For as long as heroes are written about, Winston Churchill will be written about. The proportions are all abundantly there. He was everything. The soldier who loved poetry. The historian who loved to paint. The diplomat who thrived on indiscretion. The patriot with international vision. The orderly man given to electric spontaneities. The man who flunked everything at school and then kept a generation of scholars busy in terpreting his work and his words. The loyal party man who could cross the aisle and join the opposition when principle called. The Tory traditionalist revered in his old age by the neoteric levelers.
He was a very great man, and it is the crowning pity under the circumstances that he did not have that final ounce of strength to deliver Europe from the mess in which he left it after the great war to which he, as much as anyone else, committed the entire world. It is ungrateful to say of the dead, particularly of those few among the dead who were so distinguished in their lifetime, that they owed us more than they gave us. But Churchill is as much responsible as anyone else in our time for calling forth exacting judgments. The nobility of his utterances galvanized us to believe in the final possibilities of individual human beings, of statesmen, and of nations. His great orations during the war which he told us he was waging, and believed that he waged, in behalf of righteousness, require the observer to apply the highest standards to his life and goals.
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