Sir Winston Churchill 1874-1965

THE ATLANTIC

ANYONE who ever saw Sir Winston Churchill in action will never forget it. As a director of Harvard’s Alumni Association I had the privilege of sitting directly behind him in Sanders Theater that blustery autumn day in 1943 when Harvard gave him an honorary degree; I could see the brief notes from which he spoke, consisting only of lead sentences and transitions, the bones on which he formed the splendid, muscular paragraphs in his speech. I felt that he was somewhat in awe of the academic body, for he had never been an undergraduate. But that mood disappeared when our procession with him and President Conant side by side entered the Harvard Yard, for there to his surprise, massed before the chapel steps, were the thousands of student officers — Army, Naval Reserve, and Air Force — for whom there had been no room in Sanders.

Now he was in his element. Alone he mounted the chapel steps to the microphone, and facing them, gave not an exhortation, but a stirring pledge of the loyalty they would find when fighting with Britons of their age. He ended his remarks by holding up his forefingers in the familiar V for Victory, and like a wave they rose and flung it back with a shout that must have done him good.

I saw him again more privately in the Cabinet Room at Westminster during his last term as Prime Minister. Dien Bien Phu was falling, and then, as now, the question was whether a devastating air strike would do more than temporarily relieve the pressure in Southeast Asia. “I wake up every morning,” he said, between puffs on that elongated cigar, the mate of which he had given me, “feeling as if I had an albatross around my neck. But,” he added, “I think your people are wrong, you know; I don’t think a great air strike would settle anything.”

I had brought with me proofs of an article entitled “Churchill Was Right,” in which Hanson Baldwin evaluated for the Atlantic the major decisions in World War II, in too many of which, to our cost, Churchill had been overruled. He skimmed through the page proofs while his thoughts went back to World War I. “Decisions seemed clearer then,” he said. “At the time of Agadir, when I was First Lord of the Admiralty, I circulated a white paper among my seniors in the Cabinet in which I predicted that if war came and the Germans attacked, by the end of the first thirty days the British expeditionary force and the French armies would be driven apart; but that if they could hold themselves intact, in forty days the Germans would be in retreat. When the war did Come in the summer of 1914, I circulated the very same paper, and though it did not add to my popularity, it was accurate to a day.”

In the spring of 1958 I began my quest for articles by those who had lived with Churchill in his youth or in the hot noon of his career. I first approached the Earl of Swinton, for he had served with Churchill in Parliament and the Cabinet for a quarter of a century; then came Hugh Massingham, whose father had been one of Churchill’s intimates in the days when he was an outcast; then Lady Diana Cooper, who could speak so truly of the happiness of his marriage; and Eleanor Roosevelt, a hostess perforce, who did not always approve of her distinguished guest; Sir Ian Jacob, who felt the impact of Churchill on the Army; Ernst Gombrich, the discerning judge of Churchill’s painting; young John Peck, Churchill’s private secretary during the war; Lewis W. Douglas, who of all American ambassadors knew him best; and Dr. Vannevar Bush, who dared stand up to the “Old Man” when he was confused about questions of science. We chose the best of David Low’s cartoons; and I was given permission to reproduce portraits, the busts, and those telling sketches by Graham Vivian Sutherland which are now in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. This, then, is the Atlantic’s expression of gratitude for the greatest man of our age.

—EDWARD WEEKS,Editor