Hitler and Churchill: secrets of leadership
Andrew Roberts Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 202pp, £18.99
ISBN 0297843303
Leadership was the subject of a radio discussion on a recent edition of Andrew Marr's Start the Week, and a very muddled session it was, too. One of the participants, the pugnacious right-wing historian Andrew Roberts, became so carried away with his enthusiasm for the present Prime Minister's war cries that he was led to describe Tony Blair as "Churchillian", an accolade that not even a new Labour spin-doctor could have put forward with a straight face. A radio programme is not a work of serious history, and anyone can say silly things on air, but Roberts diminishes himself and his talents by seeking fame as a popular communicator.
Now, in pursuit of this aim, he has written a slight and inconsequential book. This is a pity, for Roberts is a clever and sophisticated fellow who works hard in the archives and can usually assemble his material in a more cogent and persuasive fashion. This extended essay examines "the secrets of leadership" that lay behind the success of Hitler and Churchill, but its old-buffer style and desultory prose do not augur well for the television series that it is designed to accompany. Reflecting on the banality of a recent election campaign, he asks rhetorically: "What would Sir Max Beerbohm have made of it all?" What indeed!
Roberts is not a natural performer on either radio or television. To be outrageously right-wing on television, and win over your audience, you have to be endowed with reserves of charm and wit, along the lines of the late Alan Clark, and Roberts is a trifle lacking in that department - on screen as in print. A historian who wants both to be taken seriously and to have some fun, he has not been able to resist the lure of floodlights and greasepaint. He would have been better advised to stick to serious written history, and to percolate through to the House of Lords with suitable gravitas in later life - like his heroes Lord Blake and Lord Dacre.
The idea behind the book and television series must, at first sight, have seemed a good one: Churchill and Hitler were two leaders locked in battle, so why not examine their careers and their characteristics, and come up with some illuminating thoughts about their leadership qualities. Roberts, unlike some other historians of his genera-tion, has remained a dedicated Churchillian, and his knowledge and enthusiasm are an attractive aspect of this book, though he is not so sure-footed when it comes to Hitler.
The principal difficulty is that these two leaders, and their relationships with their followers and their nations, were so far apart - in terms of history, culture and programme - that they can hardly be fitted into the same conceptual framework. By contrast, Napoleon and Wellington, about whom Roberts has written with insight and intelligence in an earlier comparative book, appear to make natural bedfellows, a hypothesis assisted by the passage of time. Hitler and Churchill, still very much alive in popular memory today, are less easy to assimilate side by side. The plebeian and the aristocrat, the revolutionary and the staunch defender of the status quo, the dictator and the democrat, the vegetarian and the bon viveur - these men could hardly have been more different. Their only shared attribute, emphasised by Roberts, was their "almost superhuman tenacity of purpose . . . held on to throughout their long years of adversity and failure".
Like a good teacher, Roberts raises some useful questions. How did Hitler manage to mesmerise the German nation in the 1930s, at a time when Churchill notably failed to have any impact on the British? How did Churchill, facing almost certain defeat in 1940, succeed in turning the tables on Hitler a few years later? But Roberts's capacity to write attractive, anecdotal history is constrained by the straitjacket of his subtitle. He has forced himself to discuss his subjects in terms of their "leadership" qualities, a nebulous and old-fashioned notion at the best of times.
Roberts thinks that we require leaders and long to be led. Yet the absence of leadership has been a notable characteristic of the post-Churchillian age. We have learned to get along without it. Real political leaders, in any case, have been exceptionally rare, and are not created just by wartime conditions. Aberdeen, Asquith and Chamberlain were all war leaders, but have disappeared without trace. Tony Blair, take note!
Hitler was Der Fuhrer, while Churchill is often described as "the war leader", yet the concepts of leadership in German and English are separated by a chasm wider than the Channel. Differences exist in other societies as well. The Spanish have several words for leader - caudillo, cacique, or jefe - each subtly different. Today they tend to borrow from the English. Franco was known as El Caudillo, but Castro is called El maximo lIder. The French conducteur summons up something quite different.
Roberts is not worried by this wider debate. Here he discusses two kinds of leadership, charismatic and inspirational, and downgrades both of them. Charisma, he suggests, was one of Hitler's most important characteristics, but he was not born with it. Indeed Hitler in his youth appears to have been positively uncharismatic. He acquired charisma, or invented it, over time; it is a technique that can be learnt.
Churchill's leadership was more inspirational than charismatic, and this too, Roberts argues, was an artificial construct, dependent on the type of artifice usually associated with a professional conjuror. Churchill was not a natural leader in his youth. This is an interesting thesis, and Roberts gives several examples to show how both Hitler and Churchill worked hard to sharpen their separate skills. Hitler took lessons from a comedian; Churchill schooled himself to overcome his dislike of public speaking.
Roberts moves on to new, and more entertaining, ground when he looks at the behaviour of the two men through the lens of modern management theory. Churchill, he writes, believed in MBWA - management by walking about. Visiting Hendon just before the Battle of Britain and finding a lot of pilots sitting behind desks, Churchill ordered the air minister to "comb out the fluff and flummery" - the authentic tones of a modern chief executive officer, comments Roberts.
Hitler, for his part, handed out large bribes to his senior officers to keep them in line - cheques, houses and estates - the equivalent, suggests Roberts, of the "golden handcuffs" with which company bosses of today are rewarded. Roberts also takes note of Hitler's tendency towards "micromanagement" during the latter years of the war, endlessly overriding the front-line commanders, an important factor in Germany's defeat. Churchill had started the war, at the Admiralty, with the same management failing but learnt from his mistakes.
Lacking from this book is any discussion about the development of new technology, and the ability of leaders to use it. Hitler and Churchill were both creatures of the 19th-century development of democracy, accustomed to the street meeting or the crowded hall, essentially an extension of the pulpit. They easily made the transition to the radio age, when impassioned rhetoric and the disembodied voice remained all-important, and stretched out to a wider audience.
Television is something altogether different, and it is by no means certain that either Churchill or Hitler would have been able to transfer his artifice to the small screen satisfactorily. Yet no political leader (or historian) today can succeed without dominating its particular tricks. Few emerge with credit from its refining fire.
Richard Gott, co-author with Martin Gilbert of The Appeasers (Phoenix Press), is writing a history of Cuba
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