Articles

Mario Contasino will forever be connected with the story of an event that almost altered history. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. once asked: “Would the next two decades have been the same had the automobile killed Winston Churchill in 1931 and the bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933?"

"If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, ‘How shocking!'" - Winston Churchill

Europe and European Union greatly exercised Churchill's thought. While circumstances today are far different, his formulations remain instructive of his role as a grand strategist.

The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of Time. But words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but, leaping across the gulf of ages they light the world for us today. In this article, Lewis E. Lehrman explains how Churchill and Lincoln were both students of history and were both determined to act historically.

Churchill’s insistence on victory was not born of revenge or malice. He insisted that “we are bound by the principles for which we are fighting.”

It is important to remember that Churchill’s views on Islam were nuanced, and quite different from run-of-the-mill Englishmen of his time. Indeed, he caused many of his contemporaries, imbued as they were with Victorian Britain’s sense of Manifest Destiny, to regard him as a dangerous radical.

"Churchill welcomed me with old-fashioned Victorian courtesy, bade me sit down, and we at once embarked on history, paying me the compliment of taking me for the professional, himself the amateur."

President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill found themselves challenged by wars of national survival. Even though their early lives appear to be different, there are similar aspects in their educational preparation.

In "Hollow Heroes" Michael Arnold, a self-described amateur historian and former insurance company executive, contributes nothing new and detracts considerably from the efforts of his predecessors.

Churchill’s capacious memory was well stocked with phrases he first heard from Bourke Cockran. “The earth is a generous mother” was the best known, but Churchill also recited his most basic beliefs in Cockran’s words.

"We will never again have so thorough a record of any statesman’s decision making, and certainly not of one so great, in a war so vast and consequential. Indulge your Churchillian obsession with the latest volume of war documents, and behold the labor that his leadership required."

Winston Churchill was no saint, and it is a disservice to pretend he was. But he is too complex a figure to be pigeonholed by writers who criticize without considering the full picture.