The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit by Ian Buruma

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit by Ian Buruma Bard.edu From one of its keenest observers, a brilliant, witty journey through the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America that has done so much to shape the world, from World War II to Brexit. It's impossible to understand the last 75 years of American history, through to Trump and Brexit, without understanding the Anglo-American relationship, and specifically the bonds between presidents and prime ministers. FDR of course had Churchill; JFK famously had Macmillan, his consigliere during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan found his ideological soul mate in Thatcher, and George W. Bush found his fellow believer, in religion and in war, in Tony Blair. And now, of course, it is impossible to understand the populist uprising in either country, from 2016 to the present, without reference to Trump and Boris Johnson, though ironically, they are also the key to understanding the special relationship's demise. There are few things more certain in politics than that at some point, facing a threat to national security, a leader will evoke Winston Churchill to stand for brave leadership (and Neville Chamberlain to represent craven weakness). As Ian Buruma shows, in his dazzling short tour de force of storytelling and analysis, the mantle has in fact only grown more oppressive as nuanced historical understanding fades and is replaced by shallow myth. Absurd as it is to presume to say what Churchill would have thought about any current event, it's relatively certain he would have been horrified by the Iraq War and Brexit, to name two episodes dense with "Finest Hour" analogizing. But The Churchill Complex is much more than a reflection on the weight of Churchill's legacy and its misuses. At its heart is a series of shrewd and absorbing character studies of the president-prime minster dyads, which in Ian Buruma's gifted hands serve as a master class in politics, diplomacy and abnormal psychology. It's never been a relationship of equals: from Churchill's desperate cajoling and conniving to keep FDR on side in the war on, British prime ministers have put much more stock in the relationship than their US counterparts did. For England, resigned to the loss of its once-great empire and the diminishment of its power, its close kinship to the world's greatest superpower would give it continued relevance, and serve as leverage to keep continental Europe in its place. As Buruma shows, this was almost always fool's gold. And now, even as the links between the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election are coming into sharper focus, the Anglo-American alliance has floundered on the rocks of the isolationism that is one of 2016's signal legacies. The Churchill Complex may not have a happy ending, but as with Ian Buruma's other works, piercing lucidity and elegant prose is its own form of lasting comfort.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to see the video version of this on youtube.com that's chrisvoss at youtube.com you can hit the bell notification button you can see all the wonderful things we talk about and

the brilliant authors that we have on the show for some reason we always have the most brilliant authors on the chris voss show just amazing i get i get that all the time i hear people say that it's like somebody's line of PR. I know. We all know. Anyway, we always have the best authors, though. We really do. Seriously.

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And, of course, there's only one you want to listen to. Also, go to goodreads.com and look for Chris Voss under there. We have a new The Chris Voss Show group on Goodreads. We're doing a little book club where we're going to be giving away books and doing some fun things, talking about the authors and all that good stuff. So follow us over there. Today, the most excellent author that we have on today is Ian Baruma. He is the author of The Church Hill Complex. You may have heard him, Churchill. One of my favorite guys in history. The Curse of Being Special from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit. Ian teaches at Bard College. He's written a ton, just a ton of books. A Tokyo Romance, Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism, God Dusk, Behind the Mask, The Wages of Guilt,

Bad Elements, and Taming the Gods. Welcome to the show, Ian. Thank you. I was going to, my comedic brain actually was going to just start making up more titles and just keep going for another five minutes, but that's a lot of books there. Congratulations. Thank you. And congratulations on your new book. keep going for another five minutes but that's a lot of books there congratulations thank you and congratulations on your new book give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs

well barnes and noble is one place to look uh amazon.com um and all your local bookstores i hope yeah well they're still around so we got to keep them in business, right? That's right. And then people can find you on Instagram and the Facebook, right? Yes, absolutely. And where's a good place to look for them there? Ian.Broomer, I think. There you go. Get those plugs in.

So, Ian, you've written a ton of books. What motivated you to want to write this book? Well, I'll tell you. It's because I was born six years after the war, but in a country that had been occupied by Nazi Germany, the Netherlands. And so to us, the people who are liberators were the Americans, the Canadians, the British, and so on, and their reputation was sky high. And when you thought of the Anglo-Saxon world,

as the French call it, you thought of openness and liberalism and democracy and internationalism, etc., etc. And we're now living in an age that both the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Britain seem to have turned their backs on a lot of what Winston Churchill and FDR fought for. So I wanted to write a book about the relationship between Britain and America since starting in the war to defeat the Axis powers, but then what happened? Why are we in this mess? Why are we in this era of populism and everything else? So give us an overview of the book, what it's about, what entails inside of it.

Well, the book is really, the reason it's called the Churchill Complex is that the shadow of Churchill really goes a very long way after the war. And by that I mean that he became, as a war hero, he created his own myths as well as many others. And one of the great myths of World War II is that Churchill was the great hero of 1940, which he was. You needed a bloody-minded romantic like Churchill to raise the morale of Britain and so on. who appeased Nazi Germany in 1938 in Munich. And the myth is that Chamberlain was a villain and Churchill was a hero. And the problem with myths is that they get used every which way. And one way this was used is that too many presidents of the United States wanted to be Churchill and were terrified of being Chamberlain.

And so every time there was a foreign crisis, and they had to decide whether to intervene with force or not, Munich and Chamberlain came back as a kind of ghost to haunt them, and Churchill, the great war hero, loomed, and they all wanted to be Churchill, which led to a lot of very foolish wars, very destructive wars, with Britain as the sort of junior partner, clinging to the United States as though they wanted 1945 to last forever. And I think Trump and Brexit in some ways are a sort of backlash against that. Trump has gone back to the sort of America first of the 1930s that Roosevelt fought against.

It's kind of interesting to me the irony of how Trump loves Churchill. I believe there's a bust he has of him in the Oval Office, and he likes to reference him every now and then. He claimed during the pandemic that he handled the pandemic like Churchill handled the bombing of England, which is, you know, anybody who's ever studied Churchill is like, it's fantasy. And Churchill cried. He actually toured the bombed out things.

So where do you start in the book? Because you go kind of across the span, I believe, going back. Yeah, I start more or less in 1941 when the United States was not yet in the war. Churchill and Britain were fighting with their backs to the wall, desperately needed the Americans to get into the war. And they met in the bay in Newfoundland, Churchill and Roosevelt, on a battleship and drew up the Atlantic Charter, which was really a kind of blueprint for the ideal post-war order, which was all about internationalism, international cooperation, freedom, independence, and so on. Now, Churchill had somewhat different views on the right of people to be independent than Roosevelt. Churchill certainly did not want the Indians and other colonial subjects to be independent,

and Roosevelt was not a friend of the British Empire. Nonetheless, that blueprint was there. And much of the post-war order in the West, at least in the Far East, followed these ideals. And again, you know, Trump may like Churchill as a sort of heroic figure. And sometimes he sort of puts on a kind of scowl that reminds you of Churchill that may give him a sort of gravitas or something. But he's really very much against everything Churchill was in favor of.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's clearly a nationalist, a populist, and I care about my country only. I don't know where... He also claims to be like Abraham Lincoln, and he's nothing like him. He couldn't be less like him. Many people don't realize anymore

that America First was the slogan of the isolationists in the 30s and Charles Lindbergh and others, who were often more sympathetic to Nazi Germany than they were to the British or to FDR. Yeah, in fact, he was meeting with the Nazis and promoting with them. I think they gave him or Henry Ford, or both of them, a China award.

Well, I think both of them. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, my God. Yeah, Donald Trump is like Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. Like, I look like Brad Pitt. So look at that face. So there you go. So you talk about this and the parallels in the book.

Do you talk about other presidents in between and how that myth, they tried to carry that myth as well? Yes, or not. I mean, some reacted against it. So it's really how history continues to affect the present. And in this case, the US and Britain. And it changed, of course, from president to president and prime minister to prime minister. Some of them got along, some of them didn't. But whenever there was a war, not always, but very often when there was a war, the two sides found one another in this sort of shared myth of glory left over from the war. The last example of this being, of course, the Iraq War, when Tony Blair very much saw himself in the tradition of Churchill and the two Anglo-Saxon nations fighting side by side

against tyranny and so on and so forth. Boy, that turned out bad, didn't it? That was not a success. I don't think that's been either Bush's or Tony Blair's. I don't think Tony Blair's really ever recovered from that, has he? No, I think that's his lasting legacy, which is sad, even though he himself is largely responsible. But he was not a bad prime minister.

He was domestically a very good prime minister, a bit like Lyndon B. Johnson, who was a great president domestically and then screwed it all up with Vietnam. Yeah, he would have had a very different legacy if he'd figured out how to close up Vietnam. And it was interesting how much, you know know he kind of did that to himself he was lying to himself he kept asking for intelligence reports that would show they were winning and the cia the cia was like we're not winning and there's no winning of this war um but he wouldn't listen but yeah this is interesting now i noticed on the cover you have a moment of harebrained here, but you have Prime Minister Johnson. Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson, yeah. I don't know why I couldn't remember his name. Maybe it's because I don't want to. But it's interesting you have Trump and Brexit. You don't say Trump and Johnson. Is there a reason for that? Well, there are two Johnsons. Oh, is that why? And the point really, Trump represents the Trump era. Boris Johnson happens to be the prime minister, who was also very instrumental in bringing Brexit about. But

Brexit is the big thing, not really himself. Okay. So you talk about the Brexit issue, the Trump issue, the populism. Do you get into any of the election and why those, both the Brexit vote and the Trump vote were horribly misled by misinformation? Do you get into any of that detail? I get into that, not in great detail. It's more a portrait of the two leaders and why they managed to ride the wave that they did. And then the wave, of course, is discussed in the course of the book.

It's going to be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out. Our final thing is in November. I remember when Johnson got COVID after he'd been running around going, COVID's no big deal. Yeah, it's fine. I'm visiting hospitals, new stuff. And I think it's actually crippled his health, from what I understand or what I hear through the small news mills.

Mm-hmm. And I think he almost died. I think he spent one day. He did almost die, I think, yeah. Yeah, he spent one day. He claimed he was never on a ventilator, but it was starting to get weird there. We were like, yeah, you're in the ICU.

I think that's not going good. So what were some of the things that surprised you when you wrote the book? What were some of the things that surprised you when you wrote the book? What were some of the things that you didn't know about or the readers will be surprised about when they read the book? Well, not one huge revelation, but I hadn't realized the extent to which both Churchill and Munich, 1938, kept on being such a big deal in foreign policy. And Munich keeps being mentioned by presidents and prime ministers, really all the way through. The Suez Crisis in 1956, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War,

it keeps coming back. And it shows really how when people say we have to learn from history, if you don't know history, you repeat the same mistakes. Sometimes you can make mistakes by thinking about history too much. Or thinking you're abiding by it. What's the old line that I always say? The one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Yes, that's probably true.

That's a quote from me, actually. So tell us about the Munich experience and give people some more detail on what happened in Munich, if you would. Well, in 1938, when Hitler was already being very belligerent, Chamberlain went to Munich and essentially made a deal with Hitler. Hitler promised that he would take a big chunk out of Czechoslovakia, which was the Sudetenland where a lot of German speakers lived. And in exchange for which he promised that he wouldn't take any more. And Chamberlain could go back to Britain with a piece of paper saying peace for our time and so on and so forth.

Now, Churchill immediately denounced it as a bitter defeat. But Chamberlain didn't have all that many cards to play with. The British militarily were not really prepared to fight a war. I'm not sure that public opinion was quite behind it yet. So he was really playing for time. But he went down in history as the arch appeaser, the coward and so on. And Churchill, who kept saying, you cannot compromise with Hitler, turned out to be right. But of course, those moments are not rather rare in history. What you want in mostly from your leaders is that they're flexible, that they can compromise, they can make deals, they can negotiate their way out of trouble and so on. May 1940 was one moment

when there was no way you could negotiate your way out of trouble with Hitler. And that's why Churchill has gone down as this great hero. But it's not May 1940 very often. That's interesting. That was a little turning point. I've always admired Churchill. And I remember, you know remember he was screaming about how, why are we selling them engines and parts?

And America was saying the same. We were just saddling right up to Hitler. And then they kind of ran him off for a while as a crazy man, and then all of a sudden he was right. He'd been right all along. And it's interesting to me though uh and maybe you speak to this in the book you know what churchill did and the reason he won and and you know what what his real to me what his real legacy is was a defensive legacy he i mean england was attacked, was under attack, was under threat of being overrun, and he rose up the populace. It's interesting to me that they would try and use that, like in the example of Tony Blair and Bush, where we go out and attack a country.

We went out and attacked Iraq. I mean, Afghanistan, clearly the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, I believe it was, who had attacked us at 9-11. But then we just decided to go attack a country for the first time. I think this never, I don't know if it's the first time, but the first time this never really attacked us. And, but to use the Churchill sort of myth as an attack strategy instead of defense, I don't know if that plays into what you talk about in the book. Well, you could argue that, I mean, in the Korean War, the North Koreans didn't attack the United States either.

They attacked South Korea. In the Vietnam War, it was also really a civil war between the communists, North and the South. But, yes, you're right. I mean, again, Chamberlain keeps being mentioned, but of course, foreign dictators like Saddam Hussein keep on being compared to Hitler too. And just as there are not that many moments that are really comparable to May 1940 when Britain faced Nazi Germany. There are not that many dictators, or I mean, no one really, who's quite like Hitler. I mean, Hitler was a highly unusual figure, as was his regime.

That's not to say that other dictators like Saddam Hussein are not very nasty. Dictators are almost invariably nasty, but they don't necessarily threaten the world, whereas Hitler did. Yeah. And Hitler was running with it. I mean, certainly by giving them parts of Czechoslovakia, that was like feeding the dragon or feeding an alligator. You're just like, he's going to want more. And Churchill saw that, that Hitler was not a man you could reason with. Chamberlain probably knew that too, but sort of hoped that somehow he'd get away with it. More of a politician than maybe a lawyer. Yes, absolutely more of a politician, which is exactly the sort of person you need in normal circumstances. You don't need war heroes to lead you in peacetime.

What sort of fallacies do you see with Donald Trump in your book? Well, Donald Trump really comes right at the end. And I describe Donald Trump as I see him, which is a sort of carnival huckster. I think I see Donald Trump in the tradition of one of my favorite American movies of all time with Burt Lancaster, Elmer Gantry. Oh. You know, the roguish evangelical preacher who keeps sinning and then making money and so on.

He's a very American figure. And you have right-wing populism everywhere now, in Europe as well as the United States, but each country has its own history and its own traditions. And so different types get thrown up in our time. And Trump, I think, is a very American version of this. What was the name of that movie again? I'm going to watch that.

Elmer Gantry? Gantry. Gantry, there it is. Based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis. I'm going to have to watch that. That's one of the movies that I may have seen it. But all right, I got it pulled up there. I'm going to check that thing out.

You know, what's funny is if you've been, I'm sure you've been watching the news, you can't really miss this story, but we just recently got to see some of that Barnum and Bailey circus where we found out his taxes and his income and stability is incredibly fraudulent. So there we go with the h that you had. He's a promoter and a showbiz man. And you find that tradition in the history of American evangelical religion. You find it in showbiz, in Hollywood, and in politics. Yeah, I was a big fan of his in 1986 when his book came out. I was like 20 years old just going into business, and I was like, oh, this is my business god.

I read a lot of Fortune, Forbes, you know, back when Forbes was this thick thing, when his father or grandfather ran it. And so there was a lot of different businessmen that I admired. But, you know, he came on the scene with The Art of the Deal. And then by 1989 or 1990s, he put out a book that has now been actually pulled from print to hide his failures. But it was a book that talked about his bankruptcies and how he survived the 90s. And it just became, it just started to become real apparent. You know, I followed, I followed the three to four bankruptcies they filed with the Trump trust with the healthy Atlantic city properties. And finally they threw the family out because they got tired of it.

I followed him for years, and it became real apparent the dude was a huckster and had gotten most of his money from his parents. But the fact that a whole electorate would fall for it or that people, you know, most people in New York are people that are educated or people that live in big cities. You know, they were used to seeing guys like that every day on the street. But it was interesting, but it is interesting how he tries to put on the Churchill,

this Churchill mantle or frame, if you will. And you're just like, Oh my God, like he did that during the pandemic. And we were all just like, yep. Do you even know what churchill did during the war

well i believe he didn't realize quite what what pearl harbor was all about me yeah that's true that's historical knowledge is not his strong point i mean it's one of those seminal it's like not knowing what 9-11 was yeah if you don't know what Pearl Harbor was and what brought us into the war, I mean, if it hadn't been for Pearl Harbor, there's some historians that think that we might have kept settling up to Hitler through the famous aviator and Henry Ford because we were fine with it and we're just kind of like well let them roll on their thing in fact it wasn't fdr for the large part weren't we kind of in a nationalist sort of

attitude a populist attitude back then we're like after world war one we're not getting any more wars fuck everyone let them do their own thing and he had to convince the american populace to i think more than 50% felt that way. Why get involved in another European war? On the right, you had people who said, well, this is the war for fighting for the British Empire, for Jewish interests, and so on. But a lot of people were just tired

of spending American blood on foreign wars. And so it took Pearl Harbor, really, for America to finally get into the war. And I remember, in fact, I think during that time is when we turned back a whole shipload of Jewish people come escaping Hitler. And sadly, we turned them back, and I believe a lot of them ended up dying in the chambers.

Well, yeah, the United and well yeah the united states was not the only country that closed its borders i mean by the end of the 30s it was very difficult to get in anywhere well even you know places like cuba or mexico which did take quite a few people but yeah it was borders closed very quickly as we see in our own time. Yeah. When desperate people try to get into countries and, you know, people don't want them. Hell, we can't even get out of our country. I wish we were Trow Voters on passports and traveled because I don't think they realize. I mean, we're, we're currently living in a prison. Uh, like, I don't know, man,

after November 3rd, I might want to make a run to Canada and, uh, I don't think I can. So there's that, but yeah, it is interesting. I remember F didn't, I think FDR had to make a major speech to try and convince people, or he made a series of speeches to try and convince people that we need to do the war. But yeah, definitely the Pearl Harbor brought us into it. And it was naive for us not to realize that it was just a matter of time until we didn't get attacked.

Yes, and he did make several speeches trying to convince people that this was not something the United States could keep away from because it was going to if Europe were to be dominated by Nazi Germany it would be very bad for the United States as well he did say that and various in various ways of course he did help Britain even then with the so-called lend-lease program when Britain got sort of cast off ships and so on from the U.S. Navy. But he struck a hard bargain. Britain had to pay for it very, very dearly in gold and money and territory and so on.

Nonetheless, he did do something to help Britain before Pearl Harbor. But one of the great mysteries is why Hitler, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, declared war in the United States, because Hitler was already bogged down in a terrible war in the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front. Why he thought that it was a smart thing to do to then declare war on the U.S. is one of the great mysteries. Well, I mean, he was kind of a meth-headed speed freak, which is also a Trump thing.

He's an anorak junkie uh and uh uh according to noel castor and a few different people from the set of what you may call it his show uh the apprentice um so yeah i mean that was that was one of hitler's great um greatness strategies or uh things that really screwed him up was declaring war on everyone. And then he got pulled too far in every which way. And of course, bringing us into war. I believe we had one historian on from the Japanese war and what they were trying to do. And evidently, the concept was they thought they would totally cut our head off by taking out

all the ships in Pearl Harbor if they could get Pearl Harbor just wiped off the map then we wouldn't have anything to do with and then we would settle some sort of peace agreement with them and that was the idea they knew once they poked the bear which historian was that?

I believe it was a guy who wrote Operation Vengeance was the book we had on yeah I think what the the bear which historian was that i believe it was a it was a guy who wrote operation vengeance was the book we had on yeah i think what the japanese were were betting on is not that they could wipe out the entire u.s navy but they thought if they gave a very sharp shock to the americans yeah america being in in the eyes of japanese militarists a sort of decadent democracy the Americans wouldn't have the stomach to fight so they would then come back to negotiate with Japan on terms that were favorable to Japan

I think that was the gamble and wiser heads in Japan realized perfectly well that if that gamble failed that they would certainly in the end lose the war wiser heads in Japan realized perfectly well that if that gamble failed, that they would certainly in the end lose the war. Yeah, and they did. And they did. But in an extraordinary way, and one still haunts us to this day from a nuclear aspect.

And, you know, now we built the bomb and everything else and all that good stuff. So what other things haven't we cover in your book? What are the things that we'd be talking about? Well, every chapter is about a president and a prime minister and the time that they lived in. So we have the disaster of, again, World War II affecting a decision made by a politician in the 50s when Antony Eden, who Egyptian strongman at the time, was really a kind of fascist dictator who had to be stopped in the way that Hitler should have been stopped in 1938

and made a deal with the French and the Israelis to go to war with Egypt. And Eisenhower, who was president at the time, thought this was ridiculous and stopped the British in the end, and the French, and said, if you don't stop this war right away, we'll destroy the pound sterling. And that's the moment that the British realized that as a world power,

the end had come. Wow. Up until then, you know, Britain still had a lot of its empire and so on. It was a global force, but they realized in Suez in 56, when the Americans could stop them overnight, that it was sort of all over. And well, then with the other wars in Korea,

the Americans were desperate for the British to come in, and they did to some extent. And in Vietnam, LBJ desperately wanted the British to send troops so that the Americans wouldn't be fighting it alone with the South Vietnamese. And the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was a Labour Party leader. In other words, he was a socialist. And he knew that sending British troops would completely destroy his credibility with the left wing of this party. He couldn't do that. The party was divided in the same way, really, that the Democrats are today, that it had a strong left wing, and then it had a sort of more moderate establishment.

And so what, so Wilson was stuck between having to keep America happy so that Britain could stay within that sort of what they've always called the special relationship with the U.S., keep LBJ happy, but without sending troops. And that meant that he, in public, supported the war, supported LBJ, whatever he may have thought. But to his credit, he never did send troops. Then in later wars, usually the British did fight on the side, on the American side in various conflicts. Again, not all of them. I think when Margaret Thatcher decided to do a Churchill and fight over the Falklands with Argentina,

which Ronald Reagan, who was then president, called, what are they doing fighting over this little icy rock, which is more or less what it is. The Americans thought it was pretty ridiculous. Many members of the Reagan administration were rather close to the Argentinian military junta, which they saw as sort of a bastion against communism. But in the end, they did help the british and there were some very pro british members of the administration particularly casper weinberger um and and reagan rather

admired it i mean again he he can he compared thatcher and speeches with winston churchill and wow so on and and so did you find that Margaret Thatcher was very Winston Churchill-y in the Falklands? Well, she and her supporters certainly saw it that way. Whatever you think of the merits of fighting that war, she was brave. She took a gamble, sending battleships all the way thousands of miles from Britain to fight Argentina. So you can't ignore that. It was also certainly an aggressive act on the part of the Argentinians. had a point, but many people at the time thought it was pretty silly to fight a war over a place that was really of no interest and importance. But it was the principle,

and she saw it that way. And it enormously revived her political fortunes, because she was not popular in the beginning of her government. The economy was a mess. There were strikes. There were demonstrations, sometimes violent demonstrations when the mines were closed so that the miners lost their jobs and so on. And coming out of the Falklands conflict

as a war hero suddenly made her immensely popular. So it paid off. Of course, she wasn't Churchill in the sense that you can compare fighting Argentinians over the Falklands to fighting Hitler. The interesting thing for me, and I think the thing that att attunes people to churchill in history is it's it's the it's the great it's probably one of the greatest comeback uh you know stories next to next to the george

foreman rope-a-dope of muhammad ali only in the context of a country where where i mean, there were so many reasons why England should have fell. And his whole thing of we shall fight on the seas and oceans, you know, and I remember hearing that as a child and then learning the history of it. And I was just like, that guy's astounding. And I think there's another quote from him where he's like, you know, they'll take England, but I'll be dead when they do because they'll have to kill me for it.

Well, he had a tremendous gift for language and great orator. So he knew how to raise the morale and keep people from becoming defeatist and fatalistic about it and so on.

He knew they had no choice but to fight on. But it's also a little bit of a myth, which still gets promoted in Hollywood movies like Dunkirk and so on a few years ago, that Britain was completely alone as it sort of defied the might of Hitler's Germany. They weren't completely alone as it sort of defied the might of Hitler's Germany. They weren't completely alone. First of all, they had some help from the U.S. already. They also had their empire, which enormous numbers of soldiers and airmen and so on from India and Australia, New Zealand and so on. They all fought on the Allied side.

They had other Europeans. They had Poles, they had Dutch, the Free French, not that they represented a huge force, but it's not true that Britain was completely alone. But that is the cherished myth, which again made a comeback in the campaign for Brexit. Those who argued for Brexit very much used the imagery of Dunkirk in 1940. We stood alone then

and defeated Hitler's Germany. We can do it again. And then there are images of spitfires and so on. But which is really not an entirely accurate view of what it was actually like. Or what Britain is now.

I mean, it's interesting to do that correlation between a modern world, something so many years ago or so many years ago. Well, one of the problems with Brexit was that in the propaganda, the European Union is so often depicted as though it's some kind of oppressive empire and that was oppressing the poor Brits whereas in fact Britain was a major player in the EU and one of the powers and through the EU still had a lot of clout in the world much more than they will have as a middling provincial country.

And one of the people, and this is in the book, who saw that very clearly was Harold Macmillan, who was prime minister at the time of JFK. And they were a couple that got on very well. They liked each other. And Harold Macmillan, who had also been a very senior figure during World War II, and was a British nationalist and was skeptical about Britain joining Europe at first and so on. In an interview program with, what's his name, Buckley? William Buckley Jr. William Buckley Jr. He said, look, Britain has only really been a world power for about two centuries.

And the only way it can continue to be a major power is inside Europe. And he said in the same program, which was rather interesting, Buckley, this was at the time that Britain was, that African, British colonies in Africa were gaining independence, and Buckley probably didn't like that, and assumed that Macmillan didn't like it either, and said to Macmillan, well, do you really think these people are ready to rule themselves? And Macmillan said, absolutely not. And then Buckley said, so why are they granted independence?

And Macmillan said, I'll tell you why. If we don't give them independence, the best and the brightest will spend their time in prison instead of running countries and learning by running those countries how to do it. Otherwise, they'll never be ready. The longer we postpone it, the worse it will be. Buckley looked sufficiently perplexed, I think, by this answer. But it was a very good answer. And it was under Macmillan, a conservative, that a lot of the colonies in Africa did become independent.

I think a lot of presidents, and you probably found this in your book, they love the imagery of Churchill. I think one of the famous photos that a lot of times they'll cite is, I think it's a photo of Churchill, FDR, and Stalin sitting on a bench, isn't it? Well, there are many photos of where they met during these great summits in Tehran and other places. Yeah. The image, yes, but there are various things that explain that. One is that Churchill was always more popular in the United States

than Britain was. Britain as a Churchill was always more popular in the United States than Britain was. Britain as a country was rarely very popular with the Americans because after all, the United States fought a war of independence against Britain. The British were often seen as sort of snobs and hoity-toity and all that. So Britain was not so popular, but Churchill was very popular always. And I think it's because he played into, and when you asked me earlier, how does the book start? I mean, I do go back

further in time than 1941. There was a tradition, both in Britain and America, which is a little bit goes into the sort of idea of American destiny and all that, which is a very Protestant notion that the English-speaking peoples were uniquely freedom-loving and liberal, and that it was a sort of national mission, both of the United States and Britain, you know, the city on the hill and all that, to spread freedom and democracy in the rest of the world. And Churchill often used that kind of rhetoric. But it's older. It goes back to the 19th century in both countries.

And I think Churchill became the kind of heroic face of that kind of ideal. So presidents, often their clout in domestic affairs is limited, but they can do more in foreign affairs. Presidents like that image of being the ones, the great leaders who would spread freedom and democracy in the world, whether it was, that was the rhetoric, whether that was really what they were doing, that's another issue. But that's where Churchill came in and was

a very useful model. And he's a fun figure to watch. He's kind of a giant podgy guy with a, he had a beautiful smile and he'd have a big old stogie and his top hat and I watching old videos of himself, it was

interesting to watch his the way about him. And I imagine he made a great character that Americans would like because of the bombastic nature and the way he spoke and stuff, inspiring and things of that nature. That's something we usually ascribe to. We like people that talk big, which is unfortunately why Trump is president. Well, he was a great showman as as uh leaders often political good political leaders often are not always i mean there are presidents who are dreadful showmen like i mean richard nixon was never very good at that kind of thing um but fdr was quite good but churchill was had a

great sense of theater and sometimes that's needed in order to mobilize people. Yeah, definitely. So any last things we should know before we part about you and your book? Well, I think we've covered a lot. I'm very keen for people to realize that it's not just a history. The idea was very much to write a history that explains in many ways why we are where we are

now. And I guess we'll just have to look forward to the next hundred years of presidents constantly claiming to be Churchill. At best. Yeah. I mean, I've got a nice fat face. I could probably play Churchill if he gave me a top hat and a stogie. I'd probably have to shave all this off, but I could be close to it because I've got that fat face. But there you go. Guys, be sure to check it out. The Churchill Complex, the curse of being special from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit. Ian, give us your plugs so people can look you up on the interwebs.

Well, there's bard.edu where I teach. There's Facebook, which I think is ian.baruma. Instagram is ian.baruma. That's sort of it, I think. There you go. Be sure to follow him. Check out the book. And he's got a lot of books.

How many books in total do you have? I think it's about 14. 14. Holy crap. Okay, so fill up your Amazon cart and rock and roll. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Thanks to Ian for being here. Be sure to watch the video versions.

If you watch the audio or if you listen to the audio version on the podcast, you can watch the video versions. You can see the book and our wonderful discussion with Ian. And also go to our newest syndication, Amazon Music. And, of course, the best place to see this is on iTunes if you want, Google Play, Pandora, Spotify, all those places. But, you know, we'll give a shout-out to Amazon Music. They didn't let everybody on.

And then also go to Goodreads. So you can follow me there. We're posting a lot of our book reviews there and our book discussions. And we've got a group we're trying to get going over there. So check that out as well. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.