In praise of a famous man - Winston Churchill

This essay is adapted from an address to the International Churchill Society.

WHEN I was a boy I came upon the line from Ecclesiastes, "Let us now praise famous men." In succeeding decades I have found myself running its implications through my mind.

Early on I wondered why exactly it was thought appropriate, let alone necessary, to praise famous men. If such men as were to be praised were already famous, as the Biblical injunction presupposes, then would they not disdain as either redundant, or immodest, the solicitation of more praise than they had already? It seemed, in that perspective, just a little infra dig to enjoin such praise.

Some time later I bumped into the melancholy conclusion of the historian who wrote that "great men are not often good men." That finding curdled in the memory. Does it require of a famous man, to be praised, that he be praiseworthy? And if he is not a good man, merely a successful man who became famous by inventing the wheel or invading Russia or writing War and Peace, should not the praise be confined to bringing to the attention of those who are behind in the matter that which the person being praised actually did that merits more vociferous admiration? Or is that obvious? Jack the Ripper was famous, but our praise of him, if such it is to be called, does not focus on his attainments.

And then much later, much much later, I read a review of a book on Abraham Lincoln that was justified, or so it seemed, primarily by the author's diligence in bringing to light episodes in Lincoln's life, and aspects of his character, that served to diminish the myth. I found myself wondering at what point it is in the interest of civilization to devise a line between research designed to satisfy the curiosity, and research designed to deface -- the latter often an impulse of the egalitarian, who really thinks that all men should be equally famous, in the absence of which all men should be equally infamous. As in, If everybody can't be rich, then everybody should be poor. I am, at this stage in the development of my thought on that passage from Ecclesiastes, more inclined to believe that a point comes when it is wise, unless one's profession is in experimental historical clinics, to accept that which is legendary as legend, that which is mythogenic as myth -- fortifying myth, ennobling myth.

When I was a junior in college and editor of the student newspaper I received an invitation to attend a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be given by Winston Churchill, at a mid-century celebration. I drove with a fellow editor to Cambridge and awaited the appearance of the great man with high expectation, made higher by advance notice given by Mr. Churchill to the press to the effect that his speech at MIT would be an important historical statement.

Mr. Churchill's preceding visit to the United States had been to Fulton, Missouri, and we wondered excitedly whether he would go even further in characterizing the Soviet Union and its leader. We watched him with fascination as he came to the chair -- he was shorter than I had envisioned, less rotund. He guided a cane with his right hand, but even so needed help to rise to the lectern. The hypnotizing voice boomed in, and our attention was on tiptoe.

I remember rushing back to New Haven with some trepidation that the story I would write for the Yale Daily News might feature something Winston Churchill had said that was different from what the New York Times and the Associated Press and the United Press agreed was the major news story. In fact Mr. Churchill hadn't said anything different from what he had said before, which was that the discovery of the atom bomb, as we then called it, might prove to be the greatest humanitarian invention in history, making war so awful that wars would never again be fought. That hope did not prove prophetic, in that eighty million people have been killed in warfare since he gave it voice, but then it is true that most of them were killed in battles in which there was no general at hand who had the atom bomb in his quiver.

But what mattered in 1949 was the possession of the bomb. When Mr. Churchill spoke it was exclusively ours -- copyright Los Alamos, U.S.A.; but the pirate paid no attention, and within months he would develop his own bomb or, more exactly, succeed in transforming blueprints provided by American and British spies into a nuclear bomb.

But of course, the real nightmare had already come by mid century, to Eastern Europe; Czechoslovakia had fallen just the previous year. Mr. Churchill was to some extent on a diplomatic rein that night and he did not mention the name of Stalin, referring instead to "13 men" in the Kremlin. But the image of Stalin was clearly in his mind when he recalled that the Mongol invasion of Europe, well under way seven hundred years earlier, had been interrupted by the death of Genghis Khan. His armies retreated four thousand miles to await a successor, and they never returned. Might such a thing happen again? Churchill wondered.