Winston Churchill :: essays research papers

Winston Churchill SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, (1874-1965), British leader. English on his father's side, American on his mother's, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill embodied and expressed the double vitality and the national qualities of both peoples. His names testify to the richness of his historic inheritance: Winston, after the Royalist family with whom the Churchills married before the English Civil War; Leonard, after his remarkable grandfather, Leonard Jerome of New York; Spencer, the married name of a daughter of the 1st duke of Marlborough, from whom the family descended; Churchill, the family name of the 1st duke, which his descendents resumed after the Battle of Waterloo. All these strands come together in a career that had no parallel in British history for richness, range, length, and achievement. Churchill took a leading part in laying the foundations of the welfare state in Britain, in preparing the Royal Navy for World War I, and in settling the political boundaries in the Middle East after the war. In WORLD WAR II emerged as the leader of the united British nation and Commonwealth to resist the German domination of Europe, as an inspirer of the resistance among free peoples, and as a prime architect of victory. In this, and in the struggle against communism afterward, he made himself an indispensable link between the British and American peoples, for he foresaw that the best defense for the free world was the coming together of the English-speaking peoples. Profoundly historically minded, he also had prophetic foresight: British-American unity was the message of his last great book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. His dominant qualities were courage and imagination. Less obvious to the public, but no less important, was his powerful, original, and fertile intellect. He had intense loyalty, marked magnanimity and generosity, and an affectionate nature with a puckish humor. Oratory, in which he ultimately became a master, he learned the hard way, but he was a natural wit. The artistic side of his temperament was displayed in his writings and oratorical style, as well as in his paintings. He was a combination of soldier, writer, artist, and statesman. He was not so good as a mere party politician. Like Julius Caesar, he stands out not only as a great man of action, but as a writer of it too. He had genius; as a man he was charming, gay, ebullient, endearing. As for personal defects, such a man was bound to be a great egoist; if that is a defect. So strong a personality was apt to be overbearing. He was something of a gambler, always too willing to take risks. In his earlier career, people thought him of unbalanced judgment partly from the very excess of