around & about - Winston Churchill

Remnant Connection
JOHN LUKACS
One of the profound differences between the rule
of law and the rule of history is that the law
does not permit multiple jeopardy: a man may
not be tried for a case more than once. Yet the
rule of history is that of multiple jeopardy: a
man, or a cause, may be—indeed will be—tried again and
again. History amounts to the constant rethinking—and,
consequently, to the rewriting—of the past. One result of
this are waves of declining and rising historical reputations.
It is pleasant to record that, more than a half-century
after his retreat from public life, this has not happened to
Winston Churchill. His reputation has not much changed
during the last forty years; as a matter of fact, it may even
be said that admiration for Churchill has spread even
farther than before. This includes historians. About a
quarter century ago occasional historians published books
critical of Churchill, but their influence turned out to be
entirely inconsequential. This is an unusual, perhaps even
amazing, phenomenon.
The reason for this is obvious. It is that of contrast.
After Churchill there have been no presidents or prime
ministers or other statesmen comparable to him, not in any
English-speaking country or even anywhere else. (One particular
exception to that may have been General de Gaulle.)
Churchill is something like a gold standard, to which the
fluctuating currencies of the reputations of other statesmen
are, consciously or not, compared.
Another reason is the continuing interest in the
Second World War. Among its victors, the reputations of
Stalin and of Roosevelt have undergone changes since their
deaths. Yet Churchill’s reputation has hardly changed at
all—despite the fact that his wartime leadership was followed,
soon after the war, by the liquidation of much of
the British Empire, a prospect that he himself had denied
in a ringing phrase during the war.
A third reason is something that I have emphasized in
some of my writings, summing it up in a few words: while
Roosevelt and Stalin won the Second World War, it was
Churchill who did not lose it.
This is not a matter of a phrase. We—and at least
some historians—are more aware than before of how close
Hitler had come to winning his war in the late spring and
summer of 1940—and even for a long time thereafter. One
man stood in his way then: this was Churchill, whose task
was much more difficult and much less promising than it
seemed for a long time.
Dr. Lukacs is the author of over twenty-five books, including The
Duel: Hitler vs. Churchill (1990), the acclaimed account of Five Days
in London: May 1940 (1999) and, most recently, Bl od, Toil, Tears and
Sweat: The Dire Warning. He was a professor of history at Chestnut
Hill College from 1947 to 1994.
FINEST HoUR 140 / 31
Yet another reason, particularly relevant to documentary
scholarship: Unlike many other leaders and statesmen,
Churchill was not a secretive man. His quick mind and
temperament not only impelled him to express his
thoughts instantly to others; there is little or nothing in the
documentary trove of his (and of other British) archives
that throws a different light on what he said or wrote then
or afterwards. Moreover, there were instances when he
chose not to emphasize but to obscure his contribution at
decisive moments. Why, for example, did he, in Their
Finest Hour, choose to write nothing about his crucial
debate with Halifax during those five days at the end of
May 1940?
I can surmise only two reasons for that. One is educational:
his wish to tell the English-speaking nations of the
world and their readers that the British people and their
representatives had been sublimely united at that very time.
The other reason, apparent throughout his life, was his
magnanimity. He had been right: but he saw no reason to
say this not only during the war but also thereafter. “Don’t
ever tell people ‘I told you so,’” he once said to his
daughter.
He is our remnant connection—an ancient silk
thread—to a now dead, and yet deathless, past. ,