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REEDINGS
. . .
Notes
on Books by Gerard Reed
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Few
historians today question the significance of Winston Churchill and Ronald
Reagan. Both men led their
nations through challenging times, maintained a singular commitment to their
core values, and helped shape the contours of the 20th century.
Both were gifted orators, and their recorded speeches and archived
papers increasingly reveal the quality of their thought.
Furthermore, both illustrate how statesmen rightly respond to crises
and conflicts such as America’s current war with Islamic terrorists.
Winston
Churchill’s grandson, Winston S. Churchill, has collected
and published Never Give In! The
Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (New York: Hyperion, c. 2003), a
500 page treasury that documents his views from 1897-1963.
In his Preface, the editor expresses admiration for his grandfather and
indicates his rationale for publishing the collection–a small portion of the
five million words in Churchill’s complete speeches.
Amazingly, Churchill never used a speech writer!
His words are truly his words!
And he worked hard to craft them well. One
of his wartime secretaries, Sir John Colville, told the editor: “In the case
of his great wartime speeches, delivered in the House of Commons or broadcast
to the nation, your grandfather would invest approximately one hour of
preparation for every minute of delivery” (p. xxv).
The speeches are presented in chronological order and divided into five
periods, though several themes characterized Churchill: 1) the virtue and
necessity of courage, both political and military; 2) opposition to Socialism,
both Bolshevism in Russia and the softer version of Britain’s Labor Party;
3) adamant opposition to Nazism, demanding armed response to Hitler’s
aggression; 4) the goodness of the “property-owning democracy that explained
England’s greatness; 5) the correctness of Conservatism, as he defined it,
upholding the grandeur of the Christian tradition and of Western Civilization
in general..
The
first section, entitled “Young Statesman, 1897-1915,” introduces the
reader to a young politician finding himself and his political principles.
Churchill launched his political career
in 1900 at the age of 25, and would serve in Parliament (with one brief
absence) until 1964. Elected as a
Conservative in 1900, he broke with his party in 1904, “crossed the floor”
and joined the Liberals, primarily because of his commitment to free trade.
Subsequently he rapidly rose through the ranks of the British
government, becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, just as the early
tremors of WWI rippled across Europe. When
the war began he declared, with words he would repeat 25 years later: “We
did not enter upon the war with the hope of easy victory; we did not enter
upon it in any desire to extend our territory, or to advance and increase our
position in the world” (p. 59). Unlike
many, he believed: “The war will be long and somber” (p. 59), and it would
prove difficult for Churchill himself, for he was forced to resign his cabinet
position when his plan to attach Germany from the east, through the
Dardanelles, misfired.
This
led to the second period of his career, “Oblivion and Redemption, 1916-29.”
Following his Dardanelles disgrace, Churchill left the House of Commons
and served as a soldier on the front lines in Flanders.
But he returned to the House when David Lloyd George asked him to serve
in the cabinet, and in 1924 he would serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer
under the newly elected Conservative Prime Minister.
When the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in 1917, Churchill
immediately declared: “Tyranny presents itself in many forms.
The British nation is the foe of tyranny in every form.
That is why we fought Kaiserism and that I why we would fight it again.
That is why we are opposing Bolshevism.
Of all tyrannies in history the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the
most destructive, and the most degrading.
It is sheer humbug to pretend that it is not far worse than German
militarism” (p. 77). By 1921,
he recognized that: “The lesson
from Russia, writ in glaring letters, is the utter failure of this Socialistic
and Communistic theory, and the ruin which it brings to those subjected to its
cruel yoke” (p. 81). Churchill
also opposed those in Britain’s Labor Party who wanted to install Socialism,
asserting that they were “corrupting and perverting great masses of our
fellow-countrymen with their absurd foreign-imported doctrines” (p. 89).
“They borrow all their ideas from Russia and Germany,” he said.
“They always sit adulating every foreign rascal and assassin who
springs up for the moment. All their economics are taken from Karl Marx and all their
politics from the actions of Lenin” (p. 89).
From
1930-1939 Churchill endured his “Wilderness Years,” lonely and ridiculed
as he opposed Hitler and those who appeased him.
England’s “difficulties,” he said, “come from the mood of
unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful
section of our own intellectuals” (p. 104).
Politicians joined them in offering “a vague internationalism, a
squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias” (p. 104).
Clergymen were particularly reprehensible insofar as they sought “to
dissuade the youth of this country from joining its defensive forces, and seek
to impede and discourage the military preparations which the state of the
world forces upon us” (p. 155). While
pacifists talked peace Hitler armed for war.
In the midst of WWII, Churchill remembered: “For the best part of twenty years the youth of Britain and
America have been taught that war is evil, which is true, and that it would
never come again, which has been proved false.” During that time dictators armed their regimes. “We have
performed the duties and tasks of peace.
They have plotted and planned for war” (p. 318).
They illustrated the fact that “The whole history of the world is
summed up in the fact that when nations are strong they are not always just,
and when they wish to be just they are often no longer strong” (pp.
132-133). To be both strong and
just was Churchill’s goal. That
required military strength and the willingness to use it to prevent Hitler’s
ambitions. Rifles and
battleships, not rhetoric and resolutions, could deter war.
“For
five years,” he said in 1938, “I have talked to the House on these matters–not
with very great success. I have
watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway
which leads to a dark gulf. It is
a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends.
A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on
still these break beneath your feet” (p. 166).
To Churchill, Prime Minister Chamberlain’s 1938 pact with Hitler in
Munich was a “total and unmitigated defeat” (p. 172).
Churchill feared that it would prove to be “only the first sip, the
first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year
unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise
again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time” (p. 182).
Few
heeded Churchill’s words until Hitler actually moved, invading Poland in
1939 and attacking France six months later.
Then Churchill was called upon to lead his nation through the throes of
WWII. These were, his grandson
says, “The Glory Years, 1939-45.” The
war was not simply against Germany, he insisted:
“We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi
tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man” (p. 198).
It was a war to restore “the rights of the individual, and it is a
war to establish and revive the stature of man” (p. 198).
It was a war of words–and Churchill
empowered his people with words. He
made memorable speeches during these years, offering nothing “but blood,
toil, tears and sweat,”elicited courageous resolve.
His policy, he said in 1940, was” “to wage war, by sea, land and
air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to
wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable
catalogue of human crime” (p. 206). And
there was only one goal: victory! Still
more, addressing his alma mater, Harrow School, in 1941, he said: “surely
from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give
in, never, never, never, never–in nothing great or small, large or
petty–never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might
of the enemy” (p. 307).
As
the Battle for Britain began, Churchill declared: “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island
or lose the war. If we can stand
up to him, all Europe may be free” and the world saved. “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United
States . . . will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age
. . . Let us
therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the
British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still
say, ‘This was their finest hour’” (p. 229).
And, indeed, it was. The
RAF defeated the Luftwaffe in the skies over England, and “Never in
the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” (p. 245).
However dark the prospects, Churchill ever insisted that “these are
great days” (p. 308) and that the courageous would prevail.
In
due time, with the help of the United States and the Soviet Union, the war was
won. Churchill urged his
colleagues “to offer thanks to Almighty God, to the Great Power which seems
to shape and design the fortunes of nations and the destiny of man” (p.
390). Addressing the nation on 8
May 1945, the day the war in Europe ended, he said “that in the long years
to come not only will the people of this island but of the world, whenever the
bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done and
they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march
straight forward and die if need be–unconquered’” (p. 391).
He
fully intended to finish the war against Japan, but England’s Socialists
(the Labor Party) turned against him as soon as the war in Europe ceased.
They demanded a general election in July, 1945, and Churchill found
himself battling to maintain his position as Prime Minister.
Feeling betrayed, he strongly denounced Socialism as “abhorrent to
the British ideas of freedom.” Though
Labor Party leaders portrayed their positions as indigenously English, “there
can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism
and the abject worship of the State. It
is not alone that property, in all its forms is struck at, but that liberty,
in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism”
(p. 396). Desiring to control
every aspect of life, Socialists sought to establish “one State to which all
are to be obedient in every act of their lives.
This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the
arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss” (p. 397).
But the English voters apparently wanted such a system–as well as
escape the burdens of war–and Churchill’s Conservative Party lost the
election.
The
next era, “The Sunset Years 1945-63,” witnessed Churchill leading the
opposition to the Labor Party of Clement Atlee, speaking out against Russia’s
aggression, and returning to power in 1951 and retiring in 1955, soon after
his 80th birthday. He
still spoke prophetically, especially at Westminister College in Fulton,
Missouri, in 1946, where, in the presence of President Harry Truman, he warned
that we must ever oppose “war and tyranny.”
To do so “we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great
principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of
the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights,
the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most
famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence” (p. 417).
Such goods were endangered, however, because “From Stettin in the
Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the
Continent” (p. 420). This was
not the “Liberated Europe we fought to build up” (p. 421).
Soviet aggression threatened the world’s peace, and Stalin was as
much a threat in the late ‘40s as Hitler had been in the late ‘30s.
Thus began the “cold war.”
Elected
Prime Minister again in 1951, he sought to reverse the corrosive Socialist
policies established by the Labor Government.
He stood for “a property-owning democracy” and detested “the
philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy” basic
to Socialism. High taxes and
petty regulations had betrayed the traditions of the nation, he believed.
“In our view the strong should help the weak.
In the Socialist view the strong should be kept down to the level of
the weak in order to have equal shares for all.
How small the share is does not matter so much, in their opinion, so
long as it is equal” (p. 457). “Socialists
pretend they give the lower income groups, and all others in the country,
cheaper food through their system of rationing and food subsidies.
To do it they have to take the money from their pockets first and
circulate it back to them after heavy charges for great numbers of officials
administering the system of rationing” (p. 460).
Few
single volumes better illustrate the great issues of the 20th
century, for no one I can think of stood for so long at the center of world
events. Churchill’s wisdom and
courage, anchored to the realities of the political world, still command
respect and (far better than many theoretical treatises) provide direction for
making decisions today.
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Three
Ronald Reagan scholars–Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin
Anderson– have edited Reagan In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald
Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: The
Free Press, c. 2001). During the
late 1970s, Reagan broadcast some 1,000 weekly radio talks.
His wife, Nancy, says he wrote these messages at his desk at home,
rooting his ideas in “voracious” reading.
He rarely watched TV but devoted himself to reading, thinking,
speaking. Though he often
appeared to speak spontaneously, in fact he carefully prepared and followed
his written texts. In his
Foreword, George Schultz remembers his close association with Reagan: “I was
always struck by his ability to work an issue in his mind and to find its
essence, and by his depth of conviction. . . . [and] his intense interest and
fondness for the spoken word, for caring very deeply about how to convey his
thoughts and ideas to people” (p. ix).
The
editors have collected Reagan’s radio talks into four categories,
meticulously retaining the spelling and revisions in his handwritten texts.
In the first section, “Reagan’s Philosophy,” the reader discovers
the bedrock principles that guided him. Looking
back, in 1989, he noted: “We meant to change a nation, and instead, we
changed a world” (p. 4). This
resulted, in part, from the lessons he learned from WWII–lessons Churchill
tried unsuccessfully to teach his countrymen in the 1930s.
Military weakness encourages aggression.
One month before Pearl Harbor, Reagan noted, the U.S. “Congress came
within a single vote of abolishing the draft & sending the bulk of our
army home” (p. 8). The Japanese
doubted America’s resolve and thus dared attack her.
We learned, Reagan said, citing an academic study, “that ‘to
abdicate power is to abdicate the right to maintain peace’” (p. 8).
This extended to opposing the USSR and Communism in the Post-WWII era.
To those who argued “better red than dead,” he replied:
“Back in the ‘20s, Will Rogers had an answer for those who believed
that strength invited war. He
said, ‘I’ve never seen anyone insult Jack Dempsey [then the heavyweight
boxing champion]’” (p. 480).
Reagan
also believed, in accord with Churchill, that the subtly socialistic views of
American liberals threatened disaster for the nation. America’s strength resided in her confidence in “the
individual genius of man” (p. 13). Liberating
the individual from government was a major Reagan theme, one he tirelessly
repeated. Summing up his
position, he said: “The choice
we face between continuing the policies of the last 40 yrs. that have led to
bigger & bigger govt, less & less liberty, redistribution of earnings
through confiscatory taxation or trying to get back on the original course set
for us by the Founding Fathers. Will
we choose fiscal responsibility, limited govt, and freedom of choice for all
our people? Or will we let an
irresponsible Congress set us on the road our English cousins have already
taken? The road to ec. ruin
and state control of our very lives?” (p. 10).
Thus
he applauded the stance of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher.
Having visited her before she became Prime Minister in 1979, he
predicted she would “do some moving & shaking of Englands once proud
industrial capacity UNDER WHICH THE LABOR PARTY has bees running
downhill for a long time. Productivity
levels in some industrial fields are lower than they were 40 yrs. ago.
Output per man hour in many trades is only a third of what it was in
the 1930's. Bricklayers for
example laid 1000 bricks a day in 1937–today they lay 300.
I think ‘Maggie’–bless her soul, will do something about that”
(p. 47). Indeed she did! And she and Reagan became the staunchest of allies once he
became President in 1981.
A
commitment to freedom stood rooted in a belief in God, who had providentially
guided this nation. Reagan shared
and often repeated Thomas Jefferson’s view that: “‘The God who gave us
life gave us liberty–can the liberties of a Nat. be secure when we have
removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God’” (p. 14).
Still more: America has a mission
to spread the blessings of freedom. Indeed,
as Pope Pius XII said soon after the end of WWII:
“‘America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds.
Into the hands of Am. God has placed the destiny of an afflicted
mankind.’ I don’t think God
has given us a job we cant handle” (p. 16).
Such
convictions shaped Reagan’s “Foreign Policy,” the second section in the
book, summed up by these words: “We want to avoid a war and that is better
achieved by being so strong that a potential enemy is not tempted to go
adventuring” (p. 21). Since
these radio talks were given while Jimmy Carter was President, there was much
for Reagan to criticize. He
discussed, insightfully, developments in Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Korea,
Chile, Panama, Palestine, the USSR and Cuba (rebuking the tyrant Castro as a
“liar”). By contrast, Senator
George McGovern, visiting Castro, “found the Cuban dictator to be a
charming, friendly WELL INFORMED fellow.
It sort of reminds you of how we discovered Joseph Stalin was
good old Uncle Joe, shortly before he stole among other things our
nuclear secrets” (p. 183). Everywhere,
he argued, the U.S. should support freedom, especially regarding religious
expression and private property rights, and he endorsed “Somerset Maughams
admonition: “If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will
lose it’s freedom; and the irony of it is, that if it’s comfort of money
THAT it values more, it will lose that too’” (p. 85).
Part Three of the book, “Domestic and Economic Policy,” delineates
what came
Reading
Reagan, in his own hand, reveals a thoughtful man cruelly maligned by his
critics as an ignorant actor. He
routinely refers to the books and articles he was reading, carefully crediting
quotations, and blends (with that justly renowned Reaganesque touch) human
interest stories into his talks.
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