Sir WIntston Churchill

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SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, (1874-1965), British leader. English on his
father's side, American on his mother's, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
embodied and expressed the double vitality and the national qualities of both peoples. His
names testify to the richness of his historic inheritance: Winston, after the Royalist family
with whom the Churchills married before the English Civil War; Leonard, after his
remarkable grandfather, Leonard Jerome of New York; Spencer, the married name of a
daughter of the 1st duke of Marlborough, from whom the family descended; Churchill,
the family name of the 1st duke, which his descendents resumed after the Battle of
Waterloo. All these strands come together in a career that had no parallel in British
history for richness, range, length, and achievement.
Churchill took a leading part in laying the foundations of the welfare state in
Britain, in preparing the Royal Navy for World War I, and in settling the political
boundaries in the Middle East after the war. In WORLD WAR II emerged as the leader of
the united British nation and Commonwealth to resist the German domination of Europe,
as an inspirer of the resistance among free peoples, and as a prime architect of victory. In
this, and in the struggle against communism afterward, he made himself an indispensable
link between the British and American peoples, for he foresaw that the best defense for
the free world was the coming together of the English-speaking peoples. Profoundly
historically minded, he also had prophetic foresight: British-American unity was the
message of his last great book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
His dominant qualities were courage and imagination. Less obvious to the public,
but no less important, was his powerful, original, and fertile intellect. He had intense
loyalty, marked magnanimity and generosity, and an affectionate nature with a puckish
humor. Oratory, in which he ultimately...