Churchill
By Paul Johnson
Viking, 2009

Review by Ronald Goldfarb

Having recently reviewed two massive biographies—Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (900 pages) and Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (600 pages)—I wondered how anyone could do justice to so prolific and profound a world figure as Winston Churchill in 166 pages, as Paul Johnson has attempted. Churchill was a towering public figure for more than 60 years. An active military officer and a politician, Churchill also wrote about 10 million words during his dramatic and diverse career, and delivered 500 major speeches in the House of Commons. Scores of books have been written about him and news reports covering his career are voluminous. There are Churchill societies and newsletters.

As a historian and witness to Churchill history, Johnson has the credentials and experience to contribute a fresh and substantive new take. But this book is a disappointment, even while it presents some charming and entertaining moments.

The panorama of Churchill’s early, privileged life begins at Blenheim Palace, and continues at Harrow School and Royal Military College, Sandhurst (a cadet school). As the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and a wealthy American mother, Jennie Jerome, young Winston was raised in an elite world of government access and sophisticated society. Too quickly, Johnson takes the reader to Churchill’s South Africa experiences in the Boer War where he began his unusual practice of writing about events he was engaged in during his wartime and political careers. Churchill served in Cuba and India, seeking wartime action and writing about his experiences. Too glancingly, Johnson brings young Churchill, 26, back to England with medals and a notorious reputation. While he was “the best-known young man of his generation,” Churchill also was burdened by critics and enemies who considered him “brash, arrogant, presumptuous, boastful, and a bounder.” Quite a start for one who would become a uniquely heroic personality of his generation. But it is not a beginning Johnson develops adequately, however exotic the possibilities.

Johnson calls Churchill “a mass of contradictions,” though his short biography describes a man of constant talents and persistent drives. He was elected to the Parliament from different districts under the labels of six parties. Churchill’s peripatetic political moves are too sparsely explained. Churchill had a long and faithful marriage to his lifelong partner, Clementine Hozier. They had a son and four daughters, although, Johnson writes, so eccentric and manic was Churchill’s lifestyle that he and his wife “led separate existences under the same roof.”

Churchill held several positions in various governments. In addition to being prime minister during World War II, he was Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He courted media moguls and used those contacts and his skills at writing about his military and political experiences to advance his ideas and fortunes. That practice would be impossible under modern ethics standards.

Churchill’s experiences were so rich and diverse that Johnson’s approach of briskly flying over them leaves the reader hungry for information about some of his subject’s lesser-known but important positions. An example is the story—referred to but untold—of Churchill’s frustrated, planned response to the Communist buildup in 1917 in Russia, which Johnson suggests could have saved many millions of lives had Churchill’s ideas been implemented. The same is so of Johnson’s reporting about Churchill’s experiences in the Colonial Office in the 1920s when the Middle East configuration of countries was created, a series of impositions that haunts international politics today. Johnson’s reference to Churchill’s role in the Balfour Declaration, and his conclusion that “Without Churchill it is very likely Israel would never come into existence,” is questionable, failing to develop the theme and to substantiate his view. Johnson calls Churchill’s support of King Edward VIII’s marriage to Wallis Simpson “quixotic,” an example of the author’s overly empathetic treatment of his subject.

Churchill’s ability to write the histories he participated in provided him with international fame and private fortune. His “endless vista of publisher’s contracts all over the earth” allowed him to buy and develop Chartwell, his home and acreage in Kent. There, he wrote, corresponded copiously (5,000 letters to and from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in six years), painted (500 paintings), laid bricks, and entertained lavishly, consuming prodigious amounts of champagne, brandy, and cigars. He could, Churchill boasted, do “200 bricks and 2,000 words a day.” He traveled, lectured, and was ever ready to pursue the chapter of his life that is best known—coping with the challenges of World War II.

Churchill’s life and career were at their nadir after World War I and before World War II; “He brooded in his inactivity,” Johnson reports. But he was prepared to enter his most memorable days as the second war approached. Churchill’s earlier warnings of the rise of Nazism had proved correct, and as the German war machine advanced in Europe, Neville Chamberlain resigned and Churchill was made prime minister. The man and the challenge met on the world stage. Churchill’s diary reflected his confidence: “I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial…. I was sure I would not fail.”

It is in Johnson’s chapter of Churchill’s efforts during World War II (May 1940–July 1945) that his book hits its stride. Through his oratory and personal symbolism, Churchill (and Great Britain) had their “finest hour.” Churchill’s strategic buildup of the Royal Air Force proved decisive. The code breakers made critical breakthroughs that aided the Allies’ tactics. Churchill’s military decisions to move forces into the Mediterranean and to urge Russia to enter the war on the Allies’ side helped turn the tide of the war.

Johnson concludes that Churchill’s leadership was a critical and historic factor: “No one else could have done what he did through his personal leadership, courage, resolution, ingenuity, and his huge and infectious confidence.” He performed rigorously despite strokes, a heart attack, and pneumonia. He accepted Roosevelt’s questionable openness to Joseph Stalin, despite his prescient misgivings about Communist expansionism, in order to assure the end of the war.

Churchill was brutal in his war planning. He endorsed heavy bombing of German cities, Dresden and Hamburg particularly, which was criticized after the war for the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. But the tactic of reprisal was popular in England at the time. Its citizens had experienced German assaults on its cities. Like Harry S Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Churchill’s decision to obliterate German cities to disrupt German war efforts and derail their attacks on the eastern front were viewed at the time as the cruel necessities of war the perpetrators had not started.

A product of the colonial and imperialistic era, Churchill fought to preserve, against progressive views of the times, British interests in the Middle East and Far East, with their economic advantages. While Johnson applauds Churchill’s vision in World War II, he sidesteps judging his lack of it in these instances.

When the war in Europe ended, Churchill urged his nation to continue in the Allied coalition until Japan surrendered. The English people, exhausted by their ordeals, voted their leader (then as a Tory) out of office. It was a remarkable human drama—the man who led his nation for five years and three months in a successful world war was dismissed.

Britain’s global power contracted and its people were “exhausted, impoverished, and emotionally numb.” Churchill became a citizen of the world, especially admired in the United States. His landscape paintings sold well. He owned and raced horses. He wrote his war memoirs at Chartwell, which Johnson says became “a writing factory” of cowriters, researchers, and consultants, working on his official wartime papers that he took as his personal and exclusive property. He created his own history before others could revise it. No surprise then that Churchill “won the war of words, as he had earlier won the war of deeds.” He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 and earned millions for his writings.

Churchill returned to the House of Commons late in his life, and was honored by Queen Elizabeth II with the Knighthood of the Order of the Garter. His final years were “an age of dying embers, with occasional flickers of flame and fiery glow.” On January 24, 1965, Churchill died in his London home at Hyde Park Gate at age 90. The last words of this sophisticated world figure: “I am bored with it all.”

The disappointment of this book is that Johnson touches all the bases but does not linger long enough to examine some of them satisfactorily. The book reads like a lecture to a worldly audience, with charming anecdotes and quotable references from diverse sources, puzzling personal asides (I slept in that bed; I drew Churchill caricatures when I was 5), arch remarks (“a drinking companion told me”), and French phrases left untranslated. It is confounding how so permanently interesting a subject could be examined by so studied and qualified a biographer with such a mixed result.

Ronald Goldfarb is a Washington, D.C., attorney, author, and literary agent. Reach him by e-mail at rglawlit@aol.com.