Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

317 Pages·2017·15.47 MB·English

by  Thomas E. Ricks

ALSO BY THOMAS E. RICKS
The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
The Gamble
Fiasco
A Soldier’s Duty: A Novel
Making the Corps

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Photograph credits appear here.
ISBN: 9781594206139 (hardcover) ISBN: 9780698164543 (e-book)
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Dedicated to all those who seek to preserve our freedoms
CONTENTS
ALSO BY THOMAS E. RICKS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
1. THE TWO WINSTONS
2. CHURCHILL THE ADVENTURER
3. ORWELL THE POLICEMAN
4. CHURCHILL: DOWN AND OUT IN THE 1930S
5. ORWELL BECOMES “ORWELL”: SPAIN 1937
6. CHURCHILL BECOMES “CHURCHILL”: SPRING 1940
7. FIGHTING THE GERMANS, REACHING OUT TO THE AMERICANS: 1940–1941
8. CHURCHILL, ORWELL, AND THE CLASS WAR IN BRITAIN: 1941
9. ENTER THE AMERICANS: 1941–1942
10. GRIM VISIONS OF THE POSTWAR WORLD: 1943
11. ANIMAL FARM: 1943–1945
12. CHURCHILL (AND BRITAIN) IN DECLINE AND TRIUMPH: 1944–1945
13. CHURCHILL’S REVENGE: THE WAR MEMOIRS
14. ORWELL IN TRIUMPH AND DECLINE: 1945–1950
15. CHURCHILL’S PREMATURE AFTERLIFE: 1950–1965
16. ORWELL’S EXTRAORDINARY ASCENSION: 1950–2016
AFTERWORD: THE PATH OF CHURCHILL AND ORWELL
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
PHOTO CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
THE TWO WINSTONS
O
n December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a
member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own party’s
government, stepped out of a taxi on New York’s Fifth Avenue. He
was in New York to begin a speaking tour in an attempt to recover some of the
small fortune he had lost in the stock market crash two years earlier. Being
English, and perhaps distracted by his troubles, he looked the wrong way down
the avenue, and did not see the automobile that, traveling at about thirty miles
per hour, knocked him to the pavement and dragged him for a spell, cracking
some ribs and slashing open his scalp. Had he died, he would be remembered
today by a few historians specializing in early twentieth-century British history.
But he did survive. His name was Winston Churchill.
Almost six years later, on May 20, 1937, another Englishman awoke before
dawn and moved out of his uncomfortable quarters in a trench on the front lines
of the Spanish Civil War in northeastern Spain, not far south of the Pyrenees
Mountains. Though serving as a soldier, he really was a writer, a minor author of
mediocre novels that had not been selling well. He considered himself a leftist,
but in his latest work, in which he had turned to journalistic sociology, studying
the poor of England, he had caused a minor fuss and perhaps lost a few friends
by criticizing socialists. Still, in Spain he was serving as a member of the
progovernment socialist forces of the Spanish Republic. He was a tall man, and
as he moved along the west-facing trenches to check on the members of his
squad, his head was silhouetted by the sun to the east, rising behind him. A
Nationalist sharpshooter about 175 yards away spied him and fired a copper-
plated 7mm bullet. It was a well-aimed shot, sending the bullet through the base
of the Englishman’s neck, where it just missed a carotid artery. Stunned, he fell
to the ground. He knew he had been hit, but in his shock could not tell where.
Informed that he had been shot through the neck, he composed himself to die
within minutes, because he had never heard of someone surviving such a wound.
Had he expired then, he would not be remembered today except perhaps by a
few literary specialists in minor mid-twentieth-century English novelists. But he
did not die. His name was Eric Blair, but his nom de plume was George Orwell.
On the surface, the two men were quite different. Churchill was more robust
in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived him by fifteen
years. But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits. In their key overlapping
years in the middle of the century, the two men grappled with the same great
questions—Hitler and fascism, Stalin and communism, America and its
preemption of Britain. They responded with the same qualities and tools—their
intellects, their confidence in their own judgments even when those judgments
were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with
words. And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of
thought, speech, and association.
Their paths never crossed, but they admired each other from a distance, and
when it came time for George Orwell to write 1984, he named his hero
“Winston.” Churchill is on record as having enjoyed the novel so much he read
it twice.
Despite all their differences, their dominant priority, a commitment to human
freedom, gave them common cause. And they were indeed vastly dissimilar
men, with very different life trajectories. Churchill’s flamboyant extroversion,
his skills with speech, and the urgency of a desperate wartime defense led him to
a communal triumph that did much to shape our world today. Orwell’s
increasingly phlegmatic and introverted personality, combined with a fierce
idealism and a devotion to accuracy in observation and writing, brought him as a
writer to fight to protect a private place in that modern world.
One hazard in taking a dual approach to the two men is that Churchill is such
a loud and persistent presence. Look at any key event of the 1940s and he is
there, participating in it, or speechifying about it, and then some years later,
writing about it. Debating Churchill was like “arguing with a brass band,” a
member of a British Cabinet once grumbled. The political philosopher Isaiah
Berlin observed that Churchill saw life as a pageant, with himself leading the
parade. “I must say I like bright colours,” Churchill once wrote. “I cannot
pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and
am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.”
Together in the mid-twentieth century these two men led the way, politically
and intellectually, in responding to the twin totalitarian threats of fascism and
communism. On the day that Britain entered World War II, Churchill stated, “It
is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the
rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of
man.” Orwell expressed the same thought in his plainer style: “We live in an age
in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist,” he fretted two years
later.
Orwell and Churchill recognized that the key question of their century
ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought, or
how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to preserve
the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was becoming
powerfully intrusive into private life. The historian Simon Schama has described
them as the architects of their time. They were, Schama said, “the most unlikely
of allies.” Their shared cause was to prevent the tide of state murder that began
rising in the 1920s and 1930s, and crested in the 1940s, from continuing to rise.
One day in the 1950s, one of Churchill’s grandsons poked his head into the old
man’s study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the greatest man in the
world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded, “Yes, and now bugger off.”
The “Great Man” theory of history is much denigrated today. But sometimes
individuals matter greatly. Churchill and Orwell have had lasting impacts on
how we live and think today. These two men did not make the prosperous liberal
postwar West—with its sustained economic boom and its steady expansion of
equal rights to women, blacks, gays, and marginalized minorities—but their
efforts helped establish the political, physical, and intellectual conditions that
made that world possible.
I had long admired them, separately, but they became one interrelated subject
for me when, while taking a break from covering the Iraq War, I studied the
Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Researching Orwell’s role, I realized that both he
and Churchill had been war correspondents, as I was then. Orwell covered and
participated in the Spanish war, and Churchill had played a similar dual role in
the Boer War of 1899–1902.