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Great Contemporaries

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There is very little about Sir Churchill that can be considered routine, average, or some standard he can be compared to. Everything he did was generally on a scale that helped to create the Legend he has become, and that he will remain. Even when he erred, it generally was not minor, however rare, but on balance we do not, nor will we have his kind again. He loved his Country, and he loved the US, for he was 50% American, so that even in Washington D.C. today, a statue of him striding forward has one foot on British, and one on American soil.

His life was long, stretching past the 90-year mark, allowing him ample time to write and give speeches, which are routinely quoted to this day. He was a master at both disciplines, with his writing awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature in 1953.

"Great Contemporaries" is a book that is more about the men and women he knew than about the Author. He is evident throughout the read, as the impressions of these people of History are his. The 21 profiles he shares with the reader are incredible in their range, and that they were his "contemporaries" is one testament to the History he created and was a part of.

Contemporary people of fame are often identifiable by a first or last name alone. However as we live in an age where you can chat in real time across the planet, fame does not require the same level of notoriety. The fame is of a different character and caliber.

The Kaiser, Shaw, Chamberlein, Hindenburg, Foch, Trotsky, these are only a fraction of the essays this man of history will share. Too, there is Lawrence of Arabia who requires a bit more than a last name, but it is not do to his renown, rather the generic nature of the end of his sobriquet.

These reminiscences are different than those of today's leaders, there was very little distance between these people, they often met alone, and they did not bring an array of lackeys, translators, and gadflies.

A tremendous sweep of one man's impressions of people whose actions resonate to this day, and in all likelihood will not cease.

Although Winston Churchill is remember best as a statesman (and in my mind the greatest man of the 20th Century), he made his living through his pen. Churchill though of aristocratic background, was not extremely wealthy. While he could have survived on the family fortune, his expensive tastes and zest for living would have bankrupted him. So he turned to writing to earn his living.

Great Contemporaries is a series of essays written between 1929 and 1937 on the "great" leaders of the day. Churchill knew many of these leaders personally, and is able to supplement what might otherwise be a dry recitation of the facts of a career with personal stories and vignettes.

Perhaps the most famous of the essays is on "Hitler and his Choice, 1935." This essay is often cited by neo-Nazis and far leftists as proof that Churchill actually admired Hitler. But finally getting the chance to read the essay shows that any such analysis takes Churchill's words extremely out of context. Hitler was to be Churchill's great antagonist in the coming decade. In 1935, Churchill recognized that Hitler was facing a choice - would Hitler take a moderate road and perhaps be remembered as the leader who restored German honor, or who Hitler take the road of war. Churchill ends the essay with a warning, that German rearmament was continuing, and, of course, tragically, Churchill's misgivings were played out.

One problem, with this book is that many of the "great" men described are almost forgotten today, at least outside their home countries. Men like the Earl of Rosebery (Prime Minister in the 1890s) or King Alfosno XIII of Spain probably make no impression on the American reader while George Curzon is remembered, if at all, as the man who roughly proposed the border between Poland and the Soviet Union (the "Curzon Line").

The book includes essays on well-remembered men such as George Bernard Shaw, Clemenceau and Churchill's protégé T.E. Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"). These essays, full of personal remembrances by Churchill, are well worth the time.

Consider this passage, about the political climate in Britain before World War One:

"At the time, conflict unceasing grew year by year to a more dangerous intensity at home, while abroad there gathered sullenly
the hurricane that was to wreck our generation. Our days were spent in the furious party battles..., while always upon the horizon deadly shapes grew or faded, and even while the sun shone there was a curious whisper in the air."

Who could the author of such Churchillian lines be but Winston Churchill himself? The stately but rarely stentorian pacing and tone, imitations of which are rarely successful, still impresses upon the reader the power and beauty of the English language.

These biographical essays, written while Churchill was in political exile in the Thirties, were collected in book at the end of that decade. His majestically simple (or simply majestic) writing brings long-gone controversies and personalities back to life, if unavoidably suffused with the aura of the author's own personality.

Some notables that would seem to have been natural subjects for this book are missing: Gandhi, Lloyd George, Edward VII. But an American reader only passingly acquainted with the luminaries of early 20th century Britain would be interested in Churchill's memories of the First Earl of Birkenhead, Herbert Henry Asquith, and George Nathanael Curzon. The pieces are light on biographical detail and heavy on evaluation, but Churchill's estimation of most of these people is generous. He dismisses George Bernard Shaw as a jester, gallantly defends the ex-Kaiser from the worst of the late war-time propaganda, and warns of the rising influence of Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler. The reader is also reminded from time to time that Churchill was indeed a politician, as in the essay on Lord Fisher, in which he deflects blame for some WWI naval setbacks onto that gentleman.

Excepting Walpole, probably no statesman's collected bread and butter writing has ever been so memorable, or made for such good reading.

Churchill's "Great Contemporaries" was originally published by Thornton Butterworth in 1937 with twenty-one essays on "Great Men of our age," all of which had earlier appeared in newspapers or magazines. The book appeared in a revised edition in 1938 from the same publisher with four additional essays, including an essay on "Roosevelt from Afar"--the book's only essay about an American. In 1942, with Britain allied in war with Soviet Russia and the United States, "Great Contemporaries" was reprinted without the Roosevelt essay and without the essays on Boris Savinkov and Leon Trotsky; in this wartime edition the essay on George Bernard Shaw was abridged by omitting the account of the trip Shaw took to the Soviet Union with Lady Astor. Unfortunately the Simon Publications edition reproduces this truncated 1942 edition, which lacks these three essays and part of the fourth. Readers who wish to read the entire book must therefore find an edition based on the 1938 edition with all twenty-five essays. A complete edition of the book with a new introduction, explanatory notes, and additional essays by Churchill, edited by the author of this review with Paul H. Courtenay and Erica L. Chenoweth, will be published by ISI Books in spring 2012 as a companion volume to the new edition of Churchill's "Thoughts and Adventures" published by ISI Books in 2009.

Published in 1937, this book includes 22 biographical sketches of notable persons, mainly British and mainly involved in politics and government. Almost all of them belong to Churchill's preceding generation or to his own, and with one or two exceptions, he knew all of them personally. These are intimate impressions of the author revealing the secret and dangerous mechanisms of the European scene during the First World War and its aftermath. Parliamentary life, the great political debates, and the intricate geostrategic dilemmas of the worldwide chess, are all reflected from the privilieged position of a crucial observer and player.

Figures like the Count of Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain, John Morley, Asquith, Birkenhead, Balfour, Curzon, Snowden, or Parnell, suffuse life into the Great Britain of the first third of the XXth Century, with the constant musical chairs between Conservative and Liberals, as well as the definitive demise of the latter and the rise of Labour. Inevitably, several military people are central characters, war having been the predominant phenomenon of that age: Sir John French and his stoicism in the face of the initial debacle of the IWW; Hindenburg, his rise and fall; Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps the most eccentric in a gallery of eccentrics; Foch and his final triumph; Haig and the comeback in IWW. Also memorable are the favorable portrait he paints of King George V, as well as sketches of other European leaders such as Alfonso XIII, well-meaning but frivolous and detached; the fierce and coherent Clemenceau; and, as a real rarity, Hitler, to whom Churchill concedes, reluctantly, the benefit of doubt, although he sounds convinced that it will all end in disaster. G.B. Shaw is the only figure from the artistic world, sympathetically included.

In this relatively early book, Churchil's literary qualities already shine: his acute but balanced judgment, and the remarkable depth of perception which characterized him. He struggles to show both virtues and vices of his subjects, including the least presentable, like Hitler and the Kaiser. It is a valuable document of history.