The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (502 page)

That was largely untrue during Churchill’s first five or six years of retirement, and only partially true during Churchill’s last two years. Montague Browne writes that in his thirteen years of service to Churchill, he never once heard the Old Man refer to the “Black Dog.” Churchill mourned the passing of the British Empire, recalled Montague Browne, and was profoundly saddened by the dangerous state of world affairs. He expressed his worries in that regard to Montague Browne as only Churchill could: “I always feared that mass pressure in the United States might force them to
use their H-bombs while the Russians still had not got any. It’s always been a tendency of the masses to drop their Hs.” Churchill’s melancholy, Montague Browne wrote, was “objective, detached, and sadly logical”; it did not stem from any sort of “subjective mood of deep depression.”
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Retirement found Churchill busy publishing his four-volume
History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
He regularly attended dinners at his private dining society, the Other Club, and visited Harrow at least once each year. In 1956 he was invited by Eden to lunch at No. 10 in order to meet Bulganin and Khrushchev, co-leaders in the Kremlin, although Churchill told Moran that week that he thought Khrushchev would soon emerge as the real power. Meals, as always, were splendid affairs, and Churchill’s intake of roast beef, brandy, whisky, and cigars remained undiminished. He painted dozens of landscapes that met with critical acclaim. The eminent British art critic and historian Ernst H. Gombrich wrote in the
Atlantic Monthly
that Churchill’s essay
Painting as a Pastime
contained ideas “so acute and so profound… I could do no better than to build them into the fabric of my book,
Art and Illusion.
”
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His wanderlust, too, remained undiminished. Churchill’s post–No. 10 travels took him to Sicily, Morocco, the French Riviera numerous times, the Italian Riviera, Rome and Paris and New York. In 1959 he journeyed by jet to New York and on to Washington for another stay at the White House, and then to the Gettysburg battlefield in the company of President Eisenhower, who made his home nearby in the shadow of the Alleghenies. On that excursion, Churchill offered a running narrative of the Battle of Gettysburg as Eisenhower’s helicopter hovered over the battlefield—the Old Man recounting Union and Confederate troop deployments, the names of the divisions and corps commanders, the time of day and outcome of each skirmish fought. His gait was slower, his hearing almost gone, but the great mind remained strong.

Later that year he stood for election in Woodford, and was returned to the House. And late in 1959, he went to Cambridge, where he planted two oak trees and laid the foundation stone of Churchill College. At his behest, the Prof and Jock Colville had been raising subscriptions for the college since 1955, when Churchill, with MIT in mind, proposed that a similar institution for science and technology be built in Britain. Churchill contributed the first £25,000, and by the end of the decade, more than three million pounds had been raised. Churchill College opened in 1964. The charter contained a clause—suggested by Clementine and endorsed by Churchill—calling for the admission of women on the same basis as men. In 1972 Churchill College became the first of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges to admit women on an equal basis, and allow them to take up residence at the schools.
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In January 1957, Queen Elizabeth summoned Churchill to Buckingham Palace to help guide her in the selection of a new prime minister—either Harold Macmillan or Rab Butler. The need to decide arose because of the resignation of Anthony Eden, whose health had collapsed, a condition brought about by the disaster that had befallen Britain during the Suez crisis of late 1956.

It began during the summer, when Egypt’s President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in retaliation for the United States’ and Britain’s pulling their financial backing from the great Aswan Dam project in protest of Nasser’s increasingly friendly relations with the U.S.S.R. and Egypt’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China in July. The nationalization of the canal was in violation of an agreement Egypt had signed with France and Britain in 1954. On October 29, the Israeli army launched a preemptive strike into the Sinai; the British and French knew and approved it in advance. Thus, with Israel and Egypt at war and the integrity of the canal zone threatened, Britain and France intervened. In fact, Eden’s real objective was to depose Nasser, whom Eden hated for his pan-Arabic nationalism and the French despised for the aid he was rendering to the Algerian rebels. Forty-eight hours after the Israelis attacked, the RAF struck Nasser’s forces, followed three days later by a French and British landing at Port Said, on the north end of the canal, which they quickly took. America had not been notified in advance of the operation, and President Eisenhower was furious. Within days, the United States joined the Soviet Union in voting for UN resolutions condemning the British and French. Most Britons questioned the morality of the strike, Colville later wrote, but all believed success was assured. It was not. On November 6, Eden, his cabinet cowed by the American threat to gut the value of the pound by flooding financial markets with sterling bonds, ordered a cease-fire (without informing the French).
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Thus Churchill’s audience with the Queen. He advised her to choose Macmillan, later telling friends he did so because Macmillan was the older and more experienced man. But all knew that Butler, though loyal in his service to Churchill since 1940, had been a man of Chamberlain, and Munich, and at the time had told Colville that Churchill’s criticism of Chamberlain was “vulgar.” In the years since, Butler, in private conversations, had made clear his belief that Churchill was a political opportunist and that he, Butler, would be a suitable choice as prime minister. The Queen chose Macmillan. Eden retired to his country house, Rose Bower, in Wiltshire, to write his memoirs. He remained a close friend of Churchill’s, and Churchill remained loyal to Eden, who, he told Moran, had “been bitched” by the cabinet when it refused to carry through on the Suez affair. Over dinner Churchill told Colville he considered the Suez
operation “the most-ill-conceived and ill-executed imaginable.” Asked by Colville what he would have done, the Old Man replied, “I would never have dared; and if I had dared, I would certainly never have dared stop.”
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Nine months later, on October 4, 1957, Soviet scientists bolted a 184-pound metal sphere that had been polished to a high sheen atop a two-stage R-7 Semyorka rocket and launched it out of the stratosphere and into space, where it dutifully began to tumble around the earth, one pass each ninety or so minutes. The launch was a complete surprise; nobody in the West had seen it coming. They could see it now, overhead. The Soviets called it
Sputnik
1; it was about the size of a soccer ball. The Western press termed the device “an earth satellite.”
Sputnik
was outfitted with a radio beacon, which broadcast back to earth a steady signal. American scientists claimed it was transmitting secret messages. It wasn’t. The signal was gibberish, but its message was clear: we can reach you. Several times a day
Sputnik
passed over the United States and Western Europe, just visible with binoculars at dawn and dusk (which is why the Soviets had polished it). Clementine, having returned to England from Max Beaverbrook’s Riviera villa, La Capponcina, scribbled a quick note to Winston, now ensconced on the French Riviera at La Pausa, the villa of his European literary agent, Emery Reves. “What do you think of the earth satellite? I heard it on the wireless—it sounded ominous.”
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It was. The temperature of the Cold War was approaching absolute zero. The Soviet rocket that had launched
Sputnik
had a range of five thousand miles, quite sufficient to reach London. Worse, as the Soviets demonstrated a month later with a second launch, it could carry a payload of more than one thousand pounds, the weight of a small hydrogen bomb, although the payload for this launch consisted only of a dog named Laika, whom the American press dubbed Muttnik. Harold Nicolson believed Britons cared more for the dog than for the implications—men in rockets carrying atomic bombs orbiting the earth in search of targets. Indeed, members of the Dumb Friends League proposed gathering outside the Soviet embassy and observing two minutes of silence. Such was the West’s paranoia that the
New York Times
ran a story in which Dr. Fred L. Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, claimed that it was “entirely possible the Russians already have a rocket on the way to the moon,” where it might detonate an H-bomb during a lunar eclipse later in the week, perhaps in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Lenin’s November 1917 revolution. The Semyorka rocket’s accuracy was thought to be wobbly, perhaps within three or four miles of a target at best. Yet accuracy no longer mattered. H-bombs had joined
horseshoes and hand grenades, where close counts. Months earlier, President Eisenhower had asked Horace Rowan Gaither, of the Ford Foundation, to form a commission to study America’s missile capabilities. One month after
Sputnik
went aloft, Gaither’s recommendations were leaked to the press: build more missiles, quickly, and build fallout shelters.
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With
Sputnik
speeding along through the heavens, the rocket age and the atomic age had merged, as Churchill in his last major address in the House predicted would happen. But Sir Winston Churchill was no longer a participant in the unfolding of the story. In his reply to Clementine he wrote that
Sputnik
itself did not trouble him but the Soviet gains in science and technology did. “We must struggle on,” he wrote, “and [look] to the union with America.”

The world press did not think to ask Churchill for his opinion on the earth satellite. The press by then was interested only in news that pertained to Churchill’s health. Churchill had spent his entire life creating an identity from his own audacious imagination, which, as Oscar Wilde observed, was the best way to get through life without suffering through it all. Churchill had made his dream a reality; he had imagined himself into Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He had fought the monster—Hitler—without himself becoming a monster. He had prevailed on his countrymen during his final year at No. 10 to build the hydrogen bomb, in order to keep the Soviet dictators behind their Iron Curtain. Yet by 1958, new ages and new generations—the atomic, the space, the beat, the rock and roll, the television—had overtaken and bypassed Sir Winston. With no further role to play in history’s unfolding, he became a spectator.

O
n September 12, 1958, Winston and Clementine celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at La Capponcina. Clementine had finally come to accept Max, but she despised the Riviera, especially when her husband did not fare well at the Monte Carlo casino. On September 22, Churchill and Clementine embarked on a Mediterranean cruise as the guests of Aristotle Onassis on board Onassis’s yacht
Christina,
a 325-foot, 1,850-ton converted Canadian frigate—a destroyer in American parlance. Onassis, Churchill told Colville after first meeting the shipping magnate in 1956, “was a man of mark.” Onassis believed likewise of Churchill. The September voyage was the first of eight cruises Churchill made aboard the
Christina
over the next five years, in the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and to the West Indies in 1960 and 1961, when Onassis set a course from
the Caribbean up the U.S. east coast to New York City in order that Churchill could pay one more visit to his other country.
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Onassis joined the small circle of family, friends, and staff who tended to Churchill’s care and comfort. Any given day might find Bernard Montgomery stopping by Chartwell for tea, Randolph and Evelyn Waugh for dinner, the “wollygogs” for a tour of the Chartwell farms. Requests for interviews, and there were many in the first years, were all screened by Montague Browne, who in the final years composed Churchill’s few brief addresses and wrote letters for the Great Man’s signature. Two nurses attended to Churchill’s needs after 1958; two typists stood by for dictation, cleaned his brushes and palettes, and helped manage his and Clementine’s social calendar. A Mr. Shaw—“a Labour man but quite a nice fellow,” Churchill told a nurse—ran the Chartwell movie projector. Churchill never dined alone; if no family or friends were on hand, Montague Browne took a seat at the table, and did so for fifteen straight nights during one stretch. In the bargain he listened in awe as Churchill delivered fifteen dissertations on British history. Dinner conversation with Churchill, Montague Browne wrote, “was a wonder and a delight” and “never, ever dull.” All who surrounded the Great Man were, in effect, “in service” to Sir Winston. Churchill’s bodyguard, Detective Sergeant Edmund Murray, remained nearby at all times, never more than a room away. Lord Moran was expected to appear at once if summoned by Churchill, who did so frequently, often to complain of imaginary ailments. On one occasion Churchill phoned the doctor with the worrisome news that he had taken his temperature only to find it read sixty-six degrees. Montague Browne overheard Churchill’s end of the conversation: “What the hell do you mean, in that case I’m dead.” A long pause ensued, then, “Well, that is to say, ninety-six, but I would still like you to come around.”
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