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For the affectionate crowds that hung outside his house when he turned 90 in November, there was still an impish twinkle in his eyes, a pugnacious thrust to the jaw, a dash of the old defiance as he raised his hand in the familiar V sign. It was a valiant effort, for Churchill had grown ever weaker and more withdrawn in recent years. Denied his old pastimes of painting, bricklaying and racing a famous stable, he still found pleasure in food, drink and a meager ration of cigars, in feeding the black swans at Chartwell, his country manor, or reliving old wars and controversies with a few chosen friends. Though the world saw little of him, he remained one of the most widely beloved and honored men on earth. Among other high tributes were the congressional resolution that conferred honorary U.S. citizenship on him in 1963, and last year's motion of "unbounded admiration and gratitude" from the House of Commons, which had not so honored an Englishman since Wellington.
A Roving Commission. For the Churchills, greatness has been a birthright. Winston was born and raised amid the splendors of Blenheim Palace, the 320-room mansion that a grateful nation bestowed on his ancestor, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. School, by contrast, bored him; he was a poor student who allowed in later life that "no one has ever passed so few examinations and received so many degrees." Fame was always his spur. As a newly commissioned subaltern in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, he searched impatiently for battlefields to prove his mettle. It was a poor time for the molding of heroes. The Industrial Revolution had raised Victoria's England to a position of surpassing wealth; Pax Britannica in all its majesty prevailed throughout the civilized world.
Nonetheless, Churchill pushed himself into five wars in as many years. In all of them he managed to double as a war correspondent, thus launching the first of his many celebrated careers. After covering British campaigns on India's Northwest Frontier and in the Sudan—where he figured conspicuously in one of history's last great cavalry charges—Churchill also turned out excellent books on the fighting. He had honed his style with extensive reading: Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Macaulay's History of England, Plato's Republic, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Aristotle's Politics. By 1899, he had achieved such success as author and correspondent that he resigned his commission, went off to cover Britain's war against the Boer settlers in South Africa. His exploits in and out of Boer prison camps were so dramatic that in 1900 he returned to England to find himself a national hero.
Within four months, Churchill, then 25, was elected Tory M.P. for Oldham, a sturdy working-class constituency in the industrial north. To finance his new career, he earned $50,000 in five months by lecturing to packed audiences throughout Britain, then the U.S. He knew at once how to delight Americans. When a reporter asked him what he thought of New York, Churchill said gravely: "Newspaper too thick, lavatory paper too thin."