around & about - Winston Churchill

Shaper of the Present
ALLEN PACKWOOD
I
was born in June 1968, three and a half years after
the death and state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill,
and at almost exactly the time when what is now
The Churchill Centre was founded. Though always
interested in history, I was never taught about
Churchill’s life, and to me as a boy he was a name, an occasional
voice in war movies, but little more.
In the four decades since, we have come a long way
toward establishing Churchill as worthy subject of modern
study, and it is legitimate to examine the reasons. Why,
apart from self interest, do we
think people should study
Winston Churchill now?
To shape the present, you
must understand how it has
been shaped. The great conflicts
and movements of the
twentieth century, the birth of
mass democracy, the decline of
the European empires and the
emergence as a world power of
the United States, the rise of
fascism and communism, the
dislocation of the two world
wars and the cold war, the
development of mass communication
and travel—to name
but a few—continue to have a
profound effect on the world
today. Churchill lived through,
engaged with, and wrote about
these changes. A study of his
life provides a point of entry to
explore our own recent past.
But Churchill gives us
something else. Faced with these huge changes, historians
and commentators are apt to focus on socio-economic
forces and long-term trends. Important as these undoubtedly
are, they can depersonalise history and strip it of some
of the colour and vitality that comes from the study of
living individuals wrestling with emotional responses or
immediate events.
The life of Churchill is about the triumph of personality.
His energy, his humour, his idiosyncrasies, his sheer
bloody-mindedness, shine through in the archives and contemporary
accounts. He would have been an exasperating
but also an exhilarating person to work for. He was not
Mr. Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre since 2001,
has been an unflagging supporter, researcher and contributor to Finest
Hour for at least that long, and the key player in the famous 2004
Library of Congress exhibition, “Churchill and the Great Republic.”
FINEST HoUR 140 / 39
always right, but he engaged totally with the problems of
his age, and showed incredible personal bravery in
assuming the leadership of a beleaguered country in 1940.
Attempts are continually being made to enlist
Churchill in the service of modern political causes or movements.
This is problematic. He was, like all of us, a product
of a particular time and place. He did not operate in isolation,
he did not win the war alone—it is commonly
asserted that his contribution was not to lose it. He was
influenced by the thinking and actions of his time, and his
contemporaries. His real strength was perhaps to understand,
to articulate, and to harness his place in time, at
such a moment and to such effect, that he helped shape his
present, and therefore ours. ,
PHILIPPE HALSMAN, 1954
Intellectual
Compass
ROBERT L.
PFALTZGRAFF, JR.
T
hat Winston
Churchill’s stature
has endured with
the passage of the
past forty years,
transcending time and generations,
should not surprise us. It
is only with such a lengthening
perspective that we most fully
recognize greatness.
Having spent his youth
in the Victorian era, Churchill’s
life work spanned the first six decades of the twentieth
century. We cannot understand the forces that shaped that
century without examining his vast contribution: how he
decisively influenced the course of events. To study his
abundant life and works is to gain a unique vantage point
from which to observe the convulsive forces of a century
that influences our lives today.
What made him great? The eminent philosopher
Isaiah Berlin provided perhaps the best answer: “Churchill’s
dominant category, the single, central, organizing principle
of his moral and intellectual universe, is an historical imagination
so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the >>
Dr. Pfaltzgraff, who has lectured and spoken at Churchill Centre
educational forums, is founder and president of the Institute for
Foreign Policy Analysis and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of
International Security Studies, The Fletcher School, Tufts University.