Churchill’s encounter with Mark Twain appears
in the former’s 1930 autobiography, My Early Life, certainly one of his
most revealing books. on display in it are the conflicting themes of Winston’s
life: his tortured relationship with his famous father, whose legacy he strove
to exceed; his sense of being half-American despite an unswerving loyalty to the
British Crown; and his fascination with war, both as an adventurer-writer and a
statesman-politician who deeply understood the power of words.
While war and peace provided a backdrop for his
1900 lecture tour, commerce remained Churchill’s frontline concern. He had been
elected recently to Parliament, but without a steady source of income. A seat in
the House of Commons then didn’t pay any salary, and Churchill depended on his
writing assignments for a living. An agent convinced him he could earn a tidy
sum by lecturing in America. “I have so much need for money and we cannot afford
to throw away a single shilling,” he confided to his mother.
America always held a special affinity for
Churchill. Five years earlier, he had visited his mother’s New York cousins and
been mightily impressed by the young nation’s restless energy. “Picture to
yourself the American people as a great lusty youth—who treads on all your
sensibilities and perpetrates every possible horror of ill manner—whom neither
age nor just tradition inspire with reverence—but who moves about his affairs
with a good hearted freshness which may well be the envy of older nations of the
earth,” Churchill described to his brother in a note echoing Alexis de
Tocqueville. In New York, he met Congressman William Bourke Cockran, an Irish
American friend of his mother’s and a riveting public speaker, upon whom Winston
modeled his own rhetoric. “You are indeed an orator,” Churchill told Cockran.
“And of all the gifts there is none so rare and precious as that.” Winston
learned to argue convincingly rather than divisively, to persuade rather than
condemn.
Although British at heart, he described himself
as “a child of both worlds.” His mother, Jennie Churchill, grew up the
multi-talented daughter of Leonard Jerome, a Wall Street speculator and
racetrack operator (his initial fortune made in Rochester, New York, publishing
the newspaper house organ for the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party). In
describing the aggressive tycoon Jerome, Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins later
said “there was a touch of Joseph P. Kennedy about him.” Jennie wed Lord
Randolph in Paris after an abrupt romance that produced Winston’s premature
arrival eight months later, on November 30, 1874.
Friends such as Violet Bonham Carter thought of
Winston as half-American—both “an aristocrat and yet our greatest Commoner.”
This potent cross-Atlantic combination of genes seemed a key to Churchill’s
compelling personality, what the British historian A. L. Rowse called “the
strength of the two natures mixed in him—the self-willed English aristocrat and
the equally self-willed primitive American—each with a hundred-horsepower
capacity for getting his way.”
Winston was amused by those who traced his
American roots to the Iroquois or to America’s 1776 Revolutionary leader against
the British. “It certainly is inspiring to see so great a name as George
Washington upon the list,” Winston said of one published genealogy. “I
understand, however, that if you go back far enough everyone is related to
everyone else, and we end up in Adam.”
* * *
Winston
Churchill’s American lecture tour in 1931 appeared a great success, as many
enjoyed this visiting Englishman’s wit and speaking style. “Some of his
epigrams, so it is wickedly asserted by his enemies, are carefully prepared in
advance, and even practiced before a mirror,” declared a New York Times editorialist. “But their sting and point are nonetheless
delightful.” on December 13, 1931, though, the Churchill bandwagon came to a
screeching halt. That evening, Winston planned to go to bed early at the Waldorf
Astoria, his Manhattan hotel. Instead, at nine o’clock he received a telephone
call from Bernard Baruch, inviting him to his home on Fifth Avenue to meet with
two mutual friends. Into the night, Churchill took a taxicab. Along the way, he
realized he didn’t have Baruch’s precise home address, only a general idea of
its location from an earlier visit. At one point, Churchill bounded out of the
cab toward the sidewalk. He looked left but not to the right. When he turned, he
saw “a long dark car rushing forward at full speed.” The driver hit the brakes,
but too late. In a lingering split second, Churchill, then fifty-seven, thought
to himself, I am going to be run down and
probably killed. He fortunately
wasn’t—another near miss in a life lucky enough to rival any cat’s. His heavy
fur-lined coat seemed to cushion some of the blow. But the automobile took its
toll, smacking Churchill’s head to the pavement with “an impact, a shock, a
concussion indescribably violent,” and dragging him for several yards. “I do not
understand why I was not broken like an eggshell,” he later observed. In the
middle of Fifth Avenue, a boulevard of American ambition, Churchill lay
prostrate, bleeding and in pain, as police and a crowd rushed to his
aid.
“A man has been killed!” someone
cried.
While being picked up and carried away by
rescuers, this fallen stranger was asked for his name.
“I am Winston Churchill, a British statesman,”
he moaned.
By the time he arrived at Lenox Hill Hospital,
Churchill felt sharp pain yet realized he would survive. Baruch and Clementine
soon stood at his bedside. “Tell me, Baruch, when all is said and done, what
is the number of your house?” he uttered, a sure sign he’d get well and
that his quick wit never needed a crutch.
This almost-deadly car crash derailed
Churchill’s lecture tour, which he needed most urgently to pay his bills at
home. Instead, he spent the next several weeks mending, and mulling over his
future. “You will find me, I am afraid, a much weaker man than the one you
welcomed on December 11,” he wrote to Randolph, back in England. Clementine
conceded to her son that Winston had suffered “three very heavy blows” in recent
years, leaving him without either political power in Parliament or much of his
personal savings on Wall Street. “The loss of all that money in the crash, then
the loss of his political position in the Conservative Party, and now this
terrible injury—He said he did not think he would ever recover completely from
the three events,” Clementine wrote. The prospect of a diminished life seemed
more unbearable to Winston than if he had been killed on the street. It marked
the darkest period in his “wilderness years,” an agonizing time when he felt
pushed aside from his countrymen and good fortune.
By February, Churchill had recovered enough to
travel and fulfill most speaking engagements in the United States. His loyal
circle of friends and patrons rallied to his cause, deciding to buy him a
Rolls-Royce “to celebrate his recovery” and deliverance from oblivion. “We think
there is a certain appropriateness in the presentation of a motor car to a man
who has been knocked down by a taxi-cab!” wrote Brendan Bracken to Baruch.
Though his career seemed over in England, Churchill’s popularity among Americans
stayed intact. Some in the press pondered if Winston, born to an American
mother, would ever consider running for president. “I have been treated so
splendidly in the United States that I should be disposed, if you can amend the
Constitution, seriously to consider the matter,” he joked.
* * *
Old Glory and the
Union Jack draped the streets of Jefferson City, Missouri—the perfect symbolism
for a 1946 visit by President Harry Truman and the man who Truman said had saved
Western civilization.
In an open-air limousine convertible, Winston
Churchill sat beside Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successor while thousands of
Missourians waved and greeted them at the train station. The two grinning
politicians were surrounded by dour security agents (standing guard on the
running boards) as the limo drove through the state capital on March 6, 1946.
After a long train ride from Washington, the seventy-one-year-old former British
prime minister was careful not to exert himself too much. When asked that year
about his secret of success, the old warhorse advised, “Conservation of
energy—never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie
down.”
Only months after being turned out of high
office, Churchill journeyed to a college gym in nearby Fulton to give one of the
most significant speeches of his career. With the American president’s blessing,
his clarion call for Anglo-American resistance to the Soviet Union’s “Iron
Curtain” (his metaphor for the spread of communism dividing up Europe) would
launch the decades-long Cold War. But this address in Fulton, entitled “The
Sinews of Peace,” also provided another turning point in Churchill’s long life.
Instead of retirement, he chose vigorous, almost defiant engagement. Rather than
fade away with his glorious victories of the past, he decided to embrace, almost
prophetically, the future of the postwar world with its atomic dangers. He would
reinvent himself once again as a world statesman, his voice both familiar and
brand new.
Not everything about this trip was high stakes,
however. on the ride to Missouri, Truman and Churchill demonstrated their
personal diplomacy with a card game.
“Mr. President, I think that when we are
playing poker I will call you Harry,” Churchill announced.
“All right, Winston,” Truman
replied.
For more than an hour, they played with a
handful of aides and reporters aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, the
specially made presidential train car with a thick concrete floor to protect
against explosions. Churchill’s pile of chips dwindled as he lost each hand,
downing sips of drink along the way. When the former prime minister, wearing one
of his siren suits, excused himself for a momentary bathroom break, Truman
quickly issued an executive order.
“Listen, this man’s oratory saved the western
world,” Truman commanded the group, which included a young reporter named David
Brinkley. “We are forever indebted to him. We’re not going to take his
money.”
“But, Boss, this guy’s a pigeon,”
cried one of the players, Harry Vaughan, the president’s military
aide.
The president wouldn’t allow anything to trump
this special relationship. As if a matter of national security, the card sharks
were defanged. Winston’s fortunes suddenly turned for the better, Brinkley
recalled years later, after “Truman ordered us to let him win.”
Before the evening aboard the presidential
train ended, Winston displayed his considerable understanding of American
history and wondered aloud about fate. “If I were to be born again,” he mused,
he wished to become a citizen in “one country where a man knows he has an
unbounded future.”
Truman’s entourage asked what nation that might
be.
“The USA,” Churchill declared solemnly. . .
even though I deplore some of your customs.”
Puzzled, the Americans wondered what Yankee
habit so appalled him.
“You stop drinking with your meals,” Winston
replied.
