The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (4 page)

T
hat, too, was a part of him, but to leave it there would be to trivialize him. On a deeper level his aggressive, let’s-have-a-crash manner was rooted in his vision of statesmanship. That vision is difficult to grasp today. It is wholly at odds with a central doctrine of his contemporaries, sanctified by the conventional wisdom of generations since. They hold that peace is the norm and war a primitive aberration. Churchill held otherwise. As a youth he concluded that the great issues of his time would be decided on the battlefield, that Nietzsche, Carlyle, and Gobineau had been right: that war was a legitimate political instrument, that it was by no means the worst that could happen; that conflict, not amity, would be the customary relationship between great states. He reconciled himself to it—as did Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and the Zionists—and began a lifelong study of strategy.

Although he was diametrically opposed to the prevailing attitudes in Western Europe and the United States, it is arguable that events have vindicated him. In this century every world power had been engulfed by war in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Latin America has not known a year of silent guns. Australia was threatened by Japanese invasion. Indians have fought Pakistanis, Arabs have fought Israelis, Danes and Norwegians have fought Germans; Spaniards have fought Spaniards and Burmese, Burmese. Emerging nations have acquired independence only to cross the frontiers of their newly independent neighbors. Cuba became a missile base, then a port nursing Soviet submarines. Even the remote, barren Falkland Islands saw Britons and Argentinians slay one another. The United States has seen no fighting on its mainland, but American soldiers and airmen have died in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Sicily, Italy, North Africa, China, the Pacific islands, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and U.S. warships lie rusting on the bottom of every ocean. Russia and the West are locked in a truce of terror, held in check only by the fear of mutual annihilation.

Having accepted what was unacceptable to others, Churchill devoted his remarkable gifts to martial arts at an early age. His aim was always victory, but victory at the least possible cost in suffering, at the lowest price in casualties. The proper course for Britain, he reasoned, was to follow the principle of Chatham—the Elder Pitt—and hold continental enemies in the grip of English sea power, sapping their strength at the distant fringes of their dominions. In 1915 this led to the most controversial, most misunderstood decision of Churchill’s career. He meant to break the stalemate in France by forcing the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean which separates Europe and Asia, knocking Turkey out of the war and joining British and French forces with their Russian ally. Because of blunders in the field, the stratagem failed. That failure, which drove him from office and nearly ended his career, haunted him all his years. Today the wisdom of his plan then is obvious. “In the whole of the First World War,” Attlee has written, there was “only one brilliant strategical idea—and that was Winston’s: the Dardanelles.”
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Still, in the age of nuclear weapons, which Churchill did not anticipate, even the most humane of warriors is suspect. The London
Observer
declared in 1951: “Any consideration of Mr Churchill’s career as a whole brings one up against the extraordinary fact that, for all its majestic scope, it remains to this day tragically unfulfilled and fragmentary. His political role has not been meteoric and disastrous, like Napoleon’s or Hitler’s. But neither has it been linked to a definite achievement, like Richelieu’s or Chatham’s, Washington’s or Lincoln’s, Bismarck’s or Lenin’s.” An American is struck by the facility with which so many British intellectuals slight the man who saved their country. In fact, Churchill was more than an exponent of Mars. His ultimate goal was the “broad, sunlit uplands” of a time when all swords became plowshares. Even in the grim days after Dunkirk he looked westward and saw hope. If the British Isles were conquered by the Germans, he said, then the struggle would continue abroad “until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.” He had faith in eventual peace, and he believed he knew how it could be achieved: by combining the might of the English-speaking peoples in so strong a defense of the United States and the Commonwealth that the rest of the world would be held at bay, as it had been held by the British Empire in the relatively quiescent nineteenth century. Then, from that absolute base, freedom would expand outward. He cherished the possibility of a world order, a kind of Renaissance pageant to be accomplished, not by emerging states squabbling on United Nations Plaza in Manhattan, but by the Americans and the great powers of Europe, including Germany but not, significantly, the Russians, whom he “always looked on,” in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s words, “as a formless, quasi-Asiatic mass.” His dreams of a tranquil global civilization in many ways resembled the exotic mysticism of Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner, and Joseph Chamberlain, but they never turned westward. To Churchill, the “Great Republic,” as he called it, was the key. This, as he readily acknowledged, was partly because of his origins. The blood in his veins was as American as English. His mother was a New Yorker. He always kept a cast of her hand, molded in copper, on his desk. It was an exact replica of his own.
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H
e adored her and she neglected him. He later wrote: “She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly—but at a distance.” She later told friends she ignored Winston until he grew older and became “interesting.” That was an improvement on the attitude of her husband, who didn’t even like his son, but young Winston’s happiness among his nursery toys derived from neither parent but from his nanny, Elizabeth Everest—“Woom.” He recalled: “My nurse was my confidante…. [At her death she was] my dearest and most intimate friend.” Wrenched from her while still a child, he was sent to a brutal boarding school in Ascot, where the sadistic headmaster caned him until his back was a mass of welts. His treatment at the hands of the other boys was, if anything, worse. Toward the end of his life, in halting tones, he told his doctor about it. Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby woods. This was hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made. His only weapons were an unconquerable will and an incipient sense of immortality. Already he was memorizing Macaulay’s tale of a man with two comrades barring a bridge to an army:
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Beginning at the age of seven, Churchill deliberately set out to change his nature, to prove that biology need
not
be destiny. Anthony Storr, the English psychiatrist and author of
Human Aggression,
concludes that he “was, to a marked extent, forcing himself to go against his own inner nature.”
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As a Victorian, Churchill believed he could be master of his fate, and that faith sustained him, but everything we have learned about human motivation since then underscores the immensity of his undertaking. W. H. Sheldon has delineated three dominant physiques, each with its concomitant personality traits. Of the three—ectomorphic (slight), mesomorphic (muscular), and endomorphic (fat)—Churchill clearly fell in the third category. His head was ponderous, his limbs small, his belly tumescent, his chest puny. His skin was so sensitive that he broke into a rash unless he slept naked at night between silk sheets. By day he could wear only silk underwear against his skin. Endomorphs are characteristically lazy, calculating, easygoing, and predictable. Churchill was none of these. He altered his emotional constitution to that of an athlete, projecting the image of a valiant, indomitable bulldog.

At times along the way he despaired. In 1893 he wrote, “I am cursed with so feeble a body, that I can hardly support the fatigues of the day.” Yet he was determined to prove just as hardy as any mesomorph. In his teens he nearly killed himself while leaping from a bridge during a game of tag; he pitched down almost thirty feet and lay unconscious for three days. He fell again steeplechasing at Aldershot, and yet again when disembarking at Bombay, where he permanently injured a shoulder; for the rest of his active life he played polo, off and on, with his arm bound to his side. As a child he caught pneumonia. He suffered from chest ailments the rest of his life. He was allergic to anesthetics and periodically erupted in boils. Nevertheless, he refused to yield to human frailty. In his inner world there was no room for concessions to weakness. He never complained of fatigue. In his seventieth year he flew to councils of war overseas sprawled across a tick mattress on the floor of an unheated World War II bomber. During the ten years after V-E Day he suffered a heart attack, three bouts of pneumonia, two strokes, and two operations. Nevertheless, he continued to build the image of a tireless embodiment of machismo who ate, smoked, and drank, all to excess. It survives to this day. Actually, most of the stories about his alcohol intake are myth. It is true that he started each day with a scotch and soda. What is not generally known is that he made that drink last until lunch, and that the amount of liquor he put away over a twenty-four-hour day was surprisingly modest. You would never have known it to hear him talk. He wanted to be remembered as a two-bottle man, like Pitt, and he cultivated the yarns about his drinking with characteristic aplomb. Once he asked Frederick Lindemann—“the Prof,” a scientific wizard who later became Lord Cherwell—how many boxcars could be filled with the champagne he had drunk in his lifetime. The Prof replied: “Only part of one.” Churchill sighed. He said: “So little time and so much to achieve.”
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In his most famous photograph he is seen glaring at the camera, his jaw jutting like the butt end of a ham, the incarnation of defiant Britain. The Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, who understood him, caught the expression by a trick. Just before he triggered the shutter, he reached out and yanked Churchill’s cigar from his mouth. What you really see in that picture is an endomorph rudely deprived of his pacifier. If you look closely, however, you may catch a glimpse of something else: a man ruled by his instincts. In triumphing over his physiognomy Churchill had become an aggressive extrovert, but at the same time he had developed into a rare type—C. G. Jung called it the “extroverted intuitive”—and it was that, not his surface toughness, which changed the history of the world. Jung wrote: “The intuitive is never to be found among the generally recognized reality values, but is always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud, pregnant with future promise…. Thinking and feeling, the indispensable components of conviction, are, with him, inferior functions, possessing no decisive weight: hence they lack the power to offer any lasting resistance to the force of intuition.” That, or something like it, was what C. P. Snow had in mind when he wrote: “Judgment is a fine thing: but it is not all that uncommon. Deep insight is much rarer. Churchill had flashes of that kind of insight…. When Hitler came to power Churchill did not use judgment but one of his deep insights….
That
was what we needed…. Plenty of people on the left could see the danger; but they did not know how the country had to be seized and unified.” The answer was found by an extroverted intuitive. In Jung’s description of the type, “his capacity to inspire his fellow-men with courage, or to kindle enthusiasm for something new, is unrivalled.” Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Churchill’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, was constantly astonished by his “method of suddenly arriving at some decision as it were by intuition, without any kind of logical examination of the problem…. He preferred to work by intuition and by impulse.” Jan Christiaan Smuts said: “That is why Winston is indispensable.” A colleague described it as his “zigzag streak of lightning in the brain.”
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