Below is an excerpt from the book "The Third Man: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the Untold Friendships That Won WWII” by Neville Thompson. The excerpt focuses on the last meeting between Sir Winston Churchill and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.
Quebec Conference, 1943. In the back row are Mackenzie King and Sir Winston Churchill. In the front sit US President Roosevelt and the Earl of Athlone, Governor General of Canada.
In late 1948, three years after the end of the war and close to half a century after their first encounter, Mackenzie King and Winston Churchill met for the last time. King was no longer the leader of the Liberal party, having carefully engineered Louis St. Laurent into that position at the convention to choose a successor in August 1948. But he remained as prime minister in order to represent Canada at a Commonwealth prime ministers conference in October. King looked forward to his farewell appearance after quarter of a century of being the crucial figure at such events. He was unquestionably the senior figure in the British dominions.
On his way to London, King stopped in Paris for a session of the United Nations. Eleanor Roosevelt was there as a member of the US delegation and Chair of the Commission on Human Rights which produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in December. She was staying in the same hotel, in a room close to King’s. They did not spend much time together, but they did reminisce about the past and Eleanor repeated her husband’s affection for King and the many confidences he had shared. At a dinner of dominion representatives, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Ernest Bevin gave a toast to King on his retirement. Not having been forewarned, King had no reply prepared but he spontaneously pronounced a benediction on the Commonwealth. During his long years as prime minister, he said that he had tried to keep before him:
The best traditions of British public life. That I realized what the nations of the Commonwealth had derived in that way. Real bonds between nations of the Commonwealth were love of freedom, of liberty which had been inherited from the struggles of Britain, and the example of public men.
In Paris, King had been far more tired than usual, unable to breathe or sleep easily, and perspiring freely, all of which suggests blocked arteries. Shortly after his arrival in London, he felt too unwell to leave the Dorchester Hotel. Lord Moran, Churchill’s personal doctor, diagnosed heart strain for which he prescribed digitalis, sleeping pills, and morphine, and arranged for a night nurse. He went with King to a heart specialist, Sir John Parkinson, who took an x-ray and a cardiograph and detected edema (swelling) in one leg owing to poor circulation. Moran banned salt and recommended bed rest for two weeks. In fact, King remained there for three. Moran came practically every day, although there was nothing further he could provide other than encouragement. He did not charge for his services but a few months later King sent him £150.8. King was characteristically proud that his illness, indeed his whole stay in London, cost Canadian taxpayers nothing since the expense of the conference was covered by the British government. Since he could not attend the sessions, St. Laurent came by air to represent Canada after all.
Lord Moran’s concern in attending King was not his fee but his literary ambition. He was a prominent practitioner and medical politician (as president of the Royal College of Physicians he was known to general practitioners as “Corkscrew Charlie” for concentrating on the interests of specialists in negotiations over the National Health Scheme) who knew that his real fame depended on producing an account of his association with Churchill. He was reviewing and reworking his diaries to present an attention-catching account to be published after his great patient’s death, which he had no reason to think would be long delayed. King’s confinement was a heaven-sent opportunity to sharpen and increase his knowledge by adding the experience of someone who had been, as Moran had not, at many private meetings and informal discussions with Churchill and also Roosevelt.
On the very first day, they talked about Churchill for over an hour and found themselves in substantial agreement. Moran observed, and King did not dissent, that Churchill had achieved great things despite his faults. He was very strong willed, thought in big terms, and his knowledge of military history was so extensive that he could dominate any situation and not leave others much chance to say anything. Churchill recognized the value of experts but did not allow them to control. King was not so indiscreet as to tell Moran that Field Marshall Montgomery had said that he did not want Churchill around during the fighting, and that Field Marshall Harold Alexander (now governor general of Canada) had said that he had to stand up to prevent Churchill’s interference. But King did confirm that Churchill did most of the talking in cabinet and was inconsiderate of others: even Labour’s Attlee and the Liberal leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair, members of the War Cabinet, were treated almost with contempt, and most colleagues feared to say anything. To get his way, Churchill would work himself into an emotional state.
On the other hand, King attested that Churchill was loyal to his friends, stuck to his word in getting things done, and had great courage, “no fear in the world. In that way gave a powerful example to others.” King also pointed out that many were attracted by the desire to associate with such a towering figure. He claimed not to have liked what Churchill told him about the effectiveness of flattery, although King was both susceptible and not sparing in his own use of it. While no one could say if the war would have been won if anything had happened to Churchill and Roosevelt, King considered that a change of leadership might have shortened the European conflict since the Germans were terrified of Churchill. Both he and Moran considered that unconditional surrender (which was Roosevelt’s and not Churchill’s insistence) had been a mistake since it had closed every door and made the fighting more intense.
Moran also wanted to discuss relations between Churchill and Roosevelt, about which King knew a great deal. He said that Churchill had repeatedly insisted that they must meet the president in every way possible and never forget that he was Britain’s greatest friend. On the difference between them over sharing research on the atomic bomb with the Soviets, King, whose opinion had changed with the Cold War, now thought Churchill had been right that it should be withheld. A couple of days later, Moran told King that he had noticed that Roosevelt was failing at the 1944 Quebec conference and by Yalta was completely used up. This was not surprising for a detached physician and was no revelation to King, but it would have been to the public if it had been publicized on such authority, just three and a half years after Roosevelt’s death.
In addition to Moran, Mackenzie King received a stream of other visitors at his bedside: Louis St. Laurent, of course, Attlee, Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, Ernest Bevin and future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who wanted to inquire about King’s memoirs which it was assumed the Macmillan company, his family firm, would publish. It must have been a great encouragement that Bevin, who managed to carry on in one of the most demanding jobs in the government, said that his symptoms were exactly like King’s; and more people that Moran implied Bevin’s condition was the result of excessive drinking. This held out the expectation that King’s abstemious lifestyle would speed his recovery. King George VI paid his Canadian prime minister the great compliment of going to see him at the hotel. So did his uncle, Lord Athlone, who came as chancellor of the University of London with an academic delegation and an honorary degree, for which King got out of bed and dressed. There were also personal friends, notably the social reformer Violet Markham, and three sessions with spiritualists, one of whom contacted Franklin Roosevelt as well as Lord Tweedsmuir. But the highlight, on the second to last day, was Winston Churchill, still leader of the British Conservative Party, whom King would have been sorry to miss.
Churchill arrived with a copy of the British edition of The Gathering Storm. He was sorry to find his old friend in such poor condition but not greatly concerned since he had recovered from worse himself (the next summer he would quickly recuperate from a stroke). King was amazed at how well his contemporary looked—“quite young and strong”—and the quantity of work he was able to do. Churchill said that he relaxed a lot, sometimes painting for three hours a day. He was also buoyed by having just denounced the Labour government’s handling of world affairs in parliament in the same hard terms that he had used at the Conservative annual conference a couple of weeks earlier. (Prime Minister Attlee, who arrived later, told King that he had been hurt by the accusations of timidity towards the Soviet Union, responsibility for the slaughter following Indian independence, the chaos in Palestine, and the charge that his government would force Northern Ireland into joining Eire which was becoming an independent republic with no ties to the United Kingdom.)
King agreed with Attlee that Churchill’s speech was extreme, even alarming in his claim that Conservative governments would come to power in Britain and all the old dominions and take proper command of the Commonwealth. Many British Conservatives were offended by their leader’s belligerence but kept their heads down and deferred to the international hero who they hoped would carry them back to office in the election that was scheduled for 1950. This mutinous feeling was expressed to King three months later by the still exasperated Anthony Eden, Churchill’s former deputy, who said that while the great man was mellowing, he still refused to surrender the party leadership.
In their bedside conversation at the Dorchester, King and Churchill did not touch on contemporary controversies but stuck to the tranquilizing triumphs of the past. Churchill declared, although it is not clear how he could have known, that King had been much missed at the Commonwealth conference. He also cheered the invalid by assuring him again of his great services during the war: “You have never failed. You were helpful always. There was nothing that you did not do, that could be done.” He mentioned, in particular, the Commonwealth air training plan and King’s refusal to support Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ desire for the dominions to play a larger part in the direction of the war in order to undermine Churchill. He reiterated that King had been a bridge between Britain and the United States, specifying his help in the possible move of the Royal Navy to the United States. He recalled King’s encouraging telephone call after Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech two years earlier, and could not resist adding that every point in the address had since been borne out. The two parted with emotion, Churchill’s eyes filling with tears, yet King was annoyed that on his way out he asked the high commissioner (Norman Robertson) to ensure that the press was informed of his visit.
There was no sense that this was their last meeting. Once he recovered his health, King expected to continue visiting Britain, as he had when out of office in the early 1930s. Churchill hoped to go to Toronto in the spring to receive an honorary degree and wanted King to attend. King in turn invited Churchill to Ottawa. But King would not recover, and they would never meet again.
You can buy The Third Man: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the Untold Friendships That Won WWII here: Amazon US | Amazon UK
About the Author
Neville Thompson is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario, where he taught modern British and European history. He is the author of The Anti-Appeasers: Opposition to Appeasement in the 1930s, Wellington After Waterloo, and Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream. His latest book The Third Man: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the Untold Friendships That Won WWII is released in hardcover in February 2021 with Sutherland House Books. He lives in Ottawa.
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From "THE THIRD MAN: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the Untold Friendships That Won WWII" by Neville Thompson. Copyright © 2021 by Neville Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Sutherland House Books.
