All The Rage in Washington D.C. With his barnstorming speeches and appetite for a noble war, Churchill remains the guest of honour at every neo-con's shindig
BYLINE: By MARK LEONARD
BODY:
Maybe this is his finest hour. He is dead and buried in his home country, a venerable figure of history. But in the US, Churchill is alive and well, reborn as an American idol, the most powerful role model for the neo-cons. On January 21, President Bush issued a letter offering "greetings to all those observing the 40th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill". Not that the president's acolytes need much encouragement.
The more discerning neo-cons have been celebrating Churchill's birthday for years. James Mann's portrait of Bush's foreign policy team, Rise of the Vulcans, describes how Leo Strauss, their ideologue-in-chief, turned Churchill-worship into a central tenet of neo-conservatism as early as the 1950s. Mann describes how every year the leading Straussians, including deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, convene in Washington to sip brandy and smoke cigars on Churchill's birthday. But their celebrations are as nothing compared with the Winston Churchill Society, which recreates the wartime premier's decadent habits. Their annual dinner was held last autumn in the Lansdowne Resort in Virginia - a recreation of Churchill's 88th birthday meal at London's Savoy, where beef Wellington, oyster bisque with Devon cream, cracked pepper-seared turbot and Pol Roger Champagne were served.
Since 9/11 the Churchill-worship has become mainstream. It was to his words that Bush turned when he made his first major speech after the attack on the World Trade Center. When the Library of Congress in Washington hosted a Churchill exhibition in 2004, it was so popular that its opening had to be extended by two months to cope with popular demand. And since it became known that the president has a bronze bust of the great man behind his desk in the Oval office, copycat versions have been selling furiously on the internet and in mail-order catalogues. A highbrow film mapping out his life, The Gathering Storm, became a surprise hit in 2002, scooping several awards, and dominating discussions around Washington's water coolers.
When I was living in Washington last year, I found that Churchill was never far from the neo-cons' minds. James Mann recounts that on 9/11 Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, immediately thought of the final words of Churchill's memoir, The Gathering Storm, to describe Cheney's reaction to the crisis: "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial."
Gary Schmitt, director of the Project for a New American Century, explains the Bulldog's enduring appeal to the American right: "He was a statesman who saw the greatest challenge to democracy and rose to it against all odds. He shows the possibility of personal and national greatness. And like Reagan and Bush, he had the ability to see evil and call it evil." Perhaps most important for the neo-cons is the fact that he spent time in the wilderness, and then returned in glory, like the neo-cons who were in the ascendant under Reagan and then in political exile during the George Bush Snr and Clinton years. Kary Antholis, vice-president of HBO, which made The Gathering Storm, confirms this appeal: "We ferreted out a story about Churchill's relationship with his destiny which he feared he would not live up to. When he steps into the Admiralty and says, 'Winston is back', it is cathartic in the way that epic stories are. We developed the first film before 9/11 and only started filming it after 9/11. If the echoes weren't clear before we started filming they were certainly clear afterwards."
But behind all the role-playing and cigar-smoking, the American obsession with Winston is a serious business. As Schmitt explains: "It is not just hero worship. They spend a lot of time studying his statesmanship and figuring out what he did right and wrong."