Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Ford Presidential Museum. And welcome especially to the very first program of our busy winter season in 2011.

I know it was a snowy night, and of course, I came a lot farther than you did, or most of you anyway, to be here tonight and it was snowy the minute you hit Portland you get the snow showers. Predicted or not, that's the snow line over on this side of the State. But we're glad that you made the effort to be here, and we know that you won't be disappointed.

It is most appropriate for us to begin our busy season with a program featuring our primary and long-standing partner, and that is the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley, and, of course, their esteemed director, Gleaves Whitney.

To introduce our speaker, it is my pleasure to introduce Carol Van Andel, the Chair of the Executive Board of the Hauenstein Center. And before Carol comes up to the podium, would you please attend to a matter of housekeeping, which is would you please turn off your cell phones and other devices that might interrupt our program.

Carol, over to you.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you very much for inviting me to be here tonight. It's a real pleasure, and no, I did not get this tan here. I thought I'd just answer your question-- you're all thinking that.

It is my pleasure to introduce Gleaves Whitney tonight. Gleaves, he has brought national attention to Grand Valley State's Hauenstein Center. And he has helped west Michigan to gain attention as a serious center of President Scholarship.

But one of his most favorite accomplishments to me is that he has helped to extend Ralph Hauenstein's legacy of leadership and service. For those of you who know Ralph, and who love him-- I don't think you love him as much as I do. Gleaves and I might argue about that. But it is so gratifying to see a gift that was given by Ralph Hauenstein who has dedicated his entire life to giving back not only to his country, but to this State.

The Hauenstein Center that Gleaves has brought to national attention certainly fulfills that principle. Gleaves Whitney became director of Grand Valley State University Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies in 2003. During his tenure, he has organized more than 300 public programs, including four national conferences covered by C-SPAN, and three internationally webcast debates. One to more than 3,500 viewers in 18 countries. And another watched on YouTube by more than 112,000.

He has overseen tremendous growth of the Hauenstein Center's website, premiered a popular web column called Ask Gleaves.

The first Presidential Q&A column in the nation, and created a leadership academy for students and young professionals committed to public service, one that is near and dear to my heart.

In addition to his public work, Gleaves is a scholar who writes and lectures nationally on a variety of historical topics. As director of the Hauenstein Center he is recently recognized by the Michigan Council for the Social Studies as "an outstanding mentor." And was awarded its prestigious Mel Miller Mentoring Award for 2009. Whew.

Please join me in welcoming Gleaves Whitney.

[APPLAUSE]

Well thank you so much, Carol, for that very warm introduction.

We are really pleased to have such a close association, because what Carol didn't say is that she goes way back with Ralph. When you have lunch with the two of them and watch how they interact with each other it's a real charge. We're fishing together years ago, and had all kinds of experiences.

So when we have Carol on our Executive Board you're really getting the real thing-- somebody who understands Ralph's mission, and somebody who's also fiercely dedicated to extending his legacy of leadership and service. So Carol, we thank you very much for your role at the Hauenstein Center.

I also want to take a moment just to thank Elaine Didier, thank you for your opening comments. And also, Joe Calvaruso. You know the three of us have been able to forge a partnership here with the Hauenstein Center and the Ford Presidential Museum and the Ford Foundation. I think it's a partnership that's second to none in the nation. We have a Presidential Study Center and a narrower facility such as this one.

We're very proud of the programs that we're able to bring to west Michigan. But it takes some great leadership on this side of the street. So Elaine and Joe, thank you so much for all you do in that regard. I'm really proud to be associated with the brand, the name, on the other side of the podium.

[APPLAUSE]

And obviously, it is such an honor to direct the Presidential Study Center in Ralph Hauenstein's name. When I spoke to him earlier today he said to tell you that he was sorry that he couldn't be here with us tonight. Then he said, what's the weather like up there? I told him the weather, gave him a little report, and he said, I guess I'm not that sorry. So he's right now where these plants grow year round and he's really enjoying that very much.

Let me give you a little Ralph update here. He's just amazing as an individual. He's about to turn 99 years old on March 20-- 99 years old. And all of you, of course, see him around town. Remarkable individual. When he was about to turn 97 years old, people would come up-- you know, we'd be having lunch or something-- people would come up to him and they would say, Ralph, how have you made it so long and such good shape? And he said, well, it's really a simple program. I avoid stress, disappointment, anger, frustration. I don't play golf.

Then when he turned 98-- he turns 98 and people are saying, man, you're looking so great, how do you do it? What's your secret? He says, it's really very simple. I won't eat organic food.

Well, a reporter was recently with Ralph and the reporter said, you know, this is really remarkable. You're about to celebrate your 99th birthday now, and we're so interested in how you're doing, and, you know, you're really, Ralph, if you think about it you're going to be in your hundredth year. How are you going to celebrate? And Ralph, with that quick laugh of his, he said, I guess I better start preparing for the next 100 years.

We know what he really meant. He's an inspiration. So I'd like to say, Ralph, this talk's for you.

I study leaders. I tried to search out what it is in leaders through their traits, their virtues, their upbringing, their environment, their challenges-- what is it that makes a few people among us really stand out?

This evening I'd like to do something that's been on my mind a long time. I recognized a lot of faces in here from Alli and from Grand Forum and other places, and you've heard bits of Churchill lectures, you've heard bits of Lincoln lectures. But I've never had the opportunity to bring these two massive subjects together.

I'd like to compare these two modern democratic statesman, whose deaths were separated by exactly 100 years. Lincoln, of course, died in 1865, Churchill in 1965 almost on this day-- it was actually January 24. He'd had a stroke on January 10 and then two weeks later he passed away.

They do not make a natural pairing, these two. In some ways they could hardly be more different. But that's instructive because, you see, it shows us the range of leadership that we can expect now in a democracy, especially when that democracy is under stress and its very survival is at stake.

I'd like to begin in the spirit of Plutarch-- greatest biographer of the ancient world who always paired two lives to draw out the distinctions, the similarities, the differences, the lessons that we can draw from looking at those things, to get a better picture of Lincoln and Churchill, and especially their inner life.

Let's start with their ancestry. Their ancestry was quite different. Lincoln's British ancestry was populated by commoners, rabble to the government in London. Today I think they'd be called white trash. These simple folk were encouraged to leave the pretty green hills of England and take up a strenuous life in the colonies. Over the generation, this white trash morphed into the rough-hewn frontiersman who would build an empire, a transcontinental empire from sea to sea.

Churchill, by contrast, came into the world with a gilded pedigree. The child of America's upper class and England's upper crust. His most famous ancestor, of course, was Sir John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, whose victory at Blenheim helped establish a transoceanic British empire on which the sun never set.

The circumstances of their birth was quite different.

Lincoln was born, as you know, on a dirt floor log cabin that measured 16 by 20, that's all it was, in the valley of democracy-- another word for the Ohio River Basin.

Churchill, by contrast, was born in a marble floored baroque palace spanning 175,000 square feet. Blenheim Palace, if you've been there, it's just outside of Oxford-- the heart of Old England, and amidst the fine houses and horses and hounds of the aristocracy. Churchill always said that one of the two most important decisions he ever made was to be born at Blenheim Palace. The other great decision he made at Blenheim was to ask Clementine Hozier to marry him. So he thought Blenheim was good luck to him.

Their appearance was so different. Lincoln grew to a lanky 6 foot 4, weighed about 180 pounds. Matthew Brady's black and white photographs show that great shock of black hair and then the beard that he sported starting in the 1860 Presidential Campaign. He knew that he was not one of the beautiful people of his day. So he developed self-deprecating humor as a defense. When Stephen Douglas accused Lincoln of having two faces in one of the famous debates, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lincoln looked at him and he said, "My dear sir, if I had two faces would I ever wear this one in public?"

Churchill, by contrast, stood only 5 foot 6 inches tall. He was about 215 pounds most of his adult life. The grainy newsreels that we see of him show a balding pate with wispy hair. Once when he went to a barber and asked for a haircut, the barber was trying to be very polite and he said, "What kind of style would you like?" Churchill looked at him, scoffed, he said, "Style?" He said, "A man with hair my thin doesn't have style, just cut."

Their education was so different. Lincoln called his formal schooling deficient. In the lonely forests of the Kentucky-Indiana frontier, it amounted to all of one year at a passel of ABC schools where he learned to read. write and reckon to the Rule of Three. But he read. He read anything he could get his hands on.

He read the Bible, he read Shakespeare, Aesop, Burns' poetry, he read the law-- always read deeply in the law. And you know those compilations of the law, they're not just the laws that have just been passed. The compilations of the law, pick up a book even to this day, always have Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the articles, the Constitution-- he read deeply in those.

Churchill was by contrast raised in the typical blue blood manner. He was initially brought up by a nanny, then he was sent off to boarding school at the age of seven. Then on to Harrow and then on to Sandhurst. A fine pedigree, indeed. Ironically, until he got to Sandhurst, Churchill did poorly in just about everything that he did in school. In fact, his teachers pretty much wrote him off and they said that he was one of the naughtiest boys they'd ever known.

Nevertheless, he dedicated himself to a program of reading history and English literature that was second to none. This passion for reading the great cadences of our language would find themselves in the nearly 20 million words that he would compose as an adult-- 10 million of those words just in that period in the wilderness years in the 1930s.

Late in life when Churchill had amassed honorary doctorates from around the world he quipped, as life has unfolded, I've been astonished to find how many more degrees I've received than examinations I ever passed.

Now, mention of school years brings me to a bit of an off-color story. You guys won't mind, will you? You can't do Churchill without doing some of the off-color stories.

Well, once a man in a men's room was very disapproving of Churchill after he finished at the latrine. And the man was a little snooty and he sort of raised his nose up and he said, "At Eton we learned to wash our hands after using the latrine." Churchill shot back. He says, "Well, at Harrow we learned not to piss on our hands."

[LAUGHTER]

Which reminds me of another off-color latrine story. And we could go on all night with these, but I'm just going to tell you one more. This is one of Ralph's favorites, so that's why I'm including it tonight. Clement Attlee, who defeated Churchill in 1945, was a strong proponent of government intervention in the economy, in private industry of all types, and it's policy that Churchill opposed. When Churchill met Attlee in the House of Commons men's room one day, Churchill took the urinal farthest away from Attlee. And Attlee said, "Are you feeling a bit standoffish today, Winston?" Churchill replied, "When you socialists see something big you rush to nationalize it."

[LAUGHTER]

Even I'm turning red. And Ralph always loved this follow-up punchline-- I want to get it just right. This encounter in the latrine is what's behind Churchill's famous characterization of Attlee, as "A modest man with much to be modest about."

[LAUGHTER]

OK, let's get away from the latrine stories, get back to serious material here.

Let's look at their social status-- quite, quite different. Lincoln's intense childhood poverty and his rustic frontier upbringing made him socially awkward his entire life. It was one of the reasons he married Mary because she was considered upper crust from Lexington, and she brought that more sophisticated quality, and that ambition, to the marriage.

At one extreme, Lincoln was embarrassed by his cracker relatives and the dirt former background of his family. At the other extreme, he detested silk stocking pretension in all its form, especially the plantation democrats of his day. At the height of his career there in Springfield, a successful lawyer representing the multinational corporations of the day, the railroad, the successful lawyer had a comfortable but not a pretentious house. At most they had one or two servants to help Mary.

Now contrast this with Churchill. Churchill trumpeted his aristocratic background. He wrote a two-volume biography of his father. He wrote a four-volume biography of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. And throughout his adult years he maintained a lavish lifestyle. You know, you see the newsreel of him and Onassis out on the yacht in the Mediterranean so many times. He went to the South of France two or three times a year. It's one of the reasons he always was hustling for money by writing books and going out on the lecture circuit. His capacious old house there, Chartwell, required of minimum of 12 servants.

Their personal habits were different. Lincoln rose with the sun. He didn't drink. He was a teetotaler, which is unusual on the frontier in that time. And he didn't smoke-- had nothing to do with tobacco products.

Well, Churchill, quite a different story. Churchill woke up at 8:00 to be sure. He'd take his little silk mask off so that he'd finally see light. You see, he was going to determine when he was going to see light, not the sun. And he began by reading the papers, and you know in the British system, the British get their mail first thing in the morning. So he would go through his mail as well. And he wouldn't get out of his bed until almost noon when he'd splash around the tub and water would go everywhere.

But he drank prodigiously nine manly scotches a day. That's not including the port, the wine, the champagne that he also drank with lunch and with dinner. And have you ever, have you ever seen a candid shot of Churchill without a stogy. He smoked nine cigars a day as well. Nine of those. Usually Churchill held his liquor well, but he could have an acerbic tongue by the end of the day if you crossed him. In one famous encounter, Bessie Braddock said to Churchill, "Sir, you are drunk." And he replied, "And you, Madame, are ugly. At least I will be sober in the morning."

[LAUGHTER]

Another famous exchange occurred when Lady Nancy Astor said, "Winston, if I were your wife I'd poison you." He said, "Nancy, if I were your husband, I should drink it."

[LAUGHTER]

One did not want to get in a verbal dual with this man.

Their war experiences were very different. At 23 years of age, Lincoln became a captain in the Black Hawk War, but he never saw combat by his own confession. The only blood he saw in the Black Hawk War was from swatting mosquitoes. How ironic given that he would be the Commander in Chief of the war that would take more American lives, 626,000, than all other American wars combined.

Churchill was a war hero by his 25th birthday. Go back to the Boer War, South Africa, and he's in this convoy, he's in a train, a lot of soldiers in there. He's technically an embedded reporter, one of the first embedded reporters, but he's also an officer. And the train gets ambushed and he's uninjured, so he's the one who's able to pull a lot of the injured out. And he removes them to safety and he goes back-- he keeps going back, and the valor is apparent and it's going to be written about. It's one of the first things famous that will be said about him. And he's running up and down the line, he's organizing other people to remove the injured by saying, "Be men," and he's fearlessly exposing himself.

Well, then he's taken prisoner. Would you think you can keep Churchill in a prison long? He manages to escape, he hides in a mine, and he's escapes by dressing as a woman and he was able to find his way to safety. And this made the 25 year old swashbuckler, "a modern Prince Charlie," one headline put it.

Churchill also, as you know, became First Lord of the Admiralty, World War I, beginning of World War II as well, before he became Prime Minister eight and a half months after the outbreak of the second world war, the most devastating conflict in human history with more than 60 million deaths.

These two individuals knew something about war.

Now while these two leaders could hardly be more different in some of the ways that we've just talked about, they shared a number of traits, and this is instructive, too. Striking in their similarities. In their youth, they did not inspire the confidence of their peers. Neither one of them would have come out of high school being voted most likely to succeed.

Their religious outlook was so unorthodox. Neither one of them was a confessional Christian. Neither one of them seemed to pray, except toward the very end of their lives. But through the height of their public career, not praying, men particularly.

Both mastered English to such a degree that their words became treasures in our literary anthologies. Both these wartime leaders were tender-hearted-- oh, were they tender-hearted. This is one of the most surprising things I learned as I kept reading about them. There's a story of Lincoln, for example, as a boy, and he wants to man-up on the frontier. He wants to try to please his father. We're going to get into this difficult relationship with his father here in a minute.

But sees a turkey crossing the garden, and so he takes out a rifle and he shoots the turkey. He felt so bad about shooting the turkey that he vowed he would never hunt large game again, or anything larger than a rabbit.

Churchill was also very tender-hearted. He built these lakes at Chartwell, and he stocked the lakes with his favorite goldfish. He had a number of geese and ducks and he named them all. If there were little ducklings, he would be so interested to make sure that all of them were surviving and all of them were fine. He would pick them up and hold them and stroke them and call them my darling and all of this. He had names for every one of them. He also had this little poodle named Rufus that followed him everywhere. When he was conducting his business there at Chartwell, Rufus was always there.

My favorite story about Rufus is one day Churchill was on the line with an important minister, and Rufus was starting to get all tangled up in the phone line. So Churchill yells at Rufus-- he's on the phone-- "Get off the line you damn fool." Of course, the minister hangs up immediately and Churchill has to call him back and say, "No, I didn't mean you-- it was my little poodle that was on that line."

Both these men had a tough time finding a woman who would marry them. Both had challenging marriages. Both lost young children. Both spent long years out of the limelight until a national crisis riveted their attention, grabbed their energies. For Lincoln, as you know, the national crisis was the spread of slavery into the western territories.

For Churchill it was a civilizational crisis. You could read this in his speeches in 1940 where Churchill was laying it on the line. "If we do not stand firm against the Nazis, we go down, maybe western civilization goes down, and we will be-- western people will be run by race ideology." So a lot is at stake which engages these men and brings them back into the limelight.

Both of these men were attacked physically in the presence of their wives. Not very many people are aware that Churchill was pushed by a suffragette. She tried to get to him and push him in front of an oncoming train. Clemey, actually, was warding her off with an umbrella.

We all know what happened in Ford's Theater in April 1865 when and actor's bullet found its mark.

Finally both, as leaders, had the capacity to make tough decisions, and so it is no surprise that these two leaders really became reviled for many of the decisions that they made.

Abraham Lincoln has been viewed by a vocal minority of Americans to this day as a tyrant because of his interpretation of the Constitution and because of the way he prosecuted the war. And there's an African connection to this criticism. He personally profited from the sale of slaves. He actually represented a slaver in a case against a slave. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free any of the slaves that Lincoln actually had the capacity to free in 1863.

And by today's standards he'd be considered a racist. He did not want black men and women to be integrated in American society. He preferred that they go to Liberia and re-colonize Africa. All these factors, critics say, cast a lot of doubt on Lincoln's reputation as the great emancipator.

Winston Churchill was also reviled by many over the course of his long career, still is, alternately hated by organized labor, suffragettes, the Irish, the French. Oh, the French-- you know that tragedy at Oran where a French north Africa, Churchill had to make the decision to sink the French fleet. Over 1,200 French sailors went to their deaths. 24 hours before they had been our allies.

Of course, the Brits who lost loved ones in the disastrous Dardanelles Campaign. And people everywhere who were colonized by the British had their issues with Churchill.

Also, because Churchill was one of the architects of the Palestine Mandate of 1923, he's viewed as really been the author of a lot of problems that persist to this day. If any of you have sent young men and women to Iraq, there's been some work out there which blames Churchill.

There's an African connection for him, too. Recently the Churchill bust that sat in the Oval Office was packed up and shipped out because President Obama's grandfather back in Kenya during the Mau Mau Revolution had been tortured and imprisoned by the British. So President Obama did not want to have a visible symbol of Churchill in the Oval Office.

But on a lighter note, let's not forget that Churchill took criticism in stride, as he sanguinely put it, "History will be kind to me for I shall write it."

None of the foregoing parallels, none of them, none of the contrasts I've drawn really, it seems to me, get at the essence of what made these two individuals great. If you're looking to put these two individuals in the company of the greatest hundred human beings who have ever been on earth, I would argue that it was their inner strength, their exceptional psychological resilience, and their courage to persevere. And for the remainder of our time together, I'd like to focus on this most significant trait of their inner strength.

What really intrigues people about Abraham Lincoln, let's start with him, is how this man became a great leader. It's a riveting question because of how humbly he started and how high he rose in such a relatively brief time. Russell Kirk puts it this way: "Lincoln was a man who until late in his life seemed thoroughly unlikely ever to be a leader of opinion or of party, let alone a statesman. We see him only three years before he won the presidential election still an obscure and gawky western lawyer, attending court in Cincinnati in his rumpled clothes, snubbed by Stanton and the other distinguished lawyers. The man still seems pathetic at best, if not downright ludicrous. All the majesty and loneliness of his tragedy was yet to come."

I like to put Lincoln's surprising his New York rise in the context of something that Booker T. Washington said in 1899 in his famous speech on the Great Emancipator. Booker T. Washington said, the proper measure of a man is not the accolades he received, the diplomas on the wall, it's the obstacles he overcomes in the course of his life to achieve anything that he actually is able to do. And by that measure, Abraham Lincoln overcame more obstacles than any other president who's been in the White House.

He overcame geographic isolation on a frontier. He overcame that hardscrabble poverty of his youth. He overcame the lack of formal schooling, the lack of scholarly credentials. He overcame his family's lack of inheritable wealth. He overcame the lack of political connections in his family.

He overcame the fact that he was neither handsome, nor athletic, nor charismatic in the sense that we expect our politicians to be today. He overcame losing jobs and losing elections-- not once, not twice, but again and again and again. Isolated, poor, unschooled without connections or good looks or a winning track record. What a great resume to run for president.

Yet the biggest liability he overcame was what Michael Burlingame called "emotional poverty." Early in life he had to cope with a cascading succession of tragedies. I think it was having to deal, to grieve through these tragedies, that built in him that unconquerable spirit. You know they say it's the pain that you feel that makes you-- when you work through that pain is what makes you tougher and stronger.

His only natural brother died early. His mother died an agonizing death of milk sickness. If you talk to doctors and find out what it's like to die over a week period of time of this sicknesses it's dreadful. There he is cooped up in a cabin with her, watching her-- an eight year old boy watching his mother waste away.

He had to help his dad, in fact, make her coffin. The sister he was close to died after she gave birth. Then when he was in his mid-20s, his first love, the love of his life, Anne Rutledge, died. It was also another terrible scene where he has to go in and say goodbye to her. These are heart-rending scenes. With all those deaths you'd hope that Lincoln then would draw close to his father. Not so.

Father and son were alienated from each other from the get-go. Young Abe was not like other boys on the frontier. He didn't like to hunt, didn't like to fight, didn't like the farm. What he liked to do was read and think, read and think. His father thought his son was lazy-- his father would beat the son when he didn't do all of his chores. The boys would sometimes have to hide from his father. He didn't fit into the frontier life or his father's expectations. So he was estranged. In fact, he did not even go to his father's death bed and funeral.

Now given all this emotional poverty, Lincoln was prone to severe depression, what they called in the 19th century, melancholy, melancholia. The melancholy was once so bad that Lincoln went fetal. He could not even get out of bed-- this was after Ann Rutledge had died. In fact, when a storm came over and the rain fell, Lincoln got out of bed, went to the grave, and threw himself physically on the grave, on the mud, because he could not stand the thought of the rain water reaching her body.

At that point, his best friend, Joshua Speed was so worried about Lincoln that he took the knives, razors, anything that Lincoln could have hurt himself with and he hid them.

Given all this loss, Lincoln had to develop inner strength. That psychological resilience to deal with the grief. Perhaps it accounts for why he was always wise beyond his years. Sophocles, the ancient playwright said, we only learn when we suffer.

More than 2,500 years ago, the Greeks created their archetypal hero out of Odysseus, a man who made an impossibly difficult journey. Maybe the possibilities of the American odyssey are best illustrated in our prairie hero, Abraham Lincoln.

My good colleague Brian Flanagan likes to point out Lincoln grew into a kind of mythic figure by passing test after test after test. His triumphs in 1860 and 1864 and 1865 owed much to the emotional strength long-forged in the crucible of hardship and defeat.

Lincoln earns a place in the history books because he was Commander in Chief during the greatest trial our nation ever faced. He earns a spot in the pantheon of great presidents because of the courage he showed in office. He earns a cradle in our hearts because of his character-- his character even in its vulnerability that inspires us and give us strength.

We look to our American Odysseus at Abraham Lincoln's remarkable odyssey from log cabin to White House. Think, what an example. An example for us all. If he could overcome the obstacles he did and get to the White House, maybe we can fulfill our potential. If he could achieve the task appointed him by history, there is hope for each of us, and the American dream can never die so long as we know Abraham Lincoln's odyssey.

Now let me complete this little study in the name of Plutarch, these parallel lives, by looking at the most important element in Churchill's leadership, his lion-hearted courage. His courage to deal with demons inside and out. What makes biography a good read is to see how people handle adversity.

As a historian, I always like to take a snapshot of a subject, of a leader. And see if you were to take that snapshot and ask will this person at this point in life become a great leader, what are the odds? I especially like to take that snapshot and tell students about that snapshot when it looks like there's not a chance for that person to become what they're about to develop into. That's the beauty of history. And those of you who heard my talks on Washington and Gandhi and Eisenhower, I've used this technique many times. And also on U.S. Grant.

Regarding Churchill we can point to several times when we might take a snapshot and just say he's finished, stick a fork in it. Consider his childhood when he mostly had to deal with his inner demons. If we were to take a snapshot of Churchill when, say, he was about 16 years old, we would encounter a deeply troubled boy who spoke with a lisp. A point referenced in the blockbuster movie that you've no doubt seen, The King's Speech.

He had been written off by his father-- yes, written off as somebody who'd never amount to anything. And worse, emotionally neglected by both his father and his mother. Oh, the letters that he writes from boarding school, they are so poignant. The letters will say, "Dear Mummy, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please come see me." Oh, it tears your heart out to see these letters.

The lack of emotional support from his parents caused deep psychological wounds that would haunt Churchill for the rest of his life. Well, one way Churchill salved these deep wounds was by pursuing worldly ambition. If he couldn't be loved he would be admired.

It's actually not a bad strategy for somebody who's had kind of a rough childhood. And by his 27th birthday, Churchill had distinguished himself in a staggering number of arenas-- at Sandhurst, on the battlefield, as a derring-do war correspondent, as a best-selling author, as a self-made millionaire as a result of his writing, as a member of Parliament.

Now these are accomplishments that hardly anybody attained, much less in the first few years of adulthood. It must be said the salve of success was only partly successful in suppressing his demons. His granddaughter, Celia Sandys observed that all the accolade, all the adulation, the reverence even that Churchill received in later years, never made up for that little boy in him. What he really craved, which was, "For his father to look down and to know that the son, whom he always said would be a failure, had actually been a success."

Well, it's not just when he was young that it seemed Churchill wouldn't amount to much. Take a snapshot of him when he was about 42 years old after the disastrous Dardanelles Campaign, we would hear Churchill say in his own words, "I am ruined by my own poor judgment." He would be finished off by his inner demon of despair and the outer demon of a ruined reputation. After all, more than 100,000 British soldiers and sailors died in that campaign in vain.

To Clemey, it was doubtful whether he could ever recover from such a grievous mistake. But he showed uncommon resilience again, against these demons. He did two things after the Dardanelles. He left the 1st Lord of the Admiralty. And he volunteered to fight on the western front-- I want you to think about that. I'm going to say that again. He leaves the office and he goes to the mud of Flanders on the western front as a Lieutenant Colonel.

And he doesn't stand behind the lines; he gets in the trenches. He is with the men who are making the charges in that inferno called no man's land where they fight over 100 yards of turf and thousands die for. It seemed the right thing to do after the sacrifice he had asked of so many others.

Another way he showed resilience after the Dardanelles, and [? Ernathy's ?] is going to love this one, he became a painter. He became a painter after his 40th birthday, and he would go on to paint some 520 canvases. And we're not talking about real amateur efforts here. We're talking about somebody who was eventually in the Tate museum, at galleries in Paris. Picasso said, this is a man who could have made his living as a painter. Sir Kenneth Clark said, "This is the best so-called amateur I have ever seen."

This was an accomplished painter-- beautiful, expressive paintings. Bold colors that expressed that ebullient spirit of his.

You know, because he took up painting after his 40th birthday, I think he'd be the perfect poster child for AARP.

There were other times when Churchill's career was poised to fall off a cliff. If we took a snapshot of him in his mid-50s now, in the so-called wilderness years, we would see one midlife report card offered by Victor Wallace Germains who wrote a book titled The Tragedy of Winston Churchill. It comes out in 1931. It's available-- I checked on Amazon.com this morning. There's a copy on amazon.com that's available for $250. Don't buy it, it's not worth it.