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On the evening of September 1, 1939, Winston Churchill dined at the Savoy Grill in London with Duff Cooper, former head of the Admiralty, his wife Diana, and a handful of other hawkish confidants. One can only imagine the sense of cataclysm in the air. Earlier in the day the news came that Germany had invaded Poland. Churchill, who had only recently joined the government, agreed that war must be declared the following day.
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Given the pacifist mood in Britain, however, just about anything was conceivable. Less than a year had passed since the Nazi juggernaut absorbed Czechoslovakia, to which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain acceded in the notorious Munich Agreement. When the dinner broke up, the Coopers got a ride from the Duke of Westminster, who was leaving the Savoy at the same moment. The duke launched into an anti-Semitic tirade: Jews infested the Savoy. Jews were stirring up trouble all over Europe. Jews were trying to push Britain into a confrontation with Germany. Like most of the political class of his day, the duke was delighted that Britain had avoided war. He said he hoped that Hitler knew "after all, that we were his best friends." Duff Cooper broke his silence: "I hope that by tomorrow he will know that we are his most implacable and remorseless enemies."
History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it comes awfully close. It's not hard to hear echoes of this exchange in the debate over America's struggle against radical Islam—from the apologists for Iran's nuclear ambitions to the conspiracy theorists who claim Israeli involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
A stiff tonic for this malaise can be found in Lynne Olson's Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power in 1940 and Helped to Save Britain. Numerous books have traced Churchill's rise to power and wartime leadership, but few have explored the role of the Tory parliamentarians who staged a political revolt that made his ascent possible. Olson helps fill the gap admirably with a readable, thoroughly researched, and well-paced narrative.
In an era when government criticism could be considered treason, these dissident MPs—Leo Amery, Robert Boothby, Ronald Cartland, Dick Law, Harold Macmillan, Harold Nicolson, Duncan Sandys, Edward Spears, and others—risked censure and shame. In a culture where loyalty was sacrosanct, they invited political suicide by taking on their own party leader. In short, they put moral principle beyond the reach of partisan politics. While their efforts were eclipsed by Churchill's accomplishments, they nonetheless played a vital part in his political redemption—and in the larger story of democracy's triumph over terror. "No government can change men's souls," observed Ronald Cartland, the youngest member of the rebel group. "The souls of men change governments."
Olson reminds us that many of the men who opposed the appeasement of Hitler had fought in the Great War. Most of the government ministers who designed the country's policies of capitulation had not. The miseries and brutalities of war had haunted the lives of these rebels no less than their contemporaries. Yet they avoided the opposite extremes of pacifism and feckless diplomacy. Rather, for them, the experience of war had produced a certain maturity of mind, a temper of vigilance.
In her recounting of an Armistice Day speech, delivered in 1934 by Robert Boothby before an audience with no taste for another European conflict, Olson captures this mood brilliantly. Boothby's words were as prophetic as any uttered by Churchill himself. "Today, tyranny has regained the upper hand in Europe, and the danger of war is as great as in 1914," he said to stony silence. "If we simply drift along, never taking the lead … then everything that makes life worth living will be swept away, and then indeed we shall have finally broken faith with those who lie in the fields of Flanders."
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