Churchill

Perhaps it is a cliché that a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman of the next generation, yet my grandfather found merit in the maxim. He had known leaders he esteemed as the greatest of statesmen: President de Gaulle, General George Marshall, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He also was well acquainted with the decision-making of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Churchill, however, was the leader he admired above all. My grandfather once said Churchill would tell his countrymen not what they wanted to hear, but what they should hear. Winston Churchill had the mind of an historian and the courage of a soldier; he would say what he thought even if he risked political death or defeat. And he had the uncanny ability to look well into the future.

In the 1930s the British people, still reeling from the massive death count and trauma of World War I, closed their ears to Churchill’s warnings about the Nazis and the threat of another war. A decade later, just after World War II ended, the British could not accept the idea that their former ally, the Soviet Union, posed another threat to world peace. Then, in the 1950s, Churchill enraged Europeans—who had suffered country-destroying devastation at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis—by insisting that Germany must be welcomed back into Europe’s fold if the continent was to recover economically. He was jeered and attacked for this courageous and far-sighted view.

James Humes’s fascinating book begins with Churchill’s schoolboy essay at Harrow in which he predicts a world war beginning in 1914 marked by trench warfare and astronomical casualties. Churchill’s last admonition came in an address to the American Bar Association, meeting in London in 1957, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He warned that the United Nations was becoming a feckless organization dominated by dictators. The free nations, in other words, would have to look within themselves to find the wisdom and resolve to navigate freedom’s future challenges.

One of Churchill’s most striking predictions dates from 1922 and is hauntingly relevant to the world we live in today—the probability that a fanatical Islamic sect like al Qaeda would create violence and havoc in the West.

Humes also includes in his catalogue Churchill’s one notable prophetic stumble. He failed to anticipate the relatively speedy success of Overlord, the Allied landings at Normandy, and how long it would take Eisenhower’s forces to reach Paris. Maybe Churchill’s crystal ball was not as accurate in the short term as it was in the long term. Or maybe it became slightly cloudy when contemplating the outcome of a military campaign on which the hopes of all humanity depended, a campaign that Churchill had had the foresight to insist upon and to bring about.

In hundreds of studies of Churchill, no one else, remarkably enough, has focused on Churchill’s predictions and prophecies. James Humes has produced a book that is unique as well as necessary for an understanding of statesmanship. After all, as Lincoln said in 1858, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.”