I keep a reminder on my desk. A gold-colored metal strip intended to be a bookmark, it reads “Never, Never, Never Quit. — Winston Churchill.” The lion of the British Empire said something like this in an address at Harrow, his high school alma mater, as the Second World War intensified in October 1941.
Whenever I feel like giving an essay such as this one less than the polish it demands, I glance at this ersatz motto. Say what you will about Churchill, he relished a challenge.
Many think this great man saved Western civilization by defying Hitler. A historian and journalist, Churchill was twice prime minister of the United Kingdom. He fought in close combat in India, rode in a cavalry charge in Sudan and escaped a Boer prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa. During World War I, he served as first lord of the admiralty, then resigned to resume active army service on the Western Front. His hobbies were incongruous: bricklaying and oil painting.
As an orator, Churchill had supernatural gifts. He “spoke words that marched like an army with banners, and were responsible for victories of the spirit without which our present victories of land and sea and in the air would not have been possible,” wrote a Washington Post columnist in 1944.
“Words are the only things that last forever,” said Churchill.
With more than a thousand books written in his memory, according to The Churchill Project at Hillsdale College, what’s the point of another? Mr. Churchill in the White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minster and Two Presidents takes a deep, fascinating dive into the 100-plus days Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent together during four wartime visits in Washington, D.C., and at Hyde Park and Shangri-La (later renamed Camp David). The author, Robert Schmuhl ’70, also delves into the brief visits between a politically and physically diminished Churchill and President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.
Never before had the leaders of two nations passed so much time together plotting victory in wars hot and Cold. “Both strong-willed and tough-minded, Churchill and Roosevelt fought their corners and at times couldn’t resolve disputes. Churchill’s “grand alliance” wasn’t always a harmonious one, despite the bonhomie on display whenever the pair appeared in public and in front of cameras,” writes Schmuhl, a Notre Dame professor emeritus of American studies and journalism.
No novelist could create larger protagonists. “The two shared certain characteristics: aristocratic upbringings, naval experience, undeniable ambition, political success, rare resilience, incomparable confidence, oratorical ability, and dramatic flair,” writes Schmuhl, who came to this project having written books on the presidency and having studied Churchill’s life at the University of Oxford and the British Library.
Night after night their meetings ran past 2 a.m. — an accommodation for Churchill, who rose close to noon and napped in the afternoon. “We live here as a big family in the greatest intimacy and informality,” Churchill then boasted.
But those around FDR might in modern terms have called the family dysfunctional. “A trying guest — drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, [keeps an] irregular routine, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clock upside down,” wrote one of FDR’s aides.
With a historian’s hand, Schmuhl dissects the amusing (or simply bizarre) episode during Churchill’s stay in the Rose Room when he greeted FDR naked. On New Year’s morning or thereabouts, depending on who told the tale, Roosevelt was wheeled in to the prime minister’s bedchamber. He caught Churchill fresh from his bath — one of two he took daily — and drying himself with a towel. Letting it all hang out, the Englishman reportedly said, “I have nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.” Later, he supposedly told King George VI, “Sir, I believe I am the only man in the world who has received the head of a nation without any clothes on!”
No one kept minutes of Churchill’s meetings with FDR. The discussions were momentous — when the Allies would invade Europe and the progress of the Manhattan Project.
Both men were wily politicians. Schmuhl reports that their advisers feared one would get the better of the other. “The British are evidently taking advantage of the President’s well-known shortcomings in ordinary administrative methods and are striving to take advantage of his readiness to accept shortcuts and backdoor information,” fumed Secretary of War Henry Stimson in his diary.
Isaiah Berlin, first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, made this brutal assessment of FDR: Despite the “gay and generous nature and all the manners and sweep of an old-established landowning squire, he is (a) absolutely cold, (b) completely ruthless, (c) has no friends, (d) becoming a megalomaniac, and is pulling our Mr. Churchill along rather than vice versa.”
The war wore both men down. “Have you noticed that the President is a very tired man?” Churchill’s doctor, Charles Wilson Moran, reported his asking in 1943. “His mind seems closed; he seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity.” Meanwhile, FDR grumbled that Churchill behaved like a “spoilt child” when policy decisions went against him.
Devoted students of Churchill’s life might be held rapt by all the little-known nuggets Schmuhl shares. One is horrifying: Churchill came “within one minute of assassination” at the end of his June 1942 visit, according to FDR’s chief bodyguard. It happened moments before the prime minister boarded a Boeing flying boat in Baltimore. A guard who worked for the British airline stood at the plane’s door and muttered, “I’m going to kill that bastard Churchill.” A Secret Service agent overheard him, and the man, later deemed insane, was arrested. The event was kept secret for years.
By 1944 America’s relationship with Russia had become more vital, and the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K., as Churchill put it, grew less so. FDR even embarrassed Churchill in front of Stalin. “Squirm-producing ridicule” is how Schmuhl describes the moment. At the Quebec Conference in 1944, a frustrated Churchill asked FDR, “What do you want me to do? Get on my hind legs and beg like Fala?” Fala was the president’s ubiquitous Scottie.
In June 1954 Churchill visited Eisenhower. The two held meetings on Cold War strategy and hammered out a declaration to reaffirm mutual goals.
Churchill was 79. Age — and his lavish consumption of alcohol, cigars and rich food — had caught up with him. He refused to wear a hearing aid, and Eisenhower had to shout to make himself understood, according to Ike’s speechwriter James Hagerty.
Another White House staffer thought Churchill was “feeble,” adding the cringeworthy note that Ike treated Churchill “like a son would treat an aging father and was just darling with him.”
Schmuhl reports Eisenhower’s observation: “For myself I am determined that whatever the cause of my own retirement from public life, I will never stay around in active position so long that age itself will make me a deterrent to rather than an agent of reasonable action.”
Old lion Churchill would live another 11 years, dying in January 1965. For years U.S. public opinion polls ranked him among the “most admired” people in the world. Schmuhl gives Eisenhower the last word: “I think I would say that he comes nearest to fulfilling the requirements of greatness in any individual that I have met in my lifetime.”
Of course, Churchill’s actual quote on courage is better than the fake one on my desk. What he said was: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never; in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
George Spencer is a freelance writer who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.