Inside Winston Churchill

In the 15 months since Sir Winston Churchill died, books about him have been written by his friend Lady Asquith, his valet Roy Howells, and Son Randolph, who is putting the finishing touches on the "official" family biography. None of them is likely to reveal as much detail--or raise such a storm --as the memoirs of Lord Moran of Manton. Lord Moran was Churchill's doctor.

Excerpts from the Moran book (Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965) were published in London by the Sunday Times, in the U.S. by LIFE, and last week all of Britain was arguing about them. "Sir Winston is having his phagocytes counted, his pneumogastric system checked and the eliminatory functions examined in a public post-mortem," raged Columnist Cassandra in the Daily Mirror. The medical journal Lancet noted icily that "the public's trust in the medical profession derives largely from its conviction that what transpires between patient and doctor will not be bandied about," and the British Medical Association rushed out a warning to all doctors not to publish anything about their dead patients without the family's consent. Asked Daily Mail Columnist Bernard Levin: "Who was it that said biography had added a new terror to death?"

Instinct for Quacks. Moran's explanation for his act of biographic terrorism is simple. "It is not possible to follow the last 25 years of Sir Winston's life without a knowledge of his medical background," he wrote in a letter to the London Times last week. "It was exhaustion of mind and body that accounted for much that is otherwise in explicable. Only a doctor can give the facts accurately."

Lord Moran was, in fact, more than Churchill's doctor. From the time Sir Winston became Prime Minister of a besieged Britain in 1940 to the last, curt medical bulletin ("Shortly after 8 a.m., Sir Winston Churchill died at his London home"), Charles McMoran Wilson was his confidant and companion. He traveled 140,000 miles with Churchill, watched him grapple with Stalin and Roosevelt, nursed him through pneumonia in the North African campaign and the series of strokes that punctuated and palsied his postwar comeback as Prime Minister in 1951.

In his book, Lord Moran shows Churchill, clad only in a silk undershirt, trying desperately to plug up the drafts in an unheated airplane ("On his hands and knees, he cut a quaint figure with his big, bare, white bottom"). He reveals that Churchill suffered a mild heart attack while on a visit to the U.S. in December of 1941--and that he kept it a secret, even from Churchill himself. Reason: the war was going badly, and "I felt that the effect of announcing that the P.M. had had a heart attack could only be disastrous."

Churchill could be a difficult patient. He was something of a hypochondriac, Moran says, "and he takes instinctively to a quack." Once, when Sir Winston was planning to join General Alexander's army in southern Italy, Moran demanded that he take along a bottle of mepacrine, an antimalarial drug. Churchill resisted, telephoned Buckingham Palace to see if King George had ever taken the stuff (he hadn't). Wrote Moran: "Winston is just incorrigible. He has only to press a bell to bring into the room the greatest malarial experts in the world; instead, he asks the King."

All of a Tremble. Moran undoubtedly gives too much clinical detail about the pathetic decrepitude of Churchill's last years. The decline became noticeable in 1947, when, wrote Moran, Churchill seemed to be "living in the past and impatient of change. I could see then that he was sliding, almost imperceptibly, into old age." He appeared hearty enough in the 1951 elections, which returned him to office, but, "behind his bluff, he is eaten up with misgivings. He said that he had a 'muzzy feeling' in his head." Three months later, returning on the Queen Elizabeth from a meeting with President Truman, Moran found Churchill asleep in his cabin. " 'I have been dreaming; it was extremely vivid,' he said. 'I could not walk straight or see straight.' He got out of bed, and very deliberately walked across the cabin."

As he watched himself becoming helpless and senile, Churchill began to drink more heavily than ever. "I eats well and sleeps well and drinks well," he admitted jokingly in 1953, "but when I get alongside any business I go all of a tremble. I could do without smoking, but not without my liquor; that would be a sad impoverishment. It is extraordinary between night and morning that I should go like this--a bundle of old rags. I am a hulk--only breathing and excreting."

It was a sad finish for a man of such vigorous habits, and Lord Moran's critics may be excused their squeamishness at seeing it so clearly documented. But except for his very last days, Churchill had the consolation of memory. "He always goes back to the Boer War when he is in a good humor," wrote Moran. "That was before war degenerated. It was fun galloping about."

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