The life and legacy of Winston Churchill

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The life and legacy of Winston Churchill

Famed historian Andrew Roberts reveals former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's struggles during World War II on 'Life, Liberty & Levin.'

This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," January 5, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, HOST:  Hello, America.  I'm Mark Levin.  This is "Life Liberty & Levin."

Andrew Roberts.  How are you, sir?

ANDREW ROBERTS, AUTHOR, BRITISH HISTORIAN, BROADCASTER AND JOURNALIST:  On top form.  How are you, Mark?

LEVIN:  It's a great pleasure.  I'm well, thank you.  World-famous author, British historian, broadcaster, journalist.  With all this tumult going on in the world, in our country, and Britain, at least all throughout the world.  I thought this would be a good time to talk to you about Winston Churchill.

And I think our audience has a general understanding of Churchill, what a great man he is.  But I'm not sure that we have really a full understanding of the man's character, his history and why he is considered such a great man.  And you've written a book, "Churchill: Walking with Destiny."

Now, this is, you told me the 1,010th biography of Churchill, yours being the 10th -- 1,010th.  Why is your book different?

ROBERTS:  Well, I was very fortunate that in the last six to seven years, there's been an absolute avalanche of new sources that have come out about Winston Churchill.

You wouldn't have thought so considering there are a thousand and nine biographies before mine.  That Her Majesty the Queen allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father's diaries.

And King George VI who have met Winston Churchill, every Tuesday of the Second World War, was trusted by his Prime Minister with all of the great secrets of the Second World War.  The Ultra secrets and about the decrypts, the nuclear secrets, which countries were going to be invaded, which ministers and generals were going to be hired and fired and so on.

And the King wrote everything down in his diary.  So I've been able to use that which no other Churchill biographer has before.  On top of that, at Churchill College, Cambridge, where his archives are.  There have been 41 sets of papers that have been deposited there and including the diaries of his children, and so on.

So there's been a possibility to actually get into the mind of the man that way as well.

I myself discovered the verbatim accounts of the War Cabinet, the Second World War Cabinet, and so we now know what each individual minister said during the War Cabinets, which no one has known before.

And then finally, the diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, during the Second World War, have been made available over the last five years in Moscow.  And so that was fascinating, too, because he saw a lot of Churchill, of course, at the period of the Nazi Soviet Pact just before the outbreak of the war.

So really, it's this extraordinary avalanche of new sources that made me decide to want to write this book.

LEVIN:  I'm going to ask you a question that may seem silly.  But let's do it this way.  Why should Americans care about Winston Churchill?

ROBERTS:  I don't think it's a silly question at all.  I think it's an absolutely essential question.  At a time when leadership is such an important aspect in the world today, I think that Churchill enunciated so many of the most important statements that still needs to be made.

I think that he showed different qualities of leadership that we desperately need.  He was somebody with a tremendous sense of foresight.  
He spotted the First World War and the Second World War before they broke out and warned the world about what to do.  He wasn't listened to, but nonetheless, he got that right.

And then after the Second World War, with Soviet imperialism and the danger that Stalin posed to Eastern Europe, he too in his great Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri was able to delineate that as a great danger.

And then he showed tremendous moral courage, moral and physical courage, but particularly moral courage.  He never deviated because of what opinion polls said.  He went out and said what he believed and he stuck to it.  And that's something I think that is not just for the 1930s, that's for all time, a great leadership quality.

He was tremendously eloquent.  He was very, very good on his feet, of course, but also in his set piece speeches, he could move the hearts of millions.

These are things that all leaders should be able to learn from, I think, and not just military leaders, I think it's right the way across the board, not just political leaders, I mean, business leaders and everybody I think has got something that they can learn from Winston Churchill.

LEVIN:  Our President, President Trump has his bust in the open Office.

ROBERTS:  Yes.

LEVIN:  The Prime Minister of Israel has his bust in his office.  They admire Churchill enormously, but Churchill had ups and downs during his career, didn't he?

ROBERTS:  Oh he certainly has.  There are no -- there's probably no single politician who has had more ups and more downs.  You know, he was cast down, and largely down to his own blunders.  He made mistake after mistake.

He wrote to his wife, Clementine and said, I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.  He believed in learning from his mistakes.  He was very good at that.  But yes, he got Women Suffrage wrong.  He got the Gold Standard wrong.  He got the Application Crisis wrong.

And primarily, of course, he got the Dardanelles Expedition in the First World War in 1915.

LEVIN:  And what happened there?

ROBERTS:  Well, it was a brilliant idea.  The concept was to try and get the Royal Navy from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Straits of the Dardanelles between Asia and Europe.  Anchor it off Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and through the threat of shelling basically take the Ottoman Empire, take the Turks out of the hole of the First World War.

And if it had come off, it would have been one of the great strategic genius moves in the history of warfare.  But in the implementation of it, on the 18th of March 1915, the Allies lost six ships, and then they doubled down on the disaster by invading the Gallipoli Peninsula to the west of the straits, and over the next eight months, we lost 147,000 killed and wounded.

And this was not fairly really, but it was primarily Churchill's mistake and Churchill stuck with it.  And he was lambasted for it and people shouted, what about the Dardanelles at him -- right the way into the 1930s.

LEVIN:  It is amazing he recovered from that, isn't it?

ROBERTS:  It's extraordinary.  It's the only time that he very briefly considered committing suicide.  In fact, that was, as I mentioned, you don't get further down than that.  But he did come back from it largely through his extraordinary eloquence.

The government didn't want to have him on the opposition benches.  So they brought him back into the Cabinets in 1917.

LEVIN:  He also, individually, he was quite the worldly man, wasn't he?  He went all over the world.  He served in various battles or witnessed various battles and so forth.

ROBERTS:  Yes, he fought in five campaigns on four continents.  He came much close, he had 70 close brushes with death, that he believed that he had a certain destiny, a driving sense of personal destiny.

And on one occasion when he left the dugout in the First World War and on the front line of the First World War, and during the First World War, he went into the no man's land, no fewer than 30 times, which he didn't need to as a Lieutenant Colonel, but nonetheless, he left the dugout and five minutes later, he -- everybody there was a direct shell hit on the dugout, and everybody inside was decapitated.

And he said of that extraordinary lucky survival, that he felt that he could feel -- so he could hear the sound of invisible wings beating over him.  So he very much had this sense of destiny.

LEVIN:  He was Labour, then Tory --

ROBERTS:  A liberal.

LEVIN:  A liberal.

ROBERTS:  He started as a Tory, then he joined the Liberal Party for 20 years and then went back to the Tories.

LEVIN:  How do you explain that?

ROBERTS:  He had a great line about that.  He said that anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.  Well, basically, it's because he believed in free trade and free markets, and the Conservative Party dumped that idea in 1904, and he stuck with his belief and went into the Liberal Party, which supported free trade and free markets.

But then when the Conservatives came back to free trade and free markets,
20 years later, he went back to the Conservative Party, so it's a real case of the party leaving him rather than him leaving them.

LEVIN:  It's interesting going back and forth like that, because in America, maybe get one swing.

ROBERTS:  Yes.

LEVIN:  And then coming back.

ROBERTS:  Well, actually, that's true of British politics as well.  He is just about the only person who has managed to pull that off.

LEVIN:  There really has never been anyone like, maybe Thatcher is the closest example, would you say?

ROBERTS:  I think Margaret Thatcher, who of course, admired him hugely.  
She grew up as a girl during the Second World War, the family would sit around the radio in her home in Leicestershire listening to Churchill's great wartime speeches.

And if you then fast forward 40 years to the Falklands War, you see very much the kind of speeches that she was making there have huge overtones with the ones that Winston Churchill was giving 40 years earlier.  But yes, there's no other gigantic British political figure between Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and none since Margaret Thatcher, either.

LEVIN:  I want to talk about the war effort a little bit later in the program.  But one of the things that always troubles me as an American is after the war effort.  This tremendous leader, he is thrown out of office.

ROBERTS:  Yes.

LEVIN:  How did that happen?  Why did that happen?

ROBERTS:  It was -- it was catastrophic for him.  He was -- he won the war effectively, and he then loses an appalling general election defeat, a landslide victory against him.

And it happened because people wanted more, at the end of the Second World War, they felt that they deserved to have all the goodies.  They didn't really look into --

LEVIN:  National health care.

ROBERTS:  National health care, private -- nationalization of the Bank of England and all sorts of welfare state provisions.

LEVIN:  Did he oppose most of those?

ROBERTS:  No, he actually came up with some of the ideas himself 30 years before, but the British people didn't think that he was going to be able to deliver them in the same way that the Labour Party, the socialists were offering to deliver them.

And, and they voted for him, and it took some time before they worked out that we couldn't actually afford all of the things that the socialists were offering.

And from the day of the election, as the landslide came through, his wife, Clementine said to Churchill, well, it might be a blessing in disguise.  
And Churchill replied, well, from where I'm sitting, it seems quite remarkably well disguised.

LEVIN:  He was brilliant, wasn't he?  The way he wrote, the way he spoke, his little quips at a moment's notice.  Just incredible.

ROBERTS:  Oh, the witticisms.  There are about 200 Churchill jokes in my book, because he just -- he knew exactly when to slip in a joke.  He could do once -- I think, by the way, he'd be absolutely superb on Twitter because he was able to --

Many of his best jokes can fit into 280 characters or fewer.  There's a marvelous moment when a Labour MP shouts at him across the House of Commons, locked, and Churchill replies, I thank the Honorable Member for telling us what's in his mind.

There were just so many of those kind of jokes.

LEVIN:  Well, this is a spectacular book beginning to end, "Churchill: 
Walking with Destiny" by Andrew Roberts.  We're going to get into more of this.  There's so much to discuss about Churchill and about your outstanding book.

But don't forget ladies and gentlemen, most weeknights, you can see me on Levin TV, Levin TV.  You can go to blazetv.com/mark to sign up, blazetv.com/mark or give us a call at 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV.  We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN:  Andrew Roberts, your subtitled of the book is "Walking with Destiny."  What did you mean by that?

ROBERTS:  When he became Prime Minister on the 10th of May, 1940, the same day that Adolf Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg on the west invading Belgium and Holland and Luxembourg and shortly afterwards, obviously, also to invade France.

Churchill said of his becoming Prime Minister that day, I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life have been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

And so what I tried to do in the book is to investigate that, to unpack it, to look at the extent to which Churchill's previous jobs as being in charge of the Royal Navy or being Home Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer, actually did prepare him for this hour and trial of 1940.

And again, and again, I come up with this powerful sense that he was driven by a sense of destiny.  He believed from the age of -- when he was a 16- year-old school boy, he told his best friend, that there will be great upheavals and terrible struggles in our lives, and I shall be called upon to save England and save London.

LEVIN:  He was a great admirer of America wasn't he?

ROBERTS:  He loved America.

LEVIN:  And why is that?

ROBERTS:  Well, of course, he was half-American himself.  His mother, Jennie Jerome was born in Brooklyn and he was very conscious of that side of things, but he also saw America, especially before the First World War, and the Second World War as the potential savior of Western civilization, which of course, it was actually in both of those wars.

And so his -- there was a strategic element as well as an emotional element.  He was somebody who believed in the legacy of the English- speaking peoples for the rest of the world, in the way in which our joint literature and culture and values believe in democracy and so on, was something that the rest of the world could benefit from.

And he believed that when we were together, he coined the phrase special relationship, in fact, when that special relationship worked, then it was good not just for both countries, but for the whole of the rest of the world, too.

LEVIN:  Yet, were some when America was attacked at Pearl Harbor and there were Declaration of Wars back and forth, who didn't think the Americans would be able to fight very well?

ROBERTS:  Well, I know.  Yes, it's a good --

LEVIN:  But he wasn't one of them.

ROBERTS:  No, no, he was the -- he was the person who told the Cabinet that this is ridiculous.  That actually, the Americans are fabulous fighters and you only had to look back to well, he said the American War of Independence, the Civil War and of course, the fighting that took place in the First World War to realize that actually, the Americans are extremely good warriors.

And that was proved very quickly, of course, at Guadalcanal and then in Operation Torch in North Africa.

LEVIN:  What was his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt?

ROBERTS:  A fascinating one.  They liked each other personally very much.  Actually, Churchill didn't enjoy the cocktails that FDR mixed for him, but other than that, they got on like a house --

LEVIN:  What did Churchill drink?

ROBERTS:  He drank everything, but not American cocktails.  Now, he would -- he was a huge drinker.  We will probably get on to that later in the show.

But with regard to FDR, they were both aristocrats of their own countries.  
They were politically on the left, of course.  The New Deal and his sense of intellectual sense of Tory democracy overlapped a lot and they saw the world in terms of having to defeat Hitler.

And so they got on.  There was a problem by about the fall of 1944, when the interests of the British Empire seemed to bifurcate from those of the American Republic, and at that point, the relationship went through a rocky patch, but not personally, just simply through politics.

LEVIN:  Was that the -- really the dividing up eventually of Europe.

ROBERTS:  And the Empire.  He felt that -- he felt that the pressure that the State Department was putting on Britain in order to basically give back India, self-government to India was something that he, as an Imperialist and a colonialist, somebody who believed in the British Empire didn't want to happen.

LEVIN:  Obviously, he was leading a nation that could have been defeated.  Britain is being bombed.  What was his view of the Third Reich respecting the Holocaust?  What was taking place against the Jews?

ROBERTS:  Well, he called it the most grisly crime in the history of humanity.  So, of course, his stance very much was that he wanted to bomb the railway lines taking Jews into Auschwitz.

But I'm afraid the British Foreign Office, and also the United States officials of the day effectively prevented that from happening and it was something that Churchill always regretted.  He was not a dictator.  He had to bring over his own Cabinet and had to bring over the military authorities.

And on this, he said to Anthony Eden, his Foreign Secretary, invoke me if necessary.  Now, we must bomb these lines, and it never happened.

LEVIN:  And he regretted it?

ROBERTS:  Of course.  It was one of those great, great regrets.  I go into it in some in some detail in the book.

LEVIN:  And you're right.  Our State Department wasn't particularly interested.

ROBERTS:  Now, John McCloy and others actually felt -- I mean, there was an operational issue in that it was a very long way to go to fly over to Poland.  It was also railway lines are notoriously difficult to bomb.  But nonetheless, in retrospect, of course, it should have been done.

LEVIN:  We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AISHAH HASNIE, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT:  Live from "America's News Headquarters," I'm Aishah Hasnie.

President Trump back in D.C. tonight after a Holiday vacation and now facing two global hotspots.  Earlier today, armed terrorists overran a military base in Kenya, killing a U.S. service member and two American contractors.

This happened at the Manda Bay Airfield.  The al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabaab claiming responsibility, but says the attack has nothing to do with escalating tensions in the Middle East.

Meantime, in Iran, massive anti-American demonstrations accompanying the funeral of General Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone attack last week in Baghdad.

Tehran is promising harsh retaliation and now completely abandoning the controversial nuclear deal.

Speaking onboard Air Force One tonight, President Trump says there will be major retaliation if commits any act of violence.

I'm Aishah Hasnie, now back to "Levin."

LEVIN:  Andrew Roberts, a lot of the detractors of Churchill talk about this drinking problem that he had.  Did he have a drinking problem?

ROBERTS:  He did not have a drinking problem.  No.  He did drink an enormous amount.  But he had an iron constitution for alcohol.

One of his friends said that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic, because no alcoholic could have drunk that much.

And in a sense, he is right.  He really -- he mastered as he always said, drink is my servant and never my master.  He was only drunk on one occasion in the whole of the Second World War, which was 2,149 days long, which is quite extraordinary considering the pressures on him.

But no, he was not an alcoholic, and neither actually interestingly was he a depressive.  Lots of people say that he had Black Dog depression, but he himself only used that expression once in his whole life at a time when Edwardian matrons used it to explain their ill-tempered children.

And depression, of course, is a debilitating illness, and he was able to chair over 900 meetings of the Defense Committee of the War Cabinet during the Second World War.  At all times of day and night.

LEVIN:  The Lincoln detractors in our country talking about Lincoln having deep depression.  And you're right, you almost can't function if you have this deep depression.  And here, these men were functioning, really beyond what the average human being could possibly do.

ROBERTS:  And I think also, we have to remember that, of course, they did get depressed at times, but not as a result of a chemical imbalance or anything like that.  But because terribly depressing things were happening.

We lost Singapore in February 1942.  We lost Tobruk in North Africa in June 1942.  And that in those moments, Churchill got depressed but any sentient decision maker would have got depressed under those circumstances.

LEVIN:  What did Hitler think of Churchill?

ROBERTS:  Oh, he loathed him.  He hated him.  He was -- Hitler's Secretary, Christina Schroeder said that the very mention of Churchill's name will send Hitler off into rants, endless rants, about how Churchill was an alcoholic and he was in the pay of the Jews and he was an incompetent strategist and all of this sort of thing.

And yes, they -- if ever the furor got into a carpet biting moment, it would be because of the mention of Churchill's name.

LEVIN:  But was it really because Churchill was so effective at resisting as best as he possibly could the Third Reich?

ROBERTS:  And he was the first person, he was the first major British politician to spot Hitler and the Nazis for what they were really all about, and to warn the world.  And so Hitler, of course, hated him for that.

And I think it's for three reasons that they were able -- that Churchill was able to see Hitler the Nazis of what they really were.  The first was he was a Philo-Semite.  He liked Jews.  He had grown up with Jews.  He had all his life, he had gone on holiday with Jews and he knew the contribution that they've made to Western civilization.

And so he had an early warning system when it came to Hitler and the Nazis that was not vouchsafed to many of the other people in British politics and the upper classes at the time, many of whom were anti-Semitic.

The second thing was that he was a historian, and he was able to place the strategic threat posed by Hitler in the long panoply, the long continuum of British Foreign Policy and all of the other threats that we've had since the Spanish Armada.

And the last thing was that he had come up close and personal against fanaticism in his life on the Northwest Frontier and in the Sudan, Islamic fundamentalist, religious fanaticism in this case, but he could see the same tropes in the Nazis, and the political fanaticism of the Nazis in a way that the other Prime Ministers in the 1930s simply were unable to do.

LEVIN:  It's a wonderful book, "Churchill: Walking with Destiny."  Andrew Roberts, what was Churchill and Britain's interaction during the war with Japan?

ROBERTS:  Very bad.  It's one of Churchill's failings.  It's another one of his blunders, frankly.  And possibly the worst one he made in the Second World War, was not to spot the way in which Japan was able, after the Day of Infamy to invade Malay, in particular, British Malaya and also British Burma.

And we had this extraordinarily powerful naval base in Singapore, on the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula.  And we all thought that that was going to be able to hold out because it was so strong.

Well, it didn't work out.  It was of course the guns, the big guns were pointing out to sea, but the Japanese were coming through the jungle to the north from the land wood side and we had very few defenses there.  And that was largely down to Churchill.

LEVIN:  And Italy?

ROBERTS:  Well, he had a -- he made a wonderful joke about Italy.  We weren't too worried about the Italian fighting man, frankly, in the Second World War, at least their army in the Second World War.

And when Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, threatened Churchill in a reception in London when he was German Ambassador to London, and said, Mr. Churchill, in the next war, Italy will be on the side of the Third Reich. Churchill replied, well, it seems only fair.  We had to have them last time.

LEVIN:  So he didn't think too much of them.

ROBERTS:  Yes.

LEVIN:  Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget, most weeknights, you can watch me on Levin TV.  Please join us, sign up, go to blazetv.com/mark, blazetv.com/mark or give us a call, 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV.  We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN:  Andrew Roberts: Broadcaster, journalist, historian, excellent author, your book, "Churchill: Walking with Destiny."  You have another book that just came out, Leadership in War: Central Lessons from those who made History," which kind of build on your Churchill book, the qualities, the characters of Churchill's leadership.  Let's go through some of those.  
Give us some examples of what you would identify as leadership skills.

ROBERTS:  And there's a phrase that Napoleon used where he said that when we speak to the soul, it's the only way to electrify the men.  And what he was saying really was that it's not enough just to get soldiers together and send them in a particular direction.  You have to infuse them with your charisma and your personality.

And very often, although in wartime, people will put up with any number of defeats, if you're able as a war leader to promise ultimate victory, even if it doesn't seem to be near, if it can be logically explained why it's going to happen, then people will put up with terrible, terrible privations.

LEVIN:  That would explain George Washington, wouldn't it?

ROBERTS:  Of course, the whole Valley Forge story is not one is it of the privations and the cold and the supplies not getting through and lack of ammunition and so on.  It's hope.  It's the way in which George Washington was able to sell the idea of ultimate victory through self-belief and hope and of course, the Attack on Trenton.

So, all in all, you know, he is one of the great examples -- exemplars of Great War leadership.

LEVIN:  What other skills would a great leader need?

ROBERTS:  Interestingly, you would have thought that it's important to be a great orator.  But it's not always very much the case in Churchill's case.  
But, not in Napoleon's, for example.

Stalin, who, of course, was one of the most evil men in history, nonetheless, was a very effective war leader, but not because he was an orator.  He was actually quite useless at rhetoric and oratory.

Charisma is a very difficult concept for me because Hitler who is always thought of as charismatic, actually, when you delve down into it, it was largely because he had Leni Riefenstahl do his films and Albert Speer do his rallies and Josef Gerbils do his propaganda.  He himself was profoundly an unimpressive figure personally.

And so, so I don't think that necessarily this artificially recreated charisma is an important aspect.  One that is though is the idea of foresight.  If people think that your leader is looking one step ahead, or two or three steps ahead, that is very important.

With Margaret Thatcher, it was a large number of these things.  But it was also a moral conviction.

LEVIN:  You knew Margaret then?

ROBERTS:  I knew Margaret Thatcher very well.  She came and had dinner in our house, and I used to go around to her place, and she appointed me to take her place on the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust, and so I knew her quite well.

But with her, it was this fabulous sense of moral conviction that you weren't just doing this, making these great reforms in Britain in order to get richer.  You were doing it in order to be a better person, and that was tremendously powerful.

People will undergo an awful lot of privation in that sense as well if they ultimately think that what you're doing is right.

LEVIN:  And I see the great leaders have enormous stamina and energy.  They never sleep.  They're constantly thinking about things, trying to think ahead.  Is that right?

ROBERTS:  That's very true.  Absolutely.  Margaret Thatcher would only sleep for four hours a night, famously.  Winston Churchill though he had a nap in the afternoon, carried on until two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning, working.

And after his one hour nap, he believed that that effectively gave him two days.

Hitler was lazy.  He is the one person actually who just doesn't fit into the overall concept of busy and hardworking leaders.

George Marshall, who I write about in this new book, would work 16 to 17 hours a day.  President Eisenhower, not just when he was Supreme Allied Commander, but up to that point as well.  He was an incredibly hard worker.  
It's something that I think that they all, except for Hitler do have in common there.

LEVIN:  Most of the Western leaders, do they get good press or bad press?  Did Churchill get good press or bad press?

ROBERTS:  He got terrible press for a lot of the time.  He had a lot of his own party criticize him.  He had votes of confidence in the House of Commons during the Second World War.  He won them.  He won them, but nonetheless, you know, they were held to try and bring him down.

The press --

LEVIN:  His own party?

ROBERTS:  His own party.  People on his own party were criticizing him constantly behind his back.

LEVIN:  Like Thatcher?

ROBERTS:  Like Thatcher, exactly, who was ultimately, of course brought down after being Prime Minister for 11 and a half years and basically saving Britain from becoming a third rate country in the world.

The Conservatives, her own party, and indeed, my party brought her down in an act of spectacular betrayal.

LEVIN:  And Churchill throughout, they were picking at him and nibbling at him.

ROBERTS:  Constantly undermining him and even when he would make some of the greatest speeches of his life, you know, that never in the field of human conflict speech, his, we shall never surrender speech.

The Conservatives would then go to the bar at the House of Commons, order a few drinks and try to rip the speeches to shreds, speeches, which we now consider to be amongst the greatest oratory in the history of mankind.

LEVIN:  And the press was more than happy to accommodate them, I guess?

ROBERTS:  And luckily, in wartime, of course, they did have a handle on the press, and it was considered to be unpatriotic to be too anti-government, although some newspapers were, certainly the ones on the left were.

But nonetheless, throughout his life, he had a terrible time at the hands of the press, yes.

LEVIN:  We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN:  "Churchill: Walking with Destiny," Andrew Roberts.  Brexit spin in the news.  Boy, I'll tell you, the British Parliament has been wrestling itself to the ground over and over again over this.  The people voted to get out of the European Union and it seems like the Parliament doesn't want to let them out.  And so it seems like the E.U. doesn't want to let them out.

What would Churchill's position be do you think?

ROBERTS:  Gosh, that's a very good question.  His daughter, Mary told me never to assume that one knows what Papa would have thought about any issue.

And of course, the referendum took place half a century after his death, and although he was very much in favor of the European project, when he was the leader of the opposition.  When he was Prime Minister, between 1951 and 1955, his post war Premiership, he did nothing to get Britain any closer into any of the multilateral organizations that led to the European Union.

And he was a great believer in the special relationship, as we mentioned earlier, which he thought would be damaged if Britain got into an economic structure with Europe.

And he of course also had a great regard for the Commonwealth, the British Commonwealth and our relations with Canada and Australia, and New Zealand and so on.

And so I believe that he would have been a leaver and not got into the European Union in the first place.

LEVIN:  Thatcher?  Same thing?

ROBERTS:  Oh, that's an easy one.  No, no.  She used to rail against the European Union and control by Brussels.  I remember going to a speech that she gave in the House of Lords at the time of the Maastricht Treaty in 1994.  And it was completely -- there was absolutely no doubt where her vote would have gone if she had lived three years longer.

LEVIN:  Given the makeup of politics today in Great Britain, and the Parliament and the parties.  You think we'll ever see the likes of a Churchill again?

ROBERTS:  Oh, golly.  One has to remember, of course, that it took a World War for Churchill to get to power.  He would have never made it to Number
10 Downing Street in a time of peace, because there were so many detractors, so many people constantly dragging him down.

As we may mentioned earlier about the press, you know, he was never really given a fully fair hearing until he became Prime Minister.

So on that level, no, but I can't help thinking that so long as good people still go into politics, and I'm very worried about this actually, in my country, because most good people don't.

They go into journalism or they go into writing or they go into banking also.  But very few of the top class people go into -- by which I mean, personality class, of course, rather than social class -- go into politics nowadays.

And so that's a great worry for me.

LEVIN:  Why is that do you think?

ROBERTS:  I think it's a horrible job, and I think that the way that politicians are treated, the trolling on Twitter, and so on, which you have to be involved in social media, of course, but nonetheless, it's pretty hateful, and the way in which the rules, the expenses, the very low pay in my country, at least -- all of these things come together really to create an environment where you don't get the best people going into it.

LEVIN:  What do you make of Jeremy Corbyn in the head of the Labour Party?

ROBERTS:  I think that he is the most -- well, he's certainly the most left wing, but he's also the most profoundly dangerous and sinister figure.  He is an anti-Semite.  He is wildly anti-Israel, as you'd expect from that.

He is very anti-American, always has been all his life.  He's made apologies for Hamas and Hezbollah that he has called his friends.

He wants to abolish MI-5 and MI-6, and he wants to come out of NATO.  He wants massive wealth taxes, not just for the rich, but actually for pretty much the whole of the middle classes.  And he's been talking about some very dangerous economic policies that would bankrupt my country, I think in two or three of his Premiership.

Fortunately, he is down to 16 percent in the polls when it comes to his popularity, but he's a very, very unpleasant figure.  Only six weeks after the IRA attempted -- the dissident republican group in Ireland attempted to blow up Margaret Thatcher and did actually succeed in killing seven people in Blackpool in 1984, only six weeks later, Jeremy Corbyn invited the IRA to the House of Commons.

That's the kind of person who is in some danger of becoming our next Prime Minister.

LEVIN:  Unbelievable.  We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN:  Andrew Roberts, one of the problems in our country is our youth are not being taught about our history.  I mean the Civil War, Revolutionary War, World War II.  Do you have that problem in Britain?

ROBERTS:  Oh hugely.  We also, by the way have the problem about our youth not learning American history.  The other day there was a survey and one in six people thought that the American War of Independence have been run by Denzel Washington.

But we also have our problems, 20 percent of British teenagers think that Winston Churchill was a fictional character, even though 47 percent of them think that Sherlock Holmes was a real person and 53 percent thought that Eleanor Rigby was a real person.

LEVIN:  This education problem, it just seems to be universal.

ROBERTS:  The problem is that the educational establishment don't believe in great men and women any longer.  They see for ideological reasons of their own, and the idea that no one is greater than anybody else, and so they won't teach about heroes.

LEVIN:  Horrible.  Was there one thing or two things that really surprised you in all of this new research that you did for your book?

ROBERTS:  There is a huge number, but the thing that surprised me the most was when I was reading the King's diaries, King George VI diaries, which the Queen allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to do.

And in those diaries, it became very clear that Churchill was tremendously frustrated with the Roosevelt administration at the very slow pace at which America got into the Second World War because he saw the Second World War as a great struggle between good and evil between the forces of Western civilization and democracy on one side, and the most evil regime ever to besmirch human history on the other.

He couldn't understand why the Roosevelt administration was not moving faster towards bellicosity.

LEVIN:  Do you think he'd be ringing the alarms today about a country like China?

ROBERTS:  I think he certainly would be.  Oh, absolutely.  And Russia, as well today.  No, he was able to spot these dangers from a long way off and he started making warnings and nobody listened to him for a whole 10 years.  
And then finally, when it was almost too late, he was proved right.

LEVIN:  He was proved right, and history gives him credit for that, doesn't it?

ROBERTS:  Finally, yes, although there are people, there is an anti- Churchill thing.  The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party has just called Churchill a villain.  You know --

LEVIN:  Why?

ROBERTS:  This is Jeremy Corbyn's number two called him a villain.  Oh, I don't know.

LEVIN:  It doesn't really matter, doesn't it?

ROBERTS:  It doesn't really matter.  If you've got that kind of sense, then you're never going to see somebody who's truly great.

LEVIN:  You know, it's real problem when you have a major political party in your country, and we have one in our country that attacks its history.  
Particularly, its strength, and that is the great leaders in its history, the great things that have been done in its history and like the focus on all the warts and all the imperfections.

This is a fantastic book, "Churchill: Walking with Destiny," Andrew Roberts.  It's a great honor to have finally met you, my friend.

ROBERTS:  Thank you very much indeed.

LEVIN:  Thank you.  All right, take care of yourself.  See you next time on "Life, Liberty & Levin."

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