Book Review: Churchill and the King

Keeping Up with the WindsorsChurchill and the King: The Wartime Alliance of Winston Churchill and George VIby Kenneth WeisbrodeViking, 2013 Throughout the course of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and King George VI met every Tuesday for a light midday meal whenever both of them were in London. They dismissed servants and attendants and filled their own plates, standing on no ceremony as they talked about the course of the war.They were coming to know each other under some of the most trying circumstances imaginable. Britain's early years of struggle against the Nazis were an unbroken string of catastrophes - muddled supplies, inadequate training, whole armies surrendering in the face of minimal opposition, as one after another European country fell or was subsumed. Bombs fell on London, and the threat of invasion loomed.Churchill regarded his monarch - a nervous, hesitant man thrust onto the throne when his older brother abdicated - with wary suspicion, and George VI, who'd originally wanted a different man as his Prime Minister, felt the same. As Kenneth Weisbrode points out in his slim new book Churchill and the King, the two men had a surprising number of things in common - from minor speech impediments to imperious mothers - and they gradually forged a working relationship that somehow encompassed the fact that Churchill's powers were greatly enlarged by the nation's wartime footing, and by the fact that George VI was a constitutional monarch only, required by law to accept the decisions of his own subject, the Prime Minister.It's a potentially fruitful subject, one glanced at in all of George VI's biographies (and, damningly, often not mentioned in Churchill biographies) but never before now treated to a spotlight of its own. The king kept copious notes and diaries; Churchill's every utterance has spawned libraries of commentary; the two men are of sufficiently contrasting personalities to make their friendship inherently interesting.All the more of a shame, then, that Weisbrode mostly contents himself with bromides and potted summaries. The valiant King and his legendary Prime Minister met with a frequency that strongly suggests they were each getting something they deemed very important out of each other. Time and again in Churchill and the King, the reader wants Weisbrode to really dig into his story, perhaps with some creative reading between the lines. Instead, far too much of the book's scanty real estate is given over to lukewarm lectures. "Rulership, like leadership, is a puzzle," we're told,

It is not just an assemblage of policy, personality, intelligence, charisma, and power but of some changeable and often unpredictable chemistry among all these elements and also between the ruler and the ruled. It may be true that the best things in life are done in combination. Success is almost never solitary. Yet why some rulers succeed while others fail may be impossible to understand.

He's often no better when he narrows in on his specific subject:

Theirs was an alliance that came to be one of trust and fellowship, even friendship, but it was none of these things initially, nor was it simply an association of convenience. It was one of several partnerships that each man made that mattered. Partnerships are often limited. They can be dissolved. Alliances take things a step further. Genuine alliances are indivisible. In deriving its strength from the life mettle of both men, this alliance set an example and a precedent that would outlive them both.

Each separate line yells for contradiction (the wheel-spinning of "example and precedent," the odd mysticism of "life mettle" - and: alliances are indivisible? On what planet is this true?), and when they all yell together like this, they tend to drown out the rest of the book. "Why did this alliance work so well?" Our author asks, more than once. "Was it the product of crisis? Or were the two men predestined for mutual sympathy?" Readers not crediting spiritual predestination might have recourse to one of the favorite little niceties of George VI's father: "What rot!"About the individual men themselves Weisbrode is scarcely any better, mainly because he's pitching his little book to the Buckingham Palace gift shop rather than the TLS crowd. Contradictions are sanded down into quirks; disagreements pale into friendly badinage, and of course actual personal failings disappear altogether. "Britain breeds loads of dutiful, worthy, upright, and not very intelligent people," our author writes at one point, with rather charming flat-footedness, "and the king was clearly one of them. He was neither clever nor cunning." But if Weisbrode is even aware that "not very intelligent" is not the same thing as "neither clever nor cunning," he gives no sign of it; in any case, he's perfectly happy to show a king who's not cunning, but he'd clearly rather die than show a king who's a bit of a dim bulb (and George VI's much worse traits - including a mindless punctiliousness and a tendency to shriek at nameless functionaries - make no appearance at all). And with Churchill things are even worse - there things devolve into outright hagiography, including some assertions that are jaw-droppingly astonishing: "Accounts vary but most say that he rarely actually smoked; he simply kept the cigars in his mouth, or in his hand after having lit them. He certainly was neither a drunkard - as Hitler had once called him - nor a chain smoker" ("More than drink, cigars, or roast beef," the author hilariously continues, "his greatest tonic was the rhythm of life itself ...")Weisbrode is certainly right to contend that a different monarch might have made Britain's wartime years far more difficult for Churchill, but even that contention leaves out as much speculation as it includes (those Tuesday lunches were voluntary on Churchill's part, after all - there's every chance that he would have simply ignored a more troublesome monarch). Both Churchill and the King have been exceptionally well-served by biographers in the last sixty years; the particulars of their wartime relationship are well known. What's wanting here is more introspection rather than more recapitulation.