New bio proves Churchill worth a fresh look
Is “Churchill: Walking With Destiny” by Andrew Roberts the best Churchill biography of them all?
Who would presume to say, short of Winston Churchill himself, who maintained, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”?
All Churchill biographies stand on the shoulders of official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, whose primary research constitutes the bulk of what we truly know. Roberts’ new biography (Viking, 982 pp., stands tall, re-illuminating the contours of Churchill’s life with a flair for unearthing the telling detail. Here are five Churchillian tropes, reframed by Roberts’ keen attention to historical context.
1. The purported poor judgment of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty
Churchill was scapegoated by his own government for the 1915 disaster at Gallipoli during World War I. Roberts reexamines this episode, as all Churchill biographers have, and largely exculpates him.
Along the way, though, he shares an obscure, arm-wrestling exchange of letters between Churchill and King George V over the naming of new Royal Navy ships, begun in Churchill’s second month as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, that inexorably reveals just how full of himself the 30-something Churchill could be.
2. His time in the trenches led to Churchill’s stand against Hitler
Though painted as a war monger by the Hitler-appeasing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Churchill and a small cohort of anti-appeasers in Parliament insisted that only by standing up to Adolf Hitler could England hope to avoid another world war. Roberts detects “a fascinating dichotomy” in this confrontation.
“Although the appeasement movement was intended to prevent another war,” he notes, “most of its leaders had not seen action in the Great War, where- as most of the anti-appeasers had.” They were led by Churchill, who, after resigning as First Lord because of Gallipoli, had fought in the trenches.
3. Goebbels’ propaganda campaign against Churchill
In May 1940, with the Nazi invasion of France, Churchill was named prime minister because, as Churchill himself said, “no one else wanted the job.” The British people, however, took to their new PM immediately. A July 1940 Gallup poll, according to Roberts, gave Churchill an 88 percent approval rating.
Yet, Roberts points out, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was proclaiming “that Churchill was being bribed by the Jews to continue the war. ... He encouraged Britons to write chain letters for peace (and) to hiss and boo Churchill’s appearance on the cinema newsreels.” They did not, of course.
4. The irony of the famed “Finest Hour” speech.
Confronting the impending “Battle of Britain,” Churchill, on June 18, 1940, delivered in Parliament what Roberts rightly calls a “peroration (that) will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken.” “If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years,” Churchill famously closed, “men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’ ” Yet, remarks Roberts, “the British Empire was not long to outlast Hitler’s Nazi one”; ultimately, “less than a decade more.”
5. A telling moment after the war
Churchill pivoted almost immediately to a position of forgiveness toward Germany and antagonism toward Stalin and Russia. Roberts captures this with an after-hours encounter in the House of Commons Smoking Room between Churchill and an old wartime Labour Party nemesis, now advocating amity with Germany. “Of course I’ve forgiven you,” Churchill assures the man, when asked. “Indeed, I agree with very much that you are saying about the Germans … Such hatred that I have left in me – and it isn’t much – I would rather reserve for the future than the past.” Churchill then moved on alone, murmuring, almost to himself: “Hmm. A judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.”