[Paleopsych] NYTBR: Winston Churchill, Neocon?

[Premise Checker]

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: Winston
Churchill, Neocon?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27HEILBRU.html
February 27, 2005

    By JACOB HEILBRUNN

    Douglas J. Feith was becoming excited. After spending an afternoon
    discussing the war in Iraq with him, I asked what books had most
    influenced him. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and a
    prominent neoconservative, raced across his large library and began
    pulling down gilt-edged volumes on the British Empire. Behind his desk
    loomed a bust of Winston Churchill.

    It was a telling moment. In England right-wing historians are
    portraying the last lion as a drunk, a dilettante, an incorrigible
    bungler who squandered the opportunity to cut a separate peace with
    Hitler that would have preserved the British Empire. On the American
    right, by contrast, Churchill idolatry has reached its finest hour.
    George W. Bush, who has said ''I loved Churchill's stand on
    principle,'' installed a bronze bust of him in the Oval Office after
    becoming president. On Jan. 21, 2005, Bush issued a letter with
    ''greetings to all those observing the 40th anniversary of the passing
    of Sir Winston Churchill.'' The Weekly Standard named Churchill ''Man
    of the Century.'' So did the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who in
    December 2002 delivered the third annual Churchill Dinner speech
    sponsored by conservative Hillsdale College; its president, Larry P.
    Arnn, also happens to belong to the International Churchill Society.
    William J. Luti, a leading neoconservative in the Pentagon, recently
    told me, ''Churchill was the first neocon.'' Apart from Michael Lind
    writing in the British magazine The Spectator, however, the Churchill
    phenomenon has received scant attention. Yet to a remarkable extent,
    the neoconservative establishment is claiming Churchill (who has just
    had a museum dedicated to him in London) as a founding father.

    Some of this reverence has its origins in the writings of the
    neoconservative husband-and-wife team Irving Kristol and Gertrude
    Himmelfarb. As the co-editor of the British monthly Encounter in the
    early 1950's, Kristol (who deplored imperialism in his youthful
    Trotskyist incarnation) began falling under the influence of Tory
    intellectuals and started his march to the right. Himmelfarb, a
    historian of England, has always championed a return to Victorian
    virtues, which Churchill, more than anyone else, embodied in the 20th
    century. Writing in The New Republic in November 2001, Himmelfarb
    observed: ''Among other things that we are rediscovering in the past
    is the idea of greatness -- great individuals, great causes, great
    civilizations. It is no accident that Churchill has re-emerged now, at
    a time when the West is again under assault.''

    Another strand of Churchill piety can be traced to the political
    philosopher Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany for England before
    immigrating to the United States. Strauss shaped successive
    generations of neoconservatives, starting with Kristol and Himmelfarb.
    He believed that the Western democracies needed an intellectual elite
    to check the dangerous passions of the lower orders, and he saw the
    pre-World War I British aristocracy as the closest thing to Platonic
    guardians. Upon Churchill's death in 1965, he declared, ''We have no
    higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and
    our students of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of
    human excellence.''

    In the 1970's, a new neoconservative generation imbibed this lesson.
    At Harvard, William Kristol, the son of Kristol and Himmelfarb,
    celebrated the 100th anniversary of Churchill's birthday in the
    imperial manner by roasting a pig with his fellow Straussian graduate
    students. Other neoconservatives used the example of Churchill to warn
    about the perils of pursuing arms-control agreements with the Soviet
    Union. In ''Churchill and Us'' in the June 1977 issue of Commentary,
    the strategist Edward N. Luttwak, who has since decamped from the
    neoconservative movement, recounted the abuse showered upon Churchill
    for insisting upon rearmament in the 1930's.

    After Ronald Reagan became president, Churchill worship became even
    more fervent. Commentary published several essays during the Reagan
    years depicting Franklin D. Roosevelt as selling out the West at Yalta
    even as Churchill was trying to contain Stalin. Reagan hung a
    Churchill portrait in the White House Situation Room and, in 1988,
    declared Nov. 27 to Dec. 3 ''National Sir Winston Churchill
    Recognition Week.'' In his June 8, 1982, address to Parliament
    forecasting the collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan made a point of
    extolling Churchill.

    Since then, Reagan himself has been elevated to the status of
    Churchill. Just as Churchill began the fight against Bolshevism, his
    admirers contend, so Reagan prosecuted the war to its finish with the
    fall of the Berlin Wall. Like Churchill, Reagan, the argument goes,
    was dismissed as a crackpot by the regnant liberal establishment, but
    proved a prophet. Stephen F. Hayward of the American Enterprise
    Institute states in the forthcoming ''Age of Reagan'' that both men
    ''transcended their environments as only great men can do, thereby
    bending history to their will.'' David Gelernter, a Yale professor and
    contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, explains that to ''grasp
    Reagan's achievement, we must understand the striking continuum of
    pacifism from the 1930's through the 1980's through today -- and
    remember, simultaneously, that Churchill had help changing Britain's
    mind (namely Hitler's war); Bush had help changing America's mind and
    his own -- 9/11.''

    But is there a seamless continuum from Churchill to Reagan to Bush?
    Certainly Bush himself has not exactly shied away from the comparison.
    On Feb. 4, 2004, at the opening of the Library of Congress's
    ''Churchill and the Great Republic'' exhibit, Bush stated that ''our
    current struggles or challenges are similar to those Churchill knew. .
    . . One by one, we are finding and dealing with the terrorists,
    drawing tight what Winston Churchill called a 'closing net of doom.'
    ''

    But after celebrating Churchill, many neoconservatives go on to
    champion empire, and at that point matters become trickier.
    Krauthammer has applauded the idea of American hegemony, which he
    calls ''democratic realism,'' in The National Interest. Shortly after
    9/11, in an article called ''The Case for American Empire,'' published
    in The Weekly Standard, Max Boot wrote: ''Afghanistan and other
    troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
    administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs
    and pith helmets.'' The former Canadian press baron Conrad Black, the
    chairman of the board of The National Interest, is calling for the
    creation of a Churchillian Anglosphere, while the historian Niall
    Ferguson wants the United States to quit being an ''empire in denial''
    and adopt liberal imperialism.

    It's hard to see why it should. What, after all, was Churchill's
    imperial legacy? While he was laudably eager to establish a Jewish
    state, his forays into Arab nation-building after World War I,
    including the creation of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, plague the region
    down to the present. Far from helping avert the collapse of the
    empire, Britain's machinations under Churchill accelerated it. At the
    same time, it's not clear how ''liberal'' Churchill's imperialism
    actually was. He was a rather equivocal democratizer, declaring in
    1942 that he had not become ''the King's first minister in order to
    liquidate the British Empire.'' He bitterly fought with Roosevelt over
    recognizing Indian independence, and he despised Gandhi.

    For many of the neoconservatives, however, the great liberal idol
    Franklin D. Roosevelt was a disaster. The former Bush speechwriter
    David Frum has hailed Churchill as the great man of the 20th century,
    while denouncing Roosevelt for not opposing Nazism and Stalinism
    vigorously enough. It seems clear that by shunting Roosevelt to the
    sidelines and elevating Churchill, neoconservatives are doing more
    than simply recovering a neoconservative hero from the past. They are,
    in effect, inventing a new interventionist tradition for the
    Republican Party that goes beyond anything Churchill or other British
    statesmen ever imagined.

    Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for The Los Angeles Times, is
    completing a book on neoconservatism.