The ten lessons of Winston Churchill

Chris Matthews Host of 'Hardball' • Profile

Winston Churchill delivered his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech 60 years ago at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.  Chris Matthews was honored this past weekend to deliver the keynote address commemorating this historic speech and remarkable man.  Below is the text of Chris's address.

I want to thank President Lamkin and the Westminster College Board of Trustees, Executive Director Rob Havers and the Board of Governors of the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library for this invitation of a lifetime - at least, so far.

The gentleman who spoke here sixty years ago would have been an extraordinary human being even if he had not done what he did. What he did, of course, was save the honor of the 20^th century.

Here’s what author Jon Meacham wrote in Franklin and Winston, his masterful portrait of the great American-British partnership that helped win World War II:

"When Hitler dominated the Continent (in May of 1940), staring across the English Channel, Winston Churchill stood alone and stared back."

People ask me the guest I would have most liked on "Hardball." My answer is the British leader who was here sixty years ago this weekend.

Winston Churchill was a soldier, a historian, a statesman, a knight, a raconteur, a painter, a bricklayer, and every bit a smart-aleck as Jon Stewart.

Here’s what Winston Churchill said on meeting a high-toned Shakespearean actor:

"You are my fifth favorite actor. The first four are the Marx Brothers."

Here’s Churchill’s take on a political rival who was a vegetarian, a socialist, and a tee-totaller to boot:

"There but for the grace of God goes God."

Here’s how he described a tough-talking American secretary of state:

"He is the only bull I know who carries his china closet with him." You could say that about Dick Cheney.

Here’s another:

"Dogs look up at you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal."

The greatest thing I have ever read of this great man who warned here of the "Iron Curtain" is that he was exactly who he seemed to be. In the middle of the night, after many rounds of whatever they were drinking, a visitor was warmed to discover that Churchill was an even more Winston Churchill than the public version. He was the genuine article right straight through.

This evening I want to share with you what I’ve come to learn from this man, important ways on how to get on in life. I offer them to you with tremendous confidence, not because nothing ever changes - lots of things change - but because some things don’t.

There’s a lot we can learn from Churchill, I’ve discovered, not just from what he said but what he managed to do in one life.

When he graduated from Sandhurst - Britain’s West Point - he went off to India where he saw action on the dangerous, tribal northwest frontier. For all we know, it’s where Osama Bin Laden might be hiding. Based on his relatively brief experience in actual combat, Churchill decided to write a handbook on military tactics, The Malakand Field Force.

The British establishment, politicians and high-ranking officers alike, couldn’t believe this squirt had the cheek to tell them how to fight a war.

Young Churchill, still barely out of school, next headed to the Sudan as part of the British expedition to retake Khartoum from the Islamic zealots who had risen up under the charismatic leader known as The Mahdi. The Mahdi was a Muslim nationalist - a combination of Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Iran’s Ahmadinejad. He had captured Khartoum, defeated the great British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon, chopped off his head and displayed it for all his disciples to see.

In retaking Khartoum, Churchill rode in the last cavalry charge of the British army. With that came another book, The River War, in which he dared criticize the great General Kitchener, his commanding officer, for desecrating the Mahdi’s tomb.

You gotta like this guy! He reminds me of another war veteran not afraid to take on the bigshots: Senator John McCain.

In 1899, still in his early twenties, Churchill ran for Parliament and lost. Undaunted, he headed off to South Africa and the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent. Captured by the enemy, he managed to climb over a latrine wall, hide himself on a train, and escape over the border to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Heading to Cape Town, he regained his commission in the army and returned to the fighting, in fact, to the exact spot where he was captured. He then went back to England, ran for Parliament again and won.

The year was 1900.

How can you not be impressed by this guy! As I said right up front, he would have been one of the great men of his age even if he had not done what he did at a time his new century would stand in the balance.

Starting in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Churchill was right about the Nazi threat when others, especially his own party, the Conservatives, were wrong. He saw Germany building both its military machine and its concentration camps.

In 1935, Hitler renewed military conscription in Germany and proclaimed the Luftwaffe the match for the Royal Air Force. But when Churchill warned that the Germans were building 150 planes a month, he was accused of "scaremongering."

In 1936, Hitler marched his armies into the Rhineland, an area the Germans were forced to demilitarize after World War I. Watching from London, the then-prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, told his country it had nothing to fear from Hitler.

In 1937, Britain’s next prime minister Neville Chamberlain offered to appease Hitler by handing over a few colonies in Africa. Churchill’s judgment?

"This has been a good week for dictators."

He then made a prediction. "The day will come when at some point or another, you will have to take a stand, and I pray to God when that day comes that we may not find, through an unwise policy, that we have to make that stand alone."

A month later, Hitler marched into Austria. A year later, at Munich, the world watched as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain handed over much of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. At home the British people counted him, Chamberlain, a hero. Bucking public opinion, Churchill called the giveaway a "totally and unmitigated defeat."

"And do not suppose that this is the end," he warned his country. "This is only the beginning of the reckoning."

On September 1, claiming Germany had been invaded, Hitler attacked Poland. The Second World War had begun. Churchill, brought back as First Lord of the Admiralty, pointed to the dangers of neutrality.

"Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last."

Now came Churchill’s and Britain’s finest hour. In May of 1940, the same day Hitler’s panzers began their blitz across Europe, our man became prime minister. With Holland, Denmark, and Belgium quickly overrun and France, England’s last fighting ally, about to sign an armistice, with a quarter of a million British troops, the country’s entire army, stranded at the French port city of Dunkirk, Churchill refused to quit.

"Of course, whatever happens in Dunkirk," he told his cabinet, "we shall fight on."

And that he did.

Just as he was the first to see the horror of Hitler, he saw, also very early, the gathering menace of Soviet communism. When he came here to Westminster College in March 1946, he saw Josef Stalin grabbing and holding all the territory of Eastern and Central Europe the Red Army had won in battle. And, of course, he saw the Curtain going up between freedom and the lack of it.

I was there in 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down. I was there in Budapest in April, when nothing yet seemed possible, talking with a professor from Karl Marx University who said things were happening. He and his colleagues were watching Boris Yeltsin stand up to the Soviet order in Moscow and that got their hopes up. "Freedom is contagious," he told me and a British journalist late one afternoon over tea and cookies.

By September, the Hungarian government dared to tear down the barbed wire on its western frontier, allowing thousands of East Germans to escape to the west. Within the year, Hungary was a democratic republic and the professor who chatted with me about freedom being "contagious" was its foreign minister.

In East Berlin that November of 1989, I stood on a cold, drizzly night talking to people on the eastern, communist side of the Brandenburg Gate. The Saturday before, the East Germans had let people pass through the Berlin Wall for the first time. There was a rumor that the East Germans were going to open the Brandenburg Gate itself, a symbol of east-west division, between freedom and its absence.

I moved around in that crowd of East Germans asking everyone I could make eye contact with what "freedom" meant to them.

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