A Brilliant and Powerful Personality Call to the Nation

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23618, 30 March 1940, Page 1 (Supplement)

A Brilliant and Powerful Personality

Call to the Nation

In liis first parliamentary election at Oldham, the band used to play "See the Conqu'ring Hero Conies" whenever he stepped out on to the platform. That was in 1899, when he was just back from South Africa. He has been through a tremendous career since then, has held almost every great cabinet office there is to hold except those of prime minister and foreign secretary, has written many books and made many speeches, been in and out of favour several times over, and belonged to both the traditional political parties in turn. But to-day, when ho is sixty-five, they still, duchesses and taxi drivers, call him "Winston," just as they did when ho was twenty-five. The sheer brilliance of Mr. Churchill's personality and talents has been the chief handicap in his career. Your ordinary British politician, arriving at cabinet rank by means of steady application to routine party politics, feels ill at ease in the presence of such birds of paradise as Mr. Churchill. The distrust felt for Mr. Churchill by the Baldwin-Bonar Law-Chamberlain type arises from this acute discomfort: he is altogether too much for them. Great Brain

English politicians can accept any social grandee if he is stupid enough; or they can welcome the cleverest arrival from outside the inner circle; or they can make good use of talents, even of great talents, so long as there is some decorous effort at concealment. But to have all this united in one person, and a person who never made any effort to conceal his own talent, is too much. Only men who were themselves very exceptionally gifted in mind and character, such as Mr. Lloyd George and Lord Birkenhead, have been wholehearted appreciators of Mr. Churchill.

tended to boil over into interference with other ministers' departments. It was said that the Prime Minister did not feel that he could control a cabinet in which "Winston" was at liberty to turn loose the artillery of his wit. This may be the simplest explanation. And yet I remember one occasion on which 1 saw Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill together for a whole evening, and I did not discern any inability on the part of "L.G." to cope with his younger friend's exhuberant gifts. In fact, as 1 remember it, Mr. Churchill was deferential to his highly-esteemed ex-chief throughout the evening, and if Mr. Lloyd George had the slightest sense of being at a loss for words, I failed to perceive it. Men of this calibre are not "afraid" of each other's "cleverness," but neither can they help being a little overwhelming, a little disquieting, to lesser mortals. Mr. Churchill has realised this by now —although no doubt protesting in his heart of hearts against the injustice of it —and ho does make determined efforts not to shine too brightlyaided, in this as in all things, by his innate kindliness and humanity, his immense bonhomie. His wit is terrible,

"Come, then! Let us to the task, to the battle, and the toil. Each to our parts, each to our station. "Fill the Aimics, rule the air, pour out the munitions, strangle the U-boats, sweep the mines, plough the land, build the ships, guard the streets, succour the wounded, uplift the downcast, and honour the brave. "Let us go forward together in all parts of the 'Empire, in all parts of this island. There is not a Week, nor a day, nor an hour to be lost." —Mr. Winston Churchill.

IF Mr. Neville Chamberlain should retire, the logical choice for the leadership of Britain's war cabinet would be Mr. Winston Churchill, writes the noted American author Mr. Vincent Sheean. "Winston," they call him. Almost anybody you might meet in London, duchess or taxi driver, calls this extraordinary man by his Christian name. It may be the familiarity of many years,, since few public men have been so constantly celebrated over such a long period. But there is more in it' than that. There is a kind of unconscious tribute to a brilliant and powerful personality which has seemed—like a royalty—to belong to, the family of the whole nation.

There is a story in which Stanley Baldwin is quoted as saying, after allowing himself to be overruled at a cabinet meeting: "Well, I had made up my mind, but then Winston came along with his hundred-horsepower brain, and what was I to do?" For years it used to be a commonplace remark, among Englishmen interested in politics, that "Winston was too clever." They would put it thus: "Oh, yes, Winston is brilliant, very brilliant, but I don't think we want him; he is too clever."

When the foreign policy of the British Government changed last March from "appeasement" to a firm line of defence against Hitler, the first thought of most people in politics was that Mr. Churchill would be called upon to return to the government. Throughout the summer the report was current, died and revived again with unquenchable obstinacy, ft was said that the Prime Minister and one or two of his colleagues were against admitting Mr. Churchill to the cabinet because his personality was "too powerful." and

The cleverness might have been forgiven, and the impetuous manner, the Napoleonic cavalry charge of language, might have been accepted, if all this had not been allied with so many other advantages. But Mr. Churchill's good looks in. youth, his eloquence at all times, his unequalled command of language, his immense social position at birth, his relationships and friendships with all the great, the privileged, the royal and the celebrated, have made him a phenomenon so brightly coloured in the general day-by-dav life of English politics that your ordinary routine politician is, quite simply, afraid of I him. I

Winston has been Winston since his first youth. It may be, perhaps, because he made his, appearance on the scene of public interest as an exceptionally picturesque young man, the soldier-war correspondent who had fought in Cuba, India, Egypt and South Africa, the dashing young hussar whose mother was then a famous society beauty, whose late father had been a cabinet minister, whose grandfather was a duke. He stepped on the stage in somewhat , romantic guise, like a hero of Disraeli brought up-to-date, end the public made an idol of him vpry early. 4

"The Whole British Empire Trusts Winston Vital Agent in STRIKING TRIBUTE BY NOTED AMERICAN AUTHORITY ON WORLD AFFAIRS

but he controls it; his knowledge, supported by a prodigious memory, is so great that lie has most people at a disadvantage, yet he does not press it; the things lie could say and do are selectively administered not only by manners but by loyalties, which are great. In his younger days he was sometimes actuated by the desire for fame, which in his character amounted to a passion, or by the kindred desire for power. But fame and power he has had abundantly, and for many years past. What remains of those great political appetites which motivate young men is transformed, in Winston Churchill at sixty-five, into the single passion of patriotism. To that final passion he appears willing to sacrifice not. only personal ambitions but also the hallconscious yet powerful class interests and prejudices which have confused and weakened oilier politicians. By this he has risen, at the end of forty years of public life, to a position which is better than any actual office, in that men and women of all parties trust him to wage this war of life and death straight through to victory. It is a strange turn of the irony of circumstance that Winston, who was for so many years "too clever to be trusted," is now the man whom the whole Empire trusts to preserve it.

i have had some acquaintance witii Mr. Churchill at intervals during the past four years, and realise very well how one's attitude toward him can undergo revision. At first, I, like most others who have come near him, was frankly afraid. His personality is an army with banners; your first impulse is to get out of his way. His slightest sentence has weight because the words seem chosen from an altogether exceptional arsenal of words with altogether exceptional care. He lias a huge vocabulary and no hesitation in using it according to the dictates of his own instinct and experience. This sometimes means a flood of words, sometimes the merest laconic summing up, but there is never a word thrown away meaningless. Our modern way of talk is not like that —whether we are English or Americans, it could seldom be written down just as it is spoken; most of it would be trivial, redundant and very dull in print. Mr. Churchill's ordinary speech is on an intellectual and literary level which is bound to intimidate less accomplished talkers. But after a while you begin to notice that its main characteristic is a vital interest in the subject he is talking about. He never "makes" conversation.

as a schoolboy when the spirit moves him. Last winter he took great delight in the new-fashioned dance called "Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree," which he learned with great seriousness, tongue in cheek; it is a sort of hop, skip and jump, and to see Mr. Churchill doing it with mock solemnity was a proof that he will never lose the impishnessi of his youth. A few years ago, when the game of inah jongg was a universal craze, Mr. Churchill went with some friends to a performance of Shaw's play "Saint Joan." At the moment in that drama when Dunois stands on the river bank and poetically declaims "West Wind, West AVind, West Wind!" Mr. Churchill —who was perhaps bored—called victoriously from the stalls: "Pong!" In such schoolboy impulses arises much of the charm of his company, the unpredictability of his lighter talk, the general sparkle of his good humour. Nobody has a graver gravity, a more profound solemnity about solemn things, but he still knows how to have fun like the subaltern that he once was. In all these respects, as well as in the more important ones, "Winston" stands in the sharpest contrast to his protagonist in this war, the fanatical, _ teetotaller, vegetarian, neurotic Adolf Hitler. One is a rounded man—in more senses than one —who enjoys life to the full and wishes to preserve its freedom and variety for his people; the other is a haunted shell of a creature who would immolate the whole universe, if need be, to his adolescent dreams of revenge and fulfilment.

No Interest in Scandal If conversation is taking place on a subject which is of no interest to him, he remains silent. But almost anything in politics, literature or journalism interests him keenly, and almost any ordinary event of the day—the weather itself, or the appearance of a ship on the horizon, or the behaviour of a dog —can arouse him to improvisation in a style which cannot be imitated. He will listen to anybody who has anything to say 011 a subject of interest, but talk which is merely talk seems to find him completely deaf. He knows how to shut out what is trivial. I remember once when 6ome characters in a celebrated scandal were being discussed in his presence. The scandal—L have forgotten which one it was—had been exploited to the utmost by the London newspapers, and most people were unable to avoid some knowledge of it. Mr. Churchill remained silent, and was apparently thinking of something else, for, when he was directly addressed, he said: "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you are talking about."

but unstable," that he was "too impetuous." I should have said, on the contrary, that his brilliance was! harnessed to a remarkably stable and consistent political philosophy. _ J He has a deep devotion to liberty, in the traditional British sense as meaning those rights of the individual which have been won and made into law over the centuries, and I think in the mushroom growth of. Fascism shocked him more than the general abrogation of such rights. The principles of the common law and of British constitutional practice are sacred to him, and the regret with which he announced the temporary suspension of some of them at the beginning of this war was unquestionably genuine. "Remain Until Monday" In all this, I should say, you have a stable, consistent and powerfully integrated system of politicial thought, closely akin to that which governed England for the greater part of 'the eighteenth and nineteenth, centuries. If you examine the occasions in Mr. Churchill's past on which he has disagreed with his party, it is quite arguable that he has been consistent throughout, and that the instability or inconsistency was all on the 6ide of the others. Such was the case, for example, in 1904-1905, when his own party—the Tories—went so far toward tariff reform that he spoke and voted with the Liberals, whom he afterward joined.

Stable and Consistent My acqtiaintance with Mr. Churchill is due to the accident of our haying been fellow guests on various occasions at the same hospitable house in the South of France. On such visits he was on holiday, but even bo, he did a vast amount of work. The impression made by this phenomenal man upon a stranger belonging to a different nationality, with_ a totally different social and political psychology, was bound to differ from that which he makes on his own people, i The English criticism most often_ heard I in past years was that he was "brilliant,

It was explained to him that the persons under discussion were known to all newspaper readers; an outline of the story was rapidly supplied by one of the ladies present; he was informed that he couldn't possibly not know something about it. "I'm sorry," lie said. "I don't. I never pay any attention to those things unless I happen to know the people." But although he rules out triviality, he can be as irreverent and frolicsome

Last winter, in the South of France, having dined not wisely but too well, I smashed up a car on the way home and awoke the next day with many contusions and abrasions, contrite in spirit and eager to return to Paris. Mr. Churchill heard the news from my wife and gave her some advice to pass on to me. _ " Among other things, he said:- "Tell him that if he intended to _ remain until Monday he should remain until Monday. He* ought never to run away from anything—never." I remained until Monday. And I believe the British will "remain until Monday" in this war, as long as Mr. Churchill remains the power he is in their government.

—Condensed from The Saturday Eveninsc Post, Philadelphia.