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I’m loving the BBC Podcasts app on my Android phone. Today I listened to a 27-minute Great Lives summary of Winston Churchill.
I learned that on 12 June 1940, after visiting the French government and learning that they planned to surrender to Hitler within a few days, his aid General Hastings Ismay saw that Mr. Churchill was depressed. When asked why, Mr. Churchill lamented, “You and I will be dead men in three months’ time.” Despite his doubts, he stepped up just six days later and delivered this stirring speech to the House Of Commons. It closed with:
What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.
Mr. Churchill made what was at best only a hope sound like confidence. That’s a talent that’s shared by born leaders. Steve Jobs was said to have inspired people to do more than they thought possible; it was part of his famous “reality distortion field”.
Both Messrs Churchill and Jobs (and Herr Hitler, come to think of it) endlessly rehearsed their speeches in front of mirrors, making sure that every nuance was just so, and their troops responded by accomplishing more than anyone thought possible.
Russ' space 