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.
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
464 pages
$22.06
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.”
The familiarity of this epic story encourages the illusion of historical determinism. We imagine an inevitability to Hitler’s militarism, France’s shame at Vichy, or Britain’s resilience during months of murderous air raids on London. A more informed view of history, however, suggests its shocking contingency.
 A German diplomat once described Winston Churchill as “the only Englishman Hitler is afraid of.” But as Olson emphasizes, Churchill was considered politically radioactive—belligerent, a backbencher and a crank, yesterday’s politician: “The Churchillian qualities that many before had seen as serious flaws—his combativeness, high-flown rhetoric, soaring romanticism, egotism—became, in these calamitous days, essential virtues.” It might never have happened. Even after Churchill joined the government, he refused to assist the rebels in a political coup. It was up to them to orchestrate Chamberlain’s ouster and his selection as prime minister. It is worth recalling how they managed it, despite the hazards and setbacks along the way.
Olson’s book is not without its weaknesses. Her account is sometimes superficial, prone to clichés, and occasionally wanders off course. We learn much more than we need to know, for example, about the sexual exploits of some of these parliamentarians. She is at her best when she keeps her central narrative in mind—the daring of political outcasts to shake a nation loose from its moral apathy. Their numbers were never very large. They were dismissed as warmongers. Their minority status frustrated plans to directly challenge Chamberlain’s government. One of them, Dick Law, after complaining to Felix Frankfurter, an advisor to President Roosevelt and a Supreme Court Justice, got an earful. “My dear Dick, the trouble with you people is that your acts don’t line up with your convictions,” Frankfurter told him in the summer of 1939. “Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.”
We hear a good deal nowadays about the dangers of excessive certitude—a necessary caution, to be sure—but very little about the virtue of unswerving resolve. Winston Churchill was blessed to have attracted just enough resolute rebels when they were most required. A visit to his home at Chartwell suggests that he was well aware of the debt he owed them. In the lush garden there, inscribed in a stone walkway, are these words: “It does not do to wander too far from sober men.”
One way to appreciate the magnitude of the task facing Churchill and his rebel MPs is to read alternative visions for peace and security that were popular in their day. The prolific H. G. Wells, best-known for his science fiction, had long been interested in politics. His polemical work The New World Order, published in 1940, offers a window into the socialist mindset typical in Great Britain on the eve of all-out war.
For starters, the book suffers from a refusal to distinguish between democracies and dictatorships. Britain’s Ministry of Information, for example, is likened to the propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels. It is an “open question,” Wells claims, whether the legislative bodies of America and Great Britain are any more responsive to the people “than the dictators we denounce so unreservedly.” In a work approaching 200 pages, he virtually ignores the barbarism and race-based fury of the Third Reich. He shows little interest in an alliance of democracies to keep the peace, and—writing in 1940, remember—regards Hitler’s Reich as merely a tiresome replay of the Kaiser’s Germany. “The war, the Chamberlain-Hitler War, is being waged so far by the British Empire in quite the old spirit,” he writes. “There is the same disregard of any more fundamental problem.”
The fundamental problem for Wells—the “disruptive forces” that inspired German aggression—is to be found in the politics of the nation state and the economics of global capitalism: “The disease will manifest itself in some new eruption. It is the system of nationalist individualism and unco-ordinated enterprise that is the world’s disease, and it is the whole system that has to go.” Sound familiar?
Delusions about the gentle inclinations of human nature, expressed in Wells’ pacifism, found many allies among the liberal intelligentsia of his day. “Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun, and firing it, are all acts of the same order,” he writes. “It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth, any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men.” It was a viewpoint more or less endorsed by the editors at the Christian Century and the leadership of the Federal Council of Churches.
 For all of its soaring humanism, Wells’ New World Order could only be implemented by an élite corps of rational, privileged, highly educated professionals. “Either mankind collapses or our species struggles up by the hard yet fairly obvious routes I have collated in this book, to reach a new level of social organization,” he writes. “The new order cannot be brought into existence without a gigantic and more or less co-ordinated effort of the saner and abler elements in the human population.” Here is the totalitarian creature in its early stages, concealed behind the smiling, urbane visage of the public intellectual—a species that prowls about our schools of public policy and foreign service to this day.
If the reader is tempted to despair of the art of diplomacy, past and present, a book by Britain’s chief diplomatic advisor during the 1930s is a welcome corrective. Robert Vansittart shook up the British Foreign Office as a leading figure of the anti-appeasement coalition in the run-up to war—until Chamberlain had him sacked. His 1941 collection Bones of Contention offers enduring insights into the interplay of morality, religion, and international politics.
The startling compromises of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Nazi-controlled nations is a major theme of Vansittart’s critique of the political crisis. He laments “the consent of silence” proffered by the Catholic hierarchy to Hitler’s foreign and military policies. He cites as evidence a Catholic pastoral letter circulated in May 1941: “It is just as faithful Christians, fully convinced of God’s love, that we resolutely take up our stand behind our Fuhrer.” The letter appeared at a time when German tanks had taken up residence in several European capitals. Protestant pastors performed no better. Vansittart complains that “many state-paid pastors launch sermons of hate from their state-owned pulpits,” their public prayers asking God to grant Hitler “new strength” to rule Germany effectively.
Vansittart was not opposed to churches participating in politics. What he objected to was ministers making pronouncements about issues of war and peace that played into the hands of dictators—a timely note for religious leaders endlessly preoccupied with the “root causes” of Islamist rage.
 The great value of Bones of Contention is that it represents an approach to diplomacy neglected by many practitioners at Foggy Bottom. Vansittart was a 36-year foreign service veteran unafraid to defend his nation’s democratic record. He could not separate moral principle from international politics. He understood the salience of culture to the fate of democracies. And his convictions were not incidental to the fact that he judged the Nazi threat correctly. “No one more clearly realized or foresaw the growth of the German danger,” Churchill said of him, “or was more ready to subordinate other considerations to meeting it.”
 By contrast, the U.S. State Department is notorious for its equivocations about American foreign policy and its indifference to culture and religion—a weakness that has cost the United States dearly, whether in its tragic mistakes in Iraq or slowness to see the gathering storm of Islamic terrorism. Maybe a little more faith-based diplomacy, à la Robert Vansittart, is just what we need.
Joe Loconte is a senior fellow of the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio. He is the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm (Rowman & Littlefield).
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