Contact: Matthew Nehmer
202.994.6467

The Winston Churchill Lecture

7:00 PM

April 19, 2001

The Churchill Center and The George Washington University

Media & Public Affairs Building

"There but for the grace of God," he said of one rival, a self-righteous socialist, "goes God."

He called another " a modest man with much to be modest about" ; still
another "a sheep in sheep's clothing."

"You are my fifth favorite actor," he said to a distinguished figure of the British stage. "The first four are the **Marx Brothers**!"

When a woman member of parliament, known for her own sharp tongue
said "If I were your wife, I'd put poison in your coffee," he said "If I were your
husband I'd drink it."

If you were to ask me who I would most like to have as a guest on
**Hardball**? Who I would prefer over William F. Buckley, Jr. or Christopher

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Hitchens, enjoy more than James Carville or Jesse Ventura, relish more than Bill or Hillary Clinton or Barbra Streisand? It would be, without a doubt, this British gentleman of the old school who could match wits with all of them, simultaneously.

Winston Churchill said he liked a man "who grins when he fights." For he was a man exceptional at both. Love him or hate him, which many of his colleagues did both, he was – from the start – his own man.

Beginning in 1898 he rode in the last cavalry charge of the British army in Sudan. Later, he was a war correspondent in the Boer War, and was captured but managed to escape with a price on his head. As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he attempted an end run through the Dardenelles. The goal was to take Turkey out of the war and thereby end the bloodshed of the trenches. When that failed, and cost him no limit of infamy, he took leave of politics to join the British army in France. He went to fight in that very trench war he had staked his honor on trying to outflank.

The man simply _never_ quit.

When he ran for parliament the first time - in 1899 - he lost. Never one to lament a setback, upon returning from South Africa in 1900, the first thing he did was run again and win.

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When the Torys started pushing hard on protectionism, Churchill, a free trader, quit the party walked across the floor and joined the Liberals. The conservatives were ripped.

After World War I, with socialism on the rise and the Liberal party unable to challenge it from the left, our man lost three straight elections. The first of those defeats coincided with the fall of the government. He was out of parliament for the first time in a generation and without a job in the Cabinet. Churchill joked that he was now "without a seat, without an office and without an appendix." He might have added - without a party. That election was the end of the Liberals as a governing party. Quitting the Liberals, and declaring war on the socialists, he rejoined the Conservatives.

"It's one thing to *rat*," he said, "but another to *re-rat*."

You got to love this guy!

"When I get to heaven," he once said, "I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting and so get to the bottom of it."

Oddly enough, this man of action's greatest joy was to sit for hours in a field painting the scene before him.

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He also liked to write, not least about his own life and
accomplishments. A great example was *The World Crisis*, his work on World
War I. "I am immersed in Winston's biography," the great Lord Balfour said to
a colleague, "disguised as a history of the universe."

While he was wrong about many things, he was right about the big
ones.

Himself, the classic Englishman, he grew up in perpetual awe of his
wild, radiant American mother. When FDR invited him to address a joint
meeting of the Congress after America had joined the war, he said: Had it
been the other way around, had his mother been English, and his father
American and had he been raised in America, he might have gotten to
Congress on his own.

"Democracy is the worst form of government," he said, "except for all
those other forms that have been tried from time to time". He despised
dictatorships who embraced the word but rejected free elections.

"Democracy is not some harlot in the street to be picked up by some
man with a Tommy gun. Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play,
and freedom and a respect for other people."

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Of course, he probably drank too much. Fortunately, he was one of
those rare men who can drink and not let it slow them.

He lived the life of an aristocrat, never, ever, venturing into a kitchen or traveling, even to war, without a valet.

Yet he did in fact provide for that lifestyle by writing and giving
lectures, or as he put it, by his "pen" and his "tongue."

One of my favorite portraits, given to us by William Manchester, is
Churchill, climbing the stairs at midnight, leaving his dinner guests to their
cigars and brandies, as he went off to dictate and edit well into the morning.
A lot of what he wrote was to pay the bills, *hack* writing. At other times, an
incredible number of times, he wrote grand, multi-volume works on his
ancester Marlborough, his father Randolph, World War I, The History of the
English-Speaking Peoples, and, finally, of World War II, an account that led to
his receiving the Noble Prize.

As I said, how can you not be impressed with this man? He would have
been one of the great men of his age even if he had he _not_ done what he did.

What he did was save the honor of the 20th century.

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During the early nightmare years of the 20th century - from 1933 to 1938 - he was right about the Nazi threat when nearly everyone, especially those conservatives closest to him politically - were dead wrong.

He saw the truth, but more importantly, dared to point to it. He saw Germany building its military machine and - this is Holocaust Remembrance Day - its concentration camps. When war came, as he forewarned, he stood as the only leader in the world to face down Adolf Hitler, to say he and Great Britain would "never" surrender.

Beginning in 1933, he, practically alone, saw the fire begin to rage. And when his country finally had no choice but to fight that fire, he was the man to lead. Those forty years of fighting at the front and in the House of Commons, especially those lonely years spent warning his countrymen, became Churchill's job application.

Senator Muskie, one of my bosses over the years, said something to those of us on his staff the night he won his final re-election from the people of Maine. "The only reason to be in politics is to be out there all alone and be proven right."

Churchill. Winston Churchill saw it all coming.

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In 1933, few in the British elite were inclined to stop Hitler. Part of the reason was a pacifism born out of World War I. Students in the Oxford Union voted 275 to 153 on a resolution "to refuse in any circumstances to fight for King and Country."

Hearing of the "King and Country" vote, he went to Oxford and stuck it to them.

"I think of Germany with its splendid, clear-eyed youth wandering forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible of weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland."

He spoke of what was happening to the Jews. He warned of what Hitler would do to the Jews when given the chance to extend his persecutions and pogroms by invading Poland.

In 1935, Hitler renewed military conscription in Germany and said the Luftwaffe was now the match of the Royal Air Force. Then when Churchill warned that the Germans were adding up to a hundred and fifty planes every month to their arsenal, he was accused of "scare-mongering."

Again, he refused to quit.

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In 1936, Hitler marched his armies into the Rhineland, an area demilitarized after World War I. As was his habit, he immediately offered to meet with the British to discuss any outstanding differences. Hitler was always for "peace." British prime minister Stanley Baldwin told his country it had nothing to fear from Hitler.

Churchill told his country to think of what Hitler was doing to the Jews.

"It is a horrible thing that a race of people should be attempted to be blotted out of the society in which they have been born."

In January of 1937, Britain's new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain offered to appease Hitler by giving him some colonies in Africa.

Churchill's judgment: "This has been a good week for dictators."

His prediction: "The day will come when at some point or another, you will have to take a stand, and I pray to God when that day comes that we may not find, through an unwise policy, that we have to make that stand alone."

That was in February 1937. A month later, Hitler marched into a cheering Austria.

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The following year, at Munich, Chamberlain handed over much of
Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The British people thought him a hero. Again
bucking public opinion, Churchill called the give-away a "total and unmitigated
defeat."

On August 8, 1939, in a broadcast to the United States, Churchill ridiculed Hitler's claim that he was only grabbing land in self-defense.

"After all, the dictators must train their soldiers. They could scarcely do less in common prudence, when the Danes, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Albanians and, of course, the Jews may leap out upon them at any moment and rob them of their living space."

That September 1, claiming that she had been invaded, Germany's SS units invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. Churchill, returned to this post as First Lord of the Admiralty, made a broadcast to America in which he said this of those countries in Europe who remained neutral. "Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last."

In May of 1940, Churchill became Prime minister on the very day, the tenth, that Hitler began his blitz across Europe.

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Just two years ago, I was here at the George Washington University bookstore signing copies of **Hardball** and I came across Five Days in London May 1940 by historian John Lukacs. The picture I now paint I owe to him.

Twenty-five men sat around a table. They were the members of the British cabinet who were **not** involved directly in the war. They were there to hear what their new leader of just two and a half weeks, had to say about their country's frightening situation. Adolf Hitler, the man so many had tried to ignore, had overrun Holland, Denmark, and Belgium. France, England's only ally, was about to sign an armistice that would expose the Jews and other targets to the workings of the SS. A quarter million British troops, the country's entire army, was stranded in their port city of Dunkirk.

At this critical moment, Winston Churchill confronted the surrounding Cabinet with the details of the fierce fighting being waged on the French coast. He declared that England had a moral duty to fight Hitler, regardless if they were to fight him all alone.

"Of course, whatever happens in Dunkirk, we shall fight on."

It wasn't a speech in parliament or for broadcast, merely a statement of fact. Britain would now take him on alone.

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What Churchill never expected is that every person in that room stood
and cheered him. Writing later of that meeting, he said he was "sure that
every Member was ready to be killed quite soon and have his family and
possessions destroyed, rather than give in."

It is impossible to know the outcome of this past century had Churchill
not been in that room, had he not been in Britain, had he never won the
credentials - through his constant warnings - had he not been the right man at
the right time.

I remember reading something Churchill said about his ally, Charles de Gaulle, which in fact rings more true for Churchill.

As the French were about to capitulate, General de Gaulle, who was
serving as a liaison between the two governments, was pulled aboard the last
British plane as it taxied down the runway. For this, the collaborationist
Marshall Petain charged him with treason, he was tried and sentenced to
death. Churchill saw things differently. He knew that the great French
general and future president understood, as he did, that the battle just waged
and lost was part of a *world war* that promised a far different result. By
deciding so boldly to carry on the fight, de Gaulle had "carried with him, in this
small aeroplane, the honour of France."

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The same could be said of man who led Great Britain to its "Finest Hour."

He told the world the truth when it didn't want to hear it.

He fought where others would have quit.

He personified the very best in Politics.

He was out there all alone and was proven right.

But most importantly, he knew why he was there.

A Canadian pollster once told me there are three elements to political success: motive, passion, and spontaneity.

To lead you must know where you're leading. If a politician cannot tell you on the spot why he or she is there, they shouldn't be there.

Passion. If a politician lacks true feeling about his country and his cause, we must wonder why he seeks office in the first place.

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Finally, there's spontaneity. This man I describe today would not have been welcome at the White House. He would not have been at home with politicians who don't make a move that has not been before the focus groups, what the pros call "peasants under glass," who are always cleared by their pollsters and then are scripted by their writers in politically correct fashion. Churchill didn't care what his critics thought, didn't care what someone else's definition of "is" was. Where other politicians cling to the office, he would fling it away, and risk the rejection of the people, as they did on so many cruel occasions, rather than be the person he wasn't.

He knew why he was there.

He made sure he could do the job before he took it.

He wrote his own speeches because no one else but him was equipped with sufficient feeling, perspective, knowledge, nor passion - to write for Winston Churchill.

The goal of World War II, he said, was "to revive the status of man."

He wanted to levitate the individual beyond the reach of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world. His life is a guide not just to great leadership. As I've written before, he is an historic example of what a free man can be.

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