Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 736 pp., $28.

Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (Rio Grande, oh: Hambledon Press, 2002), 384 pp., $21.

John Keegan, Winston Churchill: A Penguin Lives Biography (New York: Viking Press, 2002), 208 pp., $19.95.

John Lukacs, Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 200 pp., $15.

Klaus Larres, Churchill's Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 592 pp., $40.

Winston Churchill would be pleased. His age has vanished but the memory of him has not. The German wars, the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the "balance of terror" and even-alas, he would say-the British Empire now belong to history. Churchill himself, on the other hand, continues to excite enormous interest, especially on this side of the Atlantic.

American fascination with Churchill has much to do with our own character. We greatly admire leaders who do the right thing despite overwhelming odds, such as those faced by Churchill's Britain in 1940. We dislike politicians as a rule, except for the colorful and talented ones. Few have ever matched Churchill's range-orator, author, painter, wit, bon vivant, sage and seer.

For these reasons, too, Churchill still attracts the best authors. The five books reviewed here, all published within the past two years, were written, respectively by Lord Roy Jenkins, an acclaimed British biographer; Geoffrey Best, John Keegan and John Lukacs, all distinguished historians; and Klaus Larres, a younger German scholar who is currently the Henry A. Kissinger Fellow at the Library of Congress. But do these books (some 2,200 pages in toto!) tell us anything new about the man? And more importantly, does Churchill have anything to say through them to us about our world?

Only one of the authors (Larres) claims to break fresh ground. The others offer different perspectives on that which is already well known, some of which tell us more about the writer than the subject. Thus, John Keegan's brief but elegant Penguin history has a captivating introduction that explains why, to young Britons in the 1940s and 1950s, Churchill not only represented the past, but a past they were eager to be rid of-and for whom the Suez disaster, under his successor Anthony Eden, was "finis to all for which Churchill had stood." But a year later, alone in New York, old recordings of Churchill's wartime speeches cast a spell, and Keegan became an admirer.

John Lukacs is, well, John Lukacs: he commits many a drive-by shooting en route to the main controversies. He is especially good at exploding the absurd argument that Churchill should have made a deal with Hitler in 1940, thereby preserving the Empire and avoiding that ultimate horror, American domination. Lukacs also reminds us that Churchill understood both Stalin and Soviet Russia (he rarely said Soviet Union) much better than did Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower. He knew the evil of the Soviet empire, but he also appreciated the historic caution and fear of superior force that ran through the Kremlin.

Geoffrey Best's well-written and nicely balanced biography contains his own elegy for the Churchillian virtues that he finds lamentably lacking in modern Britain. It is clear that his was a labor of both love and longing.

Lord Jenkins' massive thousand-page tome offers his special insight as a veteran Labour Party parliamentarian who observed Churchill from the opposition benches; he understood Sir Winston's passion for the House of Commons and the way it shaped his life. But Jenkins, too, becomes self-indulgent, concluding on the curious note, perhaps of interest only to himself, that Churchill, by a small margin, was a greater man than Gladstone, the subject of an earlier magisterial Jenkins biography.

Once beyond the reflections of the authors' special proclivities-like so many mirrors in a fun house-Churchill re-emerges much the same as before. As even his early photographs reveal, he was a man of defiant determination animated by the ceaseless energy of a questing ego.

Churchill's ego, which might have made him a monster, was civilized instead by two taskmasters. The first was a sense of destiny informed by English patriotism. A man hell-bent for action, Churchill narrowly survived numerous brushes with death in India, Cuba, the Sudan and South Africa-all before he was thirty. He was nearly killed on the Western Front in World War I and badly injured in a 1931 New York traffic accident. Churchill interpreted his survival as proof that he was marked by a special Providence to advance the cause of Britain, which was in turn, as he saw it, the cause of freedom and civilization. No wonder that on May 10, 1940, the day he became prime minister, he concluded that all his life had been merely a preparation for the supreme test that awaited him. Otherwise, he thought, his "luck" was inexplicable.

The other lash to his ego was the notable Churchill humor. His favorite target was himself, not only because he found his own foibles amusing but also because it disarmed his critics. His rhetorical set pieces, the product of a massive effort to overcome a lisp and stutter, were ill-suited to parliamentary jibes and interruptions. A self-deprecating wit was, therefore, both indulgent and useful in depriving opponents of material. Geoffrey Best offers a less well-known example of such humor in Churchill's first speech as Leader of the Opposition in 1945. Churchill took on the humiliation of his electoral defeat, and the notoriously difficult captainship of the losing Tories, with this little vignette:

A friend of mine . . . was in Zagreb when the results of the late general election came in. An old lady said to him, 'Poor Mr. Churchill, I suppose now he will be shot.' He said the sentence might be mitigated to one of the various forms of hard labor which are always open to His Majesty's subjects.

Such, Churchill declared to the House of Commons, was now indeed his fate.

Churchill had reason to be self-deprecating. The Great Man was often the greatest obstacle to his own success. Time and again, as Stanley Baldwin once put it, the enormously gifted Churchill lacked the gift of judgment. Had he died in 1939, his life would have been accounted a failure. His prescient warnings about Hitler, for example, were discounted by some, in part, because they came from a man who stood doggedly by that least worthy of men, King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, during the December 1936 abdication crisis. A mesmerizing orator, who was himself sometimes the most mesmerized, Churchill misjudged that occasion completely, turning the whole House against him.

Lord Jenkins includes such episodes and others in a generally admiring book that also gives us much inside information about Churchill the private man: a doting father and husband but often impossible to live with; a great earner but a much greater spender, short of money most of his life; a man of very few close friends, really a club of one. Then there was the Churchill method. His relentless questioning of the generals during World War II was an essential part of his leadership, as Eliot Cohen has recently observed.1 But there was a price to be paid. Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, said, "Winston had ten ideas every day, one of which was good, and he did not know what it was." All ten, however, had to be staffed while the war raged on.

To make matters worse, Churchill's work habits were grotesquely inconvenient for his subordinates. While others worked through the day, he was either in bed, in the bath or at table, almost always attended by those most faithful of his companions, scotch and cigars. When others wound down at nightfall, he wound up. Clementine Churchill observed that her husband knew nothing about how other people lived.

Churchill brought another more constructive, indeed vital, quality to his work. He was inured to mistakes and a veteran of defeat. After a brilliant early career he rose and fell several times. Never a real party man, he used the Liberals to ascend and then the Tories as a refuge after the Liberals shriveled. By the early 1930s he had no prospects; but "never despair." It took the catastrophes of 1940 to hoist into office the British politician most experienced in catastrophe. And then he became, as his most severe critic, the Labour radical Aneurin Bevan, put it, "the great advocate who put the case of Britain to the world and the destiny of Britain to the British."

The advocate knew the strengths and weaknesses of the case. Best writes of Churchill's "sense of his beloved country's resources in manpower and everything else being squeezed till the pips squeaked." And this provides the context for Klaus Larres to assert that Churchill's personal diplomacy, later known as "summitry", was his favored and most important diplomatic tool to ease the strain on Britain and to achieve objectives seemingly beyond reach. His most interesting example is the generally less well-known Churchillian effort (1953-55) to convene a Big Three meeting with the Americans and the Russians to ease the Cold War.

Larres is persuasive on this and other themes. His book (though thickly invested with archival research and not the easiest read) corrects the idea that after World War II Churchill had somehow levitated into an international statesman whose gaze ranged far beyond his own country's interests. Not so: his gaze, no matter how far-reaching, was firmly linked to Britain's destiny. Churchill's problem, the same one that bedeviled him after 1943 when the American war effort surpassed Britain's, could be called "relative weakness." By any measure, postwar Britain was a powerful state; but it was no longer the pivotal state whose power, if moved this way or that, would be decisive. The outcome of World War II was Europe in eclipse, Soviet Russia on the move, and America, well, Roosevelt had said the Americans would leave within two years. Churchill thus saw Britain, and by extension Europe, in danger of Soviet expansion. For the longer term, the Great Powers might "tear themselves to pieces" through an eventual clash between the Americans and the Russians made all the more ominous by the development of nuclear weapons.

While recognizing Britain's relative weakness, Churchill thought his country still held unique advantages. British foreign policy operated in three circles: empire/commonwealth; special relationship with America; and continental Europe. Britain-and Churchill, himself unique-were therefore specially fitted to influence events. And so he did, even when out of power between 1945 and 1951. Churchill's themes were "Iron Curtain", English-speaking peoples, and a United Europe. In Truman's presence he warned in 1946 that only a revived Anglo-American combination could thwart Soviet ambitions already evident behind the "Iron Curtain." Almost simultaneously he renewed his patronage of European unity to be built upon what he called an "astonishing" idea: the integration of France and Germany. Thus, Britain's role would be to nurture the new European grouping that would fill the vacuum created by the war's devastation and (thus) block the communist advance. Britain would also work to bind America to the defense of Europe. Yet, it was never Churchill's intention that his country should become either an indistinct appendage of the United States or merely a middle-size European power.

After becoming prime minister once again in 1951, the aging statesman concluded that Britain needed above all a period of peace and recuperation. This made him a "wet" in domestic politics; no Thatcher or Reagan, Churchill (like Eisenhower) secured much of the welfare state bequeathed by his predecessors, guaranteeing a social peace especially important in class-divided Britain. But this cost money, and the country's financial troubles were a constant burden. The need to develop new weapons, the costs of sustaining new commitments (the British Army of the Rhine) and old ones, such as the Suez base, the Korean War, rearmament-all these pressures bore down on an England just freeing itself of rationing.

After a year's effort, the economy began to expand, and Churchill could then focus on matters of state. An intensified Cold War could only reinforce Britain's weakness and Europe's eclipse-and further strain Britain's finances. So Churchill proposed a repeat of the wartime formula. The "Big Three" (in reality, two and a half) should explore the points dividing them. A first summit among the leaders ("jaw-jaw is better than war-war") would dispel the blinding fog of suspicion and look for common ground; later meetings at different expert levels would secure agreement in detail. This would in no way disarm the West. Rather, in Churchill's phrase, "we rearm to parley." Essentially, he wished to do in the 1950s what the democracies had failed to do in the 1930s: confront a would-be aggressor from a position of strength and use that strength to sustain a tension-easing diplomacy.

Such an approach was adopted eventually by all American administrations (including Reagan's), and it was reinforced by another Churchillian concept, "the balance of terror." But from 1951 to the end of Churchill's term in office it had few takers. Larres' narrative explains how the old man persisted against a Foreign Office he loathed (they loathed him, too); an uncomprehending or slow-moving Washington; Adenauer's resistance; French disorder; and a largely concealed post-Stalin succession struggle in Moscow. Age and illness also caught up to Churchill, weakening his hand at critical moments. Ultimately, he ran out of time.

Larres' conclusion, that in 1953 Churchill was willing to trade a united but neutral Germany for a "general settlement" of the Cold War, is arguable. Churchill's European policy was to bind the Germans to the West in every way possible, including rearmament through nato, a position he reaffirmed in 1954. His reason for not excluding neutralization at the outset of discussions about a summit may have been a ploy so as not to scare off the Russians. Perhaps Larres accepts too readily the Foreign Office view that Churchill was some kind of wrecker who did not realize his own contradictions.

Churchill retired very reluctantly on April 5, 1955, after a brilliant speech on nuclear arms still worth the read, predicting that "safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation."2 He had the grim satisfaction of seeing the Geneva Summit take place not long thereafter, although without him. The next year was grimmer still when, at Suez, Eden proved Churchill's fears that he was not up to the job. Anglo-American relations were sundered when Eisenhower committed the biggest blunder of the 1950s, sparing Gamel Abdel Nasser for another decade of troublemaking. Churchill lived long enough to see some of this damage repaired, but after a few years of honors and literary activity, he could only wait patiently for the inevitable, dying in 1965 in his ninetieth year on the same date as his father. His funeral, beautifully described in Lukacs' last chapter, ended an age.

Does the Churchill saga say anything to us today? Of course, a war against an evil tyrant always reminds us of Churchill. We can say with considerable assurance what he might have advised about the current crisis with Iraq. He would tell us that the country had been invented by the British after World War I and that he, as Colonial Secretary, had selected a Hashemite prince to rule it in payment of services rendered the Crown during the campaign against the Turks. If Iraq has not worked out, he would counsel, then reinvent it. And then with an airy puff on his cigar, he would urge us to do as he had done to protect the pipeline to Haifa: use the air force as the primary weapon. He would certainly have approved British support for the United States even if led by a Labour Prime Minister. Finally, with a sway of his hand over a map, Churchill would give the Kurds the autonomous region he thought they deserved eighty years ago. (As for the other Arabs, especially the Al-Saud, once on London's payroll, we need not explore Churchill's rather robust views here.)

Still, by Churchill's scale, Saddam is a third-rate bully and Iraq an ugly sideshow. He would have sought his own relevance in larger themes, one of which may be found in a neglected part of the Iron Curtain speech. Churchill had never been fond of the United Nations, a Rooseveltian contraption unworkable except in that rare event when the five veto-bearing powers agreed. Instead, he argued for regional alliances in concert with those powers possessing a broader reach. Surely this has been the lesson of the 1990s, which began with great ambitions for the United Nations and ended with U.S. and nato action on the ground, if there was to be action at all. These were the true "Sinews of Strength." If Churchill opposed a crippling multilateralism, he was nevertheless no great fan of fighting alone. As he once said, "When one has reached the summit of power . . . there is a danger of being convinced that one can do anything one likes." To which he would add, "The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them."

Finally, Churchill's last bout of statesmanship, his ultimately futile effort to ease the Cold War from Britain's position of relative weakness, has its lesson for today's manifestly frustrated Europeans. As the old man would have put it, if you can't put the big divisions in the field then you had better try to settle the problem when it is still at the battalion level. As matters stand today, it is clear that the major European states will not assemble the big divisions by themselves; the European Union, that bureaucratic miasma, will not act swiftly to prevent a crisis. But, he would continue, if you will not change the situation, then there is no use complaining about your destiny being in the hands of others. Fifty years ago, Britain's problem was overstretch; today, Europe's problem is underreach. This can be changed. The potential is there; it is the will that is wanting. Churchill would know what to do.