Winston Churchill & Herbert Hoover: Their Finest Hours

Judging people by how they perform in the most visible job they have performed also causes problems in assessing the competence of the individual.  People do not perform as well in all kinds of roles, and they do not perform as well across time.  Focusing purely on how successful they are in any one position, or how they do in one task, can leave an evaluator with a distorted view of the overall performance of an individual.

Two people who demonstrate this are Winston Churchill and Herbert Hoover.  They were contemporaries, and each served in the top political office in their respective countries.  That service has come to define the way that people look at them, and yet the performance in that office stands out as an abnormal period in their careers.

 

Churchill, of course, is remembered primarily for his leadership of Great Britain during World War II.  He possessed the raw charisma and rhetorical skills necessary to instill his countrymen with the will to continue to fight a battle that seemed hopeless.  Had Lord Halifax become Prime Minister upon the fall of the Chamberlain government, as was a real possibility, history would undoubtedly have been very different.

He is justly celebrated for his role in defeating the Axis.  There were few who had the track record of opposing German expansion that he did, and thus had the credibility to be such a leader.  Of the others that did, neither Anthony Eden nor Brendan Bracken had the stature or the ability to do the job, as Eden amply demonstrated when he became Prime Minister in 1955.  Churchill truly was the only man for the job.

Yet the five years of his first stint as Prime Minister stand out not only for their success, but also for their rarity in Churchill’s career.  It would be unfair to say that this was his only period of success, but it wouldn’t be an outrageous exaggeration, either.  His previous turns in the Cabinet inevitably ended in fiasco.  Loyalty was not one of his virtues, and he famously crossed the aisle twice, leaving the Conservatives to become a Liberal and then moving back a decade and a half later.  He regularly undermined his own party, whichever it was.  He was abrasive, self-interested and egomaniacal even by the standards of politics.

In his early military career, Churchill exhibited competence, but also a disregard for the rules and a tendency to do whatever best suited Winston Churchill.  He perpetually asked to be transferred to a new theater, preferably one with an active war, not because of peculiar abilities to command, but in order to facilitate his journalistic career.  It was his writing that provided the overwhelming portion of his income rather than his army salary, and it was the real focus of his efforts.  That Churchill possessed physical as well as moral courage is undeniable, as witnessed by his brief command of a battalion on the Western Front after his first political disgrace, but the short length of his stay there showed a disregard for the continuity of command that helps to build an effective fighting force.

Churchill’s judgment was sorely deficient, and his Cabinet career prior to 1939 was one of controversy and folly.  He was very effective in helping H.H. Asquith pass the monumental set of Liberal Reforms in the years prior to the First World War.  However, he vacillated badly during several confrontations between the police or the army and civilians that may have led to unnecessary deaths of striking workers and of criminal suspects.

Far more consequential was his performance in two Cabinet positions later on.  The first of these is the more famous: his turn as First Lord of the Admiralty during the opening years of World War One.  This ended with the fiasco of Gallipoli.  The second instance was his championing of the return to the gold standard at the prewar value of the pound when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the mid-1920s.  This policy turned into an unmitigated disaster, responsible for much of the depth and length of the Great Depression in Britain.  Churchill championed the British Empire long after it had become a drag on both Britain and the subject nations, and he was utterly inflexible on the subject.  He also viewed the non-British subjects of the Empire with bigotry and contempt, including the Irish.

His handling of the Admiralty demonstrates most of Churchill’s flaws.  From the beginning, it exposed the extent to which his policy views could be influenced by what was best for Winston Churchill.  From 1908-1911, as both President of the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary, Churchill fought against The First Lord’s proposed budgets for naval construction.  When took over the Admiralty himself in 1911, he abruptly changed his position.  Along with the equally charismatic and unscrupulous First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher, he argued that British security demanded the building of a new class of dreadnoughts to protect the sea lanes from the Germans.

This was the prelude to his mishandling of the Royal Navy was the War began.  Churchill and Fisher found it deeply unsatisfactory from a publicity point of view that the War developed in a fashion that relegated the Navy to a secondary, almost passive, role.  When the German High Seas Fleet refused to sortie out of its ports, its British counterpart was largely reduced to waiting for a climactic battle that never came.  The closest it came to fruition, the Battle of Jutland in May, 1916, occurred after both men had been forced from their positions. 

Faced with this frustration, Fisher and Churchill schemed to come up with ways to get the Royal Navy involved in winning the war.  The two of them had a falling out over the means, as Fisher balked at every suggestion over the fear of his precious battleships being sunk.  Churchill went overboard in the other direction, disregarding potential losses and minimizing their possibility in Cabinet debates. 

This is the genesis of the Gallipoli campaign, which began as a proposal to run the Straits of Constantinople with obsolete battleships in order to bring support to the Russians and knock Turkey out of the war.  At each stage of planning, the deficiencies of a purely naval operation became obvious.  Rather than provoking Churchill into rethinking the whole idea, it kept snowballing.  Land troops were first added in order to storm the forts guarding the Straits.  When the force was deemed too small, and the landing areas impractical, Churchill latched onto a couple of Australian divisions languishing in Egypt and some offered French troops to shift the campaign into one designed to take the Gallipoli Peninsula and storm the forts from the landward side. 

That the terrain was unsuitable for the sort of advance, the army units involved untrained in combined arms operations and decent harbor facilities entirely absent from the peninsula never caused Churchill to re-examine his initial enthusiasm for the whole idea.  While he could often be distracted by clever ideas, he was constitutionally incapable of relinquishing a belief once he had latched onto it securely.  The extent of this is shown by the fact that he spent most of the Second World War still determined to launch a war winning offensive from a soft underbelly of Europe that was neither soft nor logistically capable of supporting the troop levels necessary.

Even one of the things that Churchill is remembered for getting right turns out to have been far more nuanced than is remembered.  Most people believe that throughout the 1930s, he warned stridently about the dangers of Nazism and Fascism.  This is not quite correct.  Rather, he warned about the dangers of German militarism, much as he had ever since taking over the Admiralty in 1911.  Churchill was less distressed about the actual political systems, or even fascist expansion in general.  He was sympathetic to Japan’s takeover of Manchuria in 1931 and was adamantly opposed to assisting the legitimate government of Spain when it was faced with a military rebellion.[1]

None of these flaws in Churchill’s leadership and administrative abilities ever went away.  They were present just as strongly when he was Prime Minister.  That he was effective in winning the Second World War was only partially attributable to his strengths.  Equally important was the administrative strengths of someone else.  General Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was every bit as strong willed as Churchill, and what he lacked in charisma he made up in sheer administrative genius.  He also mastered the skill of finding ways for Winston to stay amused without letting him micromanage the war.  The arguments between the two were legendary, but Brooke won far more than his fair share of them.  Churchill pouted petulantly on many occasions, but continued to provide the charisma and parliamentary ability that allowed Brooke and the military to win the war.

Herbert Hoover shared a number of qualities with Churchill.  Both were extremely ambitious.  Both were extremely hard workers.  Both rose to the highest political position in their respective countries.  Their career arcs, however, were almost exact opposites.  Whereas Churchill benefitted from a reverse Peter Principle, continually promoted until he found his position of competence, Hoover was a success at almost everything he did except for being president.

Born in Iowa to an assuming Quaker family, Hoover was reserved, circumspect and genuinely respectful of those around him.  He became a mining engineer and spent his early adult years working in Australia for a British firm.  In addition to building a reputation as a very good engineer, Hoover did two things of note in this stage of his life.

The first was that he and his wife translated a classic renaissance era text on mining.  It remains the definitive translation of the work, and is still in use.  Hoover also invented a process for extracting zinc from the tailings remaining after iron ore was harvested from the earth. 

At the outbreak of World War I, Hoover’s life underwent permanent change.  He left mining, never to return, first to help organize the evacuation of Americans in Belgium at the start of the war.  This effort to move people out of the occupied territory soon turned into an effort to bring food into it.  Hoover became the chairman of the Committee for Relief in Belgium.  Until the U.S. entry to the war in April, 1917 they operated a system of bringing food into the country and maintaining a legal structure that prevented the Germans from requisitioning it, ensuring that it was consumed by its intended Belgian recipients.  Both the British and the Germans objected to aspects of their efforts.  One of the British government officials most emphatic about stopping the CRB’s work was Winston Churchill, who argued that it was the Germans’ responsibility to feed the Belgians and that if they didn’t, they should have to deal  the unrest that the starving people would inflict.

Hoover ran the U.S. Food Administration for the duration of the war, and then became the head of the American Relief Association.  This organization helped to prevent starvation throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including the shipment of millions of tons of food to Ukraine and parts of Russia in the wake of the Russian Civil War until the Bolsheviks were found to be taking advantage of the shipments to export grain for cash.

These efforts raised Hoover’s stature to the point that much of the Democratic Party wanted him to be their presidential candidate in 1920.  Despite the entreaties, which included effusive praise from future foe Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover declined.  Instead, he ran as a Republican but fell far short of claiming the nomination.  Instead, he became the Secretary of Commerce.  He became by far the most influential and powerful Commerce Secretary in history.  In effect, he became the person who ran the bureaucracy of the entire U.S. government.  He pioneered a partnership between the American government and businesses that stood in stark contrast to both the laissez-faire policies of the late 19^th century and the adversarial stance of the Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson administrations. 

Hoover became the only person ever to go directly from a Cabinet position to President.  Unfortunately, his Presidency is remembered primarily for his inability to solve the Great Depression.  In part, this is unfair, both because the economics profession lacked many of the theoretical tools for understanding the events transpiring.[2] He also advocated for a more interventionist fiscal policy than is generally remembered.  However, saying that Hoover was more effective than popular memory would have it is a far cry from saying that he was actually a good president.  He championed the destructive Smoot-Hawley tariffs.  Perhaps more importantly than any specific policies, his personality and inclinations rendered him incapable of rallying the population’s spirit.  In addition to improving a president’s chances of re-election, doing so can have positive effects on the economy itself.  Across the board, comparisons between Hoover and Jimmy Carter are fair.

After his defeat in 1932, Hoover largely retired from public life.  He toyed with running again in 1936, and had support at the 1940 Republican convention, but mostly lived a quiet life.  His foreign policy views remained deeply isolationist, but he returned to his humanitarian work after the start of World War II, organizing major relief efforts for both Poland and Finland.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he offered to serve in any capacity, but the deep mutual animosity between himself and Roosevelt prevented it.  When that feud was buried with FDR, he recapped his work in feeding Europe, helping to organize massive aid shipments to what would become West Germany.

It is undeniable that Hoover was effective at the vast majority of things he ever engaged in, and did a lot of admirable work.  That he is remembered primarily as a failure says more about us than it does about him.  It is as selective as the perception of Churchill as competent.  It is not something limited to these two.  It is far more widespread.  To step aside from politics but remain in the same era, Oskar Schindler was a fundamentally weak man and a complete failure, except for one towering stretch of his life.

We need to keep this phenomenon in mind whenever we evaluate people.  It is not something limited to history.  Within companies, managers are constantly making decisions about who to hire, who to fire, who to promote and who to put in charge of specific projects.  It is critically important that they make satisfactory decisions.  In order to do this, they can’t be blinded by how someone has performed in the most visible position they have held to date.  They need to look at a person’s entire career, and even the nature of their personality as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

The takeaway from this is not that we need to make sure we are choosing the Herbert Hoover’s over the Winston Churchill’s when making these choices.  That would be to miss the point entirely.  Had he been pushed into obscurity earlier in his career, or had Parliament decided that his track record did not merit elevation to Prime Minister, the world would never have benefitted from the very positive qualities he possessed along with his faults.  If he was, indeed, the only person in British politics who was capable of keeping the Empire in the war in the summer of 1940, the world would be a vastly different place.  That Churchill was stubbornly incapable of revising his views on anything despite a mountain of empirical evidence became, for that brief stretch of history following the fall of France and the apparent triumph of German military expansion, an asset to be cherished rather than a trait that led to failure.

In the same way, it is important not to whitewash Hoover.  His towering ambition frequently rubbed people the wrong way, and he bore a large share of the responsibility for his poor relations with FDR.  Late in life, he fell into some of the worst excesses of the anti-Communist movement, although he maintained the isolationism that led to his desire to let Europe solve its own problems in 1939 and 1940 rather than support the British.  His worst sins, though, were on the matter of civil rights.  As Commerce Secretary, he treated African-Americans shamefully during the relief efforts after the 1927 Mississippi floods, and then reneged upon the promises he’d made to black leaders in order to get them to remain quiet about the injustices.  It was his 1928 campaign that first pioneered the Southern Strategy of peeling southern white supremacists away from the Democratic Party.

The critical thing is to avoid make decisions based only upon a portion of the available information.  Don’t automatically assume that the Hoovers of the world will continue to be a success based upon a long run of success, or that the Churchill’s are doomed to failure if retained.  Conversely, don’t assume, as FDR seemed to, that the Hoovers’ failure in a top job means that he shouldn’t be utilized in a position for which he will be effective.  Don’t assume, as the Conservative Party and the British public did that, just because a Churchill became a huge success that it is something they can repeat under other circumstances.

What is most important in choosing the right people is to match their qualities with the job and environment for which they are being considered.  Their history, and their triumphs and failures are less important in and of themselves than they are as a method for illuminating what a person is and is not capable of. 

Far too often, people want to simplify the decisions they need to make, and take the lazy way out.  When looking at people in their organizations, or prospective insiders, they often do this by focusing on one or two bits of their career and transposing the results of those instances onto the future without taking the time to understand what those events are really saying.  Avoiding context may make the decision simple, but it does not make the choices any less complex.  The results often reveal the flaws of the process in painful ways.

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[1] I agree with Churchill’s most vocal admirers that appeasement was the wrong policy for Britain to adopt, although most of them misunderstand Chamberlain’s motives and intent.  However, they consistently misdate the start of the policy as being the fall of 1938 and the Sudeten crisis, rather than the summer of 1936 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, as well as that Churchill was a supporter of appeasement so long as it was only left-wing governments that were hung out to dry.

[2] Keynes’ Treatise on Money was published in 1930, and his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money not until 1936.