Winston Churchill and Me

Sometimes one has an experience that is so novel and extraordinary that you can’t wait to share it with all who will listen. When I experience such a moment, I find myself blurting out: “Now, that’s one for the memoirs!”

Not that I plan to write my memoirs. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading memoirs and biographies. But the idea of writing my own strikes me as just a bit presumptuous and, well, old. Unless one has the kind of dramatic life story that takes you to the White House or perhaps an Academy Award by the age of 20, the memoir thing is likely to be a dry read. Even a Medal of Honor winner like Audie Murphy and a World War I flying ace like Eddie Rickenbacker needed to put a few more notches in their belts – say 44 movies in the former’s case or a racing car career in the latter’s – before the story had enough pizzazz to merit a good beach read.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t dream. And last week I had one of those “one for the memoirs” moments that I need to share with you.

A good friend invited me to join him to hear one of my heroes speak at a club in Houston. Actually, the speaker was the grandson of one of my heroes, but who’s going to quibble? Winston Churchill left us in 1965 but his grandson Winston S. Churchill is still with us and when the grandson speaks it is with the compelling force of personality that people must have felt listening to his grandfather in 1938 when he warned of imminent storm clouds over Europe.

So I sat in an ornate room of a venerable club, the kind of club where one can retire to the smoking lounge and sip a Gibson and imagine that the rest of the evening will consist of seeing a new double feature starring some hot new stars like Lana Turner or Humphrey Bogart.

Lunch consisted of pheasant and Yorkshire pudding. This was a nice change of pace for the audience, perhaps, although I suspect our speaker would have preferred a hamburger and fries. I’m not sure what was served for dessert; our speaker was so mesmerizing I don’t think I touched it.

Mr. Churchill is a former journalist and Conservative member of Parliament whose most interesting claim to fame in my view was his circumnavigation of the African continent in a single engine plane the year he graduated from Oxford. He recounted that despite his frequent exposure to wartime danger the only time he was ever roughed up was at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Evidently the police challenged him as he tried to enter the Blackstone hotel on Michigan Avenue. “Who are you?!,” they demanded. “Winston Churchill!” he replied. “A likely story!” they replied and beat him over the head with a nightstick until the abashed hotel desk clerk confirmed that he was, indeed, Mr. Churchill.

Churchill spoke eloquently about his concern for western security, in particular the threat faced by terrorist cells, demographic changes in Europe, and nuclear weapons in Pakistan. He expressed fervent hope that the new administration in Washington would succeed in its foreign policy, but said he did have one serious reservation: That President Obama returned to England the bust of his grandfather that apparently has sat in the Oval office for decades.

Now for the “memoir” moment. At the end of Churchill’s talk I remained standing in a small group listening to him answer some questions. A gentleman walked up to him and reached out his hand.

“Mr. Churchill,” the man said. “I’m Paul Clemenceau, great-grandson of Georges Clemenceau.” Georges Clemenceau was prime minister of France at the end of the First World War and later one of the principle negotiators of the Treaty of Versailles, along with England’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Churchill looked at the man and smiled. “How nice to meet a Clemenceau,” he said. “What a small world.”

Now that’s one for the memoirs!, I said to myself. I was witnessing the grand arc of history. In 1918, as the German army unleashed one of the fiercest attacks of the war, Lloyd George sent Churchill to France to find out what was happening. There Churchill met the French Prime Minister and Clemenceau fearlessly took him to the battle front. Churchill, a tested battlefield veteran, protested that Clemenceau was putting himself in danger. “C’est mon grand plaisir,” Clemenceau responded. “It’s my great pleasure.”

To think: Could Clemenceau have guessed, at that moment, that 90 years hence his own great grandson would meet his companion’s grandson, in a private club halfway around the world?