Latest / Generals of WWII: The Art of Command / Churchill: the man who inspired Britain in the darkest hour (with Warren Dockter) | Ep 22

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Churchill: the man who inspired Britain in the darkest hour (with Warren Dockter) | Ep 22 · Generals of WWII: The Art of Command

• 0:07
  Welcome back to Generals of World War 2, the art of Command.
• 0:12
  I'm your host, John Viscardo, and with me is the great Doctor
• 0:16
  Warren. Dr. Warren and I did an episode
• 0:19
  on Generals of Napoleon about Churchill and Hitler's
• 0:23
  fascination with Napoleon. But today we're going to talk
• 0:25
  about the man himself, Winston Churchill.
• 0:29
  He might have seen Warren before.
• 0:30
  He did a Netflix documentary called Churchill at War with
• 0:33
  some other experts. It was really good.
• 0:35
  I highly recommend it. And he has a new project that
• 0:38
  he's working on. It's actually six months old,
• 0:40
  but it's really interesting. I was listening to it yesterday.
• 0:42
  It's called Churchill, the Finest Half Hour Podcast.
• 0:47
  And what is that about Warren? Well, I, I got to say, I mean,
• 0:50
  it's, it's a whole lot of fun. It's my friend Richard Toy and
• 0:54
  I, he's a professor at Exeter, basically decided we would do a
• 0:57
  podcast together. And So what we do is we try to
• 1:00
  pick a topic that we think people will be interested in and
• 1:04
  we'll do a, you know, each episode is about 30 minutes and
• 1:07
  we talk about Winston Churchill and whatever this particular
• 1:10
  topic is over about 3 or 4 episodes.
• 1:13
  So we try to get deep dives in there and you know, we try to
• 1:15
  make it accessible, but not too academic and it's just a lot of
• 1:19
  fun discussing this stuff. So our most recent collection
• 1:22
  that we recorded was about Churchill and Ireland all the
• 1:25
  way sort of through his career. And then the one that we had
• 1:28
  judge that just come out is about Churchill and the general
• 1:31
  strike, which I think we did 3 episodes on a really
• 1:34
  fascinating. Yeah, but I like about it is
• 1:37
  that it is it's 30 minute snippets of his life.
• 1:39
  And I mean, we were talking before this podcast, this could
• 1:42
  be a 15 hour episode on Churchill just because his life
• 1:45
  was so rich. So to break it down and 30
• 1:47
  minute increments I think is smart.
• 1:49
  Yeah, I agree. But one of the things that
• 1:51
  people forget about Winston Churchill, just his political
• 1:53
  life starts in 1900. He doesn't formally leave
• 1:57
  Parliament till 1964, a year before his death.
• 2:00
  So I mean, he's got a long political life and I mean, he's
• 2:03
  in some pretty heavy hitting offices during that span.
• 2:08
  Yeah, and a rich tapestry of highs and lows throughout his
• 2:11
  life. Yeah, that, that's right.
• 2:13
  You know, his political life. And that doesn't include him as
• 2:15
  a soldier or anything. I mean, he, he has a or, or as a
• 2:19
  journalist. You know, he, he has a lot of
• 2:21
  things going on throughout his political life and he's an
• 2:24
  extraordinarily long lived man. Remember, this is something I
• 2:27
  think a lot of people forget about Winston Churchill.
• 2:28
  He's actually effectively a 19th century guy.
• 2:31
  He was born in 1874. Yeah, and he wasn't the pillar
• 2:36
  of health physically, but he lived for a for a long time.
• 2:39
  Yeah, yeah, that's right. In in fact, when he was a child,
• 2:42
  there were times when his parents had been told that he
• 2:45
  that Churchill was kind of sickly potentially.
• 2:48
  And there's some early accounts in his early life of being at
• 2:51
  boys schools and being kind of sickly and frail.
• 2:54
  Obviously, he he becomes very robust.
• 2:57
  But then, you know, in later life, you know, he has a heart
• 2:59
  attack. He has got the pressure of the
• 3:00
  world on him as a Prime Minister.
• 3:02
  He has a heart attack. He had strokes.
• 3:03
  You know, his health starts declining as an older man's
• 3:06
  would. But also he never really backed
• 3:08
  off those cigars or whiskey either.
• 3:10
  So, you know, makes you wonder. Yeah, remarkable constitution.
• 3:15
  Let's start at the beginning. Winston Churchill was born
• 3:18
  November 30th 1874 and the Woodstock the son of Lord
• 3:23
  Randolph Churchill and the American born Jenny Jerome.
• 3:27
  What was his upbringing like? His upbringing is quite
• 3:31
  interesting, quite standard, but also quite unusual.
• 3:34
  So Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was himself
• 3:37
  the son of the Duke of Marlboro, who lived at Blenheim Palace.
• 3:41
  And one of the interesting thing that happened very early on in
• 3:43
  Winston Churchill's life, if you read My Early Life, he talks
• 3:46
  about the fact that his very first memories actually take
• 3:48
  place in Ireland because his father and grandfather were sort
• 3:53
  of sent there as a result of of some Victorian scandals that
• 3:58
  Randolph, who was very impetuous, accidentally sort of
• 4:01
  got himself involved in with the Prince of Wales at the time.
• 4:05
  And so as a result, Churchill, one of his earliest memories and
• 4:08
  may even you could say political memory was of his grandfather
• 4:11
  giving a speech in Ireland and everyone sort of reacting to
• 4:14
  that when he was about 3 1/2 years old.
• 4:16
  And this is what he says in My Early Life anyway.
• 4:18
  But but coming up back in Britain, you know, Churchill was
• 4:21
  sent to boarding school. His parents were very distant.
• 4:27
  It's it's an aristocratic upbringing.
• 4:29
  Absolutely. It's deeply aristocratic.
• 4:31
  And not just aristocratic, I mean, have you ever seen
• 4:33
  Blenheim Palace? Blenheim Palace was gifted to
• 4:36
  the first Duke of Marlboro after the Battle of Blenheim, Sir John
• 4:41
  Marlborough. It was his name.
• 4:44
  It is worth actually Googling if you get a chance.
• 4:46
  It's one of the grandest palaces on earth.
• 4:49
  I mean, it is one of the places that's like, I'm imposing my
• 4:52
  grandeur upon you. It's not a place that fits in
• 4:56
  with the landscape. It dominates everything.
• 4:58
  So Perchel's not only aristocratic, he's deeply
• 5:02
  aristocratic. Oh wow, it's beautiful.
• 5:04
  Yeah, let me let me share the screen.
• 5:06
  Real. Quick.
• 5:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There it is.
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  And so ahead, you know, there's the main house, and then it has
• 5:11
  two enormous dependencies on the side that are almost reaching
• 5:14
  out, like they're hugging you. But it's a huge palace.
• 5:17
  So Churchill grew up in that kind of aristocracy.
• 5:20
  You'd almost associate it with like, not being, you know, a
• 5:24
  millionaire, but a billionaire today.
• 5:26
  You know, Churchill was sent to very nice schools, although not
• 5:28
  the nicest. You know, Churchill never went
• 5:30
  to Eden. Churchill wound up going to
• 5:32
  Harrow. He went to several sort of other
• 5:34
  schools. There's a real interesting thing
• 5:36
  about this. Churchill has a rumor as a
• 5:38
  student of being a really bad rowdy student.
• 5:41
  It's very, he hated Latin. He was not a particularly great
• 5:44
  student. But what's interesting is if you
• 5:45
  go back into the archives and you look at his report cards
• 5:48
  from his early school days, he wasn't that bad of a student.
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  He plays up him being poor at Latin and stuff later in my
• 5:57
  early life when he's writing about this part of his life
• 5:59
  because it's in the 30s right when he's on the backbench.
• 6:02
  As you mentioned, Churchill attends a lot of schools and he
• 6:04
  also attends the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and became
• 6:08
  a an officer in the British Army in 1895.
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  Were there any early signs that he would become one of the
• 6:15
  greatest leaders in British history?
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  Because we talk a lot on this show about defining leadership
• 6:20
  and how to spot it. Because obviously if was in a
• 6:23
  bottle, everyone would drink it. What do you think stood out
• 6:27
  about the guy? Well, I think that's a great
• 6:29
  question. And I think a lot of that
• 6:31
  actually has to do with a portion of his life at this
• 6:34
  moment, not necessarily his schooling, but his relationship
• 6:38
  with his father. And what I want to drill down
• 6:41
  into there is, you know, I said he had a very distant
• 6:43
  relationship with his parents and he was kind of an
• 6:46
  afterthought. I think maybe to both of his
• 6:48
  parents. He he talked about how his
• 6:50
  mother was a bright shining * who seems so beautiful, but
• 6:53
  always at a distance. And his father, whom he sort of
• 6:57
  grows to idolize, particularly his father's political life, is
• 7:00
  very harsh with Winston and, and thinks he's a duller causing a
• 7:04
  duller, you know, this kind of stuff, things that he he so
• 7:07
  poorly behaved and he's slow. And so he had hoped Winston
• 7:11
  would be a lawyer, but he didn't think he was smart enough.
• 7:13
  So he enrolls him in military school because he thinks he's
• 7:17
  only really going to be good enough to to be in the military
• 7:20
  now. Churchill tells him at one point
• 7:23
  that he's interested in this kind of stuff.
• 7:24
  And Churchill had loads of toy soldiers as a kid, as you can
• 7:28
  imagine, playing out the Battle of Blenheim.
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  I mean, he had a big portrait of John Marlboro and who's one of
• 7:34
  Churchill's heroes that he would later go on to write a biography
• 7:38
  about. You know, Churchill really is
• 7:40
  interested in kind of military men, military thinking and
• 7:42
  movements. Even if it's a kind of child,
• 7:44
  you know, he's playing toy soldiers and that kind of stuff.
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  Which is why Randolph thought, well, if he can't be a lawyer,
• 7:49
  he will be happy in the military.
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  So he goes to, to to Sandhurst. And I think he's very good.
• 7:56
  You know, he gets put in the cavalry.
• 7:58
  I think that that's one of the places where, you know, but he
• 8:01
  kind of glides through it. Now, the other thing that's
• 8:03
  important to remember at this time, that his father dies as
• 8:07
  well. And his father had had a very
• 8:10
  difficult and slow decline. His father had been of course, a
• 8:14
  brilliant politician, very meteoric rise was a was a coming
• 8:18
  man. And at one point was chancellor,
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  the exchequer that basically sort of resigns on a political
• 8:22
  bluff that Salisbury calls and forces his resignation.
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  And then he kind of slowly declined after that.
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  But his father was also suffering from, most historians
• 8:31
  would say probably suffering from syphilis.
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  And so he has a very public kind of mental decline of health and
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  think that bothered Churchill a lot, that that his father's
• 8:41
  greatness had kind of been robbed.
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  And this, this leaves an indelible mark in Churchill's
• 8:47
  psyche, particularly when he dies, because he never got to
• 8:50
  have that time to be close with his father.
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  And so it creates a kind of a psychological black hole in
• 8:57
  Churchill that he needs to fill. Yeah, and they're probably not
• 9:01
  at him for the rest of his life. Like, I wish my dad could have
• 9:04
  seen me now. That would have been really
• 9:05
  amazing. At the end of his life, one of
• 9:08
  the very last essays he ever wrote.
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  Because also one of the things people forget is Churchill wrote
• 9:12
  an ocean of words, more words than little Shakespeare.
• 9:15
  Yeah. Anyway, one of the last episode
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  1 of the last things he wrote was called The Dream.
• 9:20
  And in the dream, he claims that he was drifting off to sleep at
• 9:23
  Chartwell, and the ghost of his father appeared to him.
• 9:27
  And they were talking politics. And his father wanted to know
• 9:30
  what all had happened over the last, you know, through the 20th
• 9:33
  century. And Churchill, of course, tells
• 9:36
  him of the terrible rise of the Germans and all, you know, all
• 9:38
  of these things. And with him telling him his
• 9:41
  sort of, you know, summing up the 20th century, well, he said,
• 9:44
  well, what? What were your role in these
• 9:46
  events? And before Churchill can tell
• 9:48
  him, his father's ghost vanishes.
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  And so even in old age, he's never able to really reconcile
• 9:56
  his feelings towards us. He never gets that cathartic
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  moment that his dad can be proud of him.
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  So a lot of historians, William Manchester in particular, I
• 10:04
  think sort of show this kind of the Churchill busies himself
• 10:07
  trying like pushing himself towards greatness to try to fill
• 10:10
  this kind of hole. Yeah, that's a great point.
• 10:13
  And one of the other points you touched on there was how much he
• 10:16
  wrote as a young officer and war correspondent.
• 10:19
  He gains fame covering conflicts in India, Sudan and the Second
• 10:23
  Boer War. How is he gaining early fame?
• 10:26
  Is it? Is it through his writings or
• 10:27
  through his military? Exploits.
• 10:30
  So it's both things. I mean, one of the things he
• 10:32
  told his friend Violet, Violet asked with would go on to be
• 10:34
  Violet boning Carter is that, you know, we're all worms, but
• 10:38
  I'm a glow worm. Like he, he knows very early on
• 10:41
  he's going to he's got to make a reputation.
• 10:43
  So the very first thing that he does, and this is really
• 10:45
  interesting, is he gets, he gets a correspondence dispatch to
• 10:49
  Cuba, where he writes 5 dispatches, I think, as a press
• 10:54
  liaison. And he goes there under the
• 10:56
  auspices with the Spanish. He's on the Spanish side of this
• 11:00
  thing, kind of talking about the Cuban Revolution that's going on
• 11:04
  there. And he gets some credibility.
• 11:06
  You know, he's got 2 papers that are publishing largely through
• 11:09
  the network that his mother's built of social influences,
• 11:12
  which he's able to do very early on.
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  So it's his first station is Cuba.
• 11:16
  Not many people, it's not as widely done.
• 11:19
  And then he he writes quite a bit when he's in India, which
• 11:25
  later those dispatches will be edited into a book that's not
• 11:28
  just a collection of a dispatch that actually shows a lot of
• 11:30
  deep kind of reflection called the the Malacan Field Force.
• 11:36
  That does quite well. You know, it's just sort of like
• 11:39
  an adventure book almost the way he frames that he writes for a
• 11:42
  very Victorian audience, but people like the Prince of Wales
• 11:45
  are sending him notes to say, hey, that was pretty good.
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  Churchill was hugely embarrassed because the 1st edition of that,
• 11:51
  he was so in a hurry to get it published that it wasn't proof
• 11:54
  read properly. And people were writing him
• 11:56
  like, oh, you missed this, you missed it.
• 11:57
  It really frustrated him. And a little thing I want to say
• 12:00
  before we go into the river war, Churchill also, a lot of people
• 12:04
  don't know this. Churchill's also conducting
• 12:06
  military intelligence. So he sent to Cuba to find out
• 12:09
  sort of he's on a sort of semi clandestine mission to find out
• 12:13
  about the new rifle that the Spanish have so he can report
• 12:17
  back because they're using a new type of Mauser that's powderless
• 12:20
  and so forth. And Churchill's sort of doing a
• 12:22
  deep down that so he can also report that back.
• 12:25
  And he's doing very similar things in reconnaissance while
• 12:28
  he's in India. So Churchill sort of dances in
• 12:31
  and out of doing kind of like low key intelligence stuff,
• 12:34
  which is later in life one of the reasons why he's so
• 12:36
  interested in espionage when he he goes to the Anglo Dervish war
• 12:42
  in Sudan. That's really remarkable.
• 12:45
  A lot of interesting things are having there that I think would
• 12:47
  shape him as a military late leader later on.
• 12:49
  And one of those is he's able to see now he and he and Herbert
• 12:53
  Kitchener kind of hated each other for their career because
• 12:55
  of the way Kitchener behaved in this.
• 12:58
  But he learned something very important from Kitchener, I
• 13:00
  think, which was Kitchener was able to win that were broadly
• 13:04
  through logistics. You know, previously when people
• 13:06
  had gone out to fight against the Mahdi, and I talk about this
• 13:09
  in my own book, Churchill and Islam, you know, they, they
• 13:12
  would sort of take the, the river as far as they could.
• 13:14
  Then they get on horses and they go in and of course you're
• 13:16
  subject to the whims of the desert.
• 13:19
  At that point, Kitchener decided I'm building a railroad track
• 13:23
  and I'm doing this right all the way down.
• 13:25
  And it's going to be slow and but we're never going to be out
• 13:28
  of touch with our supply lines. It's supply lines that win wars.
• 13:32
  Churchill is able to observe this and write about it and
• 13:35
  learns that lesson from Kitchener.
• 13:36
  The other thing that's quite interesting about his
• 13:38
  development as a writer in this period is he takes those
• 13:41
  dispatches. He makes another book and the
• 13:43
  books called The River War. It isn't just a book of
• 13:46
  dispatches and it's not just an adventure book like the Malekan
• 13:49
  kind of was. This is an actual history of
• 13:53
  Sudan. The the 1st edition has two
• 13:55
  volumes. He has a lot of nasty things to
• 13:58
  say about Kitchener in the volumes that would later come
• 14:01
  back and kind of hurt his political career, but we can get
• 14:04
  to that later. Churchill wrote a fantastic book
• 14:08
  about the Anglo Sudanese conflict that for years, even
• 14:11
  when I was doing research, is still considered one of the
• 14:13
  books you have to read. Well, there's two things I've
• 14:16
  learned doing this podcast. Leadership is hard to define and
• 14:20
  logistics wins wars. So yeah, I think Churchill was
• 14:23
  right to listen to Kitchener on that one.
• 14:25
  Let's talk about the boar war a little bit.
• 14:27
  He is captured by the boars but escaped from prison camp.
• 14:31
  Captivity becoming a national celebrity in the United Kingdom,
• 14:35
  I guess. How was he captured and how did
• 14:37
  he escape? It is this and his writing of
• 14:42
  this because he goes again to write his dispatches.
• 14:44
  He's down there under like with a press corps badge.
• 14:47
  There's a rail car that he's on that gets surrounded by Boers,
• 14:51
  gets turned over. This is in South Africa and
• 14:54
  that, that the, the Boer force is the sort of separationist
• 14:57
  group in South Africa who don't particularly want British rule.
• 15:00
  Typically they're, they're more Dutch.
• 15:02
  South African politics are very complex all the time.
• 15:05
  They're especially complex at this time.
• 15:06
  And one of the really interesting things is another
• 15:10
  officer is captured with him. His name was Almer Haldane.
• 15:12
  And Haldane writes also about this daring escape.
• 15:16
  Churchill leaves Haldane and they their relationship never
• 15:19
  quite recovered, although Haldane goes on to be an
• 15:21
  important general in the Middle East for Churchill later on.
• 15:25
  So Churchill, he writes about this in his book on the Bore
• 15:28
  Word, which again was A2 volume book and and is a collection of
• 15:32
  his dispatches that he was able to kind of work out the timing
• 15:35
  of the guard and just go over the fence and and take off.
• 15:38
  And he did. It was just one of those kind of
• 15:41
  like, you know what, I'm going to go for it.
• 15:43
  And he thought, you know, I'm a press guy.
• 15:44
  They can't really do anything to me without kind of breaking
• 15:47
  conventions. Now, what was really interesting
• 15:50
  from the Boer perspective, they were convinced he was a spy,
• 15:54
  that he wasn't actually pressed, you know, that he had this kind
• 15:57
  of military, he'd written publicly about military
• 15:59
  intelligence before. And so they assumed that he was
• 16:02
  a spy. And if you see The Wanted
• 16:04
  poster, which you can go online at Google, you know, there's
• 16:07
  this picture of Churchill, hand drawn picture, and it says he's
• 16:10
  a spy, that that there's this award.
• 16:11
  They're going to give out money for him to be captured and
• 16:15
  brought back in a shot. So Churchill writes about this
• 16:18
  and wonderful in his book about how he escaped.
• 16:21
  He's kind of living rough on the countryside, trying to get back
• 16:25
  to friendly territory. Some people in a farm help him
• 16:28
  hide at one point, but he is able to make his way back to
• 16:31
  British territory. And when he does, because
• 16:35
  everyone had some celebrity, right?
• 16:38
  He was this writer, but he came from a very well known family
• 16:40
  that. So when he returns, I mean, he
• 16:42
  really is held as like this kind of hero who had been captured.
• 16:46
  He comes home to kind of a Roman triumph and he, you know, he
• 16:50
  sees this is a moment for him and he understands that.
• 16:53
  So, you know, he goes back, writes more again, stays there
• 16:57
  till about 1900, I guess. And you know, he he writes very
• 17:01
  even toned about the boards very respectfully of the people who
• 17:03
  captured him. So he's not he's never saying
• 17:06
  like, oh, these these vicious bastard.
• 17:08
  You know, it's ever, it's ever like that.
• 17:09
  It's always like, oh, our worthy foe.
• 17:11
  You know, he framed in certain ways that is quite clever now.
• 17:14
  And I should mention he did try to run in between being in the
• 17:20
  Sudan and going to South Africa. He did actually try to run in a
• 17:24
  by election, which he lost I think 1899.
• 17:28
  But then he sort of comes back from South Africa and runs
• 17:30
  successful. Enters Parliament 1900 as a
• 17:32
  Conservative MP, but later switches to the Liberal Party in
• 17:37
  19 / 4 over trade policy disagreements.
• 17:39
  So my question is, just looking at his career that was about to
• 17:43
  come, how devout was he to his politics in general?
• 17:48
  Like did he really believe in the party stuff or just what he
• 17:52
  believed? No, that's a great question and
• 17:56
  it's a question historian to try to grapple with.
• 17:59
  Before I start down my version of this, I want to point
• 18:01
  everyone to a Paul Addison. He wrote a brilliant book called
• 18:05
  Churchill on the Home Front and another book about Churchill's
• 18:07
  politics. And I would, I would recommend
• 18:10
  that book to anyone interested in the politics of this era.
• 18:13
  Anyway. So Churchill would tell you he
• 18:14
  took his politics from his father.
• 18:17
  And his father was what he sort of created a kind of splinter
• 18:22
  group of the Conservatives called Tory Democracy or Tory
• 18:25
  Democrats, which was kind of a liberal wing of the Conservative
• 18:28
  Party. So his father was a little bit
• 18:31
  of a, of a wild card politically.
• 18:34
  You know, he wouldn't be a radical, but he's, you know, he
• 18:36
  plays with radical ideas, particularly on Irish home rule
• 18:38
  and stuff like that. Churchill himself, I don't think
• 18:43
  was ever an ideologue, an ideologue for the Conservative
• 18:46
  Party. He's not a typical conservative.
• 18:49
  His political view, in my opinion, and in Paul Addis's
• 18:54
  opinion, which is really where I take this, was he was a
• 18:56
  centrist. He didn't really care about
• 18:59
  domestic politics all that much. Ultimately he was bigger
• 19:02
  fighting grander games in his mind about where the British
• 19:06
  Empire should be or what Britain should be.
• 19:08
  And the kind of like, oh, well, should the interest rate be at
• 19:11
  this level or this, you know, the kind of like my new shy of
• 19:14
  government. He didn't really particularly
• 19:16
  interest him. Now he had to deal with it, of
• 19:18
  course. And so his his political view,
• 19:21
  you might almost say, is American or Americanist in its
• 19:24
  structure because it was pragmatic, which is a famous
• 19:27
  American kind of political concept.
• 19:28
  That is, hey, we'll find something that works and we'll
• 19:30
  do that. You know, so he was about
• 19:33
  building kind of central government alliances.
• 19:36
  Another very cynical way to read his switch to the Liberals in
• 19:39
  1904 is that Churchill's out for himself.
• 19:41
  And everybody and their brother knew that the Liberals were
• 19:44
  going to win in a landslide in the 1904 election.
• 19:47
  So he just switched teams. What's really remarkable about
• 19:52
  this and his politics is that, you know, he gets kicked out of
• 19:55
  office, out of the Chinette crisis in 1921, and he goes back
• 19:58
  to the conservatives of the wins.
• 20:00
  So I mean he's all he's famous for saying, you know, it takes
• 20:03
  anyone can rat from a party, but it takes ingenuity to re rat and
• 20:07
  come back. I think it's human nature to
• 20:10
  want to be on the winning side, you know?
• 20:12
  But let's talk about his personal life briefly.
• 20:15
  In 1908, he marries Clementine, his wife, and they go on to have
• 20:19
  five children. He was also a painter in his
• 20:22
  spare time. What was his personal life like?
• 20:28
  The Churchill family and and they've always kind of kept the
• 20:31
  private life guarded. Now you can, you can get
• 20:34
  glimpses of it. I mean, he had a very
• 20:35
  aristocratic life. He, you know, loved his wife
• 20:39
  unconditionally. He claimed he had a wonderful
• 20:41
  relationship, but it was also, you got to understand a
• 20:43
  political relationship as all Edwardian marriages were, right?
• 20:47
  This is this is about bringing houses together.
• 20:50
  But I think it's important, you know, Churchill spent a lot of
• 20:53
  time with his family for the amount of stuff he had to do.
• 20:58
  And you can read in his correspondence, particularly his
• 21:00
  correspondence with his wife, then he was very fond of them.
• 21:03
  He thought very fondly of them. They're a presence in his mind,
• 21:08
  even when he's mad at his son Randolph, which was frequent
• 21:11
  because his son Randolph was a bit of a tiring, you know,
• 21:14
  Churchill had this deep affection for his family and
• 21:16
  thought of himself, I think, as a family man.
• 21:19
  You've got to remember Churchill's always busy, even in
• 21:22
  the Edwardian period. Oh, he's taken on Under
• 21:25
  Secretary roles. In 1908, he's at Board of Trade.
• 21:28
  In 1910, he's home secretary. In 1910, he's first Lord of the
• 21:32
  Admiralty. You know, he's, he's doing so
• 21:34
  much all the time and not. And in addition to that, he's
• 21:37
  always writing because one of the things I failed to mention
• 21:39
  earlier is that when he comes back and enters politics, and
• 21:43
  this is true by about 1904 when he switched his party because
• 21:47
  he's working on the biography of his father, he's the highest
• 21:50
  paid writer in Britain. So his profession is a writer.
• 21:54
  He would always have said that, you know, professionally I'm a
• 21:56
  writer. I just happen to be in politics.
• 21:59
  Right. And when you say yes to a bunch
• 22:01
  of work things, then you're saying no to a bunch of family
• 22:05
  things. So it must be tough.
• 22:06
  And so I, I think, you know, I do think it would have been very
• 22:08
  difficult for Clementine because she, I think necessarily
• 22:12
  understood. She's kind of parenting alone.
• 22:15
  And he would come and he, he'd do what he could, but he was,
• 22:18
  you know, he's busy. The other thing is, is that I
• 22:21
  think she understood that she was secondary, I mean, and that
• 22:25
  his needs of his political career came first and she had to
• 22:29
  kind of manage the home life, which again, I mean that that
• 22:32
  seems unfair. But at the same time, that was
• 22:35
  how you did it in Andori in Britain.
• 22:37
  Yeah, and we'll come back to that personal life here in a
• 22:39
  little bit. So you kind of mentioned before
• 22:41
  Churchill held several major government posts before World
• 22:44
  War One, including First Lord of the Admiralty, where he helped
• 22:48
  modernize the British Navy. What do you think he's learning
• 22:51
  during this time? So Churchill being being the
• 22:57
  kind of writer he was, was always kind of interested in
• 22:59
  science fiction, and he tended to think of these kind of
• 23:02
  military Ford things. He was really up on technology.
• 23:05
  You know, there's a lot of debates about whether or not he
• 23:07
  invented the tank. He didn't like the idea of the
• 23:10
  tank been around since Da Vinci, right?
• 23:12
  But what the genius of Churchill on these kinds of things was
• 23:16
  that he was able to take other people's ideas and make them
• 23:19
  work. So with the tank in particular,
• 23:22
  he read, I guess around 19 O three or nineteen O 4.
• 23:25
  Like, we know this in the correspondence, HG Wells's Land
• 23:30
  Ironclads, I think, which is about these sort of tanks.
• 23:33
  Well, during the First World War, Churchill's like, oh, the
• 23:36
  problem's the mud. We need to be able to move these
• 23:39
  heavy things across seas of mud. How do you do that?
• 23:43
  Oh, it's tracks. Oh, OK, well, let's get some
• 23:45
  guys together. He's 1st order of the Amnity
• 23:47
  when he's doing this. So he calls them tanks because
• 23:50
  they needed to look like the kind of like water tanks you'd
• 23:53
  have on ships. So it's like this experimental
• 23:55
  thing that he's kind of pushing and they work out that you need
• 23:59
  tractor tracks in order to get through this mud.
• 24:03
  So it all sort of comes together and then he becomes a champion
• 24:07
  of the tank. He's doing the same thing with
• 24:09
  boats and with fuel. And the one of the biggest
• 24:14
  problems the Navy, the British Navy suffered with, they're in
• 24:16
  awarding areas. Everyone's kind of agreed
• 24:18
  there's a coming war with Germany.
• 24:20
  Nobody's exactly sure what it looks like.
• 24:23
  The the Germans themselves are like, yeah, we won't beat you
• 24:25
  out, You know, I mean it. It's difficult when the Kaiser
• 24:28
  is like, yeah, I'm looking for action, you know, to walk back
• 24:31
  from that. So Churchill is like, we've got
• 24:34
  to get away from coal. Coal's a serious problem.
• 24:36
  There's logistical supply line issues even this early on.
• 24:39
  You've got the minor disputes going on with coal and wells.
• 24:43
  And so he thinks, God, we got to do something about otherwise
• 24:45
  fuel this. What it's, you know, what's
• 24:47
  cleaner, cheaper and more cost effective is oil.
• 24:50
  And so he takes very serious moves very early on to see
• 24:54
  that's the future and he goes down with other leadings and
• 24:59
  that they could create the Anglo Persian Oil Company, which of
• 25:02
  course later becomes BP. This all kind of starts with
• 25:04
  Winston Churchill in Iran, which of course was Persia at the
• 25:08
  time, and sets up these oil fields to be a continual supply
• 25:13
  for the British Navy. And this is going on about three
• 25:18
  kind of four years before the outbreak of war.
• 25:20
  So he sees the Navy's got to get updated and in a very short
• 25:24
  amount of time. And I think through this, he's
• 25:27
  learning how government works, how reforms work.
• 25:30
  And maybe, you know, once World War One starts, he's getting a
• 25:34
  little cocky, like, all right, I think I have this figured out.
• 25:38
  I think that's true. And now your point about him
• 25:40
  working out how government works, I think is very true to
• 25:43
  build those kind of consensus. And I should say that that one
• 25:47
  of the things about Churchill is the fact that whatever hat
• 25:50
  Churchill wears, whether it's Home Secretary or First Lord of
• 25:54
  the Admiralty or whatever, he puts 100% of his heart and soul
• 25:59
  into that position. Yeah.
• 26:00
  This next part, though, is probably his greatest, I would
• 26:04
  say disaster on his resume. He's heavily criticized after
• 26:07
  the failed Gallipoli campaign during World War One, fighting
• 26:11
  the Ottoman Empire and temporarily, temporarily
• 26:14
  resigned from government. We see it also World War 2 where
• 26:19
  he, you know, pushes for the Italy front.
• 26:21
  Was he ever a good military strategist?
• 26:23
  And how did he recover from the Gallipoli disaster?
• 26:29
  I'm going to start by saying everybody who's interested in
• 26:31
  this needs to be read a book by Christopher Bell called
• 26:34
  Churchill and the Dardanelles, which is about the Gallipoli
• 26:36
  campaign. So I point your, your listeners
• 26:39
  to that. Let's start with the failure of
• 26:42
  of Gallipoli. Churchill got into a huge fight
• 26:46
  with Kitchener and he and Kitchener were sometimes on the
• 26:49
  same side, sometimes not. Also Jackie Fisher, who was the
• 26:53
  the sort of main Admiral under the first Lord, which was
• 26:56
  Churchill's role about whether or not the Darnell Straits could
• 27:00
  be forced and by a naval thing alone and gone up.
• 27:04
  And then Istanbul. The idea was you'd go past the
• 27:06
  straits, you'd be able to get into go, you know, go up into to
• 27:12
  where Istanbul is in Turkey and they'd see the British Navy and
• 27:15
  they'd be like, hey, the gigs up, we're going to pull out of
• 27:17
  the war. Now that seems insane from from
• 27:21
  a retrospective position that these guys are going to do
• 27:24
  without firing a shot. That's the idea.
• 27:26
  Now, Churchill's got friendships with the lead, with some of the
• 27:29
  leaders, not the main leader, which is the issue of the
• 27:33
  Committee of Union and Progress in Turkey.
• 27:35
  He's carried on a correspondence with some of these guys for
• 27:38
  years. Talat Bay Pasha is one of them.
• 27:40
  He was quite close to and they're kind of telling him,
• 27:43
  hey, if you can give us a show of strength.
• 27:46
  So that gives us enough ammunition to say to
• 27:48
  Inverapasha, who's the kind of main leader that, hey, you got
• 27:52
  to back off of this. And because you got to remember
• 27:54
  up until the 1st war, Britain and Turkey had been allied
• 27:57
  basically since the middle of the 19th century against Russia.
• 28:00
  It's odd that things have gone the other way.
• 28:02
  Now. The Inverapasha was very sort of
• 28:05
  pro German and it wanted to bring them on the side with the,
• 28:08
  the German. Anyway, that's the idea.
• 28:11
  So Churchill gets there. It becomes very clear very
• 28:14
  quickly. You can't do that.
• 28:16
  So Churchill gets very frustrated and Kitchener comes
• 28:20
  up with the idea, well, we need we will do it by land.
• 28:22
  And they have a landing at Gallipoli and it's a huge
• 28:25
  failure. I mean, they lose so many Anzac
• 28:28
  troops, which are troops from New Zealand and Australia.
• 28:31
  I mean, it's it's really catastrophic and eventually have
• 28:34
  to admit defeat, which shocks everybody that that Mustafa
• 28:38
  Camille, who would later go on had a turf commands an
• 28:44
  overwhelming amazing military defensive strategy there that
• 28:48
  just beats the bridge. It just does, you know, everyone
• 28:51
  was shocked that that the Ottoman Empire, who'd been the
• 28:53
  sick man of Europe since like 1840, was actually significantly
• 28:58
  more powerful than anyone had imagined.
• 29:00
  And so Churchill is shamed by this.
• 29:02
  And basically there was a whole Commission about who's putting
• 29:05
  together this group. They're called the Easterners.
• 29:07
  There's the easterners, the Westerners.
• 29:08
  The Westerners wanted to focus on the Western Front.
• 29:10
  Churchill had understood the slaughter that was happening
• 29:14
  there and thought we've got to do something else.
• 29:16
  And as a result, he really pushed the Darnell campaign.
• 29:20
  And then because nobody wanted to take Kitchener off the table
• 29:23
  because he's kind of the most important military thinker in
• 29:26
  Britain at the time, you know, he's the guy on the poster
• 29:28
  that's poet pointing and got the mustache.
• 29:31
  Churchill becomes the fall guy for the campaign.
• 29:33
  He did. He did.
• 29:34
  But to put it all on one guy's desk, you know, it could be the
• 29:37
  generals at the landing, it could be the supply team.
• 29:39
  You know it. It was unfortunate that he got
• 29:42
  blamed with all of it. Right.
• 29:45
  I mean, a lot of that goes down to Jackie Fisher, who and you
• 29:48
  know, they're arguing. The guys on the ground are
• 29:51
  arguing. I mean, there's there's a lot of
• 29:53
  places where this breaks down, but it all lands on his desk.
• 29:56
  So he's kicked out of government to make recompense for this.
• 29:59
  And I think this is amazing. Churchill himself signs up and
• 30:03
  goes to the Western Front and fights in the trenches, which is
• 30:07
  unthinkable to imagine any military leader today.
• 30:10
  That's like, hey, I got this one wrong.
• 30:11
  I'm going with the guys on the front.
• 30:13
  He does that because he feels so guilty about the losses of
• 30:16
  Gallipoli. And he had always imagined
• 30:18
  himself as this grand military fighter.
• 30:21
  And I think Churchill, as a military thinker, learned about
• 30:24
  a million lessons from this failed expedition, you know,
• 30:27
  that you see play out in the Second World War.
• 30:30
  You know, he was always saying as a bit of a maverick and
• 30:34
  stuff, he's able to come back and get into power through his
• 30:40
  friend Lloyd George, who, you know, asked with his kind of
• 30:43
  vote, because the war keeps going on.
• 30:45
  Lloyd George gets in and kind of makes a position for him in his
• 30:49
  cabinet. And that brings Churchill back
• 30:51
  into into power. And then he becomes Lord of
• 30:55
  munitions and then first Lord of war and air.
• 30:58
  And, you know, there's there's a sort of stepping stone with him
• 31:00
  and Lloyd George, who are good friends.
• 31:01
  And Richard and I sort of argued and Richard, right, because you
• 31:03
  wrote a book called Lloyd George and Churchill.
• 31:05
  But I'm always like, Hey, this is a bro doing a bro a solid,
• 31:09
  Like, hey, come back and help us out.
• 31:11
  And Richard's position is actually Lloyd George saw that
• 31:14
  Churchill could be dangerous if he's out of power because then
• 31:18
  you've got a political opponent, right?
• 31:20
  Lloyd George sees an opportunity to give him something that keeps
• 31:22
  him in the tent, and he does that.
• 31:24
  And so that's how Churchill is able to kind of come back into
• 31:27
  power after this disastrous thing.
• 31:29
  And I mean, it is he takes this on personally.
• 31:31
  This hurt, you know. This stays with him.
• 31:32
  Yeah, I do want to come back to it.
• 31:36
  There was there was a post I saw that he was a bricklayer in his
• 31:40
  spare time. Also.
• 31:42
  What do you think he was doing in this hobby?
• 31:48
  So bricklaying was certainly a means that he would use to kind
• 31:52
  of deal with stressing. That sort of more came into him
• 31:55
  in the 20s and 30s after the war.
• 31:57
  And it was something he loved doing during his his what he
• 32:00
  called his wilderness here. He spent a lot of time at
• 32:02
  Chartwell rather than being in London because he was out of any
• 32:05
  kind of formal laws. He was still in Parliament and
• 32:07
  he spent a lot of time working on the House.
• 32:09
  And he did that to keep to busy himself.
• 32:11
  He was always one of these people that wanted to stay very,
• 32:14
  very busy. And Churchill had suffered from
• 32:17
  what he called the black dog, which was a sort of depression
• 32:21
  that he he had. This has been heavily debated.
• 32:24
  The American biographer William Manchester kind of makes a
• 32:27
  bigger deal out of the black dog than I think is necessary.
• 32:32
  And, and, and later there's a guy named Attenborough who wrote
• 32:34
  a book about the black dog in Churchill.
• 32:36
  And they kind of worked out the Churchill didn't really suffer
• 32:38
  from depression. He kind of had anxiety issues
• 32:41
  and that's was the driving force behind a lot of this.
• 32:43
  But what was very clear is 2 things to me.
• 32:46
  Churchill busied himself as a means to keep whatever anxiety
• 32:50
  or depression away. You know it, you know, idle
• 32:52
  hands, the devil's workshop. So he made himself busy all the
• 32:56
  time. Bricklaying is, is a part of
• 32:59
  this, but another part of this is, is painting.
• 33:02
  And he took painting on almost immediately after Gallipoli.
• 33:06
  And a friend of his, Wilford Scowen Brunt, who I've done a
• 33:09
  lot of work on, recorded his diary.
• 33:11
  They were at new buildings together, which is sort of a
• 33:14
  place on vacation. And Churchill tried painting for
• 33:16
  the first time there. And Blunt was with him and
• 33:20
  recorded that. Churchill looked at his hands.
• 33:22
  He had pain on his hands. He said this is he looked at it
• 33:24
  and he described it as the blood of the of the men that he sent
• 33:27
  to their deaths. So he was, in my opinion, he was
• 33:31
  sort of using painting as a means of almost coping with the
• 33:35
  guilt surrounding Gallipoli. And he would paint the rest of
• 33:38
  his life and his career. Churchill became a very good
• 33:41
  painter to even the point that he entered paintings into
• 33:45
  competitions under aliases and would win.
• 33:51
  So you and I were talking before we came on, and what that does
• 33:55
  is it resets the brain. If your job is thinking and
• 33:58
  you're having trouble, you can't just think more.
• 34:00
  To get through that, you have to step away from it.
• 34:05
  Right, that's absolutely right. I remember when I was learning
• 34:10
  piano, sometimes you got to get up and walk away from the thing
• 34:14
  and do something else for an hour and then when you come
• 34:17
  back, it'll be there. You know what I mean?
• 34:19
  And that's true of kind of anything.
• 34:21
  It's like your brain needs some time off.
• 34:23
  And I think painting, bricklaying, you know, Churchill
• 34:26
  was very interested in animals. You know, we had a fish pond at
• 34:29
  Chartwell. I mean, a lot of the things that
• 34:31
  he enjoyed doing to de stress involved being busy, but it also
• 34:35
  gave him a way to kind of process through stuff, I think.
• 34:38
  I didn't know before he was Prime Minister, he had a a
• 34:41
  scheduled lunch with this guy Adolf Hitler.
• 34:44
  And then Hitler didn't show up for the lunch because he was
• 34:46
  busy or, or later anyway, he didn't.
• 34:49
  He waited I think an hour and he didn't show up.
• 34:52
  Churchill warned repeatedly about the rise of Adolf Hitler
• 34:56
  and the threat posed by World War 2.
• 34:58
  Why many brought British politicians favored appeasement.
• 35:03
  What did Churchill see in Hitler that other brought British
• 35:06
  politicians didn't see? Let's start with the the sort of
• 35:14
  meeting that never happened. So there's a great book that
• 35:17
  Catherine Carter's written and she she has a chapter on this
• 35:22
  and it's quite interesting. Churchill was overdoing research
• 35:25
  for his biography on John Marlboro.
• 35:28
  And there's a there was a son of Randolph Churchill who had a
• 35:32
  mutual acquaintance who knew Hitler and Hitler at this, this
• 35:35
  is before thing, you know, this is in 32.
• 35:36
  This is really before things kind of amp up for the Nazis.
• 35:40
  And he said, hey, you know, this Hitler guy is probably becoming
• 35:43
  man in Germany. You ought to at least meet him.
• 35:45
  Churchill was open to meeting him and Hitler was open to
• 35:49
  meeting Churchill. Now they never met.
• 35:51
  And the reasons, very interesting is that, you know,
• 35:53
  one of the things I think Churchill says is that, you
• 35:56
  know, this anti-Semitism thing. I don't get it.
• 35:59
  I get that you're doing this to kind of feed some of your
• 36:02
  political base, but that's kind of a messed up way to think.
• 36:06
  Then, you know, you can tell him that maybe I can talk to him
• 36:08
  about it when we meet. And so I think the idea was is
• 36:11
  that maybe this sort of the intermediary kind of said this
• 36:14
  to Hitler and then Hitler thought, well, I'm out.
• 36:15
  I'm not meeting with this guy. He's the Churchill just wasn't
• 36:18
  willing to, you know, you know, he had several Jewish friends.
• 36:20
  You know, I've been a friend to the Jewish people in Britain.
• 36:23
  He'd been an advocate for the creation of a Jewish homeland in
• 36:25
  Palestine in the First World War.
• 36:27
  So church, of course he's going to be like, hey, this
• 36:29
  anti-Semitism element of your party or put together.
• 36:32
  I don't get that. And this so upset Hitler.
• 36:34
  Hitler refused to take the meeting.
• 36:36
  Yeah, maybe appeasement is not the right word.
• 36:40
  You know, they just went through World War One.
• 36:41
  It was horrific for Britain. They lost many people.
• 36:45
  But you have Neville Chamberlain and King Edward and all these
• 36:48
  other people are like, no, no, no, Hitler's.
• 36:50
  We just need to give him this Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia
• 36:53
  and then everything will go back to normal.
• 36:58
  We'll see, and I think that's a part of it, right.
• 37:00
  Is that like a lot of the conservative conserve, you know,
• 37:03
  people like Halifax, for instance, in Chamberlain, they
• 37:06
  had this idea that the real threat is the Soviet Union.
• 37:09
  And in Churchill for a long time thought the real threat was the
• 37:12
  Soviet Union. You know, he was very anti
• 37:13
  Bolshevik and to the point where he was like, hey, this Mussolini
• 37:16
  guy. If you read great
• 37:17
  contemporaries, his book, he's he's not he's not kind to
• 37:21
  Mussolini, but he's pretty soft on him compared to his words for
• 37:24
  Hitler. Right.
• 37:25
  So he sees maybe fascism. There could be something in it.
• 37:29
  Now this is again, very early on before we see what fascism
• 37:33
  evolves into. But no, he's kind of open to
• 37:35
  these strong men in the terms of Italy.
• 37:40
  There's something about Hitler that that church was like
• 37:43
  absolutely not. And I think it's about
• 37:45
  anti-Semitism. Churchill abhorred political
• 37:48
  violence, I think. Now, this is odd to say for a
• 37:51
  man involved in so many wars and as a man who you could argue was
• 37:54
  a warlord in the same World War. But if you read his writings
• 37:57
  about the Turkish, you know, that the massacres, they call it
• 38:01
  in those days that the Armenian massacres that were taking place
• 38:04
  at the hands of sort of, you know, renegade Ottomans and this
• 38:07
  kind of stuff, particularly after the fact of the First
• 38:11
  World War. He was he was very upset by this
• 38:14
  that kind of thing. Really May Churchill distraught.
• 38:17
  I mean, he would even cry sometimes, I think.
• 38:19
  I mean, he would feel these things.
• 38:21
  And so you know that that Hitler flirted a not just flirted, but
• 38:26
  was deeply anti-Semitic, but flirted with political violence
• 38:29
  as a solution in his own writings very early on.
• 38:32
  I think May Churchill recognize this guy's not like other
• 38:37
  leaders. And I think that's something
• 38:39
  that the the other sort of intelligentsia inside the
• 38:43
  Conservative Party at the time kind of misunderstood because
• 38:46
  people like Chamberlain and Chamberlain's defense, he was a
• 38:49
  19th century politician deeply in a way, you know, so was
• 38:53
  Churchill. But Chamberlain was like, well,
• 38:55
  if a gentleman says he only wants the sedate land, that's
• 38:59
  the end of what he wants. He didn't understand that Hitler
• 39:03
  was a 20th century monster. He didn't have the imagination
• 39:05
  for it. Churchill did.
• 39:08
  Well, Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain in 1940
• 39:11
  after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain.
• 39:14
  Also, France falls to Germany around this time.
• 39:18
  How did Churchill all people attain this lofty position?
• 39:22
  Well, you know, you can imagine there's all we've all seen
• 39:26
  finest hour or or darkest hour. You know all the the stuff about
• 39:30
  that moment. You can imagine Churchill,
• 39:32
  who've been wanting to be in this seat his whole life.
• 39:35
  Chamberlain brought back in it put him in the first Lord of the
• 39:37
  Admiralty during the early phases of the war.
• 39:40
  This is kind of a poisoned chalice because it's like, OK,
• 39:42
  congratulations, everything's falling apart.
• 39:45
  You know, reminds me that scene in Spaceballs when he's like,
• 39:48
  it's a very lovely ship. I think you should go down with
• 39:50
  it. Must have kind of felt that a
• 39:52
  little bit, you know, that he finally got the thing he wanted
• 39:56
  and everything on Earth that could go wrong is going wrong.
• 39:58
  And I mean, that's where the phrase keep buggering on, you
• 40:01
  know, KBO, he put that at the bottom of his memos.
• 40:04
  You know, all right, let's go. You know, it's just like, let's
• 40:06
  get to work. And he did, I mean, remarkably,
• 40:10
  he put all of his energy, all this sort of energy that he
• 40:13
  maybe didn't know what to do with the times that had been
• 40:15
  previously put into bricklaying and whatever, you know, crazily
• 40:19
  fighting against Gandhi in 1935 around India.
• 40:23
  But anyway, I think Churchill was handed a really difficult
• 40:26
  situation 1940 as we know. But his his instinct was these
• 40:32
  guys are evil and I got to fight them.
• 40:34
  The king, the king understood Churchill's position and they
• 40:37
  were very good friends. And I think the king understood
• 40:39
  that Churchill understood the biggest threat in Europe is Nazi
• 40:43
  Germany, not the Soviet Union. I mean, there's a lot of sharks
• 40:45
  that there were openly at war with the Germans.
• 40:47
  But like Germany is different. It's going to eat.
• 40:51
  I mean, this thing, you know, they've got a lot of bad blood
• 40:53
  from the First World War and what what they're doing in in
• 40:57
  May 1940. I mean, the fall of France was
• 40:59
  unthinkable and it happens in like 2 weeks.
• 41:03
  You know, it's like, holy cow, you know, Dunkirk is, you know,
• 41:06
  you know, Churchill, you got to remove, got to resurface,
• 41:08
  reshuffle and strategically retreat, as Churchill would say.
• 41:13
  But what I think is really important is a couple things.
• 41:16
  One, you know, the other Conservatives, Lord Halifax,
• 41:18
  they've been breaking bread with people like Herman Goering as
• 41:21
  late as 1938, you know, so they couldn't be the leaders that
• 41:26
  were like that Britain needed at the time.
• 41:29
  They could. And so, for instance, you know,
• 41:31
  Halifax, who was the other alternative, He and Herman
• 41:34
  Goering were famously friends. I mean, you know, every day went
• 41:38
  on hunting parties together, pictures of them together having
• 41:41
  a big laugh. I mean, you know, so it can't be
• 41:44
  him. It has to be Churchill.
• 41:45
  And Churchill, I think, understands that.
• 41:48
  And the other thing is, is that during the this dark moment when
• 41:50
  it's like everything is lost. I mean, Boris Johnson and his
• 41:53
  book on Churchill, I love this phrase, referred to Churchill as
• 41:56
  the crowbar of history. I mean, this is that moment.
• 42:00
  And he not only meets the moment, is able to convince
• 42:02
  Parliament to fight on and, you know, and that's what the
• 42:05
  movie's about, but he's also able to to give speeches that
• 42:10
  inspire the nation. I mean the roar of the lion,
• 42:14
  right? How did he lead, Meaning what
• 42:16
  was his leadership style? Because I also find it
• 42:18
  interesting he stayed in London during the Blitz.
• 42:20
  He didn't run off to the countryside.
• 42:22
  He he, he shared in the the dangers.
• 42:26
  Wartime leader, It's hard to do better than Winston Churchill.
• 42:29
  I mean, I really, I did an interview with David Petraeus in
• 42:32
  Nashville, General David Petraeus, and I asked my very
• 42:35
  first question was who do you think the greatest leader of the
• 42:38
  20th century was and why is it Winston Churchill?
• 42:41
  I was there for a Churchill Society function.
• 42:44
  So we all sort of laughed. But you know, Churchill, his
• 42:48
  leadership was at a strategic, even beyond strategic at a
• 42:52
  national level. It's at a symbolic level even.
• 42:55
  I mean, this is a moment when he becomes the bulldog.
• 42:58
  He's like, we're going to fight them.
• 42:59
  And he gives voice to it. And you know, this is a really
• 43:02
  interesting thing because his voice is so powerful.
• 43:05
  And I don't just mean his literal voice, although that's
• 43:07
  in kind of interesting too, because AJP Taylor was a
• 43:12
  historian at my PhD supervisor. He said that you would hear
• 43:17
  Hitler on the radio and he made you think he was capable of
• 43:21
  anything, that he was terrifying.
• 43:23
  He, this man who's like Lord Saueron, this guy is
• 43:27
  unstoppable. He can do anything you can
• 43:29
  imagine. But he said then you heard
• 43:31
  Churchill on the radio, and Churchill made you believe you
• 43:35
  could do anything, that you could withstand this man.
• 43:39
  And I've always thought that was a tremendously powerful way to
• 43:41
  put that. I think that's a great point.
• 43:43
  If you listen to Hitler's speeches, it's I did this and
• 43:46
  I'm going to do that and I'm going to and then Churchill's
• 43:48
  was we are going to fight them, we're going to win.
• 43:51
  And he also did, which I think is interesting management by
• 43:55
  walking around, you know, visit the airfields, visit the
• 43:58
  soldiers going into battle, fire machine gun with them, be seen
• 44:02
  with them. Be be a part of it.
• 44:03
  I mean, he desperately want to be a part of it.
• 44:05
  One of the really interesting and more moronic moments of his
• 44:10
  leadership, which almost causes a constitutional crisis.
• 44:12
  Nobody really talks about this. Churchill is desperate to be on
• 44:18
  the ground at D-Day, so much so that he's got people putting
• 44:22
  together an armored battleship cruiser just for him.
• 44:25
  And he is like, I've got to be there.
• 44:28
  I've got to lead from the front. That's the kind of leadership I
• 44:31
  do. Now.
• 44:32
  We need to pause there for a second.
• 44:33
  As a military leader, that's one of the lessons he learned from
• 44:36
  Gallipoli is that he wasn't there at Gallipoli, and he
• 44:39
  thought if he had been, he could have made the difference.
• 44:42
  So he has a genuine this isn't just about being seen to do
• 44:45
  something. He has a genuine desire to lead
• 44:48
  from the front because he can't risk D-Day being like Gallipoli.
• 44:53
  That would be unthinkable. And, and you know, if you, you
• 44:56
  know this, of course Eisenhower wrote 2 letters, right?
• 44:59
  Eisenhower's like, we might lose.
• 45:00
  So Churchill wants to be there, OK?
• 45:02
  He, they're designed this thing. It was called Operation WC,
• 45:05
  which of course in English language is the toilet, the
• 45:08
  water closet. Well, he tells the king and the
• 45:12
  King's like, well, I'm coming. If you're going, I'm going to
• 45:14
  go. That's unthinkable.
• 45:16
  The king can't be in danger. And the king and the Prime
• 45:19
  Minister both can't be in danger.
• 45:20
  That's crazy. And then they decide, well,
• 45:23
  yeah, we'll both go. Well, they write to Clementine
• 45:25
  and they write to their wife. And they're both like,
• 45:27
  absolutely not. This is the craziest thing
• 45:29
  either of you've ever said. The the private secretary of the
• 45:33
  king is able to talk the king out of it and then says, you've
• 45:35
  got to talk Churchill out of it. Churchill is on his way to the
• 45:39
  special craft that they could build for him.
• 45:42
  So he's on the train and he and the king are riding back and
• 45:45
  forth and it's almost caused a constitutional crisis because
• 45:49
  the king says, well, I'm ordering you not to do this.
• 45:51
  It's insane to think today. But you know, this guy who went
• 45:54
  to the front in the first row was not afraid to do it.
• 45:58
  And so this isn't, again, it's not about, it's not about the
• 46:00
  show. It's because he wants to be in
• 46:01
  the fight. You've got a real constitutional
• 46:04
  crisis stuff. Nothing.
• 46:04
  Churchill says you have no authority because I'm going to
• 46:08
  be on a British naval boat and you control the land.
• 46:11
  Your authority is on Britain. Basically the king has to dig up
• 46:16
  some law about how the fact that when you're on a British boat,
• 46:19
  you're actually on English soil. And so that his authority does
• 46:23
  extend. I mean, there there's all this
• 46:24
  like they're going back and forth, going back and forth.
• 46:27
  And eventually he he says, think of your family.
• 46:30
  The king says the church, think of your family and think of the
• 46:32
  poor men on the ship who are going to be so nervous to be a
• 46:36
  target because you have to be there.
• 46:39
  And Churchill at that stage says, OK, I'm not going to go.
• 46:43
  So they're able to avoid the constitutional crisis, and
• 46:45
  they're able to avoid Churchill being on the battlefront.
• 46:48
  Now, the larger point is about Churchill's military leadership.
• 46:52
  Now, we talked about him as a symbolic leader for Britain, his
• 46:55
  voice, his language, at which he is 10 out of 10, A+ plus plus
• 47:00
  plus, best of the 20th century, in my opinion, as a military
• 47:03
  strategist. Not great.
• 47:04
  Yeah. And I'll tell you, that's an
• 47:07
  example of the fact that like his vision skewed about what he
• 47:11
  can and can't achieve personally.
• 47:15
  You know, when Churchill, when he won the Nobel Prize for his
• 47:18
  speeches and and famously they said, oh, he had been, he gave
• 47:21
  the roar to the lion, that he gave the lion its roar.
• 47:24
  He said, well, I like to think I also gave it its claws.
• 47:27
  You know, he sort of was affronted that he was not a
• 47:30
  great military strategist. And the truth is, is he wasn't.
• 47:35
  So how did Britain turned the tide of the war?
• 47:37
  Was it the victory over German forces at El Alamein in Africa?
• 47:41
  Or was it the code breaking of the German Enigma communication
• 47:45
  system? Or.
• 47:46
  I don't think it's either of those things.
• 47:48
  I think that you can see Churchill's hand in both of
• 47:50
  those. And this is what I mean about
• 47:51
  him being at the top, being the symbolic national leader.
• 47:56
  So #1 he understood that America had to be involved.
• 48:00
  America could not be involved in Europe yet.
• 48:03
  And so North Africa was a great kind of testing ground for
• 48:06
  American troops. And that gave America skin in
• 48:09
  the game in a way that was kind of brilliant, right?
• 48:13
  So symbolically, it's like get America in the war and let's
• 48:16
  give them something to root for now.
• 48:18
  You know, you can get into Montgomery versus Rommel and the
• 48:20
  real on the ground stuff there. But again, I'm kind of at the,
• 48:24
  you know, 10,000 foot level. And I think getting America deep
• 48:27
  in that way was a remarkable, you know, and it's and I'm
• 48:30
  making it sound like it was just Churchill.
• 48:31
  That, of course, is not the case.
• 48:32
  And I think that's important to talk about.
• 48:34
  And you know that dealing with Napoleon, it's not.
• 48:37
  There's a lot of people at play here and in particular you got
• 48:40
  lot of big personalities like FDR. Churchill worked closely
• 48:43
  with President Roosevelt and Soviet leader Stalin and one of
• 48:46
  the Allied Big Three leaders. So how important or integral was
• 48:51
  Churchill and persuading the US to enter the European war?
• 48:54
  There's a real interesting shift of how the power dynamics works
• 48:57
  between those three. The first thing from the outset
• 49:01
  is to say in the David Reynolds, if you've ever read his book on
• 49:04
  summitry, you know, Churchill deeply believed again about
• 49:06
  himself being there, being the man of action, that it had to be
• 49:09
  him meeting with the other great men.
• 49:12
  He's the one that calls these meetings.
• 49:13
  He's the one traveling to go meet with FDR and with Stalin.
• 49:17
  Stalin didn't go anywhere. You know, the first, you know,
• 49:19
  eventually went to Tehran. Sure.
• 49:21
  The, the, the point is, is that for the most part, they came to
• 49:24
  Stalin and necessarily so because Stalin's paying the
• 49:27
  price when people forget the Soviet Union really took the
• 49:30
  brunt of the onslaught. I mean, Hitler hated the idea of
• 49:35
  losing to France and to Britain, but he was afraid to lose to the
• 49:38
  Soviets. And so, you know, and ultimately
• 49:41
  that's what happens really. But that personal dynamics
• 49:44
  really, really important about a getting FDR to get into the
• 49:48
  battle, leaving, you know, Stalin's saying as early as 42
• 49:51
  guys, you've got to help. As soon as he's on their side,
• 49:54
  he's like, I need help. And he did.
• 49:56
  I mean, Stalin's not trying to even think about the after
• 49:59
  effects of the war or kind of lay the groundwork for what
• 50:02
  comes after that. That's much later.
• 50:04
  He's just like we're fighting an existential battle to be alive
• 50:09
  against this sort of Nazi onslaught.
• 50:11
  So Churchill plays a huge thing in convincing FDR and even I
• 50:16
  beyond FDR, because FDR agreed with him more or less.
• 50:19
  I think he played a huge part again, using his voice in
• 50:22
  convincing the American people they needed to be in Europe and
• 50:27
  that where you can see in North Africa.
• 50:29
  And I think that's why that's, you know what he addressed a
• 50:31
  Congress. I think that that had a huge
• 50:33
  sway because even the people who posed him were like, damn, that
• 50:36
  guy's got a point. He's good at building coalitions
• 50:39
  of friends and enemies. I mean, clearly Stalin was not
• 50:42
  his favorite person and he was very leery of the guy, but he
• 50:45
  also needed him and Roosevelt, who was his friend.
• 50:48
  So he was good at building, you know, I guess, bridges for these
• 50:53
  different parties to help Churchill get through the
• 50:55
  crisis. Oh, that's right.
• 50:56
  And I mean, what's really interesting is the bridge that
• 50:58
  he helps build between Stalin and FDR actually starts serving
• 51:03
  them better than him. I mean, they, they become quite
• 51:05
  close and Churchill gets left out in some of the stuff.
• 51:09
  I do think Churchill and Stalin kind of got on.
• 51:12
  I mean, they, they sort of have that kind of back slapping like,
• 51:15
  haha, we're drinkers and we have a good time.
• 51:17
  And you know, in a way that FDR was always a bit like, I don't
• 51:20
  know. But I think I think on a
• 51:22
  personal level, they did enjoy each other's company.
• 51:24
  But also Churchill, no one really trusted Joseph Stalin and
• 51:29
  rightfully so. I mean, he's always out for, for
• 51:31
  himself, maybe not even Russia. I mean out for Joseph Stalin.
• 51:35
  But I also think that that breaking the codes.
• 51:38
  I just want to go back to that point.
• 51:39
  The amount of money and time that was spent and put into
• 51:45
  military intelligence. Churchill is got Churchill's
• 51:48
  fingerprints all over. He himself was interested in
• 51:51
  intelligence. He was interested in the code
• 51:53
  breaking. You know, he called him his
• 51:54
  Corkscrew minds, Churchill's war wizard.
• 51:56
  He loved all that. And he was willing to put, you
• 52:00
  know, the funding and resources behind this stuff.
• 52:02
  And I mean, he loved it so much. And I'm someone who taught
• 52:06
  military intelligence and I find this difficult.
• 52:08
  He liked to review the actual decrypts.
• 52:12
  So he, you know, he didn't want the analysis that would be given
• 52:15
  to, he wanted to analyze it himself.
• 52:18
  FDR famously hated Intel intelligence briefing.
• 52:22
  You know, he was just like, whatever, I don't care where's
• 52:24
  Churchill's like wants to be in it, in the details, in the
• 52:26
  actual like here's the code, let's break the code, you know,
• 52:30
  which is really remarkable. I also want to say on the point
• 52:33
  of about what ultimately brings them together and kind of, in my
• 52:37
  opinion, wins the war. I don't know if you've ever read
• 52:39
  a book called The Engineers of Victory by Paul Kennedy.
• 52:43
  It's the most convincing reason for why all this sinks in my
• 52:47
  opinion. And in the conclusion of his
• 52:50
  book said that it was a culture of encouragement on the Allied
• 52:55
  side. So, you know, when they're
• 52:56
  trying to put together how the Spitfires and the the new
• 53:00
  Mustangs at work, we're using Rolls Royce engine, but we're
• 53:02
  putting it on these kind of bodies.
• 53:04
  You just can't. There were a lot of lot of
• 53:05
  failures, but it didn't matter. Churchill kept going back to
• 53:09
  this like, hey, the Pie Crete stuff didn't work.
• 53:11
  OK, we'll figure something else out.
• 53:12
  Oh, the codes weren't right. Well, OK, let's figure something
• 53:15
  else. You know, it's just like, we'll
• 53:16
  do it. We'll figure it out together.
• 53:17
  You you said this. He says we he's talking about
• 53:20
  America. He's talking about the Allied
• 53:21
  powers in Germany. OK, you've got the best tanks,
• 53:25
  right? You've got the the Leopards,
• 53:27
  you've got the Tigers. But if you get it wrong, boy,
• 53:31
  you've really pissed off a a whole lot of people that are all
• 53:34
  gaming to be the Hitler's favorite, right?
• 53:37
  You know, the Allied leadership was like, we, we got to get
• 53:40
  through this thing together. And, you know, there's obviously
• 53:42
  positive reinforcement, but it's like, you know, guys weren't
• 53:45
  afraid to just come up with wackadoo ideas.
• 53:47
  You know, that bomb that bounced on the water or another example
• 53:50
  that he gives is the thing with the hedgehogs that would throw
• 53:54
  depth charges in the Pacific. You know, just an engineer on a
• 53:58
  boat one day came up with how you do that.
• 54:00
  You couldn't release a depth charge so close to your boat or
• 54:02
  it might blow you up. And so they created these sort
• 54:06
  of little things, and it was just this idea of like these
• 54:09
  kinds of engineering feats. I want to get to post war
• 54:13
  because he still has quite a resume to go here and this this
• 54:17
  is still a head scratcher to me. Britain wins the war.
• 54:20
  Churchill in the Conservative Party, lose the 1945 general
• 54:24
  election to Clement Attlee in the Labour Party.
• 54:27
  I still don't understand how Churchill lost this election
• 54:30
  after leading Britain through the most violent war in history.
• 54:33
  What you got to remember #1 is the British structure.
• 54:36
  In it, you don't vote for a man, you vote for parties.
• 54:40
  So the Conservatives are running the the election, You know, the
• 54:43
  central government, Churchill now the war's over, has has
• 54:45
  stopped. And then we're going to kind of
• 54:47
  do the British reset. What you got to remember is
• 54:50
  since the 1930s, Churchill says, hey, I'm not like those other
• 54:54
  Conservatives. I'm different.
• 54:56
  I don't like Nazis. And he spent the last 10 years
• 54:59
  telling you how unconservative he is, which is how he's able to
• 55:02
  build a coalition with the Liberals and with with Labor,
• 55:06
  right, And with Clement Attlee and people like Arthur
• 55:08
  Greenwood. And so Churchill is saying, I'm
• 55:11
  not really one of those conservative guys.
• 55:13
  I'm doing my own thing. I'm trying to find solutions in
• 55:16
  the middle. I'm not ideologically driven.
• 55:18
  I'm here for the British people. Now, Churchill still the
• 55:22
  political leader of the Conservative Party, right?
• 55:24
  But he also overplays his hand because he starts putting out,
• 55:27
  he, there's a famous radio speech that he gave where he,
• 55:31
  he's saying, oh, you know, if, if Labour wins this, they're
• 55:34
  going to have a new Gestapo. It's called the Gestapo speech.
• 55:37
  And even Clementine's like, pump your brakes, man.
• 55:40
  This is crazy. Nobody's talking about that.
• 55:43
  I mean, and it made him sound like he was an out of touch old
• 55:46
  man. And so those two things kind of
• 55:49
  together, you know, I think was the undoing of the Conservative
• 55:53
  Party because Churchill, you know, he'd been in the war.
• 55:55
  He was a great wartime leader. He had a reputation for being a
• 55:58
  wartime leader, not really the guy you want during peace
• 56:01
  because again, like we said the beginning, he's not really
• 56:03
  interested in the fine minutiae of government.
• 56:06
  He's into big state making stuff.
• 56:09
  And the final thing I want to say is the kind of genius of the
• 56:13
  campaigns that were run. So Churchill's Conservative
• 56:16
  Party run, very stodgy old man telling you, oh, the left there
• 56:21
  Gestapo. Labour ran a really dynamic
• 56:24
  party and their posters said cheer for Churchill, vote for
• 56:28
  Labour, and that became the opinion of the whole country
• 56:32
  because they didn't trust the Conservatives who'd been soft
• 56:35
  with the Nazis, particularly at the time when it was coming to
• 56:38
  light what the Germans had been up to.
• 56:42
  You got to remember this going all the way back to why
• 56:44
  Churchill got out of, we kind of skipped over the Chinette
• 56:47
  crisis. But at the end of the First
• 56:48
  World War, Churchill and Lloyd George were afraid that Turkey
• 56:53
  was going to March. You know, they didn't want
• 56:55
  Turkey to be in Europe at all. And it had had marched to, to
• 56:58
  unite that part of Turkey with the other part of Turkey.
• 57:01
  Churchill and Lloyd George are like, we're going to go to war
• 57:02
  to stop this. This is literally like right
• 57:05
  after the, the, the peace conference in 1990.
• 57:08
  So this is 19/21/22 and it's called the Chenek crisis.
• 57:13
  And they're trying to stop the Turkeys, the Turkish going in.
• 57:15
  And Churchill says, well, we're willing to go to war for this
• 57:18
  without checking in this Churchill and Lloyd George,
• 57:21
  without checking with any of the imperial holdings, any of the
• 57:23
  Commonwealth or the allies at all.
• 57:25
  They're just like, we're going to stop them.
• 57:27
  And everybody immediately put out a press release like, no,
• 57:30
  we're not. We got no dog in this fight at
• 57:32
  all, bro. And that created such a crisis.
• 57:34
  It broke the Lloyd George government.
• 57:37
  And it also sort of kept, I mean, it knocked Lloyd George
• 57:40
  out of serious power for the rest of his life.
• 57:42
  And so there was this idea that's like, you can't if we let
• 57:45
  Churchill in charge of stuff after the fact, you know,
• 57:47
  remember what happened last time.
• 57:49
  Returns as Prime Minister in 19 from 1951 to 1955 and remains an
• 57:54
  influential Cold War figure famously warning about the Iron
• 57:58
  Curtain dividing Europe. And again, we see this ability
• 58:01
  to recover. So I'm going to let you discuss
• 58:04
  those two speeches. In opposition 1946, he gives in
• 58:09
  March, he goes to Fulton, MO in America and gives the famous
• 58:12
  Iron Curtain speech, which is actually called the Sinews of
• 58:15
  Peace. And in that speech he lays out a
• 58:17
  vision of three major things. The first is the Iron Curtain.
• 58:21
  That actually it was the Soviet Union was the problem and that
• 58:24
  the Iron Curtain had had descended.
• 58:26
  And we don't really know what's going on over there.
• 58:28
  They're up to no good. So that that defines the rest of
• 58:33
  the 20th century really up to 1989.
• 58:36
  The, the second part of that speech, which also defines the
• 58:38
  next part of the 20th century is he starts calling for a real
• 58:42
  close relationship with Europe. Now it's not really until
• 58:45
  September 1946, I think in, I don't know if it was Zurich or
• 58:52
  anyway, he, he gives a speech called the United States of
• 58:55
  Europe where he calls for Europe to be integrated in the same
• 58:58
  way. And this becomes, you know, this
• 59:00
  sort of lays the groundwork for how Europe would behave for the
• 59:02
  rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century.
• 59:07
  The third thing that he lays out is the special relationship,
• 59:10
  which, of course had existed, but the America and in
• 59:13
  particular Anglophone countries would have to exist as a united
• 59:18
  front. And so you have America and
• 59:20
  Britain as two major players in this special relationship, but
• 59:23
  there's also Canada, Australia, you know, what we call the Five
• 59:26
  Eyes. And it creates, you know, these
• 59:27
  three things define what happens to the rest of the 20th century.
• 59:33
  He wins the Nobel Prize in literature in 1953 for his
• 59:36
  historical writings and speeches.
• 59:39
  And then, I mean lives to 1965 and receives a state funeral
• 59:45
  widely regarded as one of the largest in British history.
• 59:50
  So I guess my final question is, it's So what is his legacy?
• 59:53
  That's a really difficult question.
• 59:55
  And, and here it's the enormity of the figure.
• 59:58
  I mean, we're now, you know, about 100 years away from
• 1:00:02
  church, not his death, but from when he was sort of politically
• 1:00:04
  active. You know, we're 200 years away
• 1:00:07
  of, if not more from Napoleon. Napoleon still too big To sum
• 1:00:11
  up, You know you can't make a movie about Napoleon's life, as
• 1:00:14
  we've seen recently with Ridley Scott's attempt, because it's
• 1:00:17
  too big. And that's also true with
• 1:00:19
  Churchill. I mean, it's, it's hard to sum
• 1:00:24
  up because the man was in everything and he was there for
• 1:00:26
  so long. And then, you know, they're
• 1:00:27
  different people who've looked at it in different ways.
• 1:00:29
  One of my favorite Robert Rhodes, James wrote a book
• 1:00:33
  called Churchill, a study and Failure, and it looked at his
• 1:00:35
  life up to 1939, you know what I mean?
• 1:00:39
  And then you could make a case of the he's this goofy weird guy
• 1:00:42
  that keeps going from thing to thing kind of words kind of
• 1:00:44
  doesn't. And then the world say World War
• 1:00:47
  happens and he's the absolute right man for the job, saves the
• 1:00:51
  world, arguably. And then it's like, OK, bye,
• 1:00:54
  thanks. Now, now.
• 1:00:56
  And you know, some of the other stuff we don't we had we don't
• 1:00:58
  really have time to get into. Is this 51 to 5555?
• 1:01:01
  Government does some really important stuff that helps bring
• 1:01:05
  about a detente with the Soviet Union.
• 1:01:08
  It lays the groundwork for how humanity is going to deal with
• 1:01:10
  the hydrogen bomb because he's still influencing Truman and
• 1:01:15
  Eisenhower. He's able to bring Eisenhower
• 1:01:17
  together with Khrushchev for their meeting in nine as a kind
• 1:01:20
  of elder statesman. It lays a lot of the groundwork
• 1:01:23
  for how that portion of the Cold War would work up till, I would
• 1:01:26
  argue a kind of Nixonian era or maybe even later.
• 1:01:29
  He was a success in World War Two.
• 1:01:31
  World War One? Probably Debatable.
• 1:01:33
  Debate, I think, I mean, it depends.
• 1:01:35
  I mean that's it depends on who you ask, right?
• 1:01:37
  So if you ask someone from Britain or America, was he
• 1:01:39
  success? Absolutely.
• 1:01:41
  If you ask someone in India, probably not.
• 1:01:43
  You know, they're different. You know, Churchill, I think you
• 1:01:46
  get into those questions about him being a man and having
• 1:01:48
  flaws. I mean, Churchill held 19th
• 1:01:50
  century ideas about people, which often meant that he was
• 1:01:53
  racist, you know, as we would conceptualize it today.
• 1:01:57
  And I think sometimes could even be considered that by his
• 1:01:59
  contemporaries. But at the same time, you know,
• 1:02:02
  he had this kind of unwavering faith in the British Empire and
• 1:02:06
  Britain, you know, And so he's a complex figure and understanding
• 1:02:09
  these complexities of how he ruled.
• 1:02:11
  I mean, yet sometimes Ireland would have called him a hero,
• 1:02:15
  and other times Ireland would have called him a villain.
• 1:02:17
  You know, he sat down and did everything he could to work with
• 1:02:20
  Michael Collins. But Eamon Dellavera famously
• 1:02:23
  hated him and even sent a letter of condolences to Nazi Germany
• 1:02:27
  when Hitler died. I mean, you know, they're so
• 1:02:30
  it's a complex legacy. It's about who you ask.
• 1:02:32
  But, but from my perspective, he remains one of the most
• 1:02:35
  fascinating figures of the 20th century.
• 1:02:38
  You know, in terms of the big, the big books about him, you
• 1:02:42
  know, Martin Gilbert's biography is still, bar none, the best
• 1:02:44
  one. I also like Andrew Roberts's
• 1:02:47
  biography, although I disagree with with much in it.
• 1:02:50
  But I think Roberts is still a worthy contribution to the
• 1:02:53
  literature, of course, for me, what's been influential
• 1:02:58
  Churchill's Empire by Richard Toy, I think is one of the most
• 1:03:00
  brilliant books about the philosophy that guides the man
• 1:03:03
  Paul Addison's book I mentioned about his domestic policy, You
• 1:03:06
  know, my own work focuses more on his view of cultures in
• 1:03:10
  particular in a kind of colonial phase around Islam and, and, and
• 1:03:14
  people from India and that kind of stuff, which I think is
• 1:03:16
  tremendously important now in particular.
• 1:03:19
  But but again, Gilbert's work and anyone that focuses on that
• 1:03:22
  special relationship, I think is so important.
• 1:03:24
  But one of the last thing and enduring legacies of Winston
• 1:03:26
  Churchill is that there is a special relationship between the
• 1:03:31
  UK and the US. And even my friends in Britain
• 1:03:34
  are like, no, I don't think there is.
• 1:03:35
  A lot of people here are like, what's special or what are you
• 1:03:37
  talking about it? It's codified in law.
• 1:03:40
  There was an act passed in 1943 called the Bertha Act, which the
• 1:03:43
  British and and USA act that said we would share intelligence
• 1:03:47
  later. It was codified as the USUK law
• 1:03:50
  in 1947. The fact that we have a special
• 1:03:52
  relationship is legal and there's it's publicly documented
• 1:03:57
  and it gets forgotten about because it's clandestine stuff
• 1:04:00
  and whatever. But there is a fundamental
• 1:04:02
  Churchillian legal, you know, ethos that that goes through all
• 1:04:07
  of our buildings and work in Washington and in London, and
• 1:04:10
  people forget that. Well, if you'd like to learn
• 1:04:12
  more about Churchill, you could also check out Warren Doctors
• 1:04:15
  podcast, Churchill the The Finest Half Hour, which you can
• 1:04:19
  find wherever podcasts are heard.
• 1:04:21
  And we thank Warren for his time.