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The Journal of Military History 67.3 (2003) 983-984



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Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian. By John Lukacs. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-300-09769-7. Pp. xiii, 210. $21.95.

It is easy to find people who respect and admire Winston S. Churchill. It is easy to find respected historians who write about Churchill. It is not so easy to find respected historians who write admiring words about Churchill.

John Lukacs is one of the unusual. A professor of history at Chestnut Hill College until the late 1990s, Lukacs lives in Pennsylvania. His Five Days in London: May 1940 appeared in 1999 and focused closely on a short week when no Prime Minister could have won World War II but surely might have lost it. Now the same press, Yale, has published Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian.

At about two hundred pages the new book is as brief as the other. But it takes as broad a view of Churchill as Five Days was carefully narrowed. The present volume is a study of the reach and power of Churchill's mind: what he learned from reading and writing history; what he did when at the world's center stage; what he predicted and foresaw. It is also explicitly a reply to some well-known criticisms of Churchill as thinker and actor and writer.

This is not the right book to hand to the college Junior newly interested in war or British politics. It is, however, a strong and successful collection of essays that well serve more advanced students and teachers in the fields of history, historiography, political science, and to a lesser degree, military science. [End Page 983]

Lukacs opens up old questions and inquires into new trends of scholarship on Churchill with the enthusiasm of an amateur and the skills of an author of two dozen volumes. His felicitous justification for writing—and for writing another book about so famous a subject—is that "Historical thinking and writing and study are, by their nature, revisionist. The historian, unlike a judge, is permitted to try a case over and over again, often after finding and employing new evidence" (p. 21).

Here we find an unusual defense of Lord Randolph Churchill, the father's biography as told by the son, as the best of Winston Churchill's histories. The famous six volumes on World War II are judged better than their counterparts on World War I because The World Crisis is said to decline in quality, down to The Eastern Front which was "almost an afterthought" (p. 118). Lukacs has vim as a critic of several of his professorial fellows. Rutgers's Warren Kimball and Princeton University Press are rightly acknowledged for the three-tome "monument" of correspondence between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, but Kimball is also criticized for editorial mistakes. The younger, less subtle John Charmley, author of books very hostile to the Prime Minister, is given a considerable handling and then dismissed. Lukacs observes that Charmley's hostility makes his critique too little like the work of better British historians and too much like that of German nationalist writers, e.g. David Irving.

This volume has one minor failing—in the writing, not the scholarship. A few passages are unmistakably jumbled because antithesis and parenthetical observation are overdone, or historical or literary references overcrowd the paragraphs. (Pp. 122-23; 138; midpage 176.)

We look out today upon not only Churchill but two-thirds of a century of assessments of him. Readers of many earlier books will be refreshed viewing this new study. Lukacs sees his subject as a mountain, clearly visible, at a distance, deserving of its place of honor near the center of the expanse of the twentieth century.

 



Christopher C. Harmon
Marine Corps University
Quantico, Virginia

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