Martin Gilbert: Winston Churchill's 'special relationship' with the United States
[Neil Cameron is a Montreal historian.]
Winston Churchill's pro-digious life found a prodigious biographer in Sir Martin Gilbert. Gilbert has published 75 books, and while many have been on other topics, he has made Churchill his lifelong preoccupation. His huge six-volume life was not only the largest work on any single political figure of the 20th century, but effectively a history of British and world politics centred on the life of the century's most remarkable man.
Since completing that heroic task, Gilbert has continued to write about Churchill, in books of less daunting proportions. Churchill and America, his most recent one, deals with a large and important story.
Churchill's "special relationship" with the United States was immensely important throughout his career, and in 1940-45, the skill with which he turned his personal attachment into a close wartime alliance shaped the whole character of the Second World War and its aftermath.
Churchill's mother was a beautiful American heiress, so that, as he put it, "American blood flowed in my veins." This mattered more because he chose to play on that blood connection in his wartime addresses to the U.S. Congress and public than as a real influence on his early years. His relationship with his mother was adoring but remote, and his upbringing was entirely English. He never really knew much about the United States as it was experienced by its ordinary citizens.
Gilbert shows that even as a child, what caught Churchill's imagination was the concept of a common Anglo-American civilization, sharing values of law, liberty, democracy and military valour. His adult encounters with the United States and Americans really began in the First World War, including one with Franklin Roosevelt, then Undersecretary of the Navy....
Winston Churchill's pro-digious life found a prodigious biographer in Sir Martin Gilbert. Gilbert has published 75 books, and while many have been on other topics, he has made Churchill his lifelong preoccupation. His huge six-volume life was not only the largest work on any single political figure of the 20th century, but effectively a history of British and world politics centred on the life of the century's most remarkable man.
Since completing that heroic task, Gilbert has continued to write about Churchill, in books of less daunting proportions. Churchill and America, his most recent one, deals with a large and important story.
Churchill's "special relationship" with the United States was immensely important throughout his career, and in 1940-45, the skill with which he turned his personal attachment into a close wartime alliance shaped the whole character of the Second World War and its aftermath.
Churchill's mother was a beautiful American heiress, so that, as he put it, "American blood flowed in my veins." This mattered more because he chose to play on that blood connection in his wartime addresses to the U.S. Congress and public than as a real influence on his early years. His relationship with his mother was adoring but remote, and his upbringing was entirely English. He never really knew much about the United States as it was experienced by its ordinary citizens.
Gilbert shows that even as a child, what caught Churchill's imagination was the concept of a common Anglo-American civilization, sharing values of law, liberty, democracy and military valour. His adult encounters with the United States and Americans really began in the First World War, including one with Franklin Roosevelt, then Undersecretary of the Navy....