Churchill

One mark of a great biography is found in the ability to make a very old death newly devastating.

I turned the final page of the final volume on Winston Churchill by William Manchester (really, Paul Reid after Manchester's death), and felt the pangs of the inevitable, yet titanic loss of perhaps the greatest leader of the 20th century.

Here are a few reasons why you should love Churchill:

1) He, and Britain with him, stood alone against a seemingly invincible tyrant in Hitler. In the early 1940's, Hitler and Stalin--the last century's greatest monsters--carved up Poland like a turkey, before Hitler wiped out the rest of western Europe and pulverized England with wave after wave of bombers ("The Battle of Britain"). Remember, the Soviet Union was Hitler's ally, France was crushed with barely a fight, and the United States was entangled in isolationism. Britain stood alone. Yet they stood.

2) Churchill alone was able to call Britain from the moral equivocations of Neville Chamberlain (the previous Prime Minister) to a renewed moral vigor that would sustain them in the dark days ahead. Churchill knew that Hitler was posing both a moral and mortal threat to Britain and the West, and instilled with the courage of his convictions, was able to call Britain to stand upon the vast inheritance of Western civilization and withstand Hitler's onslaught. Only the light of moral conviction and ground courage in such moments, and Churchill lit the lamp.

3) Churchill, unlike the more pragmatic Franklin Roosevelt, saw the threat that Soviet communism posed to the free world and sought to thwart it. To give FDR his due, his pragmatism enabled him to navigate America's isolationism and eventually guide them into the war. He also was dynamic in his own right. Yet, he lacked Churchill's sense of moral conviction--that Western values are just of worthy of our blood as Western peoples. As a result, FDR consistently spurned Churchill in favor of "Uncle Joe" Stalin. FDR's progressive idealism blinded him to the evils of communism and he was unable at times to distinguish true friends and foes. Churchill, on the other hand, worked vigorously to restrain the shadow of Soviet tyranny.

4) He was a modern renaissance man. Not only could Churchill call forth courage in the face of seemingly invincible evil, but he was an unparalleled orator and parliamentarian, an artist of the highest caliber, and a Nobel Prize-winning author. In other words, he was a genius. Few men are endowed with such gifts--and quite a few of them are quite quirky. Even fewer are endowed with the ability to harness such intellectual gifts in order to lead a people.

On January 24th, 1952, Churchill's top aide, Jock Colville, walked in on him while he was shaving. Churchill told Colville that his father had died on that day many years before, and that he would die on that day as well. On January 24th, 1965, Winston Churchill indeed breathed his last. The Queen had a stone placed in the floor of Westminster that simply read "Remember Winston Churchill."

We could do much worse than heed those words and heed the man.