June 11, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 42

By John G. Plumpton

One of the missions ofYmest Hour is to bring its readers the best and latest in Churchill scholarship. This is usually done through feature articles and book reviews. Some scholarship is first published in scholarly and even popular journals, and to cover that area John Plumpton renews his former column of article abstracts, Inside The Journals, last seen in Finest Hour 84. Most often we will feature material directly about Churchill but we will also consider Churchill-related topics or themes in the broadest sense of the meaning of that term. We will include book reviews of Churchill and Churchill-related books if they say something new or significant about the topic.

Adelson, Roger and Sikorsky, Jonathan: “Churchill in the 1990s,” The Historian, 1995 (58) 1: 119-23.

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The Historian considered the state of Churchill scholarship in the 1990s by looking at recent books by two historians who represent opposite schools of historiography: Martin Gilbert’s Churchill: A Life and In Search of Churchill, and John Charmley’s Churchill, The End of Glory and Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940-1957.

Winston Churchill, who has long stirred controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, was the subject of most of an issue of the Historian in Summer 1958. The then-editor wrote that “Churchill virtually invented the tank, laid the foundations for the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State, and the Zionist home of Israel, out-drank the Russians, out-talked President Roosevelt, out-guessed Corporal Hitler, and indubitably saved the free world from destruction in 1940.” A less heroic view of Sir Winston was presented in the articles that focused on him as historian, politician, reformer and strategist.

In London on 11 July 1995, Churchill’s role during World War II was debated in the great hall of Church House, Westminster. John Charmley and Lord Clark held that Churchill had sold out Britain to the United States, a proposition opposed by Lord Blake and Andrew Roberts. The anti-Churchill and anti-U.S. proposition was defeated by a substantial majority of the capacity crowd.

In reviews published in The New York Times Book Review that same month, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Henry Kissinger expressed regret over the way Conservative revisionists have been debunking Churchill. Historians in the 1990s who want to understand Churchill will find it easier than did his contemporaries earlier in the twentieth century who had to contend with the great man’s own writings. Despite his defense of himself, Churchill was stigmatized with irresponsibility by such books as Robert Rhodes James: Churchill, A Study in Failure, 1900-1939.

To understand Churchill during and after World War II, the historian’s job is more difficult because of Churchill’s global influence as Prime Minister during the war, as the media’s leading statesman of the English-speaking world and as the legendary figure of English liberty. This reputation was supported by Churchill’s best selling memoir of World War II and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. In addition to this was the massive and masterly biography of Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert. Gilbert also wrote a single volume Churchill: A Life “for readers to judge for themselves Churchill’s actions and abilities.”

If the readers are the jury, Gilbert is Churchill’s chief defense attorney. Gilbert takes Churchill’s own words more seriously than do recent historians. He deals sympathetically with controversial parts of Churchill’s career. As for the man’s private life, Gilbert passes over some of the charges some of Churchill’s contemporaries have made in print. The biographer is, in this incidence, taking precedence over the historian. Gilbert is always respectful of the man whose finest hour, like that of Britain, was in 1940.

Other historians have asked tough questions about Churchill’s long public life. One such historian is John Charmley, who is one of the group of historians who wear Conservatism on their sleeves. Charmley’s Churchill, The End of Glory made a splash only after a review by Lord Clark, a rich and outspoken former junior Conservative Cabinet Minister, asserted that Churchill should not have rejected Hitler’s peace terms in 1940 because they would have protected Britain’s status as a world power far more than his selling Britain out to the United States. Clark’s review upstaged Charmley’s general theme that Churchill was a romantic imperialist whose views hardly changed since the 1890s.

The last part of The End of Glory and Churchill’s Grand Alliance blames Churchill’s “Atlanticism” for preventing Britain from being more assertive. While Charmley appreciates that the actions of statesmen must be judged by the exigencies of the situations they faced, he remains indignant over Churchill’s sacrifice of so many vital British interests to the United States. Charmley’s grasp of politics in London is better than his understanding of Anglo-American policymaking and the enormously complicated scene in Washington. He is a partisan British nationalist who degenerates into uncritical anti-Americanism.

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