Paging Winston Churchill.

His emulators include Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush, and his detractors say he destroyed the British Empire, but as a wartime leader he stands alone.

By Matthew Price

Nov. 7, 2001 | June 1940, London. The Nazis poised to strike at Britain. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, gravely addresses Parliament. His oratory is stirring, grandiloquent, passionate: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty," the great man intones, "and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" It was one of his greatest speeches.

October 2001, New York City. The aftermath of a deadly, frightening attack, almost instantly compared to the Blitz. Thousands dead. A city in mourning. On the television, a commercial featuring the bright lights and sights of Manhattan flashes across the screen, Mayor Giuliani imploring would-be visitors to "come see New York united in its finest hour."

We are all Churchillians now. And the clichis are flying.

From Bush to Blair, Churchillisms have become a lingua franca for our leaders. "We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire. We will not falter and we will not fail," the president gravely declaimed in his address to Congress after the attacks, his words a clear homage to the rolling cadences of Churchill's "we shall not flag or fail" speech before a weary, stunned Parliament in the wake of Britain's ignominious retreat from Dunkirk in the dark days of early summer, 1940. "[Churchill's] words are being mobilized and once more sent into battle," noted one approving historian.

Then there is Giuliani, New York's "Churchill in a Yankees cap," as reporters took to calling him after Sept. 11, adopting one of Churchill's most famous phrases to rally the city (using it as a marketing tool, no less!). And just as Churchill, the gruff epitome of John Bull, visited the bombed-out areas of London's East End during the Blitz, comforting citizens, giving them hope, there was Giuliani, the New Yorker's New Yorker, at ground zero, somber, sober, his resolute determination invariably compared to Churchill's reassuring steadfastness as bombs fell on London 60 years ago.

This is fitting, for Giuliani is a known Churchill buff. In the days after the attack, he took up John Lukacs' book "Five Days in London: May 1940," a blow-by-blow account of Churchill's hard-won decision to fight on alone against the Nazis -- a decision he had to push through over the objections of his own war cabinet, which he wore down through a combination of perverse will, guile and clever persuasion. Even though Lukacs' book is not an account of the Blitz, but rather the circumstances that led to it, it is clear why Giuliani would find much inspiration from its pages. In Lukacs' account, Churchill was the man who wouldn't deal with the Nazis, who wouldn't take no for an answer, who rebuked his critics with stinging eloquence. (Of those who would negotiate with Hitler, Churchill quipped, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last." )

The rhetoric is inspiring; his quotations could fill a book, yet we forget that Churchill's now titanic standing in 20th century history has a complicated history all its own. His reputation has been itself a kind of battleground; generations of historians, politicians and critics have contested his actions and dissected his words.

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