CHAPTER 1

THE TWO WINSTONS

O n December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still

a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own partys

government, stepped out of a taxi on New Yorks
Fifth Avenue. He was in New York to begin a speaking tour in an at-
tempt to recover some of the small fortune he had lost in the stock mar-
ket crash two years earlier. Being English, and perhaps distracted by his
troubles, he looked the wrong way down the avenue, and did not see the
automobile that, traveling at about thirty miles per hour, knocked him to
the pavement and dragged him for a spell, cracking some ribs and slash-
ing open his scalp. Had he died, he would be remembered today by a few
historians specializing in early twentieth-century British history. But he
did survive. His name was Winston Churchill.
Almost six years later, on May 20, 1937, another Englishman awoke
before dawn and moved out of his uncomfortable quarters in a trench on the
front lines of the Spanish Civil War in northeastern Spain, not far south of
the Pyrenees Mountains. Though serving as a soldier, he really was a writer,
a minor author of mediocre novels that had not been selling
well. He considered himself a leftist, but in his latest work, in which he had
turned to journalistic sociology, studying the poor of England, he had caused
a minor fuss and perhaps lost a few friends by criticizing socialists. Still, in
Spain he was serving as a member of the progovern-ment socialist forces of
the Spanish Republic. He was a tall man, and as he moved along the west-
facing trenches to check on the members of his squad, his head was
silhouetted by the sun to the east, rising behind him. A Nationalist
sharpshooter about 175 yards away spied him and fired a copper-plated 7mm
bullet. It was a well-aimed shot, sending the bullet through the base of the
Englishmans neck, where it just missed a carotid artery. Stunned, he fell to
the ground. He knew he had been hit, but in his shock could not tell where.
Informed that he had been shot through the neck, he composed himself to die
within minutes, because he had never heard of someone surviving such a
wound. Had he expired then, he would not be remembered today except
perhaps by a few literary special-ists in minor mid-twentieth-century English
novelists. But he did not die. His name was Eric Blair, but his nom de plume
was George Orwell.
On the surface, the two men were quite different. Churchill was more
robust in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived
him by fifteen years. But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits. In
their key overlapping years in the middle of the century, the two men
grappled with the same great questionsHitler and fascism, Stalin and
communism, America and its preemption of Britain. They responded with
the same qualities and toolstheir intellects, their confidence in their
own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their
contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words. And both
steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought,
speech, and association.
Their paths never crossed, but they admired each other from a dis-
tance, and when it came time for George Orwell to write 1984, he
named his hero Winston. Churchill is on record as having enjoyed
the novel so much he read it twice.
 Despite all their differences, their dominant priority, a commitment to
human freedom, gave them common cause. And they were indeed vastly
dissimilar men, with very different life trajectories. Churchills flamboy-
ant extroversion, his skills with speech, and the urgency of a desperate
wartime defense led him to a communal triumph that did much to shape
our world today. Orwells increasingly phlegmatic and introverted per-
sonality, combined with a fierce idealism and a devotion to accuracy in
observation and writing, brought him as a writer to fight to protect a pri-
vate place in that modern world.
One hazard in taking a dual approach to the two men is that Chur-
chill is such a loud and persistent presence. Look at any key event of
the 1940s and he is there, participating in it, or speechifying about it,
and then some years later, writing about it. Debating Churchill was
like ar-guing with a brass band, a member of a British Cabinet once
grumbled. The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed that
Churchill saw life as a pageant, with himself leading the parade. I
must say I like bright col-ours, Churchill once wrote. I cannot
pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant
ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
Together in the mid-twentieth century these two men led the way,
politically and intellectually, in responding to the twin totalitarian threats of
fascism and communism. On the day that Britain entered World War II,
Churchill stated, It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on
impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish
and revive the stature of man. Orwell expressed the same thought in his
plainer style: We live in an age in which the auton-omous individual is
ceasing to exist, he fretted two years later.
Orwell and Churchill recognized that the key question of their cen-tury
ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought,
or how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to
preserve the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was
becoming powerfully intrusive into private life. The histo-
rian Simon Schama has described them as the architects of their time.
They were, Schama said, the most unlikely of allies. Their shared cause
was to prevent the tide of state murder that began rising in the 1920s and
1930s, and crested in the 1940s, from continuing to rise.

One day in the 1950s, one of Churchills grandsons poked his head
into the old mans study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the
greatest man in the world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded,
Yes, and now bugger off.
The Great Man theory of history is much denigrated today. But
sometimes individuals matter greatly. Churchill and Orwell have had
lasting impacts on how we live and think today. These two men did not
make the prosperous liberal postwar Westwith its sustained economic
boom and its steady expansion of equal rights to women, blacks, gays,
and marginalized minoritiesbut their efforts helped establish the polit-
ical, physical, and intellectual conditions that made that world possible.
I had long admired them, separately, but they became one interrelated
subject for me when, while taking a break from covering the Iraq War, I
studied the Spanish Civil War of 193639. Researching Orwells role, I
realized that both he and Churchill had been war correspondents, as I was
then. Orwell covered and participated in the Spanish war, and Churchill had
played a similar dual role in the Boer War of 18991902.

Who were these men, what arguments did they use in preserving a space for
the individual in modern life, and how did they come to those views?
This book concentrates on the fulcrum point of their lives, the 1930s
and 1940s. The heart of both mens stories is in the same crucial period
from the rise of the Nazis until the aftermath of World War II. In this
period, when so many of their peers gave up on democracy as a failure, neither
man ever lost sight of the value of the individual in the world, and all that that
means: the right to dissent from the majority, the right even to be persistently
wrong, the right to distrust the power of the majority, and the need to assert that
high officials might be in errormost espe-cially when those in power strongly
believe they are not. As Orwell once wrote, If liberty means anything at all, it
means the right to tell people what they do not want to hearmost especially,
for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge. He pursued that very
specific right all his life.
Churchill helped give us the liberty we enjoy now. Orwells writing about
liberty affects how we think about it now. Their lives and their works are worth
better understanding in that context. In turn, we will better understand the world
we live in today, and perhaps be better pre-pared to deal with it, as they dealt so
well with theirs.
Let us now turn to them as young men, setting out on the paths of their lives.