Podcast: Secrets of Statecraft, Hoover Institution

I was hon­ored to be invit­ed to join Lord Roberts, author of Walk­ing with Des­tiny at Secrets of State­craft. It was fun to chat with the author of the fore­most one-vol­ume life of Churchill, about where Sir Win­ston stands on his 150th birth­day. We mutu­al­ly con­clud­ed that he stands as tall as ever.

Mistakes real and imagined

Andrew Roberts: “It’s sort of clas­sic, isn’t it, that the more you look into Churchill’s actu­al actions, the less the detrac­tors real­ly have to say? They’ve a few lines that they can come out with, espe­cial­ly obvi­ous­ly, on social media. But when you actu­al­ly dig into the truth, there’s less and less behind it. Would you say that’s fair, historically?”

Richard Lang­worth: “Yes, I think so. Of course there are many cas­es where he made mis­takes, seri­ous ones. They nev­er seem to come up. Instead we always get these long trails of red herrings.”

AR: “Let’s go into some of them.”

And we did: all crit­i­cisms are here: the real, the  imag­ined, the pre­pos­ter­ous. We cov­ered the gamut, from women’s suf­frage to the Ben­gal Famine.

Churchill today

AR: “Now tell me why you think that 150 years after his birth, we should still be inter­est­ed in Churchill, what he has to teach us today.”

RL: “That’s a tall order, Andrew.”

AR: “Sor­ry, old boy, that’s why you’re on.”

RL: “First, I like what you said at the end of the Net­flix doc­u­men­tary. Who else could still make peo­ple laugh six­ty years after his death? I mean, we will say that about Grou­cho Marx. But a politi­cian? Can you think of anoth­er one?

“Beyond that, we need to remem­ber him because he spoke ever­last­ing truths about the rela­tions between peo­ples, about gov­er­nance, about the val­ue of lib­er­ty. Those are as rel­e­vant as ever today.

“I was alive and sen­tient in 1959, which was the 150th anniver­sary of the birth of Abra­ham Lin­coln. And I don’t remem­ber any­thing like as much atten­tion paid to him as we do to Churchill today. Of course, we live in a dif­fer­ent era, an age of 24/7 sat­u­ra­tion media. But he does seem to be per­ma­nent­ly on everyone’s mind.

“As to what appeals about him: Sir John Giel­gud said ‘Churchill was as ordi­nary as any of us and as extra­or­di­nary as any of us can hope to be.’

“But of all answers to that ques­tion, I always come back to Sir Mar­tin Gilbert‘s. He was asked to explain Churchill in just one sen­tence. Sir Mar­tin didn’t hes­i­tate:  ‘He was a great human­i­tar­i­an who was him­self dis­tressed that the acci­dents of his­to­ry gave him his great­est pow­er at a time when every­thing had to be focused on defend­ing the coun­try from destruc­tion rather than achiev­ing his goals of a fair­er society.’”

Related articles

“No Cut­let Uncooked: Andrew Roberts’s Superb Churchill Biog­ra­phy,” 2018.

“Review­ing Netflix’s Churchill at War: The Things We Do For Eng­land,” 2024.

“Churchill at 150: ‘A Cer­tain Splen­did Mem­o­ry,’” 2024.

“Get Ready for Churchill’s Anti-Sesqui­cen­ten­ni­al,” 2024.

“Churchill’s Racist Epi­thets are Remark­ably Rare,” 2020.