Becoming Winston Churchill

WINSTON CHURCHILL was only 20 when he met the man whom he credited, more than any other, with shaping him as an orator and a politician of principle. As Churchill wrote: “I regard him as the biggest and most original mind I have ever met. When I was a young man, he instantly gained my confidence and I feel I owe the best things in my life to him.”

The man was BOURKE COCKRAN, a charismatic Irish-born lawyer and Democratic Congressman from New York City who was a close friend and adviser to both the Democratic President Grover Cleveland and the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Acclaimed by his peers as one of the finest lawyers in his generation, he was widely acknowledged as the greatest orator in the Gilded Age of politics.

Following the deaths of their respective spouses in early 1895, Cockran travelled to Paris where he met Churchill’s mother, the beautiful American-born heiress Jennie Jerome, LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL. They were immediately, magnetically, drawn to one another and became lovers in the spring of 1895.

When the 20-year-old Churchill made his first journey to the land of his mother’s birth in November 1895 on his way to cover the rebellion in Cuba, Jennie asked Cockran to take her son under his wing and provide a strong man’s influence, something needed but never received from the boy’s late father.

The Revised & Expanded Edition of Becoming Winston Churchill offers a more complete portrayal of Churchill’s coming of age between 1895 and 1908. It includes:

Longer passages from letters between young Winston and his parents, especially with his mother after his father’s death where disputes over money were frequent.

Additional excerpts from contemporary Churchill and Cockran speeches that illustrate the older man’s influence on Churchill’s political thought and oratory.

More newspaper accounts on the dramatic impact Cockran’s speeches had at national conventions and on the floor of Congress alike where even Senators and Supreme Court Justices came to hear.

 A 13-page letter from Cockran to President Theodore Roosevelt on the Panic of 1907 sent at the President’s request to summarize the advice Cockran had given to him at their meeting in the White House.

A charming memoir of the impressions a young American girl had upon meeting Churchill on board a ship in Bombay bound for Egypt in 1899 and the adventure the young couple had in Cairo where, on the way to see the pyramids, they stopped at an orchard and attempted to purloin a lemon only to be driven off at gunpoint.