Churchill and America,
by Martin Gilbert
(Free Press, 528 pp., $30)
DAVID PRYCE-JONES
When Winston Churchill died in 1965, he was almost certainly the most famous man in the world. Ever since, as he slips out of living memory and into history, he has remained as famous as ever, an undisputed champion of Western democracy who in perilous times stood up to Nazism and Communism. Churchill wrote his own massive account of the events in which he had played so decisive a part. As is only to be expected where such a world-historical figure is concerned, innumerable others have weighed in, and there are debates about this, that, and the other issue in his career, in particular some of his wartime military judgments and the postwar future as he imagined it.
About the time of Churchill's death, Martin Gilbert began his special task of chronicling the great man's long life. By now, he has published thousands of pages and millions of words in huge volumes of biography and documentary supplements. With a scholar's thoroughness, he excavates the archives, and in addition seems to have spoken to everyone and anyone who has some relevant anecdote or incident to record. The procedure and the devotion speak for themselves. Evidently he is awarding Churchill the preeminent place in the Pantheon of Great Men that he believes he deserves, and about which argument is superfluous. In this perspective, a chronicle of the facts in chronological order substitutes for making any case that might need to be made.
Churchill and America, his latest book, brings together everything that correlates the two proper nouns of the title. In a very high proportion of the footnotes here, Gilbert is quoting from his own previous biographical volumes and documentary supplements. Here, in short, is a compendium.
Evidently Churchill had a romantic idea of America. Many Englishmen of his generation — witness Kipling — welcomed what they saw as America's approaching future as a great power. But perhaps Churchill was specially influenced by his American mother, Jennie Jerome, and her distinguished New York family. Certainly he claimed to be part-American when it suited him. Gilbert says that the mother was a confidante and helper, "furthering his plans and ambitions as best she could." He also quotes an ambiguous sentence Churchill wrote: "I loved her dearly — but at a distance." And he leaves it at that.
In 1895 Churchill made the first of what were to be 16 visits to the United States in his lifetime. He was to form lasting friendships with influential Americans such as the politician Bourke Cochran and the financier Bernard Baruch. Not everybody was impressed by the rising British star. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his ambassador in London, "I do not like Winston Churchill." Early visits nonetheless laid the foundation for profitable lecture tours and writing assignments. A day was to come when he would receive the colossal advance of $1.15 million from Time-Life for serialization rights to his memoirs.
Churchill's fixed view of America's potential to be a benign and decisive factor in Europe began to take practical expression during World War I. By then a member of the war cabinet, he seems to have believed that victory was possible only with American participation in the field. He criticized subsequent American failure to send troops to oppose the Bolshevik revolution, and then to join the postwar League of Nations. Gilbert makes it plain that on all sorts of further issues, large and small, Churchill fought the British corner while making sure never to take any step that might damage partnership with the United States, which he saw as essential to peace.
The development of this partnership with FDR under the shadow of Hitler shaped the modern world. At first, FDR thought that Churchill had once been personally rude to him, and he never quite got over the suspicion that Churchill was a bit of a showman, too easily carried away by his imagination and therefore in the last resort maybe brilliant but not really sound. Becoming prime minister in 1940, Churchill had to take care not to present Britain's plight too darkly for fear of implying that the country was beyond saving from Hitler; yet anything less than dramatization risked creating damaging complacency and delay in Washington. Gilbert shows how Churchill walked this fine line, deploying the full range of rhetoric to amplify determination as well as to cry for help, and time and again putting himself out physically for the face-to-face meetings with FDR that he so much relied on to obtain what he wanted.
The several clashes of opinion between Churchill and FDR are reasonable subjects of dispute to this day — for instance, over the terms of Lend-Lease; over the landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy; over the possible advancement of D-Day to 1943; and over the decision to leave the capture of Berlin and Prague to the Soviets. Above all, at the time of the Yalta conference in 1945, the diverging approach of the two democratic leaders to Stalin and Soviet imperialism had tragic long-term consequences. Through the turmoil, and then in the Truman and Eisenhower years, Churchill clearly hoped to retrieve what he could, but inwardly accepted that the United States had become the world power Britain had been in his youth.
The extracts from telegrams and correspondence and memoirs are duly and readably ordered on these pages. As is his customary style, Gilbert passes no judgment for or against what was done or left undone. Not a mere matter of complying with academic scruple, such abstention provokes the question, What is the point of writing history? Is it just to get the facts straight, or does the study of the past serve a higher purpose of distinguishing right decisions from wrong, and so help to avoid making the same mistake twice? Gilbert's readers will certainly be well informed, but they will be none the wiser for it.
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