The Very Model of a Democratic Statesman
MATTHEWS, CHRISTOPHER
The Very Model of a Democratic Statesman At the heart of Churchill's politics was a deeply felt dedication to and confidence in the people he led. By Christopher Matthews On a cold, drizzly night...
...Churchill wrote of Kitchener's exploits in The River War—and criticized him for desecrating the mahdi's tomb...
...writing both possible and noble...
...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...
...We have but one aim, and one single irrevocable purpose," he said after Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941...
...Even his heroic role as Britain's wartime leader did not shield him from defeat...
...His daughter Mary recalled a family that lived "literally from book to book, and from one article to the next...
...When they rejected him, he gave truer leadership in opposition than the government in power...
...In 1904, he showed that his allegiance to principle overrode even party loyalty...
...A few years later, in Capetown, I stared in awe at a line of voters that stretched across a wide plain from horizon to horizon...
...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 even without an appendix...
...Churchill had that too, and had need of it, not for a day, but for weeks and months and years...
...What made his "Dunkirk speech" in early June 1940 his greatest was the understatement of its message...
...His life is a guide to what a free man can be...
...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...
...For all these reasons, Churchill is the democratic hero of our age...
...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...
...Such are the triumphs at this century's end...
...When the British people made him their leader, he excelled at the task...
...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...
...It's one thing to rat," he said, "it's another to re-rat...
...The goal of World War II, he said, was "to revive the status of man...
...A year later, he alerted the world at Fulton, Missouri...
...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 . . . 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...
...Churchill would bear the blame for the casualties at Gallipoli...
...he told the House of Commons in his first speech as prime minister on May 13, 1940...
...John Lukacs's new book, Five Days in London: May 1940 (reviewed on page 34), 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...
...This is Freiheit," said a young man wearing an old army surplus jacket...
...In fighting Nazism, Churchill fought alongside the Soviets in a military sense, but very much against them in ideological purpose...
...We must be united, we must be undaunted...
...No one knew the vagaries of democratic life better than Churchill...
...Wars are not won by evacuations," he told his hearers bluntly...
...You ask, what is our policy...
...Simply by being the courageous, independent, self-reliant man he was, he was a tribute to the species...
...But what he did out of office—alerting an indifferent world to the Nazis' rise in the 1930s...
...Death and sorrow will be companions of our journey, constancy and valor our only shield...
...Incredibly, he survived...
...We will never parlay, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang...
...But in 1951, thanks to some vigorous street campaigning, the man who had led Britain to its finest hour was back as premier...
...But there was more going on here than spin...
...His aim was to take Turkey out of the war and encourage rebellion in the Balkans against Germany and Austria...
...After his defeat in 1945, he wrote a history of World War II that won the Nobel Prize...
...Churchill wielded power through close contact with the truth...
...Every time he suffered a political defeat, Churchill produced another daunting work of history...
...but there is that still rarer courage which can sustain repeated disappointment, unexpected failure, and shattering defeat...
...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...
...Declaring him an honorary citizen of the United States, John F. Kennedy said Churchill sent the English language "into battle...
...He wanted to raise up the individual beyond the reach of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world...
...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...
...Democracy is not some harlot," he said in condemning the Greek Communists in the closing weeks of World War II, "in the street to be picked up by some man with a Tommy gun...
...Undeterred, he tried, again without success, for a seat in a February 1924 by-election...
...Four weeks ago," broke in a woman nearby who said she was a nurse, "we couldn't have done this...
...He was narrowly elected to parliament in the "khaki election" of 1900...
...Yet his rebellion carried a bonus for human history...
...He learned never again to take responsibility for a military effort without the requisite authority...
...You ask, What is our aim...
...That is our policy...
...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...
...At Westminster, Churchill quickly proved independent on matters of policy...
...No one in this century so personified the democratic ideal...
...And of all this, one man is the emblem...
...What gave Churchill majesty was not just his horror of the century's twin scourges, against which he spearheaded the fight...
...It was the same voice that spoke —again, while others were silent—of the postwar peril from Moscow...
...Wading into the crowd, I tried to find out, with my limited German, what freedom meant to them...
...He could do this because the sentiments to which he gave such fine expression were his own...
...From this nothing will turn us, nothing...
...But to Churchill, democracy was primary...
...His slogan of 'blood, sweat and tears' has entrenched him in a position that makes him totally immune from attack," Goebbels barked...
...Churchill's bold words rested on a hard foundation...
...From his first electoral defeat in 1899 to his cruelest defeat at the very hour of military victory in 1945, he lived out that defining fact of democracy: You win some, you lose some...
...An instinctive anti-Communist, he understood nevertheless that Hitler posed the more present danger...
...In 1950, Churchill and the Tories lost again to the socialists, if by a much-diminished margin...
...This standing in a public place arguing openly about such things as democracy, capitalism, and socialism...
...People started to gather, hoping to be among the first to cross over to the West...
...I asked, "Was ist Freiheit...
...They could not kill British morale if the British had already heard the worst from their own leaders...
...I am immersed in Winston's brilliant autobiography," a colleague wrote, "disguised as a history of the universe...
...Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe...
...Following World War I, he was defeated along with the rest of the Liberal government...
...In the 1930s, he produced some 400 magazine articles in addition to his books...
...His book Hardball was recently updated by Simon & Schuster...
...During the decade when it would count for most, Winston Churchill would be out of the government and free to speak his mind...
...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 Labourites...
...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...
...If writing about warfare after a single campaign seemed precocious, Churchill quickly outdid himself...
...Churchill's writing, speaking, and governing all derived their strength from his honesty...
...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...
...In 1924, twenty years after quitting the Conservatives, he rejoined them...
...Following the Liberals' postwar defeat, he began to reassert his independence from the party...
...When the Tories adopted a tough protectionist stance, the free-trader Churchill crossed the floor to the Liberals...
...We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime...
...In World War I, he rose to first lord of the admiralty, a position where his audacity would carry a catastrophic price...
...A scarred veteran of democracy, Churchill scorned those who loved the word but rejected free elections...
...Winston Churchill needed no badge of office to see, to think, to speak, to lead...
...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...
...Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid...
...As Anthony Eden pointed out, "Courage for some sudden act, maybe in the heat of battle, we all respect...
...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...
...Long, dark nights of trials and tribulations lie before us," he warned in an especially bleak radio address...
...People long silenced now can speak...
...Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot...
...A world threatened by Nazism and communism was saved twice...
...For Winston Churchill—a man of words, an orator and author—freedom was the word that made speech and Christopher Matthews, host of Hardball on MSNBC and CNBC, is a nationally syndicated columnist with the San Francisco Examiner...
...he could "handle" Stalin...
...Named to the cabinet in 1908, he was required by precedent to stand for reelection...
...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...
...Though he campaigned as a proponent of Britain's effort in the Boer War, he also expressed high regard for his recent enemy...
...Shaking off the embarrassment, he ran in a district more favorable to his party and won...
...He joined Kitchener's campaign to regain Khartoum from the disciples of the mahdi, who had vanquished and beheaded the great Charles "Chinese" Gordon...
...Said one bright-eyed woman, "This is the day I've waited for my whole life...
...Seeking to return to parliament in 1923, Churchill was rejected again...
...No leader was so clear-eyed about the century's villains...
...for without victory there is no survival...
...We must be inflexible...
...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...
...An undistinguished student, he spent his youth and young adulthood proving himself as a military man...
...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...
...By the early 1930s, he had the vision, the resolve to tell his country what it needed to know...
...As Britain's prime minister, he saved his country and perhaps the world from Adolf Hitler...
...A great fight lay ahead, from which Britain would not flinch...
...Always, he tried to avoid overpromising...
...By preparing the public for bad news, Churchill denied the Nazis the full PR value of their victories...
...He said the same in private...
...It was his dedication to the democratic creed...
...Hating trench warfare, he pushed for a combined land and sea invasion of the Dardanelles, the gateway to Constantinople...
...His mistake was in backing a halfhearted campaign that relied exclusively on sea power...
...One man who recognized the strategy behind Churchill's dismal honesty was the top Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels...
...After World War I, it was The World Crisis...
...Churchill accomplished that end, and not just in his leadership against Nazism and communism...
...When Stalin broke his promise to hold elections in Poland, Churchill saw the writing on the wall...
...At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill alone pushed for free elections in Poland...
...He lost...
...That is the heart of it...
...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...
...The politician who sticks to his principles will know defeat as well as victory...
...Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play, and freedom and a respect for the rights of other people...
...If Hitler invaded hell," he told his secretary John Colville, "I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons...
...giving the Iron Curtain its name in 1946—deserves an equal place in the history of our times...
...In his view, free elections in Poland were a "distant" concern for the United States, since Polish-Americans were mostly of the second generation...
...By Christopher Matthews On a cold, drizzly night in November 1989, rumors flew in East Berlin that the Brandenburg Gate might be opened...
...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...
...Finally, in that year's general election, he won...
...to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime...
...For the first time in history, South Africans of every color could cast ballots...
...In this, he was a different sort of leader...
...Countries once democratic in name only now experience the real thing...
...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...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 16
