Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill

by Candice Millard

For his part, Atkins found Churchill not just amusing but fascinating. He had seen his like only once before, in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, where Atkins had had lunch with Theodore Roosevelt. The young reporter had watched as the Rough Riders, the motley crew of cowboys, college athletes and law enforcement officials Roosevelt had brought together to fight in the war, gathered eagerly around him, hanging on his every word. “It was like a conference,” Atkins later wrote, “with Roosevelt as both principal speaker and chairman.” Before they parted ways, Roosevelt, who just three years later would become the youngest president in U.S. history, pulled Atkins aside to tell him that “so far as he knew, he was the only officer who had ‘performed the feat’ of shooting a Spaniard with his revolver in the charge up the slopes.” Atkins, who was used to the almost extreme discretion and modesty of British military men, was startled by Roosevelt’s blatant self-promotion, but he didn’t hold it against him. In fact, he found his honesty refreshing. “I noted the simplicity with which he said this, in the manner of a man genuinely recording a fact of sufficient interest,” he wrote. “Few British officers would have mentioned it, but Roosevelt was not boasting.”