Visions and Revisions

...It is more than time," he writes, "that historians (and the rest of us) stopped treating the lucubrations of Gladwyn Jebb, Harold Macmil-lan, old uncle Ted Heath and all with respect which they scarcely deserve...

...His obsession with Churchill leads Charmley to overlook longer-range factors that shape history...

...He also fails to show what alternative policies, whether Chamberlain's or Eden's, could conceivably have maintained Britain as a great power or preserved the Empire in an age of worldwide revolt against colonialism...

...Peace could have been made...

...Nor does he establish how a Britain divorced not only from the United States, but from Europe, could possibly sustain an independent role in world affairs...

...it is his politics...

...In addition, radical reinterpretations may be fueled simply by boredom with regnant orthodoxies...

...In all the events in which he himself took part," wrote Maurice Ashley, the eminent scholar who served for a time as Churchill's research assistant, "he was conscious that history was watching him and would one day judge him...

...If de Gaulle, Eden later reflected, had seemed "contumacious, especially to our American allies, perhaps we should have learnt from it...

...The wartime Prime Minister was a remarkable man, but he was not the single architect of the decline and fall of the British Empire...

...Every war in American history has been followed in due course by skeptical reassessments of supposedly sacred assumptions...

...His dedication to the myth of the unity of English-speaking peoples, Charmley contends, ended up reducing a once proud and independent country to a pathetic American satellite state...

...As for Britain joining Europe, Charmley is an unyielding skeptic...

...If he had only been around in 1940, they think, then he would have understood...

...The most sustained assault has been mounted by John Charmley of the University of East Anglia in his trilogy Chamberlain and the Lost Peace(m9), Churchill: TheEnd of Glory (1993), and now Churchill's Grand Alliance: the Anglo-American Special Relationship 1940-57...

...Isolationist historians, for example, argue that FDR maneuvered the country into World War II, and go so far as to assert that he permitted the destruction of the U.S...

...Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York Graduate Center A HISTORIAN himself, Winston Churchill saw it as the right, even duty, of historians to pronounce judgments...

...In placing so much blame on him, Charmley neglects the economic, social, cultural, and demographic factors that determined Britain's rise and withering in the world...

...It is true that Roosevelt and Churchill often disagreed about the strategy of the Warandof thepeace...

...John Charmley was born in 1955, so World War II is almost as remote from his generation as the Spanish-American and Boer Wars were from mine...

...The Frenchman's stubborn national pride may have exasperated Churchill and Roosevelt, but his very obstinacy strengthened the postwar position of his country...

...and through so-called 'progressive' taxation, which deprived individuals of the opportunity to pass on their wealth...

...They may be moved by the events of their own time, like the young historians who, persuaded of the wickedness or folly of America's intervention in Vietnam, began to read such wickedness or folly into U.S...

...But second opinions are not necessarily wiser than first...

...After troubles are surmounted, a vivid sense of their difficulty and danger can easily fade away...

...Revisionism is nevertheless an essential part of the process by which history, through the posing of new problems, the employment of new perspectives and the investigation of new possibilities, enlarges its reach and enriches its insights...

...Some Left-wing historians have absolved Stalin of responsibility for the Cold War and placed the blame on Harry Truman...

...Revi sionists may have many motives—including some not consciously recognized—besides the desire forpurity in historical analysis...

...Some of the faults of later years might have been avoided if we had shown more of the same spirit...

...Lincoln has even been accused of bringing about the rebels' attack on Fort Sumter...

...In foreign affairs it meant an end to [British] imperialism and protectionism, indeed to any barriers which stood in the way of the imposition of Americanism'on an unsuspecting world...

...As the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl put it, history is "an argument without an end...

...Recalling Harold Macmillan's remark that the British should consider themselves the "Greeks in the new Roman Empire," Charmley takes delight in pointing out (several times) that in the Roman Empire the Greeks were slaves...

...The British guarantee of Poland was bad enough, but the fatal mistake came in 1940-41 when Churchill kept on fighting instead of negotiating a peace with Hitler and thereby saving the Empire...

...It should be no great discovery, especially for an English scholar, that nations tend to protect and pursue their own interests...

...Convinced the U.S...

...Moreover, we wouldn't have much history written if historians were confined to writing about things they personally experienced...

...Unabashedly a Right-wing Thatch-erite, he is reminiscent of the ultracon-servative Tories who never really trusted Churchill, and he occasionally interrupts his narrative to vent his prej udices...

...The improbable hero of Churchill s Grand Alliance is Anthony Eden...

...Few historians today believe that political hawks caused the War of 1812 or slaveholders the Mexican War...

...This is an intriguing historiographical reversal: For years historians have been portraying Roosevelt as the innocent and Churchill as the old master...

...Few write that the Civil War was needless, or that FDR schemed to provoke the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...In a major effort at historical revaluation, Charmley portrays Lord Avon as the thoughtful champion of an independent British foreign policy, the resolute defender of British interests against American priorities, and the prescient prophet who "foresaw the shape of the future better than anyone...

...Some attribute his critique of Churchill to the fact that he was born a decade after the end of the War...

...Neville Chamberlain had been right in 1939...

...Or they may be driven by a quest for originality, and by the parricidal impulse that occasionally afflicts scholars seeking to advance themselves by trampling on the bodies of their elders...

...It is very difficult to remember," as F.W Maitland has said, "that events now in the past were once far in the future...

...Cold War and World War II policy...

...Both were outsized figures, both had a magnificent sense of history, each rejoiced in what he saw as the incredible luck of occupying the world stage with the other...

...She was an arbiter as well as a Muse...

...Appeasement," Charmley writes in his latest book, "was the only road open to a statesman who wished to preserve the power of the United Kingdom...

...In sharp contrast to all those admirers who have strenuously denied that an honorable peace could have been made in 1940or 1941,"Charmley insists, "Churchill knew better...

...So, as he would have expected (and perhaps resented), Churchill is again being brought before what he liked to call "the Bar of History...

...His present prosecutors come from a new generation of revisionist British scholars whose arguments are not merely rhetorical or political or polemical, but are fortified by documentation...

...If anyone is likely to survive that argument and come out on top, it is Winston Churchill...

...He attributes to FDR "a vein of Machiavellian cunning which would not have disgraced a statesman of the old European school of Bismarck...

...Eden's great regret, Charmley suggests, was that he did not follow the example of Charles de Gaulle...

...FDR's New Deal, he tells us in language that would please Newt Gingrich, was "little more than a veil for government interference in the lives of individuals on an unprecedented scale, both through 'agencies...

...The essential thesis is that Winston Churchill was personally responsible for the decline of Britain and the disintegration of the Empire...

...It seems evident, though, that had Charmley been there in 1940, he would have agreed not with Churchill but with Neville Chamberlain on appeasement and Lord Halifax on the desirability of a negotiated peace...

...Yetjustasithasbeen an error in past years to romanticize the harmonies of the relationship, it is an error today to exaggerate the discords...

...would repay him by underwriting "Britain's position as a Great Power," Churchill staked everything on the alliance with America...

...In the new Charmley volume, Franklin Roosevelt emerges not as the villain but as the leader Churchill failed to be: the cool, crafty, calculating, accomplished champion of his own country's interests...

...Let us not, however, be too agitated by the rise of revisionism...

...Or they may often be a consequence of the lack of historical imagination that renders young scholars incapable of grasping the urgencies and uncertainties responsible for decisions taken before they were born...

...The Spanish-American War, the two World Wars and the Cold War have, each in turn, endured the revisionist touch...

...In practice, Charmley observes, the special relationship meant that "America would support British interests where they coincided with her own, and only then, whilst expecting the British to tow [sic] the line whenever America wanted her to do so...

...fleet at Pearl Harbor...

...Their disagreements must be understood within the embracing framework of grand purposes, shared objectives and common ideals...

...Charmley stoutly defends Roosevelt against the charges of naive idealism conventionally brought against him and sees him out-maneuvering and manipulating the ever-credulous and ever-hopeful Churchill...

...The new volume concentrates on what Charmley views as Churchill's delusions about the Anglo-American "special relationship...

...Against all this it should be kept in mind that, on the whole, past exercises in revisionism have failed to stick...

...Sometimes revisionism may serve political interests...

...The War of 1812, fought to preserve the freedom of the seas, was later ascribed to the expansionist ambitions of Congressional hawks...

...But because he decided to appease Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than Adolf Hitler, the author argues, Britain was delivered to the Socialists, Eastern Europe to the Communists, and the rest of the world to the Americans...

...It is essentially a tendency to challenge established historical explanations, and it should surprise no one...

...It is not Charmley's age that determines his slant...

...Similarly, the Mexican War retrospectively became a slaveholders' conspiracy, and the Civil War was pronounced "needless...