Churchill and Roosevelt

Isaiah Berlin, in 1949, comparing Churchill and Roosevelt:

Mr. Roosevelt, as a public personality, was a spontaneous, optimistic, pleasure-loving ruler who dismayed his assistants by the gay and apparently heedless abandon with which he seemed to delight in pursuing two or more totally incompatible policies, and astonished them even more by the swiftness and ease with which he managed to throw off the cares of office during the darkest and most dangerous moments. Mr. Churchill too loves pleasure, and he too lacks neither gaiety nor a capacity for exuberant self-expression, together with the habit of blithely cutting Gordian knots in a manner which often upset his experts; but he is not a frivolous man. His nature possesses a dimension of depth—and a corresponding sense of tragic possibilities, which Mr. Roosevelt's lighthearted genius instinctively passed by.

Mr. Roosevelt played the game of politics with virtuosity, and both his successes and his failures were carried off in splendid style; his performance seemed to flow with effortless skill. Mr. Churchill is acquainted with darkness as well as light. Like all inhabitants and even transient visitors of inner worlds, he gives evidence of seasons of agonized brooding and slow recovery. Mr. Roosevelt might have spoken of sweat and blood, but when Mr. Churchill offered his people tears, he spoke a word which might have been uttered by Lincoln or Mazzini or Cromwell but not Mr. Roosevelt, greathearted, generous, and perceptive as he was.

The whole article is worth reading, even though David Bentley Hart has called Berlin, if memory serves, “that most fraudulent of twentieth-century intellectuals.” I think Hart's gripe has mainly to do with Berlin's book on Johann Hamann.

The point is that Churchill should always be remembered as one of the great democratic leaders of history, despite his air of imperialism and aristocracy. For Churchill managed to sweep his people up in a grand story, to provide a focal point for a sense of purpose, but, most importantly, to remain in the service of democracy: ultimately, to elevate the people of the nation rather than to crush them into a collective. In this sense, the comparison with Lincoln is especially apt.