In Search of Churchill

...but standards prevailed, and principles went unchanged...

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...Moreover, Anderson himself was extremely reluctant to discuss the matter...

...There to my amazement were dozens of letters from "my" Churchill...

...Eleven days after his letter to Cock-ran, Churchill escaped from prison and returned to British lines a hero, thus commencing, as it were, on the fabled career of the Great Winston Churchill...

...ics...

...Among the Churchill letters in Bourke Cockran's archive, one was especially revealing...

...I looked at Randolph, but he had risen from the table and was already at the sideboard, where the baron of beef was awaiting, his back to us...

...The mind boggles," Gilbert writes, "at how much misinformation may have crept into the history books, mine included, by such routes...

...And when Mrs...

...Pearman died in 1941, Churchill provided for her daughter's education...

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...You may choose from a list of saintly pioneers: William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and so on...

...In the 1750's, surviving Puritans, on the eve of extinction, surrounded by the evidence of mercantile society, bemoaned their vanishing holy experiment...

...Now, a little further down the evolutionary chain, journalists have taken up the chorus...

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...Then he lunged towards the editor, who had to dodge round the table, until Randolph hurled the carving knife on the floor and strode out of the room...

...As journalism, if that is the word for it, the decline is not just palpable, but malevolent as well: from those conscientious, sleep-inducing Sunday-morning shows—"Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," etc...

...Delete the word "talk" from these arresting opening sentences, and you scarcely need to read the subsequent pages to arrive at Kurtz's unstartling conclusion: "From Imus in the morning to Koppel late at night, America has become a talk-show nation, a boob-tube civilization, a run-at-the-mouth culture in which anyone can say anything at any time as long as they pull some ratings...

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...Ill-health had forced Mrs...

...Translation: There used to be a media culture of distinction...

...I thought to myself, what a dull half hour I will have: an unknown novelist's letters from an almost equally unknown local politician...

...When a newspaper editor whom Randolph especially wanted to impress, and for whom he had prepared a particularly elaborate dinner, imprudently admitted that he had cut the dispatches of the Times' Berlin correspondent during the 1930's, Randolph's reaction was awful to behold: The cutting of the Berlin dispatches was a central point in the perfidy of the appeasers...

...It was not merely in obscure archives, however, that Gilbert would come across "lovely grub...

...to such terrors of the airwaves as John McLaughlin and G. Gordon Liddy...

...When Randolph died and Gilbert succeeded him as Churchill's official biographer, he devoted himself to the quest for "lovely grub...

...I opened the packet...

...He has also produced a one-volume life of Churchill, along with ten documentary volumes containing, as he puts it, "a comprehensive selection of the letters, documents and other contemporary materials covering all periods of Churchill's life and career...

...Following this Downing Street 'tutorial,'" writes Gilbert, "I spent many hours with [my wife] Susie in the Public Record Office, studying the Cabinet and ministerial records...The story that we pieced together over several months was hitherto unknown...

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...Less familiar is the name Charles Torr Anderson...

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...Raunchy talk, smug talk, self-serving talk, funny talk, rumor-mongering talk...

...Shortly after Snowden's death, Lady Snowden wrote: "Your generosity to a political opponent marks you forever in my eyes the 'great gentleman' I have always thought you...

...I suspect that Mrs...

...Gilbert was very disappointed, but since it was so cold outside, and he was reluctant to leave the library's warmth, he asked the archivist to bring him the letters of the American novelist: She came back with a big package...

...Applications taken over the phone...

...It did not come at all naturally to Gilbert, whose Oxford education had made him "used to reading secondary works in which the historian had already established the facts or, if he had failed to establish them, had left them vague and blurred...

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...The archivist left, then returned with the sad news that the Cock-ran file contained no letters from the great Sir Winston Churchill—only a few by a now-forgotten American novelist, alsonamed Winston Churchill, whom Sir Winston had met in 1900...

...The "Lovely Grub" of Winston Churchill's Life In Search of Churchill: A Historian's Journey by Martin Gilbert Wiley 31-6 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan Since 1968, when he replaced Randolph Churchill as Winston Churchill's official biographer, Martin Gilbert has produced six narrative volumes tracing Churchill's career from the eve of the First World War in 1914 to his death in 1965...

...In 1934 he became Director of Training at the British Air Ministry...

...Since then, we are told, journalistic ideals have slowly given way to commercial demands: Money, not integrity, oils the machinery, and ratings are the measure of status and achievement...

...But until Gilbert contacted him in the early 1970's, no one knew of the crucial role Anderson had played during Churchill's "wilderness years...

...In a letter to Gilbert, Colville argued that Moran had simply misunderstood Churchill: The expression "to have a black dog on one's back" was one that my nanny used to use very frequently...

...Public affairs used to be covered by newspapers whose mission was to report the news fairly and accurately, and present it to readers in authoritative form so that citizens could draw sensible, well-informed conclusions...

...Conspiratorial talk...

...Angry talk...

...A diliThe Sound ofAmerica: YaketyYak, All Talk Back 68 February 1996 • The American Spectator...

...Reading this charming memoir of his search for Churchill, one can't help concluding that Gilbert is something of a "great gentleman" himself...

...Until then he had been too shy, and also too frightened, to tell them about his true Churchill connection...

...As entertainment, of course, the trajectory is steep: from Arthur Godfrey's innocent radio banality to the TV carnival world of Sally Jessy Raphael...

...The assistant had been unable to believe that the Great Man's letters were in the archive of a long-ago figure with no known British connection...

...Randolph Churchill had been a journalist since the 1930's, so this approach to history—always demanding to know what, who, and when—came quite naturally to him...

...Lord Moran, not moving very frequently in nanny circles, evidently thought that this was some new and remarkable expression which Sir Winston applied to himself...

...And so, despite his unpredictable rages, it became for me...

...The American Spectator • February 1996 67 he was inconsiderate to his subordinates—was also exploded by Gilbert...

...Eventually, though, Randolph's passion for details — "lovely grub," he called them—became Gilbert's as well: "History was for Randolph a feast, full of delicious morsels...

...In Search ofChurchill gives a sense of that excitement...

...he taught the youthful Gilbert how to be a historian...

...Besides Churchill's papers, these came mainly from public and private archives, supplemented bythe recollections of people who knew Churchill at various points in his life...

...Gilbert calls his discovery of this vein of goodness in Churchill's character "the most rewarding" result of his years of archival toil...

...Why wait to do it...

...Loud talk...

...It was a very common expression among nannies...

...Pearman's daughter, Rosemary...

...We never saw him again that night...

...In 1974, then–Prime Minister Harold Wilson invited Gilbert to io Downing Street, and lectured him for three hours about Churchill's role in the coal miners' strike of 1926...

...Fiercely loyal to his father's political legacy, Randolph was a vivid and formidable character who still burned with hatred for Neville Chamberlain and his band of appeasers...

...Suddenly, he turned towards the table, brandishing the carving knife, shaking and trembling, and exploded with a bellow of fury: "S---s like you should have been shot by my father in 194o...

...There is nothing new in this, of course: People have been shaking their heads about American vulgarity and greed since before the founding of the Republic...

...The fun began in 1962, when the 26year-old Gilbert set aside plans for graduate study at Oxford for what he thought would be a six-month stint as research assistant to Churchill's son, Randolph...

...As I read, he would fire questions at me, which I would jot down in the margin....I had to find, or at least to seek, the answers to a dozen questions each time I read a file to him, sometimes more...

...It is widely believed that Churchill was hostile to the miners, but Wilson—a staunch Laborite who had studied the coal negotiations in considerable detail—told Gilbert how impressed he had been by "Churchill's determination to give the miners a fair deal...

...Now the "villain" had revealed himself, and done so without realizing what he had done...

...Much of the research behind this prodigious body of work must have been extraordinarily tedious—Churchill's papers alone are estimated to weigh fifteen tons—but some of it was pure pleasure...

...If all of this makes sense to you, then Howard Kurtz's chronicle of the yacking universe will make comfortable reading...

...In the 1950's, television writers of the so-called Golden Age—Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky, for instance—regarded their Eden as having been invaded by the serpent of Madison Avenue...

...Pear-man to take a year off, but Churchill promised to pay her salary while she was recuperating...

...Written from a South African prison on November 3o, 1899, it concluded, "I am twenty-five today...

...Convinced that government officials were deliberately misleading the public about the Royal Air Force's lack of readiness, he began giving Churchill secret Air Ministry documents, which 66 February 1996 • The American Spectator Churchill used with devastating effect in his attacks on the Baldwin government...

...Had I been in trouble which I could not control myself, there is none to whom I could come with more confidence that I should be gently treated...

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...He quotes from a 1938 letter sent by Churchill to his long-time secretary, Mrs...

...But "after I pieced together Anderson's story," Gilbert writes, "he asked me to come to his home in Chichester to tell his grandchildren...

...Talk shows, in their various forms and incarnations, serve as a gauge of relentless decline...

...Gilbert had learned that Cockran's papers were deposited in the New York Public Library, so one "bitterly cold March day" in 1965, he asked the Library's archivist for any letters in Cockran's papers written by Winston Churchill...

...JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...Churchill's kindness also comes out in a letter sent to him in 1937 by Ethel Snowden, widow of the Labor politician, Philip Snowden, one of Churchill's severest critHot Air: All Talk, All the Time Howard Kurtz Times Books / 384 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian nA merica is awash in talk," writes Howard Kurtz, who covers journalism for the Washington Post...

...But Randolph did more than provide occasional fireworks...

...Another myth about Churchill—that Call today for your free personalized quotation: Murdock-Taylor 3350 Peachtree Road, N.E...

...I think that Sir Winston must have said on various occasions to Lord Moran, "I have got a black dog on my back today...

...Their litany is familiar...

...In the 188o's, novelists as varied as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain saw the collapse of democratic civilization in the triumph of capital during the Gilded Age...

...Squadron Leader Anderson had won the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1917...

...Gilbert's job was to go through the files containing Winston Churchill's letters, have them typed up by one of the secretaries, then read them aloud to Randolph...

...Pearman, and given to him by Mrs...

...It is terrible to think how little time remains...

...You're not getting any younger, and every year you delay the more expensive coverage becomes...

...Actually, he had sixty-five years ahead of him, but Churchill, convinced that he, like his father, was destined to die young, thought that he had to make his name soon...

...Gilbert agrees with Colville that, far from stemming from deeply-rooted psychological difficulties, Churchill's bouts of depression were simply "a reaction to the world's failures, and deep frustration whenever he was not in a position to influence them...

...One of those was Churchill's private Secretary, Sir John Colville...

...now it is a world of cacophony and avarice, an asylum where the inmates have tied up the psychiatrists, and found PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...

...Another name rescued from oblivion by Gilbert is that of Bourke Cockran, a Tammany Hall politician (also reputed to be Churchill's mother's lover) whose inspiring oratory exerted a powerful impact on Churchill...

...Names like Lord Moran and Sir John Colville are well known to all students of the Churchill saga...

...It turned out that Churchill had tried to win the miners "a minimum wage that could not be undercut by individual owners," but the Cabinet "declined to support Churchill's efforts...

...50 My daddy died and mommy says we can't live here anymore...

...Colville challenged the view, popularized by Churchill's physician, Lord Moran, that throughout his life Churchill had been prone to lengthy and debilitating bouts of depression—what Churchill called his "black dog...

...Everest [Churchill's nanny] must have used it too...

...Gilbert's doubts about Lord Moran's judgment were reinforced when, having completed the final volume of his biography, he discovered that Moran's published diary, upon which he had relied but which he'd never seen in its original form, was not, strictly speaking, a diary at all— merely a series of undated musings...

...With the invention of broadcasting, the techniques of presenting the news were modified, to be sure...

...The stress on the words "s---s" and "shot" was fearsome to hear...