A Flawed Man in His Finest Hour
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
A Flawed Man in His Finest Hour Eminent Churchillians By Andrew Roberts Simon & Schuster. 354pp. $27.50. Churchill: An Unruly Life By Norman Rose Free Press. 516pp. $25.00. Reviewed by...
...Although the authornever tries to hide Churchill's shortcomings, he gives him the benefit of every doubt...
...As a "backbencher" he still had his powerful voice and mighty pen, but hardly any supporters and scant influence—either in the Party or the nation...
...More spurious is the charge that non-white immigrants undermined Britain's economy by taking blue collar jobs away from Britons and slowing the drive for greater industrial productivity...
...Moreover, any deal with Hitler would have lasted no longer than suited his purposes—until, that is, Germany disposed of Russia...
...His great unpopularity among fellow MPs would undoubtedly have kept him from becoming Prime Minister were it not for Hitler...
...Europe's tragedy was Churchill's break, and he made the most of it...
...The Conservatives' 1929 electoral defeat began what Churchill would call his "wilderness years...
...Thus Rose, a diligent researcher, cannot fail to show that Churchill was an opportunist who, except when issues touched on deep-rooted prejudices—for the Empire, against trade unions—rarely stood on principle...
...it is not supported by any hard evidence and is not worth taking seriously...
...the center of German power was in Western Europe, not in the far off and nearly impenetrable Balkans...
...Roberts starts promisingly enough by declaring that like Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians is his supposed model, he hopes to shed light on the Age of Churchill by considering some of its representative men...
...If Britain had dropped out of the War there would have been no way for the United States to intervene in Europe and little chance of defeating Hitler...
...everyone who favored opening Great Britain to nonwhite immigration—a process that began during Churchill's second, postwar round as Prime Minister...
...His Churchill: An End to Glory, issued in the United States a year and a half ago, indicts the Prime Minister for failing to make peace with Hitler in 1940, thereby losing the Empire and benefiting British Socialism...
...He was disliked and distrusted by the Conservatives, but when they returned to power he was named Chancellor of the Exchequer—mainly, it appears, to neutralize him as a potential critic of the leadership...
...Conservative Americans used to argue that if only Roosevelt had listened to Churchill there would have been no sellout at Yalta...
...the Tory MPs who preferred Neville Chamberlain to Churchill, even after Chamberlain's forced resignation in May 1940...
...None could have convinced the British when all seemed lost that they were actually enjoying what he called "their finest hour...
...For though the Tories came back, they no longer feared him...
...The central fact of Britain's modern history is its decline as an industrial state and consequently as a world power...
...It was not only Britain's good fortune but the world's that in 1940 a man existed who could mobilize the full power of the English language in the service of liberty...
...With the War on the Continent lost, and the United States on the sidelines, many in Britain felt the moment had come to accept Hitler's terms for peace: Britain would keep the Empire while he retained Europe...
...Despite these mistakes, which would have finished a lesser man, his decade of political isolation ended when war with Germany broke out in 1939, precisely as he had been predicting it would in speeches and articles for years...
...About his rhetoric one would be hard-pressed to find fault...
...In these respects Churchill resembled many other politicians, but was distinguished by his extraordinary rashness and singularly badjudgment...
...Roberts offers two explanations for this slide: In the 1950s the unions received excessive pay and perks, and there were too many nonwhite immigrants...
...In his assessment for the New York Times Book Review, he saw Rose damning Churchill with faint praise...
...Those attempting to understand why will get no help at all from Andrew Roberts' Eminent Churchillians...
...Rose gives it fewer than six pages...
...As Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, he strongly influenced British strategy, often for the worse...
...Lord Louis Mountbatten, another idiot, but also a clever and mendacious careerist who scrambled over the bodies of better men to reach the top...
...Critical historians have pointed out that Churchill was not the consistent anti-Nazi and antiappeaser portrayed in his memoirs, but no one else of his prominence in Britain warned against Hitler so early and so often...
...The Allies' embarrassing failure to force their way through the Dardanelles, followed by the Gallipoli fiasco, almost ended his career...
...It was at this critical juncture that Churchill realized his full promise at last, leading the British people with never to be forgotten eloquence and force...
...Self-centered and self-serving to an extraordinary degree, he was largely uninterested in others except when he could use them...
...The end of his chapter on immigration reveals all: "Britain had become what Churchill had feared, 'a magpie society.'" We are on higher ground with Norman Rose's useful, moderate and fair-minded Churchill: An Unruly Life...
...Nevertheless, in the context of contemporary scholarship Rose is a friendly commentator—a far cry from Clive Ponting, for example, whose Churchill, published in Britain in 1994, damns his subject totally and finds nothing whatsoever to praise...
...It avoids the question...
...In a rare display of modesty he once said that it was the British people who had the lion's heart, it only fell to him to supply the roar...
...Thereafter, Churchill probably did the Allies more harm than good (though Rose hesitates to admit it...
...Furthermore, selective memory and bigotry make Roberts' judgment highly suspect...
...Had D-Day taken place in 1943, as General George C. Marshall and American planners wanted, Germany would most likely have fallen at least a year earlier than it did, saving countless lives and keeping all of Central Europe, and maybe part of the East, from falling behind the Iron Curtain...
...Rewarded with a sub-Cabinet position, Churchill rose quickly after that...
...So odd and venomous a work ought to be more entertaining than it is...
...And the other butts of the author's poison arrows were small fry, perhaps as contemptible as he makes them out to be, yet hardly worth the trouble...
...As a result, after the outbreak of hostilities popular sentiment forced Chamberlain to give a vindicated Churchill the Admiralty again...
...With Britain still ruling the waves, he was now a figure of world importance...
...He distinguished himself as an administrator as usual, but reaffirmed his reputation as an adventurer by promoting doomed Allied efforts to intervene in Russia against the Bolsheviks...
...Partly it disappoints because of Roberts' chosen targets...
...For this, all else can be forgiven...
...Britain's finest hour is Churchill's monument, and his claim to greatness...
...Yet even if his Turkish gamble had succeeded, the AI lies would not have gained much...
...Even those without political animus have been influenced by the passage of time and the opening of Churchill's archives to unauthorized biographers...
...Most serious was Churchill's absolute determination to prevent, or at least delay, the Allied invasion of France...
...None had his command of the language, his ability to summon the past in aid of the present, or his faith in British greatness...
...So the family name and his own obvious talents got him noticed at once...
...He further compromised himself by promoting a reactionary Indian policy and by vigorously defending King Edward VUI, whose intention to marry a divorced woman was indefensible by the standards of the day...
...Indeed, Churchill appears in this book only at the margins...
...There was no way that Britain, with its modest resources, could have held on to its vast and restive colonial possessions acquired in another era...
...No other British politician could have rallied the nation as he did...
...But it is a motley crew of secondary and tertiary characters that occupies his attention: King George VI, who we are told was an idiot and ap-peaser...
...A summary of his career puts Churchill in perspective...
...Like the American air campaign over Europe, the RAF attacks were not only a crime but a blunder—one that, unike the United States, Britain could ill afford...
...He entered Parliament in 1901, at the age of 26, as a Unionist (Conservative...
...In this position he was most conspicuous for rhetorically leading the government charge against the General Strike of 1926, which the Tories broke...
...He quarreled with party leaders early on, however, and in 1904 crossed over to the Liberal side?just in time to prof t from its stunning electoral victory the next year...
...author, 'A Democracy at War: America s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" OF THE seven or eight truly great political figures of this century, four at a critical point shared the same stage—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph V Stalin...
...His "peripheral" theory never having really been tested, Churchill would revive it in World War II—with equally unfortunate results...
...Churchill almost single-handedly held down the fort until Soviet Russia and America were finally dragged into the War...
...It was the long delay of what became Operation Overlord, not Stalin's guile or Roosevelt's innocence, that brought the Red Army so far into Europe...
...The grand manner of historical narration has gone out of style and was dated even in Churchill's day, but as a master storyteller and phrasemaker he will always be read...
...While three have secure reputations (Hitler and Stalin as monsters, of course), Churchill's has fluctuated wildly...
...This was the only way for the Allies to ensure Germany's early defeat and also minimize the Soviets' postwar sphere of influence...
...This was nonsense...
...As for Churchill's second Prime Ministership, from 1951 to 1955, even those who admire him have difficulty finding merit in it...
...His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been a Tory, serving briefly as Chancellor of the Exchequer before syphilis and egomania did him in...
...In Britain, as in the United States, new immigrants tended to fill jobs the indigenous population did not want...
...Roberts' case here rests solely on racial prejudice...
...Some of Churchill's critics are ul-traconservatives like John Charmley...
...Walter Monckton, the then Minister of Labor who caved in repeatedly to the trade unions: and Sir Arthur Bryant, a popular historian who was an idiot as well and pro-Nazi to boot...
...In 1924, with the coalition falling apart and the Liberal Party collapsing, Churchill, to use his own term, "re-ratted" and rejoined the Tories...
...Space precludes listing Churchill's other errors, not to mention his innumerable harebrained schemes...
...Everyone knows, though, that Britain's relative economic decline began in the 19th century and was already well advanced when unions supposedly became too greedy in the 1950s...
...He gave himself too little credit...
...Out of office after Gallipoli, it did not take long for Churchill to work himself back into favor, thanks in particular to the rise of his patron David Lloyd George, who as Prime Minister of the wartime coalition government appointed him to a series of important Cabinet posts...
...At one time venerated, he has become the object of severe criticism in recent years...
...No one was more responsible for the Royal Air Force bombings of Germany, which killedhundredsof thousands of civilians, consumed at a minimum 25 per cent of Britain's War effort, and contributed little to victory...
...Churchill sought to end the bloody stalemate on the Western Front by invading Turkey and flanking Germany from the south...
...This too is nonsense...
...This was not apparent to Henry A. Kissinger...
...With the possible exception of Mountbatten, none captured the public's imagination the way "Chinese" Gordon and Florence Nightingale—two of Strachey's subjects—did in their day...
...For his leadership in that desperate time Churchill will always be honored...
...Many of them dismayed his own chiefs of staff, long-suffering professionals who devoted endless hours to talking him out of one crackpot idea or another...
...By 1914, when the Great War broke out, he had become First Lord of the Admiralty...
...With his books, articles and especially speeches, he proved again that words above all are what determine the fate of nations...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...To be sure, Britons admired George VI, but in large measure for being so average—a welcome change from Edward, his dashing but irresponsible brother...
...Churchill's language was so intemperate that, not for the first time, he struck many as seriously unbalanced...
...Churchill's ancient anti-Bolshevism resurfaced near the end of the War, but he more than anyone enabled the Communists to take control of the East by resisting the opening of a second front in Europe...
...Nor did anyone speak so vigorously on behalf of rearmament at a time when the government was economizing...
...And not alone for his version of events—his "case" as he candidly described his majestic six-volume The Second World War, published between 1948 and 1954...
...But recently conservatives like John Charmley have attempted to deny the achievements of his first term by arguing that the Empire could have been saved if Churchill had accepted Hitler's terms in 1940...
...And when the Prime Minister was forced to step down, Churchill was the obvious replacement...
Vol. 78 • October 1995 • No. 8
