Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. [Paperback]

John Lukacs (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300103026 | ISBN-13: 978-0300103021 | Publication Date: April 10, 2004

A clear-eyed view of Winston Churchill, the workings of his historical imagination, and his successes and failures as a statesman, by the celebrated historian of World War II and best-selling author of Five Days in London, May 1940. John Lukacs has spent a lifetime considering the complex personality and statesmanship of Winston Churchill. In previous books Lukacs has told the story of Churchill's titanic struggle with Adolf Hitler in the early days of World War II. Now, in Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian., he turns his attention to Churchill the man and visionary statesman.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A prolific senior historian of modern Europe, Lukacs has written about Churchill many times before, most recently in Five Days in London, May 1940. That recycled a small part of his The Duel: 10 May-31 July: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler. This rather thin new volume contains little that is new, and is seemingly a reorganization of Lukacs's lecture notes, leavings, reconsiderations and reviews. There are shrewd chapters on Churchill's cautious relations with Stalin, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, and on Churchill's critics. There are reevaluations of Churchill as a visionary and as a historian capable of "splendid phrases and passages," often at his best when "personal and participatory." Although Lukacs credits Churchill's extraordinary army of research assistants over much of a lifetime for his massive output, he fails to note that much of the work was written to order, fat contracts supporting an authorial lifestyle almost unique in his time. A chapter on Churchill and Eisenhower persuasively takes the political general down a peg or two, and the excoriation (and exposure) of the pompous Churchill-baiter John Charmley is overdue. A final chapter, personal observations on the three days in January 1965 when Lukacs went to London to observe the great man's obsequies, seems either padding or self-indulgence. Overall, though, Lukacs convincingly portrays a leader of an empire in irreversible decline and a towering, if flawed, hero of our time.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Lukacs was able to connect with a popular readership in his two histories about Churchill's finest hours in 1940 (The Duel, 1991, and Five Days in London, 1999); his work is also of special interest to professional historians (The Hitler of History, 1997). This volume of essays about the Churchill of history debates, sometimes explicitly in the form of reworked, previously published book reviews, other historians' critiques of the cigar-champing bulldog. In particular, Lukacs can't abide John Charmley, whose writings arraign Churchill for not negotiating with Hitler, the very theme of Five Days. Lukacs' ability to meld the scholarly with the popular is much in evidence here, particularly in the author's discussion of Churchill's quality as a historian. Here again, Lukacs defends Churchill against some dons (such as the late E. H. Carr), while conceding defects in some of Churchill's works. These books, especially the Nobel Prize-winning The Second World War, are perennially popular and evidence of the wide and enduring interest in Churchill. No doubt that interest will fuel demand for Lukacs' historiographic articles. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300103026
• ISBN-13: 978-0300103021
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,749,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Ode to Greatness, October 3, 2002

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dougrhon "dougrhon" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. (Hardcover)

John Lukacs has written a number of books about and involving Winston Churchill. Most deal with his role in World War II. In this little volume, really just an extended essay, he waxes poetic on a man he clearly admires deeply. The book is divided into short chapters in which Lukacs considers a number of different aspects of Churchill's character and personality. First he considers Churchill as a visionary by examining some of Churchill's well known, Cassandra-like predictions such as the danger of Hitler and after the war of Soviet aggression. In the section on Churchill as statesman, Lukacs looks at Churchill's complicated relationships with Stalin, Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Lukacs also discusses Churchill's views on Britain's relationship with Europe and his take on the policy of appeasement. In a chapter on Churchill as historian, Lukacs looks critically at Churchill's most important works, in particular, his "Life of Marlborough", his biography of his father, "Lord Randolph Churchill" and his history of the First World War, the "World Crisis". Lukacs appreciates Churchill's talents as an artist of the written word. He demonstrates why Churchill's work succeeds not just as history but as literature. In the next section, Lukacs effectively refutes Churchill's severest revisionist critics in a chapter entitled "His Failures, His Critics". It may interest the reader to know that their exist so-called historians whose purpose in life seems to be to blame Churchill either for fighting Hitler or for losing the empire and world leadership to the United States. As Lukacs argues, this is ridiculous. Finally, in a beautiful essay that is alone worth the price of the book, Lukacs describes his feelings while attending Churchill's state funeral in 1965.

Quite a bit is covered in such a small book but as a Churchillphile, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lukacs has a true appreciation of human greatness and this book demonstrates why Churchill was a great man, one of the greatest of the modern era. Great does not mean perfect of course and Lukacs eloquently explains why Churchill, with all his flaws, was truly great. This is not a book of history or an appropriate reference for a study of Churchill. Nor is it the proper starting point for one seeking to learn about Churchill's life. But for one who already loves and reveres the memory of this great man, this book is balm for the soul. It makes the case, quite clearly for Churchill's greatness. It is at once poignant and eloquent. It is well worth reading.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historian as politician and vice versa, October 21, 2002

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Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. (Hardcover)

About halfway through Lukacs' chapter on Churchill and Eisenhower, I wrote down the phrase I used to title this review. One of the author's missions is to explore how Churchill's study and writing of history shaped his politics, statesmanship, and "vision." And sure enough, just a few dozen pages later, Lukacs himself, modifying a phrase of J.H. Plumb, described Churchill as "a historian-statesman and a statesman-historian" (p. 102).

John Lukacs is himself a great writer and interpreter of history. And though I've read lots of things about Churchill over the years, few historians have impressed me as he has with their ability to synthesize and interpret. By all means, still read the longer biographies -- Gilbert, naturally, as well as Best and Jenkins more recently. But let Lukacs help you sort out what it all means. Among other things, you may well find yourself agreeing with him that Churchill "was not The Last Lion" (p. 17).

Lukacs' description of Churchill as a patriot but not a nationalist (as contrasted with Hitler, who was a nationalist but not a patriot) is also a revealing one -- especially in an era when the two are too easily confused.

Hundreds or thousands of volumes have been written on Churchill as statesman and war leader. But only one (Maurice Ashley's "Churchill as Historian," 1968), plus a few journal articles, have viewed him as a student and writer of history and tried to assess how that affected his other spheres of life. Lukacs views it as central, giving Churchill, as it did, a philosophy of history (p. 123) as well as a world view that allowed him to place events and ideas in their larger historical context (Lukacs sees this as the essential difference between Churchill and Eisenhower).

Given the resurgence of interest in Churchill -- which never entirely wanes, of course -- post-9/11, several of Lukacs' insights and conclusions may come as a surprise, or be considered "controversial": notably, that Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton was less about the dangers posed by communism *per se* than about those inherent in a divided Europe; that Churchill's glory was not that he won a great victory, but rather that he prevented a great defeat; and that in his dealings with Stalin during and after the war, he tried "to save what was possible" (p. 182). This last point Lukacs deploys (in an excellent chapter on Churchill's failures and his critics) against those who hold Churchill to blame for the "loss" of Eastern Europe to communism (through the Machiavellian "percentages deal," for example). Lukacs argues that Churchill recognized there were only two real options: All of Europe dominated by Hitler, or half of Europe dominated by Stalin. There was, Lukacs says, no third way.

Duff Cooper, a Churchillian, once wrote that one of the problems with democracies is that too few democratic leaders have read any history. Lukacs shows how Churchill's own reading and writing prepared him for the challenges of his century. Readers of this book, in turn, emerge with a clearer view, not only of those challenges, but also of The Man of the Century himself. Very highly recommended.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A throwaway, February 3, 2003

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R. Coleman "roncoleman" (Passaic, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian. (Hardcover)

And a tolerably worthwhile throwaway, considering Lukacs's knowledge of his subject. If you have decent familiarity with the issues, this book won't weigh you down and it adds nuance to the accepted portrait of Churchill. But this is certainly not an introduction to Churchill and the author's biases, particularly against Eisenhower, mar the presentation. This chafed at me in particular, and I hold no particular brief for Ike. But Lukacs is an historian, yet he swipes at Eisenhower throughout the second half of the book, almost never building an argument but rather using innuendo. He largely assumes that the reader shares his biases, more in the way of punditry than scholarship. I don't regret reading the book, but I am sure I could have made more productive use of the time and money on another Churchill work.