Counterfeiting Churchill

By Scott Horton

Woodrow Wyatt, “Churchill in his Element,” September 1954.

In André Gide’s great novel, les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), is the subject not ultimately the process of minting false personalities rather than money? This indeed is an essential aspect of every society, and ultimately also an aspect of the politics of every society. It provides a sort of reverse measure of human freedom. The more oppressive, the more totalitarian the society, the greater the need to “remint.” Not only must the lives now about us be made to conform to the expected model, but it becomes essential to reach into the recesses of history and recast important personages, and particularly iconic figures, to meet the current mold of thought and conduct.

Witness the former Soviet Union, the nation that Robert Conquest told us was unique in human history in that it had a “completely unpredictable past.” And witness the Claremont Institute’s announcement that it will shortly honor Donald Rumsfeld with its 2007 Statesmanship Award in a dinner in honor of Winston S. Churchill.

The Claremont Institute is the publisher of The Claremont Review among other things—a periodical that I highly recommend as a source of lively and entertaining debate from the Neoconservative corner. Reading the Review, I am always offered an extraordinary and learned take on things, especially classical texts and American history—but the ideological trend in the publication is unmistakable, and the decision to link the names of Donald Rumsfeld and Winston Churchill is typical of it. And unfortunate.

But I also reckon Sir Winston a cultural hero, a figure whose wisdom and foresight cause him to emerge from the records of the twentieth century as a sort of political Diogenes. He bridges the Old Whig tradition and modern conservatism. I find it hard to connect him in any way with Donald Rumsfeld, a consummate political opportunist whose final deed, as the worst secretary of defense in the nation’s history, was to make a wreck of the greatest military force fielded in human history. Churchill had a firm grasp of the common cultural values of the Anglo-Saxon peoples—of the role of Rule of Law and the eternal quest for freedom as the inspiration for their evolution. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, unleashed a Hobbesian chaos on Iraq and, when challenged, uttered “stuff happens.” One is perhaps the greatest political orator of the last century, the other a bumbler so comical that his words provide endless material for political satirists. One was a man of a great moral vision, the other a figure so morally compromised that he is likely to pass the balance of his life battling well-grounded charges of war crimes. They come as close to being polar opposites as possible in the English-speaking world.

But on a far more human level one of the aspects of Churchill that gives his image such luster both in his own time and today was his ability to stir the respect of even his most entrenched political rivals. Churchill was a hard-nosed pragmatist, but he was also a man of a noble and generous spirit. One of the best demonstrations of this comes in the article that Woodrow Wyatt (later Lord Wyatt of Weeford), a prominent Labour politician, wrote in the September 1954 Harper’s. It includes a wonderful recollection of young Churchill—the Liberal M.P. fresh back from South Africa, filled with concern for the mistreatment of the Boers and the excesses of the conduct of that war (precisely the Churchill that the folks at The Claremont Review want to forget), delivering his maiden speech:

He arrived to speak in a debate on the South African war with a number of different speeches ready to deliver. One of them, he hoped, might be suitable. As the moment grew closer, he despairingly tried to think of some opening sentence which would smooth the way into his speech and appear to have some connection with the speech then being delivered by the young Lloyd George whom he had to follow. Lloyd George had put on the order paper an amendment moderately critical of the government, but in the end he had decided not to move it.

Aid came to Churchill in his unhappiness, from an old Parliamentarian, a Mr. Bowles, sitting nearby. Only someone who has had to make a speech in the House and is certain at the last moment that he cannot do it can fully understand Mr. Bowles’ charity. He whispered: “You might say ‘instead of making his violent speech without moving his moderate amendment, he had better have moved his moderate amendment without making his violent speech.’ ” Churchill repeated the words as he stood for the first time in the House of Commons.

The Commons is always pleased if it can help a new speaker through the agony of his first speech. There was a glad laugh and Mr. Churchill put the most appropriate of his prepared speeches into gear and drove away. His speech, while not outstandingly brilliant, was not as colorless as most maiden speeches. The Conservative Government were for the ruthless prosecution of the war and for damnation to all Boers. “If I were a Boer,” he said, “1 hope I should be fighting in the field.” He went on to demand that it should be made “easy and honorable for the Boers to surrender.” The whole of his speech, which generously recognized the claims and feelings of the Boers, contradicted the trend of majority thinking. For an ambitious young man to go against his own party so early needed courage.

Churchill showed courage in the face of great foreign menaces, inspiring his country to a valiant defense, he showed brilliance and ingenuity in forging the key alliance with America that won the war—that’s the Churchill we all know and remember. But there is also the Churchill who demonstrated the depth of his belief that a colonial engagement was pigheaded and being handled in an ineffective way—that was also an essential element of Churchill, one of the things that separated him from the typical politicians of the age and defined his greatness.

And in the end Winston Churchill was also a great statesman, a man who valued diplomacy and knew the finite limits of the powers of arms. One of his greatest late speeches made this point, with the help of famous lines of Vergil’s Aeneid,

When nations or individuals get strong they are often truculent and bullying, but, when they are weak, they become “better mannered.” But this is the reverse of what is healthy and wise. I have always been astonished, having seen the end of these two wars, how difficult it is to make people understand the Roman wisdom, “Spare the conquered and confront the proud.” I think I will go so far as to say it in the original: “Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.” The modern practice has too often been, “Punish the defeated and grovel to the strong.”

I could not reread these lines, in Wyatt’s wonderful essay, without having the image of Donald Rumsfeld flash through my mind. His failings are, indeed, precisely what Churchill was warning us against.