The End of Churchillism?: Reappraising the Legend
Article Summary and Author Biography
America is mad about Churchill. And if Sir Winston does not deserve such uncritical applause, he still emerges from two recent scholarly treatments with his reputation intact.
Winston Churchill is probably more revered today in the United States than he is in Britain. For the British he is a great statesman, certainly, and one to whom we owe it that 1940 was our finest hour rather than a year of humiliation and disaster. But he stands in a line of other great statesmen-the two William Pitts, the Duke of Wellington, perhaps David Lloyd George-who brought us through comparable trials.
In the United States, however, Churchill is seen as a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, surpassing any comparable American figure-with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln-in his goodness and greatness. Shrines to his memory proliferate across the United States. American presidents from Kennedy to Bush, perhaps unable to find appropriate figures among their own predecessors, have taken him implicitly or explicitly as a role model, focusing on his supposed shrewdness of judgment in peacetime and his undoubted qualities of leadership in time of war. The well-founded suspicions felt for him by his American contemporaries, that he was primarily concerned with harnessing American power to the service of British interests, have largely melted away. Churchill is now seen as the last great leader of the West, one whose like we shall not see again.
This is understandable enough. In spite of his indomitable John Bullishness, Churchill took far after his American ancestors far more than his English ones, something for which anyone who reads, in the Blake-Louis volume reviewed here, David Cannadine's hilarious account of the drunken, degenerate, spendthrift family from which he sprang has cause to be grateful. His arrogance, his egocentricity, his flamboyance, his emotionalism, his unpredictability, his remorseless energy, not least his eccentric taste in friends and generous indulgence in drink made him an outsider to the British "establishment" from the moment he entered politics at the beginning of the century until the day in May 1940 when they turned to him in despair because there was no one else to whom they could turn.
More importantly, Churchill is remembered in Britain for a political career that was checkered, to use no stronger a term. He switched parties with a nonchalance that few found endearing, and was given office, as often as not, because he was more of a nuisance outside the government than inside it. His judgment on major issues was frequently terrible. Even his credibility about the danger posed by Hitler's Germany was eroded, for his contemporaries, by his stubborn resistance to the granting of self-government to India and by his lone stand in defense of King Edward VIII. By the 1930s the fact that Winston was on one side of an argument was seen by most sensible people as a good reason for being on the other. One of his most perceptive biographers, Robert Rhodes-James, wrote a study of Churchill's career up to 1939 and entitled it quite legitimately Churchill: A Study in Failure. The problem for the historian is not, as so many Americans believe, why Churchill's advice was ignored for so long, but how it was that a man with so unpromising a background and so disastrous a track record could emerge in 1940 as the savior of his country.
CHURCHILL DISSECTED
Of the two volumes under review here, the first is by a group of established, if not "establishment," historians containing few surprises, and the second by a scholar of a younger generation who tries to pack as many controversial judgments into his 650 pages of text as the volume can hold.1 The American contributors to the edited volume include Gordon Craig writing on Churchill and Germany; Warren Kimball on Churchill and Roosevelt; Stephen Ambrose on Churchill and Eisenhower; and Roger Louis, one of the editors, on Churchill and Egypt after 1945. The British contributors are too numerous to mention here individually, but they-sorry, we-are all immensely eminent, and there is one Indian scholar, Sarvepalli Gopal, who writes about Churchill's disastrous record with respect to his own country more in sorrow than in anger.
Although there are few surprises, there are a number of points that may come fresh. One, made by no less an authority than Ronald Hyam, is how little real interest Churchill took in the British Empire by which he set so much store. Such knowledge of it as he possessed had been gained during his brief tours of duty at the Colonial Office in 1905-1908, when he had to deal mainly with South Africa, and in 1921-1922, when he focused on the settlement in the Middle East. He never visited India after he left it as a cavalry subaltern in 1897, taking with him a collection of prejudices that he was never to change, and he never penetrated farther east at all. Robert O'Neill confirms in his essay that the Pacific region was a faraway country of which Churchill knew nothing, and points out the calamitous results that his neglect of British defenses, naval and military, in Southeast Asia was to have for British strategy-and Commonwealth relations-in the Second World War.
It may, however, come as a surprise for those who think of Churchill primarily as a great war leader to find how much interest he took in domestic affairs, and, as Paul Addison shows in his contribution, the leading part he played in social reform; both under Asquith between 1908 and 1912, when the foundations were being laid of "the welfare state," and under Baldwin between 1924 and 1929, when as Chancellor of the Exchequer he collaborated closely with Neville Chamberlain at the Ministry of Health to extend a scheme of comprehensive social insurance. Almost the only American president who has not yet cited Churchill as a role model is President Clinton. He is better entitled to do so than some of his predecessors.
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