One is always grateful to members of the academy for paying positive attention to Churchill, but I couldn't get through these tapes. Prof. Fears is a kind of right-wing Cornell West, pontifical, self-satisfied, and convinced that he is right. Churchill never puts a foot wrong and is described as almost God like. This is exactly the type of worshipper who sets Churchill up for ambushers like Christopher Hitchens (see pages 14-15).

We begin with Churchill in 1940 at "the House of Parliament," changing his country's mind about fighting Germany. Fears says that the French and Belgians had surrendered, "not because the soldiers wouldn't fight but because of a collapse at the top." (Wasn't it both?) If Churchill had taken a poll in May 1940, he would have found that 80% of Britons thought Britain should negotiate with Hitler. (Where is the evidence of that?)

A shining moment is Fears's comparison of Churchill with Pericles and Lincoln, who together, he says, comprise history's "three outstanding statesmen." A statesman has "bedrock principles, a moral compass, and a supreme vision"; a politician has none of the above. Unfortunately this is accompanied by veiled references to Bill Clinton, which date the performance.

All this is by way of introduction to the first lecture, which is all about John Duke of "Marlburrow" and the Spencer-Churchills - which I fast-forwarded when I started to learn how Sir Winston was related to Princess Di. There is none of the interpretation one is entitled to expect - e.g., about how the writing of Marlborough influenced Churchill's World War II actions and speeches, or the salient lessons that book offers for our time.

Lecture #2 is about Lord Randolph and Jeanette Jerome ("Jenette"). Fears, who has read all the chatter, believes Jenny "slept with 200 men." She is at Blenheim, seven months pregnant, when her labor begins: "They married in April" (wink-wink, nudge-nudge). She doesn't make it to her bedroom because "the library at Blenheim is the longest room in England" (longer than the "House of Parliament"?).

Lord Randolph is "a powerful man with a huge drooping moustache," which put me more in mind of Jack London's Wolf Larson than the slight, stooped Randolph. I quit the first tape when Lord Randolph's "Tory Democracy" was described as a veritable Victorian New Deal, complete with "social security, unemployment insurance, health care, and pension plans." If only Franklin Roosevelt had studied Tory Democracy, he wouldn't have had to hire all those whiz kids in 1932.

I skipped ahead to the two World Wars where, hiking up his trousers, Prof. Fears launches into a kind of alto-staccato. He correctly notes that Kitchener, who at first approved and later refused the Army's help at the Dardanelles, "set up Churchill at the cost of 213,000 lives"; that Lloyd George was partly responsible for Churchill's 1915 overthrow; that Fisher first promoted the Dardanelles attack and then resigned over it; that there was nothing wrong with Churchill defending himself in a book (today politicians do that all the time); and that Churchill was disliked in part because "genius invokes distrust," and because he was too impetuous and lacked political antennae.

But Fears spoils it with a string of errors: Jenny died in 1922; Churchill served in the "calvary"; he drank "strong, robust scotches" (actually he drank scotch-flavored water); he built the Chartwell lakes "with his own hands"; and he wrote eleven books and 400 articles (it was over forty and 1000 respectively).

In the 1930s, Fears goes on, Hitler refused to meet Churchill because WSC was politically finished. The "whole Nazi regime would have collapsed" had the Allies opposed its occupation of the Rhineland. Halifax, Baldwin and Chamberlain were not decent men; they were politicians in the most odious sense, interested only in power. A map showing the 1939 assault on Poland indicates it all went to Germany (actually Russia got a big piece) and shows a "front" where none existed. Robert Rhodes James's book (A Study in Failure) is dismissed as insufficiently admiring; it tries to explain why WSC was "ultimately a failure." (The book only goes to 1939.)

My problem is that I'm too close to the subject, too critical and too cynical. The world is full of slapdash portraits of Churchill, from the sloppy critiques of left-wing revisionists to the hagiography of the right. Others may see qualities in this production that I fail to see. But so help me, any one of the last twenty speakers at Churchill Center events could have done a better job. If the publishers of such material would call upon experts to vet the stuff before publication, it wouldn't start off life flawed.

I found your review of the Churchill audo-visual lectures by Professor Fears and the Education Company (FH 114) quite puzzling. I think you are too close and too deeply enmeshed in the trees of Blenheim to see them for the forest. You and those you associate with may debate the intimate details of Churchill's life, and look down on those who paint Churchill's greatness with too broad a brush; but what about the average ignorant and apathetic, who, if they do hear anything about Churchill, hear that he was a successful alcoholic who smoked cigars and gave some good speeches? The typical leftist, socialist professor (and, unfortunately, college students are the only students who may be taught about Churchill) teaches about Churchill's warmongering, racist, imperialist ways.

The Churchill in-crowd may have its petty disagreements about how much scotch Churchill drank or how many books he wrote, but his true light grows dimmer every year, and we cannot afford to snuff out those lights which may burn too brightly. 

Churchill was a great man, and that is not reflected in the picayune corrections you have made to Fears' lectures. Fears in his lectures was himself Churchillian: eloquent, grandiose, zealous, inspirational. He deserved better than your review, which is much like the small-minded critics who have dogged Churchill for years, over-examining and scrutinizing every last detail to wring the most criticism possible from an extraordinary life.

Get out of your "bubble" and consider the general public's knowledge and understanding of Churchill. You may have second thoughts about unknown inaccurate details about Churchill's greatness when you realize Churchill's greatness itself is unknown. 

Signed:  S.B.

I doubt that Churchill's greatness will ever be unknown, though it is certainly underappreciated. It appears that we agree on strategy but disagree on tactics.

As editor of Finest Hour I try to keep in mind that not every reader wants to engage in minute examination of tea leaves. Not every reader doesn't, either. The job requires a balance between some pretty basic material, like our student essays or the great war speeches, alongside more detailed coverage of obscure subjects. This is what we strive to provide.

Either way, we follow two guidelines, other than our frequent reader surveys. The first is the admonition of Lady Soames: "be scrupulously accurate"-as her father said, "in all things great and small, large and petty." The second is a remark by Professor Paul Addison: "To me, it only serves to diminish Churchill to regard him as super-human."

Nothing ever published is free of errors. Celia Sandys' Churchill contains mistakes; that doesn't prevent it from being right on what counts, and so good that we won an Annenberg Foundation grant to distribute 5000 copies to North American high school teachers using Churchill in their curricula. Which proves, incidentally, that college students are not "the only students who may be taught about Churchill."

I admitted in my review of the Fears tapes that I was too close to the subject and inclined to nitpick. So let's stipulate that objecting to a lecturer who doesn't know there are two Houses of Parliament may be a triviality. How much scotch Churchill drank, or how many books he wrote, may also be trivial-but Professor Fears raised these issues, not I.

If the lecturer had settled for citing Churchill's "love of freedom, commitment to honor and morality, and courage and resolve in the face of evil," no one could gainsay him. But what about his suggestion that Churchill was conceived out of wedlock; that his mother slept with 200 men; that Kitchener "set him up" over Gallipoli; that 80% of the British people wanted to negotiate with Hitler; that Neville Chamberlain was not a decent man? Or that Jones' Marlborough is more important to read than Churchill's Marlborough-out of which all Prof. Fears seems to derive is that Churchill was related to Princess Di?

How do such statements enhance Churchill's greatness? On the contrary, they are more likely to be assimilated by perverters of history, to reappear in some defamatory article or website, alongside charges that WSC was a warmongering imperialist drunk who conspired in the attack on Pearl Harbor and fire-bombed Dresden.

The Churchill Centre considers Churchill "in the round," as Professor John Ramsden wrote. And they expect us to deny ammunition to the army of anti-Churchill, anti-Western hate-mongers, only too ready to seize upon non-facts and ignorant hagiography to serve their own ends.