Endless Churchill.

• Author: Sicherman, Harvey
• Position: Books

Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 736 pp., $28.

Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (Rio Grande, OH: Hambledon Press, 2002), 384 pp., $21.

John Keegan, Winston Churchill: A Penguin Lives Biography (New York: Viking Press, 2002), 208 pp., $19.95.

John Lukacs, Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 200 pp., $15.

Klaus Larres, Churchill's Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 592 pp., $40.

WINSTON Churchill would be pleased. His age has vanished but the memory of him has not. The German wars, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the "balance of terror" and even--alas, he would say--the British Empire now belong to history. Churchill himself, on the other hand, continues to excite enormous interest, especially on this side of the Atlantic.

American fascination with Churchill has much to do with our own character. We greatly admire leaders who do the right thing despite overwhelming odds, such as those faced by Churchill's Britain in 1940. We dislike politicians as a rule, except for the colorful and talented ones. Few have ever matched Churchill's range--orator, author, painter, wit, bon vivant, sage and seer.

For these reasons, too, Churchill still attracts the best authors. The five books reviewed here, all published within the past two years, were written, respectively by Lord Roy Jenkins, an acclaimed British biographer; Geoffrey Best, John Keegan and John Lukacs, all distinguished historians; and Klaus Larres, a younger German scholar who is currently the Henry A. Kissinger Fellow at the Library of Congress. But do these books (some 2,200 pages in toto!) tell us anything new about the man? And more importantly, does Churchill have anything to say through them to us about our world?

Only one of the authors (Larres) claims to break fresh ground. The others offer different perspectives on that which is already well known, some of which tell us more about the writer than the subject. Thus, John Keegan's brief but elegant Penguin history has a captivating introduction that explains why, to young Britons in the 1940s and 1950s, Churchill not only represented the past, but a past they were eager to be rid of--and for whom the Suez disaster, under his successor Anthony Eden, was "finis to all for which Churchill had stood." But a year later, alone in New York, old recordings of Churchill's wartime speeches cast a spell, and Keegan became an admirer.

John Lukacs is, well, John Lukacs: he commits many a drive-by shooting en route to the main controversies. He is especially good at exploding the absurd argument that Churchill should have made a deal with Hitler in 1940, thereby preserving the Empire and avoiding that ultimate horror, American domination. Lukacs also reminds us that Churchill understood both Stalin and Soviet Russia (he rarely said Soviet Union) much better than did Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower. He knew the evil of the Soviet empire, but he also appreciated the historic caution and fear of superior force that ran through the Kremlin.

Geoffrey Best's well-written and nicely balanced biography contains his own elegy for the Churchillian virtues that he finds lamentably lacking in modern Britain. It is clear that his was a labor of both love and longing.

Lord Jenkins' massive thousand-page tome offers his special insight as a veteran Labour Party parliamentarian who observed Churchill from the opposition benches; he understood Sir Winston's passion for the House of Commons and the way it shaped his life. But Jenkins, too, becomes self-indulgent, concluding on the curious note, perhaps of interest only to himself, that Churchill, by a small margin, was a greater man than Gladstone, the subject of an earlier magisterial Jenkins biography.

Once beyond the reflections of the...