The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (298 page)

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To the memory of

JOHN COLVILLE, C.B., C.V.O.

1915–1987

Harrovian, Civil Servant, Fighter, Pilot, Scholar

(William Manchester, August 1994)

FOR BARBARA

(Paul Reid, August 2012)

The British Isles, September 1940

London and the City of Westminster, September 1940

Eastern Mediterranean

North Atlantic

Southeast Asia

Western Mediterranean

Eastern Europe and the Middle East

Western Europe

In 1988, William Manchester began writing The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, the third and final volume of his biography of Winston Churchill. Bill’s research was complete. He had assembled his notes in fifty-page bound 8½ × 21-inch paper tablets, which he called his long notes, or “clumps.” More than forty such tablets were dedicated to the war years 1940–1945, and a few addressed the postwar years 1946–1965.

His notes consisted of photocopied extracts from myriad sources, including Churchill’s speeches, wartime memoirs, letters and telegrams Churchill sent and received, diary entries of contemporaries, official documents, newspaper clippings, and numerous secondary sources. They also included excerpts from transcripts of more than fifty interviews Bill conducted in the early 1980s with Churchill’s friends, family, and colleagues.

Between 1988 and 1998, Bill, in increasingly poor health, wrote about one hundred pages of Defender of the Realm, a first draft covering the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940, and the beginning of the Battle of Britain in July 1940. Then, in 1998, he suffered two strokes that left his speech slightly slurred and his left leg partially paralyzed. Although the strokes did not steal his memory or his ability to formulate complex thoughts, Bill could no longer connect those thoughts on paper. He could no longer write.

My first encounter with Bill was on the page, when I read his account of the assassination of President Kennedy, The Death of a President. By the time I met Bill in person, I had read all of his nonfiction works. Like so many readers, I thought the first two books of The Last Lion were magnificent, and like so many, I eagerly awaited the final volume.

In 1996, I covered a reunion in West Palm Beach of Bill’s World War Two Marine buddies for the Palm Beach Post, where I worked as a reporter. Bill, ill with pneumonia, could not attend. Two years later, in 1998, I accompanied five of those old Marines to Bill’s home in Middletown, Connecticut, for a reunion designed to raise his spirits after his strokes and the death earlier in the year of his wife of fifty years, Judy. The Marines had all achieved success in life—an industrialist, a petroleum engineer, an oceanographer and Magellan biographer, and a Baptist minister with a doctorate in divinity—and they were proud of their service as enlisted men. By the end of the weekend, I felt as if all these Marines were my good friends, including Bill.

Our friendship deepened in the years that followed. I visited Bill often, sometimes in the company of the old Marines, who gathered at Bill’s house once a year. Bill and I chatted by phone regularly. We talked history, politics, and, always, baseball, specifically the annual autumn demise of our Boston Red Sox. He asked for, and I sent him, copies of my stories. I felt certain that he would never finish Defender of the Realm, but when I suggested that he find someone to complete the book, he would shake his head no. He and his publisher, Little, Brown, regularly received calls and letters—even surprise office visits—from fans around the world asking when the book would be finished. In 2001 Bill told the New York Times that he could no longer put words to paper. Eventually, he agreed to consider a collaborator, but none proposed worked out. My surprise, therefore, was total when, late one evening in early October 2003, during one of my visits to Middletown, Bill asked me to finish Defender of the Realm. “You write,” he said, “I’ll edit. My red pencils are sharpened and ready.”

He sent me home that weekend with about a dozen of his clumps and several books having to do with the Battle of Britain. My mission was to write sixty pages on the Blitz. Based on their impressions of my sample chapter, Bill, Don Congdon, Bill’s agent of fifty years, and Little, Brown decided I should proceed. Our collaboration began.

But it would not last long. By early 2004 Bill was very ill. He died on June 1. By then I had realized that his clumps were not intended for literal transcription, but had served Bill as a narrative catalyst. The notes were arranged neither strictly chronologically nor by topic or character. Bill had inked into the margins numerous shorthand reminders and color-coded references to topics and sources only he could decipher. Some he had explained to me, others he had not. The notes had helped guide Bill toward a form—a portrait of Churchill—that he had already envisioned, much as an architect’s rough line drawings can conjure in his mind an image of his finished building. The notes contained enormous amounts of information, but they had no outline and no sense of narrative structure. Bill’s notes spoke to him in ways they could not speak to me.

Over the course of several months, I assembled much of the original source material Bill had used, including the full transcripts of the interviews he had excerpted in his notes. To this I added a digital edition of Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James, along with new editions of memoirs and diaries of Churchill’s contemporaries. I perused official British government documents that had not been released when Bill was assembling his notes. I reread Bill’s earlier biographies and histories for insight into his approach to narrative pace and cadence. Only then could I begin to write the book.

Bill spent many years on the Wesleyan University campus as an adjunct
professor of history and writer in residence, but he was not an academic. He was a storyteller who made history accessible by masterful use of the dramatist’s tools—plot, setting, and character. He and I often discussed his approach, and agreed that the biographer must get out of the way of his subject, who should be placed squarely within his times and be allowed to speak and act for himself. In the case of the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century, the importance of doing this is obvious.

At the start of the project, I spoke at length with the eminent British historian Sir John Keegan, who offered encouragement and guidance. Churchill’s namesake grandson, Winston S. Churchill, gave generously of his time, up to his death in 2010, answering yet more questions on the subject of Sir Winston, as did Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames.

I thank the following friends and colleagues who offered wise counsel as the years went by; many read and commented on the manuscript in its various stages: Sanford Kaye, Jim Case, Rich Cooper, Jane Deering, Tess Van Dyke-Gillespie, Bill Gillespie, David Rising, Jeff Baker, Albin Irzyk (Brigadier General, U.S. Army, ret.), John Newton, Craig Horn, Howard Bursen, Dr. Porter Crow, Virginia Creeden, and Alex and Joan Balas. Thanks also to my former editors at the Palm Beach Post—Tom O’Hara, Jan Tuckwood, and Melissa Segrest—whose journalistic standards are in the highest and best tradition of American newspapering. Alan White (British Foreign Office, ret.) offered vital insight into the workings of the British government. Journalist John Murawski examined the manuscript with a reporter’s eye. Doctors Audrey Tomlinson, Ron Pies, David Armitage, and Michael First brought their vast clinical expertise to bear on matters of Churchill’s mental and physical health. My thanks also go to Maggi LeDuc, a recent graduate of American University, who spent many long hours in a successful search for photographs that captured the spirit of Churchill and his times.

Historian Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London, gave sound advice over the years when asked, and I asked often. Roosevelt scholar Warren Kimball provided invaluable guidance on the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship.

Lee Pollock, executive director of the Churchill Centre, put the resources of that organization at my disposal. Those who seek to learn more about the extraordinary life of Sir Winston Churchill are well advised to begin their search by contacting Lee at
www.winstonchurchill.org
. Richard Langworth, editor of the Churchill Centre quarterly, Finest Hour, combed the manuscript for historical accuracy, as he had done for volume two, Alone.

Over the past eight years, Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch and editorial director Geoff Shandler have given this project their full support. I thank them and assistant editor Liese Mayer and editorial assistant Brandon Coward, who, with constant good cheer, helped guide the project through its final stages.

I owe my editor, William D. Phillips, an immeasurable debt of gratitude. Six times the manuscript passed between us, and six times Bill wrought improvements. This is his book, too. And after Bill finished his perusals of the work, Pamela Marshall took up her copyediting task, from the first word to the last, twice. It has been a pleasure to work with Bill and Pamela, but foremost, it has been an honor.

I am profoundly grateful to Bob Kopf, Ken Linge, and Jim Miller; Ray Foster, my neighbor from Lynn, North Carolina; my brother, Jim Reid; and my good and true friends Marcello and Diane Fiorentino. Without them, this project could not have come to fruition.

My agent Don Congdon did not live to see the finished manuscript. Don’s son and partner, Michael, stepped in and, like so many who had a hand in this project, did so with enthusiasm.

In 2003 Bill Manchester, with one simple declarative sentence, changed my life: “I’d like you to finish the book.” Bill died years before he could hold in his hand a complete manuscript of Defender of the Realm. But even though he was not here to discuss the project, or to review my pages or help me decipher his cryptic notations, our partnership remained intact. Bill trusted me to tell this story, and for that I thank him.

Five others, who long ago set in motion my role in this story, also did not live to see the completed manuscript: John and Eleanor Reppucci, my childhood neighbors in Winchester, Massachusetts; my sister Kathy; and my parents, Mary and Sam Reid, he a son of South Boston and the United States Naval Academy. They all loved a good tale, and all could spin one. My introduction to Churchill came almost six decades ago. On Saturday mornings I stood next to the stove as my father, attired in his old Annapolis bathrobe and a seaman’s cap, flipped pancakes and fried eggs while reciting along to Churchill’s wartime speeches, which played on our old RCA Victrola. “Listen to Winston,” my father commanded, stabbing the air with the spatula in syncopation with Churchill’s words. I listened.

One year my father put the six volumes of Churchill’s The Second World War under the Christmas tree. Quoting Churchill, he summed up the moral of the story thus: Never give in.

I offer those words to a new generation of readers, including my son, Patrick, who enthusiastically critiqued every permutation of the manuscript, my daughters, Georgia and Mary, and my stepsons, August and Alex. Never Give In.

Paul Reid

August 2012

Tryon, North Carolina