#320 The Making of Winston Churchill Part 2

23:49He was the hard bastard. He's the one that built the family fortune. And with age and time, that aggressiveness may diminish, but it never disappears. And we're seeing that even when he's a much older man in his interactions with Churchill. And she says, on occasion, Churchill caught a glimpse in him of the old cutthroat. And other people saw this too. There is a woman who compares. She meets both Joe Chamberlain and Churchill. She compares both of them on separate pages. This is excellent. Let me go to what she said about Joe Chamberlain first. She had looked closely into his personality and didn't like what she found.

24:19By temperament, she concluded, he is an enthusiast and a despot. Running alongside this genuine enthusiasm is a passionate desire to crush opposition to his will, a longing to feel his foot on the neck of others. Then she has dinner with Churchill. First impression she wrote of him in her diary. Restless, almost intolerably so, without capacity for sustained and unexcited labor. Egotistical, shallow -minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism. He had what the kids call riz, what you and I would call charisma, superhuman levels of charisma. but with a certain personal magnetism.

24:58That's the word she's using. Great pluck and some originality, not of intellect, but of character. He talked exclusively about himself. He has no notion of scientific research, but his pluck, courage, resourcefulness, and great tradition may carry him far. So I wanna go back to this idea that other people constantly get you trying to limit your ambition, to try to dim your light for their sake. And I wanna compare and contrast it to the advice that he actually gets from Joseph Chamberlain. So this guy says, when he was told one day that Winston was caught up in reading yet another book on Napoleon.

25:28He shook his head in disappointment and said that Winston would do better to study the drab heroes of life. Framing oneself upon Napoleon has proved a danger to many a man before him. That's just another way of saying Napoleon was special. You're not special. You're not Napoleon. What are you doing? You're wasting your time. That's not advice that other cutthroats or other people that have achieved great things or have the desire to achieve great things would give you. So this is Joseph Chamberlain. Somebody achieved great things. Counseling a younger Winston Churchill. He says, if a man is sure of himself, it only sharpens him and makes him more effective.

26:04Remember, Winston said he had more conversations with Joseph Chamberlain than he had with his own father. That leads me into his relationship with his father and the fact that he's going to write a thousand page biography on his father. A main influence in Winston Churchill's life, just like a lot of people that you and I study, is the fact that you can always understand the son by the story of his father, that the story of the father is embedded in the son. So before we get into this, I need to put down this book and pick up Hero of the Empire from last week. There is a photo insert, and more importantly, a caption in the photo insert of that book that describes, gives you an overview of the complicated father -son relationship.

26:40Born into the highest ranks of British aristocracy, Churchill had an air of haughty self -confidence even at the tender age of seven. What he longed for most, however, was the love and attention of his father. His father is Lord Randolph Churchill. Lord Randolph had little time for his oldest son. One of the greatest regrets of Churchill's life was that Randolph died an early and tragic death, depriving Winston of the chance to know his father. And so now we have Churchill in his late 20s, maybe early 30s, I'm pretty sure it's late 20s, writing this gigantic biography on his father. The biography was meant to honor Randolph's memory, but writing it was also a way for Winston to understand his own life.

27:18He had never established a close connection with Randolph, though he had yearned for one. His father was a tragic figure, an ambitious and outspoken politician, sounds familiar, but a failure as a statesman. At 40, people would argue that Winston was just like Randolph, a failure as a statesman. Randolph was a restless man, always searching for attention, but never getting enough to please him. sounds just like his son, the proud son of a great family, but a difficult husband and father. Living in Randolph's shadow was far, for much of his life, Winston couldn't help wondering if his father's legacy was a blessing or a curse.

27:51And so the fascinating part is in this biography, he's not just trying to tell the story of his father, he's trying to tell the story of himself. The Randolph who emerges from Winston's book is a misunderstood hero who tries to inspire his party and his country to achieve great things, but who is defeated by the forces of reaction and selfish interests. Too soon, his wings are clipped and he slowly falls to earth. At the time that Churchill was writing this, he has no idea that he's going to find a similar fate for himself about 10 years from now. He lives large and dies young. A thousand pages long, the biography is a towering, gleaming monument, the son gathering up the disordered pieces of his father's life to construct a romantic vision that might guide his own career.

28:34What is also fascinating about this book is the fact that because his dad, I think his dad dies when he's like 46, something like that. There's a lot of people that were friends with his dad, that worked with his dad, that were colleagues of his dad that are still alive as Winston matures and becomes older. Winston becomes to know some of them and they usually hold an opinion like this. Winston is astonishingly like his father in manners and ways and the whole attitude of his mind. But Mr. Churchill is superior to his father. He adds a knowledge and industry that his father did not possess. Everywhere you go, when people meet Winston Churchill, they're shocked at his energy, his intensity, and his work ethic.

29:12What is happening there? Did Churchill know his father didn't possess these talents? Is that part of what drove him to outdo his father? You see a lot of lines like this. It was this deep well of strength that often left his contemporaries in wonder, and that sent him apart from so many other sons of the aristocracy, who thought it vulgar to appear too energetic. It also distinguished him from his father. Why would he want to be distinguished from his father? What killed his father? Randolph suffered for years from the debilitating effects of the syphilis that killed him. The whole experience, as Winston says in the biography, was an embarrassment.

29:48It was also heart -rending to a son who wanted to idolize his father. He never forgot the morning that Lord Randolph died, more than a half a century later. I'm going to interrupt this sentence. If you have kids, do not underestimate the impact. Long after you're dead, your impact on your children lives on. Listen to this. More than a half a century later, when he was prime minister for the second time, he surprised his doctor by suddenly remarking, my poor, poor papa died on January 24th, 1895. It was a long time ago. The date was seared into his memory. Strangely, listen to this. Strangely, his own death would fall on the same day.

30:32Churchill took his last breath at the age of 90 on the morning of January 24th, 1965, the 70th anniversary of his father's death. Churchill was special and it was obvious to a lot of people around him. There's this quote that has been on my mind a lot since I read it for the first time. It's actually in the other book too, and it's in this book. And the more I think about this description, the more I like it. So he has this lifelong friendship with actually a woman that he wanted to marry, and she turned him down. Her name is Pamela, and so they wound up becoming friends for 60 years. But she gave one of the best descriptions of Churchill, and the more I think about it, it's one of the highest compliments that you can actually give a person if you sit here and think about what she's saying.

31:11The first time you meet Winston, you see all of his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues. There's two successful attributes that Churchill has that I think we should try to emulate. One is it says they always talk about his energy levels. They say that he never seemed to run out of energy. I'm just going to leave a link down below. There's this excellent video. I think it's 11 minutes long. It's about this guy who sold his company to Steve Jobs a few years before Steve Jobs died. And even when he was sick, knew he had cancer, knew he was dying. And even though Steve was older than him, this is the guy that wound up selling his company to Steve and then going to work at Apple.

31:45Even though Steve was older than him and sick, he said that Steve was way higher energy than he was. And so I'll leave that link down below in the show notes. I highly recommend it. I've watched the video, I don't know, probably five, maybe 10 times. The story is fascinating. And so the second trait is the fact that Churchill, throughout his life, sees things earlier than other people. What I'm about to describe to you, this is eight years before World War I. He's observing the German military. He knows that they're a threat. He tries to tell people around them. People don't believe him. They don't agree.

32:13There's another great, I covered this book on Churchill. I think it was the first book I ever read on Churchill. It's called The Splendid and the Vile, and it's all about his time as prime minister. And there's a great line in the book that goes something like, you may not like Churchill, but he was right on Hitler. He saw Hitler for who he was way before most of the people around him. This idea that he just sees things earlier than other people. It happens over and over and over again. Remember, this is eight years before World War I. Churchill spent a week observing maneuvers of the German army.

32:40It was a chance to take a close look at the military machine that posed the biggest threat to peace in Europe. Though Kaiser Wilhelm insisted, that's the leader of Germany at the time, insisted he didn't want to war with anyone. Yeah, okay, well, what's coming out of your mouth and then what are your actions? Always go with people's actions. The Kaiser himself issued the official invitation asking Winston to be his personal guest for the week. Oh, okay, what are you going to do? Churchill followed a mock battle of 50 ,000 men in the German infantry, artillery, and cavalry. The regiment was a proud one and took itself seriously as a fighting force.

33:11This is Churchill's observation. The Kaiser gave him a special pass to inspect the latest German artillery weapons and invited him to a field conference with his generals. Well, for a guy that says he doesn't want war, he's certainly practicing a lot for it. Kaiser Wilhelm began showing off his knowledge of all the great battles fought over time. His history lesson had a serious point. He was clearly suggesting that blood would be spilled again if any army was unwise enough to attack the Germans. His words reinforced the message. Germany was ready and willing to make war if pushed. So Churchill goes back and he says he gave the Germans credit for superiority in numbers, quality, discipline, and organization.

33:48This is Churchill's writing, right? They have superiority in numbers, quality, discipline, and organization. These alone, he emphasized, were four good roads to victory. You should pay attention to what they're doing. We should prepare now, eight years before war breaks out. Third trait is Churchill's force of personality. And it's really interesting because this is described by one of his lovers. It's remarkably consistent. This is Churchill as a young man. It's going to sound a lot like the Churchill, the one that the world came to know and love. Winston discoursed on the brevity of human life and his determination to accomplish great things in the short time available.

34:24He told her, we are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm. More important, she perfectly understood the nature of his talk, that it was essentially Winston thinking aloud. He was highly opinionated, strong -willed, idealistic, romantic, intense, overwhelming, and demanding. He possessed a boundless, boundless drive. Churchill had big ideas, and he wanted to act on them without delay. He says stuff like this to everyone all the time. Sometimes I feel as if I could lift the whole world on my shoulders. And the reason this is important to repeat is because his internal world, right? His internal monologue is telling him, I'm special, I'm special, I'm special.

35:03And then the external world starts to agree with his internal world, telling him that you are special. And you see that at his rapid rise, at 33 years old, he was finally taking his place in cabinet and was the youngest to do so in almost half a century. This is so important to understand because then you realize the shock. Imagine if you had this relentless self -belief since the time you were seven, they said. From the time you were seven, then everything around you, you rise faster and at a younger age than anybody else. You get to 40, you're thinking, okay, the next stop is prime minister, and then the exact opposite happens.

35:32You get kicked out of government, and you think your entire life is over. We're going to get there in a minute. More personality traits that he shares with Steve Jobs. He generated his own light. It was intense, direct, and concentrated as a beam. Another trait that Churchill shares with Steve Jobs is the fact that he raises the bar and pushes the pace for everyone around him. This is going to be Churchill's frenemy, I guess is the way you would describe it. They're serving together, they're fellow politicians, and even his own biographer notices a distinct difference between Lloyd George's life before Churchill and after Churchill.

36:04This is what an ambitious, somebody that's raising the bar for you, that's pushing the pace, what that looks like, the effect they have in your own life. The answer was that his greatest cabinet colleague and rival, Winston Churchill, came afterwards, stirring Lloyd George to do more than simply sound radical. Once Churchill joined the cabinet, everything changed. As a pair of powerful personalities with high ambitions, Winston and Lloyd George came to dominate the liberal government, both as partners and as rivals, with each trying to reinforce or undermine the other, depending on their shifting self -interest.

36:34Winston was the spark that ignited the change. Winston made it clear that he was not there to do business as usual. I intend to make myself damn disagreeable, he said. This phenomenon was noticed by Paul Graham when he was building Why Combinator. He talks about in his essays why ambitious people need. They must be around other ambitious people. Let me read you an excerpt from one of Paul Graham's essays. Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.

37:10Probably the most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement that they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age. And so Churchill's doing this not only for the people around him, but he's actually trying to change the institution in which he's operating. He tries to do it for the government. And really, you could think about this as not as what he's doing as a politician, but this is his blueprint for life. In effect, Churchill was proposing to do for the nation what he had been doing for himself, to achieve quick success by thinking big, taking risks and making the most of opportunities why they lasted.

37:39And then just a few observations that I enjoyed from the human aspect of his life, not just his career. And it's the fact that he did want a family. He wanted love. You see him in this book struggle, try to find the right woman. He attempts this many times, finally gets it right, gets married, locks out, finds a supportive lifelong spouse, and then becomes a father for the very first time at age 34. And he's writing, There's a bunch of letters that he writes to his wife that are fascinating, but I love this. Like, he's happy that he's not single anymore. Being a father and having a family is very important to him.

38:13Bachelor life had been lonelier than Winston had wanted to admit, and now he finally had a companion with whom he could share everything. And so he writes to his wife, I feel a vivid realization of all you are to me, and of the good and comforting influence you've brought into my life. It is a much better life now. And so Churchill's aggressive nature, obviously, is going to be loved by some people and hated by others. he winds up doing a good job of offending two kings. One king that he was able to offend is Edward VII. And if you really think about this description of Edward VII and how he chose to live his life, Churchill was really offended by the behavior.

38:48It's just the worst kind of monarch that you could ever imagine, and I don't know much about what he did to the country as a whole. I'm talking about how he lived his life. Churchill just viewed him as just this fat, lazy king. And you'll see why with this description. Edward VII would indulge his gargantuan appetite with gusto. It was the good life that had ruined his health, adding so much bulk to his modest frame that he could barely move at the end. He was so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs. Life had become one long feast. Much of it served to him by a parade of society beauties who added their fond caresses, whoever knows what that means, who added their fond caresses to his many other comforts.

39:31So he just sought comfort, sought a life of idleness, sought a life of the easiest path through life that you could possibly imagine leads to an early death. This is the exact opposite. Again, I know I'm repeating myself, but Churchill, like Teddy Roosevelt before him and a bunch of other people, I just like people that do things when they don't. They're taking the harder path when they don't need to. And you see this later on in his life in that book, The Splendid and the Vile I mentioned earlier. There's notes that Churchill sends to his son where he hates idleness. He hates laziness. He hates it in other people, and he hates it within his family members.

40:02And so he writes this to his young adult son at the time. And he says, Your idle and lazy life is very offensive to me. You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence. And so if his son and the king were searching for the easiest path possible, Churchill did the opposite. And we see this with a letter that his wife writes to him. Dearest, you work so hard, she wrote him, and have so little fun in your life. She was only partly right. Hard work in exciting times was Winston's idea of fun. And the constant desire to push the pace, the constant intensity that he conducted all of his affairs with, it could be exhausting to people around him.

40:42He was demanding in all things that mattered to him, which was often exhausting for others who lacked his intensity. And even the way he plays, this is the surprising thing that he liked best. I don't remember reading this before, but it comes up a bunch of the times in the book, so I have to imagine that it was in the other biographies I read. But it says, One of Winston's favorite ways to relax was to dig in the sand. So he'd go down to these beaches, and sometimes he'd get caught doing this. And this is what he's doing on the beaches. He would create battle defenses and pretend campaigns as a way to indulge his ever -active imagination.

41:13Idle onlookers were not welcome. This was serious work in its own way, giving the builder a refreshing chance to create worlds of his own without having to ask anyone else's opinion or permission. It was one of the things that he liked best in the world. And out of everything else that you and I are talking about, right? If we're really like, okay, let me, what we're trying to do here is like trying to figure out what was a young Winston like? What was he doing that is going to prepare him for his greatest moment that he could not have possibly predicted was going to come? And this idea is like, what was he doing when he was playing?

41:45going down to the beach and actually engaging in these campaigns, almost preparing himself for real life events that are going to happen 25, 30 years into the future. And this kind of intensity and practice and dedication leads to, again, another sign from the external world that he is as special as he thinks he is. At 37 years old, he becomes the civilian head of the strongest naval force in the world. He becomes the first Lord of the Admiralty, I think that's how you pronounce it. And as soon as he takes over the organization, we see his personality imbibed in the organization. He said that the only results that really mattered was the fleet, so his ship's ability to confront an enemy with a few minutes of shattering, blasting, overpowering force.

42:27The only punch worth throwing was a knockout punch. This is Churchill personified. Said Churchill, the best way to make war impossible is to make victory certain. He did nothing by halves. And so immediately goes and tries to fix all the problems that he sees with Britain's Navy. The first thing is the fact that, hey, our ships have to be fast. And ships go faster if they burn oil instead of coal. At the time, all of his ships burn coal. So he's like, okay, let's burn oil. But they're like, Winston, here's the problem. Britain doesn't have a reliable supply of oil. Now, this is crazy. This blew my mind.

43:00You know British Petroleum, BP. Winston played a role in creating it. So he solves the problem, the fact, hey, I can't, I want to burn oil. My ships are burning oil, not coal. We don't have any oil. Okay, so let's go buy a majority interest in an oil company. So he says he would solve that problem by taking Britain into the petroleum business, arranging for the government to acquire a majority interest in the Anglo -Persian Oil Company, which is now British Petroleum, or as we know it, BP. That is insane. That blew my mind. Second problem. The most advanced gun of the day is these 13 .5 -inch guns that are on these, like the naval destroyers, right?

43:36He's like, that's not big enough. I want a 15 -inch gun. And everybody tells him like, well, here's the problem. No one knew if the 15 inch gun would work because as Churchill put it, no such thing as a modern 15 inch gun existed. None had ever been made, but that did not deter him. So I get to this part, right? He's essentially saying, hey, team, I want you to build something that we don't know. Like one, no one else has. And the reason no one else has is because no one knows if it can be done. But if we can figure out how to do it, then that means we'll be the only ones with it. A long time ago, like two or three years ago, probably three years ago.

44:07I read this biography of Larry Ellison. That's insane. I should actually reread it. It's called The Billionaire and the Mechanic. It is about, I think the subtitle is how Larry Ellison and a car mechanic teamed up to win sailing's greatest race, the America's Cup, twice. And so I'm reading this section of this Churchill book, and it made me think because Larry was, you know, he's an extreme winner. I think I said in that book that if Michael Jordan sold Enterprise Software, he'd be Larry Ellison. Like they have the same kind of competitive, like psychopathic competitive drive. And so Larry pushes his team.

44:37They're losing at the race. He's like, hey, we're going to build the largest hard wing. It's like thing that goes on top of the sailboat and everybody's around him. It's like, you can't do that. No one's ever done it. And Larry's way he thinks about it's actually kind of genius. He goes, this is what Larry said. I know that most people think that trying to build a hard wing of this size is crazy, but that's the beauty of the idea. The other side isn't trying to build one. So we'll have a wing and they won't. And what he's really saying is like, if we can do something really hard, we won't have any competition.

45:07It's exactly what Winston is saying here. Winston was willing to make plans on a grand scale and to be imaginative and daring when others were content to think small and go slow. I think the fact that Churchill was a relentless student of history, I think he stumbled upon and discovered something that I think you and I also know. if you read a lot of biographies, if you're studying and you're learning from history, this stretches your own story. It makes you reach farther. It makes you believe that you're capable of more than maybe you're doing right now. And we see this as a lifelong student of the country's history.

45:43Churchill was allowed to play a role in the epic story of the British naval power. He was following in the steps of giants who had defeated the Spanish Armada in the 16th century and Napoleon's Navy in the 19th. He did not want to be the man who let the Royal Navy be overwhelmed by the Germans. And so as I mentioned earlier, Churchill has this talent to be able to see things usually years in advance to other people. He wants to prepare the Navy, wants to be the world's best Navy, wants more ships. And the cabinet keeps telling him, no, you didn't need four battleships. What's wrong with it? You only need two.

46:15Be reasonable. I hate that word. The worst advice I've ever heard is like, be realistic. That's terrible advice. So it says, you know, you don't need four more battleships. You know, I think two is going to be enough. Two, you know, we feel in the cabinet that is more reasonable. And I love this, this few sentences. That word reasonable was the key. Winston's opponents never tired of saying that he was unreasonable. He wouldn't listen to reason, they said. He wouldn't compromise, they said. And part of the reason they thought he was so unreasonable is because they didn't believe war was actually going to happen.

46:48There's a lot of statements in the book. They're like, it's impossible for two civilized European countries, such as Germany and England, to actually engage in warfare together, or against each other, rather. And yet, just a year or two later, in August 1914, the war with Germany actually began. Still only 39. This is just great, great writing. Still only 39, Winston was now at the center of a world war. It had taken him only 13 years to rise from a parliamentary backbencher to one of the top posts in an empire at war. He now had the chance to change the course of world history and to prove the worth of his heroic view of life.

47:25Winston enjoyed an enormous advantage, for this was his hour, the arrival of the war that he had seen coming and had prepared himself to fight, whether by land, sea, or air. And what is shocking is how everybody around him does not have the same approach. They weren't taking it seriously. There's a bunch of people in high positions of the government. It says, for the British, what would help to turn the war into such a long and bitter slog was the half -hearted way in which their leaders threw the nation into the fight and then failed so long to pursue it vigorously. Churchill's rival, this guy named Reggie McKenna, who actually wanted to read to be the head of the Navy and not Churchill, starts saying stuff like this.

48:02Churchill talks well, he says, but he's never done anything big. He continued in this vein for some time, completely blind to the irony that he was golfing while Churchill was hard at work. Churchill gave a forthright explanation of his position. If we have to fight, we must fight with single hearted conviction. And so I just have three notes on this page. Number one, pursue your goal vigorously. Number two, non self -aware idiots surround you. Like the guy saying, Churchill's not doing anything while this guy is golfing. Churchill literally puts himself in harm's way repeatedly. He risks his physical safety, which he does not need to do, which is also what he did earlier in life, as we talked about last week over and over again why this guy's on a fucking golf course non -self -aware idiots surround you that is number two number three fight with single -hearted conviction and so we see the fact that Churchill was willing to put skin in the game he shocked the military and most of the nation when he abruptly decided to throw himself into combat as a field commander in all but name as first lord lord of the admiralty he wasn't supposed to be on the bridge of a battleship under fire much less commanding troops on the front lines.

49:08But on October 3rd, when he went to the Belgian port of Antwerp to observe the fierce fighting there, he ended up staying three days and leading the beleaguered forces as if he had suddenly been transformed into a general. This is leadership. He was under continuous and heavy fire and the sheer violence of it, as well as the drama of the last stand against an overwhelming German force awakened every fighting instinct in his body. And even with that, the shocking thing is how fast his fall comes. Remember, he gets the job at 39. At 40, he is disgraced. And it comes down to the Gallipoli campaign.

49:42He definitely played a role in formulating this idea for this campaign. I've heard it's always his blame. That's what I understand. This book makes the case that, you know, definitely he was definitely to blame. But, you know, he took the lion's share of the blame and there was a lot of people to blame. But it says he was wrong. It was a disaster from start to finish. As the situation went from bad to worse in the next few months, mistakes after mistakes was made by both the navy and especially the army which tried to clear gallipoli of turkish troops who proved to be far more disciplined and determined than the british had been willing to believe talked about that last week there is this tendency for large powerful countries just like large powerful companies they get fat and lazy and arrogant because they've they've just had success after success after success this inevitably leads them to underestimate underestimate their opponent.

50:27That is never smart to underestimate anybody. It is all downside, no upside. They did this in the Boer War. They called it like, we can't lose a bunch of these farmers, right? They do this two decades later in Singapore, like I talked about on the Alistair Urquait. I think it's episode 318, a few episodes back. Same exact thing here. They're like, these Turkish troops, we're going to smoke them. And the result was something around 20 to 40 ,000 dead British soldiers. Tens of thousands died as the fighting dragged through the rest of the year. It was one long misadventure that did nothing to change the course of the war.

50:58The blame for this tragic campaign was put at the feet of Churchill, who was made to pay the price for the failure. This setback was so big that a suitably big scapegoat was needed, and Winston was it. With astounding suddenness, his meteoric rise flamed out. He's going to get kicked out of government. The people he thought were his friends did not see any reason to help him. Supposed friends and allies say stuff like, Churchill will have to go. He will be a rumened man. He is kicked out. He is no longer allowed to be the first lord of the admiralty. He says, I am finished, he lamented. I am finished in all that I care for.

51:32This is what he cares about, the waging of war and the defeat of the Germans. The reversal of fortunes could not have been more shocking. And because he was so self -confident and so boastful, this is obviously going to be predictable as well. Winston's enemies were jubilant. They were finally having their revenge for all his moments of defiance and imprudence. For a long time, Winston was in a state of shock. It really was describing what happens when you lose a sense of purpose. For a long time, Winston was in a state of shock. He wandered around like a man half alive. He looked years older, his face pale.

52:06He was very depressed. It was not simply his misfortune that weighed on him. It was the abrupt loss of purpose. He spent five months idle, waiting for opportunities that never came. He made up his mind to start his career all over at the age of 40. He was suddenly confronted with the possibility that he had reached the last chapter and now he must fight or die. Remember, the war is not over. He couldn't take any comfort from the story of his father's life, for Lord Randolph had never managed to revive his own career after falling from power in his late 30s, just like he is, right? Winston must have been haunted by that fact and have wondered whether he was simply repeating a family tragedy.

52:46His father lingered too long and suffered a slow death. Winston would take his chances in the trenches. His star had grown so dim that he didn't think his reputation could suffer much more. From this point, it seemed that he could only rise if he survived. Ever the gambler, he was willing to throw the dice once more and risk everything for another chance to restore his fortunes. He arranged for a letter to be given to Clemmie, his wife, in the event of my death. He is going off into the trenches of World War I. Death is a very real possibility. This letter was supposed to be the voice of a ghost speaking to Clemmie in case his story had reached its end without the chance to add one more chapter.

53:26He wrote, Do not grieve for me too much. I am a spirit confident of my rights. Death is only an incident and not the most important which happens to us in this state of being. On the whole, especially since I met you, my darling one, I have been happy, and you have taught me how noble a woman's heart can be. If there's anywhere else, meaning an afterlife, if there's anywhere else, I shall be on the lookout for you there. Meanwhile, look forward, feel free, rejoice in life, cherish the children, guard my memory. God bless you. Goodbye, Winston. and that is where I'll leave it for the full story highly recommend reading this book and I would also read Hero of the Empire I think they're both fantastic if you find yourself wanting to learn more on Churchill I made two other podcasts about him it's episode 196 and episode 225 if you buy this book or any of the books using the link below you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time that is 320 books down 1 ,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon