August 29, 2013

Finest Hour 106, Spring 2000

Page 15

BY CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS

At the heart of Churchill’s politics were a deeply felt dedication to and confidence in the people he led.

ON A cold, drizzly night in November 1989, rumors flew in East Berlin that the Brandenburg Gate might be opened. People started to gather, hoping to be among the first to cross over to the West. Wading into the crowd, I tried to find out, with my limited German, what freedom meant to them. I asked, “Was ist Freiheit?”

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“This is Freiheit,” said a young man wearing an old army surplus jacket. “This, standing in a public place arguing openly about such things as democracy, capitalism, and socialism.” A nearby woman who said she was a nurse broke in: “Four weeks ago we couldn’t have done this.”

A few years later, in Cape Town, I stared in awe at a line of voters that stretched across a wide plain from horizon to horizon. For the first time in history, South Africans of every color could cast ballots. Said one bright-eyed woman, “This is the day I’ve waited for my whole life.”

Such are the triumphs at this century’s end. A world threatened by Nazism and communism was saved twice. People long silenced now can speak. Countries once democratic in name only now experience the real thing. And of all this, one man is the emblem. As Britain’s prime minister, he saved his country and perhaps the world from Adolf Hitler. But what he did out of office—alerting an indifferent world to the Nazis’ rise in the 1930s; giving the Iron Curtain its name in 1946—deserves an equal place in the history of our times.

For Winston Churchill—a man of words, an orator and author—freedom was the word that made speech and writing both possible and noble. Declaring him an honorary citizen of the United States, John F. Kennedy quoted an earlier remark by Edward R. Murrow: Churchill sent the English language “into battle.” With the Czechs, the Poles, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Danes, and the French beaten and the continent of Europe overrun in June 1940, his was the voice that said Britain would “never surrender.”

It was the same voice that spoke—again, while others were silent—of the postwar peril from Moscow. At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill alone pushed for free elections in Poland. Sick, wearied by the war, and tragically unwary of the new global menace from the left, Franklin Roosevelt felt he could rely on the old charm; he could “handle” Stalin. In his view, free elections in Poland were a “distant” concern for the United States, since Polish-Americans were mostly of the second generation. But to Churchill, democracy was paramount. When Stalin broke his promise to hold elections in Poland, Churchill saw the writing on the wall. A year later, he alerted the world at Fulton, Missouri.

WHAT gave Churchill majesty was not just his horror of the century’s twin scourges, against which he spearheaded the fight. It was his dedication to the democratic creed. No one in this century so personified the democratic ideal. When the British people made him their leader, he excelled at the task. When they rejected him, he gave truer leadership in opposition than the government in power. Winston Churchill needed no badge of office to see, to think, to speak, to lead.

In this, he was a different sort of leader. A son of the British upper classes, he had the public persona of a man who earned his way by his pen and his tongue. He saved Britain not by protecting it but by rousing his countrymen to brace themselves for what he assured them would be their “finest hour.” He could do this because the sentiments to which he gave such fine expression were his own.

That is the heart of it. The sentiments, about England and about the cause of freedom, that he championed on the world stage were Churchill’s personal convictions, and he brought to them the courage of a fighter. John Lukacs’s new book, Five Days in London: May 1940 (reviewed in Finest Hour 105), lays it out in detail: At the crucial moment, Churchill’s understanding of Hitler, of Britain’s danger, of politics, and of his countrymen allowed him to face down the appeasers and make the case decisively for all-out war.

“You ask, what is our policy?” he told the House of Commons in his first speech as prime minister.

I will say: It is to wage war: by sea, land and air,with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

CHURCHILL’S bold words rested on a hard foundation. An undistinguished student, he spent his youth and young adulthood proving himself as a military man. Upon graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he went to India, and the result was his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. If writing about warfare after a single campaign seemed precocious, Churchill quickly outdid himself. He joined Kitchener’s campaign to regain Khartoum from the disciples of the Mahdi, who had vanquished and beheaded General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. Churchill wrote of Kitchener’s exploits in The River War—and criticized him for desecrating the Mahdi’s tomb.

In South Africa, where he went as a war correspondent, Churchill’s capture and daring escape from the Boers late in 1899 won him celebrity. He was narrowly elected to parliament in the “khaki election” of 1900. Though he campaigned as a proponent of Britain’s effort in the Boer War, he also expressed high regard for his recent enemy.

At Westminster, Churchill quickly proved independent on matters of policy. His maiden address challenged the defense budget as excessive (the very indictment that had cost his father, then chancellor of the exchequer, his political career). In 1904, he showed that his allegiance to principle overrode even party loyalty. When the Tories adopted a tough protectionist stance, the free-trader Churchill crossed the floor to the Liberals.

No one knew the vagaries of democratic life better than Churchill. Named to the Cabinet in 1908, he was required by precedent to stand for reelection. He lost. Shaking off the embarrassment, he ran in a district more favorable to his party and won.

In World War I, he rose to First Lord of the Admiralty, a position where his audacity would carry a catastrophic price. Hating trench warfare, he pushed for a combined land and sea invasion of the Dardanelles, the gateway to Constantinople. His aim was to take Turkey out of the war and encourage rebellion in the Balkans against Germany and Austria. His mistake was in backing a halfhearted campaign that relied exclusively on sea power. He learned never again to take responsibility for a military effort without the requisite authority. Churchill would bear the blame for the casualties at Gallipoli.

Incredibly, he survived. Following World War I, he was defeated along with the rest of the Liberal Government. The loss coincided with some emergency surgery, and he found himself, as he put it, “without a seat, without an office, without a Party, and without an appendix.” Seeking to return to Parliament in 1923, Churchill was rejected again. Undeterred, he tried, again without success, for a seat in a February 1924 by-election. Finally, in that year’s general election, he rejoined the Conservatives and won. “Anyone can rat,” he said, “it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”

In 1929, Churchill made what looked to be a final break with the Conservative leadership, this time over dominion status for India, which he opposed. Yet his rebellion carried a bonus for human history. During the decade when it would count for most, Winston Churchill would be out of the Government, free to speak his mind.

Even his heroic role as Britain’s wartime leader did not shield him from defeat. In July 1945, he returned from the Potsdam conference with Stalin and the new American president, Harry Truman, to learn of the Conservatives’ loss to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party. In 1950, Churchill and the Tories lost again to the socialists, if by a much-diminished margin. But in 1951, thanks to some vigorous street campaigning, the man who had led Britain to its finest hour was back as premier.

A SCARRED veteran of democracy, Churchill scorned those who loved the word but rejected free elections. “Democracy is not some harlot in the street,” he said in condemning the Greek Communists toward the end of World War II, “to be picked up by some man with a Tommy gun. Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play, and freedom and a respect for the rights of other people.”

To William Manchester we owe the most vivid portrait of Churchill the writer, working into the wee hours on some speech or article, long after his dinner guests had left or gone to bed. His daughter Mary recalled a family that lived “literally from book to book, and from one article to the next.” Every time he suffered a political defeat, Churchill produced another daunting work of history.

After World War I, it was The World Crisis. “I am immersed in Winston’s brilliant autobiography,” a colleague wrote, “disguised as a history of the universe.” In the 1930s, he produced some 400 magazine articles in addition to his books. After his defeat in 1945, he wrote a history of World War II that is still in print today after millions of copies. For the totality of his literary work he won the Nobel Prize.

Churchill’s writing, speaking, and governing all derived their strength from his honesty. What made his “Dunkirk speech” in early June 1940 his greatest was the understatement of its message. With the British Expeditionary Force, sent to save France, successfully evacuated to England, he used the upbeat occasion to lay out the possible cost of what remained to be done. “Wars are not won by evacuations,” he told his hearers bluntly. A great fight lay ahead, from which Britain would not flinch. “We shall go on to the end,” Churchill said:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail….And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island, or a large part of it, were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

ALWAYS he tried to avoid over-promising. “Long, dark nights of trials and tribulations lie before us,” he , warned in an especially bleak radio address. “Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be companions of our journey, constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted. We must be inflexible.”

One man who recognized the strategy behind Churchill’s dismal honesty was the top Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. “His slogan of ‘blood, sweat and tears’ has entrenched him in a position that makes him totally immune from attack,” Goebbels complained. “He’s like the doctor who prophesies that his patient will die and who, every time his patient’s condition worsens, smugly explains that he prophesied it.” By preparing the public for bad news, Churchill denied the Nazis the full PR value of their victories. They could not kill British morale if the British had already heard the worst from their own leaders.

But there was more going on here than spin. Churchill wielded power through close contact with the truth. His years as a soldier and war correspondent, his battles with party leaders, his cabinet position in World War I, his stubborn independence, all had helped to prepare him for his historic role. By the early 1930s, he had the vision, the resolve to tell his country what it needed to know. A decade later, like Charles de Gaulle, he saw that the battle of France was more than that: It was part of a global conflict in which Adolf Hitler would ultimately be outnumbered. He saw, where the appeaser Lord Halifax could not, that to meet with Hitler was suicide, for the man in Berlin would conclude no deal that left Britain on its feet.

FOR all these reasons, Churchill is the democratic hero of our age. From his first electoral defeat in 1899 to his crudest defeat at the very hour of military victory in 1945, he lived out that defining fact of democracy: You win some, you lose some. The politician who sticks to his principles will know defeat as well as victory. As Anthony Eden pointed out, “Courage for some sudden act, maybe in the heat of battle, we all respect; but there is that still rarer courage which can sustain repeated disappointment, unexpected failure, and shattering defeat. Churchill had that too, and had need of it, not for a day, but for weeks and months and years.”

No leader was so clear-eyed about-the century’s villains. An instinctive anti-Communist, he understood nevertheless that Hitler posed the more present danger. “We have but one aim, and one single irrevocable purpose,” he said after Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us, nothing. We will never parlay, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.” He said the same in private. “If Hitler invaded hell,” he told his private secretary, John Colville, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” In fighting Nazism, Churchill marched alongside the Soviets in a military sense, but very much against them in ideological purpose. The goal of World War II, he said, was “to revive the status of man.” He wanted to raise up the individual beyond the reach of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world.

Churchill accomplished that end, and not just in his leadership against Nazism and communism. Simply by being the courageous, independent, self-reliant man he was, he was a tribute to the species. His life is a guide to what a free man can be. 

Mr. Matthews is the host of the MSNBC and CNBC cable news program “Hardball,” Washington bureau chief of the San Francisco Examiner, and the author of two best-sellers, Hardball and Kennedy and Nixon. This article is reprinted by kind permission of the author from The Weekly Standard, January 3/10, 2000.