Churchill: The Nerve of Failure
ROSE, BICHARD
Churchill: The Nerve of Failure Winston Churchill in Trial and Triumph. By Alan. Moorehead. Houghton, Mifflin. 117 pp. $2.50. Reviewed by Richard Rose Staff writer, St. Louis...
...He first broke from it by opposing self-government for India...
...Yet he used the image of the father he never really knew, Lord Randolph Churchill, as a model for his early Tory political life...
...Moorehead deftly surveys his life of service to six monarchs...
...No one would have it otherwise...
...Labor party leaders can still remember Churchill's martial figure during the 1926 General Strike...
...J. M. Keynes wrote devastatingly of "The Economic Consequences of Mr...
...Many great statesmen have had the moral courage to do that which may fail...
...Yet, six years later he was back in office, and with his speech of May 11...
...The amazing resiliency here chronicled really derives from an event in 1704?¬when Churchill's ancestor...
...Lord Marlborough, defeated the French at Blenheim, says Moorehead...
...The cherub-faced orator learned to act as if "he had only to continue boldly and all would be well...
...Because he shows him in dark moments of despair as well as in the bright light of victory, this man of incredible achievements remains fully human in his portrait...
...And Churchill, made great by the virtues of an aristocratic society, has never disowned it, a sobering reflection upon egalitarian principles...
...Churchill's last defeat, two months after V-E Day in 1945, was caused by working-class distrust of Conservative principles, exacerbated by Churchill's astonishing attacks upon his Labor war-time coalition colleagues as planning to bring Gestapo tactics to England...
...The family name and tradition established then made the modern leader feel secure psychologically...
...Churchill has never been at a loss for a platform either, an important practical consideration for a politician...
...Churchill returned later in the war as a minister, helping to carry the tank from drawing board to battle-field...
...Sir Winston is benefiting from the maxim, "In the life of a man persistently in the public eye it is the last lap that counts...
...His prose style insured a hearing for his views in the popular press when less gifted outcasts were crying unheard...
...In studying such a mighty oak of a man, the hardest thing to achieve is perspective...
...After switching parties and rising quickly with the pre-World War I Liberal government, the still young Churchill had full responsibility for the British disaster at Gallipoli thrust upon him, although he never had full authority there...
...no contemporary has ever survived so gloriously, having failed so often, as Churchill, a man with a bulldog's tenacity...
...This defeat on the economic battle-ground has left the only scars not fully healed...
...Louis "Post-Dispatch" THE "nerve of failure" explains the success of Sir Winston Churchill, according to the brief but perceptive study written by Alan Moorehead, a former Beaverbrook correspondent...
...When his hour came in 1940, Churchill expressed relief, for he had finally found the place for which he had been searching, at a time when England faced a challenge as great as any in its history...
...Britain went back on the gold standard and experienced a general strike...
...Now in the winter of his life...
...His insurmountable will faced many trials before his finest hour in 1940, when his personal motto, "Never surrender," was transmuted into the roar of a gallant, nearly defeated lion...
...His earlier Liberal stand is considered by many only a condescending gesture de haut en has, Moorehead declares...
...1953 clinched Labor party support for his world leadership...
...Back at Westminster on the Conservative side of the House in 1924, Churchill was elevated to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer...
...After giving his career a thorough scrutiny, Alan Moorehead does not deprive him of justly-earned laurels...
...Quickly he gained prominence-and enemies...
...Taking the part of Edward VIII in the abdication crisis, he only made himself more isolated...
...In his reconstruction of the failure of what he calls "in its possibilities, the most important single operation in the whole course of the two world wars," Moorehead is particularly good...
...Three limes he was defeated in bids for re-election to Parliament, once by a Scots Communist...
...He had the good fortune to be right...
...Churchill soon found himself anathematized by his own party council...
...Suddenly he found himself no longer a Liberal, no longer in Commons...
...thus he endured many journeys into the political wilderness...
...Never at a loss for words...
...His thunder-bolts against disarmament could not dispel the fog that enveloped party leaders...
...Here we have outlined in fair proportion, briefly but significantly, the roots, the trunk and many branches of the Churchill genius...
...A Victorian childhood full of neglect first accustomed Churchill to going it alone...
...Removed from office when Labor returned to power in 1929...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 48
