'Churchill: A Life': This bio is his finest hour
CHURCHILL: A Life, by Paul Johnson. Viking, 181 pp., $24.95.
Along with Jesus, Napoleon and Hitler, Winston Churchill is one of the most chronicled figures in history. A gifted orator and writer, and arguably the greatest statesman of the 20th century, he penned some 10 million words in his lifetime, and at least twice that amount have been expended on him. Churchill's steadfastness held the Allies together in the early years of World War II, when Germany looked unstoppable, and his inspiring rhetoric was a balm when all seemed lost. He was also a charming rogue with a fondness for dining and drink and was blessed - or cursed - with a sharp tongue. "If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee," Nancy Astor once lashed out at him. "And if I were your husband," Churchill responded, "I would drink it!"
Churchill has proved naturally attractive to biographers, who have produced multivolume monuments; with "Churchill: A Life," British historian Paul Johnson has fashioned a capstone. "No man did more to preserve freedom and democracy and the values we hold dear in the West," Johnson writes in this book-length essay. "None provided more public entertainment with his dramatic ups and downs, his noble oratory, his powerful writings and sayings, his flashes of rage, and his sunbeams of wit."
Johnson reminds us that Churchill was one of the most divisive figures in English political history, however much his wartime leadership won over detractors. By then, he was a veteran of nearly four decades in Parliament, and his pre-1939 record was decidedly mixed. Always jockeying for position, he switched parties several times, and earned a reputation for untrustworthiness. During World War I, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, he planned the invasion of Gallipoli, in Turkey, which ended in a bloody fiasco for the English and their Australian allies.
Churchill had passions outside of politics to keep him going. He was an amateur builder, forever tinkering at his country house. And he wrote. As a stylist, Churchill is incomparable, and the words flowed out in torrents. (He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953.) But Churchill never wandered far from the political fray. In the '30s, when a weary Britain was reluctant to fight another war, the prescient Churchill warned of the dangers of a rearmed Germany. Some thought he was needlessly bellicose, but history vindicated him.
The war prompted his greatest speeches, which Johnson praises, but we also see Churchill's waggish side. During his famous "finest hour" speech in the House of Commons, when he proclaimed, "We shall not flag or fail," he quietly joked to fellow MPs in an aside, "We shall fight with pitchforks and broomsticks, it's about all we've bloody got." Johnson's fine eye for this side of Churchill gives his book a charming pungency. Churchill may have sent biographers into overdrive, but it's doubtful that he will ever exhaust our interest.
