain’s weak defenses, of the loss of the Rhineland, of the drama in Austria, now approaching a tragic climax, and added: “We do not know whether Czechoslovakia will not suffer a similar attack.” To turn away from the Americans was folly, he said, facing Chamberlain and concluding: “I predict that the day will come when at some point or other, on some issue or other, you will have to make a stand, and I pray God that when that day comes we may not find that through an unwise policy we are left to make that stand alone.”
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A
fter thirty years of marriage the Churchills had reached the age at which familial bonds loosen. All the children except Mary, now in her midteens, were grown. Diana, nearly thirty, had married the son of Sir Abe Bailey, a wealthy South African and a friend of Winston’s; three years later she divorced him and married Duncan Sandys. Now she was the mother of two. Randolph, in his late twenties, had been engaged to a girl from Cleveland, Ohio, until his mother talked him out of it. Her motive had been his happiness, but the real winner was the girl. Despite his distinguished name and his leonine features, the Churchill’s only son was a grim prospect for any bride, or, indeed for anyone who crossed his path. Already he had as many enemies as his father. The constitution of one club had actually been amended to read: “Randolph Churchill shall not be eligible for membership.” During one dinner-party argument he shouted at an executive of British Petroleum: “You have nothing to contribute to this. You are only a clerk in an oil store.” He was a chain-smoker, and late in his life, when a tumor was discovered in his alimentary canal, many hoped for the worst. They were disappointed. It was benign. Lord Stanley of Alderly learned of the surgery while standing at the bar in White’s. “What a pity,” he said, “to remove the one part of Randolph that is not malignant.” Both parents shared the responsibility for having raised a cad, though Winston’s guilt was more conspicuous. Remembering his own wretched school years, he had approved of his son’s contempt for Etonian discipline. After only four terms at Christ Church, Randolph came down from Oxford to launch his public career by a lecture tour of the United States. Everyone in the family except Winston, Mary recalls, thought the scheme “a hare-brained adventure.”
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Eventually—and perhaps inevitably—the youth turned on his father. One mealtime after another erupted in terrible rows between the two, often in the presence of eminent guests. It became, in Colville’s words, “a sad and sorry relationship.” The climax followed a January 1938 visit to Chartwell by Leslie Hore-Belisha, the war minister. A few weeks later Churchill sent him a small gift. It was a typical Churchillian gesture—magnanimity toward a man whose company he enjoyed despite their disagreements on the government’s defense policy. One evening during dinner
en famille
he was highly critical of Hore-Belisha’s role in shaping that policy. Randolph interrupted to say that since he felt that way, the invitation to the war minister and the gift must have been meant to curry favor. The rest of the family gasped. Young Churchill meant to be ironic, but he must have known that his father’s personal honor was no joking matter. Outraged, Winston stopped speaking to his son. Randolph wrote him the next day, not to apologize, but to reproach him for “relapsing into moody silence.” Churchill replied: “I thought yr remark singularly unkind, offensive, & untrue; & I am sure no son shd have made it to his father. Your letter in no way removes the pain it has caused me, not only on my own account but also on yours, & also on account of our relationship…. I really cannot run the risk of such insults being offered to me, & do not feel I want to see you at the present time.”
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As the years passed, Colville recalled, “the worm turned, and when Randolph arrived, resolved to be good and peaceful, it would be Winston who launched an attack.” Thus their relationship deteriorated, never sinking to the depths of Winston’s with his own father but nevertheless a source of pain for the entire family. The intriguing question arises: Where was Randolph’s mother? The answer is that she was there but might just as well not have been. Aloof, silent, eyes averted, Clementine by her whole manner proclaimed that she had warned her husband, he hadn’t listened, and this was the result. But the son felt uncomfortable with his mother, too. Later, after he had married Pamela Digby, he told her that Clementine “hated” him. That was absurd, but friends of the family thought her an unusual mother. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, the wives of Britain’s public men balanced their obligations to their husbands against those to their children. Most compromised. To Clementine, Winston always came first. Mary recalls that he and his career “consumed the cream of her thought and energy.” That was not entirely true. She “never became a yes-woman,” in Mary’s words, “or lost her capacity for independent thought.” Certainly she had a strong mind of her own. When Pamela was having difficulties with her young husband, Clemmie advised her: “Pack up, take the children, leave
and don’t tell him where you’re going
. You can’t imagine how kind and sweet he’ll be when you return.”
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