On Churchill's Birthday: Why Barack is No Winston

In the midst of WWII and the struggle against the Nazis, Winston Churchill made one of his most famous pronouncements: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory; victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

On Churchill’s birthday–he was born 136 years ago today–it is instructive to reflect on what that one word meant to Churchill, the British, the West, and the enemies of freedom, and what its current banishment from President Obama’s lexicon means for us today.

To my mind, the most important facet of the way Churchill emphasized victory is his clear understanding of the morality of victory.

Churchill’s famous “V” hand gesture became a symbol of his leadership. But Churchill himself intended his own public image to be, as is the case with great leaders, simply a reflection of the people of Britain. As such, according to biographer Gretchen Rubin, when Churchill was told that his most significant accomplishment was to give his people courage, Churchill objected: “I never gave them courage; I was able to focus theirs.”

And the “V” sign, in Churchill’s demonstration, represented two sides of the same coin. Here’s Rubin again:

The V sign was suitably hostile: with the front of the hand toward the audience, as Churchill did it, it meant “Victory,” but by turning the back of the hand to [Britain’s antagonists] especially with an upward movement, the gesture became an obscene “Up yours!” It was also a call-and-response gesture that the crowd could use to signal their own confidence in victory. Leslie Hore-Belisha admitted of Churchill’s hats and cigars, “Perhaps such foibles call attention to himself. But,” he continued, “what of his V-sign? There we have his knack of evoking a patriotic emotion. It is a gesture of genius.”

It is also a genius that is apparently missing from our current leadership. At the close of the Democratic convention in 2008, then-presidential nominee Obama promised to “restore our moral standing so that America is once more the last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom.”

Yet as the Washington Times pointed out in an editorial following the release of Bob Woodward’s book on the Obama administration’s war leadership thus far, Obama “studiously avoids the term ‘victory’ in discussions of Afghanistan. He’s not concerned with ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ the war, but whether the United States emerges from the conflict stronger or weaker. One problem with this approach is that the Taliban and al Qaeda (like the North Vietnamese) are very focused on winning.”

To the president, to muddle is moral; to speak of victory is obscene. In this way, however, Obama is an appropriate messenger for his party.

In my early days as a reporter, which coincided roughly with the early part of the Iraq war, a group of us from the newsroom went to the local pub. The conversation quickly turned to the war, and the group began harshly criticizing the decision to invade Iraq. I argued that whatever they thought of the reasons for the invasion, we had an obligation to win the war. The senior reporter on staff then shot me a look of horrified recognition and sneered accusingly, “You sound like a Republican.”

What a sad commentary on the current Democratic Party, I thought. You would think that both parties would desire victory, and simply disagree on the means. Not so, apparently; speaking of victory is now a mark of identification as a member of the American right.

Harry Reid’s “this war is lost” pronouncement rather neatly encapsulates the left’s mindset. But Obama must be different. He is the president and commander-in-chief of the military. Public support for the war effort tacks closely with the way a president chooses to verbalize the mission and the aim of the war, and it always has. A lackluster leader will promptly drain the public of the energy required to sustain support for the war at home.

But the reverse of that is also true. As John Keegan notes in his biography of Churchill, when on V-E Day Churchill shouted to the public “This is your victory,” many in the crowd shot back at him “No, it’s your victory.” But this was merely for show, Keegan writes:

At the same time the British accepted his tribute to them as right and justified. They knew they had done a great thing. Whatever their occasional and individual fallings below the nation’s traditions of greatness to which he had appealed, they felt that they had indeed done their best, that women and men alike had braved the fierce attacks of the enemy, and that together they had sustained as a people the nation’s independent resolve, in the interest of the idea of liberty.

When President Obama explains a particular policy, he generally aims to sound “professorial,” believing that sounding smart is the best way to motivate the public. This has the effect of trading coherence away for opacity. And sometimes, as Churchill proved, the best–and most morally suitable–option can be offered in one word.