Churchill

“There’s only one political leader in history who had his own crystal ball.”

—RICHARD NIXON ON CHURCHILL, TO THE AUTHOR IN 1992

Winston Churchill is rightly celebrated as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century and among the greatest of any century. His oratory rallied the British nation in its darkest hour against fearsome odds. His grim yet inspiring acknowledgment when he became prime minister that he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” his vow that Britain “shall fight on the beaches,” and his praise of the RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain—“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”—will be recalled as long as men contemplate the peaks of human eloquence.

One of the most revealing examples of his combination of prophetic vision, resoluteness, and soul-stirring oratory occurred out of the public eye at a crucial moment early in the Second World War. Though scarcely anyone realized it, Churchill’s premiership, and with it the entire fight against Hitler, almost ended three weeks after he took office in May 1940. While Churchill was desperately trying to rally the nation and coordinate the evacuation of the trapped British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, a few of his government’s senior members, still in the demoralizing grip of appeasement, were trying to open a back channel to Hitler to seek peace terms. Italy, not yet a belligerent, was willing to act as an intermediary. The foreign minister, Lord Halifax, was pressing hard for negotiations, and was winning some support in the small war cabinet. Churchill risked isolating himself in the fragile new government. He knew that if he sought peace terms the government, at the very least, would fall, and the consequences might indeed be much more dire. In a meeting of the war cabinet on May 28, Churchill’s eighteenth day in office, he argued that “nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.” Halifax would not yield, however, and the argument between the two grew heated. Churchill moved to adjourn the war cabinet so that he could discuss the matter with the full cabinet.

“There now occurred one of the most extraordinary scenes of the war,” Sir Martin Gilbert wrote in his official biography of Churchill. The prime minister summoned his full dramatic powers and gave one of the most forceful speeches of his life—to an audience of only forty people around the long cabinet table in 10 Downing Street. Churchill described the gloomy scene in France, anticipating that Hitler would take Paris and “offer terms” to Britain. There was no doubt, though, “that we must decline and fight on.”

Hugh Dalton, the minister for economic warfare, recorded the scene in his diary:

And then he said, “I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man.” But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called “disarmament”—our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up....

“And I am convinced,” he concluded, “that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” [Emphasis added.]

“Not much more was said,” Dalton’s diary entry continues. “No one expressed even the faintest flicker of dissent.” Halifax’s last spasm of appeasement was dead, never to return.

Dalton’s dramatic account did not surface until many years after the war. Churchill deliberately concealed this entire episode, including the climax of May 28, in his World War II memoirs out of tactful consideration for Halifax and others. He merely recorded that he gave a status report on the deteriorating conditions and insisted that, whatever happened, “we shall fight on.” No mention of calling upon his colleagues to choke in their own blood, or of the bitter struggle with the last vestiges of appeasement inside his own war cabinet during the previous few days.

But the next paragraph of Churchill’s recollection clearly hints that something more dramatic had taken place:

There occurred a demonstration which, considering the character of the gathering—twenty-five experienced politicians and Parliament men, who represented all the different points of view, whether right or wrong, before the war—surprised me. Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and come running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in the leading of the nation, I should have been hurled out of office.

Left unsaid is that had Churchill yielded to the last gasp of the appeasers, it surely would have resulted in Hitler’s complete triumph in Europe. Churchill understood that this would be the end not only of the war but of Western civilization itself. If Hitler wins, he warned, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and care for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

Could anyone have predicted that Britain would ever find itself in such a desperate situation, and that it would require the supreme character of someone like Churchill to survive the storm, who would tell the world that Britain would never surrender? Actually, someone did predict it, almost forty years before. And that person was Winston Churchill himself.

Cast your mind for a moment back to 1898. Churchill, a young officer in General Sir Herbert Kitchener’s army, participated in what is said to have been the last cavalry charge in British history ¹, against the lines of the “Dervishes” of the Mahdist army in Khartoum. The British had sent Kitchener’s expeditionary force to the Sudan to avenge the death of General Charles Gordon at the hands of the Mahdi—Mohammed Ahmed—and shore up the exposed southern flank of Egypt. It was a long and arduous campaign, but the superiority of British arms left no doubt about the outcome. The ultimate battle was a one-sided slaughter, giving Churchill his first glimpse of the horror of modern warfare soon to visit the twentieth century on a vast scale. He wrote an extensive account of the campaign in one of his early books, The River War.

It is clear from Churchill’s account that he understood that what he called “the terrible machinery of scientific war” would mark a turning point in human affairs in the twentieth century, with the most profound implications for soldiers and their commanders, civilian statesmen, and general populations alike. His experience in the Sudan campaign was the basis for much of his foresight into the social and political trends in the twentieth century and even today.

Churchill’s narration of the climactic battle of Omdurman captures well the scale of the raw slaughter of modern warfare:

[M]ore than 12,000 [British] infantry were engaged in that mechanical scattering of death which the polite nations of the earth have brought to such monstrous perfection.... They fired steadily and stolidly, without hurry or excitement, for the enemy were far away and the officers careful. Besides, the soldiers were interested in the work and took great pains. But presently the mere physical act became tedious. The tiny figures seen over the slide of the backsight seemed a little larger, but also fewer at each successive volley. The rifles grew hot—so hot that they had to be changed for those of the reserve companies. The Maxim guns exhausted all the water in their jackets, and several had to be refreshed from the water-bottles of the Cameron Highlanders before they could go on with their deadly work. The empty cartridge-cases, tinkling to the ground, formed small but growing heaps beside each man. And all the time out on the plain on the other side bullets were shearing through flesh, smashing and splintering bone; blood spouted from terrible wounds; valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells, and spurting dust—suffering, despairing, dying. Such was the first phase of the battle of Omdurman.

The Khalifa’s plan of attack appears to have been complex and ingenious. It was, however, based on an extraordinary miscalculation of the power of modern weapons; with the exception of this cardinal error, it is not necessary to criticise it.

Nearly ten thousand Dervishes were killed in this attack, an equal number wounded. British casualties were few in what has been called more an execution than a battle.

But Churchill does not leave the matter there. One of the mistaken clichés about Churchill is that he was a racist imperialist. (Is there any other kind in the annals of modern political correctness?) If this were true, his account in The River War would be a Manichean tale of the complete triumph of the superior forces of good over the forces of evil and depravity. He might have been expected to evince the attitude of Hilaire Belloc’s lyric,

Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

Yet The River War betrays no European insolence. Although Churchill had some bracing criticisms of Islam, as we shall see later, The River War is remarkable for its consideration of the courage, virtue, and humanity of the enemy. It includes stiff criticism of the conduct of the British military. (Indeed, this is one reason Churchill later suppressed the first edition of The River War, which threatened to become an embarrassment to his early political career, and hastily republished a heavily abridged edition.) It is an account that the academic critic would call “fair-minded.”

Churchill offered sympathy and praise for the vanquished foe, culminating in a remarkable lesson that he hoped readers would take from the scene:

Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was borne in on me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.... The valour of their deed has been discounted by those who have told the tale. “Mad fanaticism” is the depreciating comment of their conquerors. I hold this to be a cruel injustice. Nor can he be a very brave man who will not credit them with a nobler motive, and believe that they died to clear their honour from the stain of defeat. Why should we regard as madness in the savage what would be sublime in civilised men?

For I hope that if evil days should come upon our own country, and the last army which a collapsing Empire could interpose between London and the invader were dissolving in rout and ruin, that there would be some—even in these modern days—who would not care to accustom themselves to a new order of things and tamely survive the disaster.² [Emphasis added.]

Whom does this last sentence most remind us of, if not the Churchill of 1940—the Churchill of “never surrender”? Lady Violet Bonham Carter noted this same passage, asking: “Can there be any doubt that if in 1940 the Battle of Britain had ended in defeat we would have been one of these?”³ How did he have the premonition, forty years before the fact, that the fate of his country might come down to the courage of such a man?

Looking back today, Churchill seems like a figure of destiny, and yet his best-known predictions of the awful consequences of appeasement and his rise to the premiership in Britain’s darkest hour are but the culmination of a lifetime of extraordinary predictions. Churchill often deprecated his own facility of foresight, once remarking, “I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.” On another occasion he said the chief qualification of a politician “is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.” But Churchill seldom had to explain why his warnings or predictions did not come to pass. Quite the opposite; some of his long-range predictions, especially concerning technology, are coming true right now. How did Churchill acquire this foresight? What advice did he give to anyone wishing to understand the statesman’s art?

His simple and frequently repeated advice can be boiled down to two words that he shared with me when I met him while an exchange student in England in 1953: “Study history, study history.” He added, “In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.” It was a familiar lesson for those close to Churchill. He gave the same advice to his grandson, Winston S. Churchill II, when the boy was only eight years old. “Learn all you can about the past,” Churchill wrote to his grandson in 1948, when the younger Winston was away at boarding school, “for how else can anyone make a guess about what is going to happen in the future.”

I shared Churchill’s advice with Richard Nixon, for whom I worked as a speechwriter. Nixon expressed his appreciation of Churchill’s skill as a prophet: “Churchill had the mind of an historian and the courage of a soldier. First, Churchill could see the patterns of the past being repeated in the present, and second, he had no fear of risking political death by going against the polls or conventional wisdom.” Nixon added that “the vision of Churchill was all-encompassing as it spanned not only the world of diplomacy and politics but the sphere of technology.”

A careful review of Churchill’s own historical works, starting with his magisterial biography of his forebear John Churchill, the first duke of Marlborough, and continuing with his multi-volume works on the two world wars and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, will show that it was not merely the repetition of past patterns of history that he could see. History for Churchill was a source of imagination about how the future would change, which is why he wrote, “The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.”⁴ Churchill exemplifies a saying attributed to Thucydides that “history is philosophy teaching by example.” The modern philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that Churchill had “a historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multicolored past.”⁵

Churchill’s historical analysis of the megalomaniacal “Sun King,” Louis XIV, and his observations of Napoleon’s military and political strategy clearly informed his early perception that Hitler’s Nazi movement would become a worldwide threat if left unchecked. Churchill knew, as soon as the early 1920s, that the Versailles peace conference of 1919 had left Germany embittered and that Germany would strain at the leash to re-arm in defiance of the terms of Versailles. Churchill watched the feebleness of the successive Weimar governments, with instability yielding to crisis as the Great Depression spread across Europe. He had taken wary note of Hitler even before the Nazi party took power in 1933, and Churchill warned early of “the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit” in Germany. His early warnings were not popular in a nation still deeply war weary after the colossal loss of life in World War I. His recommendations against disarmament were met with hoots and jeers from his fellow members of Parliament.

It would not be the last time that Churchill’s perception of the tendency of world affairs was poorly received yet ultimately vindicated by subsequent events. The arc of his predictions about Nazi Germany and his arguments against appeasement of dictators found its sequel after World War II with his overview of the Cold War.

Not long after Churchill was turfed out of 10 Downing Street at the end of World War II, he came to the United States at the invitation of President Harry Truman to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the president’s home state. The world was weary of war and eager to enjoy a new era of peace. Given the public mood, Churchill’s warning of the new totalitarian threat in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech did not fall on sympathetic ears. Even though the president had previewed the speech during the long train ride with Churchill to Missouri and had privately expressed his approval of the message, Truman felt compelled publicly to disassociate himself from Churchill’s remarks. Eleanor Roosevelt, who had never cared for Churchill during the war, called him “a warmonger,” and seven Democratic senators called him a threat to world peace. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal criticized the Fulton address. Yet today the “Iron Curtain” speech is celebrated for its wisdom and foresight about how the West should conduct the Cold War so as to avoid World War III—advice that was, this time, largely followed. As we shall see, Churchill predicted with uncanny accuracy the duration of the Cold War and how it would end if sensible policy were followed.

Churchill’s emphasis on history has led some to suppose that he was merely “a man of the past.” Churchill’s abiding interest in history, and the powerful imagination it produced was not simply a variation of the idea that “history repeats itself,” or what social scientists call “pattern recognition.” He intuited technological and social changes that no historical precedent would have suggested. He anticipated far ahead of time such features of the modern world as nuclear weapons, wireless communications, terrorism, increasingly superficial media coverage of government, and giant government bureaucracies. He could be slow to perceive or come around on some issues, such as women’s suffrage. During the years when he made his living by accepting virtually every writing project offered, he declined to write a speculative article on the subject “Will there ever be a woman prime minister?”

Despite mistakes or misperceptions, Churchill’s historical imagination was keenly attuned to the irregular rhythms of extraordinary change. Consider the sweep of his public life: in early adulthood he participated in the last large cavalry charge of the British army, while his career ended with his deliberations over what to do about the problem of nuclear weapons. Has any statesman’s career spanned such spectacular and ominous change? Time magazine, in naming Churchill “Man of the Half-Century” in 1950, did not think so. “No man’s history can sum up the dreadful, wonderful years, 1900–1950,” Time wrote; “Churchill’s story comes closest.”

One of his political adversaries, the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, offered a perceptive analogy to explain Churchill’s genius, comparing him to a layer cake: “One layer was certainly seventeenth century. The eighteenth century in him is obvious. There was the nineteenth century, and a large slice, of course, of the twentieth century; and another, curious, layer which may possibly have been the twenty-first.”⁶ Churchill himself reflected in his autobiography, My Early Life, “I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.” ⁷

Churchill wrote these words in 1930. Many of the most sweeping changes he had already anticipated were yet to occur. While he regarded many of the changes and events he predicted with melancholy or regret, he was never fearful. Reviewing his many prophecies is not just an exercise in recollection. As Attlee’s analogy ought to suggest, studying Churchill’s cast of mind should instill the same kind of hopefulness in the twenty-first century.