"Churchill and the Power of Words' in NY

On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler invaded France. That same day, the British government of Neville Chamberlain fell, and the man who until then had been the most conspicuous political failure of his generation, Winston Churchill, became prime minister.

Churchill had had an adventurous career; he had held high office as first lord of the Admiralty and chancellor of the Exchequer (both times disastrously); as an author, he was a throwback to the Earl of Clarendon, the minister under Charles II who had written the first and still literarily the best history of the English Civil War.

Churchill's gifts as an orator were unmatched. But he had never held the office to which his talents, if not necessarily his judgment, seemed to destine him, and, at 65, the brass ring had apparently passed him by.

Then, overnight, not only the government of Great Britain but also the fate of humankind passed into his hands.

Seeing Hitler clear

Britain had a dozen different leaders who could have negotiated a deal with Hitler. Only one could lead it in battle. Churchill's pugnacity was legendary, and so was his antipathy to Hitler.

The British had stood in a similar plight nearly 200 years before, when William Pitt the Elder became prime minister at a low moment in the Seven Years' War, announcing grandly that he knew that he could save the country and that no one else could. He was right, and he did.

Churchill more modestly offered blood, sweat, toil and tears in his first address to the nation. But many could wish they had chosen a more accommodating leader when, three weeks later, Britain narrowly escaped the loss of its entire European army at Dunkirk as the French collapsed. Britain now stood completely alone.

Churchill responded with his defiant no-surrender speech. It was either heroism or madness, but the die was cast. Winnie was not a quitter.

Blood, sweat and rhetoric

The Battle of Britain— the phrase was Churchill's own— is the centerpiece of the Morgan Library's "Churchill and the Power of Words," although the show covers his whole life. Churchill was wedded to words from an early age, but never at the cost of action; he sought adventure in Britain's imperial wars as a young man and never shrank from risk, often enough unwisely.

Indeed, few men have had such an appreciation of words as deeds. Churchill was mistaken when he said he could offer only blood, sweat, toil and tears (but, of course, that itself was a brilliant rhetorical ploy). Words were his most important asset; and, in the naked moment after Dunkirk, they were the indispensable weapons in Britain's arsenal. Without them, the planes and ships would have been useless.

Churchill was a conservative and an imperialist. His policies at the Treasury hit ordinary Britons hard, and you can easily dig up expressions of racism and brutality in his writings and speeches about the lesser breeds of the empire.

One clear insight

Less well known (the show barely mentions it) were Churchill's bouts of clinical depression, which by ordinary standards would have rendered him unfit for office. And he drank. But one thing he saw clearly as no one else did: the evil that Hitler represented and personally embodied.

Churchill wrote a pamphlet, The Truth About Hitler, as early as 1935, an important piece of the exhibition. He noted Hitler as a leader of exceptional force and ability, but also one who was rapidly bringing Germany— and Europe— to a dangerous crossroad. Within a couple of years, he perceived Hitler as a danger to civilization itself.

Churchill's backbench speeches of the late 1930s against Hitler have of course been noted, but not nearly as well studied as his stirring and justly famous wartime addresses. The Morgan show gives them deserved prominence, especially one speech delivered in defense of rearmament. It argues with great clarity and eloquence that Hitler and his fascism constitute an existential threat to civilization, and that acquiescence to them will usher in a long night of barbarism.

Not only reading the text but listening to Churchill's recorded voice in the Morgan's improvised theater space, one feels the unshakable conviction in the words, and the vision of human freedom that lay behind them.

Projecting confidence

Britain itself was far from a perfect society, and Churchill far from a perfect man. But in the presence of radical evil, the hard-won achievement of relative goodness, toleration and decency was a sanity to be defended at all costs.

Winnie may have missed many lesser truths, some of them also deeply important. But, in that place and hour, he got the biggest one right.

Churchill projected a confidence and determination he couldn't always have felt. "No one," Leo Amery recalled, "went out of his presence without feeling a braver man."

The iconic photograph of Churchill standing in the ruins of Parliament after German bombs had leveled it (it's here too) still bears the same message it did 70 years ago: "If I am standing, Britain stands."

Courting America

Yet Churchill was also a realist. Though his country had survived the Battle of Britain, its position in the year between the fall of France and Hitler's invasion of Russia was desperate indeed. Only American help could save the situation and preserve postwar democracy, even were Hitler to be defeated.

Churchill, half-American by birth himself, had dismissed the idea of an Anglo-American alliance as a "wild impossibility" when young. But that had been 1899; by 1927, in The World Crisis, he considered it indispensable to world security.

Roosevelt was sympathetic, but the American public was deeply resistant to another foray into European feuds. Churchill was reduced to privately begging; in August 1941 he wrote to Roosevelt's senior advisor, Harry Hopkins, that he "should be grateful if you could give me any sort of hope."

Iron Curtain

The frustration he felt comes out in the taped excerpt from his "Give us the tools" speech of February 9, 1941. After paragraphs of praise and flattery for America as a partner in the great fight for liberty, he concluded famously with an appeal for material if not military assistance: "Give us the tools and we will finish the job."

It's one thing to read this on paper, and another to hear the honey-tongued Winnie, all supple cajolery to this point, suddenly bark out this last line in a tone almost of command.

Churchill continued to pin his hopes for the future— including the future of the British Empire itself— on an Anglo-American condominium, which he tried to reinstate in his famous "Iron Curtain" speech of March 5, 1946 in Fulton, Missouri. But he had been alone for too much of his career, and had seen his country too long at bay in its hour of peril, to trust any partnership with the fickle Yanks.

Thus he approached Stalin in 1944 with a deal for partitioning postwar Eastern Europe, and in his second term as prime minister he found himself at odds with Truman and Eisenhower, though never publicly. This didn't mean that he was insincere about the historic affinity of what he called "the English-speaking peoples"; it did mean that no nation could finally trust anyone but itself— a lesson the states of the European Union appear to be painfully relearning today.

Death of the Empire

Churchill's great words are nonetheless a universal possession. As the exhibit documents, he was a conscious student of rhetoric from the beginning of his career, and his typed speeches are broken into short segments, each a specific thought-and-breath unit.

Of course, he wrote them himself, something no modern politician would dream of doing. Genuine oratory is a lost art. Perhaps that's why governing is a lost art too.

Churchill hoped the British Empire would last a thousand years; it was gone within 25. I saw its last act for myself as a student in London, during his great state funeral in 1965.

A mounted cortege wound up the Strand, with Churchill's caisson at its center. When the procession finally faded from view, mound on mound of horse apples were all that remained. Sic transit gloria— so all empires end, as ours will too.

But Churchill was right: Had the British empire lasted a thousand years, the Battle of Britain probably would have been its finest hour. That it lasted only twenty-five was not his fault, if it was a fault. What was within his power was to defend freedom, and he did so magnificently.♦


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