Savior of the West.(Churchill: A Study in Greatness)

Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best (Hambledon, 384 pp., $29.95)

In his remarkable essay "Winston Churchill in 1940," originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1949, Isaiah Berlin paid tribute to Churchill's greatness. In Berlin's judgment, Churchill was "the largest human being of our time," a "gigantic historical figure" whose "work and person will remain the object of scrutiny and judgment to many generations." This has always been the popular view of Churchill, and remains so especially in the United States, where he is admired by all those still capable of admiration. But Berlin's judgment was not- and still is not-shared by all of the experts. Berlin records that many of Churchill's contemporaries took pleasure in dismissing him as an anachronism. They mocked what they saw as his hollow-sounding rhetoric and his "reactionary" preoccupation with politics and war.

But it was precisely Churchill's old-fashioned engagement with the dramatic aspects of human history that allowed him to articulate perfectly what was at stake in the great conflict between National Socialism and what he did not hesitate to call "liberal and Christian civilization." Churchill's magnificent speeches during the Battle of Britain reminded the beleaguered citizens of Great Britain that they were fighting for enduring principles, and allowed them to rise above their mortal selves. In 1940, Churchill and the British people were more than an imperiled tribe defending their island outpost; they revealed to all with eyes to see the nobility of heroic human resistance to tyranny. As prime minister, wrote Berlin, Churchill "was able to impose his imagination and his will upon his countrymen, and enjoy a Periclean reign, precisely because he appeared to be larger and nobler than life and lifted them to an abnormal height in a moment of crisis."

Berlin's essay is a powerful expression of the sentiments common among those who lived during the age of Churchill. But most young people growing up in what Geoffrey Best calls "demilitarized" societies have an extremely difficult time connecting with Churchill's "virtues and victories." And they are not aided by contemporary historians who too often shun political and military history as elitist and are filled with egalitarian resentment against the very category of human greatness. These critics of traditional political history dogmatically deny that "great men" can shape the course of history.

Seen in this larger context, Best's splendid new book on Churchill is remarkably countercultural. In the most decisive respects, he picks up where Berlin left off a half-century ago. A distinguished British academic historian who lived through the Battle of Britain as a youth, Best sets out to vindicate the "naive" notion that Churchill was the greatest human being of the age; his approach to history seeks to clarify commonsense judgment, rather than to subvert it in the fashionable academic manner.

Best is rightly convinced that we are much "diminished" if we can no longer appreciate the virtues of a man such as Churchill, and is profoundly aware of the obstacles to such an appreciation. Churchill was an eminently civilized man: a parliamentarian, statesman, writer, painter, and warrior; he therefore appreciated better than we do today that the civic and martial virtues are essential to a well-rounded existence as well as to the health and survival of the democracies. Churchill loved adventure and thrived when standing up to adversity. He was a loving husband and father, and was blessed, in Clementine Churchill, with an unusually devoted and intelligent wife; but he could never be satisfied with a quiet middle-class existence. As a result, he was plagued all his life by accusations that he was a "warmonger." Best does a ...