And so there the Last Lion sits, in bronze, next to the fireplace beneath a West Texas painting. Bush likes the juxtaposition. Churchill, the president said in accepting the bust, “knew what he believed, and he really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me… He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.” Churchill’s visage sometimes appears to take in the whole room. “He watches everything I do,” Bush has joked.
What would Churchill make of what he’s seeing? What would FDR think of the man sitting at his desk? By drawing on the drama of World War II in talking about his own war, Bush himself has invited the questions–and the comparisons. Charging ahead, we are learning, does not automatically make the world better. Given the faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that justified the Iraq war, the peculiarities of the pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime, the casualties in the aftermath and the poor planning for a post-Saddam order, invoking the Great Men of World War II is fraught, for their legacies are so large Bush risks seeming small in their long shadow.
Yet at a gathering to open a Library of Congress exhibit on Churchill this winter, Bush explicitly linked World War II to Iraq and the war on terror. “In their worship of power, their deep hatreds, their blindness to innocence, the terrorists are successors to the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” Bush said. “And we are the heirs of the tradition of liberty, defenders of the freedom, the conscience and the dignity of every person. Others before us have shown bravery and moral clarity in this cause. The same is now asked of us, and we accept the responsibilities of history.” The “we” includes Tony Blair. “A majority of decent and well-meaning people said there was no need to confront Hitler and that those who did were warmongers,” Blair told the Guardian in March 2003.
Now, amid dark days for the American effort in Iraq, a wave of World War II commemoration is about to break over us. On Memorial Day comes the dedication of the World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall, where Bush will speak. Then, a week later, the president travels to Normandy to give an address marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied landings that began the liberation of Europe. Bush’s appearances at the ceremonies will, for many, raise a fundamental question about that most elusive and essential of gifts: war leadership. How does Bush measure up against the giants of old? What can he–and we–learn from the road to D-Day?
On substantive grounds, the analogy is an enormous stretch. Bush’s war against Al Qaeda and the battle for Iraq–the president thinks of them as parts of a whole–are not comparable to World War II in scope or scale. Roughly 60 million people, soldiers and civilians, died in that conflict. Churchill and Roosevelt were leading a global hot war in which states, driven by ideology and avarice, were embarked on conquest; great armies and navies massed against one another in ways that would have been recognizable to the ancients. Fighting terrorists and their sympathizers is, we know, a different kind of war, one more like President Kennedy’s “long twilight struggle” against communism, a battle fought in an atmosphere of anxiety with flashes of combat.
Trying to find the right historical frame for our current conflict has become a consuming intellectual exercise. Some–including NEWSWEEK, in a cover story in April–have sought clarity in comparing and contrasting Iraq to Vietnam. Others think of the French fight for Algiers; still others point to the aftermath of the Great War and Versailles, which created Iraq in the first place. No parallel is exact, but turning to history is the only way we can make sense of the present. “The farther backward you can look,” Churchill once said, “the farther forward you can see.”
Governing always looks easier from the visitor’s side of the desk in the Oval Office, from the press room or from the historian’s perspective in the archives. But there is no doubt that the early returns on Bush’s war leadership are troubling. Despite the administration’s claims, there is still no convincing evidence of Iraqi ties to terrorism; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; we have not been greeted as liberators, and more Americans have died in Iraq since Bush prematurely declared victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln a year ago than had died there before. So the president has a learning curve to master, and he should start with the Great Men of the Greatest Generation–or else he may face Churchill’s political fate, defeat at the polls in the wake of a war. Bush has read the right books, from Martin Gilbert and William Manchester on Churchill to Michael Beschloss, James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Roosevelt. Whether he has absorbed the lessons of such works is another question.
Bush eschews complexity; FDR and Churchill embraced it. Bush prefers to decide, not go into details or revisit issues; FDR and Churchill were constantly examining their own assumptions and immersing themselves in postwar planning. Bush is largely incurious about the world; FDR and Churchill wanted to know everything. It is not too late, however, for the president to reach back into their lives for guidance–they are not inaccessible figures. Steely and subtle, hawkish and gentle, fierce and forgiving, they were men before they were monuments. And in the debate over D-Day (or Overlord, as the cross-channel invasion was called), all of their gifts and quirks, genius and weaknesses, came into sharpest focus.
The story of World War II can appear simple and straightforward now, but in fact, the war could have gone either way, and the landings on the Normandy coast 60 summers ago were the result of years of thought, planning and debate–endless, frustrating, face-to-face arguments among the British, the Americans and the Soviets. Now a legendary moment, the hinge of the war in Europe, the decision to cross the channel did not come quickly or cleanly.
Bush, however, likes his decisions quick and clean. “Let me tell you, in life you’ve just got to do what you think is right,” he told foreign journalists in the Oval Office in the fall of 2001. “That’s what a leader does. Leaders take a position not because of some poll or focus group; they should take a position on what they think is right and suffer the consequences. That’s what a good leader does.”
Judged against the Roosevelt-Churchill standard, this definition is only half the story. Taking a stand is not all a good leader does. FDR could be too tied to polls–Churchill once said as much–but their joint leadership was a complex cocktail of certitude and second-guessing, grand decision making and gritty detail.
Bush has the courage part down, which is no small thing. Sometimes leaders must defy political elements in their own nations in order to project power to fight battles beyond their borders. Refusing to cave to public opinion, damning naysayers and ignoring the press is sometimes exactly what should be done. (Churchill once lamented that journalists always “spun round with the alacrity of squirrels.”) Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s own finest hours came when they chose the difficult over the easy. For Churchill, it was his lonely and courageous stand in 1940 when he stared across the English Channel and said Hitler had come that far but would go no farther. Others in the British elite would have reached out to Berlin for a possible deal, sanctioning the Third Reich’s conquests, but Churchill told the cabinet that “if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
Roosevelt, too, faced a dilemma that might have defeated weaker men. Until Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war on the United States on Dec. 11, 1941, the great mass of Americans hated the idea of getting embroiled in yet another European war. Initially unsure Churchill was worth betting on, Roosevelt moved with care. (Told of Churchill’s becoming prime minister on May 10, 1940, FDR said he “supposed Churchill was the best man England had, even if he was drunk half of his time.”) As Churchill stood strong through Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz of civilians in London and elsewhere, though, Roosevelt was impressed, and he spent most of the 27 months between Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor inching America toward engagement. He did it with deft executive and legislative maneuvers, igniting industry and getting supplies to Britain. “I am a juggler,” Roosevelt said. “I never let my left hand know what my right hand is doing.” To keep all the balls in the air, FDR had to be at home in the ambiguity of pre-Pearl Harbor America. It was only after the Japanese attack on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, that he could join Churchill’s fight in full. “We are all in the same boat now,” Roosevelt told Churchill by telephone that night. “God be with you,” Churchill replied. The prime minister was beside himself: at last England and America were together. Within weeks Churchill was at the White House, celebrating Christmas and planning the coming battles.
Among the first items on Roosevelt and Churchill’s agenda over those wartime holidays was an American military plan to cross the English Channel and take the fight directly to Hitler. The shortest road to Berlin was through northern France, so Gens. George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower urged a quick amphibious assault on the coast. FDR was drawn to the idea of a fast strike, but Churchill, the architect of (and scapegoat for) the disastrous Gallipoli landings in 1915, was wary; he had an abiding terror of high casualty figures. It was one thing to draft a plan in Washington, but quite another to make it reality in the sands of a distant place.
The allies, Churchill believed, simply were not strong enough to mount an operation against occupied France. “When I think of the beaches of Normandy choked with the flower of American and British youth, and when, in my mind’s eye, I see the tides running red with their blood,” Churchill would later say to Eisenhower, “I have my doubts… I have my doubts.”
Roosevelt, though, was inclined to go with his generals. The plan, he told Churchill, “has my heart and mind in it.” He wanted swift action against Germany. It was good politics (the democracies strike back) and fit in with what Churchill referred to as the American tendency to think grandly but not necessarily carefully.
Unwavering about the war in public, in private Churchill never stopped asking questions. He and Roosevelt were endlessly curious men, with Churchill dreaming up operations on the spur of the moment and Roosevelt taking time to write Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the young Shah of Iran about how they might grow more trees in the desert. Even many of Bush’s admirers would not argue that self-questioning and intellectual energy are hallmarks of his character. In commencement speeches the president jokes about his having had a C average. A distinguished professor of history at Yale, John Morton Blum, taught Bush in History 35: Politics and American Culture (a course also taken at various times by John Kerry, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman and George Pataki). “I don’t remember him, and I don’t think he came to lectures very often,” Blum says. When Bush’s undergraduate grades leaked during the 2000 campaign, Blum saw that Bush had gotten a respectable 82. The professor called his graduate assistant from the era and asked him how Bush had scored so well. “He’s not a bad guy,” the old assistant told Blum. “I used to drink beer with him down at DKE.” Although FDR was also a young aristocratic American who had not excelled in the Ivy League, as president he thrived on debate and hearing opposing viewpoints hashed out in front of him.
And so, in the hours of meetings with Churchill about D-Day, from Hyde Park to Washington to Casablanca, and in a flow of letters, Roosevelt became convinced that Churchill was right about the timing and the American generals were wrong. A cross-channel invasion in 1942 or 1943 was out. The Allies would instead strike in North Africa, awaiting sufficient forces to take on Hitler’s Fortress Europe. There is still much debate over whether Overlord could have succeeded earlier in some form, but the preponderance of the evidence suggests Churchill was right to make the case he did and Roosevelt was wise to listen to him. The events of 1943 and 1944 (the combat experience gained in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and the achievement of air superiority in northwest France by April 1944), the buildup of Allied forces and the triumph over Germany’s U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, a victory that kept supplies coming to the liberating armies, were all important to ultimate success, and all took time.
Bush demonstrated a detailed interest in the military planning for Afghanistan and Iraq, but he does not like the creative chaos Roosevelt encouraged. According to Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” Bush never held a meeting of his war council to debate whether invading Iraq would help or hurt the larger war on Al Qaeda, nor did he think out what a postwar Iraq would look like. In deciding to attack and staying on top of early combat, it seems, Bush believed his work was largely done. “The more he’s been president, the more he’s talked and the less he’s listened,” says a former Bush administration official. “The president gets impatient with debate; he doesn’t play around with ideas.” That is also apparently true even in private, at the summit: sources close to Blair say that the prime minister and Bush tend to shy away from frank exchanges on issues that divide them, for fear of damaging their genuine friendship. In contrast, Roosevelt and Churchill could disagree sharply as they tried to settle on the right course. “Lovers’ quarrels,” Churchill told Roosevelt after one such dust-up about the march to Berlin, “always go with true love.”
Their minds raced and roamed, often together. One of their most visited fields of intellectual play: the shape of the world to come. Beginning with the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, the World War II leaders believed they had to frame the battles their nations were fighting in the context of a better, brighter postwar order. Amid cocktails, cigarettes and cigars, the two men personally debated occupation policies, colonialism, “trusteeships” for fledgling states and a raft of other postwar political questions.
In Roosevelt’s imagination, the use of force and the means of future diplomacy were inseparable. At the conference where Overlord at last got the go-ahead–Tehran, late in November 1943–the president insisted that Churchill and Stalin also sign off on a plan for a United Nations organization. The beginnings of the great instrument of multilateralism of the 20th and 21st centuries, then, are inextricably bound up with what Eisenhower called the “Great Crusade.”
Comrades in arms can be annoying and exhausting, but, as Churchill once put it, “the only thing worse than Allies is not having Allies.” Throughout World War II, while they were fighting to rescue France from the Nazis, Churchill and Roosevelt endured the haughty Charles de Gaulle’s frequent fits of pride. “Oh, let’s don’t speak of him,” Churchill said on a Sunday evening at dinner in January 1943, after a long tussle with de Gaulle. “We call him Jeanne d’Arc and we’re looking for some bishops to burn him.” Yet Churchill and Roosevelt knew they needed a strong France in a postwar Europe, and de Gaulle would give them that. So they put up with him.
French President Jacques Chirac is Bush’s de Gaulle. It was Chirac who launched the diplomatic war against Bush on the eve of the president’s trip to the United Nations in September 2002, calling Bush’s policy of pre-emption “extraordinarily dangerous.” The administration struck back, repeatedly suggesting that France was profiting from contracts with Iraq. Now, of course, America needs French help in the reconstruction, and Chirac’s government is responding by opposing almost every effort to win U.N. approval of the occupation. A good war leader would have foreseen this postwar moment and tried to handle the wartime diplomacy better, heeding these words of Roosevelt’s, from his last Inaugural in 1945: “We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ’the only way to have a friend is to be one’.”
When D-Day finally came, in the first week of June 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt’s humility and humanity were on vivid display. In London, on the evening before the assault, Clementine Churchill came to her husband’s map room to say good night. “Do you realize,” the prime minister said to her, “that by the time you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?” In Washington, it was Eleanor who woke FDR with the news of H-Hour. He sat up, put on an old sweater and worked the phones.
The casualty toll was mercifully better than expected: roughly 3,000 men were killed on the first day of Overlord (about the same number of people murdered in the attacks of September 11, 2001). “Thank God!” FDR said on hearing the news. The previous weekend he had retreated to Charlottesville, Va., to craft his only public remarks of the day of the invasion: a prayer he would read out over the radio.
Bush is at his most eloquent when he speaks of the clash of values between terrorists and the innocent. “You are defending your country, and protecting the innocent from harm,” Bush told the troops assembled aboard the Abraham Lincoln. “And where you go, you carry a message of hope–a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, To the captives, come out, and to those in darkness, be free.” He was, in a way, echoing the language of World War II. Churchill called it a fight for “Christian civilization”; FDR said that “the defense of religion, of democracy and good faith among nations is all the same fight.” But what is a surface similarity masks significant differences. Their war, after all, was not being waged largely against jihadists who espouse radical Islam.
And on a deeper level, while Roosevelt and Churchill spoke in theological terms, they thought in historical ones. Theology overlooks or suppresses facts that do not fit its particular world view; history confronts such facts. Leaders with historical imaginations know there are few simple answers to the world’s tangled problems. They understand that though they may be fighting a battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, they must grow accustomed to governing in a gray twilight.
In Bush’s universe, a president makes a decision and then moves on to the next. He might benefit, however, from spending a bit more time contemplating brushstrokes of history. The desk Bush uses is the one from which FDR gave his fireside chats, the forum in which he educated and mobilized public opinion to understand a changing world. He taught from that desk, using the presidency, in his phrase, as “a place of moral leadership.” Early in 1942 Roosevelt asked his listeners to have a map at hand to follow along as he explained the global situation, and stationery stores sold out their inventories.
Both Roosevelt and Churchill underscored that war required sacrifice and candor about the prospects for success. In assessing intelligence estimates and thinking about the steep bill–in blood and treasure–of our war for Iraq, perhaps Bush will recall these words of the prime minister’s as he gazes at the Great Man’s bust: “There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy. But they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.”
Pondering that might have kept Bush from standing before the mission accomplished banner so shortly after taking over a complex country. In March 1945, with Germany tottering, Churchill wrote FDR a personal letter. “Peace with Germany and Japan on our terms will not bring much rest to you and me (if I am still responsible)… There will be a torn, ragged and hungry world to help to its feet.” They knew the work of this world is never finally done. Bush, to his credit, can be a fast learner, and much of what we are now seeing on Iraq–more cultivation of allies, a push for U.N. engagement and a coming series of speeches on the war–is, according to a senior official, the result of the administration’s recognizing earlier mistakes, even if Bush himself would not concede a single misstep when asked about the war in his recent (rare) press conference.
Acknowledging error is not weakness; it can be wise statecraft. “It is common sense to take a method and try it,” Roosevelt said. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Churchill is great not only because he refused to give in to Hitler but because he understood the art of alliance. FDR is great not only because he convinced a reluctant nation to confront a seemingly faraway threat but because he understood and explained the new order in which Americans were living. “Today science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together,” Roosevelt wrote the day before he died, “that it is impossible to isolate them one from another.”
With a new generation now facing fire on distant battlefields, the rest of us owe them our best efforts to grasp and apply the lessons of what has gone before. “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy,” FDR wrote in his D-Day prayer. “Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace… a peace that will let all men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.” In a voice from the past, a prayer for our time.
