The Last Lion 3: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

His effect on men is one of interest and curiosity, not of admiration and loyalty. His power is the power of gifts, not character. Men watch him, but do not follow him.

In many ways Churchill remained a nineteenth-century man, and by no means a common man. He fit the mold of what Henry James called in English Hours “persons for whom the private machinery of ease has been made to work with extraordinary smoothness.

Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.

Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

Churchill, aware of Hitler’s use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what Hitler’s fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that “this is just between us.

In 1988, William Manchester began writing The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, the third and final volume of his biography of Winston Churchill.

Tell me the sort of agreement that the United Nations will reach with respect to the world’s petroleum reserves when the war is over,” Ickes proclaimed, “and I will undertake to analyze the durability of the peace that is to come.

Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: “The Unnecessary War.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future,

One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Then, after calling

The weather was worsening, but winter was not the enemy of the Russian soldier; thirteen million pairs of fleece-lined boots stamped Made in the USA ensured that the Red Army marched in relative comfort.

It meant good-bye to London and to Churchill, whose company Harriman thoroughly enjoyed, and to Pamela, whose bed he enjoyed (the lovers’ hiatus lasted almost three decades, until 1971, when Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward became the third Mrs. Harriman).

A big blow came in June 1962, when Churchill slipped and fell in his suite at the Hôtel de Paris. While drifting in and out of consciousness, Churchill told Montague Brown that he wanted to die in England. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dispatched an RAF Comet to bring the Great Man home. The press expected the worst. Montague Browne believed he would have to instruct the Duke of Norfolk to set Operation Hope Not—Churchill’s state funeral—in motion. On the flight to London, Churchill, heavily sedated, awoke, and muttered to Montague Browne: “I don’t think I’ll go back to that place, it’s unlucky. First Toby, and then this.” Montague Browne had forgotten Toby, the budgerigar, but Churchill had not. The body was frail, but not the wit.

squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because . . . it is the quality which guarantees all others.

The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained.

People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future.

The truth is so precious,” Churchill told Stalin, “that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.

Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England’s imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might.

In Churchill’s moral paradigm, loyalty was an absolute, where trust admitted to degrees.

Sherwood, Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter and biographer, wrote that although Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol… continued at quite regular intervals through most of his waking hours,” it did so “without visible effect on his health or mental processes. Anyone who suggested he became befuddled with drink obviously never had to become involved in an argument with him on some factual problem late at night….” Churchill’s drinking habits, Sherwood wrote, were “unique” and his capacity “Olympian.”18 Despite his prolonged, consistent, and prodigious consumption of alcohol, Churchill was not a drunk. But neither was he a moderate social drinker,