Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the Ford Forum on January 30, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
Recently historians from many nations commemorated the birth 150 years ago of one of the most remarkable political figures in modern times. Before his death in 1965 at the age of ninety, Winston Churchill had come to be acclaimed by many as the “Greatest Living Englishman” and the greatest man of the twentieth century. He was revered as the indomitable statesman and orator who, by his words and his courage, inspired his nation to persevere in a battle for what he called Christian civilization and to emerge victorious in the most gigantic war the world has ever known.
Interest in Churchill has not abated since his death nearly sixty years ago. More than a thousand books have now been written about him. Nearly every facet of his life has been the subject of study.
Churchill himself, one might say, led by example. During his life, he published more than three dozen works of his own, some of them autobiographical, not counting a posthumously published, eight-volume compilation of his speeches between 1897 and 1963 that runs to nearly 9,000 pages.
Nowhere—outside of Great Britain—have Churchill’s words and deeds attracted more attention than in the country he came to call the “Great Republic”: the United States of America. This was not happenstance. His father was a British aristocrat, but his mother was an American, and from boyhood, Churchill was fascinated by the history of his mother’s native land. His acute awareness that he was “half American by blood”—as he put it—helps to explain both his lifelong curiosity about America and many Americans’ curiosity about him.
In 1895, shortly before he turned 21, Churchill visited the United States—specifically, New York City—for the first time. He was on his way to Cuba, and he stayed only eight days, but it was long enough for him to sense the vitality of the awakening giant in the New World. America was “a very great country,” he told his brother. The young traveler’s curiosity very quickly turned to love.
In 1900, Churchill returned to the United States for the second of ultimately sixteen visits during his lifetime. This time, he came for a lecture tour. Since his first visit, he had served in combat as a British soldier in India, Sudan, and South Africa; had written five books about his adventures; and had been elected to the British Parliament. During the Second Boer War in South Africa, he had even been captured by the Boers. His sensational and harrowing escape from their prison camp won international headlines. By the time he reached America in late 1900, he was probably the most famous young man in the world.
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Churchill’s lecture tour was a success. American audiences were charmed by his verve, wit, and oratorical ability. He widened his acquaintance with American elites, a process he developed assiduously in the years to come. And most significantly, he began to propound a theme that he reiterated for the rest of his life: the desirability of what he called “the fullest, closest, intimacy, accord and association” of Great Britain and the United States. “I am proud that I am the product of an Anglo-American alliance,” he declared humorously in 1900. But he was not really joking. The cultivation of what he eventually called a “special relationship” between the U.S. and the United Kingdom was at the heart of his geopolitical vision.
Churchill’s second voyage to the United States inaugurated the first phase of the Churchill-America relationship. It was a phase that lasted all the way to the 1930s. During his successful lecture tours, he did not avoid mentioning current events and sometimes angered Americans who did not share his enthusiasm for the British empire. But fundamentally, before World War II, American perceptions of Churchill were derived not primarily from his fame as a British politician but from the endless cascade of scintillating books and essays that he produced and circulated in the United States. Before he died, his articles appeared in more than 40 American magazines.
This first phase—featuring Churchill as a celebrity and literary entertainer—yielded in 1940 to a new phase, during which, for most Americans, he became a hero. Defiant, courageous, and unyielding, he was easily the most eloquent of all the leaders of nations during World War II. In the later words of President John F. Kennedy, Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”
Churchill’s effort was immensely aided by the growing availability of radio in the United States. During the war, countless Americans heard some of his greatest addresses by radio and were inspired. One such listener was a young soldier named Caspar Weinberger, who later became President Ronald Reagan’s stalwart Secretary of Defense and a tireless champion of Churchill’s legacy. Another was the future American President, Richard Nixon.
Churchill’s reputation as the indispensable leader who saved his government and nation from total defeat in 1940 was reinforced by Churchill himself in his monumental, six-volume history titled The Second World War, published between 1948 and 1954. It contained two million words. Widely excerpted in newspapers and magazines in the United States, the volumes were a sensational bestseller. A few years later, he completed a long-dormant, four-volume History of the English Speaking Peoples, another tremendous bestseller in the United States.
In 1963, for the first time in American history, the United States Congress voted to make a citizen of another country—Churchill—an honorary citizen of the United States. It was a gesture that must have mightily pleased its recipient, the foremost advocate of the Anglo-American “special relationship.”
Less than two years later, Winston Churchill died. Of the tributes to him that poured in from every direction, one may be of special interest to readers of this essay. It came from Russell Kirk, the distinguished American conservative scholar and native of Michigan. Kirk extolled Churchill as an “aristocrat of genius” who for “sound sense as a statesman…had no equal in our time.” Few of Kirk’s fellow Americans would have disagreed.
Soon after World War II ended, American perceptions of Churchill entered a third phase. No longer perceived simply as a heroic wartime leader, he was increasingly perceived as a prophet and a sage. If Churchill’s magnificent “Finest Hour” speech of June 18, 1940 was the single most consequential address of his career, arguably the second most consequential was his address in America on March 18, 1946, in which he solemnly told his audience, which included President Truman, that an “iron curtain” had “descended” across central Europe and that the Soviet Union—our recent wartime ally—was behaving in a dangerously threatening manner. He implored the United States and United Kingdom to work in “fraternal association” and unite with other democracies in opposition to Soviet expansion.
Churchill’s dramatic appeal shocked and outraged many on the American Left, who accused him of poisoning relations with the Soviet Union and risking a new world war. But within a few weeks, thanks in considerable part to Churchill’s timely warning, American public opinion swung overwhelmingly in favor of an invigorated Anglo-American alliance in the face of the Soviet threat. Once again Churchill, with his gripping rhetoric, had helped to galvanize the West.
In the ensuing Cold War against the Communists, Churchill became for many Americans a symbol of farsighted resistance to tyranny. His scathing critique of British appeasement of Hitler at Munich evolved into a history lesson that a generation of American political leaders absorbed.
Some of them even tried to emulate Churchill. John F. Kennedy, who as a teenager voraciously read Churchill’s multivolume series The World Crisis and other books, was notable in this respect. In 1959 and 1960 Kennedy deliberately based his campaign for the presidency on Churchillian themes.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, who liked to quote Churchill, formed a friendship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, herself a devotee of Churchill. Their close political alliance seemed to epitomize the Anglo-American “special relationship” that Churchill had so persistently sought.
After the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001, invocations of Churchill multiplied in American politics. President George W. Bush, who declared himself a “great admirer” of Churchill, kept a bust of the great man on display in his office and publicly praised him for refusing to surrender or compromise during “an hour of peril.” Significantly, among the most ardent supporters of Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East was a faction on the American Right known as neoconservatives, for many of whom Churchill was a political lodestar.
The continuing American esteem for Churchill has deeper roots than party politics, however. Since his death, there has arisen among the “English-speaking peoples” what has been called a “Churchill industry”, in which historians, filmmakers, and commentators visit and revisit every aspect of his long life. The locus classicus for Churchill scholarship is the eight-volume, so-called Official Biography begun by his son Randolph and completed by Martin Gilbert in 1986. Much reviewed and lauded in the United States, it is the longest biography ever written. The most devoted promoter of Churchill scholarship and commemoration is the International Churchill Society (as it is now called), founded in 1968. It has many American members. Its quarterly magazine, Finest Hour, and its much-visited website, along with the Churchill Project initiated by Hillsdale College in Michigan, attest to the esteem that Churchill’s legacy still commands among many Americans.
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Here I call your attention to the noted political philosopher Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an eminent scholar in the United States. The day after Churchill died, Professor Strauss eulogized him in his classroom at the University of Chicago as a statesman of superlative excellence and “political greatness” whose life political scientists everywhere should meticulously study. Since then, some of Strauss’s students (and their students), all commonly called Straussians, have taken up this challenge and have become tenacious advocates for Churchill’s record and legacy. Notable among these was the late political scientist Harry Jaffa. Today the influential Claremont Review of Books, founded by some of his students, is a citadel of scholarship and commentary sympathetic to Churchill.
Not everyone, however, who studies Churchill walks away as an enthusiast. In recent decades, in the United States and Great Britain, his record has come under critical and at times, ferocious attack from revisionist historians and their allies in the media. On the Left, he has been portrayed as a racist, reactionary egotist, and imperialist whose judgment, in politics, was frequently and terribly flawed. Often, these revisionists have denounced what they derisively call the “Churchill cult”—especially the hawkish, neoconservative Churchillians whom they hold partly responsible for President Bush’s unpopular war in Iraq.
On the American Right, revisionists like the libertarian scholar Ralph Raico and the paleoconservative writer Patrick Buchanan—among others—have disparaged Churchill’s record comprehensively—most notably his fateful decision in 1940 to fight on, against all odds, after the fall of France. What he should have done, the rightwing revisionists appear to believe, was to acknowledge Britain’s defeat and accept Hitler’s offers of a negotiated peace. Then, presumably, Hitler would have left Britain and its empire alone, turned east, and destroyed the Soviet Union. Instead, the rightwing revisionists charge, Churchill stubbornly continued a war he could never win alone—at the ultimate cost, these revisionists allege, of “his country’s greatness.”
This is not the place to analyze the rebuttals that other Churchill scholars have given to these critiques. Suffice it to say that it is my impression that the Churchill revisionists—at least in America—are marginal in the history profession and that among Americans generally he remains an iconic figure.
And that is how he will likely remain for a long time to come. Just weeks ago, in conjunction with the sesquicentennial of Churchill’s birth, the Netflix streaming service released a massive, four-hour documentary film titled “Churchill at War.” It is one of many acts of remembrance at this time that will likely enhance his reputation for a new generation.
A famous historian once remarked that history is “an argument without end.” In the lengthening argument about Winston Churchill’s life and legacy, I suspect that, on the truly essential points, this “aristocrat of genius” will continue to emerge victorious.
*This essay is a slightly edited version of a lecture delivered at a Winston Churchill Sesquicentennial conference organized by the Otto von Habsburg Foundation and held in Budapest, Hungary in November 2024.
Image of Sir Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh on Wikipedia
