Browsing Footprints in Time, the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a tale from eighty years ago with a lesson for American public life today.
The idiosyncrasies of the British government being what they were in 1945, Colville, who had served Churchill as a private secretary throughout the Second World War, became one of Clement Attlee’s private secretaries when the Labor Party leader displaced Churchill as prime minister in July 1945 and inherited Churchill’s civil service staff at 10 Downing Street. Churchill and Attlee had been both partisan rivals and colleagues in the war-winning coalition government; there was respect, and perhaps even affection, between them despite the bitterness of the 1945 election campaign. That led to the story in question, which Colville tells with understated panache:
“I…had a curious start as one of Mr. Attlee’s private secretaries. Churchill tried to make political capital out of an ill-judged letter written by Professor Harold Laski [a leading Socialist intellectual] during the recent Election Campaign. He and Attlee exchanged angry letters on the subject for publication. It became my duty to go to Claridge’s, where Churchill had temporarily established his headquarters, and help him draft a Joshua-like blast of the trumpet to Attlee. I delivered it to Attlee and helped him draft a withering reply. This enjoyable and totally ineffective exercise lasted several days. Each knew that I was assisting the other.”
It is unimaginable that anything like that could happen in the overheated American politics of the moment, characterized as they are by a vindictiveness that might have given Inspector Javert pause. We are the poorer for it. And while certain circles today would deride Churchill and Attlee as members of the British “elite,” it was an elite in which the duty of public service was deeply ingrained and for whom the country’s good transcended partisanship in an emergency. Thus, Attlee, leader of the parliamentary opposition, played a key role in bringing Churchill to power in the “darkest hour” of May 1940, and Churchill not only made his rival a member of his small War Cabinet, but eventually Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the House of Commons. This was statesmanship of the highest order, and we could use some of it today.
A few days after my re-engagement with the Colville memoirs, I found myself in Simi Valley, California, where I was given a thorough tour of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum. The facility’s architecture and landscaping beautifully complement the surrounding terrain; the museum does a fine job of explaining a life and a presidency of great consequence for the nation and the world; “the “Gipper’s Bar and Bistro” serves a terrific tuna melt sandwich with excellent fries. Those whose theological lodestar is St. Augustine will likely cringe at the first clause of the inscription at the simple gravesite where Ronald and Nancy Reagan are buried — “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.” Taken as a whole, however, that Reaganesque faith in the possibility of human decency helps explain the text from the Gipper’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention, which closes the museum tour:
“Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts.”
The 47th president should learn from this. At a few moments in his inaugural address, Mr. Trump seemed to have done so. But actions, as always, speak louder than words, and the president’s petulant decision to deny further federal security protection to his former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and his former national security adviser, John Bolton — both of whom are under a fatwah sentence of death from the vicious mullahs now running Iran — would have appalled Churchill, Attlee, and Reagan. Whatever making America great again may mean, it cannot mean meanness of this sort.
History measures the enduring greatness of public figures in many ways; nobility of spirit married to decency of comportment in both victory and defeat is surely one of them. Thus I respectfully suggest that President Trump place on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office a plaque with the following text, which Churchill inscribed as the “Moral of the Work” in each of the six volumes of his history, The Second World War, which helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature:
In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Goodwill.
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