April 24, 2013

FINEST HOUR 150, SPRING 2011

“Great captains must take their chance with the rest. Caesar was assassinated by his dearest friend. Hannibal was cut off by poison. Frederick the Great lingered out years of loneliness in body and soul. Napoleon rotted at St. Helena. Compared with these, Marlborough had a good and fair end to his life.”
—WSC, Marlborough, vol. IV, 1938 

================

Winston Churchill served his last term as Prime Minister between 1951 and 1955, leaving at the age of 80. Georges Clemenceau served his last term as Prime Minister of France from 1917 to 1920, leaving at the age of 79. Each entered politics under the age of 30, supporting himself through writing. Each was a radical in his youth, growing more conservative as he aged. Far beyond retirement age, each inspired his countrymen, who knew them respectively as France’s Tiger and Britain’s Lion.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

Overt similarities aside, as Paul Alkon suggests herein, there is powerful evidence that Churchill patterned his own political attitudes after Clemenceau, whom he deeply admired—and that Clemenceau, although Churchill was the much younger man, unproven when they met, also admired him.

Clemenceau died in 1929, too soon to consider any parallels of his career with Churchill’s. Indeed, a comparison between them would never have arisen, were it not for 1940 and Churchill’s finest hour. In that signal year, aged over 65, WSC was brought to office by other old men—not the “troublesome young men” of one recent book but troubled older men from three different parties. Their unity of faith and action made Churchill their nation’s leader at precisely the right time.

Don Graeter’s “A Time for Old Men” focuses on those days in 1940, and the aging individuals who made the difference in Britain’s hour of peril. As such, his piece is well qualified to lead our features on this theme.

Churchill was thought to be politically finished in 1945, when the country flung him from office on the eve of complete victory over all Britain’s enemies. But he thought otherwise. When the editor of The Times had the effrontery to suggest that Churchill should carry himself as a national leader and not remain long on the scene, his replies were characteristic, and illuminating: “Mr. Editor, I fight for my corner….I leave when the pub closes.” And he meant it—as we learn from Terry Reardon’s “Reluctant Retiree,” and Barbara Leaming’s outstanding new book, Churchill Defiant.

How did Churchill do it? John Mather provides the physical explanation: how a fast-aging statesman, packing the baggage, the ups and downs of a record career in politics, somehow defied most medical advice and all actuarial probabilities from 1940 to his final retirement four months short of his 90th birthday.

“Great captains must take their chance with the rest.” Churchill took his chance, and like John Churchill First Duke Marlborough, he “had a good and fair end to his life.” It wasn’t all he had hoped for: his goal of permanent world peace remained elusive—as it remains today. Yet who can gainsay his record?

Churchill thought at the end of his life that he had “worked very hard and achieved a great deal, only to achieve nothing in the end.” With our longer perspective, we may disagree. Churchill did not win World War II: what he did was not lose it. “Only Churchill,” Charles Krauthammer wrote, “carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable—dark, impoverished, tortured.” And Charles de Gaulle remarked: “In the great drama, he was the greatest.”

What can the world’s Democracies learn from the long careers, devotion to liberty, and lifetime defiance of odds by leaders like Churchill and Clemenceau, who lived their finest hours well over retirement age? Is something to be said for electing leaders with thirty or forty years’ political experience? Or is this to be avoided, absent a very special type of character, like Britain’s Lion or France’s Tiger?

That is the theme and purpose of this issue of Finest Hour. We take no position at the end. Perhaps none can be taken, because history never repeats, as Mark Twain quipped—”though it sometimes rhymes.” Churchill alone could not save the world. But we can’t resist wondering if others like him will be there when we need them—and if we will have the fortitude, like the Old Men of 1940, to hand them the job. We’ll see—and probably soon.

RICHARD M. LANGWORTH, EDITOR