 Good job. Frankly, I'd rather listen to the Alabama Shakes, but we're supposed to do our jobs here. I see some friends across the audience. Welcome. Welcome to New America. My name is Tom Ricks, and you're on the flight to Churchill and Orwell. If your destination is somewhere else, you want to leave now. I thought what I'd do is talk for about 20, 25 minutes, and then get into your questions and answers, which I think are the more interesting part of this sort of event. First, can everybody hear me back in the cheap seats? You can hear you? Good. Hear me. I want to begin by thanking New America for giving me a home here. Thank you, Andres. This is a wonderful place to write a book, and if you're ever looking for a place, you should apply here. Thanks especially to David Sturman, who's sitting in the back corner there, did Yeoman's work and helping me with research. If you have any problems with the photo section of the book, he's the guy to talk to. Also to Peter Bergen, who couldn't be here today because CNN has basically chained him to a chair all day, and to Dan Rothenberg, if he's around as well. Orwell and Churchill. This is the book published today, actually. This is my first public event for it. I am fascinated by these two guys. I've been immersed in their words for the last three and a half years, and it's been a real pleasure. They're both very good writers in a very different way. Churchill is an ornate writer, very elegant. Orwell is the opposite. Orwell's ambition was, he said, to write as transparently as a window pane. If Orwell was a piece of glass, he'd be stained glass, with light shining through it. Despite the huge differences between them, they came surprisingly to many of the same conclusions about the major issues of their time. Churchill was a conservative and an imperialist, and a loudmouth, and an extrovert. He loved good food, and man did he love good booze. Orwell was a socialist and an introvert. Orwell did not pay a lot of attention to creature comforts. One day during World War II, he came home, and his wife had very nicely left dinner for him and food for the cat. Orwell absentmindedly ate the cat's food and fed his dinner to the cat. Orwell and Churchill were contemporaries, especially in this most crucial period of both their lives, the 1930s and 1940s, yet they never met. But they admired each other from a distance. Churchill loved Orwell's last book, 1984. He read it twice. And Orwell named the hero of that book Winston, at a time when there was only one person in England that people referred to when they met Winston. In fact, he was the only politician in England that people referred to by his first name. Everyone else was Baldwin, Chamberlain, Attlee, Churchill, the people called Winston. This book is not a full biography. You could never get a full biography of these two guys into a book this thin. Churchill, during his life, he made his living by writing, wrote 15 million words in his life. I think off the top of my head that's the equivalent to about writing 1,500 books. The crucial period, as I said, for both of them was the 1930s. For Churchill, he referred to the 1930s as his time in the political wilderness. He split with his own party over the issue of appeasement. Appeasement was what the smart set in England thought was the right policy. Appeasement said we can negotiate with the Nazis with the rise of Hitler. We can find ways to accommodate them. And it was the official policy of the Conservative Party that empowered, so it was British foreign policy. And for a decade, Churchill stood up, beginning in 1933, when he made his first speech on the issue, and said, no, appeasement is not going to work. And again and again he uses the phrase, the fact of the matter. His key fact of the matter was that Germany is re-arming, and every day Germany is becoming stronger, more militarily powerful. And so his point was, you think you're buying time, but the longer you wait to confront Germany over this, the more powerful Germany will be. And this was especially true after Germany annexes Austria and gets Austria's gold, and then annexes part of Czechoslovakia and gets the Czech arms factories. And enormous, more manpower, probably with those two moves, Germany probably almost doubled its military and economic power to wage war. Churchill stood alone in the House of Commons. He said, the great dominant fact is that Germany is re-arming has begun to re-arm. When he said that he was laughed at. The general view was that he was an aging, washed up, marginalized politician. And when England declared war in Germany in September 1939, he finally was invited into the cabinet, the conservative government that he'd been kept out of. On that day, Chamberlain, the prime minister, got up and gave a speech that was very personal about all his hopes and dreams had been shattered. Everything he had worked for was gone. Churchill, a far greater man with a far larger view, got up and gave a very different speech. His speech was not about the feelings of Winston Churchill. His speech was about the future of the world and the nature of the war, which on that day, Britain had entered. And he said, and I'm quoting, This is a war to establish the rights of the individual. It is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. This is very similar to what Orwell was thinking. Orwell on the other side of the political spectrum, a socialist intellectual. By this point, of course, by the time war had begun, a lot of people had come to recognize that perhaps Winston Churchill had been correct for the previous seven years of his warnings. And then, about eight months later, he actually became prime minister in May 1940. It was an extraordinary time, the spring, summer, and fall of 1940. It was the greatest time of his life, and I think the most crucial period in modern Western history. Remember at this point, Denmark, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, and then France, all had come under German domination or control. Spain was fascist, Italy was fascist. England had some colonies and overseas allies, but England basically stood alone in Europe. And again, the smart money in England still thought that the right move might be to cut a deal, to negotiate a peace settlement with the Germans. Halifax, still the foreign minister, thought they could get a deal in 1940 under which they allowed Germany a free hand in Europe in return for being allowed to keep the British Empire. Churchill, in a series of arguments in May and June 1940 with his own cabinet, argues against this and says, at the end, gentlemen, if we are to bring the history of this island and its independence to an end, let it be when we are lying on the ground, choking on our own blood. This is also the time when England daily expected a German invasion. They had a code word, in terms certainly enough, it was Cromwell. That if Cromwell was broadcast, that meant German landings on the beaches were imminent, expected within hours. And in fact, in September 1940, the Cromwell code word was broadcast. It turned out to be a mistake, it didn't happen, but it was pretty close. So Churchill is politically shaking his own party, his new policy of standing firm isn't getting agreement from a big part of his own party or, as it happens, from a lot of aristocrats including in the royal family, and he's facing Germany. These are the months when Churchill gives the great speeches, whose phrases we know even now, blood, sweat, and tears, we will fight them on the beaches. This was their finest hour. Those are all spring, summer, fall, 1940. Orwell. Orwell also was transformed in the 1930s. And I think for Orwell, just as Churchill's greatest stuff is sometimes his speeches, some of Orwell's greatest work are his essays, and it begins writing in the late 30s and early 40s. Orwell enters the 1930s, a pretty conventionalist socialist leftist. And he always remains there. There's kind of a myth, especially in America, that Churchill became a right-winger, and that is absolutely false. Churchill to his dying day remained a socialist, but he became an anti-communist socialist, especially an anti-stalinist. That happened, that change in Spain in 1936 and 1937. He went there ostensibly to report on the war, very quickly became involved in fighting for the left side, the Republican government of Spain, which was being challenged by fascist and nationalist rebels. He was shocked by what he saw there, especially because he saw huge lies on both sides. And in fact, the Soviet Union's espionage organization, the NKVD, the secret police, was becoming more and more involved in running the Republican government, and especially in running security operations and espionage operations. Meantime, they also stole all of Spain's gold, by the way, which is still, and Russia has never been returned. Orwell came back on leave from fighting at the front to find that the little anarchist socialist Trotsky-ite splinter group that he belonged to had been targeted by the Soviets, by the NKVD. They decided to liquidate this organization because their biggest enemies were the anti-stalinists left. Franco and those guys were just a problem, but they couldn't tolerate the existence of non-stalinist leftism. Trotsky-ism presented a real threat to Stalin that he didn't want another leader of communism than himself. And so to be associated with the Trotsky-ite view was to become extremely vulnerable. Orwell comes back on leave, meets his wife in Barcelona, and pretty soon becomes involved in street fighting where his party is under attack. He fights there, he goes back to the front, where the soldiers on the front haven't been told anything about what's going on. His poom unit, his little anarchist unit, is still up there in the front lines. On May 20, 1937, Orwell, who was a pretty good squad leader, got up and he was checking his men's men on sentry duty. And because their lines faced westward, he had the rising sun behind him, which made him very visible to the outline. And a sniper's bullet hit him right here, passed right through his throat, between the windpipe and an artery. I talked to a doctor about this, there's about a quarter inch space, and the bullet passed right through there. Bruised the windpipe and injured some nerves so that one of his arms stopped working for several weeks. But oddly enough, didn't kill him. He actually writes very eloquently about lying on the ground, thinking, okay, I've never heard of anybody being shot through the neck surviving. I've probably got a few minutes to live. And he composes himself. He says, conventionally enough, I began to think how I'd miss my wife. And then he said, I thought to myself, I will miss this world, because after all my complaining, it fits me so well. But to surprise, and to the surprise of his comrades, he survived. His buddies took off him, flashlight, pistol, compass, everything else that was useful, because they knew once he got to the hospital, it would all be stolen. He went back, recuperated for a few weeks, and then finally went back to Barcelona, where his wife was waiting for him. When she saw him, she leaned in his ear and hissed, get out, get out now. His unit, his people, the poom, were being hunted on the streets. He became a fugitive on the streets. One day he was walking in Barcelona, and he saw a buddy of his from the front lines, and they both had to avert their eyes and not recognize each other. And that leads to a scene in 1984 in which your friends don't recognize each other on the street for fear that the other one might be under government suspicion or surveillance. And he bitterly resented this. There was real reason to fear. At this point, the Russians were liquidating the opposition leadership to them. And in fact, we know now from the KGB files that were found and researched after the end of the Soviet Union that the NKVD built and used a crematorium on the outskirts of Barcelona to get rid of their enemy's bodies after they executed them. We also know from the NKVD files that Orwell and his wife were under indictment as of July 1937 for Trotsky-eyed deviation, behavior, and treason. Had they stayed in Spain, they almost certainly would have been picked up and ended up in jail, where some of their friends died that summer in 1937 and others were executed when the Franco-Faction prevailed and won the Civil War. The whole experience, which I find fascinating, I just think there's a movie to be done about Orwell in Spain, not about the front lines as much as sort of this film noir experience he has being hunted in Barcelona. The whole experience transformed Orwell. He came back thinking not only is the right lying about what happens in Spain, the left is lying as well. It was a shock to find that it was the Communist Party line that it was not only moral to lie, it was actually you were morally bound to lie if it supported your party line. That that was the more ethical thing to do. When he got back to England, he collected all the newspapers he could find about the Spanish Civil War and sat down and read all the articles on them. And what he saw was what we would now call fake news. This is what Orwell wrote. It's a fairly lengthy passage, the only one I'm going to reflect on you. But it's really striking, especially in the context of today's debates about the news. This is Orwell. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely, denounced as cowards and traitors and others who had never seen a shot fired hails as the heroes of imaginary victories. And I saw newspapers in London retailing those lies and eager intellectuals building superstructures over events that had never happened. Orwell came home from England with a different view. He thought that communism and fascism were actually pretty similar even though they were seen as being at different ends of the political spectrum. He thought both were the opposite of democracy. And from then on, his mission became to tell the truth as he sought no matter what the consequences, no matter whether it antagonized the left or his own allies on the right. He especially became skeptical of everything he read, especially when it came from those holding power. And Orwell's lifelong mission after that was to study and understand the abuse of power, especially by governments. If David is still here, I'd love a glass of water. David ran away. Sharon Burke, former government official, looks like she's pouring some water. A position that no longer exists, by the way, because apparently global warming has stopped existing. So, the middle of the 20th century, these two guys, Orwell and Churchill, grappled with the great questions of the time. Hitler and fascism, Stalinism and communism, America's rise, Britain's decline. Remember, back then, the smart set, the intellectuals, many of them thought that Freud had figured it out. The key question of the 20th century was the subconscious, the unconscious, the workings of the human mind. Others, more political, thought Marx had figured it out. The question, the key question of their time, was who owned the means of production? The people or the capitalist? Those may seem odd now, but people really believe that those were the key questions of the time. Churchill and Orwell went a different way. They recognized that the key question of the time was how to deal with the rise of the intrusive state, what we now call the surveillance state. How can we preserve freedom in the modern world? And they responded in a similar way, bringing the same qualities and tools, their intellects, their confidence in their own judgments, even when those judgments were abused by most of the contemporaries, even when they were minority views among their own parties. And they both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association. And I think it's a good lesson. Anybody who opposes freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of association, to me, is attacking democracy. And that includes people who think that certain people shouldn't be allowed to speak at universities or who think that repugnant views, like those of Nazis, should be violently stopped from being heard on our streets. A thriving democracy allows those repugnant views to be aired, because the best thing for them is sunshine, which disinfects such infections. Well, I think we need to remember in our own times this approach. A, know your principles. B, observe the facts of the matter, not what you think they might be, but find out what they are. And then apply your principles to those facts. Do this especially to police your own side, your own group's views. Point it out when they are incorrect. Don't just attack the other side. Make your own side, you to it. A very good example of this, by the way, that I discussed at the end of the book, is Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from the Birmingham Jail early in the 1960s, when he is jailed for protesting illegal laws, when he's jailed for saying black people are being subjected to routine violence by the police and black people are not being allowed to vote as they should be under the law. He begins by stating the matter. He observes the facts. He realizes principles to them. This is how the book ends and then we're going to get to your questions or denunciations. These are the last two short paragraphs of the book. I kind of think of them as my last will and testament for journalism. We can all endeavor to do the same, pursuing the facts of the matter, especially about the past of our own country. For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of the minority to dissent loudly. The accurate view will almost always at first be a minority position. Those in power will often want to divert people from the hard facts of the given matter, whether in Russia, Syria, or indeed here at home. For example, why did it take so long for white America to realize that our police often treat black Americans as an enemy to be intimidated even today? Why do we allow political leaders who have none of Churchill's loyalty to traditional institutions to hold themselves out to be conservatives? The struggle to see things as they are is perhaps the fundamental driver of western civilization. There is a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Yeum, Mill and Darwin and from there through Orwell and Churchill to Dr. King's letter from Birmingham City Jail. This is the agreement that objective reality exists that people of good will can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter. Thank you very much. Now as I said, facts, questions, denunciations, first, wait for the microphone to arrive. Second, if you would say your name, I'd like it but you don't have to. It's still a free country. Is it working? It is. And three questions are better than speeches. Randy, Sim, Churchill is usually portrayed as a true imperialist to the end of his days. He never saw a reason for ending the British Empire or limiting it, pulling it back. Is that correct in your view and secondly if it's correct, how do you square that with your view of him as an opponent of tyranny and all that? Thank you. Thank you, by the way, for your remarks. Thank you. You're right. Churchill wasn't imperialist all his days. He thought imperialism was a good thing which was the classic definition of imperialism. He thought they were bringing the civilization. It's not unlike Thomas Jefferson being a slave-holder yet an ardent proponent of freedom. This is the fundamental contradiction I think of Western thought in the last 300 years. As Samuel Johnson put it so eloquently about the American Revolution, how is it that the drivers of slaves yelp so loudly for liberty? It's a contradiction. These are sometimes contradictory people. One thing I really tried to do in this book is discuss the flaws of both men. Churchill, I think, lacked empathy. He was probably a narcissist. Really only cared about his own feelings. Yet I think anybody with more empathy than him might not have made it through World War II through the crushing burden of taking over the prime ministership and thinking that they were likely to lose the war. He was determined, actually, to die fighting if they were going to lose the war. He would not leave the island. Orwell had his own flaws. Orwell had a real streak of anti-Semitism. Orwell is cringe-worthy when you read him right about women. His view of sex is basically it's not really consensual that all intercourse is a form of rape. There seems to be the only way he could portray it. And Orwell is also a little bit weird about power. He's a very contradictory guy. When he graduates from Eaton, he goes off and becomes a policeman in Burma. It just doesn't compute. All I can think is he had been bullied a lot in school by both teachers and other students. And I think he wanted to find out what it was like to exercise power. What is it like to be in a position of power? And he found that power corrupts. But he writes his first book Burmese Days. It's kind of about that. Being corrupted by power. Later in World War II, he keeps on trying to sign up for the military. He's rejected. His lungs are terrible. Even in his 30s and 40s. He can't get into the military. He wants to do something to help the war effort. He winds up going to work for the BBC essentially working in propaganda. If you remember in that time before the torture chamber that poor Winston has taken into is called Room 101. This is actually the meeting room at the BBC where he clearly felt tortured by the meetings there. After a couple of years, he realizes that working at the BBC is not really helping the war effort. And he goes off and he writes Animal Farm. And then he writes the great essay Politics of the English Language. And then he writes 1904. Much more of a contribution than anything he was doing at the BBC. Another question, please? Why don't we do there and then front row and then you? Okay. My name is Nancy and I'm interested to know whether you know if the English public in the 30s and 40s felt a responsibility to obtain the facts for themselves. And if you have any thoughts on why general public today seems more impervious to facts. You will not find a group in any society I think more impervious to facts than the British aristocracy of the 1930s. These were people who were not into the facts of the matter at all and rather resented it. And I mean it sounds funny to say it but it's quite true. They were very much anti-research. They liked academic theoretical research but they disdained applied science. It's one reason Britain that had been so far out ahead of the industrial revolution the first country to have the industrial revolution with steam power and so on. Really sits out the second industrial revolution of the late 1800s was the revolution of electricity, chemicals, manufacture and actually powered vehicles and machines powered by gasoline and electricity. And Britain's economy really starts to go into decline in the 1880s. One reason is that the British aristocracy did not put their best and the brightest into industry. They disdained it and they didn't like just they didn't like people getting their hands dirty and they also took too much money out of their businesses to spend. They didn't put as much money into innovation and R&D as they should or into payments of good workers. Instead they took it and spent it on being frivolous. So Churchill in the 30s is faced with this group of people who not only won't look at the facts are not interested in the facts and I think that's as great a danger as people peddling false facts. What you have now I think with fake news is people are not saying I have my own facts they're saying I don't care what the facts are and that's a dangerous position to be in. I see it more in the American right than on the left but I see it some on the left too and it's just a worrisome state of mind to see when people get into a mindset like that. It's Mike Clouser Do you know if Orwell had any interaction with the Lincoln Brigades in Spain? Orwell and the Lincoln Brigades is interesting. The Lincoln Brigades is a dominantly American international brigade that's fighting down further south east of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell is up around just south of the Pyrenees northwestern Spain maybe about 180 miles west of Barcelona. No, Orwell never fought down there but he was so bored on the front where he was on which is quite static that he thought it might be more interesting to go down there and join up with them and he was warned against it by a politically aware officer who said you should be careful down there they're executing the anti-Stalinist. It's funny I've actually read this book in some ways or in a staff ride I did. A staff ride is when you go out with a bunch of experts and examine a battlefield sometimes with people playing roles to say I was Robert E. Lee this is what I did, Gettysburg here is why I did it. I was invited at Johns Hopkins University staff ride of the Spanish Civil War several years ago and because I was a war correspondent at the time and a journalist at the time I was assigned the role of Orwell and your job is on a staff ride not only to get up and speak at a given point you have to be responsible at all times if somebody says Orwell what were you thinking about this? You have to have something to say. So as part of that we went out and we walked the International Brigades lines southeast of Madrid it was fascinating because the place they chose to look at was where there are some Americans and a bunch of Irish leftist and across the lines some of the people fighting them were Irish fascist and then the next day we went further northeast and we looked at a place where the Italian army sent in by Mussolini got in a battle with Italian leftist and you realize the more you look at this that the Spanish Civil War was in many ways a European Civil War being fought in Spain between right and left you also see the left sorting itself out I'm fascinated by how France handled World War II I was recently in Paris and it's really striking if you know your Vichy history you realize how much the French cooperated with Germany Marine Le Pen's showing in the polls is no accident there is a big chunk of the French right that is very sympathetic to that line of thought even now all these issues were being hammered out in Spain in the 30s which makes it so fascinating don't even get me started on Hemingway in Spain it's a denunciation from me we have a question here and a question there oh ok we'll get to you this poor guy here has been waiting for a while Andres by the way is the guy who basically invited me to come to New America to write the book here it's funny you should mention that because I'm kind of mulling this when you finish a book the big question is ok what do you do next it's long every time about what my next book would be after I finished my last book I said 6 months studying the Vietnam War because I realized in the course of writing my book The Generals there really is not a good military history of the Vietnam War they all give you a little bit of combat and then there's just all about diplomacy and politics in Washington so I spent 6 months studying the Vietnam War and concluded that I couldn't write it unless I spoke Vietnamese I was willing to live in Hanoi for a year we don't understand anything about that war we don't even know who we were fighting there's a very good book called Hanoi's War by a woman who was University of Kentucky Vietnamese American refugee who concludes that neither Ho Chi Minh nor General Japp played any role in the war after 1967 and in fact Japp Japp's people when they opposed the Tet the plans for it were put in jail in the jail that subsequently became the Hanoi Hilton for American fliers and Japp himself went into exile I say that as payload if I were to write the American version about a key period in American history I think the two events in American history that redeemed America a country built on slavery and the destruction of indigenous peoples the two events that redeemed America were the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement which concluded the Civil War the two most interesting people to me in the Civil Rights Movement are Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King and to me what's fascinating is how Rustin educates King in nonviolence King at first in Birmingham and I'm sorry in Montgomery, Alabama has weapons around this house stuff is being chucked into the windows crosses are being burned first thing Rustin does is he walks into his house and says get rid of the rifles you will not win this with violence with any tools of violence that to me is how that book would open who are these people, how do they do this Rustin is just fascinating I mean black pacifist quaker homosexual communist it reminds me of James Baldwin's great line when some interviewer said to him James Baldwin homosexual fiction not writer black and he said yeah I hate the trifecta so that's if I were to think of an American equivalent it would be that the great shock to me is in this relatively small population with a relatively small intellectual elite these people pass each other repeatedly like ships in the night one of Orwell's best friends later in life was Malcolm Muggeridge Muggeridge when he was at, I can't remember which newspaper I think the observer sat next to Randolph Churchill Winston Churchill's son and saw Winston Churchill all the time later Muggeridge helps edit for the newspaper part of Churchill's memoirs Muggeridge also is the guy who really pays a lot of attention to Orwell as he lies dying in a hospital there's all these other connections to them so for example Orwell knows Raymond Mortimer a literary critic who was having an affair for a while with a British MP who's very close to Churchill yet these guys never meet I think it's basically because Orwell was such an introvert he didn't go out a lot and he was a writer and he lived by his writing and he wrote a lot and one thing I know as a writer is that writing is time consuming and you have to be alone to do it so he spent most of his time alone Churchill got around that and doing a lot of dictation and in fact would have teams of dictation that's lined up one from 4 to 8 p.m. one from midnight to 4 a.m. he would just go for 12 hours at a time drinking whiskey sodas and dictating then he had a team of smart young Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates to kind of buff it up and put the facts in and then it would come back to him and he'd put the style in I think we need to wrap it up soon we have time for one more question I'm very enthusiastic can you define a little bit more exactly how Churchill influenced Orwell or Orwell influenced Churchill was there any quote by Churchill that he mentioned about Orwell or vice versa because the way you seem to be defining it is just two pillars basically at the same period of time and there's no overlap that I haven't seen yet exactly how you're trying to do the thesis but Churchill shows up a lot in Orwell especially in his diaries Orwell off and on kept diaries very prolifically commenting on everything from the weather which he liked to observe closely to the state of his chickens and his vegetable garden to politics so you see comments from him about Churchill all the time Churchill is the one conservative politician he admires who he thinks has imagination who is able to rise above the aristocracy he points out that one reason that he thinks Churchill is a successful politician is he said because he's no gentleman which a lot of people in England thought because Churchill was half American sometimes you see that other conservatives refer to Churchill as a mongrel in fact there's a whole school of thought that thinks that Churchill sold out imperialism because of his American blood and there may be some truth to that I mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted at the end of World War II Vietnam to get independence and he didn't get it because the British and the French said A, no, and B, you don't understand colonialism think of how American history would be different if FDR had gotten his wish Churchill on Orwell is a much thinner thing what we know is he was aware of Orwell in his circle knew some of Orwell's friends and read 1984 twice and loved it that takes care of the prepared part of all this and the questions I'm happy to sign books for anybody who wants me to sign them and I've got to be out of here in about 20 minutes or so but we can start now so thank you