A Mismatched Pair

THERE'S NO DOUBT that both Winston Churchill and George Orwell (two of the 20th century’s harshest critics of the Soviet Union) would be fascinated by the gaggle of money launderers, KGB men, and other Vladimir Putin supplicants dominating today’s international and domestic news.

Thomas E. Ricks, a national security adviser at the New America Foundation, has written a relatively compact dual biography of the two men, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. It is extremely readable, but it leaves out a lot. Ricks comments: “On the surface, the two men were quite different. ... But in crucial aspects they were kindred spirits ... [who] grappled with the same great questions—Hitler and fascism, Stalin and communism.”

It’s an intriguing thesis that in the end doesn’t quite pan out. Ricks’ narrow focus on these 20th century “isms” ignores a profound difference in attitudes by Churchill and Orwell, which in the end demonstrates a deep political chasm.

Orwell wrote extensively about poverty, Britain’s debilitating class system, the deep wounds inflicted by imperialism, and powerful governments using deadly doublespeak. Though he was famously known for criticizing socialists, Orwell stated very clearly after the publication of 1984 that he was indeed a socialist, a political philosophy that Churchill detested, almost as much as he did communism.

Churchill, a bestselling war correspondent from his 20s to his mid-30s, worked as a newspaper journalist, military analyst, and high-ranking politician. His amazing military career—as soldier and prime minister (leading Britain against the Nazis) endured over 50 years, from 1895 to 1945. Ricks is at his best in critiquing Churchill’s brilliant moves and almost fatal missteps. As Ricks writes, “The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed that Churchill saw life as a pageant, with himself leading the parade.” And it is this famously drawn “pageant” that clearly mesmerizes Ricks, who has worked as a war correspondent himself.

But Churchill’s attitude and actions involving imperialism have been getting considerable scrutiny by scholars, especially over the last 15 years, and there is a growing body of work describing Churchill’s words and actions—particularly in Britain’s colonies—as arrogant and cruel. Even an old chestnut, recounted by biographer Martin Gilbert, reveals this state of mind: “‘It is alarming and also nauseating,’ Churchill told the West Essex Conservatives on Feb. 23, ‘to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace while he is still organizing and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience.’”

Although Churchill was involved in creating some social reforms with the Liberal Party before World War I, he was also under constant attack in the 1920s for strike-breaking and using excessive police force, issues largely ignored by Ricks.

Ricks does not offer up anything original when profiling George Orwell, a disappointment for many diehard Orwell fans. In fact, Ricks’ Orwell is altogether humorless, without charm, and wooden. And it is Orwell’s much more imaginative and penetrating lens, embedded in his deeply felt and diverse reporting over many years, that has captured today’s zeitgeist—“deep states” involved in unending war, powerless workers yoked to huge police states. It is Orwell’s ferocious sensibility—like no other—that informs 1984, making it a best seller again in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.

Most high-profile people turn out to be very complex. Despite Churchill’s heavy-handed imperialism, there is no taking away from his monumental contributions during World War II. There’s no telling what would have happened to the Western world without Churchill. And Orwell communicated in such an obscure way toward the end of his life that some critics say he allowed himself to be claimed by the Right—which did not define his lifelong sensibility, by any means.

Ricks attempts, but doesn’t succeed, to describe two brilliant men who never actually met and who profoundly altered the course of history in vastly different ways.