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Learning about Churchill through His Appetite
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For a reader, getting one’s arms around Winston S. Churchill is like trying to hug a mountain. He was a colossus, a phenomenon.Churchill strode across the world from the time he was commissioned in his regiment, the Queen’s Own Royal Hussars, in 1895 to his death in 1965. He was a force in history, in journalism, in politics and in fun, which he brought to everyday life.This has made reading comprehensive books on Churchill daunting. The great work is his official multi-volume biography by Martin Gilbert and the fact-crammed one by Roy Jenkins, a British politician and biographer. The former is too big and the latter so detailed about the operations of the House of Commons that readers are turned off. William Manchester's biography of Churchill was more novel-like and, as a colleague of mine once said, “lighter on British minutiae.”It is the smaller books that are a joy for readers, who treasure taking their Churchillian history in delectable bites. Martin Gilbert realized this when he wrote “In Search of Churchill,” which is a book about how he wrote the official biography, and one of the most revealing books on Churchill.To enjoy Churchill, to cherish the foibles and the towering achievements of the incontestably great man, read around Churchill. There are many wonderful books in this cannon, for example “Churchill and Ireland” by Mary Bromage.So in this way of approaching a big subject obliquely, it is a joy to read Cita Stelzer’s “Dinner with Churchill” a superbly researched and told story of Churchill’s passion for dinner parties and his belief that in the convivial atmosphere of the well-lubricated social event, minds could be changed and information gained.Stelzer has added a shining star to the firmament of Churchill biography: the idea alone is brilliant. What a marvelous concept to write not about Churchill’s great struggles, but rather about the dinners that he used as a tool of statecraft in the time leading up to and through World War II. Churchill not only believed in dinner parties as a tool to advance his causes, such as trying in Tehran and at Yalta to save Poland from Stalin, but also as riotously enjoyable occasions.Churchill loved to talk, to stimulate ideas and disclosures through his own verbal bravado and so to gain intelligence. He also just liked to eat and to drink, and to celebrate the dinner party as a high art form. He ate a lot and had strong opinions about what should be served. He also drank a lot; maybe not as much as he liked people to believe he drank, but he always had a drink going. Usually he drank champagne or Scotch, starting at breakfast, and this was supplemented with fine wines, port and brandy at dinner.For me, the interesting thing about Churchill’s drinking was how he put it to use rather than being used by it. If he had been indifferent to its effects, one would assume that he would have drunk tea all day. By making jokes about his own consumption, Churchill was able to put his guests at ease and loosen their tongues.Stelzer, who has pursued previously unpublished diaries and spoken to those who were at some of his dinners, believes that Churchill’s drinking is overstated and that he remained very much in control. Martin Gilbert reports on how after long, well-lubricated dinners Churchill would retire and write for two hours. Although there have been many drunken writers, very few could write under the influence. Very few can pour out the golden words after the golden liquid.Be that as it may, Stelzer has captured all the elements of Churchill: his energy, his resilience, his attention to detail, his endless enthusiasm, his humanity, his joy, his baroque speech, his love of the British people, his sometimes petulance and occasional childishness.The reader is awed by how much fun Churchill could have had while prosecuting the greatest war yet raised.This is a wonderful book because if you know nothing about Churchill, you will love it; if you know a lot about Churchill, you will love it more. Through the dinners, Stelzer has served up a man in full. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Republican Graybeards: ‘Let Romney Be Romney’
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The scene is the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Reno, Nev. Enter Mitt Romney stage right, dressed as Rambo.
This typecasting goes with the territory for Republican presidential aspirants. None going back to Richard Nixon has been able to resist it because that is what the base wants. The base wants to believe that their man will bound on the world stage with a dagger between his teeth, swathedin belts of ammo, an assault weapon at the ready and a brace of grenades on his belt, ready to toss at anyone who does not toe the line
The most dangerous part of this metaphorical macho get-up for Romney is the one that is not seen. It is the script by the likes of John Bolton, George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, with editing by an assortment of Bush-era neo-cons, and some old-time Cold War warriors from the Bush and even Reagan era.
One of these men, a former secretary of defense, told me at the time of the Iraq invasion: “At least the Arabs will respect us now.”
In truth, the Arabs got quite a different lesson. It is one that all empires learn eventually: When you invade, you reveal yourself in ways you would rather not have.
One of the many sad lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions is how after brilliant military performances, we fell apart in both countries with inter-agency squabbling, a lack of planning and terrible naivety in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Agency forInternational Development. Worse, the CIA either did not know or was not heeded about conditions on the ground in either country. Is it possible that no one told George W. Bush about the Sunni dominance of the Shia majority in Iraq? But that is true. Money, lives and respect have been lost.
Conservative foreign-policy thinking is, it seems to me after decades of talking with conservatives about foreign policy, unduly influenced by two aspects of history, both British.
The first is the British Empire. I was born into it and spent the first 20 years of my life in one of its last embers, Rhodesia. Conservatives are right to admire much of the British Empire. It was a great system of trade, education and, much of the time, impartial justice.
It rested on two planks: military superiority and huge confidence in British superiority. Call it British exceptionalism. Its unwinding in Asia and Africa had different causes that led to the same result.
In Asia, and particularly in India, which then included what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh, the end came when the idea of the British as a kind of super-race with their “show” of ceremonies, from tea to parades, plus military and civil skills died. Indians started traveling to Britain, particularly in Victorian times, and were appalled at the squalor they found in British slums. These people were not that super.
In Africa, the end came because of a general sense after World War II that self-determination was the way of the future.
What hastened everything was not only a change in moral perception but also the proliferation of small arms.
Churchill famously said: “I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” But it was dissolving. Britain’s main loss, looking back, was to its pride.
The other British history lesson that is misread by conservative foreign-policy analysts in the United States is Munich.
Certainly when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper on Sept. 30, 1938 and declared, “peace for our time,” he was a hero. He was a hero because just two decades earlier, the British Empire had suffered 3.1 million casualties in World War I.
Churchill knew that this wound was open. He did not refer to the courage and sacrifice of that war when seeking courage and sacrifice in a new war. Also, Britain was not ready for war; rearmament, urged by Churchill, was still in its infancy.
Many old-line Republicans tell me that Romney is not a man who will be marched around by those who brought us Vietnam, Iran Contra and Iraq. He is smarter than that.
They believe that when the time comes, if it comes, President Romney will be Romney. Not Rambo. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Old New England Mills Where Profit and Beauty Entwined
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Across New England they stand as testaments to a time when the United States was a place of untrammeled confidence. The air was infinite, the water clean and abundant. At least for those in the ownership class, life was good and getting better. They are the great textile mills of New England; magnificent stone and brick structures, in their way as beautiful as basilicas, found along the streams of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Water, as a motive power source, drew them to the streams. Then they added steam, hence the mills’ magnificent smokestacks: sentries standing lonely guard over the memories of a more confident time. Mostly the mills are abandoned now, waiting a new use or the wrecker’s ball. Some have been saved by being converted into residential lofts and art centers. None will again make cloth, or provide thousands of jobs. Before critics and designers began linking form to function, the mill architects of New England, these designers of castles of production, did so, using great stonework and imaginative engineering. They are stunningly handsome, the way that great bridges are; the spirit ofenterprise encased in stone and brick lovingly. So when and why did we develop a penchant for ugly buildings? Was it the downside of cost accounting? Why are so many modern schools dumpy and deformed? Why must we put our children to study the classics in structures that implicitly deny the classics? Winston Churchill said, “We shape buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Indubitably. In the second half of the 20th century, did we hand human aspiration over to cost-cutters, put it through a calculating machine and turn it out bent and spindled? Must we learn to appreciate the economics of urban blight, the strips of chain outlets that presage our arrival in any town or city? One can weep now over the beauty of a mill in Rhode Island or a grain elevator on a Virginia farm. But will we weep in a century over the golden arches? Shed a tear for the mall? Swallow hard for Public School 19 somewhere? If the abandoned mills of the Industrial Revolution were just a little older, we would characterize them as archeological sites — perhaps U.N. World Heritage Sites — and assure their survival for generations to come to marvel at. Of course the history of New England industrialized weaving was not without strife and folly, greed and cruelty. The loom technology was smuggled out of Britain by industrial espionage, labor conditions wereterrible for much of the life of the mills, and labor unrest continued through all the days of the textile industry. Royal Mills in West Warwick, R.I., for example, the former home of Fruit of the Loom, was the scene of a bitter strike in 1922. 
Powering yesterday, charming today Incidentally, this giant mill has been preserved. In a stunning piece of imaginative restoration, it has been converted into 250 apartments, keeping the feel and preserving some of the artifacts of the old mill. It is a restoration that deserves global recognition for showing how the 19th century’s relics can find life in the 21st century, just as the restored power plant on the South Bank of the River Thames in London now houses the Tate Modern art gallery. When old beauty meets new high purpose, something thrilling happens. The trick in urban architecture is to remember the people who are outside of the buildings as well as inside; those who can glory in the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower by looking up as well as going in. For this full enjoyment, great architecture needs great public space. Would the skyscrapers of New York be as glorious without Central Park to view them from? Would the new "Shard," the extraordinary glass-clad building in London, the tallest in Europe, be as great if it could not be viewed from the city’s abundant public spaces? Yet urban design today, in an age of public austerity, makes no allowance for public space and has come accept the myth that economics are at odds with great city design. I am comforted to know that the great squares of London, the avenues of Paris and the mills of New England were built for profit. It can be done. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate - no responses
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The Case for Fixing Up America
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I’m asked with some frequency these days, what do I think the United States will look like in 25 years to 50 years? Underlying this question is a real concern that we’ve lost our way as a nation, that the best is behind us and a strong feeling that the generations to come won’t have it as good as we’ve had.
Actually, I think the United States will be fine. It’ll still be a world power, but not as dominant as it is today and was in the 20th century. I think we’ll still have one of the largest and most important economies in the world; that we’ll still be a powerhouse of invention; and that ourmovies, music and other entertainment forms will still dominate the globe.
American English will continue to be the international means of communication. Sorry Britain, there’s no license fee on language.
A rosy picture, eh? Not quite.
The second, and maybe the more important question, is what sort of country will the United States be to live in? This picture is less rosy.
First, we’re dividing into a country of the super rich and the burgeoning working poor living unpleasantly. The movement of quality manufacturing jobs in the auto and steel industries to the South tells part of that story. The high-wage jobs of Michigan and the unionized North — jobs that pay about $35 an hour — to the union-free auto plants and factories of the South, which pay $14 an hour, is a harbinger of the future. Can less be more?
If the United States is going to have told hold down its wages, then we should fix the living space; that means the infrastructure. It’s a mess and it’ll take decades to bring it up to the standards of much of the rest of the world.
We need better roads (less time in traffic), repaired bridges, sewers, water systems and public transportation. We also should fix the parks — state and national — and build pedestrian areas where we can enjoy the great natural beauty of our rivers and woodlands. London and Paris and Vienna make their rivers places of beauty and recreation. New York runs highways along its rivers — highways where it should have cafes. Los Angeles has enclosed its streams in concrete.
London has refurbished Brunel's masterpiece of design St. Pancras railway station to accommodate the new 200-mph trains that will whisk you to Paris in a little over two hours. Both the station and the trains are great achievements; achievements that can be enjoyed by traveler and visitor alike.
By contrast Union Station in Washington, D.C., a masterpiece in its day, is a mess. The tracks are inadequate. The station seating is inadequate, broken and mostly an afterthought. The restrooms are inadequate and dirty. The majesty of the station has been destroyed by tawdry retailers and half-finished repairs. Decay permeates the place — maybe to prepare the passengers for the disreputable taxis outside.
What an introduction to the capital of the free world. However, if you’ve just arrived on Amtrak, you might already be so dispirited you won't notice.
Likewise, the nation's schools need to be renovated. Leaky buildings seem more designed to prepare students for a lifetime of failure and decline than for a life of pride and accomplishment. “We make buildings and they make us,” Winston Churchill said.
The case for fixing the nation's infrastructure is compelling. But it does not compel in Congress. Congress is hell-bent to hurt the infrastructure with cost cutting-measures that will — as has happened in Britain and Spain — as likely as not add to the deficit rather than reducing it.
A more believable use of the government's resources might be to start fixing America by diverting some of the defense budget to sprucing up and repairing the nation, yielding results in a time frame of 25 to 50 years.
The story of another Churchill saying goes like this:
Churchill was walking in the garden of his beloved home, Chartwell, when he summoned the gardener and said, “I want you to plant an oak tree here.”
The gardener, looking to Churchill and seeing a man approaching 90, said, “But sir, it’ll take a hundred years to grow.”
“Well, you had better plant it now, hadn't you?” averred Churchill.
Quite so. The future awaits. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Prime Ministers and Publishers: An Unholy Alliance
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Lord Northcliffe
British newspaper publishers love prime ministers. Conversely, prime ministers love publishers. That is, if the publisher in question owns a national newspaper with a big circulation (often in the millions).
You cannot get into the club if you only own, say, the Lewisham Borough News. This is an exclusive club for those who wield real, palpable power: Witness the scandal of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in Britain today.
The club has been operating for more than 200 years. But it was at the turn of the 20th century, with ever-expanding voter rolls, that the intimacy became really intense. Victorian prime ministers had to put up with editors and owners of journals of opinion, like The Spectator or Punch, and sometimes The Times.
Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his Liberal rival, William Gladstone, bargained with the media of their day. But these did not sway huge swathes of the electorate in the way that was to come. General education produced millions of avid readers and improved printing technology, notably the Linotype machine, made large mass- circulation newspapers possible.
Two brothers, Vere Harmsworth and his more colorful sibling, Alfred, were the first big-time press barons. In time, they were rewarded with titles: Alfred became Lord Northcliffe and Vere, Lord Rothermere.
It is unlikely that all of the prime ministers — and all of them had to deal with the press barons — really liked the intimacy. These men mostly had huge egos, daunting agendas, and their friendship always came with a price. So, of course, did the friendship of the politicians. They sought support in elections and freedom from scrutiny in governing.
Part of the price was usually the peerage, but then there were other considerations. Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian, wanted prime ministers to endorse his campaign for “Empire Free Trade.” Others had other interests; but the tariffs on newsprint, the subsidy of cable traffic (which made getting news from overseas cheaper), and subsidized postal rates for newspapers and periodicals were common to all.
Northcliffe lectured World War I Prime Minister Lloyd George on how to run the war — and everything else. Beaverbrook treated Lloyd George’s successor, Bonar Law, a fellow Canadian, as his surrogate in government and campaigned for him relentlessly.
After that, Beaverbrook turned his demonic energies to supporting Winston Churchill — even though Churchill was at a low period during much of the1930s. Not only was the man who was to be Britain’s greatest prime minister out of power, he was also out of money.
The newspaper proprietors, in surprising unity, came to Churchill’s aid. Churchill boasted that he made 1 million pounds from his articles in one year and retired his debts. That was an astounding amount of money, and it reflected the fact that the newspaper bosses were overpaying him enormously, according the historian A.J.P. Taylor.
The leading paymasters were Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, and Brendan Bracken, the Irishman who owned the Financial Times. In Churchill they saw potential, a lively contributor, and someone who gave the best dinner parties in England. Bracken even encouraged rumor that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son, although he knew this was nonsense.
The cultivating of prime ministers was an ecumenical affair. Cecil Harmsworth King, who ran Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1960s, lectured Prime Minister Harold Wilson on everything, including his own somewhat ridiculous idea that Britain needed a bipartisan national government — as in wartime — to get it out of his its financial difficulties. Rupert Murdoch went all out for Margaret Thatcher. But he turned against her successor, John Major, and supported the Labor Party and Tony Blair. Gordon Brown failed to get Murdoch’s nod, but current Prime Minister David Cameron did. The rest, as they say, is history.
When television came along, the proprietors had a new incentive to cultivate prime ministers: licenses. The big winner here was the least pushy of the publishers, Roy Thomson, another Canadian, who owned The Times. He got the license to run commercial television in Scotland and became Lord Thomson. Like Murdoch, Thomson did not crave the company of prime ministers. He was happy to let others carry his requirements to the men in power. Murdoch has used various intermediaries, including the American economist and free-market ideologue Irwin Stelzer.
Is it all over now? Will prime ministers shun the company of media barons?
Will the sun rise in the East tomorrow? – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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President Obama’s Troubles
May 20th, 2013
Guests Brian Kelly, U.S. News & World Report; Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News; Joe Davidson, The Washington Post
The Future of Drones
May 13th, 2013
Guests Claude Salhani, journalist and Amitai Etzioni, The George Washington University
Europe; its Problems and its Promise
May 6th, 2013
Guests Annette Heuser, Executive Director, Bertelsmann Foundation; Darren Gersh, Journalist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies
What’s Ado in Washington
April 29th, 2013
Guests Joe Madison, SiriusXM Radio
A Discussion of the Anti-terrorism College at the National Defense University
April 22nd, 2013
Guests Michael Bell and Sebastian Gorka, College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University