Book Reviews

Churchill: Walking with Destiny

by Andrew Roberts
Penguin Books Ltd., 2018
CDN$54.00 HC, CDN $12.99 Kindle

Reviewed by Bruce Lyth

The words of the old lion haunt us still. When I was in high school, an eccentric candidate for student council president campaigned by papering the school with posters bearing his name alongside assorted Winston Churchill quotes from the war. Alas, we lacked beaches on which to fight in the hallowed cause of reorganized cafeteria seating, and so the candidate was defeated. Some twenty years later, it seems less common for politicians to orate badly in the Churchillian mode, or even to label as ‘appeasement’ opposition policies that are ‘misliked.’ This bittersweet development may be due to the more censorious mood of our present moment.

How are we to assess so complicated a person? King’s College London-based historian Andrew Roberts has supplied a superb biography to aid in that task. Churchill: Walking With Destiny is admiring of its subject, but honestly presents his many misstatements, bogus predictions, and grotesque fondness for a dying imperialism. Indeed, the book’s great strength is that it sings with the words of Churchill himself, with little intervention from Roberts’ authorial voice. It is often funny; we learn not just of Churchill’s quips in the Commons, but also of his quacks at his pet ducks from his deck at Chartwell, and of wife Clementine’s worry for another pet bird’s aerial ‘indiscretions’ indoors. It is often stirring; we feel the quietly-tense moments when the dovish Lord Halifax considers the premiership, and we are seized with the frenetic energy of Churchill finally walking into Number 10 Downing Street as the resident. Where Roberts’ own voice does intercede, it is often—perhaps as a reflection of recent denunciations of Churchill—somewhat defensive. The reader is regularly informed that Churchill was actually correct about this prediction, or that action. The implication is that when considering Churchill’s many and lately oft-quoted ill-chosen words, the reader ought to use the fullness of context to render a more forgiving judgment upon the man himself. In a rare misstep, this is a courtesy that Roberts does not extend to Mahatma Gandhi, when he quotes the Indian statesman’s own poor words about Hitler as a means of somehow vindicating Churchill’s views about India.

Perhaps most personally thrilling about Churchill is its portrayal of the role of language in Churchill’s military leadership. As a young officer on the Afghan frontier, and in the Boer War, Churchill cajoled newspaper editors into employing him as a war correspondent (quite an appealing secondary duty to this humble staff officer). Roberts gives the clear impression that Churchill would have listed a command of language among the key elements of national power, alongside Spitfires and Lancasters, and coal and steel, along with the certain acceptance of a second brandy at lunch. The contrast with our present time is vivid. We now inhabit a literary wasteland wrought by decades of business management consultants intent upon ‘corporatizing’ the language and practice of public service. I suppose we can hope that archivists in generations to come will look back and say ‘this was their finest quarter.’ But Churchill ably spurs a hope that in studying Churchill’s example we can summon some measure of his love of language in service to Canada. Roberts’ Churchill shows that a military leader can charge towards victory by spilling the blood of fascists and the sublime words of Tennyson and Kipling and Shakespeare; he demonstrated that well-chosen words can supply young lads with the drive needed to climb aboard a bomber and attempt to shuffle Hitler off planet earth.

All that said, Churchill sometimes used his voice for ill. His racist invectives against Gandhi rankle in particular. Roberts falters in that he has an occasional tendency to pass off Churchill’s instinctual sense of an inferred responsibility of the privileged to act with generosity and nobility towards those less privileged as an excuse for inexcusable opposition to home rule for India. It is a failing of both Roberts and Churchill that they do not see Gandhi as engaged in fundamentally the same struggle of defending the right of people to govern themselves, with Churchill wielding the weapons of the strong, and Gandhi the weapons of the weak.

Nevertheless, Churchill, in this reviewer’s opinion, correctly prizes the power of human agency; this is no person merely floating in the current of a Victorian upbringing, or stumbling through the crevices of the tectonic structural forces of geopolitics. What a thrill it would have been to have observed Churchill when he finally read 1984 and encountered the imperious O’Brien, who informs Winston Smith that, “…if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” As Roberts shows, Churchill’s contribution to our civilization is to say to hell with all that. He made our almost-instinct almost-true: namely, that the totalitarian boot can be successfully resisted if one has an iron voice and a resonant will. It is a lesson we would do well to remember in this structural time of relentless surveillance, capitalism, climatic upheavals, and massing populist furies.

So we return to the question of how to judge such a man, for a belief that an individual’s words and actions matter suggests that he be held accountable for those words and actions. Roberts’ biography shows that the stunning breadth of Churchill’s life does not facilitate a simplistic judgement. Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets unacknowledged legislators, which I take to mean that poetry has the implicit power to shape how we think and act in the world, but in the winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for literature, we find both a poet and an actual legislator. For my part, I question the usefulness of easy judgement when held above a full view of a person’s life, and in the cause of public service, there are few substitutes for the study of history. As the Czech philosophical writer Milan Kundera put it, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Churchill is a fitting act of memory.

Captain Bruce Lyth is currently employed as a staff officer in the policy section of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM). In 2019, he deployed to the Middle East as part of a Canadian contingent in the fight against Daesh. Prior to joining CANSOFCOM, Captain Lyth was an analyst with Canadian Forces Intelligence Command (CFINTCOM). He has also worked at Canadian Forces Base Comox as an Analyst supporting air operations. He holds degrees in political philosophy from the universities of British Columbia and Victoria.