In 1957, Sir Winston Churchill addressed the American Bar Association on the paralysis of the U.N. "Justice cannot be a hit or miss system. We cannot be content with an arrangement where a system of international laws applies only to those who are willing to keep them." If action cannot be taken against aggression, it will become a "failed" institution.
Churchill's prescience is singular. Everyone is familiar with Churchill's philippics of the early 1930s warning of Hitler’s rising menace and his 1946 "Iron Curtain" address that alerted Europe to the Stalinist threat. But some of his other prophecies are lesser known: the creation of the state of Israel (1904), the atomic bomb (1918), the future supremacy of air power (1918), and the energy crisis (1922). President Nixon said in 1991: "Churchill is about the only leader who had his own crystal ball."
Just consider his memorandum as home secretary to the British War Office in 1912 when he predicted that Germany would invade France through neutral Belgium and would not be stopped until the 40th day at the Marne River. Although the War Ministry dismissed it as the armchair musings of a domestic policy minister clearly out of his depth, it did happen in 1914, to the very day.
Again, when war broke out in September 1914, the generals said the war would be over by Christmas. Churchill said it would be closer to four years than four months.
The beginning of the year is always the occasion for crystal ball predictions. The 24th of January will be the 38th anniversary of Churchill’s death in 1965. In this year of a presidential election, it is appropriate at this time to examine how Churchill's ability to foresee the future and act accordingly was the core to his leadership success.
Nixon told me that Churchill had "the mind of an historian" and "the courage of a soldier." As a student of past events, Churchill had the knowledge to see how certain patterns of the past might be replicated in the future. When he foresaw an emerging danger, he had the resolve to take action against the counsels of conventional wisdom at the risk of political death.
Appeasement of Hitler was the popular policy in the 1930s, but Churchill combated it, drawing censure from both left and right for his efforts.
Before the war, conventional wisdom held that the Nazi Hitler would never make common cause with the Communist Stalin. Churchill, however, predicted the 1940 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Later, Churchill would send warnings to a disbelieving Stalin that Hitler would break the agreement and invade Russia.
In his 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech, Churchill warned of aggression by the Soviet Union, which until recently had been our wartime ally. President Truman immediately disowned Churchill's message and invited Premier Stalin to give his side.
In 1947, Churchill would shake the world when he urged that defeated Germany would have to play a major role in the rebuilding of Europe.
Churchill had the imagination to think big. Perhaps that was the artist in him. As a painter, he preferred the bold colors. His insight would not be muted by the browns and grays of bureaucratic equivocations, diplomatic niceties or political hedges.
When World War I was mired in the stalemate of trench warfare, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, drew a sketch of a "landship." The War Ministry called it Winston's Folly, but in 1917, the tank turned the tide of the war.
Even before the war began, Churchill introduced a new ship to the Royal Navy, which he dubbed "the destroyer." He also pioneered the airplane in battle. As Cabinet minister, he piloted himself every day to France and back to report on the war.
This uncanny ability to grasp the future revealed itself long before he ever held public office. At 15 at Harrow, he wrote an essay describing a world war with machineguns in trench warfare fought by conscripted as well as professional soldiers.
This intuitive imagination continued in his 1897 novel, which he wrote at age 23. "Savrola" is memorable for its eerie description of an ex-German corporal who unleashed demagogic rantings under a Nationalist Socialist banner to take over a country.
In 1945, Churchill, despite leading Britain to victory over Germany, predicted his own overthrow by the Socialists. After a dream in which a sheet was draped over his head, he awoke saying, "It is an omen of my own defeat." Was the prediction an intuitive vision combined with his experience after World War I, when he and the victorious Lloyd George government suffered a massive defeat?
Churchill would also predict, close to the very year, the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1952, his parliamentary secretary, John Colville, asked him when the Iron Curtain would fall. "About when you are 75." If Colville had lived to 75, he would have witnessed the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Churchill later explained his thinking to Colville: World War II had legitimized the Soviet dictatorship, and it would take another generation before the tyrannical falsity of the Communist promise was understood.
Prophets like Churchill are almost as rare a phenomenon as a blue moon. Politicians with "the mind of an historian" and "the imagination of an artist" are hard to find, but perhaps we can look for in presidents "the courage of a soldier" – the courage to express unpopular truths. "Courage" is what Churchill called "the first of human qualities."
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