In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

"Yes. One of the reasons I admire this book so much is the technical feat of writing it. The genius is really in the structure. Writing a book about writing a book is a very difficult thing to do when what you’re trying to do is cast light on the historical episodes that the book is about. Reynolds has succeeded brilliantly in doing that and getting the balance right. It’s hard to see how it could have been done better. It’s not too long. He had to be selective because there’s an enormous amount of material and he couldn’t cover everything. But I think he basically chose the right bits. Fundamentally, it’s a book about the way in which Churchill tried to manipulate his account of history in order to make himself look better. That’s what it boils down to. The only criticism I have of the book—and it’s not really a very big one—is that with the title, which is obviously great, there is a slight risk of suggesting that Churchill was always successful in getting his interpretation accepted. Churchill had the great advantage of having access to lots of original documents, which nobody else had access to and, therefore, it was quite difficult for anybody else to refute his account. But people weren’t stupid. There was a lot of publicly available information that people could use to dispute Churchill’s interpretation and they did. One has to be a bit cautious about thinking that ‘In Command of History’ means he laid down this version and then that became the totally authoritative, uncontested version until such time as the archives were open to everyone. One of the important points in the book is that, in the first volume, The Gathering Storm , David rightly points out that you could read it without really knowing that Churchill spent a huge chunk of the first part of the decade campaigning against the ‘Government of India Bill’. Because Churchill generated so many memoranda, so many speeches over the years, it became fairly easy for him to construct a story where he spotted the danger of Nazi Germany earlier than everybody else and then consistently spent all the time up until 1939 talking about this while—supposedly—barely anybody else paid the slightest bit of attention. Those are the foundations of the heroic narrative, that he was a uniquely farsighted prophet. Historians would now emphasise—and indeed have been doing for about 50 years, if not longer—that Churchill was concerned to obtain political office and that many of his actions and exactly what he said at particular moments was shaped by that. You can go through his speeches and have fun finding the bits where he said really nice things about Neville Chamberlain, for example. Churchill, from his own point of view, wouldn’t have denied that he was seeking office. He would have asked how he was going to do anything or get what he wanted unless he held office. And, sure enough, he had to hold office, as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1940, before he could obtain the highest office, that of prime minister. “He would insist to the publishers, ‘Well, I could finish this volume if I had a holiday in Morocco!’ For which they, of course, were expected to pay…” The book also shows how accounts of particular episodes during the war were shaped by the desire not to offend the Americans post-war, or not to offend Eisenhower. He might have been quite critical of some things Ike did during the war, but that was not the sort of thing to which he was going to draw attention. This book is also interesting on the technique by which the book was actually written. Churchill was a bit of a nightmare author. He was always late and the book got larger and larger. There were always corrections up until the last minute. He would insist to the publishers or to Time-Life , who were serialising it, ‘Well, I could finish this volume if I had a holiday in Morocco!’ For which they, of course, were expected to pay… It certainly kept him in the public eye. Obviously he was the leader of the opposition, so you’d think he would have been in the public eye anyway. But he wasn’t that desperate to turn up and be incredibly diligent in the House of Commons. He left a lot of that stuff to Anthony Eden. So, yes, if he can remind everybody of his past greatness, that’s obviously electorally useful. It serves all sorts of functions. It served to ‘justify himself before history’, as he puts it. It served current political purposes. And he wrote it to make money."