How Heroic Was Churchill?Paul Johnson distills lessons from his life.
Posted Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, at 6:35 AM ET
In November 1940, on learning of Franklin Roosevelt's defeat of Wendell Willkie, Winston Churchill composed one of his many flattering and importuning telegrams to the president in Washington. He had, he told FDR, prayed for the president's re-election. "Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe," Churchill wrote, "and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us all safely to anchor." It was a brilliant and lovely note—and Roosevelt never replied, an omission that bothered Churchill for years.
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StumbleUponAny of us who has had a heartfelt letter go unacknowledged knows the feeling: We want to be sure our words hit the mark, and nothing is more maddening in such a moment than silence. Churchill asked Roosevelt about the congratulatory note at the close of another cable but heard nothing, and the episode so bothered Churchill that he was still thinking about it long after the war. When he reprinted the telegram in his war memoirs, he added: "Curiously enough, I never received any answer to this. … It may well have been engulfed in the vast mass of congratulatory messages which were swept aside by urgent work." Perhaps—or perhaps FDR, always a cool, coy mistress, was trying (with success, obviously) to keep Churchill off balance.
In this small incident, we glimpse the human Churchill beneath the grandeur of the deity of history he has long since become. The human Churchill is Paul Johnson's chief concern in his brief new biography, Churchill, but I raise the Case of the Unacknowledged Telegram because it contains one of Churchill's finest forgotten phrases: "Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe." It is an interesting test of the significance of any event, that: Will the problem or crisis of the hour be remembered—cue kettle drums—as long the English language is spoken? Damn little will meet that criterion, but Winston Churchill is among the things that will.
Which, predictably, presents biographers with great promise and great peril. The promise lies in the fact that Churchill repays one's imaginative investment of time and contemplation, but it is perilous because, as even Churchill remarked on being told of a planned biography of him, his life was "well ploughed."
Before reading Johnson's book, I would have said that those who are drawn to write about Churchill are basically compelled to do one of two things: find a particular aspect of the great man's life and, as we now say, go vertical, or attempt to advance a provocative argument about the meaning of it all. A book of mine, published six years ago, is an example of the former: I reconstructed Churchill's fraught relationship with Roosevelt. A book of Pat Buchanan's, The Unnecessary War, published last year, is an instance of the latter. Johnson has found a third way, though not a startling one.
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The Secret to Churchill and the reason he is still and will always be relevant, is his essential sympathy and humanity. He was shaped by the best standards of the Victorian age. He was an imperialist (for a relatively good empire, as even George Orwell acknowledged, but let's not get into that), a believer in the British class system, a (by modern standards) racist, and an energetic but usually wrong would-be military strategist. He was also a genius whose sympathy for the little guy led to the most far reaching social legislation in Britain's history when he and Lloyd George emasculated the House of Lords, and a fighter for the underdog who didn't hesitate to attack colonial abuses.
Churchill's basic humanity is evident when the scope of his life is survived, and particularly, the period 1934-1940. He understood early where Hitler was coming from, the source of his supposed grievances, and the power of using anti-Semitism as a political lightning rod, and was revolted. When people across the political spectrum (from GB Shaw to Annie Morrow Lindburgh) saw Stalin and Hitler as two leaders heading the world into a better future, Churchill with his Victorian and 'old fashioned' ideas of fairness, justice, and humanity, didn't hesitate to say that he thought both were monstrous. And while he would 'unsay no unkind word' he ever said about the Soviet Union, he recognized early on that Hitler was the greater and more immediate threat to European peace, and tried desperately to convince Stalin that be ally himself with the Democracies against Hitler. For his own cynical reasons (Hitler offered half of Poland and a free hand against Finland) Stalin refused, sending Eastern Europe crashing into a 50-year nightmare of war and oppression. But the little fat man with the cigar never gave up hope, and never acknowledged the 'permanence' of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as some of the more worldly types did -- he simply noted, in his autobiography, that "it cannot last."
Churchill will always be relevant as an example of someone who had to make some pretty hard, unpalatable choices, and who even sometimes compromised with evil -- but he never adopted the cynical poses of contemporary and later politicians, and never lost his essential sense of right and wrong. For that, we should always be grateful.
-- Freetrader2
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I just finished volume two of William Manchester's tragically uncompleted Last Lion trilogy, and I think I'd rate it the best biography I've ever read...and it doesn't even cover his tenure as PM. I consider myself firmly in Manchester's camp calling him the savior of democracy in the Western world.
Churchill was the greatest man of the 20th century even if sometimes he took a 19th century approach to it. His deification is well deserved; though like the more interesting deities in history, he had a flawed, eccentric side. Very emotional, authentically human fellow, unlike so many of the other great men of history who are ciphers (do we know anything about the personality of George Washington?)
Look forward to reading Meacham's book.
-- Bentoniani
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Throughout the 1930s the Treasury had warned that rearmament was unaffordable and that another war with Germany would bankrupt the country, ruin the British economy, and lead to the loss of the Empire. Events, of course, proved them to be right. But Churchill simply did not think in those terms in 1940. He had an exaggerated sense of the wealth and power of the British Empire relative to Germany coupled with a Micwaberish sense that something -- meaning the USA and/or USSR -- would ultimately turn up to defeat Hitler. I don't think that he knew what the consequences of his policy would be, but I don't think it would have mattered if he did know.
-- jack_cerf
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