The speech turned the tide, and after three days, Churchill won the vote 464-1. He noted dryly in his book that “[t]he naggers in the Press . . . spun around with the alacrity of squirrels. How unnecessary it had been to ask for a Vote of Confidence? Who had ever dreamed of challenging the National Government?”
Unknown to everyone in that debate, there were still more than three years to go in the war, with many more horrendous losses before victory.
Churchill is remembered in the popular imagination as someone who rallied a nation, vowed never to give up, and took his country to victory. Few remember that, like Bush, Churchill faced a crisis of confidence two-and-a-half years into the war, exploited by those “with lesser burdens to carry.”
It is also worth remembering that Churchill in 1942 was not yet the historic “Winston Churchill” we all now venerate. On the contrary, the real Winston Churchill was voted out of office in 1945. He was a person with strengths and weaknesses, operating in real time. But history remembers him as a giant, because he took a stand that was fundamentally right, and saw it through, overcoming unanticipated military setbacks, the inevitable mistakes of war, significant domestic political opposition, and an openly hostile press.
So it is useful to realize that, as history was occurring in real time, Winston Churchill faced the same obstacles that currently confront George Bush — setbacks, mistakes, political opposition and media hostility — and that these things always occur, and are not necessarily historically significant. History takes a longer view.
We know history’s ultimate verdict on Churchill, since his record is complete and can be viewed from the perspective of passing time. We don’t know the verdict on Bush, since we are still operating in real time. But he is on the right track, having learned the right lessons from history (including the need to act before the gathering storm bursts, and to see things through, notwithstanding unanticipated adversity) — and he is vastly underappreciated, in the same way Churchill was in 1942.