But from this distance-and mountains are usually better viewed from a distance-we are able to discern some of the key characteristics that made Churchill Churchill.įirst, though, we must set the scene. There is, of course, no single answer history doesn’t work like that. How did he do it? How did this man of whom so many thought so little in the beginning manage to survive and prevail? Before Churchill, England, and the West writ large, was at risk of falling under what he once referred to as “all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule.” After him, liberty was saved, and the great story of individual freedom and the rule of law rolled forward. This is neither hyperbolic nor sentimental. Given his war leadership, particularly during the crisis of 1940, Winston Churchill became what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin would call “the largest human being of our time.” Implacable in the face of Hitler, determined to stand alone, if necessary, and stare down the Nazi threat, Churchill won a permanent place in the pantheon of heroic leaders who have single-handedly shifted the course of history. Roosevelt-and the rest of the world-would find out before long. Roosevelt, then meeting with his Cabinet in Washington, learned the news from an aide’s scribbled note, he looked up and said that he “supposed Churchill is the best man that England had, even if he was drunk half the time.” In those early days, Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor, recalled that Roosevelt “was so uncertain about” Churchill that he wondered “what kind of a fellow” the new prime minister really was. “I thought I knew a good deal about it all,” Churchill recalled, “and I was sure I should not fail.”Ĭhurchill, alas, was about the only one who was sure he would not fail. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” There was no fear, no uncertainty. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. As he went to bed at about three o’clock that morning, Churchill recalled, he was “conscious of a profound sense of relief.
He had long thought that his fate and that of his nation were intertwined. He believed in himself, even if the skeptics and the doubters were legion. In this bleak hour, Winston Churchill, now 65 years old, was summoned by King George VI to become prime minister and marshal the defenses of liberty against Nazi tyranny. Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht was on the move in Western Europe, threatening to sweep across the ancient nations to the English Channel and then, for all anyone knew, to do what no one had successfully managed since William the Conqueror nearly nine centuries before: storm and subjugate England itself. It was Friday, May 10, 1940, and things could hardly have been worse.
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