A Doctor's Dilemma

...His courage, energy and resolution, the boundless delight in life and especially life at its fullest stretch, made him lovable and open...

...Although the British medical periodicals are now running two-to-one in favor of Lord Moran's publishing, Lady Churchill, son Randolph and a great part of the lay press have condemned the book as a breach of friendship, of taste and of a physician's discretion...

...I don't think I shall ever get well, but I shall not make any decisions until September...

...But while Herndon positively gains by his not having followed Lincoln to Washington, Moran's account is damaged by his exciting but superficial exposure to history...

...Lord Moran records that time and again when men were summing him up, they returned to 1940: "Without him anything might have happened...

...And in the case of Churchill, this feeling brought about the concrete results it promised...

...Clemenceau, the Vendéan, and de Gaulle, the Catholic officer, neither of whom despaired of the Republic...

...Moran believes that the failure of contact between Churchill and FDR toward the end was due to the ebbing of their strength...

...Fragments of a sympathetic and acute medical study of Churchill Moran sets awash in a torrent of trivialities...

...His family and his friends pressed him to retire...

...has been losing things...

...enjoying his own choice of words, and without a trace of resentment...

...I held that this was none of my business...

...Anthony will mew a good deal.' ") As a chronicler, Moran does not come out as the Boswell he was urged to become by Lord Bracken and members of the Cabinet...

...At last when the P.M...

...Lloyd George, the proBoer Welsh peasant saving the British Empire...

...Rather, his book might more accurately be compared with the curious life of Lincoln written by his law partner in Springfield, Bill Herndon...

...He omits Churchill's brillant estimate in 1912, when no one in Europe had been educated by war, of the course of a German invasion of France...

...One hopes that if Churchill had driven a passenger train instead of presiding over 50 million people, Moran might have offered him different advice...

...What partly redeems both books from mere chatter about mutual friends and enemies, great and little issues, is that both ask the right questions and do not give easy answers...

...they feared he might do something to injure his reputation...

...Lord Moran's book should not be read for illumination but for the healthy puzzlement that is the best response to greatness...

...One has a right to be interested in the health of public men: The physical condition of Wilson, Roosevelt, Forrestal, Cripps, Bevin and Eden at crucial moments cannot be left out of an historical account...

...Outside of Churchill's family, no one except his immediate political associates enjoyed such a continuous and intimate connection with him in the last years...

...I knew that he would feel that life was over when he resigned...

...Yes,' Winston mused, 'for a time, but the inspiration did not last' and then he added sadly, 'it did not return...

...The most telling, and the grimmest sentence in the book applies to Roosevelt at Quebec: "You could have put your fist between his neck and his collar...

...As a front-line medical officer in World War I, Moran had become concerned with what he called in another book "the anatomy of courage," but his observations to Churchill on the subject of morale were brushed away...

...In fact, while it contains little enough on detailed medical matters, it could only have been written by a close friend...

...Bracken and Beaverbrook died before him...

...He first sums up the criticisms of Churchill: "half genius and half bloody fool," Attlee...

...In this, he resembled so many great leaders of the democracies who have been on the edge of things: Lincoln, the prairie lawyer, directing the first great industrial war...

...In addition to the charge of indiscretion, Moran has been criticized for his crude way of "taking measurements," to use his own phrase...

...One of the difficulties in evaluating Churchill is a basic one in the study of any public figure...

...But taken in balance and considering Churchill's feeble and prejudiced grasp of this problem, one concludes that it can only do good to his memory to know that he modified his views...

...Wilson and Roosevelt, liberal aristocrats...

...Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God,' Birkenhead...

...I did my work...

...This book, what Lord Moran considers a "manageable" selection from the journal, together with a commentary and summing-up runs to half a million words...

...I feel very lonely without a war," Churchill once said...

...So many people buttonholed him on political matters as they left the Cabinet that he has yielded to the temptation to turn what might have been a compact and interesting private memoir into a diffuse and unoriginal political chronicle...

...Churchill's personality was almost instinctive...

...One function of politics, though, is clear: to enlarge men's sense of control over their own destiny in times of great change and among forces not wholly understood...

...It is more questionable that we should be told that Churchill after his stroke in 1953, "when death was around the corner," confided "not without many qualifications" that he had been wrong over India...

...He has just been appointed Prime Minister and I have become his doctor...

...Then, after conceding the justice of the observations, Moran goes on to stress the admitted supremacy of the man, giving an endearing impression of certainty in his friend's greatness, but scarcely illuminating the issues...

...He once gave Moran a copy of his 1940 speeches...

...was getting ready for his afternoon sleep, he cried out irritably: 'Sawyers, where is my hot water bottle?' 'You're sitting on it, Sir.' replied the faithful Sawyers...

...or at least have offered-to someone, perhaps the passengers-a less oblique justification for the P.M.'s continuance at his post...

...Moran, curiously enough, reminded him of the great impulse given the poetry of Gray by the death of the poet's beloved friend, West...

...And in Moran's presence Churchill could face and discuss without elaborate ceremony the strains of war, the bitterness of rejection at the polls after military victory (" he muttered something about ingratitude, 'I don't care if I never see England again.' "), the pressure to resign as his faculties weakened, and the hard last years of incapacity and despair...

...Elsewhere, Moran stresses Churchill's remarkable previsions: over tanks, over landingcraft in 1917...

...Most remarkable also are Churchill's statements about his own condition: "When I was young for two or three years the light faded out of the picture...

...but Moran is surely right in depicting him as a man alone...

...Is much known about worry, Charles...

...Nor is Moran's insistence on irrelevant detail curbed by brevity...

...Most of what Moran writes is quite fit to lay before the public: Churchill's account, for example, of how in the early years he was assailed by the "Black Dog"-fits of depression that might endure for months, animated by doubts and fears of making a mistake which he only overcame, Moran feels, by forming "a cast of mind in which he seemed incapable of seeing that he was at fault...

...All morning the P.M...

...Comparisons with other historical figures might have been more helpful...

...The author's most remarkable disclosure is that during Churchill's second Premiership, Moran "urged" him to continue in office "though I knew he was hardly up to his job for at least a year before he resigned...

...Like Herndon, Lord Moran is most interesting and least open to criticism when he confines himself to casting the dry light of a professional relationship upon his subject, a man overcoming inner difficulties, struggling for strength and self-possession...

...Where Herndon tried to increase the consequence of his story with fairy tales about Ann Rutledge, Moran sets up half as gossip, half as statesman and is successful as neither...

...Since its publication last month in England, it has brought upon Lord Moran's head a prodigious row...

...Moran could respond with more indulgence and detachment than could be expected from the overdriven and exasperated Viscount Alanbrooke fuming into his diary, and without the "grim smile" of Anthony Eden, the heir apparent who, with his hopes more than once deferred, watched while Churchill groomed himself for "taking a curtain...

...Unfortunately, like Herndon, Moran does not bring a great treasure of insights to his subject...

...needed someone to hold his hand," Anderson...

...Indeed, John Masefield urged Moran to write specifically from a medical perspective, on the grounds that the decline of Churchill's health during the War and the strokes, however heroically overcome after it, would explain his loosening grip and lack of concentration in writing the War Memoirs...

...Whatever unpleasant sensations his slight failure in loyalty to a friend may arouse, they are aggravated by his great lack of discipline as a storyteller...

...Sawyers [his valet], Sawyers, where are my glasses?' 'There, Sir,' said Sawyers, leaning over his shoulders as he sat, and tapping the P.M.'s pocket...

...So begins the journal of Lord Moran, Churchill's private physician from May 1940 to the end of Churchill's life...

...the early premonitions about the Russian advance, and the endeavors to circumvent it through Italy and Vienna (not, in my view, technically well conceived, however desirable...

...For achievement, as judged by the social sciences, is not as obvious and demonstrable as it is in the exact sciences...

...But in the end, it is neither his power over words, nor his ingenuity and foresight that have secured Churchill his preeminence...

...Winston Churchill is 65...

...Both are, in different proportions, vivid, human, intimate and also ill-planned, in dubious taste and sometimes inaccurate...

...Churchill himself felt the change...

...All this is of legitimate public concern...

...Not a very good idea,' he added...

...It's not an idea, its a coincidence,' said the P.M...

...I sat in the Commons, but black depression settled on me...

...Moran observes that Churchill's mind was unscientific, and that as the War came to involve more accurate planning and careful thought, his relevance decreased...

...The Channel and the Air Force saved England in 1939-'40, but probably they could not have unless Churchill had made England ready to be saved...

...There are pathetic vignettes: Churchill awaking on the mornings after speeches in the Commons "oppressed with the fear that he had committed an irreparable error which might prejudice his political career,' or "his complete failure of words one day in the House, despite Members' obvious sympathy and encouragement...