Friends + Interlocutors,

I was unaware at the time of the Henry ‘Chips’ Channon diaries, which have only recently been published in unexpurgated form after sitting in London bank vaults for decades. Channon was an expatriate American who was a member of Parliament during the Second World War. Neilson was a member of Parliament at the start of the Great War. Discouraged and disillusioned, Neilson decamped England for America when England declared war on Germany. Chips Channon, an unabashed Anglophile, crossed the ocean in the other direction. Both he and Neilson regarded Churchill as a mountebank and warmonger. They were not alone in this assessment.

The recent uproar which ensued when Tucker Carlson entertained a reappraisal of Winston Churchill’s record as well as a revised look at the Second World War is confirmative of our predicament. The thought police arrived lickety-split. The American establishment media and the powers-that-be do not take kindly when the received, popular version of events is disputed. It might tarnish their reputation. 

This attitude is based not just on ignorance and intolerance but self-preservation. The Channon diaries and the writings of Neilson—high ranking individuals who were on the ground when history was being made at a critical time in the Twentieth Century—tell a different story from the established narrative.

Some background is in order. Henry Channon left Chicago and landed in Paris in 1917 as a volunteer for the International Red Cross. You may recall that Ernest Hemingway was also a Red Cross volunteer, but ended up in northern Italy, attached to frontline Italian troops fighting the Austrians. Chips, by contrast, was ensconced in an an apartment on the fourth floor of the Ritz. Somehow someway, he was adopted by Parisian high society. He seems to have known every aristocrat in town, as well as writers Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust et alia. 

He was having a wonderful time. Entry. May 13th, 1918. “Such fun today. Mon dieu can this life continue? I am too happy, something will snap.” Entry. May 15th, 1918. “…and it is now the thought steals across my brain…there can be no God, for it there were, he would be in Paris.” 

Still, a war is going on. Entry. March 23rd, 1918. “Bombs are bursting all about us…. The strangest thing is that no one has seen a German plane. There is a wild rumor that we are being shelled, not bombed, by some new diabolical invention from the front. Entry. March 29th, 1918. “The bombardment has been terrific today. The first shell nearly threw me from my bed this morning at 7:20.” Entry. March 30th, Easter Sunday. “The Parisians are worried about the offensive but are reluctant to admit it…. There are riots at the stations.” 

The first Chips mentions Churchill is in August, 1918. An air raid in the middle of the night. Big Bertha in action again. Entry. August 16th. “For a while I thought that Paris would blow up…. I dressed and went to the cellars…it was filled mostly with frightened servants and some guests at the hotel half dressed and some frankly en pyjama…Don Luis of Spain…the Duchess of Sutherland quite sleepy and bored, Elsie de Wolfe angry and fussy, Winston Churchill, fat and puffy…and others.”

Under Prime Minister Lloyd George, Churchill was Minister of Munitions, over from England to assess the carnage on the western front. Lloyd George would be Prime Minister for the duration of the war, and during the Paris peace conference, and several years thereafter. He and Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour had composed the Balfour Declaration in 1917 with help from Washington after Wilson had entered the war. Copies were air-dropped over Germany and Eastern Europe. Behind the lines propaganda.

At the start of the war in 1914, Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty. In which capacity in 1915 he had helped orchestrate the sinking of the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, as a ruse to facilitate President Wilson joining the Allies. Churchill had also famously masterminded the disastrous, aborted year-long invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli. Perhaps you’ve seen the movie.

In October 1918, Channon became an honorary attaché at the American Embassy. He records without explanation or details that he is embarking on a diplomatic career. Entry. October 8th. “This morning I began my diplomatic career, choosing a moment when the world is electrified by the proposal of the Central Powers for an armistice, which amounts to an admission of defeat. As the note is addressed to President Wilson it must be answered by him. The old Downing Street supremacy always rivaled by the Quai d’Orsay is quickly passing and yielding to Washington.” An astute prevision. The end of European primacy became a stark reality after the Second World War.

Entry. October 25th. “I am liking my diplomatic work. I went the other day to the Élysée Palace to secure Poincaré’s signature for some papers.” Entry. November 12th. “All Paris has headaches, but the rioting, the singing, the drinking, the kissing still goes on…c’est la victoire!” Entry. December 6th. “I have been in bed several days with the fashionable ‘flu’ or grippe espagnole.” Entry. December 20th. “It has been a full week with dances and two ‘heavy’ functions. The first was a reception at the American Embassy to meet President Wilson and Mrs. Wilson that I had arranged. I was able to invite all my friends…”

Fast forward to 1924. We find Channon in Geneva. What is he doing there? He is assisting Lord Buckmaster as an assistant British delegate to a conference of the League of Nations. No explanation. How Channon can do this as an American citizen is unclear. He had gone to Oxford and obtained a degree in French—the international diplomatic language—in 1921 but was not naturalized as an English subject until 1933.

Entry. January 17th, 1924. “Arrived in Geneva and found my Lord Buckmaster charming…. The object of the conference is to examine the competence of the legal entity….We are instructed by the Foreign Office to insist that the clauses of the Covenant are biding and that a signatory nation must abide by the decisions of the League or she becomes outlawed and technically at war with all civilizations.” This sounds like those imperious pronouncements emanating from modern-day Washington.

In the meantime, Churchill had become Colonial Secretary and presided over the important Cairo conference of 1921 where the spoils of war in the Middle East were divvied up. The Ottoman Empire had collapsed. Whitehall was in charge. The promises of Lawrence of Arabia to the Arabs during the war about self-determination after the war were thrown out the window. 

The Balfour Declaration was enforced. Palestine, a de facto outpost of the British Empire was turned over to the Zionists in the person British Zionist Herbert Samuel who had been made British High Commissioner in 1920. Hence, the neocolonialist enterprise of Israel was launched under the aegis of Churchill and England. The indigenes of Palestine were abandoned. Blowback from this curious, highhanded decision continues to this day.

Fast forward to 1938. Channon became a Conservative member of Parliament in 1935. He takes over the seat from his mother-in-law. In 1933 he marries the brewing heiress Lady Honor Guinness. Chips has not had a job since his diplomatic assignment in Geneva in 1924. He has written several book. Up until his marriage and becoming a member of Parliament, he was subsidized by his father in Chicago. Churchill is also a Conservative member of Parliament. As in Paris, Chips is at the epicenter of high society. 

Entry. July 27th, 1937. “Winston C. spoke again this afternoon [in the House of Commons] in his usual fluent way; it was almost the same speech he delivered fourteen months ago, and again as recently as last March when he warned the govt of the vast German rearmament. To hear him is to believe that the Germans are arriving tonight. What utter nonsense, but his fear and dislike of them amount to an obsession and threaten seriously to undermine his judgement on other matters. He is becoming a man with une idée fixe.”

Did Chips have a point? From now on, he becomes a political enemy of Winston Churchill and an enthusiastic partisan of Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative Prime Minister. Upon Chamberlain’s return from the Munich Conference in October 1938, Chips calls him “the man of the age” and “the King of the world”. Chips and Chamberlain are anti-war. They work hand-in-glove to avoid another European conflagration. 

—end of part I—