The Central Figure Of the 20th Century

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The New York Sun

Winston Churchill is central to our understanding of 20th-century historical and biographical writing. This claim would have sounded preposterous a generation ago when – as historian John Lukacs noted in “Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian” (2002) – there was a lull in Churchill studies. Even now, in some quarters, my contention may seem extravagant; it isn’t.


Robin H. Neillands, in a sparkling new biography for beginners of Churchill – “Churchill: Statesman of the Century” – reports that more than 500 books on the subject have been published since Churchill’s death in 1965. The state funeral – a very rare honor that put Churchill in Admiral Nelson’s and the Duke of Wellington’s company – partly accounts for his apotheosis. Broadcast in the television age, the ceremony and its awesome sense of the past coming to a close in pageantry expressing the continuity of British history is powerfully evoked in the closing chapter of Mr. Lukacs’s book.


The Churchill revival is also a stunning rebirth of a vision of history that professional historians spent a century censuring. Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory of history was regarded as protofascistic when it was not being derided as a simplistic, romantic conception. It is the events that make the man, not the man who makes the events, the chastising anti-Carlyleans averred, and they dominated historical writing for the better part of the 20th century. For such thinkers, biography distorted the historical process by making politics and much else a matter of personality.


This devaluation of individuality is precisely what Martin Gilbert confronted at Oxford in 1960, several years before he embarked on the official biography – eventually eight volumes, with 15 more of accompanying documents. As Mr. Gilbert wrote in his indispensable biographer’s memoir, “In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey” (1994), he began his graduate work on the:



post-1917 struggle for power in the Ukraine, then on British rule in India. I have since learned that Churchill had rather a lot to say on both, and had taken a lead in policies and controversies regarding both. Yet neither of my supervisors, both of them deeply versed in their subjects, directed me towards any of his writings either autobiographical or historical.


Mr. Gilbert’s knowledge of Churchill was, in his own word,”abysmal.” Indeed, there is still little place for Churchill’s biography or his own historical writings in the academy, but outside of it, there is a mania for Churchill.Why?


To be sure, he had his day in the spring of 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler, although even an admirer such as Mr. Lukacs admits in “Five Days in London, May 1940” that Churchill could not win the war but only keep his country from losing it. Debunking historians like John Charmley in “Churchill: The End of Glory” (1992) argued that Churchill would have done better by Britain if he had made a separate peace with Hitler, thereby preserving as much of the British Empire as possible and avoiding a humiliating postwar reliance on an ascendant America.


Mr. Charmley’s views are as much anti-American as they are anti-Churchill, but in an ironic way Mr. Charmley’s animus reveals the heart of Churchill’s continuing appeal. The essential sources here are Mr. Gilbert’s book, “Churchill and America,” and John Ramsden’s “Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend Since 1945,” because both historians regard the United States as the key player in elevating Churchill to world historical status.


Roosevelt and Stalin were the victors of World War II, and Churchill was the junior partner, representing an empire on its way out. Yet Churchill was the one who recognized the United States’s potential as a world leader. This is the foundation of his unassailable place in this nation, and what made him a world power even as his own land declined. Mr. Gilbert might as well have called his book “The American Churchill” or “Churchill: The American,” since from Churchill’s earliest days he embraced this country’s potential as a world leader and what he liked to call the partnership of the English-speaking peoples.


Churchill’s pro-Americanism was no mere sentimental tic – a product of the fact that his mother, Jennie Jerome, was born in Brooklyn – or a ruse to edge Roosevelt into the war on Britain’s side. As Mr. Gilbert documents in an appendix, Churchill made 16 trips to this country, the first in 1895 and the last in 1961. Churchill loved American energy and what we call “makeovers.” In Britain, Mr. Gilbert reports, Churchill’s changes of party (Conservative to Liberal to Conservative again), provoked a political opponent to call him “half alien – and wholly reprehensible.” Mr. Gilbert cites a World War I colleague commenting: “There’s a lot of Yankee in Winston. He knows how to hustle and how to make others hustle too.”


Yet in 1940, at the age of 65, Churchill was deemed not merely a failure but a reckless adventurer; he seemed to many a dicey replacement for the steady, if not very imaginative, Neville Chamberlain. Churchill’s dismal record is retailed in Robert Rhodes James’s impressive “Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900-1939” (1970). Churchill had never really recovered from his part in the World War I disaster in the Dardanelles. As early as 1913, Rebecca West referred to Churchill as “that pathetic figure whose lack of political success is an eternal warning to opportunists that there are some souls for which the devil does not care to pay a price.”


In “In the Footsteps of Churchill: A Study in Character,” Richard Holmes identifies a narrowness in the British character, especially among intellectuals, which made the expansive, “American” Churchill – especially during the 1930s – the odd man out, with his tiresome opposition to appeasement and his emphasis on rearmament. Mr. Holmes, a British historian who takes a very American tack by calling Churchill “Winston,” demonstrates that his subject was indeed struggling against a mind-set. As Churchill himself put it in a speech to the Royal Society of St. George (April 24, 1933, quoted by Mr. Holmes):



The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without.They come from … a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.


With his American bravado, Churchill was energized. And it was precisely the “can-do” spirit in Winston Churchill – and in Winston Churchill alone – that enabled him to save his country. Britain stood alone in the summer of 1940, and it was thanks to Churchill’s leadership. In his several books on Churchill, John Lukacs shows what a near thing it was for Churchill in those tense Cabinet meetings in May 1940. Arriving at an understanding with Hitler did not seem an unreasonable proposition to British leaders who did not have Churchill’s conviction that sooner or later America would enter the war, and that it was worth fighting on even if it meant, in guerrilla fashion, taking the action to the very fields and streets of Britain. Churchill was not a man, he was the man, thanks to the force of his will and his words.


Many recent books make this point. Geoffrey Best’s “Churchill: A Study in Greatness” (2003) is the best one-volume Churchill biography. “I have been pleased,” he writes, “to adopt other writers’ judgments where they have said things better than I could have done or have at any rate said them first. I am grateful to have found so many sturdy shoulders to stand upon. … Regarding the many aspects of Churchill’s life which have become matters of per sisting controversy, however, I have enjoyed making my own mind up.” With such an attitude, it is not hard to understand why Mr. Best’s work is unsurpassed in its synthesis and insight.


But there are many worthy competitors to explain Churchill’s greatness. Paul Addison’s elegantly compact “Churchill: The Unexpected Hero” (2005) concludes with this provocative assessment: “Churchill is no longer the hero he used to be, but in the end the recognition of his frailties and flaws has worked in his favor. It has brought him up to date by making him into the kind of hero our disenchanted culture can accept and admire: a hero with feet of clay.” John Keegan’s Penguin life, “Winston Churchill” (2002), contains a wonderful brief analysis of Churchill’s world-stirring language.And Roy Jenkins’s “Churchill: A Biography” (2001), which draws on the biographer’s own experience as a Cabinet officer, concludes with this judgment:


I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.


Here is a case where history and biography have become one. We need to know everything about the man in order to understand why he made so much history.


John Keegan stands out among the biographers for his effort to understand the whole man. It is rare to find a Churchill biography that makes much of his sexuality or finds it relevant in assessing his achievement:


Churchill, as he himself recognized with uncharacteristic insight, had a weak sexual drive. He was innocent in his judgment of others’ sexuality and apparently personally innocent of sexual experience until his marriage, at the age of thirty-four, to Clementine Hozier, herself serenely pure minded. Churchill was a moral oddity: a man who was world-wise without being a man of the world. It may have been his indifference to the lures of the flesh that heightened his susceptibility to the seduction of words and to the spell of history as romance.


So far as is known, Churchill never committed adultery. Mr. Keegan might have added, though, that the serene and pure-minded Clemmie had one shortlived, discreet affair in the 1930s.


Mr. Ramsden, on the other hand, suggests that Churchill’s true significance can only be caught by quoting Churchill himself.The words are the man, and the words shaped history. Here is Mr. Ramsden quoting from Churchill’s memoirs describing the end of 1940, after having served eight months in office:



We were alive. We had beaten the German air force. There had been no invasion of the Island. The Army at home was now very powerful. London had stood triumphant throughout her ordeals … With a gasp of astonishment and relief the smaller neutrals and the subjugated states saw that stars still shone in the sky. Hope, and within it passion, burned anew in the hearts of hundreds of millions of men. The good cause would triumph. Right would not be trampled down. The flag of freedom, which in this fateful hour was the Union Jack, would fly in all the winds that blew.


Churchill writes as a man with the world on his mind, and his words reminds me of Walt Whitman’s assertion, “I contain multitudes.” Historians have often pointed out the mythifying that suffuses Churchill’s prose, and Mr. Ramsden himself calls Churchill the original spin doctor.Yet he concludes:



It is difficult not to be carried away by such powerful words, especially for the British. But perhaps we should not try to resist, if we are fully to understand the impact that Churchill had on so many people, both at the time and since. The man, the message, and the way in which he so effectively expressed it were and are indissolubly one.


It seems to me that Lincoln is Churchill’s only equal; they shared the indispensable ability to write great prose.


Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. And deservedly so. Such is the prestige of the novel that we often forget that some of the modern world’s greatest literature is biography and history. No one should think Churchill won it because his books were influential best sellers or because he was a great man. He was one of the great writers of the century, as John Lukacs demonstrates in “Visionary, Statesman, Historian.” In a brilliant chapter on “Churchill’s Historianship,” one of our greatest historians demolishes the “gifted amateur” denigration of Churchill’s work.


Churchill the historian had faults: a tendency to write self-exculpatory prose, an excessive desire to vindicate his father, Randolph Churchill, and the Duke of Marlborough. But his early books were military classics, his autobiography is a masterpiece, and two great memoir-histories are tour-de-force reconstructions of the past. Churchill’s power as warrior, statesman, and writer was his historical imagination.


To those who dismiss Churchill as a mere stylist, Mr. Lukacs asks, “If you have a right (and fine) sense of the past, can your history be entirely wrong?”Mr. Lukacs concedes that “there exist bad histories that are written tellingly or even well,”but he adds,”there can be no good history that is not told or written well. After all, whatever the research, there is no historical fact the meaning of which exists separately from its statement, from its very phrasing.” In those words, I recognize the author of “Historical Consciousness” (1985), still one of Mr. Lukacs’s finest books, and one that can be invoked to show what made Winston Churchill great: In his person he embodied historical consciousness, and in his writings he re-creates that consciousness, over and over again, which is, in itself, the very thing that binds a single identity together and with it informs the whole world.


A CHURCHILL LIBRARY


Churchill: The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison (Oxford University Press, 308 pages, $25).
Churchill’s very failings are part of his appeal as a hero for the modern age.


Churchill: A Study in Greatness by Geoffrey Best (Oxford University Press, 370 pages, $29.95, $19.95 paper).
Considered by some historians as perhaps the best one-volume biography.


Churchill and America by Martin Gilbert (Free Press, 528 pages, $30).
The best investigation of Churchill’s love affair with the American people.


In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey by Martin Gilbert (Wiley, 338 pages, $19.95 paper).
An inside look at how Mr. Gilbert wrote the official biography.


In the Footsteps of Churchill: A Study in Character by Richard Holmes (Basic Books, 351 pages, $27.50).
Hails Churchill’s geopolitical genius and strength of character that remain apposite to today’s world.


Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins (Plume, 1,024 pages, $18 paper).
An astute work based on Jenkins’s own experience in Parliament and in Labour governments.


Winston Churchill by John Keegan (Penguin Lives, 208 pages, $19.95).
A succinct, unusually penetrating look at the man as well as his policies.


Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian by John Lukacs (Yale University Press, 200 pages, $25, $15 paper).
Perhaps the best single assessment of Churchill’s manifold genius.


Churchill: Statesman of the Century by Robin H. Neillands (Cold Spring Press, 216 pages, $12 paper).
A lively introductory biography.


Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend Since 1945 by John Ramsden (Columbia University Press, 672 pages, $39.50, $17.50 paper).
Acknowledges that Churchill’s greatness has been, in part, a product of his own genius at “spin.”


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