“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” said Churchill. “Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”
From this distance the unflinching Englishman and the jaunty American can seem Olympian, frozen in black and white, their voices stirring but scratchy. In the wake of the recent terror attacks, however, the language of the first conflict of the 21st century is drawn from their mouths: the prime minister coined the phrase “finest hour,” the president “a date which will live in infamy.” Rallying his people, Rudolph Giuliani is being called Churchillian, and in his few spare moments, the mayor consulted John Lukacs’s “Five Days in London,” an account of the first, critical period of Churchill’s prime ministership. It is true that the war President George W. Bush has declared is more complicated than the battles FDR and Churchill fought; in the ’40s we knew where the enemy was. But understanding what they did and how they did it sheds light on something essential: the art of leadership.
In times of crisis, words matter. During the dark days of 1940, Churchill thought, rightly, that he was destined to be the savior of Britain. He had always believed that. When he was a child his parents cruelly ignored him; in reaction he retreated into his own mind, dreaming of dazzling military exploits as he played with thousands of toy soldiers. “It’s when I’m Joan of Arc that I really get excited,” he once said.
With Hitler on the march, Churchill’s grandeur and grandiosity matched the moment. “The Prime Minister was able to impose his imagination and his will upon his countrymen, and enjoy a Periclean reign, precisely because he appeared to them larger and nobler than life and lifted them to an abnormal height in a moment of crisis,” wrote Isaiah Berlin. Churchill, Berlin went on, lifted “a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves, and, by dramatizing their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, trans-formed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour.”
He never doubted what others thought could not come to pass: victory. “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule,” he said, “we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…” During the Blitz, which killed tens of thousands, the prime minister refused to leave the danger zone. At Downing Street, he told his family that, in the event of invasion, “I am counting on each one of you to take at least one dead German with you.” His daughter-in-law, Pamela, protested that she did not know how to fire a gun. “But my dear,” Churchill grumbled, “you can use a carving knife.”
Across the Atlantic, Franklin Roosevelt faced a trickier task. Reluctant to get too far ahead of public opinion, FDR had moved only glacially to support England. At the time of the attack in the Pacific, the nation was still largely unprepared for war; when Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, the U.S. Army was 18th in the world, weaker than even Sweden’s and Switzerland’s. Yet Roosevelt, driven by a sense of confidence he conveyed to the country with his reassuring voice, his smile and the play of his cigarette, knew any obstacle could be overcome: struck down by infantile paralysis at the age of 39, he never walked again. Refusing to speak of his disability, he relentlessly forced himself, and his nation, forward. The man who had comforted his terrified children when he was carried from his sickbed at Campobello with a cheery “I’ll be seeing you chicks soon!” would tell a broken nation amid the Depression that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” When he died, a Texas congressman was found leaning against a wall in the Capitol. “He was the one person I ever knew–anywhere–who was never afraid,” said Lyndon Johnson.
Roosevelt and Churchill understood–and George W. Bush is learning–that leadership is not just about defining the enemy; it is about pointing ahead, to the world that will rise out of the ashes of war, to what Churchill called “the broad, sunlit uplands” worth the sacrifice and the blood. The day before he died, FDR had been working on a speech. His last words: “Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” A decade later, in his last great address, the prime minister said, “Never flinch, never weary, never despair.” In the end, their hearts were together. Their eyes looked ahead. So should ours.
