Political leadership

20. Baker and Glassner, Man Who Ran Washington (13 October 2024)

by kurto

The career of Jim Baker, a corporate lawyer from an upper-crust Houston family, epitomizes a bygone era of Washington DC dealmaking, crowned by his successful tenure as Secretary of State during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Baker, who chafed at his campaign director and chief of staff roles, premised authority on power not wisdom as well as skill in sidestepping responsibility, with legal know-how acting as guarantor. The approach falters when the fundamental questions stretch the paradigm, in Baker’s case, the Baby Boom-era welfare state politics and Cold War arms control. Despite the authors’ frequent contention that dealmaking is out of fashion, Baker’s successor is Obama, the president himself the knife fighter.

A product of Princeton-as-finishing school, he turned to politics not because of his first wife’s death but from weariness with corporate law. His second marriage made for tempestuous family life. Still, over the 10 years from age 48 to 58 he soared from an outsider to Secretary of Treasury and then State, Nixon’s resignation having opened the way. Baker’s modus vivendi was to leak but not lie to the media; to keep a file of unethical requests; as negotiator, to allow the opposite side to show concerns had been expressed, without conceding the substance of his position. He used ‘double option’ positions to take credit or disavow the outcome. No permanent enemies, but equally no clear mechanism for driving consensus; there are compromises with Democrats but fewer examples of conciliating Republicans. Quayle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are exemplars of conservatism. Buckley is said to be an eminence grise.

Baker preserved Social Security, and is credited with Canadian free trade by Mulroney. He was the first American leader to accept Chinese tyranny as concomitant with economic growth, and responsible for Willie Horton campaigning. His great rival was Henry Kissinger, the strategist being a very different prototype to the dealmaker. Nixon thought him prone to illustory international consensus. Thatcher thought his decision making average, e.g., allowing Germany to come together without any concern for proto-European Union (given Merkel, was she wrong?). He ended his days trading on influence, rallying to put the second Bush in the presidency.

Where is the line between duplicity and personal honor? He didn’t waste time on guilt over Machiavellian moves, according to his wife. The authors recur to the theme of Baker being out for himself, e.g., as Reagan’s chief, versus Bush’s consigliere; Nancy Reagan is said to have been pleased, Barbara Bush unhappy.

Well sourced, though from a historiographic perspective, the authors tend to describe characters as they would be remembered, rather than contemporaneously viewed (e.g., Oregon senator Bob Packwood). Reagan ‘stoked division’ by campaigning on welfare queens, apartheid was failing in 1992, left-liberal homogeneity pervades.

16. Mahoney, Statesman as Thinker (13 August 2022)

by kurto

Holds up Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Tocqueville, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel as exemplary statesmen, demonstrating excellence of vision and execution through contemporary turbulence. Courage, moderation (temperance and prudence), and magnamity (greatness of soul, according to classic or Christian ideals) in pursuit of justice are the essential attributes of those who would command practical reason in service of ordered liberty. Aristotle’s is the classic statement of a gentlemen-statesman, the opposite of Weber’s charismatic leader. Modern political thought and social science cannot discern the requisite qualities, believing in a false realism: in ascribing every action to naked power, the ability to assess motivation is forfeit and consequently to distinguish the statesman from the tyrant. The study of humanity includes legitimate uses of authority, Aron observed: Napoleon’s tyranny demonstrates greatness unchained from humility. The unbounded will seeks to reshape nature and society, but energy without wisdom is of little use.

Cicero: contending with Caesar, the Roman served as prototype in exemplifying foresight via reflection not ambition or will.

Burke: Reason is to be tested against practical modifications; theory alone will fail: prudence needs principle as much as principle prudence. ‘Ingratitude is the first of revolutionary virtues’ (p. 40)

Tocqueville: a deterministic fatalism (‘democratic history’) cannot illustrate the role of greats in history.

Churchill: Berlin’s Mr. Churchill in 1940 is the consummate statement.

De Gaulle: depreciated ‘Nietzschean disdain’ for the limits of human experience, common sense, law, seeing instead the need for balance, what is possible, and mesure. The Maginot line was morally corrupt – effete. Where Aristotle’s magnamity countenances hauteur, de Gaulle’s great man was Christian.

Havel: the Czech’s genius was to identify and surmount the ideological traits of post-totalitarian (post Leninist-Stalinist) regime, no longer dependent on mass violence yet still repressive.

Reagan and Thatcher receive honorable mentions as conviction politicians.

6. Kissinger, Leadership (12 February 2024)

by kurto

Portrays six postwar leaders whose statesmanship transformed the international (or at least regional balance of power) so as to promote stability and domestic order by establishing common purpose (not factional triumph). Framing the era as successor to the ‘second 30 Years War’, thereby sidelining the ‘ideological’ contest between Communism and liberalism, and establishing a typology of responsible and reckless politicians (i.e., statesmen and prophets), Kissinger asserts leaders must address tragedy – the nation’s history and limitations. Later chapters underline the importance of incrementalism – raison d’état trumps ideas – although why de Gaulle in particular is not a prophet (of grandeur) but only a self-appointed exponent of lost glory is unaddressed. Leadership requires analysis, strategy, courage, and character (possibly religious). The author disdains the views of Reagan, the hidden antagonist, which happened to sideline the author and his considerable sense of self-importance.

Adenauer: perhaps the best chapter, demonstrating his success in establishing Germany’s contrition, which certainly was to precede reunification and possibly not come until the USSR’s decline, and commitment to harmonious Europe. Christianity is the source of European civilization. Adenauer opposed Kurt Schumacher’s leftist populism, submissive to the ‘will of the people’, which raised the specter of interwar fanaticism. Suez showed America would not inevitably protect Europe, which therefore must unite; Cuba demonstrated further divergence.

De Gaulle: where Churchill saw his role as fulfilling English (British) history, de Gaulle his as resurrecting. attempting to recover historic grandeur, the failed quest for European preeminence (counterpoised by British commitment to the balance of power). He was very effective at persuading the public of a vision of independence with little connection to reality. However, the more pronounced the Cold War challenge, the more supportive of the Atlantic alliance (e.g., Cuba).

Nixon: governing at a time when (liberal) elites had lost faith in national interest as a legitimate or even moral end of policy, he sought to retore Theodore Roosevelt’s balance of power, and ‘never succumbed to the conceit of leadership’ as personal agency. Sometimes rambling in defense of his own role, Kissinger nonetheless makes a fair point that the US was excoriated for not interceding in Bangladesh even while condemned for warring in Vietnam. The liberal consensus arrived at the dubious view that ‘bad’ regimes will collapse if only pushed; friction results from ‘misunderstandings’; a Kantian rules-based order is inexorable. In this sense, Kissinger’s incrementalism is a middle ground. Nonetheless, his understanding of American exceptionalism is poor, overlooking liberalism as its basis in favor of identity and geography, with a dash of natural law.

Sadat: the Six Day War dramatized the danger of placing pan Arabism in front of the Egyptian national interest (for which he had been imprisoned) in the Mediterranean and world system. Breaking with Nasserite orthodoxy could only be sustained by continuing progress: Sadat was the closest of these half-dozen to a prophet. America isn’t the Middle East’s mediator but a benevolent power, given to republicanism as well as its economic interests (e.g., oil, shipping.) NB: the UN condemned Camp David for ignoring the resolution of Palestine, voting against 102-37, an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Lee: Singapore required growth to sustain its population, domestic (cultural) cohesion, and a nimble foreign policy balanced among Russia, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Civil services were famously scrutinized for corruption, with salaries pegged to 80 percent of the private sector; the army made small but professional (with all subject to reserve service); and racial classification abjured. ‘It is only when you offer a man – without distinctions based on ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and other differences – a chance of belonging to this great human community, that you offer him a peaceful way forward to progress and to a higher level of human life’ (p. 295). And: ‘Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain sense of moral right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not a result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them’ (p. 304). Is technocracy not an ideology? Kissinger elides the question.

Thatcher: a ‘conviction’ leader who fought the battle of ideas but not to the ends of imposition, as did the Communists, and her achievement was to make the ‘middle ground’ see her view. She believed in international law up to the point where sovereign states cede their moral authority to the UN: the Falklands reasserted the validity of territorial sovereignty, as opposed to national interest (masquerading as ideology) and as an alternate to the post (anti) colonial quest for rules. Disraeli saw German unification as a greater political event than the French Revolution. Thatcher’s opposition to reunification stemmed from here personal experience of World War II, and her antagonism to the proto-European Union on grounds of its transformation from a trading community to socialist statism.

Western elites have moved from a public-minded aristocracy, embodying the virtues of their nation-states, to a meritocracy strayed into a vague internationalism, technocracy (Lee?), and class interest.

4. Bramston, Robert Menzies (28 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s longest-serving prime minister mastered the mechanics of politics such that he reached an artfulness and unparalleled command. Major accomplishments include the establishment of the Liberal Party, sustained prosperity and the demise of sectarianism, and reorienting Australia toward the Pacific region; while he stumbled on the Suez Canal and Vietnam and stayed too long in office, losing touch with his cabinet and eventually voters. Like de Gaulle, he should have left sooner, in 1963. His distinctive crafted entailed deep understanding of government institutions (e.g., the Westminster system and the common law), policy guided by conviction (e.g., the goodness of family, home, and community), party management and alliance with the Country Party, astute retail politics aimed at winning respect (not popularity), and persuasion by logic, reason, emotion.

Menzies, becoming at 25 a nationally regarded lawyer through defeating HV Evatt in the Engineers case, which applied federal law to state jurisdictions, turned to politics to erase family dishonor stemming from his not enlisting for World War I service. Flashing to Attorney General and then PM, he supported appeasement (as Curtin favored conciliating Japan) but snapped to Britain’s defense. He visited London four times in three years before losing control of the United Australia Party, giving rise to reputation for British obsequiousness: The

    Sydney Morning Herald

editorialized his brilliance tarnished by lack of public understanding. (Bramston dismisses David Day’s claim he wished to replace Churchill.)

Menzies learned from his first-term mistakes and modified his public persona. He opposed Labor selectively and did not insist on undoing Curtin and Chifley’s great innovations – though he profitably contested nationalizing banking – believing it a mistake to contest settled issues, and that a PM first gained stature in parliament before winning voters. Over 1942-44, he gave weekly radio broadcasts touting the virtue of liberalism and famously the ‘forgotten people’, foreshadowing Reagan’s General Electric touring. Having established the Liberal Party by painstaking campaign and then formal convention, he resigned as party leader in 1947 to invite rivals: by 1949 he was a credible alternate to the wartime’s statist socialism. As PM, he left ministers to run their portfolios, provided they were masters of their briefs, seeing himself as primes inter pares, albeit with a naturally commanding presence. LP’s statism governed by budget policy and managing credit rather than bureaucracy. Menzies continued Calwell’s postwar immigration program (which he thought the unions wouldn’t have accepted if originating on the right). Abroad, despite deep sympathies with Britain he pursued Australia’s national interests by building closer ties with the US. He knew virtually all the West’s key players; Nixon regarded him highly. Menzies’ political philosophy was interpreted differently by Fraser, Howard, Abbott, and others (p. 115).

See also Robert Menzies,

    Afternoon Light

18. Roberts, Last King of America (10 September 2022)

by kurto

George III was a custodial not a tyrannical monarch, demonstrating a principled constitutionality and remaining above faction without undermining those in power. Initially unpopular and enduring a series of irresolute or unprepared prime ministers, during the French Revolutionary era he showed himself determined and muchly helpful to Pitt the Younger’s success. The recasting of the British monarchy as constitutional head of state commenced with him, not Victoria.
George’s education was superior to public schooling but reclusive. He learned to value the balanced constitution while developing lifelong hostility to Whig oligopoly. Self-denying for the sake of country, he was the first Hanover to see himself as primarily British. He was kindly and at ease among the populace; many less flattering characteristics aspects of his character are attributable to the salacious Horace Walpole, an entertaining but often misleading diarist.
Just prior to reaching his majority, Parliament entered the Seven Years War having sacked Pitt the Elder, its best strategist, in favor of the corrupt Henry Fox. (George II, though conscious of his rights, did so at the Duke of Cumberland’s urging; he merely agreed with the Old Whigs.) Bute’s tutelage of George was held against his ministry, and the king was at first seen as grasping both by contemporaries and historians, wrongly in Roberts’ view.
At the French war’s denouement, Bute ceded the sugar island Guadeloupe, after having instead considered Canada on grounds that French pressure would have kept the American colonies loyal to Britain. Once safe, economic matters were a pretext for the real issue of self-government. Bute and Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) fashioned George’s opinion that American claims to self-government had no standing in English law. In addition to the strategic error of tethering the Americans to the Atlantic seaboard (the Proclamation of 1763), this conservative view propelled Britain toward losing the colonies.
George tended to appoint prime ministers and leave them to legislate and execute, notwithstanding the unwonted predominance of the Grenvilles (George and his brother Richard Temple) and the Pitts (the elder being married to Temple’s sister). The Stamp Act was Grenville’s responsibility, and having insisted on dismissing Stuart-Mackenzie as Lord Privy Seal of Scotland, forcing George to break a promise, Grenville alienated George to the family for making him subject to factional interests. Lasting but two months, Grenville was replaced by Rockingham, who had never sat in Commons nor anyone else’s cabinet. Contra Conor Cruise O’Brien, on his return Pitt the Elder (now Lord Chatham) was given more scope than Rockingham, one of several occasions on which Roberts disagrees with the Irish historian. Later the sons of Pitt and Grenville would become PMs, indicating George’s essential forbearance.
In the years following the Stamp Act’s repeal, George contended with keeping Grenville out as PM, Wilkes out of the Commons, Parliamentary review of royal finances and appointments, and France out of the West Indies. Historians who contend George tried to gather power ignore the politicians who wished to avoid responsibility – including Lord North, who had otherwise ended the merry go round. Relatedly, contemporary European governments often resorted to genuine tyranny (e.g., mass arrests, execution of civilians without trial) whereas there had been arrests at all following the Boston Tea Party. George behaved with constitutional propriety during the American unrest, going along with hawkish ministries (admittedly to his liking) rather than driving policy. Of the 28 charges laid against George in the Declaration of Independence, only 2, regarding taxation and parliamentary authority to legislate for the colonists, are logical.
In post facto war gaming, the UK wins the war 45 percent of the time. Even as the war deteriorated, George, stepping back from hopes of an outright win, was determined to hold Canada, Nova Scotia, and Florida. The stakes were more patriotic than economic: circa 1776, imports from the British Windies totaled £4.5 million, versus 1.5 million from India, while the Americans were far below.
1779 marked existential danger for Britain. A French fleet of 63 ships and 30,000 regulars gained control of the English Channel. George showed a decisiveness that North lacked, pressing for attack in the Windies, Gibraltar, and Minorca, recognizing that France and Spain’s joining the war converted the conflict from a domestic question of Parliament’s constitutional rights in the colonies to the UK’s survival as a great power. Colonial possessions had to be defended, even at the risk of the homeland’s invasion, because of the sugar islands’ revenue. However, he was less clear sighted about responsibilities for the American war’s military losses. (NB: ‘Hessians’ werer from several small principalities, representing one-third of the soldiery. Not mercenaries, they were paid by the German states. Though effective they made for poor propaganda, especially during the New Jersey winter of 1777-78.)
Though not ignoring the denouement, Roberts’ current thus turns toward domestic matters. Thinking George a moderate, he is generally unsympathetic to Burke, described as a ‘radical Whig’ (e.g., pp. 417, 445, 486, 490). Pitt on Burke: ‘much to admire, nothing to agree with’ (p. 526). Irish repeal of the Declaratory Act demonstrates Westminster had learned from America, rather panic in the Rockingham administration. Whig attempts to arrogate East India Company patronage to Parliament in 1778 seemed an oligarchical revival to George; parallels to the Whigs’ 1766’s repeal of the Stamp Act make them seem hypocritical.
1784’s dismissal of the Fox-North coalition stemmed from the East India Bill, and was quite constitutional of George. The subsequent election, a hotly contested affair which produced ‘Fox’s martyrs’, indicated that the Whig leader had overplayed his hand regarding East India, the loss of America, and near-republican critique of the monarch. Pitt’s rout result in George’s having a genuine ally for the first time, at time when the king could still have his choice of ministers. Had he died in 1783, he might have been lumped together with his Hanoverian predecessors; but instead he and Pitt saw off the French revolutionaries and Bonaparte. By 1792, Pitt as PM was no longer immediately responsible to the king, but to Parliament; he, Dundas, and Grenville were a united front in dealing with the monarch; Addington extended the trend. Pitt’s success was muchly due to George’s support.
As when recovering from illness, so with the initial period of the Revolutionary wars. Evident homeliness, piety, and commitment to national victory established his bona fides. Whereas during the American revolution George’s principled stance was unhelpful, in the French wars it was invaluable. Ironically, he traveled little, never visiting Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; nor Hanover; nor the American colonies or Windies. Indeed, did he travel north of Worcester or west of Plymouth. He never went to see the newly industrializing Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds.
In Ireland, George supported toleration of the Catholic Church but not equality, for he was head of the Church of England (and of Ireland), and so was unhappy with the Earl of Fitzwilliam’s concessions. His successor, Earl of Camden, confiscated 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes – indicative of 1798. Neoclassical architecture, already underway, reached its apogee during his reign as he frequently paid interest in public projects.
(NB: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.)
(NB: as an insult, a XXX husband, rather than not remarry, should as condign punishment marry the devil’s daughter. The riposte: the law prohibited marrying one’s deceased wife’s sister – p. 407)

2. Jenkins, Churchill (24 Jan 2023)

by kurto

Churchill was the greatest of Britain’s prime ministers, surmounting Gladstone and Lloyd George, despite substantial personal foibles.
More concerned with policy and (often social) legislation, government machinations (especially Parliamentary doings), and society doings and gossip than Roberts, Jenkins more fully portrays why you would dislike the aristocratic thruster. In seeking to show Churchill was out of step, however, he too often falls back on ‘the sense of the house’. He contends, against Roberts and unconvincingly, Churchill was a proto-Europeanist. Often he is more the reproving politician than a historian.
Churchill had the gift of insolence – memorably amusing, performing without fear. His many talents first evident as a junior officer in India, though Jenkins seems unduly critical of the autodidact making up for lost school time.
Upon crossing to the Liberal Party, Churchill was naturally inclined to imperialists Asquith, Grey, and Haldane but personally closer to the Little Englanders. Curiously, he trumpeted his father’s unionism though himself soon to oppose the Curragh mutiny and favor updated Home Rule. He accepted a role junior to Lloyd George, the pair of whom cast aside the Gladstonian tradition of embracing libertarian political issues (and ignoring social matters) in favor of ‘constructive radicalism. ‘[Lloyd George and Churchill] were the two British politicians of genius, using the word in the sense of exceptional and original powers transcending purely rational measurement, in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result they were the two outstanding prime ministers, although in terms of solid (peacetime) achievement Asquith runs at least equal, rather as Peel did with Gladstone and Disraeli in the Victorian age. Churchill was substantially the greater man both because of the wider range outside politics of his interests and accomplishments and because his central achievement in 1940 and 1941 was of a higher order than Lloyd George’s in 117 and 1918, brought off against heavier odds, and still more vital to the future of the world. Furthermore, on issues and people, he had more fixity of purpose and coherence of belief than did Lloyd George: ore principle and less opportunism would be another way of putting it. Yet Lloyd George was undoubtedly strung in a number of significant qualifies than was Churchill, and one, and perhaps the most remarkable of his strengths was the could long exercise and almost effortless authority Churchill.’ (p. 144)
Though in 1911 he had left the Board of Trade, passed through the Home Office, and already spent two months as First Lord of the Admiralty, National Insurance was very much Churchill’s, the details being fully worked out while there. Labour Exchange Boards and enforcement of sweated labor provisions were also to his credit. Unlike most ministers, Churchill drafted his own minutes – and sent them before queries could be lodged.
1919-20 was the least impressive phase of Churchill’s career. He himself considered the Conservative abandonment of unionist Ireland as the most dramatic u-turn in modern history, though it was Lloyd George’s decision and treaty. Churchill and Bonar Law had the least natural rapport of any two major UK politicians to 1950. Baldwin’s failed bid for a protectionist mandate catalyzed Labour’s rise; on Macdonald’s 1924 accession, Churchill had to go back to the Tories as the Liberals were clearly finished.
Churchill was right to return to the gold standard: the establishment’s ‘superior wisdom;’ bested rational argument and instinct. Save that the move turned out poorly!
Marlborough evinces Churchill’s dispute with Macaulay: he won but not without the Victorian’s scoring points. The principal reason Churchill wanted to retain India was economic, as rivals were catching up the UK. Opposing independence is presented in terms of Parliamentary machinations, not political thought: he was on the losing side so he must have been wrong. Too bad – a Labour historian in the 2000s could have taken an honest look at imperialism; no one could now do so.
Churchill’s vindicated wilderness years are qualified in ‘yes but’ chapter 25. Again he falls back on sense-of-the-house explications, without treating Churchill’s stated position. Only war could have brought him back, the author says. His opposition to Soviet communism, commencing in the 1930s and continuing during wartime, is shortchanged. Eden is given credit for wartime diplomatic successes.
The Norway inquest of May 1940 was the most dramatic, far-reaching Parliamentary debate of the 20th century. Almost everyone of note participated. Its rivals are the Don Pacifico affair of 1850, which proved of little consequence; 1831’s first Reform Bill, when the doomed rotten boroughs were named; and 1886’s first Home Rule bill. In this passage, the author’s deep personal experience shines through – elsewhere he is too eager to display his bona fides, as when Atlee received a telegram at Jenkins’ wedding (p. 776) – but the author says there is no doubt Halifax would not take the job, contra Roberts. Churchill was the right man for the nadir of 1940-41 by dint of his courage and self-confidence. His connection with Montgomery reflects both being ‘light casualty’ tacticians; his rapport with Roosevelt was never so deep as often considered. In nearing war’s end, Churchill felt sidelined. (NB: of all the Europeans, Poland least reveres Churchill for acceding to Stalin’s demands for Moscow-based Polish exiles.)
Churchill’s partisanship in opposition bears little relations to an ‘essentially moderate’ term in office over 1951-55. Accepting that Labour legislation was a ‘considerable success’, he played a ‘constructive role’, for the clock could not go back to the 1930s. He missed his chance to bring the UK into Europe because Eden was cool on the matter, Eden acting as a kind of junior PM. Jenkins essentially holds the UK should have abandoned its residual imperial interests to join the Steel and Coal pact. It would have been better had Churchill retired in 1953, that Eden’s didn’t move because of illness and Butler lacked ruthlessness.
For Churchill, duty’s most powerful ally was the desire to be at the center of events. He drew energy from constant change of scene and pattern. He returns again and again to alleged chronic depression, again contra Roberts.
Quotes:
‘Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests; Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference. (P. 132)
‘Oligarchies were seldom destroyed and more frequently committed suicide’ (p. 165)
Clementine: ‘To be great one’s actions must be understood by simple people’ (p. 302)
Jenkins on democratic centralism: ‘All successful political meetings give both audience and the speaker a simultaneous sense of influencing events, with a residue of inspiration but not actually challenging the currents of politics. Whereas constituency militants are ‘almost inevitably a force against sense and statesmanship … The difficulty of sustaining enthusiasm without giving militants excessive power has been one of the perennial problems of democratic government’ (p. 531)

1. Roberts, Churchill (12 Jan 2023)

by kurto

Churchill, the first to spot the enormity of Nazism and Communism, was a restless, forward-thinking leader who learned from his mistakes (e.g., Dardanelles, Tonypandy, the gold standard) and triumphed in the end, preserving liberty in the 20th-century west and therefore the world. A fox not a hedgehog, he was a Burkean prejudiced on behalf of England and English-speaking peoples. ‘Man is spirit’, he said on resigning the premiership in 1955, meaning the possibility of success owes to willpower and hard work.
Though possessing a famous name, aristocratic schooling (beloved of the view that men make history) and excellent military training, Churchill felt he hadn’t long to make his mark – ironic given his late success. Also until late, he hadn’t outlived his reputation as a thruster. ‘No boy or girl should every be disheartened by lack of success in their youth, but should diligently and faithfully continue to persevere and make up for lost time.’
As a 20-something junior officer in the Sudan, Churchill confronted extremist sociopolitics. MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain, appeasers all, never had; nor did they fight in World War I.
Imperialism, a civilizing mission, fit comfortably with reformism. Scandalized by treatment of the defeated Boers and opposing Balfour’s resistance to tariff reform, in the 1900s was he spoiled for a fight with the Tories, and readily crossed to the Liberals. On the 1910 passing of Edward VII, the consensual Tory Democrat in Churchill proposed a coalition government might reform Lords; implement Home Rule; introduce compulsory National Insurance, military service, and land reform.
Proposing in 1912 that the naval budget take a ship-building holiday if the opposition collaborated, Churchill was dismissed by the Germans as a warmonger; if he had died before 1939, his primary legacy would have been modernizing the navy in time for World War I. Obstinacy was a liability during the Dardanelles campaign (but invaluable in World War II). He learned to accede to unanimous military chiefs, and to form them into a coordinated conference subordinate to politicians. He was returned to Lloyd George’s cabinet because of his public voice, that is, his ability to mold and magnify public opinion.
From 1898 to 1939, he made some 1,700 speeches (traveling 80,000+ miles), far more than any other first-rank politician, and was therefore very good at judging an audience. Churchill recounted that he articulated British pride, but rather he inspired it. His wartime speechifying was prefigured in an 19th-century essay entitled the ‘Scaffolding of Rhetoric’: well-chosen words, carefully crafted sentences, accumulated argument, use of analogy, and deployment of extravagance. He often spoke of freedom, drawing on history, Magna Carta and the common law; and not much of Locke, Hume, or Mill. In the Commons, he mastered great flights of oratory with ‘sudden swoops of the intimate and conversational’.
Churchill’s biography of his father was invalid, more a posthumous exercise in justification and self-instruction. Whereas the 1933-38 publication of Marlborough’s biography marked the apex of his political education. As writing history was his professional and a corollary to governing (to making it), he possessed detachment from power which most professionals lack. His political models also included Pitt the younger and DLG, but Clemenceau was most a propos.
By his own sights, returning to the gold standard was his biggest mistake, a lesson in trusting unanimous experts against inner doubts. Other examples include Boer War strategy and World War I convoys. It was the source of his unyielding opposition to appeasement. In the same decade, while Chancellor, he was hostile to the rising United States, and converted to belief in the need for a larger navy.
Antipathy to Indian independence stemmed from his belief in civic mission, without which imperialism was simply dominance. He saw England as responsible for ending suttee, the ostracization of untouchables, and so on. This – not his opposition to appeasement – triggered his years in the wilderness. ‘Every prophet has to come from Civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then must serve periods of isolation and meditation. That is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.’ (p.351). But anti-communism blurred his judgment regarding Italy and Japan.
The Other Club established and maintained personal relations which exceeded partisanship: the UK’s ruling class was united as was no other power, and more than 20 served in wartime government. This the positive side of Foucault’s slippery power.
Contemporaneous accounts of Churchill’s assuming the premiership portray his grasping the prize from a vacillating Halifax – save for his own tellings. Described (on p. 616) as a coup, the entire establishment would have plumped for his more dignified rival. Up through 1942, it tolerated him for lack of a better alternative, and because of his public popularity (which hovered in the high 80s and low 90s to April 1945); it did not accept the losses thereto resulted from is failure to re-arm and appeasement. But, in addition to forecasting the totalitarians’ rise, he correctly predicted the course of the war (forecasting its end in 1944): defeat of Japan would not lead to defeat of Germany, but the converse applied.
The French army’s demoralization was the most dismaying of inherited problems, and his decision not to commit British air force to the French was among the most significant he made. Signing on to the Atlantic charter, especially the anti-imperial article 3, indicated his commitment to good relations with the US and Roosevelt (at least since the 1920s, he had favored Democrats); but his relationship with Marshall was problematic. He left a trail of criticism – later exercised from his memoirs – critical of Overlord (Normandy invasion) because of his previous amphibious failures. (Brooke was similarly critical of Churchill, forgetting the latter had championed buildup campaigns in Africa and Italy). After landing, he was (not consciously) sidelined by Eisenhower, who did not need the help of a politician-cum-2d Marlborough. (NB: the ‘second front’ indicates Soviet propaganda, for the UK was already fighting on 5 (France, Britain’s skies, the Atlantic Ocean, North Africa, and the Mediterranean). (NB: He acted swiftly to protect the Greeks from communist guerillas.)
In fall 1944, he decided against a khaki election that would he have won, but subsequent defeat was a blessing in disguise. India, de-colonization, financial austerity, retreat from the sterling area were not to his forte, as he himself recognized. Opposition allowed him to campaign against Soviet aggression. His later foreign policy objectives were the Commonwealth, the English-speaking peoples, and Europe. But England could not be subordinate to federal Europe (p. 926 – Jenkins et al are wrong on the point.) Roberts describes imperialism as evil rather than mistaken, perhaps the strongest of his not-infrequent condemnations. Simultaneously, having read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Churchill began championing ‘property-owning democracy’, a late-life replacement for Tory paternalism (which became a party staple through Thatcher).
Quotes:
‘History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations: but with this shield, however the fate may play, we march always in the ranks of honour. (p. 617)
‘…When nations are strong they are not always just, and when they wish to be just they are often np longer strong.’ (p. 399)
‘Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story, with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope’. (p. 893)

5. Ellis, His Excellency (2005)

by kurto

Washington was a physically dominating figure who was not well educated, but married into elite society. Possessing an outsized ego, he managed his image closely, particularly regarding early military failures. After a successful French and Indian War, he accumulated land and aspired to fulfill the promise of the west, but his debts to British cotton agents transformed him into a revolutionary. Ideology played no real role, although he did wrestle with the question of slavery. As a general in the Revolutionary War, he is proclivity was to attack but he realized survival was the victory, a la Fabius. He grew to recognize the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation during this time, and subsequently agreed to lead the Constitutional Convention and become the first president. He disliked partisan politics, reluctantly agreed to a second term, and all but dismissed Jefferson as a schemer. Hamilton was responsible for much of the administration’s success. Ultimately, says Ellis, Washington never conquered his ego but recognized posterity is the final judge and had the confidence to submit — unlike Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, etc.

5. Sarkozy, Testimony (7 Apr 2007)

by kurto

Outlines the political platform of French president (to be) Nicolas Sarkozy. The author is a retail politician who rose to the finance and interior ministries, unusual for someone who is not an ‘Enarque’. His the more remarkable for being overtly post-Gaullist in a conservative party; Sarkozy writes he is focused not on international grandeur but instead on domestic capabilities and progress, particularly relative to Europe. (He is of course a pan-European, but also an Americanist.) Driven by political examples, such as the pernicious effects of the 35-hour week, and drawing on examples from his time in government, the work does not stamp out a doctrine per se, but constitutes an interesting snapshot.

Garrow’s Rising Star: an Obama retrospective

by kurto

A long-form interview between two Obama historians, assessing the president’s character and comparing him with Martin King, generally unfavorably. David Garrow’s

    Rising Star

‘is a tragic story about a young man who was deeply wounded by the abandonment of both his white mother and his Black father—a wound that gifted him with political genius and at the same time made him the victim of a profound narcissism that first whispered to him in his mid-twenties that he was destined to be president.’ Of interest:

To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms.

In the absence of what was once American journalism, it is hard to know which portrait of Obama’s post-presidency is truer to life: Obama as a celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or as a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society from his basement, in his sweats.

I think Barack in that winter of ‘08, ‘09, realized there was no way that his presidency could actually live up to the expectations. And I think even the fanboy journalists would acknowledge, under a little bit of pressure, that it ended up being an underwhelming, disappointing presidency. It will, in the long run, be seen as a failed presidency because of the international failures.

Samuels: How do you write a biography of a fictional character authored by someone who’s deliberately created and obscured and erased their actual life and replaced that self with a fiction?

For Barack, everything has to be a success. Everything has to be a victory. I mean, I’m not a health policy expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud. It’s a great achievement for the health insurance industry.

Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.

it’s inescapable that Barack’s success in ‘08 is rooted in white people seeing him as an easy ticket toward racial absolution. It’s a need that white people in this country have. And what we’re still seeing week after week now for these past two or three years, especially with places like the Times and the Post, is that this white need for absolution was not cured by the Obama presidency. I frankly don’t understand it.

‘The Obama Factor: A Q&A with historian David Garrow’, 2 August 2023, Tablet.