Winston Churchill: Walking with Destiny

When Winston Spencer Churchill died

at the age of 90 on January 24, 1965,

life stopped for a few days in Great Britain.

While he had been in ill health

and out of the public life for many years,

his death still came as a shock,

not only to the British people but to the rest of the world.

From the average person in the street

to world leaders and the British royal family,

it seemed as if there was no one who was not affected

by the passing of the man who many considered to be

the greatest figure of the 20th century.

I think his legacy is his inspiration

and the example that he set in the most difficult time

that his country had ever had.

The vital importance of Winston Churchill was

that he kept the flag of freedom flying.

I'm convinced that but for Winston Churchill,

it is entirely possible that the Nazi swastika

would to this day be flying

over the palace of Westminster, over Buckingham Palace,

and over every capital city of Europe as far east as Moscow.

25 years earlier, few would have predicted

this kind of adulation.

May 10, 1940.

Nazi Germany had just invaded France, Belgium,

Holland, Norway, and Denmark.

Increasing numbers of Britons, dissatisfied

with the way in which Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

was handling the war,

were now demanding a change in the government,

so Chamberlain handed in his resignation.

The public were calling for Churchill, the newest

member of the cabinet

and the First Lord of the Admiralty,

to replace Chamberlain.

But he was not the preferred choice

of King George VI and many

in the majority Conservative Party, the Tories.

After a spirited debate in the House of Commons,

a reluctant decision was made by the Tories to go

with public sentiment.

That evening, Churchill was driven to Buckingham Palace

to meet with the King.

On the drive back to his residence

at the Admiralty, Churchill was

uncharacteristically quiet.

His personal bodyguard, Inspector Walter H. Thompson,

wanting to break the silence,

decided to congratulate his boss

on his appointment.

"I only wish the position had come your way

in better times, for you have an enormous task,"

said his long-time aide.

Churchill became quite emotional.

"God alone knows how great it is," he replied.

"I hope it is not too late.

"I'm very much afraid it is.

We can only do our best."

The situation he was inheriting was

extremely bleak.

Over 130 Nazi divisions, backed by

the powerful Luftwaffe in the air, were on the assault

throughout Western Europe.

More than 300,000 British and French troops

in Northern France and Belgium were caught

completely off guard.

The French army was cut off and unable to launch

an effective counterattack.

Late on May 10, in his residence

at the Admiralty, Churchill reflected

on the situation and the events which had led

to his becoming Prime Minister.

By the time he was ready to retire for the night,

his glum mood after meeting with the King

had changed.

He wrote in his diary "I was conscious

"of a profound sense of relief.

"I felt as if I were walking with destiny

"and that all my past life had been

"but a preparation for this hour and this trial.

I was sure I should not fail."

In early 1930, Winston Churchill was

living in the wilderness, both physically

and politically.

Thrown out of office the year earlier with

the rest of the Conservative government, he was still

a member of Parliament but without a cabinet

position for the first time

in almost 3 decades.

He had retreated to the beauty of Chartwell,

his country estate in Kent, a few hours outside London.

Chartwell was his home.

Um, he had a house in London, but Chartwell was

where he felt most, I should think, at peace.

He did an enormous amount of work in the grounds.

He developed waterfalls which went down into

ponds, where he kept wonderful fish,

and there was a swimming pool,

and then at the very bottom,

there was a big lake where he had black swans,

and--he loved any living creature, so anything

that he could put there, whether it was fish or

birds, he always had.

My grandfather described Chartwell as somewhere

where "a day away from Chartwell is

a day wasted."

One of his favorite tasks

at Chartwell was bricklaying.

In fact, he took such pride in his work that he

joined the bricklayers union.

One day, he decided to take on a particularly

ambitious project, a brick wall outside

a cottage a local contractor was building

for him on the estate.

Watching him work was his bodyguard Walter H. Thompson.

At noon, Churchill left to have his lunch.

As he was dining, the builder took

Inspector Thompson over to Churchill's half-built wall,

each layer of bricks progressively out of line

with the next.

"Look at his wall," the builder exclaimed.

"If he puts one more layer of bricks on it,

it will topple over."

Knowing how proud Churchill was of his

bricklaying skills, Thompson did not want to

deliver the bad news.

So the bodyguard and the builder tore down

the wall and rebuilt it while Churchill

enjoyed his lunch.

Upon his return, Churchill stood

before the wall admiring his work.

"Look at that," he proclaimed to Thompson.

As straight as a die."

Despite his isolation at Chartwell, Churchill had

not stopped paying attention to world affairs,

especially a developing situation

in Germany.

In October 1930-- this is almost

3 years before Hitler becomes chancellor--

Churchill went to a dinner party

at the German embassy in London,

and the counselor of the embassy was startled

because Churchill kept asking him about Hitler.

He found it so unusual that he reported this to

the German foreign minister as an oddity.

One of the reasons why Churchill was

paying attention to Hitler's rising

popularity was his concern about the Nazi

leader's views and rhetoric about Jews.

Randolph Churchill, his father, had many close

Jewish friends.

After his death just before Winston's 20th birthday,

these same friends looked after him,

becoming father figures, and when he began his

political career in the early 1900s,

his first Parliamentary seat was in Manchester,

with a large Jewish constituency.

Churchill's concern about Nazism was also shared

by son Randolph, who in the early 1930s was

working as a journalist.

My father, when he was only 21 years old,

his first commission as a journalist was to go to

Nazi Germany and report on the German election campaign,

and he made friends with Hitler's

press secretary Putzi Hanfstaengl.

Less than a year later, Randolph Churchill

accompanied his father, his mother Clementine,

and his sister Sarah on another

trip to Germany, this time to Munich.

Churchill had signed a contract to write a book

about his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough.

Marlborough had defeated the French in the 17th century

in a series of battles at Blenheim near Munich,

and Churchill spent several weeks doing

research there.

It was very fortunate for history that Churchill,

when he was in his early 50s, found himself

in November 1932 in Munich and saw the Nazi

thugs marching in the streets and heard their

cries and knew that Hitler was anti-Semitic.

Hitler's press secretary Hanfstaengl

heard that Randolph was in Munich and contacted

him with an idea.

Would his father be interested in meeting

the leader of the Nazi Party?

Churchill said, "Well, I'm happy to meet

"him, but I'd like to know why he's so

against the Jews."

The plan was for Hitler to meet

Churchill in the lobby of his hotel one evening

after dinner.

Apparently, according to

Hanfstaengl, Hitler came to the glass door

of the hotel restaurant and looked through

at my grandfather,

but in the end,

he didn't dare go through with the meeting.

I think Hitler maybe just didn't have

the self-confidence at that particular moment to