To understand Winston Churchill’s character, a historian considers him in the context of his partners, rivals, and enemies.
No prominent figure got under Winston Churchill’s skin like Mohandas Gandhi, writes the Cambridge University historian David Reynolds in “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him.” Gandhi’s “political creed of nonviolence could not be overcome by force, and that challenged everything Winston had understood about power” since adolescence. Gandhi, in his loincloth, threatened Churchill’s “creed of manliness,” Mr. Reynolds explains. Churchill’s manliness was built on his pride in the British Empire, which another British historian, Andrew Roberts, has called Churchill’s “secular religion.”
There is no use differentiating the so-called bad Churchill, the imperialist, who was against Indian independence, from the good Churchill, who saved the world from Adolf Hitler. Churchill’s early and prescient warmongering against Nazi Germany was intrinsically linked to his sense of superiority regarding Great Britain’s place in an imperial world. Clement Attlee, Churchill’s deputy prime minister during World War II, who defeated him in 1945, said Churchill “was rather like a layer cake,” with 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century layers as well as “a large slice, of course, of the 20th.” Again, there is no contradiction: After the fall of France in 1940, Britain’s military position against Nazi Germany was so absolutely dire that it took a reactionary of sorts, with a romantic view of national destiny, to fight on.
Mr. Reynolds suggests how the different pieces of Churchill’s personality fit together by portraying him in terms of the principal personalities with whom he interacted, and who, therefore, helped define him. In addition to Gandhi and Attlee, the reader meets Hitler, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Charles de Gaulle. The author also writes about Churchill’s relationships with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and his wife, Clementine. A fresh, fast-paced and bracing look at Churchill, “Mirrors of Greatness” is also an insightful and, at times, counterintuitive guide to those other personalities.
Churchill, Mr. Reynolds tells us, was “largely self-taught. He never went to university—probably to his benefit,” since a traditional, classical education might have undermined his particular genius, making him more like the others of his class and generation. He loved his mother dearly, but at a distance, though she helped advance his career. His father was also remote and unsympathetic; he died when Churchill was 20. Winston spent his whole life proving himself to that deceased father.
Churchill bolted out of life’s starting gate. In 1894, a month before his father died, he graduated near the top of his class at the royal military academy at Sandhurst, having entered near the bottom. By the time he entered Parliament, at 26, he had fought in several colonial wars and written five books. These were generally not the purplish and flawed writings of youth. They were deeply analytical and mature works. I found “The Story of the Malakand Field Force” (1898), about British India’s Northwest Frontier, extremely useful while covering the American war in Afghanistan in the early 2000s because of its unrelieved realism regarding the dilemmas of occupying powers in tribal regions. “The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan” (1899) is an epic tale of geographic determinism enmeshed with Homeric heroism, which reads like something out of Herodotus.
In 1901 Churchill warned in Parliament that the next European war would be so destructive and industrialised it would threaten “the whole manhood of the nation. . . . The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.” Churchill was not a nihilist regarding war but a truly clairvoyant realist, even while still so young, and foresaw the devastation of World War I. During that war, he was blamed for the 1915 Gallipoli fiasco and relieved of his position as First Lord of the Admiralty in H.H. Asquith’s government. Rather than sulk in depression, he took up painting and then soldiering, as an officer leading from the front in night raids in Belgium.
Churchill’s romantic sense of history sometimes led him astray. In a chapter on Mussolini, Mr. Reynolds explains how Churchill’s love of the Roman Empire affected his judgment. He believed in 1935 that Il Duce was a great man who could help neighbouring Austria maintain its independence from Hitler’s Germany. He also believed that Italy, because of its weaker economy, did not constitute a threat to Britain. Even after Mussolini was executed in April 1945, Churchill opined that the Italian leader had rescued his country from the communism into which it might have descended and had given it a lofty position in Europe. History would have seen Il Duce differently, Churchill said, had he not taken the wrong turn in backing Hitler in June 1940, when France and all of Europe seemed lost.
Churchill was blessed with unparalleled energy and sheer enterprise. He was also, Mr. Reynolds observes, convinced he was a man of greatness and devoted all his energy toward one purpose: becoming prime minister. That sets up the heart of Mr. Reynolds’s book and the confrontation with Neville Chamberlain, who had become the British prime minister in 1937. Chamberlain was an efficient administrator who believed deeply in improving the lives of ordinary Britons after the devastation of World War I. But he was a relentless plodder, while Churchill (an admirer of Napoleon, Mr. Reynolds tell us) believed in audacity.
Why did Chamberlain delude himself that peace with Hitler was possible? Mr. Reynolds insightfully notes that personal diplomacy of the sort that Chamberlain practiced during several meetings with Hitler in the fall of 1938 constituted one of the “dark arts” at which Chamberlain, for all of his other abilities, simply had no aptitude. Personal diplomacy puts a premium on judgment—on sizing up your interlocutor. Chamberlain, who believed in the trustworthiness of Hitler’s signature on the paper he waved for the newsreel cameras, fundamentally misunderstood him.
Chamberlain’s bet on Hitler proved one of history’s great miscalculations. Two days after Poland was invaded in September 1939, Chamberlain under great duress brought Churchill back into government as First Lord of the Admiralty. All this set up the cabinet drama of May 9, 1940. Under pressure from the Labour Party, which had joined the wartime coalition government, Chamberlain said he would serve in an administration led by Edward Wood, Lord Halifax. But Halifax, the foreign minister, made it clear that as a peer he could not serve as prime minister. At a crucial moment, Churchill took over. “The question of whether . . . Churchill ‘seized the premiership’ or ‘had it handed to him’ should not obscure the essential point,” Mr. Reynolds writes. “Neither Chamberlain nor Halifax had what it took to be a war leader—and they knew it.”
Churchill’s irrepressible imperialism complicated his relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which, the author explains, was all sunny camaraderie on the surface but had tension underneath. Meeting Roosevelt on a Royal Navy warship in a secluded Newfoundland bay in 1941, Churchill was emotionally shaken by the extent of the American president’s disability and the “grace and courage” evident in the way he coped with it. Yet from the beginning Churchill and Roosevelt were split on their war aims: Churchill saw the future only in terms of the British Empire, and Roosevelt most clearly did not. Mr. Reynolds relates how, as the war continued and American power waxed while British power waned, the relationship between the two men subtly shifted to a colder, unequal one. Nevertheless, Churchill continued to believe the very future of the world rested on the personal relationship between him and FDR.
Churchill’s relationship with Stalin was far more subtle. Both FDR and Churchill were aware of Stalin’s vast crimes against humanity as well as the absolute necessity of keeping Stalin a strong and well-equipped wartime ally. In this way, both FDR and Churchill were realists. Churchill, again like FDR, felt that he could handle Stalin.
As for the French leader Charles de Gaulle, Mr. Reynolds does not let reports of their personal aversion limit his portrait of the general’s relationship with Churchill. As other historians have noted, de Gaulle did not become the heart and soul of Free France the moment he escaped to Great Britain in 1940. This only happened after Churchill allowed him to use the BBC for his famous “Appel” of June 18 and for further periodic exhortations to the French population. Churchill did this against the advice of the Foreign Office and the war cabinet, which vainly hoped to keep the Nazi puppet leader Marshal Philippe Pétain “in play” by not overly offending him. “This was a debt the General never forgot in all their subsequent altercations,” Mr. Reynolds writes. And there were great altercations. Churchill, on the eve of D-Day in 1944, did not want de Gaulle anywhere near France. But enter France de Gaulle did. And upon his entry into Paris, de Gaulle triumphantly strode down the Champs-Élysées, seen and practically touched by millions.
Perhaps the most touching chapter in Mr. Reynolds’s book is the one about Churchill and Attlee, the Labour Party politician who replaced him as prime minister after the war, built a socialist state and developed Great Britain’s atomic bomb. Attlee has often been seen, as Churchill famously said, as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” But though he lacked charisma, this somewhat meek and diminutive man was in fact a loyal comrade in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, who among other things defended the strategic bombing of Germany. Attlee had known life in the slums and fought at Gallipoli. Churchill, Mr. Reynolds writes, “often found Attlee easier to talk with than many members of his own party.” Churchill saw Britain through the war, but Attlee was the “architect” who rebuilt Britain’s economically battered society on a fairer basis.
By framing his portrait of Churchill strictly in terms of Attlee and the other formidable personalities in this book, Mr. Reynolds provides a freshly penetrating look into the many qualities of Churchill’s extraordinary mind. The monument of the man now breathes in full.
Mr. Kaplan holds the chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is “The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China.”
