What a Free Man Can Be
Remembering Winston Churchill, for all time.

Chris Matthews is the host of CNBC's Hardball
May 12-13, 2001

EDITOR'S NOTE: On April 19, 2001, Hardball host Chris Matthews delivered a lecture on Winston Churchill at George Washington University's Churchill Center. As speech's go, it was pure Matthews: tough, direct, and rising to the level of its subject. Matthews's lecture — delivered here on NRO exclusively and in its entirety — serves as a concise and energetic chronicle of one of history's greatest men.

here but for the grace of God," he said of one rival, a self-righteous socialist, "goes God. He called another

Printer-Friendly E-mail a Friend

opponent " a modest man with much to be modest about." Another: "a sheep in sheep's clothing." "You are my fifth favorite actor," he said to a distinguished British star. "The first four are the Marx Brothers!" An equally sharp-tongued woman member of parliament once said: "If I were your wife, I'd put poison in your coffee. "If I were your husband," he said, "I'd drink it."

Who would I most want on Hardball? More than William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, James Carville, Jesse Ventura, Bill or Hillary Clinton, or Barbra Streisand? It would be this British gentleman of the old school who could match wits with all of them at once.

Winston Churchill said he liked a man "who grins when he fights." He could do both.

From the start, he was his own man. In the Sudan, in 1898, he rode in the last cavalry charge of the British army. He was a war correspondent in the Boer War. Captured by the enemy, he escaped over a latrine wall, hid himself on a train, and made it to Mozambique — all the time with a price on his head. Back in Cape Town he won a commission in the army and headed back to the same spot where he'd been captured.

Heading up the British navy in World War I, he attempted an end run through the Dardenelles. The goal was to take Turkey out of the war and put an end to the bloodshed of the trenches. When the attempt failed — and he took the hit for it — Churchill re-joined the army and headed for the trenches himself.

The man never quit.

When he ran for parliament the first time — in 1899 — he lost. When he got back from the fighting in South Africa in 1900, the first thing he did was run again and win. When his Tory party started pushing hard on protectionism, Churchill, a free trader, quit the party, walked across the floor, and joined the liberals.

After World War I, with socialism on the rise and the Liberal party unable to challenge it on the left, our man lost three straight elections. Thanks to the first of those defeats, plus some emergency surgery, he found himself, as he said, "without a seat, without an office, and without an appendix."

In winning back his seat, he quit the liberals, declared war on the socialists, and rejoined the conservatives. It's one thing to "rat," he said, it's another to "re-rat." You got to love this guy.

Getting the Big Ones Right
He loved to paint. Oddly enough, this man of action's greatest joy was to sit for hours in a field painting the scene before him. "When I get to heaven," he said, "I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting and so get to the bottom of it."

He also liked to write, not least about himself nor his accomplishments. "I am immersed in Winston's biography," a senior colleague said of Churchill's book on World War I, "disguised as a history of the universe."

A classic Englishman, he grew up in perpetual awe of his wild, radiant American mother. When FDR invited him to address a joint meeting of the Congress after America had joined the war, he said that had it been the other way around, had his mother been English and his father American, he might have gotten into the chamber "on my own."

Although he was wrong about many things, he was right about the big ones. By my count he lost a half dozen elections, including the cruelist of all when the war in Europe had been won. He despised the communists who loved the word "democracy," but never risked a free election.

"Democracy is the worst form of government," he is famous for saying, "except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." I like this better: "Democracy is not some harlot in the street to be picked up by some man with a Tommy gun. Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play, and freedom, and a respect for other people."

It makes me happy just to read about this man, to know he was of us, that one of us was Winston Churchill. Of course, he probably drank too much. He most certainly lived the life of an aristocrat, never, ever, venturing into a kitchen or traveling, even to war, without a valet. But he paid for that aristocratic lifestyle by himself, through an endless stream of writing and lectures. He made his living, as he put it, by his "pen" and by his "tongue."

One of my favorite portraits, given to us by William Manchester, is Churchill, climbing the stairs at midnight, leaving his dinner guests to their cigars and brandies, as he went off to dictate and edit well into the morning. A lot of what he wrote was to pay the bills, hack writing. At other times, an incredible number of times, he wrote grand, multi-volume works on his ancester Marlborough, his father Randolph, World War I, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, and, finally, of World War II, an account that led to his receiving the Nobel Prize.

As I said, how can you not be impressed with this man? Winston Churchill would have been one of the great men of his age even if he had he not done what he did. What he did was save the honor of the 20th century.

During those early years of the nightmare — I'm talking about 1933 to 1938 — Churchill was right about the Nazi threat when nearly everyone, especially those conservatives closest to him politically, were wrong.

From the time Hitler came to power, he saw the truth of what was happening and dared to say so. He saw Germany building its military machine and its concentration camps. When war came, he had the credentials to face down Adolf Hitler, to say Britain would "never" surrender. The man who spotted the fire got to lead the brigade. His forty years as a fighter especially, when he fought all alone in the 1930s, constituted his job application.

Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, for whom I served a number of years, said something to his Senate staff the night he won his final re-election. "The only reason to be in politics is to be out there all alone and be proven right." Churchill. Winston Churchill. He personified that notion.

Facing the Crocodile
In 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, few in the British elite were inclined to stop him. Part of the reason was a pacifism born out of World War I. Students in the Oxford Union voted 275 to 153 "to refuse in any circumstances to fight for King and Country."

Hearing of the "King and Country" vote, Churchill went to Oxford and stuck it to the students: "I think of Germany with its splendid, clear-eyed youth wandering forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible of weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland." He said they must have been cheered to hear what the best and brightest of British youth had to say.

He spoke of what was happening to the Jews. He warned of what Hitler would do to the rest of European Jewry if given the chance to extend his persecutions and pogroms to other countries. In 1935, Hitler renewed military conscription in Germany and said the Luftwaffe was now the match of the Royal Air Force. But when Churchill warned that the Germans were building 150 planes a month, he was accused of "scare-mongering."

Again, he never quit.

"We cannot afford to see Nazidom in all its present phase of cruelty and intolerance, with all its hatreds and its gleaming weapons paramount in Europe," he said. He warned that "side by side with the training grounds of the new armies, concentration camps pockmark the German soil." He wondered how any country could punish men who had fought in its defense, men and women "whose only crime was that their parents had brought them into this world."

In 1936, Hitler marched his armies into the Rhineland, an area demilitarized after World War I. Typically, he quickly offered to meet with the British to discuss any outstanding differences. Adolf Hitler was always for "peace."

British prime minister Stanley Baldwin told his country it had nothing to fear from Germany. Baldwin said Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that he was headed eastward. Why should the British care if the Nazis grabbed a few countries then ended up fighting the Russians, as he put it, the "Bolshies." Churchill told his country to think of what Hitler was doing to the Jews. "It is a horrible thing that a race of people should be attempted to be blotted out of the society in which they have been born," he said.

In January of 1937, Britain's new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered to appease Hitler by giving him some colonies in Africa. Churchill's judgment: "This has been a good week for dictators."

Churchill's prediction: "The day will come when at some point or another, you will have to take a stand, and I pray to God when that day comes that we may not find, through an unwise policy, that we have to make that stand alone." That was in February 1937. A month later, Hitler marched into a cheering Austria.

The following year, at Munich, Chamberlain handed over much of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The British people thought him a hero. Again bucking public opinion, Churchill called the give-away a "total and unmitigated defeat."

"And do not suppose that this is the end," he said on the floor of the House of Commons. "This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom — as in the olden times."

On August 8, 1939, in a broadcast to the United States, Churchill mocked Hitler's claim that he was only grabbing land in self-defense. "After all, the dictators must train their soldiers," he said. "They could scarcely do less in common prudence, when the Danes, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Albanians and, of course, the Jews may leap out upon them at any moment and rob them of their living space."

That September 1, of 1939, claiming Germany had been the one invaded, Hitler invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. Churchill, returned to this post as First Lord of the Admiralty, broadcast to America his view of those countries who remained neutral: "Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last."

In May of 1940, Churchill became prime minister on the very day, the tenth of the month, that Hitler began his blitz across Europe.

Churchill's Hour
Just two years ago, I was here at the George Washington University bookstore signing copies of Hardball, and I came across Five Days in London, May 1940 by historian John Lukacs. The picture I now paint of what happened on May 28 of that year I owe to him.

Twenty-five men sat around a table. They were the members of the British cabinet not involved directly in the war. They had come to hear what their new leader of just two and a half weeks had to say about their country's frightening situation. Adolf Hitler, the man so many had tried to ignore, had overrun Holland, Denmark, and Belgium. France, England's only ally, was about to sign an armistice that would expose the Jews and other targets to the workings of the SS. A quarter-million British troops, the country's entire army, was stranded in the French port city of Dunkirk.

At this critical moment, Winston Churchill confronted the surrounding Cabinet with the details of the fierce fighting being waged on the French coast. He declared that England had a moral duty to fight Hitler, even it had to go it alone. "Of course," he said, "whatever happens in Dunkirk, we shall fight on."

It wasn't a speech in Parliament or for broadcast, merely a statement of fact. What Churchill never expected is that every person in that room stood and cheered him. Writing later of that meeting, he said he was "sure that every Member was ready to be killed quite soon and have his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in." It is impossible to know the outcome of this past century had Churchill not been in that room, if he had not been at all.

There is something Churchill said about his ally, Charles de Gaulle, which rings more true for him. As the French were about to capitulate in 1940, General de Gaulle, who was serving as a liaison between the two governments, jumped aboard the last British plane as it taxied down the runway. For this, the collaborationist Marshall Petain charged him with treason. He was tried and sentenced to death. Churchill saw things differently. He knew that the great French general and future president understood, as he did, that the battle just waged and lost was part of a world war that promised a far different result. By deciding so boldly to fight on, Churchill said de Gaulle "carried with him, in this small aeroplane, the honour of France."

The same could be said of the man who led Great Britain to its "Finest Hour."

Churchill told the world the truth when it didn't want to hear it. He fought when others would have quit. He personified the very best in politics. He was out there all alone and was proven right. But most of all, he knew why he was there.

A Canadian pollster once told me there are three elements to political success: motive, passion, and spontaneity. To lead you must know where you're leading. If a politician cannot tell you on the spot why he or she is there, they shouldn't be there. Passion. If a politician lacks true feeling about his country and his cause, we must wonder why he seeks office in the first place. Finally, there's spontaneity. If he were to go the White House today, Churchill would have wanted to bring his cigar, a lit cigar.

He would not have been at home among so many of today's politicians who don't make a move that has not been first tested before a focus group, what the pros call "peasants under glass," where every position is cleared by pollsters then are scripted for fashion and political correctitude. Churchill didn't worry what his critics thought, didn't ask what someone else's definition of "is" was. Where other politicians cling to the office, he was prepared to fling it away, to risk popular rejection, which came to him on so many cruel occasions, rather than be the person he was not.

He knew why he was there. He made sure he could do the job before he took it. He wrote his own speeches because no one else but him had the feeling, the knowledge, the passion to write for Winston Churchill.

The goal of World War II, he said, was "to revive the status of man." He wanted to raise up the individual beyond the reach of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world. His life is a guide not just to great leadership. He stands as an example of what a free man can be.