Churchill, Heroic Relic or Relevant Now?
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
New York Times, March 30, 2003
In 1936, while Winston Churchill was regularly warning a complacent British Parliament about the imminent threat of German rearmament, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, told a colleague that when Winston was born, "lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle" bearing great gifts: "imagination, eloquence, industry, ability." But then came a dissenting fairy who said, "No one person has a right to so many gifts," and gave
Churchill a "shake and twist." As a result, Baldwin concluded, "he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why, while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice."
But in this case, Churchill's advice was based on what he saw as early as 1935: "Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent." And perhaps because his compatriots took more delight in his gifts than in his wisdom (which one Labor M.P. called
"scaremongering"), in 1940, when Churchill became prime minister, he could promise only "blood, toil, tears and sweat" as England stood, nearly alone, facing Nazi Germany.
Churchill's heroic reputation was established because his judgment, wisdom, endurance and courage really did help ensure the survival of England and stave off a Dark Age. That is also why Churchill's image was so often invoked in the days after the 9/11 attacks.
President Bush, in predicting a long and difficult war against terrorism, echoed
Churchill's rhetoric, saying, "We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited Churchill. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was regularly compared to him and said he was reading Churchill's speeches.
Now that the United States is again engaged in battle, Churchill is again an inescapable presence. Earlier this month, his grandson Winston S. Churchill, wrote in support of a war against Iraq in The Wall Street Journal, noting that "it was my grandfather, Winston
Churchill, who invented Iraq and laid the foundation for much of the modern Middle
East." As Britain's colonial secretary in 1921, Churchill put the Hashemites — Abdullah and Feisal — on their respective thrones in Amman and Baghdad, and futilely argued for establishing an autonomous state for the Kurds.
In addition, Churchill's arguments about the dangers of appeasement are recurring in contemporary debates. They are latent in discussions about the strategy of pre-emptive war and in criticisms of the United States' previous responses to Islamic terrorist groups and North Korean nuclear ambitions. The notion, at any rate, that some threats may not be appeasable may have helped burnish Churchill's recent reputation, which the historian
John Lukacs believes to be "at a peak."
But contemporary debates about policy will necessarily involve tugs of war over
Churchill's reputation. Indeed, as Mr. Lukacs shows in some of the cogent essays in his

recent book, "Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian" (Yale), Churchill's status has been a major political issue over the last 30 years.
In the public imagination, the heroic image has long been the dominant one. Churchill himself joked that he would ensure his place in history by writing that history himself — as he did in the six volumes of "The Second World War," which helped win him the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1953. The stentorian prose of William Manchester's first two volumes of his Churchill biography ("The Last Lion") reinforced that stature for the lay reader. And the eight volumes of the "authorized" biography by Martin Gilbert testified to its subject's monumental importance.
But beginning in the 1960's, Churchillian scholarship also began to focus on Churchill's military and political mistakes. The historian Robert Rhodes James subtitled his 1970 book about Churchill "A Study in Failure." (Mr. Lukacs considers it one of the best written about Churchill.) Mr. James argued that Churchill's warnings about Germany may have fallen on deaf ears partly because Churchill was so widely distrusted after a long career of party-switching, posturing and political misjudgments. In fact, as he was fulminating against Germany, Churchill was also opposing constitutional changes in the government of India and said it was "nauseating" to see a "fakir" like Gandhi being met on equal terms. Historians attacked Churchill from the political left for such imperial sentiments as well as for his admiration of political personalities like Mussolini (whom
Churchill called a "really great man" in 1935 — before he changed his mind).
Historians also attacked Churchill from the right. John Charmley's 1993 book, "Churchill:
The End of Glory," argued that Churchill was wrong even when most triumphant. Mr.
Charmley suggested that an agreement might well have been reached with Hitler in the
1930's, thus preventing war, but that instead Churchill's war strategy doomed the empire to dissolution and put Britain in America's pocket.
At the same time, Churchill's own histories — including his multi-volume accounts of the first and second world wars, his epic "History of the English-speaking Peoples" and his study of his ancestor Lord Marlborough — came to seem academically quaint. J. H.
Plumb criticized them for philistinism and their author for showing no mastery of Marx and Freud.
In this critical context, some essays in a new book by the British historian David
Cannadine, "In Churchill's Shadow" (Oxford), even provide a bit of reprieve, for while
Mr. Cannadine says that Churchill was often "a bombastic and histrionic vulgarian, out of touch, out of tune and out of temper," he also believes that Churchill brought to British life "a breadth of vision, a poetry of expression and a splendor of utterances" unlikely to be heard again — a political poet of sorts, comforting, in Mr. Cannadine's view, a "nation in decline."
Churchill poses a challenge because there is no simple way of accounting both for the scope of his achievements and for the range of his failures. Roy Jenkins's large-scale
2001 biography of Churchill (Farrar Straus & Giroux) sometimes risks reducing

Churchill to a mere politician, but Mr. Jenkins — himself a veteran of the Parliament and the Cabinet — is still seduced into awe. The military historian John Keegan recounts in his recent brief biography of Churchill (published by Viking) that as a young man in the
1950's, Mr. Keegan, like many of his generation, found Churchill to be simply irrelevant
— an aging conservative leader, a relic of a passing imperial age. But recordings of
Churchill's speeches changed his mind.
Another kind of response to the Churchill problem is Klaus Larres's "Churchill's Cold
War" (Yale), which tries to shift the ground for admiration of Churchill toward liberalism, arguing that Churchill's views of international conflict have to be reinterpreted. Mr. Larres, now holding a visiting professorship at the Library of Congress, suggests that throughout his career Churchill was actually an advocate of "personal diplomacy" and détente. This was one reason, Mr. Larres argues, that even though
Churchill had popularized the term Iron Curtain to describe the Soviet empire, he believed some accommodation could be reached. Churchill, in his old age, futilely lobbied to arrange for a tripartite summit with President Eisenhower and the Soviet successors to Stalin.
But whatever the approach, Churchill seems destined to spur a certain amount of discomfort. He can seem both a relic of a past era and an urgent spokesman to this one.
One reason is suggested by Algis Valiunas in "Churchill's Military Histories: A
Rhetorical Study" (Rowman and Littlefield).
Mr. Valiunas points out that, as Tocqueville suggested, "historians in democratic times do not take account of great men who dominate vast events, but rather show vast events dominating the masses of men." Democratic histories are demonstrations of irresistible forces into which masses of men are swept. But Churchill, Mr. Valiunas argues, did just the opposite. His military histories place the emphasis on the individual, the ways in which particular decisions and actions and arguments sway the course of history.
Churchill, Mr. Valiunas says, was an aristocratic historian writing in democratic times on behalf of democratic causes.
This is where the old-fashioned texture of Churchill's thought comes from. He also acted according to that model. He shaped himself into the heroic mold he idealized, then used it to inspire a democratic public. He combined opposing traditions, using individualism as a spur for nationalism, seeing England's aristocratic past as the foundation for a democratic future.
Churchill was partly attracted by figures like Mussolini and even Stalin, who could seem to embody aspects of the heroic ideal. But he also saw that they had twisted the heroic mold into a perversion. He saw, too, that while appeasement might postpone a reckoning, it could also lead to war.
And that sometimes war, for all its horrors, was the only choice. During the 1930's, in the face of much opposition, such were the unappreciated offerings of his judgment and his wisdom.