The Churchill Series - Feb. 3, 2006

(One of a series of daily posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

Reader's Note: In all previous series posts, any relevance to the day’s news was coincidental. That's not the case with today's post. - John

On May 23, 1937 the editor of The Times of London, Geoffrey Dawson, complained in a letter to a friend:

I should like to get going with the Germans. I simply cannot understand why they should apparently be so much annoyed with The Times at this moment.

I spend my nights in taking out anything which I think will hurt their susceptibilities and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.

Dawson and The Times' appeasement of Nazis was typical of what most European journalists and newspapers were doing then.

A notable exception was a young Hungarian Jew, Emery Reves. A month before Dawson wrote his letter, Reves founded in Paris a small press service meant to promote democratic values and counter the increasingly strident and violent Nazis. He contacted Churchill and offered to publish him.

Churchill welcomed the offer. By 1937 most European papers would no longer publish his descriptions of precisely what the Nazis were doing or his calls for nations to unite and oppose them.

At first, Reves found twenty-six papers which agreed to run Churchill's columns. But they came under pressure, and gradually their numbers dwindled.

Reves traveled throughout Europe trying to persuade editors and publishers to run Churhill's columns. That took great courage as by then the Nazis were using kidnappings, beatings and murder to intimidate journalists.

By May 6, 1939 Reves was forced to write Churchill and tell him his columns were no longer allowed to appear in Poland, Romania or Greece "through fear of Germany." It was the high season of appeasement: Munich and "peace in our time."

The "peace" was brief. Soon Poland was invaded and defeated. Romania allied with Germany. Greece began to prepare for an invasion it now knew was sure to come. The Allies’ western front was collapsing. The Nazis invaded and occupied Norway and Denmark. And America's Ambassador to The Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy, like many other well-informed people, had decided democracy was finished in Europe.

In the midst of all that, early on the evening of May 10, 1940, Churchill received a brief phone call. The King wished him to come to Buckingham Palace.

It had been a year and four days since Reves had written his letter.

Reves survived the war. Churchill made sure Reves became one of the chief editors and publishers of his WW II memoirs.
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Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life. (pgs. 575-619, 864)