← Not Dead Yet
Not Dead Yet
Andrew Roberts
01:14:25
The guys get fancy when Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, joins the pod. (Again with the historians.) The guys talk about Churchill and the Special Relationship between the United States and Great Britain. What was Churchill’s political...
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- [00:04]
A
We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.
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B
Foreign.
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A
Hi, I'm Ben Sasse.
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C
And I'm Chris Stirewalt.
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A
And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
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C
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
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A
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
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C
All right, Ben Sasse. I think this is definitely first that we've had any member of titled nobility. I don't know, maybe Megan McArdle is a viscount in some way. I don't know. But I believe this episode will be the first that we've had with titled nobility.
- [01:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, you've proposed a lot of guests from the Austro Hungarian Empire, but I keep rejecting.
- [01:25]
C
I'm trying. Well, look, I have. In middle life, I have come to be surprisingly enthusiastic about the Austro Hungarian Empire. So don't tempt me. Don't tempt me about my pro Habsburg sentiments.
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A
Is it John Mulaney that says that pretty much everybody's dad believes they're in training for a World War II quiz at some point? And do you have an Austro Hungarian version of that reality slash joke?
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C
Well, as I get older, I become more Burkian. Right. And as I get older, I become. I say, you know, what we have is not perfect, but we should look for modest improvements, not radical root and branch overhauls. And it would have been nice maybe if we could have kept the Austro Hungarian Empire for a little while longer. Losing both the Ottoman Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire the same generation, I think, was more. More than the west could handle.
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A
I'm sure there's a joke in your proworkian idea that says, why are you in favor of only the super rich being able to buy burritos?
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C
But
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A
I've never. I'm not much of a Thai guy anyway, but I've definitely never been a weird, dorky late 18th century ties to places where you're trying to meet women as an 18 to 23 year old. But if I were a Thai guy, it would be Burke.
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C
So wait a minute. Is that. Are you accusing me because I'm. Because I do favor a bow tie and did favor a bow tie in my youth. I wasn't wearing a Jebeau. I wasn't. I mean, I don't know what that
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A
is, but you keep your private life in private, buddy.
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C
Do you know the necktie that Abraham Lincoln wears that you see Abraham Lincoln depicted wearing frequently?
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A
No.
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C
That is, that is a jabot, which is a cousin to the ascot, which is a cousin to the cravat. So just consider my teenage love of the bow tie to be inspired, of course, by George will consider that just to be just raw sex appeal for adolescent males. I'm telling all you guys out there, if you want to meet chicks, go bow tie.
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A
I dissent, but we are not giving a lot of dating advice on this podcast.
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C
No, no, no, no. I, I, I, I, I, it, it took me until I was, I was a pretty old person to figure out anything close to the right thing when it, when it comes to that stuff. And good news is I got it really right when I finally got it right. So that's. Congratulations. Why do you want to talk to Andrew Roberts?
- [04:21]
A
Oh, how many ways does a rose smell right? How did Churchill's wilderness years make him a better leader? Did he have a political philosophy and what was it? Are some of the great things about his character and leadership also mirror images, slash flip sides of quasi narcissism? What's the deal with painting and bricklaying and Churchill's black dog? I mean there, there's not exactly a micro bundle there, but there's some edge of micro stuff. I suspect we won't get much into Napoleon, but I kind of wish we could. You joke about Andrew and Lord Andrew Roberts, but I do think having taught political philosophy over the course of the last, I don't know, 20 years, I try to teach at least one course a year and I've done a little more political philosophy flowing out of, leading into and flow flowing out of the American Revolution and founding in Philadelphia the last two years. And as I think more and read more, it's so obvious that we have a mixed system on purpose. The divided government and checks and balances we have, but some of our written constitution flows from the English unwritten constitution or 1689. And so I do think that Andrew kind of as one of the world's best selling historians, becoming an aristocratic lord at whatever age he is. I think five years ago he got put in the House of Lords. I think would be fun to discuss mixed systems. But I suspect we'll just nerd on Churchill long enough that we won't have time for all that.
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C
There's only one way to find out. Here are things that you gentle listeners should know about Andrew Roberts, or as we should call him correctly, Baron Roberts of Belgravia. He is, as he should be, a graduate of Cambridge. He continues to serve as a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He is. Oh, by the way, the Hoover Institution is. Is having way too much. I. I blame Scott Immergut. We've got. We've got too much Hoover going on here. I have to stand up on my hind legs for AEI here. We need to get some more AEI representation on this podcast. Sir, we've been. We've been in a. In a dry spell. Scott has been overawing us.
- [06:43]
A
But you know what we're doing? We're adding all of the members of the House of Lords that we have as scholars with us at AI. Every one of them is getting on the podcast.
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C
Well, you don't know. You don't know what Yuval's got. Got going on. You don't know.
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A
Okay, call him. I'm calling him Lord Yuval now. I mean, we've always talked Yuval, you know, not that smart, lots of sex appeal. But Lord as a title for Yuval is perfect.
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C
I can see him. I can see him chafing even at the joke. Okay. He is a distinguished. Baron Roberts is a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he. He does host the Secrets of Statecraft podcast. Looking at you, Scott imberget. More than 20 bucks translated into dozens of languages.
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A
I just wish you could pay the bills, you know, like, what I want for that guy more than anything is that one of those books would sell. Dang it.
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C
Well, actually, one of the things that. That has been a motif for you in this podcast is lusting after other
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A
people's outearning of their advances. Correct.
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C
Covet. Covetousness. Yes. No, has. Has been the fact that the history that people want to read is not being produced inside the academy. And the history that people want to read is being written by people who are writing for the popular audience. And when you look down the list of the bestselling nonfiction books, there's a ton of history books in there that could never win a doctorate. Right, because it's not about the ethnomusicological influences of the talking heads on. On later conceptions of The Great Society.
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A
Five Foot Dudes Afraid of the Bicycle Bar in Utrecht, 1709-1712. Exactly.
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C
He is, among other things, the author of a book about Lord Salisbury, Victorian titan. His book the Storm of A Comprehensive History of World War II that that basically crushed the bestseller lists in both the United states and the UK. He wrote Napoleon A Life that Was in 2014. He wrote Churchill Walking with Destiny in 2018. And I should ask him about this, the Last King of America. His more recent, what was described as a radical reexamination of the misunderstood reign of King George iii. So I just put in here and he won acclaim for his definitive history of the evolution of warfare from 1945 to the modern day, which he co wrote with General David Petraeus. Lord Roberts is our very welcome guest, so let's hear what he has to say.
- [09:37]
A
One more tiny for our audience if they don't know the economics of publishing, like sadly, Americans have stopped buying books. There are kind of two categories that sell right now. So called chick lit that gets sexier and sexier. Romance literature marketed to women and self help books marketed to young men written by mostly returning special ops guys. There's a genre of that that those two categories continue to sell. But in general, book sales have collapsed. And so if you're trying to pay the bills writing books, it's almost impossible. And 85% of people never get paid anything on a per copy basis for their books because they get in advance. It's smaller, they're smaller over time. But if you don't sell more than the projected number that was used to calculate your advance, you don't get any extra money. If you out earn your advance again, it's only like 15% of people, then you start getting $2.50 a buck. And we joked about this when we had McRaven on, but Lord Roberts has sold 25 or 30 million copies. I don't know that I'm really right on that, but it's in that ballpark. And so this is a dude who is laboring to do real and good history. Your point about history books selling outside the academy and not in the academy? It isn't just that sell better outside the academy. They're actually history as opposed to identity politics. They're the better books. And Lord Roberts is crazy ass rich now because it turns out stuff like Churchill, people want to read about it. And he sells 10 million copies of this and 4 million copies of that and they always had other advance. So one of the reasons I'll shut up, but one of the reasons this podcast exists is to say, ah, it's a myth that if you didn't have necessity, life would be better. Most people Once they have, you know, crazy money or whatever, start doing stupider things. Not more discipline, more love of neighbor, service oriented, virtue centric things. And Lord Roberts has no constraints in his life. I mean he's got finitude and mortality, but I mean he's got no monetary constraints. And so how he chooses to spend his time and why he still writes great stuff is one of our questions. There you go.
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C
All right, let's hear it.
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A
Lord Roberts, thank you for making time in your intercontinental life for us. You are one of my favorite people to learn from and so I have been looking forward to this day for quite a while. Chris and I have an unspoken agreement that I get to ask the first question, but the supposed condition is it's not allowed to be a multi parter, which he never asks me for later in the podcast. So this one is a two parter, but we're going to sh. We're going to pretend it's not. We're obviously going to want to do a lot of substance. Everybody probably gets to the point of boring you with all of our Churchill and Churchill and Napoleon. And Napoleon standalone questions. But first, can we do a kind of vocation and a vocation question? I would love to have you tell us and our listeners how you think about what your main calling in life is. And the edge of second half of the question but it's not a multi parter is vocationally. There are so many people who wish they could be Andrew Roberts, but they don't want to do all the work to have the background that you do. But they still also want to make after dinner comments the way you do it. And so we'll get to, I'm sure, like what what Brits and Englishmen and women and Americans should know about history. But I think the second half of the question is people who want to be able to be a great dinner guest and make five to seven minutes of comments on something they know. I know dozens of them who just wish they could be a mini version of you. And so the core question is what's your vocation? And the side question is what about people who have other jobs but want to be well read and want to be good conversationalists? What can they learn from you about short bites of rhetoric? Only a single question there.
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B
Thank you so much for all those implied compliments. I appreciate all of them. Ben, with regard to my vocation, which is not a word actually that Englishman ever use because it's considered too highfaluting, but Americans use it all the time so it's nice to be able to use it.
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A
We Christians just mean, what is God asking you to do?
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C
We got lots of colleagues.
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B
Okay, got it. It's changed a lot in the last four years since I've been in the House of Lords, because there, I think before that my vocation was very much to write history books about interesting subjects, interesting people, interesting periods of history, and to try to encourage people to read them. It's very straightforward. Then in November 2022, when I was appointed to the House of Lords, I slightly like. It's so important not to sound pompous about all this. Slightly try to expand it and deepen it.
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A
Your title is Lord Pompous. Comes with the gig.
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B
That's right, actually. And also it's of Belgravia, which is also considered, therefore, because it's the sort of toniest part of London. It sort of adds to the pomposity pretty much automatically. But nonetheless, without wanting at least to sound pompous, whether I do or not, the vocation has slightly changed because it's an extraordinary bully pulpit in a way to have that, to have the ability, the privilege to be able to give speeches in the upper house of our Parliament, which of course has been around for 850 years. I see it as part of my job really is to try to put modern day issues into their historical context for their lordships, for my colleagues. So I suppose my vocation has slightly changed. Slightly expanded, become much more interesting. You said earlier that you thought I might be bored about questions of Winston Churchill. Nothing ever bores me when it comes to Winston Churchill. I cannot be bored by anything to do with Winston Churchill. With the second part about dinner guests and trying to be witty and amusing. First of all, practice. It's a terrible thing to admit, but if you do have a good witticism, a throwaway line, then it's very sensible to practice it in front of the mirror and make sure you've got the timing right so you don't screw it up. Everybody pretends they don't, from Oscar Wilde to Noel Coward to Churchill himself. But actually Churchill spent as many minutes, sorry, as many hours practicing a speech as the. There were minutes of that speech. And yeah, which is incredible. He'd spend days and days just going over them again and again and again. So if he was making an eight minute, amusing sort of throwaway lines of eight minute speech, actually, he'd have spent eight hours writing it, working on it, practicing it and getting it right. So I do recommend, recommend that.
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C
So you're saying that when the some chicken, some neck, the bangers of history that we remember, and all of that stuff that seemed very spontaneous. Was he not being spontaneous? Were those practiced witticisms?
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B
They were practiced. Some of them would be sitting in the back of his mind for up to 60 years. He'll have heard them at a music hall in Victorian England, and then he would come out with them in the reign of Elizabeth ii, sort of six monarchs later, or however many it is. And he had a phonographic memory, which is like a photographic memory, but it is for jokes and phrases and sounds. And it was truly extraordinary. I mean, that wonderful joke, for example, about how he was drunk and said, bessie Braddock. And he replies, yes, and you're ugly, but at least in the morning I shall be sober. That gag was made in the 1880s and he just remembered it. And he brought it out again in the late 1940s when he had the opportunity, and it was served up to him almost on a silver platter by Bessie Braddock.
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C
I wonder if you see Napoleon. So these titanic figures of. And I don't know whether you are the kind of Englishman who does not wish to be referred to as European. I sense and hope maybe that you are.
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A
I have a gas. Teacher.
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B
Teacher. I'm not European. I'm just not. I know I'm supposed to wish that I was, et cetera, et cetera, but I'm just not.
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C
So these two titanic figures of European history and. Or let's say Western history, you have written these definitive biographies of these people. Can I ask a sort of applauding question?
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A
What are they?
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C
In what ways are they the most alike and in what ways are they the most different?
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B
Golly. Actually, it is interesting how the differences. Napoleon wasn't much of an orator, for example, he never really sort of held an audience giving a speech. It wasn't his thing. Excuse me. And although he had a very good sense of humor, and so obviously did Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher didn't, for example, and that they tend to be physically brave and put up with discomfort and the danger of assassination and all of those kind of things. In that case, of course, Churchill and Napoleon were soldiers, so you'd expect courage, but also physical courage is to be seen in quite a lot of the politicians that I've written about. But really, I suppose it's moral courage that is much rarer and also much more interesting, really. The willingness to go against the grain, that is, it always concentrates the mind, I think. But trying to draw together personal characteristics of all of my subjects I think would be next to impossible. George III had no sense of humor whatsoever either. A great Mel Brooks line, which is what's the opposite of comedy? Germany. And that rather, rather sums up the Hanoverian sense of humor. It was said by somebody in the one of the courtes of the royal family that nothing makes them laugh so much as when you catch your finger in the door.
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A
Okay, when you said all of your subjects. I'm going to come back to Churchill on Napoleon in a minute, but for just a second. Again, a two parter one. Are you surprised that you've sold a gazillion bajillion copies of your definitive biographies on this, these two. And third or second, if you could have another of your subjects with whom you were as closely associated, who would it be and why?
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B
I am always surprised when I get royalty checks and.
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A
And congrats that it worked out really well for you.
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B
Thrilled. No, exactly. That's always a very, very ple. Moment. And not least because, you know, a lot of historians, especially outside the academy, do work very, very hard for ever shrinking advances. It's tough out there actually for a lot of historians. And so I am conscious of how lucky and privileged I am with that side of things. The person I'd like to have met, except for Napoleon and Churchill, it's actually Lord Salisbury, the Victorian Prime Minister of the late 19th century, who was again an extremely funny man, very caustic wit. He was the master of the English form of high irony, which I think is about the most sort of advanced form of sense of humor it's possible to have. And I would absolutely love to have the chance to have sort of dinner with him.
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A
And so for a 14 year old kid in London who doesn't know who Lord Salisbury is, what's the 92nd case of why they should want to read about him?
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B
Oh, because he was the Prime Minister. He started becoming a prime minister in 1886 and he carried on until 1902 with various breaks, but he was prime minister three times and he was therefore Prime Minister at the very height of the British Empire. He was the most powerful man in the world for a long time, for 15 years, and Queen Victoria's last Prime Minister. And he was the mastermind really behind the expansion of the British Empire in that phase. And he was a master politician, a great orator, as I say, very funny. But he basically is the third most important person of that period, whereas the other two, Disraeli and Gladstone are far, far more fam than him. Which is, which is weird. Considering what a tremendous series of achievements
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C
he had, I'm principally interested. I'm interested in a lot that you could tell us, but I'm principally interested in getting us to how we can learn to be better people and live better lives through what you've gleaned from history. And so I want, I think you probably can guess where I'm going to go. And I'm going to talk about overcoming adversity and overcoming failure. And we all have our own Gallipolis, right? We all have our own. The setbacks that we experience, sometimes hubristic, sometimes just bad luck. Will you give us a little bit on Churchill and the unsinkability ultimately of Winston Churchill?
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B
Yes. He had a self belief that meant that after catastrophes in his life and you've unerringly got the biggest of them, Gallipoli, the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 to January 1916, in which 147,000 Allied troops were killed or wounded in that disaster which was entirely of his making. It was his idea and he pushed it through. That would have destroyed many a lesser man and instead he went off into the trenches as a form of redemption. He didn't need to. He was 40 years old and married and we weren't calling up married 40 year olds in those days. And at that time of the war and he bounced back and by The July of 1917 he was back in the government as Minister of Munitions. So it was a black time for him. And he wasn't a manic depressive, but he got depressed when things happened to him that would have depressed anyone. The fall of Singapore, the fall of Tobruk and obviously the Dardanelles. But each time he had enough of a belief that he had something major to contribute and he had this sense of himself walking with destiny all the way from the time that he was a schoolboy. And so that's the reason that I subtitled my book Walking with Destiny Me. It really does fascinate me that he had this. This idea he wasn't a Christian, but he did believe in an Almighty. And one of the primary purposes of the Almighty was to look after Winston Churchill. And that definitely, if only the guy
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A
had some ego, you know, if only he got a little bit of ego.
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B
But when you ask about, about his, about the concepts of how it can be useful, he was himself actually asked by a young American who was crossing Westminster hall on the day of the coronation in 1953, the late Queen's coronation. And the young lad went up to him and asked for life Advice. And Churchill said, study history, study history, for therein lies all the secrets of statecraft. And I think that's an incredibly. I think that even today that's a tremendously useful piece of advice. I mean, I would say that obviously, because I'm an historian, but nonetheless, I do think it is important.
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C
Now, I will not accept the one word answer, Frenchness, in reply to the coming question, which is Napoleon Bonaparte definitely had a sense of destiny, and Napoleon Bonaparte definitely believed that the Almighty had carved out a special role for him. Napoleon, whatever anybody thinks of Napoleon Bonaparte, he changed the world and he did all of those things. It came to tragedy. But talk about the difference between destructive hubris and a resolute sense of purpose, and that you do have audacity, juxtapose those things.
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A
Well, that's a nice distinction.
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B
Yes, it is. And actually, of course, there can be the evil side of the sense that Providence is on your side. When Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped assassination on 20 July 1944, he put down the fact that he just had his trousers shredded rather than that he was killed to Providence. And it allowed him to think that although he wasn't a conventional sort of believer in an Almighty, nonetheless something, fate, luck, chance, whatever we called it, Providence had saved him for a greater thing, which obviously was to try to win the war. And we recognize that as being unhinged and just sort of ghastly insane. But when you look at actually what the belief was, it isn't a million miles away from what Napoleon and Churchill were thinking and probably what Julius Caesar was thinking and probably what, you know, Putin is thinking, that they are. That they are sort of specially being used for some greater thing than themselves. So you can, you can call it. In some people it is, it is madness. In other people, it's. It's almost sort of divine and sublime time. And you're right about him believing in his own star. He actually talks about his. This is. Napoleon talked about his star, his luck. He believed that luck was feminine and that sometimes she turned her back on him. Obviously, the retreat from Moscow being the classic example of that. But she is somebody who one can woo, essentially.
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C
Very French.
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B
That's a very French Yousef, don't use the word Frenchness. But also Churchill had an actual star that he looked up to in the night sky when he was lost near the Nile during the river war campaign of 1898 and feared that he was going to be wandering around in the desert and die there. And, and there was a sort of twinkling star and he followed it to the Nile and was saved. So it's not just the question, it's not just a metaphorical thing. The idea of having a star to guide by, he actually had a physical one.
- [30:56]
A
Can I ask a coda to Chris's question? And maybe I want to lead with humility here. Churchill didn't have a lot of humility. And yet one of the things I think history can teach us is to have a proper sense of our place in the order of things. And obviously he's one of the extraordinary figures of human history. So he's not, he's not every man in that sense. But I guess part of the question
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B
is
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A
humility is essential in a good leader. And I'm sure Churchill has more actual humility than some of the ways that Churchill obsessing with how history will remember Churchill all leads us to think about his relationship to humility. But I'm curious as to how he thought about the median soul or citizen under his statecraft, because I know the BBC has said some incredibly stupid things about the relationship between Churchill and working class folks in the past. And I suspect that you, with some crosses to bear toward that organization, have a strong view about the way the BBC misrepresents Churchill's relationship to the working class. But psychically, how did he think about the median citizen? And how does that relate to the character study? That was him saying to the kid in Westminster, study history because of statecraft, most people aren't gonna be involved in statecraft, and yet we should still have study history.
- [32:25]
B
Well, he thought that most people were involved in statecraft insofar as they had the vote. And he talked a lot about the little man in the booth putting his cross by the name of the person he want to be elected. And he was a fervent, fervent belief in that form of democracy that gave the power to everyone. Obviously not including women during the early part. But he came around to supporting the female enfranchisement towards the end. But he was a believer that he was always the servant of the House of Commons, that the people were the master, or at least the nation state was the master. And that he had a concept of ambition whereby he thought that ambition was a good thing so long as people had the qualities and the merits to justify the position that they were ambitious to try to get to. He didn't. Partly because he was the grandson of a duke and therefore right at the very top of the apex of the social scale. He didn't have a hugely class conscious mind in That a lot of middle class people will look up to the upper class and down to the working classes. If you're right at the very top, the perspective is different. And so he didn't really break. He didn't judge people according to what class they came from, which was very unusual in Victorian England, which was a highly stratified hierarchical social structure.
- [34:02]
C
Churchill was extraordinarily productive. He did an amazing, he produced an amazing name.
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A
Chris asked all of our guests morning boozer questions. I think we're headed to there.
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C
Ask said it. Well, I mean, well, obviously we should, we should, having. Having seen people try to recreate Winston Churchill's heroic alcohol consumption levels. But how was, was he as prolific and productive as his legend says? Was he really cranking out that many memoranda, that many speeches that all, all that I've seen that he produced was, was he a, a that prodigiously productive?
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B
He was. And the reason actually isn't anything. It's not really to do with ambition either. It's to do with money. He was always short of cash. The reason that he wrote 51 books and churned out well over 800 articles and gave as many thousands of speeches as he did was because he was. He wrote more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined. What a stat. Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? And the reason is that he was broke all his life. He always spent more money than he earned until the age of 70 when he actually first got into the black and out of the red for the first time. And that was when he sold his war memoirs. But up until what he did, as soon as he got any money was to buy the first of 47 racehorses, horses. You have this man who is, on two occasions in the 1930s, he nearly has to sell his beloved home, Chartwell, because he's just a massive spender. And there's one moment when his daughter Mary Saames told me about the time in the 1920s when he wrote to his wife Clementine and said, no more champagne. Got to, we've got to stop drinking champagne for morning, noon and night and that's an end of it, so stop buying champagne. And I asked Mary how long that lasted for and she said about two days. Because his assumption was always that the best way of getting yourself out of debt and to be able to essentially pay off your debts was just to work Garda, and to earn more. And that's why he became the best paid war correspondent in the world during the Boer War and why he was able to charge Huge amounts for his articles. Partly, obviously because of his fame, but also because he did put an enormous prodigious amount of work in. And he always tried to underplay it, just as he overplayed his alcohol consumption, which was not as vast as it was made out to be. He loved the idea of being thought of as being able to drink the whole time. And he did smoke 160,000 cigars in his life as well. But there's something actually that Ben just mentioned about his humility. There is a speech that he gave on the occasion of his 80th birthday when the House of Commons and the House of Lords again in Westminster hall, celebrated his 80th birthday. And that was the occasion when he said that all he had done during the Second World War was to give the lions roar, that the heart of the English speaking peoples was that of a lion. And he was privileged to have been called upon to give the roar, which is a tremendous. When you think about it, it's tremendously modest thing to have said, and I don't believe it's true. I think that actually a lot of British people would have been perfectly willing to made peace with Hitler in 1940. And in fact, it took Churchill to make that decision and to be there at the time and to insist on continuing the fight. So, in fact, it was more. It was much more than just the lion's roar, in my view.
- [38:21]
A
Are there any key differences between Churchill the author and Churchill the orator?
- [38:26]
B
That is a very good question. Yeah, he did have a form of literary craft, when you break down his writing style that he. He didn't adopt with his speeches. He recognized that his speeches were there to win over an audience on a particular day. And that although of course, he recognized that they would be repeated throughout history, but nonetheless, he was trying to make a point on the day. Whereas he did recognize that his books were a different form of literary craft, as it were. I've just actually given a speech in Tel Aviv on Churchill's literary craft, and it sent me back to reading a lot of his works, and they are significantly different from his speeches.
- [39:24]
C
Okay, I want to ask you about 1945 and what it was like for Winston Churchill to be at the apex, to have been at the apex, apex, to have saved Western civilization, to have done all of that and then to lose. And so here is a guy who, as you say, has this deep respect for the voting people. What was it like for him when the voting people turned him out right after he had provided this great service and been the roar of the lion.
- [40:02]
B
Yeah, he accepted it extremely well, really. He recognized that, as he told the King's Private Secretary, that the people have been through a lot, essentially the Second World War. They were exhausted. They weren't going to vote for the Conservative Party, which a lot of them blamed for getting them for appeasement and getting them into the war in the first place. Many of the MPs were the same people who had been MPs elected in 1935, ten years earlier, and who had been responsible for appeasement. So he took it as a personal rebuff, of course, as well. When the King offered him the Order of the Garter, he said that he didn't think he could really accept the Order of the Garter when he'd just been given the Order of the boot. But the best line definitely was on the actual day when the numbers were flooding in and the ticker tape was telling him that he'd lost by a landslide. And his wife Clementine said that it was a blessing, might be a blessing in disguise. And Churchill said, well, from where I'm sitting, it's remarkably well disguised. But actually, it was a blessing in disguise because if he'd won the 1945 general election, he was by that stage exhausted and utterly fatigued. He wouldn't have made a good Prime Minister. He didn't make a great Prime Minister, frankly, in his second term, what's called the Indian Summer premiership. And of course, he was 80 by the time he left the premiership. So really, 1945 did allow him to go off on long holidays to Morocco to paint. He wrote those war memoirs that I mentioned earlier, which finally put his family finances on trial track. He was able to sort of sit out the loss of India, which pained him as a lifelong imperialist. And, of course, he wasn't there for the socialization of British politics and the way in which socialism was imposed on Britain after the Second World War. So really, it was quite providential for him, him to have lost in 1945.
- [42:41]
A
What does Churchill, a man who struggled with what he called the Black Dog of Depression, have to tell us about optimism and resilience? And I'm particularly interested in the wilderness years in the mid to late 30s. Did he have a sense that it was definitely going to work out, that he was going to return to power, or what's the probability, since he had had of that? And how much bigger a deal would it have been to him if he hadn't been called back to service in 40?
- [43:11]
B
Well, first of all, we've got to get this. We've got to nail down this Black Dog, thank you, please thing, because he only mentioned it once in a letter to his wife in 1911. And at that stage, at that time, Black Dog didn't have the. The implications of manic depression that it. It does today. And he was not a manic depressive. He got depressed when depressing things happened to him. But you couldn' couldn't have chaired 900 meetings of the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet if you were a depressive who suddenly had Black Dog descend on them at uncertain times that you have no control over. So, yes, he got depressed, of course, in the 1930s, when no one was listening to his warnings about what Adolf Hitler was really like. The rise of the Nazi Nazis and the lack of response from politics and the British people and the press and so on did leave him angry and depressed. But he didn't have. Although he believed that he knew the way forward, he didn't know that he was going to be called upon. He didn't have that sense in 1938 that he was going to be prime minister by 1940, funnily enough, actually, his wife did. Clementine had a much stronger sense that they were going to turn to him and appoint him again. The interesting thing, of course, is that he had the moral courage not to change his message and he stuck to what he believed and he didn't in any way tone down his message about Hitler and the Nazis. He kept saying exactly what he believed. He didn't believe in opinion polls. There's a marvelous line in 1942 when he said that he'd been told that by a Gallup poll that hadn't been as good as usually they were. I mean, his personal support in the Second World War was always incredibly high. It was always in the high 80s, early 90s, unknown at any other stage for any other politician in the whole of British history. But he made a speech in 1942 saying that he was always told that it was important for politicians to keep their ears to the ground. But he said that he didn't think that the British people would respect a politician caught in so ungainly a posture.
- [45:54]
A
Oh, dear.
- [45:54]
C
But it's true. It's true. Nobody knows what works, so do what you think is right and maybe you get lucky. Maybe you get lucky. I am going to try to steal a question from Ben Sasse. This is where I try to get in the mind of Ben Sasse and steal the question that I think he would ask for his last question. So let's see how I do. You wrote a book with David Petraeus, so I'm not going to let you go without giving us a little current affairs. You wrote a book with David Petraeus, Andreas, a couple years ago, but we were in Ukraine with Ukraine was going on by then. And it's a really fascinating history of warfare and what, how we got to where we are and where we're going. So you've had two or three years since that book. You made some projections, you made some predictions about where the trajectory century. What do you think now about where we're headed with the history of conflict?
- [47:05]
B
Yes, it was called Conflict the evolution of warfare 1945 to Ukraine. And David and I went to Kyiv together and it was utterly fascinating talking to the generals and the ministers about the way the war was going. It was at a much worse state than it is today. And today you're seeing some quite extraordinary changes in the fortunes of the Ukrainians. The Russians have not taken an inch of Ukrainian territory in the entire last month. In fact, they've had to give up some. The Russians are losing 1,000 killed and wounded a day in this war, which is many more than the Ukrainians. Drone warfare has entirely changed the nature of the battlefield, as we predicted in that book that it was going to. I mean, when we say predicted, of course it had already started by then, but it has accelerated at a geometrical pace. I mean, it's quite extraordinary how much they've been able to advance. I don't think that your president would have shown Mr. Zelenskyy anything like so much respect as he has done in the past week. If you project to February of last year when he said that Zelensky had no cards in that infamous meeting in the Oval Office. Well, Zelensky's got a very serious set of cards now. He's got drone technology. There are a lot of American companies and even Israeli companies would be very interested in sharing. So actually it's very pleasing that the predictions we made also to do with sensors and space technology and cyber and so on are coming true. But boy, are they coming true faster and harder in drone technology than anything else.
- [49:16]
C
So if we were to just do a little future history here and then I promise I will let Ben ask his last 14 part question.
- [49:26]
A
But if we're to do a little
- [49:28]
C
future history, we are we going to be in a world where it's all robots fighting robots? Is it? Does the future, does the future bring us. It's all drone V, drone warfare or what do you see?
- [49:46]
B
Yeah, that's exactly what I see. And I'm afraid. I see, I see fighter jets with no humans in them. I see the war in which these robots who are not going to have algorithms that are going to show mercy and compassion and pity that we've seen in every previous war when humans are fighting them. And I see escalations starting getting much, much faster without the human in the loop. When I'm very depressed about all of this, I see the Chinese managing to use AI because they're completely untethered as a totalitarian state to any form of morality with regard to regulating it. And so I, I have a rather black view of the, of the future,
- [50:44]
C
I'm afraid, Ben, you got to bring us home on something better than that that's dark. I, I took us down the wrong hallway, Ben. You got to bring, bring us back.
- [50:53]
A
I mean, the truth is I was really deciding between the last question that was Churchill painting in Morocco. I wanted habits of mind about how Churchill the painter and the bricklayer could come back to the great historical and oratorial, let's go rhetorical and written word. I really did want to wrestle with either that or the exact question you asked about the Petraeus book, but it went so dark. I'm not asking a drone follow up question. So it's instead, why don't you do future history for us, Andrew, on the special relationship, if we had a long version and Chris wasn't going to mock me about multiparter, I would actually like to know in the half century before Churchill's birth and in his what he lived to 91. I'm trying to remember 90 in his 90 years and then maybe in the, you know, half century plus sense. I would like to understand how British thinking classes evolved in their understanding of the US and of the special relationship. But that's too much. So do as much of that as you want to do the history or the setup. But the future is what I'm most interested in. Give us an optimistic case for the special relationship being recovered and restored.
- [52:10]
B
Right, I'm going to start with, I'm going to start with painting and bricklaying. Actually, because you've mentioned it, we'd like
- [52:16]
A
to give you another outline.
- [52:17]
B
That's very sweet of you. The first thing to say to your listeners is that there is the largest ever exhibition of Churchill paintings that is in London at the moment, at the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square in London. It's going on until I think, late October. And so if any of your listeners are in London or have got enough time to get over there, do go and see it, because it has the most fantastic collection, 62 pictures taking him right the way from the earliest part of his painting all the way to the end. His paintings of the south, of France and of Morocco, and of various stately homes in England, they've been lent by everyone from the King to the House of Lords to private owners, and it's utterly breathtaking. It leaves you realizing that he was. Was an actually extremely good painter. I'm no expert on his bricklaying. I do own, actually, a part of one of the bricks that he laid at Chartwell in my collection in my study. But the walls are all still standing, so they kind of embed at that. With regard to the future of the special relationship, actually, I was very pleased to see that our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who as a socialist is not at all ideologically close to Mr. Trump, nonetheless did get on with him the other day in their conversation. He recognizes that along with having tea with the King every week, part of the job of the British Prime Minister is to get on well with the American president. And Starmer managed it. Keir Starmer managed it before Bernard, for at least until the Iran war started. So you have. Part of the. Of the special relationship is the actual personal relationship between the two, but much, much more important than that is the relationship between the peoples. Because, you know, there have been moments with Ted Heath and. And Richard Nixon. LBJ didn't get on terribly well with Harold Wilson, I think it was. All in all, you know, you can have sometimes wonderful relationships, as with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher or George W. Bush and Tony Blair and obviously Churchill and FDR and Truman. But it can survive bad relationships, too, because we are massive investors in each other's economies. We visit each other on a huge basis. The shared history is second to none. It's a wonderful connection with regard to our law and our literature and so many things that. With the intelligence services, obviously, nuclear cooperation, so many things that can survive a president and a prime minister who don't get on. And as I say, they do tend to try to get on. So the future of the special relationship, I think, is good so long as you have an American president who believes in it and who's committed to it and who obviously is also committed to NATO, which is the absolute linchpin of our. Of our defense.
- [55:53]
C
Yeah.
- [55:55]
A
Thank you, sir. In the start of your answer there, it reminded me of how Churchill had predicted the weapons of mass destruction long before, you know, we split The Atom. And so I think we should all go back and reread Shall We Commit Suicide. What an important essay. But thank you for all that you do to surface. You make a very, very compelling case for someone reading a lot of history and having buns of steel to write a lot of history along for the next time we get a break bread together. I love learning from you, sir.
- [56:29]
C
You can't say that to a member of the House of Lords.
- [56:32]
A
I'm sorry, I spoke about a lord's buns of steel. That's a full pot.
- [56:37]
B
Can I just mention one other thing, though, that I should have mentioned in that last answer, and that is something that Britain desperately needs to do in order to be relevant to the special relationship, and that is to spend more on defence. It is utterly pathetic of my country to be spending 2.67% on defence. This new Prime Minister can't even guarantee to get up to 3% by 2030. I mean, we can't be taken seriously if we don't have a serious army, navy and air forces. And unfortunately, we are just not spending the money necessary. Necessary to have any either of the first two, certainly. So it's a real problem as far as the British are concerned and we absolutely can't blame anybody else but ourselves.
- [57:22]
C
The record shall so reflect. We are tremendously grateful for your time, for your remarkably sonorous voice. I hope you do the mellifluousness of it. I hope you do your own books on tape, though your books are pretty long, so you might understandably take a pass on that. But it has been so great to hear your voice. Have your insights with us today.
- [57:46]
B
Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Ben.
- [57:48]
A
Thank you, Andrew. Enjoy your travels.
- [57:50]
C
Well, professor, what did we learn today?
- [57:53]
A
We gotta flip the script sometimes and let you go first on these, but thank you.
- [57:59]
C
No chance, brother.
- [58:01]
A
I thought, well, first of all, I was humbled in one obvious thing and there was another one where he was kind to hold back on, but it was nice to hear him set the record straight on Churchill's black dog. So I was just wrong about a key point, or I took the popular myth and so not have it take too much of Our character sketch of Churchill is interesting, it's real, but not the whole story. I also think his view of public service service and how he thought about the sovereignty of the people without sacrificing his own views was really interesting. I mean, obviously not every human is called by God or endowed with all of the big leadership responsibilities. And sometimes I love Churchill, but sometimes, as I've thought about Churchill's view of the world. It seems so centered on what his callings were and not what middle brown median soul is called to do. And so I've kind of wanted to hear more reflection on what he thinks about that. And so his idea that statecraft in a democratic republic is not the right term for them precisely, but is partly the calling of everybody since they have the vote. I think that's really interesting. And the fact that he didn't want to sacrifice his views. He had a trustee, not a delegate model of what it meant to be prime minister. And yet thinking the people were sovereign and him staying consistent on what he believed and also recognizing the people, that was an unexpected learning for me. What you got?
- [59:33]
C
I got my father in law a T shirt that says it's only treason if you lose. And it has a picture. I think it's George Washington. I think it's George Washington, but it's a 4th of July T shirt. It's only treason if you lose. And I despise, despise Napoleon Bonaparte. I think he is a. It was a wicked, evil force in the world and I think he was a lunatic and I think he was a liar and I think he was strict. I take a Nelsonian view strictly on Napoleon and all of that stuff.
- [60:16]
A
Could you bring a little bit of passion? Could you have a view here instead of soul mealy mouth?
- [60:22]
C
So the difference between being Winston Churchill and believing that God had ordained for you to change history and being a villain like Napoleon Bonaparte is sort of a Marxian view would say it just matters whether you win. Right? The T, the T shirt would say, yeah, if you win, then everybody thinks you're awesome and if you lose, everybody thinks you're a villain.
- [60:56]
A
No, I was going to make an edge of Gen 6 joke. Gen 6 is a big, big, big deal and it's really gross. And still Shane Gillis's stuff about what? Guys can't go to the capital anymore. Guys can't have fun anymore. Anyway, a Gen 6 joke doesn't exactly fit here. Push on. But it's.
- [61:13]
C
But it does fit. It fits exactly. The reason that we need to have a code outside of ourselves. I was just at Gettysburg and it'd been a long time since I'd been there and I took my son and we tromped up where I think it's the seventh Texas climbs up in the face of the little round top. And we took that very steep climb. And doing it at age 50 versus doing it a lot of those, A lot of Those guys were kids, you know, they were 16 years old. I think the average age of an infantryman at the, at the battle of Gettysburg was 22 years old or something. And you, you, you go up that, you go up that steep climb, then you get up the top and you walk around the back and you go out to where Joshua Lord's Chamberlain in the 20th Maine swung the and held the line and saved the Republic. Those Texans, Hood's brigades that were coming up the front didn't think that they were fighting for the Slavocracy, right? They didn't think that they. They didn't think that they were there because they want. They were going to keep people as, as chattel slaves as property. They were there for a bunch of reasons that, that sound ridiculous to us now, right? They sound totally, utterly ridiculous. They were there for the Constitution. They were there for the rights of states. They were there because they thought that the north was trampling their own rights. They thought that they were the rightful heirs of the revolutionaries of the 1776. And they believed that. They weren't pretending to believe that. They actually believed that. That I know now that they were fighting to protect an institution that is among the greatest evils that the world has known.
- [63:20]
A
Yeah, they were wrong.
- [63:22]
C
And they were wrong. They were absolutely wrong. But that doesn't mean they didn't believe it. And figuring out which side the idea of the arc of history is long and it bends towards justice is hogwash. Right? Everybody. Not everybody. Most people engaged. If you want to take January 6th, you do survey work on democracy. So there have been a billion public opinion polls done on threats to democracy. How do you see democracy? People who believe that the January 6 rioters, the people who sacked the Capitol and pooped in Nancy Pelosi's wastebasket, were,
- [64:05]
A
are wrongly accepted my bingo card. This was not on my bingo card for this podcast. I'm going to reorient the listeners in a minute to why this relates to Napoleon, but continue with your scatological language, sir.
- [64:19]
C
So the people who think that those folks were either right or excusable in what they were doing sincerely believe that. Right? They sincerely believe that Napoleon sincerely believed that God had ordained that he would go and subjugate Egypt. He sincerely believed. Believed that he was ordained to rule over all of Western Europe. He believed that he was there for the right. And thinking about those boys at the little round top and thinking about Winston Churchill and Napoleon just reminds me that it's really, really, really important that I know which way is up and that I have something to guide me. Sometimes you're somebody like Robert E. Lee. And if you have a good guide star, but you will still find yourself in the wrong. But you gotta. You gotta have principles. If you don't know what you stand for, you'll. You'll fall for anything.
- [65:21]
A
So I think we're on our way to the longest outro ever because there are at least four or five threads there, so you can mock my nesting that we need to pull on. I mean, I think we have Catherine Boyle coming back on in a couple of weeks as our first repeat guest. I think you're just making the case right now. Now, not just. You are also making the case right now for Lord Roberts to come back soon because we didn't spend enough time on Napoleon. And I would have liked to hear him make his argument that starts against my position as well. It isn't just that Napoleon, we know him in the English language as a leader of France trying to cross the Channel and invade Britain.
- [66:03]
C
And
- [66:05]
A
he isn't merely that to me. He's also a really bad dude. And some of Andrew Roberts stuff. Want to make a re. Historicization case that if you understanding. Understood him in a context, Napoleon isn't that bad. I don't agree. I'm with you. I don't agree with that. But it's weird for us to say that when he's one of the world's experts on it. And we didn't get to spend much time on that, so we got to have him back on. We got to talk about Napoleon. We got to talk about the contrast between Napoleon and Churchill more. Oh, also the oversimplified videos. I don't know if you ever use those with your kids making fun of Napoleon and his insecurities and his sex life in some cartoon version. Things for kids are also very funny. Anyway, back. Back to Churchill for a minute. One of the things that I have loved about him since, you know, started reading him and reading about him a lot for late in college is just how dang prolific he was. And your point about it isn't exactly your positive mental. What is it? PMA equals opm? It isn't exactly Chris Pratt on positive attitude means other people's money, but the guy just never stops the boundless energy I find so attractive always writing. Not as attractive that he was always maneuvering, but he was always thinking about the next thing. And there's just so much about his zest for life that's compelling. And I know I've obsessed about this on past episodes. But the micro point about brain and brawn often going together, I think is so relevant for the moment we live in. And so the fact that Churchill had physical labor outputs in his life, bricklaying for a long time and then painting later in life, means that to quote the Mike Row complaint about the idea that he and Marco were saying the same thing when Marco said fewer philosophers, more welders, and Micro said, hell no, more of both. I think what's really interesting about some of that in a world where more and more and more knowledge work for more and more of our neighbors and progeny from here can be really depressing if you don't also have a way to fight against the Sisyphenian sense that there's a stack of to dos on your desk or on your bedside table and you never get to any completeness in your work. And physical tasks help you do that. And I wonder if one of the reasons Churchill was such a prolific writer is because he had physical labor outputs alongside his knowledge work, discuss, debate, rebut.
- [68:48]
C
The Chesterton quote. We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure. It is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it in encounters, by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive. One is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from, shrinks from that is a traitor. It's all from memory is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being
- [69:20]
B
so.
- [69:21]
A
We are not worthy. The quote is good, but also just the fact that you've got poetry memorized yet again. I'm doing a bow. Continue.
- [69:29]
C
Now, that's not. That's a. That's a quote. That's a quote. The.
- [69:32]
A
You just couldn't read. I mean, you got. You really stumbled 80% of the way in.
- [69:36]
C
Oh, my gosh, you're the worst. The. The idea of being animated, that, as my old daddy used to say, life is an adventure to be lived, not a problem to be solved. And you got to get out there and take your. Take your hacks, right? You got to take your hacks at it. And you have to. To go back to the Mike Rowe episode, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, right? That you find meaning and purpose. And the way that you find meaning and purpose is by having a worthwhile objective. This is the scam. The scam is you gotta believe that what you're doing is important. You have to believe that what you're doing is a raid is a great Adventure. And I think Winston Churchill had that.
- [70:29]
A
Agree. Churchill's kind of England's Teddy Roosevelt, sort of a rough rider from Chartwell. I mean, we can disagree, we will probably agree with each other, but we can disagree with a lot of Teddy's political philosophy. But it would still would have been fun to have Lord Roberts tell us who would have won a cage match. I, I kind of think Teddy, you know, took a bullet and finished a speech, so he's probably scrappier. But it would have been, it would have been a, a fun fight, only
- [70:54]
C
be only because the episode would go on too long if I, if I, if I answered your claims about Teddy Roosevelt. Psychotic weirdo, busy body, terrible president. But that's fine. I, I, I won't, I, I won't do it. I'm a Taft man. But that's fine. We, we can just leave it there because we're running long. What?
- [71:15]
A
I think we should relitigate some elections from the early 20th century at some point.
- [71:20]
C
I'll do 1912 with you anytime, anywhere. I'm, I'm, I'm your man.
- [71:25]
A
I guess you like dudes who get stuck in bathtubs, but that's your right, man. He killed them. Cured himself of asthma. There are some positive things about his boundless energy. I'm not there. He's not on my tie. But, but there's some things we could say that are positive. It didn't sound like you had any.
- [71:42]
C
There, there's many positive things you could say about Napoleon Bonaparte. And you know who was really physically, you know who was really physically fit? Ma. Super fit. Ma. Super duper fit. And you know what? He had big ideas. That's the great thing about Ma. He had big ideas. He was into big systemic change. He had a lot of energy. So we shouldn't, we shouldn't judge Ma or Teddy Roosevelt harshly because they wanted good things and they were good swimmers.
- [72:09]
A
To, to paraphrase Louis ck just because you have to get your MRI at the zoo doesn't mean we should treat you badly in every way. Oh, also, he saved college football. Oh, wait, you don't even know.
- [72:23]
C
Oh, well, that, that, that, that is definitely another conversation that we're going to have to have.
- [72:29]
A
Eighteen people died playing college football in 1904. Whoa. That, that, the head trauma was too much. We still don't need these pansy ass rules where quarterbacks are playing flag now. But anyway, there's, they're course corrections.
- [72:44]
C
Now you're just trolling me now. All you're doing now Roosevelt press praise. College football. You're just trolling me now.
- [72:51]
A
It wasn't praise. I was just imagining a really good cage fight.
- [72:57]
C
All right, we'll do it next time. That is it for this week's episode. We hope you'll, like, review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions, or whatever else is on your mind. You can write us@sassandstyrewaldmail.com this podcast was produced by Scott Emergett with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Rise Institute. The music is from Drew Hulman, the Neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life.
- [73:22]
A
Oh, and write reviews like we get a million fan mail letters, but like we need people to actually give us five star.
- [73:29]
C
Five stars. Six if they'll let you.
- [73:31]
A
Teddy would have done six.