Cita Stelzer

For seven decades the powerful, influential and successful beat a path to Winston Churchill’s door. He shook hands with every prime minister from Lord Rosebery to Mrs Thatcher, and almost every president from William McKinley to Richard Nixon. He talked physics with Albert Einstein, cinema with Charlie Chaplin, imperialism with Mark Twain and art with Walter Sickert. He angered Theodore Roosevelt, admired John F. Kennedy, mentored Edward Heath and was accosted by Frank Sinatra. He lived a life so packed with meaning and ministerial office – and of such historical significance – that he can make his contemporaries seem rather small by comparison. The result is that – in books about Churchill – his friends, colleagues, acquaintances and foes often appear as fish do to a scuba diver; darting briefly into view before disappearing back into the gloom.

Yet these relationships mattered to Churchill, both personally and professionally. His collaboration with Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George created much of the modern welfare state; his work with Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Charles de Gaulle and Harry Truman moulded the postwar world. And, throughout his career, he was supported, informed, inspired and assisted by a whole host of others – politicians, bankers, industrialists, scientists, journalists and publishers – who can be, often unfairly, reduced by historians to a footnote.

Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network and David Reynolds’ Mirrors of Greatness attempt to redress the balance, taking Churchill’s relationships as their subject. In doing so, they explain what Churchill’s contemporaries meant to him, saw in him, did for him – and how they changed history. Each book, in its own way, drags important men and women out of Churchill’s orbit and stands them alongside him.

As its title suggests, Stelzer’s book focuses on North America, covering Churchill’s various visits to the US during the first 40 years of the 20th century. In narrating his travels across the booming continent, Stelzer ably recounts the hands that Churchill shook and the relationships that resulted, as he seemingly met with every important industrialist, banker, politician, general, admiral and commentator – usually while touring the country as a paid speaker. William Randolph Hearst, J.P. Morgan Jr, John D. Rockefeller and scores of others all crossed his path and, once back in Britain, Churchill kept these contacts warm through meetings, occasional letters and gifts of signed books. By the time that he became prime minister in 1940, Churchill acolytes, boosters and sympathisers could be found scattered across North America. When Roosevelt required information on Britain, its fighting chances and the character of its prime minister, Churchill’s network stood ready to provide it. Figures including the journalist Edward R. Murrow, fresh from London, were able to assure the president that Churchill’s resolve to fight was strong. These contacts, Stelzer writes, ‘were a helpful offset to the noninterventionist, isolationist, even pro-German background of [US] public opinion’ in the early years of the Second World War. On this, Stelzer is convincing: she ably demonstrates the help that Churchill’s contacts gave Roosevelt as he struggled to lend support to a beleaguered Britain in the aftermath of the catastrophe of Dunkirk. Stelzer presents Churchill as an accomplished networker who was very conscious of the power of personal relationships.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Joel Nelson is working on a book about John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill for PublicAffairs.… (meer)

Fun to read anecdotes of how Churchill used food and meals as diplomatic and educational opportunities.
Now meals to him meant 3 to 4 hours together, without Facebook, in conversation (or perhaps himself expounding..).
There was actually too much info on the menus, etc for me as a barely capable minimalist cook - but some foodies will love it. Though I must say that one serious handicap of the Kindle is its inability to display any detail (like text…) with images. I do hope Amazon can find a solution for this.

To have an entire chapter on “Cigars” was a first for me. But for Churchill, it deserved it.

The inside information on some of the world leaders that Churchill dined with was of course usually interesting.

The lengths to which world leaders (in particular Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) went to impress each other with their food and resources was actually beyond my imagining. Flying ham to Potsdam overnight from London, for example!
And to deliver a large sumptuous meal in a foreign war zone took incredible logistics resources and people. The price of high level diplomacy, eh?
The was a long chapter at the end of the book, where the author delivered brief biographical sketches of many of the folks Churchill had dined with. It was often quite interesting.
The book is supplemented with a long bibliography and a deep index.… (meer)

Really, this deserves 3.5 stars. Dinner with Churchill is a fairly delightful look at the banquets and dinners and eating and drinking habits of the King's First Minister, before, after, and mostly during the Second World War.

If there's anything holding the book back, perhaps, it's the rather sweeping claims about Churchill's dining representing so much of his character. I know the normal school of thought when it comes to history requires a thesis, but this one may have been a bit...stretched (skillfull use of ration coupons for group dinners = concern for the common Briton, that sort of thing). On the other hand, the use of - and ability to find - a surprising array of primary sources on Churchill's meal tabs and cigar orders is quite impressive.

Perhaps the best parts of the book are the final three chapters, which examine at some length Churchill's food, alcohol, and cigar preferences. They were certainly inspirational in their own way, and just plain fun. So while the book isn't a masterpiece, it's a relatively quick read, and therefore well worth your time.… (meer)