A Half-American Original

...Churchill concluded that both causes "are, I believe, identical...

...Of them the greatest is Sir Martin Gilbert, who replaced Churchill's son, Randolph, as Churchill's official biographer upon the son's death in 1968...

...When in 1952 General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected, Churchill was less optimistic than when Truman became president...

...This great friend of America slowed down...

...During the American Revolution more ofhis relatives fought on our side than Britain's...

...James's, that when Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the Navy-and senior American present--met Churchill, the Englishman acted as a "stinker...

...T HROUGH CHURCHILL'S LONG LIFE he was indeed deeply entoiled with his mother's country, America...

...i 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006 REVIEW the book under review reveals, a big heart...

...Two days before he had written President Eisenhower, whose presidency no longer alarmed him, asseverating his belief that both had worked for two great causes, "AngloAmerican brotherhood" and "the arrest of the Communist menace...

...But by standing against A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin (ALFRED A. KNOPF, 374 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by Steve Chapman evolutionary theory in the Scopes trial, he provoked the glorious derision of H.L...

...Large corporations still dominate our economy, bankroll our politicians and frame our mass culture...

...I think this makes war much more probable...

...Churchill had immediate high regard for President Harry Truman, though the Missourian was not so sure of this fancy Brit...

...One of the great dramas of this book is Churchill's ardent and clever courting of the former assistant secretary of the Navy, and Roosevelt's bold contraventions of Congress's neutrality acts barring him from assisting the British...

...Kazin nonetheless thinks his subject has substantial relevance to the 21st century...

...I am not i even clear that Castro has matched Churchill as a i cigar-smoker...

...Not even Castro can match i Churchill as an erudite writer and orator, a political i leader and military strategist, a soldier, a gardener, a i bricklayer, a traveler, a wit and bon vivant...

...Mencken and other progressive thinkers, thus dooming himself to be remembered mostly as a risible hayseed who stood in the way of science and got flattened...

...By the late 1930s he surely wanted to meet him, for both men recognized that war with Germany was imminent...

...Though Kazin thinks the modern party could profit from emulating Bryan, it may be that the flaws that kept Bryan out of the White House are all too present among Democratic lead64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006...

...The Prototypical Unelectable l iberal I F YOU WANT TO BE TREATED KINDLY by history, it's helpful to choose the right friends but crucial to choose the right enemies...

...In 1895, age 20, Churchill makes his first visit to America, taking a proper measure of our BOOKS IN REVIEW journalism: "The essence of Americanjournalism," he writes his brother, "is vulgarity divested of truth...

...Alarmed that the Americans were not going to get into the fight with the Germans he planned a Christmas holiday at the White House...

...BOOKS IN It was of course the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s that became the anvil against which Reagan smashed the liberal New Deal coalition, and which saw a large number of liberals abandon their old faith and become conservatives or "neoconservatives...

...The years dragged on...

...His fascination matured through middle age until he stood with his American cousins in the center of the world's arena, at first against the right-wing tyrants and a few years later against the left-wing tyrants...

...None of these exemplary leftists, i however, could claim Churchill's breadth, and all i have suffered embarrassment at the hands of their i more recent biographers...

...One cannot put it down without a deeper appreciation of Churchill's greatness and ebullient personality...

...Bryan's time is not unlike our own," he asserts...

...I knowthat throughthe decades our friends on the left have had their own favorites: Chairman Mao Zedong and, more briefly, Marshal Joseph Stalin and the perdurable Dr...

...To this day some of the true believers still hang on to Fidel--not so long ago Oliver Stone joined the long list of Hollywoodians making a pilgrimage to Castro's progressive isle...

...Bryan sponsored the nation's first income tax and was a key backer of two major constitutional amendmentsone providing for direct election of senators (previously chosen by state legislatures) and one extending the vote to women...

...Gilbert has adopted a print technique that assists the reader in easily following the long chronology of his narrative...

...Though now 78 years old (see the top of Gilbert's page 415), he redoubled his efforts to achieve a summit between Moscow and WashingtOn...

...His interests and I attainments ranged more widely than those of any of i his competitors...

...On the evening ofhis arrival here on December 22, that worry too was vanquished as our Admiral Harold Stark assured him that the Atlantic and European theater was to be the "decisive one...

...Not since the Civil War has anyone else had the honor of losing more than twice as the nominee of a major party...

...What the author doesn't consider is that if Bryan deserves credit for making the Democratic Party what it is today, he may also bear some responsibility for its decline...

...The president believed that presidential power needed to be wielded efficiently against those threats...

...That I did not doubt, but was there really enough information to write a book on the subject...

...Some things never change...

...the raw material is simply too prodigious...

...By the late 1930s FDR was directing a confrontational foreign policy against the Nazis with the counsel of his new friend Churchill and in spite of American isolationists...

...In fact, he wrote an aide, "I am greatly disturbed...

...is the founder andeditor in chief i of The American Spectator...

...on the other hand, his growing appreciation for Reagan might be taken as a sign that Reagan's magnetism is still strong, and that with another decade, we'll pull over the few remaining old liberals who also believe in American exceptionalism...

...At the top of each left-hand page there is the year of the chapter's events...

...On December 11, the day before he boarded the Duke of York for America, the idiots Hitler and Mussolini declared war on us, but this did not end Churchill's worries...

...Writes Kazin, "Bryan was the first leader of a major party to argue for permanently expanding the power of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans from the working and middle classes," arguing tirelessly for "legalizing strikes, subsidizing farmers, taxing the rich, banning private campaign spending, and outlawing the 'liquor trust.'" A Godly Hero reminds us how much bigger a role he played than just presidential candidate...

...Moreover Churchill is one great man who attracts other great figures, for instance great historians and biographers...

...stay at the White House, dictating memos from his White House tub and being caught stark naked by the president as he dictated still more memos in his guestroom-"You see Mr...

...I N THIS METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED and lucidly written book Gilbert takes us through this war and the next, the Cold War, demonstrating Churchill's growing affection for America and the continuing anxieties he felt as the world remained a dangerous place, now made more so by Communists with atomic bombs...

...Our fascinai tion with Churchill will...

...Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin hopes to reclaim Bryan from this caricature and elevate him to his rightful place in the pantheon of liberal heroes...

...T ODAY I THINK MOST HISTORICALLY minded people would agree that of all the public figures of the 20th century, Winston Churchill is the i most absorbing and impressive...

...He decided to stay on as prime minMAY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 BOOKS IN REVIEW ister...

...This will not last...

...At his last cabinet meeting on April 5,1955, his final words were: "Man is spirit" and "Never be separated from the Americans...

...Gilbert, however, makes it clear that Churchill's worries persisted...

...Castro reportedly gave up his Cubanos i years ago in deference to the World Health Organi ization...

...His delivery of one of the most famous speeches in American history, his 1896 "cross of gold" address, Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune...

...The president told Kennedy that Churchill was "one of the few men in public life who was rude to me...

...In addition, Gilbert has written over 70 other books on world history...

...After December 7,1941, one would think Churchill was much relieved that the support he sought from the NewWorld was at hand...

...Late in life the last Edwardian was still i lighting up...

...He recalled to Joseph Kennedy, our ambassador to the Court of St...

...It doesn't help that Bryan is perhaps the most prodigious failure in American political historynominated three times for president by the Democratic Party and getting beat each time...

...But we lack politicians, filled with conviction and blessed with charisma, who are willing to lead a charge against secular forces whose power is both mightier and more subtly deployed than a century ago...

...He is justly recognized as one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, and here he is still at work in the new century...

...But he also writes his mother: "What an extraordinary people the Americans are...

...With the rise of barbaric aggressors such as the Nazis and the Japanese militarists America was living in an era of threats to its "national security" (FDR's coinage...

...atop the right-hand page is Churchill's age...

...Though Churchill became the first great power leader to sound the tocsin against Moscow, he also became an ardent advocate of high-level meetings between adversaries at the "summit" (Churchill's coinage...

...This book was born during a luncheon in the White House with Karl Rove and various other Bush administration aides just before the President departed for London in 2004 to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair...

...Their hospitality is a revelation to me...

...Most Americans know him, if they know him at all, only as the Bible-thumping windbag Matthew Brady Harrison of Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind...

...To revive an old line, "It did not start with Bush...

...Twenty years later FDR still remembered it...

...Yet he still sets imaginations aglow i among some liberals...

...Churchill could not remember meeting Roosevelt...

...His presidential campaigns, in Kazin's view, rescued the Democratic Party from the laissez-faire individualism of Grover Cleveland (who once said, "Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people") and prepared the way for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson...

...The discussion turned to British antiAmericanism, as that virus was in season, and Gilbert noted that Churchill had opposed it all his life...

...Some things never change...

...His American partner in the World War II struggle, President Franklin Roosevelt, had gotten off to a bad start with the Englishman when first they met at a 1918 Allied Ministers of War banquet in London...

...President, I have nothing to conceal from you...

...For four decades Gilbert has gathered documents, hunted down facts, and interviewed witnesses in chronicling his principal's life through six volumes of the eight-volume official biography and several additional books, a particularly interesting one being In Search of Churchill, a book about Gilbert's adventures in writing the official biography...

...Howard Dean lamenting President Bush's use of power against the Islamofascists...

...Reeves might appear to be a slow learner...

...He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is," Truman noted in his diary after their first meeting...

...At 503 pages Churchill andAmerica is certainly a book, and for my money it is as informative a book on the man as I have read...

...And to his brother he writes on another day: "This is a very great country my dear Jack...

...It is difficult to write a bad book about Churchill...

...Att all-American Original Churchill and America by Martin Gilbert (THE FREE PRESS, 528 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...From the music of his language to the whiff of his cigar, I think I now have the old boy down pat...

...He feared we would make the Pacific our major theater...

...and by 1939 Churchill was convinced Germany would win without America in the fray...

...Only as a jailer and torturer has Castro suri passed Churchill...

...The obvious difference is that Bryan's views were an outgrowth of his faith, a philosophy that Kazin says "married democracy and pietism in a romantic gospel that borrowed equally from Jefferson and Jesus...

...And so Churchill had a jolly if busy Christmas In 1895, age 20, Churchill ma kes h is fi rst visit to America, taking a proper measure of our journalism" "The essence of America n jou rnalism," he writes his brother, "is vulgarity divested of truth...

...He had vast talents and, as i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...Hence the title of this book...

...Fidel Castro...

...Think about this when next you hear Dr...

...That melding of church and state may have less appeal now than it did then, particularly on the left...

...Thanks to his views on laissez-faire capitalism, activist government, and the use of military force, William Jennings Bryan was the darling of the liberals of his age, which might be expected to inspire affection among the liberals of our age...

...only confirms the common perception of Bryan as a religious crank whose oratory was as antiquated as his view of science...

...All these causes, with the exception of Prohibition, are consistent with modern liberalism...

...Yet his faith in this country only deepened...