A Conversation with Andrew Roberts

I want to thank you all for your flexibility I know there have been changes in the venue because of the the federal shutdown and so we got a bigger venue and we are delighted that you've come out this evening but thank you for your flexibility and I also want to thank chance Cooley chance Cooley is a junior here at the University of Texas and it's because of chance that Andrew Roberts our featured speaker here tonight is here so if you would just acknowledge chance Cooley a budding lawyer who is apparently very tenacious so I have high hopes for your future chance thank you so much for putting this together tonight we are delighted to welcome Andrew Roberts renowned author of the storm of war than a new history of the Second World War masters and commanders how four Titans won the war in the West and Napoleon a life his work has won various awards including the LA Times Book Prize for biography the wolf has Wolfson history prize and the British Army Military Book Award tonight mr. Roberts will talk about his latest triumph Churchill walking with destiny which by the way will be sold on premises after the program and signed by Andrew Roberts his book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for a whopping eight weeks it has also received the kind of commercial and critical success that authors dream of including a review in The Wall Street Journal which reads in part we now have two reasons to be grateful to mr. Roberts the first is that his is in arguably the best single biography of Winston Churchill the second is that as a result no reasonable person will write a Churchill biography for years to come so you're putting many good authors out of work and with this superlative book of yours the the review goes on the book is a brilliant feat of storytelling monumental in scope yet put together with tenderness for a man who always believed that he would be Britain's Savior Andrew will be interviewed tonight by our friend Karl Rove who was senior advisor to George W Bush from 2000 2007 and deputy chief of staff from 2004 to 2007 karl is himself a best-selling author of two books his memoir courage in consequence and his book on the 25th President entitled the triumph of William McKinley ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Andrew Roberts and Karl Rove [Applause] thank you Mark so Upthegrove says you've got an interview Roberts and I said why don't we just let the man talk he says no we need you to play the role of Charlie Rose I said well my wife won't let me he says well you can be Edward or Moreau I said Arnold smoke he said okay fine you're conservative William F Buckley I said I can't pronounce all those big words so we're gonna have some fun Andrew incidentally is has been in Texas since Friday and over the weekend we treated him to a ranch dinner featuring shank of wild boar so he's beginning to think he has a grasp on what it is to be Texan so be thinking about your questions so you could leave a memorable impression upon him when we get to the audience participation I want to start by playing off of what Mark said 1009 biographies why the hell do we need another where first of all may I say what a great honor it is to be here at the LBJ Presidential Library and the answer is really that in the last decade there have been no fewer than 41 sets of papers that have been deposited at Churchill College Cambridge in the Churchill archives including the papers of his daughter Mary Soames there Her Majesty the Queen has allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father's Diaries the diaries of working George the sixth and and Churchill met the King every Tuesday at the Second World War they had lunch together and Churchill trusted the king with all of the great secrets of the Second World War the nuclear secrets the ultra secrets who he was going to hire and fire the countries that were they were going to attack and so on and so that was a fantastic new source there's also been the diary of Ivan my ski the Soviet ambassador in the early part of the war which have just become available in the last three four years the verbatim accounts of the cabinet's war cabinets which I discovered in six years ago and the love letters of Pamela Harriman that which she led a very active romantic life in the Second World War and lots of the people that she slept with knew Churchill well so the the fact is that there is a huge cornucopia of new information which means that in pretty much every page of my book there's something that will not have appeared in any Churchill Biography before you start obviously at the beginning the birth of Churchill I'm taken by the longing that you described that he has as a child for parental affection and yet it's affection that he rarely receives tell us about his relationship with his parents and how you see that effect on the you know sort of the his character and his life yes it's um it's a very sad story really because both his parents were his father was a brilliant mercurial highly intelligent successful man the Chancellor of the Exchequer who never at any points or any anything particularly special about his son in fact some of the most moving letters in this book are desperate need for affection from Winston Churchill and getting nothing but frankly contempt from his from his father and his mother seemed to be the absolute opposite of what one expects from American motherhood she took no notice of him either and she was a beautiful socialite who led a very very active social life but but in the whole of the first six months of 1884 for example when Winston Churchill was nine years old she only saw him for six and a half hours and so so this poor lad who also went to a prep school where he was sadistically beaten by by his head mast really went in order to get love and affection he went for his his nannies love and affection mrs. Everest who who treated him well and in fact was the person who spotted the lacerations on his bottom that came as a result of this the sadist that at his prep school and so psychologically he had every right to be to be very dysfunctional but actually he showed so much love and affection for his parents after his father's death he wrote his father's biography and two volumes over a thousand pages sort out his father's friends he called his own son Randolph and after his father and in his autobiography my early life he said of his mother that she shone for me like the evening star brilliant but at a distance you know in addition to sort of reacting as we would not expect to that kind of relationship with his parents he is strangely imbued right from the early age with a sense that he's made for great things you tell the story he's 16 and he tells his school school hood chum that he's gonna save England from invasion and London from extermination that's right yes he was 16 years old his friend Merlin Merlin Devens he was discussing their futures together and and Churchill rather extraordinarily for a 16 year old says I can see in their in in the future I can see great struggles terrible upheavals and I shall be called upon to save London and saving them from invasion and of course everybody would have been permitted to have laughed at him at when he was 16 how awful century later exactly that happened he had this extraordinary sense of destiny one that was in many ways imparted to him by the many close brushes with death that he he had in his life so how did this how did this sense of destiny reveal itself as an adult what does it allow him to do in what's the arc of his life that is affected by this and in times of stress and strain and turmoil how does he react well what it did was to allow him to be incredibly calm under pressure he because he believed that he was destined to save to save London and save England when the when the terrible most perilous days that ever threaten my country dawned in 1940 and 41 they found the Prime Minister completely calm in fact making jokes and that and the more dangerous the situation got them funny areas dates became and and so this had a truly positive effect on him but when he there are so many occasions when he nearly died there's one when he left he was in the trenches of the First World War and he left his dugout and five minutes later a German whiz-bang high-explosive hit the dugout direct hit and decapitated everybody inside and off that occasion he said that he felt that he had invisible wings that were beating over in and of course these invisible wings were the the Providence that was going to save him and and therefore allow him in a future war to to save London and England young man loves his father father as a politician he wants to follow his father into politics and have a political career talk about the extraordinary rise of the young Winston Churchill I mean he is this is astonishingly fast yes he's very much driven by an attempt to want to vindicate his his father and his father's memory his father had resigned in 1806 and had been frozen out by the conservative establishment and he wanted to to get into politics but he had no money largely because his parents were huge spendthrifts and so he became a war correspondent became the best paid war correspondent in the world in fact at one point between the ages of 21 and 25 he fought in no fewer than four campaigns on three continents and in the course of that he managed to make such a name for himself for his brave he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and crossed 300 miles of enemy territory hiding in a down in a mine at one point where when the candle gutter doubt he had rats crawling across his face and followed by a vulture as well at one point and so when he got back to Britain he was a national hero and he was able therefore to fight a parliamentary seat which other people of his age and class and background were able just to buy he had to have made a name for himself in order to to be able to have a chance to get into politics so he's elected to the Parliament at the age of 25 so yeah constitutional ages which you can enter the USS or Representatives very few people do now so fast forward this into what this is 1901 18 1899 1900 yeah so 14 years later World War one and the young man is now the First Lord of the Admiralty and commanded the greatest Navy on the face of the planet and during this time he pushes for the invasion of the Dardanelles of Turkey in essence send the fleet up the Dardanelles open a land route to our water route to Russia and force the Ottoman Empire out and it goes horribly wrong that's right on the 18th of March 1915 this brilliant plan to try as you say to to get the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles straits anchor it off Constantinople modern-day Istanbul and thereby knocked the Turks out of the central powers which would if it had come off in one of the great coos of the grey war goes horribly wrong with six ships being sunk in the in the attempt to to get through the Dardanelles and then instead of calling the whole thing off Churchill very much is the key figure behind increasing the the whole attempt and landing a large army on the Gallipoli Peninsula which is on the European side of the Straits and they get bogged down from the 25th of April 1915 onwards into a terrible slogging match just as bad as anything that was seen on the western front and in the course of that no fewer than a hundred and forty-seven thousand Allied troops were killed or wounded and this of course was very much held against Churchill he wasn't the only person who wanted this but he was the most prominent one and so he really up until the 1930s there were still people shouting what about the Dardanelles at him in in public meetings yeah how does he personally react to this and obviously forms doubt he's forced out of government he resigns and and he decided to go and fight in the trenches he didn't need to he wasn't of age that where we were calling up married men of 40-plus at that stage and yet he in a sort of redemptive sense felt that he had to share the dangers of the of the men that he'd sent to the Dardanelles so he became a lift and colonel in the Royal Scots Fusiliers in charge of the 6th battalion and and he was tremendously brave then all through his life physical courage is a absolute part and parcel of Winston Churchill and he went into no-man's land no fewer than 30 times in the course of the six months that he commanded the battalion but he didn't need to do because he was he could have stayed back at battalion headquarters but he got so close to the German trenches on occasion he could actually hear them speaking in them does this have any role to play in his recovery because by you know 1925 he's not only back in politics but having left the Conservative Party as a young parliamentarian he's gone back to the Conservative Party from the Liberal Party and seems to be the coming young man yes that's right and he said of changing his policy twice that that anyone can rat but it takes a certain ingenuity to rear at it and he by the end of the First World War he had been Ministry of munitions which is a very important role with two and a half million people working in the munitions factories worked under him and this was part of something that he was to say later in his life when he became prime minister in 1940 he he wrote in his memoirs I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial and being Ministry of munitions was an obvious and indeed First Lord of the Admiralty was an obvious preparation for the hour in the trial of 1940 so shortly thereafter though shortly after he returns to polit to the Conservative Party he's thrust out of government and oncome by the end of the 20s the wilderness years he is out of Parliament and party he has suffered terrible financial reverses in the depression he almost dies in a pedestrian accident in New York actually yes in the front of this of this book you can see between his eyes there in the just above his forward well they on his forehead just above his nose a huge cut a great gash in his face which was which came as a result and it went a livid red during during meetings in the Second World War when he lost his temper and that came as a result of crossing the road in in New York on Fifth Avenue and 76th Street and being English looking the wrong direction and and being hit by a car and very nearly killed he spent three weeks in hospital so in the midst of all these you know sort of political reverses personal reverses comes to nearly financial reverses health reverses somehow or another he perseveres during this decade sort of a lonely voice warning a danger take us there and and talk to start with the fall from political Grayson how does who is he during this decade well he's very widely you're right I mean financially he lost the equivalent of four million pounds in one day on The Wall Street Crash modern equivalent he as you say his his health was always up and down he had he had as well as the car crash he had two plane crashes and another three comma crashes in his life he had nearly drowned swimming across Lake Geneva as a child he'd escaped a house fire these were the and those were just peacetime brushes with death so he had that at the same time he had the the terrible sadness of the death of one of his children is his daughter marigold and and yet in that decade when he was was lambasted by the British establishment the Conservative Party that tried to take his seat away he was shouted down in the House of Commons on one occasion and constantly ridiculed but he never changed he had as well as this physical courage that I mentioned earlier he had the moral courage not to alter his message which was all the way through the 1930s that Hitler and the Nazis needed to be guarded against and we needed rearmament especially in the air in order to protect ourselves from from Hitler and the Nazis and so that was part and parcel of of why it was Churchill who came to power in 1940 rather than anyone else because he had been the person who for an entire decade had been warning about precisely what actually came to pass so why is it why is he unique why is he the guy who's blowing the danger it's a very good question I think I think it's three things overall I think firstly he was a Philo's he might he like Jews he'd grown up with Jews his father had liked Jews he was a scientist who supported the Balfour Declaration and so he had an early warning system when it came to Hitler and the Nazis that was not about safe too many of the other people on the conservative benches in the of his agent glass and background many of whom were anti-semitic second thing is that he was an historian and he was able to place the threat that Hitler posed in the long continuum of of British history and saw it in terms of the threat posed by philip ii of spain at the time of the Spanish Armada and of louis xiv of france whose attempts to Gemini's the continent were stymied by Churchill's own great ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough and then Napoleon of course who Church will admired personally for his ambition and his sense of destiny but also he appreciated the Napoleon's an attempt was attempting to take over the continent and then the Kaiser and then finally of course Hitler and also um Churchill spotted in Hitler and the Nazis the same kind of real political version of the fanaticism that he'd seen as a young man on the northwest frontier and in the Sudan in terms of Islamic fundamentalist religious fanaticism and this again was something that just wasn't spotted at all by the prime ministers of the 1930s because men like Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain had never actually come across any kind of fanaticism in their lives so spring 1940 of the United Kingdom in the Western reeling in the face of Nazi military power their voices whispering that England might have to sue for peace and asked Harry Hitler for terms and yet over a few days in May this familiar figure this little this voice in the wilderness takes command of tip number 10 downing what happened well um Neville Chamberlain was was ousted effectively after the defeat in Norway which was actually much more Winston Churchill's fall than Neville Chamberlain's because because he was First Lord of the Admiralty it was very largely a naval defeat nonetheless the British House of Commons voted in in enough numbers although Chamberlain won the vote he won it by such a smaller amount than he'd usually than his government usually won by that there was a sense that the he morally lost the the arguments and he resigned and there was a choice between him and the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and and at a key meeting on the 9th of May it was decided by the four people in the room Chamberlain Churchill Halifax and the Chief Whip David Morrison that it should be Churchill who would be whose name would be put forward to the king and there are so many different versions about what happened during that meeting and I devote pretty much the whole of chapter 19 of this book to looking at the versions and to working out which ones I judged to be most likely and I very much come down with the the point of view that Winston Churchill did exactly what he'd always done all the way through his career which was insist on getting the job may he here he claims that he sat back and just allowed it to to be to be given to him but that goes wholly against first of all what everybody else thought about that meeting and remembered of it and secondly what Churchill had done all the way through his career up until then you mentioned the king for for 75 plus years historians have been you know drooling over the prospect of getting into the Kings private Diaries and you got into them yeah and can you imagine how annoyed other historians oh yeah I understand contracts have been let on you so as you read these first of all describe how you had to go read them but but as you read them what did you learn about Churchill and about George the sixth and their relationship and the broader picture that you didn't know about before yes well it's it's there of course kept in the round tower at the Royal archives are in the top of that that very old round tower medieval thing in the middle of Windsor Castle that you'll recognize from from Megan's wedding and and you go up you go up to the top there and then they are very very closely protected to the point that if you need to go to the restroom you have a and attendant in white gloves who follows you to make sure that you don't pop in to it's a little creepy to make sure you don't pop in and then sort of you know pinch any of the of the documents that are around there and it's a wonderful archive and it was and I got a great kick from it as you can imagine being the first Churchill biographer allowed in and into these particular papers but what they told me really I told me an awful lot of things they were there's extensive quotation from them in this book but the thing that most surprised me was the extent of the frustration really that Winston Churchill felt about the United States not getting more involved in the Second World War earlier he saw the war in very much black-and-white terms as a war for civilization and democracy against the most evil man in history and he couldn't understand why the Roosevelt administration was being so glacial in moving towards a bellicose stance and of course this was not something he could say in public he couldn't say this in Parliament he certainly couldn't say it on the airwaves to the United States and so he used the King as a sounding board really and as a way of venting his his frustration over this in the days that followed his ascension to power number ten he gives a remarkable set of speeches over the next months and years Edward R Murrow once said that Churchill he mobilized the English language and sent it into war well what were the sources of this great strength of Churchill's and from where did it come and how how much attention did he pay to what he said and how he said it well of course he had a he was self educated very largely self-educated and he read in enormous amounts he was he could quote Shakespeare he dreams of Shakespeare he loved Macaulay and given and the great historians of the past and it was because of that and also the most extraordinary amount of practice he gave the the collection of his speeches of all of his speeches and I found actually four or five speeches that are not in the in the collected works they cover 8,000 pages and and he gave he gave many hundreds of public speeches before the war and so he was very good at working out which phrases worked and of course as a result given us phrases that will live for as long as the English tongue lives and he was asked by his private secretary how it was that he was able to what what the tricks of the trade were really what his techniques were for writing these speeches that give such gave such extraordinary morale boost during the Second World War and he said well look there are four things in particular that I always keep in mind the first is keep your sentences short second always use short words if there's a chance between a short word and a long word go for the short word and the third one was or each sentence needs to be perfectly clear everyone must understand exactly what you're saying in each sentence so no waffle and and fourthly use anglo-saxon words use Old English words use words that the english-speaking peoples will understand because they've used them in their every life for a thousand years and and when you look at the peroration the final paragraph of his great we shall fight on the beaches speech of june 1914 in which he speaks of fighting in the streets and fighting in the hills and how we shall fight with growing confidence in the air and of course ending we shall never surrender and you look at that 141 words of that of that paragraph all but two of them are come from Old English of those words and the the two exceptions being confidence which comes from the Latin and surrender which comes from the French you are an Englishman right and this check it so apropos of that Churchill of course is the leader of one of the the three de Gaulle would say four great powers Allied powers talk for a moment about his relationship with FDR and and then about Stalin his son his relation Winston Churchill's relationship with FDR was always a good one personally they they got on well they came from the aristocratic wings of their room of their societies they were both actually I mean Churchill's Tory democracy was almost analogous to the New Deal politics of FDR they liked each other personally they they enjoyed each other's company and and jokes Churchill couldn't stand Roosevelt's and cocktails but other than that there was nothing else that they that they a sort of discreet on until the fall of 1944 when although they kept their personal friendship alive nonetheless the the post-war interests of the British Empire were diverging very strongly from those of the American Republic and so at that point you actually get some 240 more messages going from Churchill to FDR than FDR replies to there is a there is a at the beginning of a breakdown in that in that relationship with regard to Stalin and Churchill of course had been the great staunch anti-communist he had virtually invented antagonism he had he had denounced Stalin and what he called his daily budget of executions in the 1930s at the time of the Great Purge and was fully cognizant also by 1940 of the responsibility starlings personal responsibility for the cotton Massacre of some 14,000 Polish officers and yet personally he was able to get on with Stalin because Stalin because it was so important that that any British Prime Minister had to get on with the leader of Russia when the Russians were killing four-fifths of all Germans killed on in combat by which I don't mean bomb from the air I mean soldiers killed on the ground four-fifths of them were killed by the Russians so it's a scent it was essential that they got on and they did get on Churchill would go to to the Stalin's private apartment in the Kremlin and and drink with him drink vodka with him until 3 o'clock in the morning and would go to his dacha in the countryside and and that was the way that he established a a personal relationship with starting which in a way is quite troubling that that he actually said in the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 - and need and I like that man of Stalin but of course to set against that he was of course also the person who showed not only just showed full sight before the Second World War but after it - when at the at the iron curtain speech in Fulton Missouri in March 1946 he was also the first person to warn against Stalin and Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe you mentioned Roosevelt's cocktails that brings up the subject of mr. Churchill's drinking it seems to consume them large quantities but doesn't seem at least in the is your boat to be much affected by no Churchill drank an enormous amount but he had the most iron Constitution for it it was as he said his his servant rather than his master he would he would a normal lunch during the Second World War would start off with a glass of two of champagne and then he'd have a glass or two of white wine with his first course and also to have red wine with his main course and then a glass or two of brandy and then he'd go and have a nap for for an hour or so and and then he'd have much the same to drink in the evening and have a very weak whiskey and soda that his private secretary one of his privates actually told me that it was more like mouthwash than than an alcoholic drink and but that was kept up pretty much all the way through till he went to bed at two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning one of those great friends CP snow said of him the Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much [Laughter] victory in Europe Hitler is dead Nazism smashed and yet within weeks Churchill has gone from number ten now stood by the people of Britain what happened well it was um it was shocking to him he went on these great election speeches and people flocked to hear him whether they were gonna vote for him or not as it turned out they they weren't but nonetheless he was such a personality that they all turned up to listen and he took the wrong impression from this he therefore thought that he was going to win the election but he was only one name on three on 650 ballot papers and the British people were exhausted by the war they wanted the various things that the Labour Party were offering and had it been a presidential system like you have he'd of one but as it was in the parliamentary system people wanted to punish the Conservatives who have been responsible for appeasement and and so there was a landslide victory against him and on the when it became clear that afternoon that this was happening as the results were coming in his wife Clementine said to him well darling it might well be a blessing in disguise and Churchill said from where I'm sitting it seems quite effectively disguised so Churchill is I mean he he's a great man and he gets the big things right but he also one of the things I take away from your book is is that he is also clearly not infallible he makes mistakes yeah and he was a great man who made mistakes and as a leader how did he deal with the fact that he made mistakes well he yes you're quite right I mean he's a flawed deeply flawed politician I mean he was making decisions of course he was in public life for two-thirds of a century so he wasn't going to going to get everything right but there is a long list of the things that he got wrong he got within suffrage wrong the old standard the abdication crisis we talked earlier about the about the Dardanelles campaign plenty more examples where that came from and he said when he was fighting in the trenches he wrote to his wife Clementine and he said I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes because he was a politician who was capable of learning from his mistakes he was somebody who for example with the Dardanelles never once overruled the Chiefs of Staff in the Second World War he would sit in these hard-fought meetings with the Chiefs of Staff he had every constitutional right to if he wanted to he was defense minister as well as prime minister but he never once overruled them when all three of them agreed on on something so yes he did make mistakes not in the really big things the really big things about the rise of Prussian militarism the threat of Adolf Hitler the threat of Joseph Stalin after the war these are the really important decisions of the 20th century and he got those rights but boy there were an awful lot of lesser decisions that he got wrong so I'm gonna reserve interviewers prerogative the final question to me so we're gonna turn to the audience here in just a moment but I want to I want to have a lightening round here so favorite Churchill joke well they change all the time my favorite Churchill joke but the one I'm enjoying at the moment is his remark to Yocum von Ribbentrop who later became German Foreign Secretary but at the time he was the German ambassador to London and when he threatens when he threatened Churchill and said in the next war Italy will be on the side of the Third Reich Churchill said seems only fair we had to have them last time [Laughter] so favorite Churchill comeback in a parliamentary debate favourite comeback oh when one of the MPs shouted rot at him during what during his speech and Churchill immediately replied I'd like to thank the Honourable member for saying what's in his mind okay so I know this from my wife's personal experience you have an extensive and highly prized collection of Churchill memorabilia favorite memento from your collection he's like picking out your favorite child his bowtie I bought I bought his bowtie at auction earlier this year sorry a layer last year and was absolutely thrilled to discover much later on that the under bidder had been Gary Oldman so you won't be appearing in his next move okay so weirdest memento in your collection weirdest I've got David lloyd George's dress shirt which my wife has always asked me to have washed but it's got his DNA on it so I'm not going to all right let's turn to the crowd and uh and if you got a question raise your hand we'll let Andrew call on you and shout it out and he'll repeat the question we got wondering right here oh they were mainly over over post-war issues the once the troops were landed in Normandy Eisenhower very much had the had to say over whether or not to adopt the narrow thrust strategy into into Germany or the broad front he went for the latter of course and and the the British ultimately backed him over that so so as far as strategy was concerned not a lot but in in the issues say of whether or not the monarchy was going to be allowed to continue in Greece and indeed Italy over things like Argentinian meat for some reason was a huge bone of contention the the Americans were very unhappy with the way in which Churchill had imprisoned Mahatma Gandhi for his quit India movement there were arguments over huge huge arguments over post-war trade trading relations especially between Britain and the former British colonies sorry America and the former British colonies I think there's a whole list of them in in Chapter I think 31 and and I go into into a few of them another question over here [Music] that's very good question yes well I obviously driving ambition is true of of both of them I don't think ambition is a bad thing so long as it's allied to great talent which in in both of their cases of course it was they both had this sense of destiny that they both felt that they were walking with destiny they came from they were both our Stoke rats Corsica now scoop aristocrat in in the paintings case of course but Churchill was the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough and both soldiers and Churchill very much admired Napoleon in fact he wanted to write Napoleon's biography and rather we're in a rather weird way he also won't try to persuade Charlie Chaplin to make him a comedy movie about Napoleon yeah I'm not sure how that would have turned out but I think the biography would have been one of the great great biographies of the world minor minor a similarity Napoleon has a Nymphaea a nympho sister and and Churchill has a let's say outgoing daughter-in-law Pamela Harriman as I said earlier I was given exclusive access to to Pamela Harriman spade the papers she she was receiving as well as being married to Randolph Churchill her and her husband who'd by him she had a baby she also had an affair with Averell Harriman the who she had subsequently married in FDR's envoi and also jock Whitney and ed Murrow and general general kenneth anderson and marshal of the Air Force a Charles portal and someone we just know of as Jerry and these are all from there from her love letters these are these are all people who are sending her her love letters with whom she had an affair during the Second World War and I like to say that although I had exclusive access to her love letters nobody had exclusive access to her their question here yes portrayal TV portrayal or movie portrayal um well I thought that Gary Oldman was wonderful in in darkest hour he with the prosthetics and the and the chuckle and the glint in his eye I thought he captured Churchill absolutely brilliantly Robert Hardy I think is still my favorites from the wilderness years TV series of the 1970s but nonetheless Gary Oldman was was great and there have been some some less good ones I think John Lithgow the six-foot-five drama let's go in the in the crown playing the five-foot-six Churchill is sometimes leaves something to be desired a little too much of Churchill at that one do I see something up here a question up here yeah here at the back Center yes sir you blew poverty was is the reason he was a he spent an enormous amount he he always wanted and needed to have the best of everything he liked having silk next to his body all the time and he he spent he smoked 160,000 cigars in his life and in order to pay for this he didn't get very much money from his spendthrift parents so he wrote 37 books and 890 articles and what happened was he if somebody if notice her turned down an article of in the 1930s he would just keep it and wait and wait to use it again which is something that a lot of journalists do don't they go I refuse to answer on the grounds it might tend to incriminate me and you say you get the situation in March 1942 which is a terrible moment in the war where the Japanese have taken about an eighth of the world's surface the British are on the retreat in the North African littoral the Russians are on fully on the retreat in in Ukraine and this is the moment that Winston Churchill has managed to sell an old article that he's written years before to a because he's Prime Minister and any editor will pay anything that and pays the fortune he used to get 23,000 pounds her ask was about $30,000 per article and so he chooses this terrible moment in the Second World War to to publish an article in The Illustrated Sunday Herald entitled are there men on the moon which concludes that yes there are there are such things as aliens and UFOs I mean the extraordinary thing if Teresa may were to publish an article like that one wonder over here I would ask him about about this sense of destiny that he had I'd like to him to unpack that phrase about walking with destiny because I do think it's a it's a driving feature in his life and he did talk about the the invisible wings he wasn't a Christian he in the whole of his 5.2 million words that he wrote in 6.1 million words that he spoke he never said the word Jesus Christ or wrote it he was he believed that there was an almighty but if you look carefully at it theologically the sole duty of the Almighty seems to have been to take care of Winston Churchill so I I think I try and unpack his is his views on on this aspect of the affair up here on the side yes absolutely he this was another thing along with painting that allowed him to to really get away from politics and and to concentrate on something else he he actually got accepted into the National Union of bricklayers and he built not only two walls two rather fine walls in a chart wall his country house but actually an entire cottage that he used later as a studio and if you visit chart well which I do recommend everybody do when they go to England because it's a really wonderful place splendid Museum and really captures the spirit of him you can see these these walls we've got another one here but before just a quick playing off the bricklayer so President Bush took up painting in part by reading an essay because he read an essay by Churchill about the joy of painting that it for forty some odd years had given him and shortly thereafter I got married and the president called up and said I'm gonna send I've got a gift for you and I said well no gifts he said I'm gonna paint your dogs so for about ten days I got these stupid emails from him send me a picture your dogs from the right side send me pictures your dog from the left side you say Bob is a chocolate lab this isn't chocolate send me a picture of Bob's true color I need nan I need Nan's face you know I need man lying down after 10 days he says god no more pictures I got everything I need I'm raking really good progress I think you're gonna be very happy with what I did and I emailed him back and said thank God you didn't follow Church illa take a brick lane as well yes this is a this is a as you can imagine controversial a hard-fought issue Winston Churchill said some extremely racist things in his life very racist remarks made racist jokes and so on and it's you have to remember that of course that he was born in the same time that Charles Darwin was alive and that however obscene and ludicrous it might seem to us people did believe that there was a hierarchy of races and and they thought that that was scientific fact and so when he went out to India he he very much believed in the British Empire he believed that the British were doing good for the native peoples and he dedicated his life I mentioned earlier how he wasn't really a Christian in the way his secular belief was that of the British Empire but it was a totally different kind of belief from the extermination astray sysm of Adolf Hitler it was some what he took from this sense of a hierarchy of races was that the the British owed of profound responsibility to the native peoples of the Empire and so when he saw when he looked to the British Empire as a young man when he and out in in as a subaltern in the late 1890s he saw a place that had doubled the life expectancy of Indians and had put 8 times more land under cultivation than before we went out and that had created huge civil engineering projects and the largest railway system outside the United States universities for the first time in India's history and created a peace for the longest time in India's history and he thought that that was something and of course it abolished sati the horrific throwing of widows on their husband's funeral pyres and various other practices like that sati as well and and thought it was worth defending worth fighting for and so when in November 1942 he said that he did not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire he meant it and neither in that Premiership nor in his post-war membership from 1951 to 55 where any colonies made independent oh let me let's do one more up here and then I'm gonna close with a final question yes that's true he did he knew he knew Halifax well he he was told by Neville Chamberlain that Halifax couldn't take the job because he was in the House of Lords and by that stage you really did need to have a prime minister in the House of Commons that the King said well can't we put his peerage into abeyance and the great thing about the unwritten British Constitution is you can do anything if you want you know that could be that could be a one line of act of Parliament that could be passed in an afternoon but but Churchill in in the meeting of the 9th of May that Churchill had had really secured at the the succession and it wasn't down to the king it was down to those four men in the room and so so Halifax is sorry the King's objections were overruled effectively and Neville Chamberlain said no it will be Winston Churchill that we call upon so a final question fifty-four some odd years after he's dead died why is this man got such a hold on us that several hundred people show up to hear it talk by a Brit about once to Churchill what it was what is going on here with us because we do have this fascination with him your books been on the bestseller list for eight weeks and movies are made about him and win prizes and and yet he's been gone for so long yes I think it's a number of things I think we love the idea of a leader who doesn't with all due respect to you Kyle have any spin doctors are you all you really need is one good one [Laughter] doesn't have any spin doctors who dictated all his own speeches so when he spoke you knew it was him who speaking he never employed a speechwriter he never took any notice of opinion polls or focus groups so he was leading and saying what he believed and I think that that's something that's very attractive I think a leader who was able to look to see into the future to have the most extraordinary full sight to be able to warn against Prussian militarism then the Nazis and then Soviet imperialism is also something that impresses people somebody who has such tremendous moral courage to to not be blown off course allied to great physical courage and somebody who has such eloquence that they're able to coin phrases which will as I say live as long as our language I think those things will always fascinate us and and it will be a sad day for us really as people the if we're no longer interested in people like Winston Churchill I'd like to just finish there with a with a joke with one of Winston Churchill's jokes which I which I particularly haven't loved which is that when his private secretary came to him and told him that their cook had been made pregnant as the result of the nocturnal assignation with a man in the street in Verona Winston Churchill immediately replied obviously not one of the two gentlemen thank you very much indeed [Applause] [Music]

Channel: LBJ Foundation

Views: 16,249

Rating: 4.7635469 out of 5

Keywords: andrew roberts, karl rover, winston churchill, lbj library, lbj foundation, austin, author, history

Id: efyXtQCD634

Length: 57min 46sec (3466 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019