Paul Reid: "The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-11-26/paul-reid-last-lion-winston-spencer-churchill-defender-realm-1940-1965
The works of historian William Manchester included two enormously popular biographies of Winston Churchill: “The Last Lion”, Volumes I and II. They were published in the 1980s and chronicled Churchill’s life up until World War II. Manchester spent a number of years doing the research for the next installment, but his health began to fail. Before he died in 2004 he asked his friend, journalist Paul Reid, to complete the task. Now, nearly two decades later, this third and final volume has been published. It details Churchill’s pivotal role during World War II and his post-government years. Join Diane for a conversation with biographer Paul Reid about the life of Winston Churchill.
Guests
Paul Reid
award-winning journalist.
Read An Excerpt
Excerpt from "The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965" by Paul Reid. Copyright 2012 by Paul Reid. Reprinted here by permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
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I am far too young to remember the British Empire or British Commonwealth, but at its peak it was the most powerful nation of its day. Churchill's destiny was to preside over its final years. Nowadays Britain's economy is contracting, and has been surpassed by Brazil and several other emerging nations, although they still have great cultural and political influence. It seems very likely that the same factors that caused Britain's decline are already at work in the USA. The main ones may be unreconciled class and political divisions and loss of national unity.
It was probably the strokes that kept him from finishing this book, but I have to wonder if Churchill's relatively sad post-war career---raging against the dying of the Empire, mediocre to poor performance when back in office, and an intellect sufficiently undimmed to understand that this were the case---may have made him not wish to finish it and sapped his will thereto.
For British people who lived then, there was a general sense that Churchill embodied Solon's recommendation to account no man happy until his death. (Americans and others who didn't have to live under his government are generally more kind, remembering the Blitz alone.)
I am so thrilled to hear that the third book of the Churchill trilogy did get written after all. My father was a big fan of william manchester. He was so eager for him to write this final volume. He would go to the bookstore in the Netherlands so often to ask when it woud come out that they finally gave him the phone number of his publisher. My father called the publisher in the US (my father was in Holland). They told him that they didn't know but to call Manchester's assistant. To make a long story short she told my father that Manchester was very ill but that he would love to talk to my father. My father called him and they talked about half an hour reminiscing about the war II. My father was so excited that he called me right after he hang up with Manchester. "Guess who I just talked to"...Both died pretty soon after this conversation. It has become a family story.
Tanja Eikenboom
Question to Paul: Did Manchester ever mention Winston Churchill's dislike of President Roosevelt's secret meeting with King Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy (Feb. 14, 1945)? This was where Roosevelt was securing cheap oil for the US' war efforts, in exchange for security for the newly formed Saudi Arabia. Roosevelt did not disclose to Winston his intentions of this secret meeting with Ibn Saud, as well as King Farouk of Egypt, Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, until the evening prior to the Westerners' departure from the Yalta Conference. When Churchill learns of it, he speedily contacts his diplomats in the Middle East, and demands they get him immediate appointments with the same potentates that Roosevelt had met with. The friendship between King Ibn Saud and FDR is a book in itself.
Recommended reading: THE EVIL EMPIRE by Steven A. Grasse. This book exposes the secret history of England’s global misdeeds. He asks what few have dared to ask: Having spent the better half of the millennium turning the world into their personal litter box, where do the English get off blaming everything on America? Whose land-grabbing ways put the Palestinians and Israelis at each others’ throats? Who invented machine guns, wage slavery, and concentration camps? The closer you look at English Imperialist history, the more you realize they’re in no position to be pointing fingers.