Reviewed by Stanley Weintraub

Sunday, December 9, 2001; Page BW05

CHURCHILL
A Biography
By Roy Jenkins

Farrar Straus Giroux. 1002 pp. $40

Hefty to hold, Roy Jenkins's quirky but mostly admiring life of Winston Churchill serves up the vanity with the glory, and the fudge -- since Churchill produced volumes of self-serving history -- with the facts. Exploiting the vast printed record much as he did in his biography of William Gladstone (1997), Jenkins concedes that he has done no new research. Rather, he claims that he is "the only octogenarian" to have written a life of Churchill, and that he has had "the widest parliamentary and ministerial experience of his biographers."

While the first boast is empty, the second has substance. Jenkins often ventures judgments from his own knowledge of the bureaucratic corridors Churchill once commanded. Wryly astute about Churchill's out-of-power "wilderness" periods -- the last his "frustrated discontent" of the 1930s -- Jenkins observes, "In these circumstances it is neither surprising nor discreditable that when he thought there was a chance of major office . . . he pulled his punches against the government. Nor was he seeking place without power. Indeed, one reason that he was kept out was the belief that, once in, he would dominate the government."

Probing the ambition and disappointment that energized Churchill, Jenkins acutely anatomizes the discredited post-Gallipoli politician, seemingly finished at 40. Resigning the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster ("the least regarded of the archaic sinecure offices"), which he had accepted "not . . . [as] a wounded animal wanting to crawl off and hide" but "keen to cling on to such public offices as were still at his disposal," he rejoined the army in November 1915 as a major, hoping to rise quickly through his connections and reestablish himself. To journey from Dover across the Channel and on to his battalion's forward position in Flanders took only from mid-morning to late afternoon. (The war was within listening distance of the chalk cliffs, so close that Tommies in front-line mire could receive yesterday's London newspapers.) "It was a vivid illustration," Jenkins writes, "of how near and yet so far was the life of the trenches to and from that of English normality."

Once in the line he "immediately began to change his mind," realizing that Prime Minister Asquith would never approve stars for a former minister now a liability, or a command that would undermine the shaky government. Churchill, Jenkins contends, became "completely disorientated and did not know from one twenty-four hours to another what he wanted to do." Though he maintained the loyalty of his subordinates, "there can be no doubt that the core of his ambition moved decisively and paradoxically . . . back from the sandbags of the trenches to the despatch boxes of Westminster. He wrote almost frenziedly to a wide range of friends . . . asking for advice."

Luck was with him. Two depleted Scots Fusiliers battalions were merged. Now a lieutenant colonel, he was junior to the other ranking officer, and could bow out. A six-months hero, he went home to the House of Commons to plot his resurrection.

Fortune often served Churchill, who became adept at exploiting adverse circumstances. His reputation was first made in the Boer War in 1899 when he was captured, managed to escape, then published his adventures. Ten weeks after returning, he was an MP at 25. After his trenches interlude in World War I, he rejoined a government from which Asquith had been expunged, and enjoyed renewed visibility as minister of munitions. Switching parties later, he was in office as the General Strike erupted in 1926 and, while the daily newspapers were silenced, started up the government's own British Gazette, with a run of 2.2 million copies. It earned him labor's wrath, and enormous public attention.

Back in the wilderness in the Depression decade, he kept up his costly lifestyle by living "from mouth to hand," as he put it, turning out well-paid lectures and books and articles by employing a team of researchers and dictating to typists. When war again came, popular demand returned him to his old job at the Admiralty, and although defeats followed in abundance, some of the embarrassments his own making, he was finally, in May 1940, prime minister.

American readers may find some of Jenkins's takes on the later Churchill disconcerting. He sees the Roosevelt relationship as "more a partnership of circumstance and convenience than a friendship," and Eisenhower as a "jejune" and "political general . . . always a little cold for Churchill's taste." Jenkins is scathing about Churchill's weakness for alleged charlatans such as Lord Beaverbrook and Admiral "Jacky" Fisher, and curiously leaves to a footnote a remark that Clementine Churchill (who earns more plaudits than her husband), despite "all her wifely wisdom and persistent warm affection" for Winston, "managed to be absent at nearly all the most important moments of Churchill's life." Alternately idiosyncratic and shrewd, and addicted to such off-putting words as "cancellarian," "epistolatory," "unfriendlily" and "peripherist," Jenkins offers us an unawed look at Churchill rather than, in English parlance, "the mixture as before." •

Stanley Weintraub is the author of "Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914" and many other books.