When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Yet Wilson misses the full reach of his best phrase. It is not just that the world needs to be made safe so that democracy can flourish. The establishment of a democracy will itself be the guarantor of that safety. Democracy is not the system required once stability has been restored. It is itself the underwriter of international security.

  The oversight probably stems from Wilson’s reluctance to push Congress too far. Although Jefferson had used his first Inaugural Address to proclaim America the ‘world’s best hope’, and Lincoln had made similar high-sounding noises, these had been the vaguest of aspirations. No one had meant it like Wilson. Many presidents since have echoed Wilson’s idealism, notably George W. Bush, who declared in his second Inaugural Address ‘the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world’. Wilson’s question here seems contemporary to us because it has always been the conundrum of American foreign policy: to withdraw or to engage.

  It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

  Wilson ends by singing the chorus in the most resonant way he can find, by invoking the nativity of America. We have had appeals to humanity, mankind, free peoples of the world and a ‘League of Honour’. Now Wilson really gets up with the gods by appealing to America. This is the American answer to what ranks higher than a battle for civilisation – the American constitution. Wilson’s stirring conclusion is clinched by locating the demand for action within the folds of American history. A nation such as this can do no other while remaining true to itself. It is the ultimate appeal to character. This is not just what we should do – it is who we are.

  You might wonder why Wilson does not begin with the appeal to America and work out from his strongest point. The answer is that he needs the preceding argument in order to establish it because the point was exceptional. The standard American attitude before then had been, in the words of John Quincy Adams, that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had committed America not to interfere in Europe, as well as vice versa. Wilson’s demand that America take part in the spread of liberty was as much a rift in the argument then as it is now.

  At the immediate conclusion of the speech there was a moment of silence which gave way to a great explosion of applause. Wilson then drove back to the White House past crowds of cheering people. ‘My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that,’ he is recorded as having said on the way home. He was, of course, tragically right. Even by this time, the war had become one of the most murderous conflicts in human history. In his final words Wilson acknowledges this impending sacrifice by borrowing Martin Luther’s words from the Diet of Worms: ‘I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other, so help me God.’

  WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Their Finest Hour

  House of Commons

  18 June 1940

  Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was, as David Cannadine said, a master and a slave of the English language. No figure in politics since Cicero has made a closer study of public speaking. Never before or since did any speaker lavish so much high-octane rhetoric on so few subjects to warrant it. Yet, as that parody suggests, nobody changed the future with words quite like Winston Churchill. For all his faults, and they were many, Churchill is a titan of the story of rhetoric. In De oratore, Cicero creates the template for the finest orator of all. Churchill has a claim on that title. This speech, with the nation on the verge of disaster, is his finest hour.

  Winston Spencer Churchill was born on 30 November 1874, in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Ungifted scholastically, he joined the Royal Cavalry in 1895. As a soldier and a journalist he travelled widely. During his time as a subaltern in the Indian Army, he wrote a short pamphlet called The Scaffolding of Rhetoric. Churchill was himself a long time taking the scaffolding down. Almost as soon as he was elected as the Conservative MP for Oldham in 1900 he acquired a reputation for lavish verbosity. Disraeli’s famous insult of Gladstone – ‘a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’ – suits Churchill more neatly. An abundance of flourish applied to a dearth of subject matter made him the butt of satire from his peers. As he said himself: ‘I have had to eat my words many times and I have found it a very nourishing diet.’

  He didn’t help himself by his erratic politics. Churchill defected to the Liberal Party in 1904, serving as first lord of the Admiralty, in which job he oversaw the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in the Great War. On resigning from the government, he travelled to fight on the Western Front. When he returned to domestic politics he crossed the floor back to the Conservatives, serving as Baldwin’s chancellor of the exchequer from 1924. His next disaster, in a spiralling pattern, was his choice for Britain to rejoin the Gold Standard.

  Churchill lost his seat in 1929 and spent much of the next decade writing and making speeches. On Indian independence he was a lonely and misguided voice, and at times a harmful one, which has left a stain on his reputation in India to this day. On the appeasement of Nazi Germany, however, he was triumphantly, and courageously, correct. When Neville Chamberlain resigned in 1940, Churchill succeeded him as prime minister and minister of defence, a position he created for himself, in an all-party coalition government.

  Suddenly Churchill had a subject. Britain faced an adversary, in Hitler’s Germany, that had, in Martin Amis’s vivid phrase, found the core of the reptile brain and was building an autobahn that went there. In the summer of 1940, with the threat of imminent invasion and with the prospect of a hazardous air battle to come, civilisation hung in the balance. Churchill famously said, in his first great address of that summer, that he offered nothing but blood, sweat, toil and tears. He forgot to add words, which he called up for the war effort. Churchill spoke for the virtue of conversation over conflict, bombast rather than the bomb.

  Proof that there is no gratitude in politics, though, came with the Labour victory in the 1945 general election, in which the demobbed soldiers voted for the promise of welfare-state security. Churchill disgraced himself in his old fashion with the stupid accusation that the Labour Party, his trusted coalition partner, would introduce a kind of native Gestapo. The defeat of the war hero in 1945 may seem surprising but, in retrospect, Churchill had played his part in an acceleration of history that had left him behind.

  It is forgivable that he should have neglected the prospects for Britain after the war. As Churchill prepared his speeches in the summer of 1940 it didn’t seem that his country had any prospects. But, despite the constant promptings of his deputy prime minister, the Labour leader Clement Attlee, Churchill showed little interest beyond the immediate conflict. In this respect he compares unfavourably with David Lloyd George, whose inspirational war rhetoric was always turned towards the future. But perhaps no present has ever been as dire as the present was for Churchill. It seemed, at times, to hold no future at all.

  I spoke the other day of the colossal military disaste
r which occurred when the French High Command failed to withdraw the northern Armies from Belgium at the moment when they knew that the French front was decisively broken at Sedan and on the Meuse. This delay entailed the loss of fifteen or sixteen French divisions and threw out of action for the critical period the whole of the British Expeditionary Force. Our Army and 120,000 French troops were indeed rescued by the British Navy from Dunkirk but only with the loss of their cannon, vehicles and modern equipment. This loss inevitably took some weeks to repair, and in the first two of those weeks the battle in France has been lost. When we consider the heroic resistance made by the French Army against heavy odds in this battle, the enormous losses inflicted upon the enemy and the evident exhaustion of the enemy, it may well be the thought that these 25 divisions of the best-trained and best-equipped troops might have turned the scale. However, General Weygand had to fight without them. Only three British divisions or their equivalent were able to stand in the line with their French comrades. They have suffered severely, but they have fought well. We sent every man we could to France as fast as we could re-equip and transport their formations.

  Churchill stood to speak to Parliament, on the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, at a moment of present danger; four days after the fall of France and a fortnight after the evacuation of Dunkirk. The Germans had hit France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands from the air while German forces advanced through the Netherlands, northern Belgium and Luxembourg into the Ardennes Forest; their next stop was France. The Dutch had surrendered after a brutal attack by the Luftwaffe on Rotterdam and the Allied attempts to defend Belgium were a fiasco, their forces squeezed between two German lines of advance. This pushed the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) back to the coast near the French port of Dunkirk. The evacuation, Operation Dynamo, took a week to accomplish and brought back more than 300,000 men across the English Channel in 800 civilian and military vessels, under a hail of bombs from the Luftwaffe. In all the history of retreats it is the most heroic, but it left France exposed. By 12 June German tanks had broken through the Maginot Line and on 14 June they entered Paris. Churchill had encouraged France to resist but had refused to commit more military resources.

  The end came sooner than he had hoped. Four days after this speech France signed an armistice with Germany which, on Hitler’s insistence, took place in the same railway car in which Germany had surrendered to France in 1918. The fear was that Britain was next. It seemed inevitable that Hitler would turn to Operation Sea Lion, his code name for his plans to cross the Channel. British intelligence had intercepted German radio transmissions that seemed to make invasion imminent.

  This at once posed the problem, for Churchill, of tone of voice. He needed to be both realistic and optimistic, and the two tones clash. But if anyone could cope, then Churchill could. He remains the keenest student of rhetoric ever to have held high office. He had studied Cicero and Aristotle and he decided, to use the latter’s term, to be forensic in the military detail he offered. Large sections of this speech are the work of an expressive war reporter.

  We know from the transcript now held at Churchill College, Cambridge, that he sweated over this text, as he did with all his speeches. Churchill was a Stakhanovite labourer, whose methods of composition were eccentric. For weeks he would try out phrases at dinner, interrupting conversations to sound out the rhythm of a new witticism. He would write while on the telephone, circling the Great Hall at Chequers, propped up in bed or looking at maps of the conflict. But perhaps Churchill’s favourite location for writing was his bath. He was inordinately proud of being able to control the taps with his feet as he dictated. Pity the poor typist, because Churchill never bothered to learn how to type; he dictated everything. The creative process absorbed him so completely that he became oblivious to the world. On one occasion he was so lost in his words that he did not notice that his cigar ash had ignited his bed jacket. A private secretary helpfully told him: ‘You’re on fire, sir. May I put you out?’ Without pausing, Churchill replied: ‘Yes, please do’ and completed the sentence.

  I am not reciting these facts for the purpose of recrimination. That I judge to be utterly futile and even harmful. We cannot afford it. I recite them in order to explain why it was we did not have, as we could have had, between twelve and fourteen British divisions fighting in the line in this great battle instead of only three. Now I put all this aside. I put it on the shelf, from which the historians, when they have time, will select their documents to tell their stories. We have to think of the future and not of the past. This also applies in a small way to our own affairs at home. There are many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments – and of Parliaments, for they are in it, too – during the years which led up to this catastrophe. They seek to indict those who were responsible for the guidance of our affairs. This also would be a foolish and pernicious process. There are too many in it. Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine. Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. Therefore, I cannot accept the drawing of any distinctions between Members of the present Government. It was formed at a moment of crisis in order to unite all the Parties and all sections of opinion. It has received the almost unanimous support of both Houses of Parliament. Its Members are going to stand together, and, subject to the authority of the House of Commons, we are going to govern the country and fight the war.

  Churchill then makes a call for unity. He has been prime minister for little more than a month and already the trials of war are closing in. The first task is to head off the claim that Britain should have sent more military help to France in its attempt to stem the German advance. Churchill and the generals had concluded that, callous as it seemed, they were better off husbanding their resources for the battles to come.

  Then he confronts a domestic political issue. The search for scapegoats took the form of demands that the chief appeasers, Halifax and Chamberlain, should no longer be in the government. Churchill was himself the lucky general who had succeeded to the premiership despite being the man who oversaw the disastrous Norway campaign that had sealed the fate of Chamberlain. So it is perhaps with a touch of self-interest that Churchill asks, in the name of national unity, the press and political packs to back off.

  He does so with the first display of sophisticated rhetorical technique in the speech. The stakes are already set high, and Churchill uses them to sound the warning. But how elegantly: a quarrel between past and present means that we lose the future. It’s not quite true that public criticism of Lord Halifax would really undermine the war effort, but the dispute was a futile distraction and it irritated Churchill if people did not focus on the sole objective: to govern the country and fight the war. The felicity of the phrasing should not disguise the severity of the stricture. Instantly, anyone engaged in such a quarrel is made to feel frivolous at best and injurious to the nation at worst.

  Those are the regular, well-tested, well-proved arguments on which we have relied during many years in peace and war. But the question is whether there are any new methods by which those solid assurances can be circumvented. Odd as it may seem, some attention has been given to this by the Admiralty, whose prime duty and responsibility is to destroy any large sea-borne expedition before it reaches, or at the moment when it reaches, these shores. It would not be a good thing for me to go into details of this. It might suggest ideas to other people which they have not thought of, and they would not be likely to give us any of their ideas in exchange. All I will say is that untiring vigilance and mind-searching must be devoted to the subject, because the enemy is crafty and cunning and full of novel treacheries and stratagems. The House may be assured that the utmost ingenuity is being displayed and imagination is being evoked from large numbers of competent officers, well-trained in tactics and thoroughly up to date, to measure and counterwork novel possibilities. Untiring
vigilance and untiring searching of the mind is being, and must be, devoted to the subject, because, remember, the enemy is crafty and there is no dirty trick he will not do.

  In November 1941 Churchill observed in the House of Commons: ‘Ministers, and indeed all other public men, when they make speeches at the present time have always to bear in mind three audiences: one our own fellow countrymen, secondly, our friends abroad, and thirdly, the enemy. This naturally makes the task of public speaking very difficult.’ Most speeches have to speak to more than one audience, still more so in these days of instant communication, but the problem is never more acute than in wartime. Churchill is simultaneously addressing political friends and foes in Parliament, the nation at large (which he reached in a broadcast of the text verbatim at 9 p.m), the listening powers-that-were in the United States, neutral states who are attending carefully to his words as an index of the state of British strength, and of course the enemy, to whom he must betray no weakening of resolve. This has to be military report, popular inspiration and global diplomacy intertwined.

  You get a glimpse here of Churchill’s sense of humour when he says, with deliberate bathos, that the enemy is unlikely to offer any ideas in exchange. Any dictionary of quotations will show that Churchill is, without question, the wittiest senior politician there has been. War is not exactly the best material for comedy, though, for Churchill as it was for Lloyd George, mockery is an effective war weapon. The famous instance is his insistence on pronouncing ‘Nazi’ as ‘Narzees’. Churchill had a problem with sibilant sounds which he practised by insistently rehearsing phrases like ‘The Spanish ships I cannot see for they are not in sight’, but ‘Narzees’ is taking the rise and the British public loved it.