The Hero and His Superpower

The Hero and His Superpower Churchill Defiant Fighting On, 1945-1955. Barbara Learning. Harper. 384 pages; index; $26.99.

The term superpower was used by an American professor in 1944 to identify a new category of strength - a state that combined an armed global presence with a readiness to act in defense of worldwide interests. Its prototype was the British Empire and Commonwealth. This imperial entity contained more territory and people than did the two other powers of the wartime "Big Three," the United States and the Soviet Union. Even in 1945, the sixth year of Britain's exhausting struggle, Japan would have faced a terrible foe had Hiroshima and Nagasaki not compelled a sudden surrender: Alongside its U.S. ally, the Empire was ready to hit the Home Islands with four British battleships, more than a dozen aircraft carriers, and millions of men from Britain and the Commonwealth.

Seemingly overnight, however, this imperial eminence and clout dwindled faster than anyone imagined. By 1956, due to White House pressure, humiliated, Britain had to retreat from its military intervention at Suez. Having threatened to undermine the pound should Britain not withdraw immediately. President Dwight D. Eisenhower nonetheless graciously observed that the British were still his "right arm." It was a description of British power that would have been an insult 10 years earlier, and preposterous 10 years later. What occurred in the decade after 1945 is a case study of superpower decline. These years also include the riveting ones of Winston Churchill's final time in office. Both events make Barbara Learning's Churchill Defiant worth the attention of political-military decision makers as well as of students of leadership.

Prime Minister Churchill was stunned to be defeated by the Labour Party in July 1945 while at the Potsdam Conference with Joseph Stalin and President Harry S Truman. Churchill then served as leader of the Opposition until October 1951, thereafter returning as prime minister until 1955, then handing power to his chosen successor Anthony Eden, who would be compelled to resign after the Suez debacle.

Altogether, these years may be the most personally revealing of his long life. Scrambling to compensate for Britain's diminishing strength, he tried to align the British Empire and Commonwealth with America's newly expanding worldwide interests. At the same time, he was fighting off his Conservative Party rivals before they finally nudged him from 10 Downing Street at age 80, by then nearly "ga ga," as Eden unkindly remarked. Despite such highstakes drama, these years are essentially neglected in all the writing on Churchill - he might as well have left the world stage with the Axis' defeat in 1945.

Churchill Defiant helps to fill the gap in our understanding of one of the 20th century's preeminent leaders. Learning is a talented biographer whose similarly well-written profiles include John F. Kennedy's early years, a "missing history" of Jacqueline Kennedy, and the lives of such stars as Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe and Orson Welles. This is helpful experience for a Churchill biographer - Learning can distill the cinematic quality of how this colorful, protean hero spent six years fighting his way back from electoral defeat in 1945 to return to the center of world events - altogether ready in 1951 to reassert Britain's might in the world. But the world had changed. To this end, Churchill Defiant also offers a glimpse of how leaders of a declining superpower become lost in time.

Limited scope is both the strength as well as the weakness of Churchill Defiant. Devoting the first half of her book to Churchill's years out of office and the second to those back in 10 Downing Street, Learning gives too much attention to the strange political maneuverings of Churchill's last rumblings for immortality, at least as they play out at home. The "insider baseball" of British politics becomes taxing - chapter after chapter concerns internal Conservative Party quarrels and betrayals with men such as Salisbury, Macmillan, Butler and Crookshank, about whom we know little and therefore care less. More interesting is the attention paid to Churchill's dreams to craft a "summit" (his original term) after Stalin's death in March 1953. But Eisenhower resisted Churchill's notions of reviving Big Three diplomacy. Britain was no longer an equal. Its global "Empire and Commonwealth" was in political disarray. Nor, simply put, did Britain have enough money - the "sinews of war" - for a place at the table. The age of true continental superpowers, now armed with hydrogen bombs, had arrived. Relatively little has been written elsewhere about Eisenhower's impatience with the aging warlord and about Churchill's refusal to accept a lesser world role for what he kept calling "the Empire." This part of Learning's story is valuable history.

In a book of this size, however, the minutiae about Conservative Party squabbles sometimes obscures the larger issue of paying attention to a world transformed. The Korean War, for example, receives less attention, though it is the event that within months turned America into a global military colossus at the same time that British power shrank in comparison, learning mentions the pound's devaluation in 1949, after seminal negotiations in Washington, but otherwise we learn little about Britain's desperate financial straits.

Learning's spotlight throughout is on Churchill, his activities, moods and thundering. The reader soon yearns for wider context. OEurchill had changed the world in 1940 by defying Hitler; from 1945-1955, he was trying to change the world again, finally by trying to broker an East-West peace at the "summit" Yet Washington kept dismissing his enthusiasms. Why? There was more to it than Churchill just being an "old man in a hurry." By the 1950s, Congress as well as the Eisenhower administration discerned U.S. interests increasingly at odds with those of Britain, whether in Korea, the Middle East, Western Europe, Southeast Asia or the Pacific.

No one even knew from 1953 until about 1957 who among the Kremlin's "wolves" would come out on top, which made Churchill's eagerness for a summit - essentially with persons unknown in the Kremlin - all the more disconcerting to Washington. But Churchill Defiant tells us little about these framing events.

Learning's shortcomings as a writer of history, in contrast to being a fluid biographer, are further evident in her slighting of two other giants of the time. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, is described simply thus: "Dulles, whose breath stank and whose left eye twitched incessantly and disconcertingly, arrived in London." This is absurd trivialization of one of the century's great American lawyers, an official whom Eisenhower found indispensable, and a reflective man who wondered whether the United States should be a global military power in the first place. Similarly, Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign secretary from 1945-51, receives slight attention. Surely the greatest foreign secretary in the history of the British Empire, he dominated British diplomacy for five-and-a-half years, and was a force behind the creation of NATO along the way. No one in public life, certainly not Churchill, had understood and faced down Soviet power earlier than Bevin. Might we be told how he and Churchill interacted? That is not explained.

Despite the thin context and analytical missteps, Churchill Defiant is history as well as biography in which Learning presents Churchill with a subtlety missed by the man's more learned biographers such as Martin Gilbert. Those authors dwell nearly exclusively on the Churchill of big picture excitements: Churchill as a subaltern in India, First Lord of the Admiralty during the World War I, the bleak prophet of the 1930s, and the vital champion at the bridge against Nazi barbarism. Learning instead succeeds by presenting us with something different. A finer portrait of Churchill emerges.

To that end, in Churchill Defiant we finally have a book that would make his intimates and colleagues smile with recognition.

[Author Affiliation]

Derek Leebaert has taught foreign policy at Georgetown University for 15 years and is a director of the U.S. Army Historical Foundation. His latest book, Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan, was included in the Washington Post's "Best nonfiction of 2010" list.