Blood, toil, tears, and sweat, are famous and familiar words to us today.  They evoke thoughts of courage, fearlessness, and an unwavering determination to succeed.  Other Churchillian phrases echo down to us through the corridors of time – words like: “finest hour,” “we shall never surrender,” “we shall fight on the beaches,” and so forth.  They are timeless and meaningful.  

Dr. Lukacs told me during a recent interview that in his opinion Winston Churchill’s best oration from those days was the eulogy he shared about Neville Chamberlain, who succumbed to complications due to stomach cancer on November 10, 1940, just six months after leaving office:

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart--the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.”

Frankly, Winston Churchill was not the one-dimensional warmonger some in his day thought him to be, and that some even today persist in insisting he was.  He was an inspiring leader at the right time and in the right place.

It’s vital that he not be forgotten, nor demonized through the writing of specious history.  A new generation, one easily influenced by fleeting images and drawn to the simplistic rhetoric of political gurus, needs to get a sense of this great man and glean from his courage and character. 

John Lukacs concludes his narrative with an excerpt from a speech made by Mr. Churchill in 1955, when his active political life was drawing to a close at the age of eighty:

“Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world?  It does not matter so much for old people; they are going soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind.”

Something to think about before a torch is passed to yet another new generation of Americans.