June 23, 2015

Finest Hour 114, Spring 2002

Page 30

By Richard M. Langworth

The Great Courses: Churchill, by Prof. J. Rufus Fears. Audio and videotapes with guidebooks. The Teaching Company, 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100, Chantilly VA 20151-1231, telephone (800) 832-2412. Three videocasettes $149.95; six audiocassettes $89.95.


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).

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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.

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