Churchill
Benjamin Disraeli wrote that in the study of history too much attention is paid to the facts and little to the people when the truth is that the best way to approach the history is usually by knowing well the characters that marked each epoch: how they were, what they thought and why they acted as they did. If there is a significant character in the twentieth century that is Winston S. Churchill: no one lived with such intensity, strength, and energy, and no one had a greater incidence in a great number of subjects; few people have done so much to defend the freedoms and the set of values that we associate with the West, and few lives allow a reading as enriching and with as many learning as Winston Churchill.
A gigantic historical character
Churchill was the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, and as Boris Johnson more recently put it “the greatest statesman ever produced by Britain”. Not only was he aware of the serious threat posed by Nazism, but he would also be the first to note in the early 20s the "atrocious crime" against of humanity that represented Lenin and the Bolsheviks, while President Wilson, for example, welcomed these changes. After World War II, it will be the first to anticipate the structural incompatibility between the USSR and Europe and as the continent was to be divided by the Iron Curtain that would extend like a deep scar by Europe during decades. His career, too, in August 1950, in a speech in Strasbourg, warned of the threat posed to Europe by the Brussels bureaucracy and the importance of Parliament. However, he failed to see the threat posed by Japanese rearmament in the Pacific and would prove tragic in 1941 and 1942 marking the British debacle in the Far East.
The book addresses other major failures such as his miscalculation when he was Secretary of the Treasury - perhaps its most splendid and comforting political moment - in 1925 when it came back to the gold standard - a good decision - but not the artificially high rate with which (parity prior to the Great War) and would condemn the UK to an unattainable price level for the uncompetitive then, by comparison, British industry. Of that error were in part derived the policies of "easy money" during the roaring twenties in which in the Federal Reserve try to devalue the dollar with respect to the pound - aiding to its natural partner on the continent - with the great cost of generating a bubble in the domestic economy that will eventually collapse by the end of the decade.
Churchill had a great relevance in the Middle East. He took advantage of the vacuum that will leave the collapse of the Turkish Empire in the region, whose borders were largely set at Churchill's initiative that among other things the modern state of Iraq was invented. On the other hand, Churchill will never be a party politician, and although he had a great success as a speaker, he was undoubtedly among the best in the Chamber, his political nose will fail more than once making him in the losing flock in a few Occasions: Serve as an example when you are stuck in your position to defend the inept of Edward VIII instead of your brother, the future King George VI. In most times to his wife's despair, Clementine, who was always smarter than his sometimes-bitter husband.
His appetite for life made him an overflowing figure: at dinner he tried to drink only champagne, Pol Roger his favorite (1928), smoked cigars - better said: let them consume, not inhale the smoke, Romeo and Juliet your favorites; he liked hunting, polo, painting - he was, in fact, a painter more than remarkable (250 paintings of the 500 he survived, all of them highly prized) - and, although he was never a good student or trained at use, obtained from an early age an exquisite mastery of language. Churchill loved the English language, leaving between 8 and 10 million written words, that is more than the words ever written by Dickens and Shakespeare combined.
His incredible ability to work is especially visible in his face as a writer. He once told Baldwin that he could write two thousand words a day. His memoirs of World War II, the first key testimony of the genre and perhaps his essential work, consist of two volumes and 2,050,000 words in comparison, for example, with 1,100,000 words used by Edward Gibbon in his classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This great work, which includes a history of English-speaking peoples, a biography of his celebrated ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, or his own memoir, not only earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature but also provided him with large sums of money both for the sales of copies as well as conferences. He earned a lot but spent even more: he was a sybarite of life for whom the income only served to be able to spend. He always had a great ability to value his written words by being the best-paid journalist of his time.
Being in New York, on December 13, 1931, he crossed Fifth Avenue at night looking in the opposite direction-as many of us do when we traveled to London-and he was run over by a car. He did not die of a miracle and suffered serious injuries. Yet he did not lose consciousness and the first thing he did was recognize that the accident had been his fault. The recovery was painful. While still in the best hospital, he wrote an article expressing his tenacity in the face of the adversity of the accident as well as a reflection on his rich and practical philosophy of life. He received 600 pounds for the copyright of the article that was printed everywhere.
Like most of his generation, Churchill never knew how to invest well, and he did not really know the mechanisms of financial markets. He was present in New York during the crash of 29 where he lost large sums of money. However, these were always minor setbacks of which the character was grown and strengthened. His "great voyage in the desert" will come from the 1930s when he, and practically only himself, glimpsed with clarity the threat posed by Adolf Hitler for his beloved England and the rest of the continent. Churchill, who was one of the few who read and believed Hitler's Mein Kampf, and did not minimize the risks involved and which was then labeled illusory that soon would be left by the bulk of the European elite.
Last line of defense of Western civilization
Pacifism was not only fashion but also a consensus in Churchill times. Yet, as Paul Johnson has pointed out, in government more than pacifism there will be foolishness: troops and capacities were reduced while Germany was bouncing to the teeth. A young John F. Kennedy, who will deeply admire the English statesman for his courage, whose illustrious and authoritative father served as Roosevelt's ambassador to the court of Saint James, will make his final thesis on this subject with the suggestive title * Why England Slept*, which will be published later with some success. In the meantime, Churchill always maintained an uncomfortable position in the House, insisting on the risks of Hitler and the recklessness of guarding. In this sense, Churchill's way of thinking was tremendous anti-fragile that has popularized from this time the philosopher Nassim Taleb.
Looking at the figures later, and as always, it seems surprising that no one else noticed the threat of Hitler-Mussolini, united by the "Steel Pact", which together added 800 bombers compared to 47 on the British side. This situation contrasted with the years leading up to World War I, with Churchill as Lord of the Admiralty and devoted body and soul to visit all the naval bases on the continent and oversee the change from the fleet of coal engines to motors that operated with oil, and greasing, in general, the British military machinery. Be that as it may, and perhaps the element that alone would have given Churchill immortal fame was to guess how the capitulation of Munich in 1938 - when Hitler was allowed to swallow Czechoslovakia - made inevitable a second major world war (the finest years according to historian Max Hastings). There remains his speech of October 5 of that same year, his most sad speech, and also the most striking and premonitory.
As had happened before, Churchill was reborn from his ashes once more in August summer of 1939. That year Hitler had intensified the war machine by building more than 200 submarines before the passivity of Great Britain and France. In summer, he closed an agreement with Stalin to partition Poland - following the course of action described by Churchill years earlier. On 1 September, Nazi troops invaded Poland that would be at the mercy of two of the worst totalitarian regimes in the history of mankind. Two days later, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany. Churchill has then proposed again as the first Lord of the Admiralty and joined the Six-member War Council. His voice and energy returned to the House and to the British people as a whole through the BBC Radio, and again his mastery of words and passionate rhetoric again made the country's spirits thrill. It is also then that he began his intense epistolary relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt - more than a thousand letters and a Christmas, 1940, and PM as together in the White House. It was a friendship, not without misgivings, -FDR distrusted more of Churchill's imperialism than Stalin's (one among other symptoms that reveal Roosevelt’s poor capacity of vision), but that was fundamental for the approximation between Great Britain and the United States and the coordination of the war effort between the two powers to defeat Hitler.
In May, after Chamberlain's repeated failures to manage and direct the war effort, Parliament's loss of confidence in him was evident. It was May 7-8, just as German troops began their final offensive against France when Churchill's figure emerged as a new consensus MP for wartime. He counted on the preparation and experience of three lives, after years away from the life of the Party he had no mortgage, and because he had repeated and detailed the risks of the Nazi threat during the previous six years, he had all the authoritative world to lead the destiny of Britain in its hardest hours.
Churchill came to power with a preparation and a long experience like no other politician before. Churchill also knew how to put all this capital to the service of his position, his country and the difficult situation o the country. King George VI - who did not get off to a good start with Churchill - said: "I can not have a better PM." The "Churchill factor" was decisive in the victory against the Nazi holocaust; no doubt today that History would surely have been different without Churchill.
Preparing his legacy
The electoral defeat of 1945 - marketed by its surprising character - marks the beginning of the final stretch of his political career. Although it will remain in the chamber and will be an iron point of anchorage in the defense of the principles of Tory liberalism, its influence will never again be that of wartime - despite its return to 10 Downing Street in 1951-. However, as Clementine cleverly advanced, the loss of the election will take the form of a positive black swan, since, first, he saved Churchill from having to deal with an economy and country ruined by the War, and allowed time to write. It was then that Churchill overturned all his energy - which was not small - in writing his memoirs of World War II. Hitler and FDR were already dead, and Stalin gave up writing nothing thinking, "he said," that the state machinery would write his story. This gave Churchill a unique position to write the first great first-person version of what 2GM was and how it had developed. In addition, he had exclusive access to his warships, which he negotiated with the Government, which, after leaving power, became, to a large extent, his property.
The first volume was published in May 1947 and quickly became one of the most successful and award-winning books in history. The contract amounted to 2.23 million dollars, about 50 million today. In 1953, Churchill became the first MP awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Later he will still have the energy to write another remarkable and equally ambitious book: History of English-speaking Peoples.
In spite of the loss of the elections of 1945, also of those of 1950, and to have assured certain economic comfort, followed by passion and conviction in the House of Commons from where it supported young leaders of its bench and, to the measure of its possibilities - which were then few - to oppose Labor's nationalization programs, the rise of trade unionism (which would be so lethal in the long run for the English economy) or the abolition of the National Health Service.
Churchill will have a sweet decline receiving during the last years of its life multitude of recognitions and honors of all type. In 1963, Kennedy granted the Honorary Citizenship of the United States - conferred by the Congress - the maximum recognition that the American nation grants to a foreign citizen.
A life to learn from
Few lives have been so well lived and it is difficult to think that someone can aspire to match it in breadth and variety of successes on so many fronts. Historian Paul Johnson especially highlights five aspects that explain his overwhelming success.
The first lesson is to always aim for the maximum. To point high, even as in the case of Churchill, is not counted especially with positive reinforcements that encourage and encourage this healthy ambition. Churchill did not always achieve his goals, but his ambition always led to worthwhile achievements. Second: today there are shortcuts to hard work. Throughout his life, Churchill was an energetic and indefatigable worker, always striving to maintain a healthy balance between pleasure and work, alternating stages of great intellectual and physical effort with moments of restful sleep. Third, and perhaps the most important lesson, Churchill never allowed setbacks, accidents, mistakes, unpopularity or criticism to lead to discouragement. He showed in this sense an enormous capacity for physical and psychological reparation, a great resilience, before all the vicissitudes and misfortunes that I present to him in life and constitutes a fantastic example of how success in life is, first and foremost, an attitude issue. Fourth, Churchill lost a surprisingly small amount of time in the pettiness of life: grudge, hatred, blaming others, seeking revenge, spreading rumors and gossip, were never part of his agenda. Churchill had a reputation for being nice. He was a politician, who had enemies and detractors, but was never a vengeful person, spiteful or malicious, on the contrary, was affectionate and benevolent with his adversaries. When he came to power, for example, he had a cordial and conciliatory treatment with his political opponents. Today surely would not watch the TV and would not be in social networks. Finally, and closely linked with the above, is the fact that the absence of hate left much room for joy in his life. Churchill always knew, in the good moments and also in the not so good moments, to laugh, to have fun and to enjoy the great and small pleasures of life.
Everyone who values freedom under the law, and government by, to and from the people, can find relief and confirmation in the history of his life.