Volume 4, Number 2 · February 25, 1965
What Price Glory?
By Malcolm Muggeridge
The King and His Court
by Pierre Viansson-Ponté
Houghton Mifflin, 250 pp., $5.00
Hostile Allies: FDR and Charles de Gaulle
by Milton Viorst
Macmillan, 280 pp., $6.95
I was asked the other day who I thought were the three outstanding men of action of our time, and answered without thinking: Gandhi, Stalin, and De Gaulle. On reflection I am inclined to stand by my choice. Most Englishmen would have begun with Churchill, but to me he has always been a slightly ridiculous figure, mouthing the rhetoric of a past age to sustain the fantasies of the present one. It was precisely this, admittedly, that was required in 1940 to maintain the pretense, while waiting for Russia and America to come into the war, that we English were continuing to wage it. Once they were in, Churchill's role was exhausted. A good many Americans would likewise, I suppose, have begun with Roosevelt, manfully overlooking the appalling banality of his thoughts and utterances in the light of his practical achievements in counteracting the Depression and as a war leader. Sooner they than I. Leftists of all categories, again, would doubtless play it safe and opt for Lenin, whose writings—some ten million words of them—I find unreadable, and whose brief appearance on the stage of history ended in the New Economic Policy, the negation of everything he had ever ostensibly believed in or advocated.
Review, 2517 words
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