Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
Lynne Olson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
436 pp.
As President George W. Bush steadfastly pursues a ruinous policy in Iraq, his supporters laud him as a latter-day Harry S. Truman or even Winston Churchill. Standing firm against the appeasing elites and ignorant masses, President Bush is said to recognize the far-reaching threat to Western civilization that everyone else is missing. It is his firm determination that will save America despite itself, we are told.
Perhaps some people, other than George W. Bush, really believe this. But the claim demonstrates that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Most people spinning the Bush-as-Churchill line are simply following P.T. Barnum’s aphorism that “there’s a sucker born every minute.”
Churchill was steadfast, even stubborn. He was much more, however. Despite his flaws, he had intelligence, knowledge, inquisitiveness, experience, talent, and insight in prodigious quantities. George W. Bush is a decent person, but his frat-boy demeanor should not be confused with intelligence, knowledge, inquisitiveness, experience, talent, and insight.
There is a far deeper irony to the comparison of Bush and Churchill, however. If George W. Bush resembles any European figure in 1940, it is British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Both followed disastrously unrealistic policies. Both attempted to enforce ideological conformity and attacked their critics as unpatriotic. Both led their nations into crises. Both botched the wars they fought. Both resisted calls for change.
If there is a Winston Churchill today, it is a critic of Bush, someone who has been in the Republican wilderness for pointing out the administration’s abundant errors in Iraq. Vietnam veteran and Iraq critic Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) comes to mind as one possibility. But even he probably wouldn’t push the comparison too far.
The president’s similarities with Neville Chamberlain blaze forth in Lynne Olson’s new book, Troublesome Young Men. She explains:
“As prime minister, Neville Chamberlain possessed an overwhelming parliamentary majority. He and his men were masters of the House of Commons, manipulating and dominating that body just as they did the other traditional overseer of the government, the press. Using tactics that have striking resonance today, Chamberlain and his subordinates restricted journalists’ access to government sources, badgered the BBC and newspapers to follow the government’s line, and claimed that critics of their policies – in both the press and Parliament – were guilty of damaging the national interest.”
Troublesome Young Men provides a wonderful political narrative about how a small number of conservative MPs risked their careers to challenge their party’s and nation’s entrenched leadership. The book also illustrates the importance of individuals, irrespective of the larger “historical forces” allegedly at work. It is simply not true, contends Olson, former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, that Churchill’s rise was inevitable. Luck, or providence, was constantly in play.
The dissidents spent two years seeking to breach the prime minister’s seemingly “impregnable position,” in Olson’s words. The rebels’ plight brings to mind the status of GOP critics of President Bush’s war in Iraq. For the longest time they were only voices shouting in the wilderness. But the voices are growing louder. American presidents have an institutional security absent for British prime ministers, so George W. Bush undoubtedly will finish his term. His Iraq policy, however, likely will go the way of Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy.
Olson sets the stage in the summer of 1939. The Munich agreement of the previous year had not brought peace. The problem was not appeasement per se – appeasement, resolving the grievances of contending powers, had worked before, delaying the onset of World War I. A little more appeasement in the summer of 1914 might have prevented humankind from jumping off the cliff into the murderous abyss of global conflict. The problem a generation later was that the British were attempting to appease someone who could not be appeased, perhaps the only person in Europe, and certainly the only person leading a European country, who wanted war.
Notably, appeasement was neither isolation nor nonintervention. Chamberlain’s Britain actively aided an aggressive power in dismantling an allied, democratic state. Tossing Czechoslovakia to the wolves would have been a high price to pay at any time, but it was a particularly foolish policy when doing so strengthened the prime aggressor and whetted its appetite.
Nevertheless, there was enormous public relief in Britain in the immediate aftermath of Munich, since the dark war clouds seemed to dissipate. Chamberlain enjoyed a burst of popularity. Only after Germany violated the agreement by swallowing up the rest of Czechoslovakia did appeasement lose its popular appeal.
Even then it was difficult to oppose Chamberlain. As of August 1939, notes Olson, Harold Macmillan “was one of a small group of Tory MPs who had been scathingly critical of the Munich agreement and who had banded together, under the ostensible leadership of former foreign secretary Anthony Eden, to resist any further appeasement.” Churchill was the best known opponent, of course, but he also had more than usual amount of political baggage, in current parlance. All told, the intra-Conservative Party opposition constituted a beleaguered minority
The ensuing battle was difficult and bitter, and is nicely detailed by Olson. Chamberlain deployed every advantage of office: he could offer cabinet posts, generate constituent pressure, and deny renomination. He was fiercely determined to have his way and was fully prepared to demand complete loyalty to his government. These behaviors predated Munich but intensified afterwards. Writes Olson, “The prime minister had always been a man of great determination and obstinacy, but in the past year, after being acclaimed throughout the world as the savior of peace following Munich, he had become increasingly intolerant of any criticism or disagreement.”
Nevertheless, the dissidents carried on, despite the odds. Olson tells us who they are, discusses their complex relationships, details Chamberlain’s brutal countermoves, and explores the complex game in which they looked for an opening to upend the government. Through it all Churchill’s role was surprisingly equivocal. Brought back to the Admiralty by a prime minister weakened by military defeat, Churchill then defended the government, even in the debate over Britain’s disastrous intervention in Norway, which led to Chamberlain’s ouster.
The high point of Troublesome Young Men is the debate on May 7, 1940. The government was not ready for the storm about to break:
“Chamberlain and his men knew they were in for a rough time over the next two days. But they were confident they would emerge as the victors. The debate will be ‘awkward,’ John Colville [one of Chamberlain’s private secretaries] acknowledged on May 6, but ‘obviously the government will win through.’ His assessment was shared by many others, including journalists like Ed Murrow. ‘Chamberlain’s government is in no immediate danger,’ Murrow reported on CBS the week before the debate. ‘The British are not in the habit of overthrowing governments because of military defeats.'”
But history is not fixed; in this case, the complex interplay of real human beings was fascinating and decisive. The prime minister’s presentation to Parliament was flat. The opposition MPs were hostile. Conservative dissidents attacked. Then Leo Amery, a longtime friend of Chamberlain, delivered one of the most important, celebrated, and fateful speeches in British parliamentary history. It was particularly effective because Amery was no radical – he was a 64-year-old right-wing MP and former Chamberlain loyalist. His peroration is one of the most famous in history. Quoting Oliver Cromwell in dismissing the famous Long Parliament, Amery declared: “In the name of God, go!”
We live in an age when words uttered on the House or Senate floors don’t seem to matter much. When was the last time that a congressional speech changed policy, let alone history? On May 7, 1940, a speech transformed the world. Explains Olson: “Amery’s words ripped the air like bullets. The ministers’ faces whitened, and loud gasps swept the chamber. The sense of shock was almost palpable.” A reporter wrote that Amery had hit the government with the “most damaging assault since before the war.”
Amery’s speech set up the confidence vote which, notably, Chamberlain won. But his majority had shrunk and his public backing had shattered. A coalition government followed, headed by Churchill; ironically, few of the dissidents themselves won substantial office. Moreover, five more years of bitter fighting remained before the war was won.
Still, whatever one thinks about the policy of appeasement or Churchill’s wartime leadership, his ascension to power should give hope to dissidents in all ages, including today. Sometimes the good guys do win against enormous odds. And it’s a lesson worth remembering. Olson concludes her fine book:
“The rebels’ cause certainly had seemed impossible at the time. They were defying a seemingly omnipotent prime minister and political establishment, whose success at shutting down dissent and dispute within the government and the press had been unparalleled. In the course of their two-year struggle the dissidents, with a rare exception like Ronald Cartland, were not untarnished heroes. They were timid and cautious on occasion, susceptible to intimidation and appeals to loyalty made by Chamberlain and his men, worried about their careers and being branded parliamentary pariahs. But when their country’s future hung in the balance in May 1940, they put all those considerations aside. In the end, they did what Leo Amery had urged Arthur Greenwood to do eight months before.
"They spoke for England.”
Now it is time for America’s leaders to speak for America.
