“Although he was an aristocrat by birth, Churchill was widely believed to be not really a gentleman at all. On the contrary, he was often described as a highly gifted, but undeniable, ‘cad.’” He was “widely distrusted as a man of unstable temperament, unsound judgment, and rhetorical (and also alcoholic) excess….For most of his career, there hung around him an unsavoury air of disreputability and unseemliness, as a particularly wayward, rootless and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order. Before 1940, it was not easy for him to be taken seriously as the man of destiny he believed himself to be, when so many people in the know regarded him as little better than an ungentlemanly, almost déclassé, adventurer.” During the interwar years he remained “a shameless cadger and incorrigible scrounger.” “[His] friends were almost invariably drawn from [a] raffish world.” “By the mid-1930s… [he] had become almost a parody of the paranoid aristocrat: intransigent, embittered, apocalyptic, a reactionary of the deepest dye.’” These generalizations by David Cannadine have the mark of a heavy pen; they are somewhat exaggerated, but they are not without substance. Perhaps more balanced, but not essentially different, are the summary sentences by Andrew Roberts. “The national saviour image of Winston Churchill in 1940 is so deeply ingrained into the British psyche as to make any criticism of his conduct during that year sound almost blasphemous. At the outset of that annus mirabilis, however, he was not considered the splendid personification of British glory he was to become later on. Rather he was seen by many in society and in the Conservative Party as a political turncoat, a dangerous adventurer.” At best he was a “delightful rogue who lacked political judgment,” at worst “unscrupulous, unreliable, and unattractively ambitious.” Churchill’s wit and oratorical ability were not enough to overcome severe doubts about his judgment.” Besides, some of his enemies often referred to him as a “half-breed” (his mother having been American, and a woman with more than one past) or a “mongrel.”
Martin Amis:
He is more to our taste than he ever was to theirs. Lincoln now commands a consensus of sober admiration and gratitude that was quite unavailable to him or to anybody else during America’s bloody adolescence. Changes in aesthetic fashion have even rehabilitated his physiognomy, and drastically. Old Abe was not a plug-ugly (a thug, a ruffian), but that’s how everyone thought he looked: plug ugly. ‘The ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,’ said one well-disposed observer, who could discern only a ‘plebeian vulgarity’ in his gaunt and haunted face. To us, nowadays, that face is a vision of forbidding authenticity.
Bark-hard, slanting and angular, Lincoln stands like Geronimo among his slackly epicene contemporaries; in comparison, supposed heart-throbs such as General McClellan and, indeed, John Wilkes Booth are no more than mustachioed doughboys. In 1854, Lincoln resembles a man of the frontier, but one sent there by Hollywood: Robert Ryan rather than Ronald Reagan. A later photograph, taken in February 1865, two months before Lee surrendered his sword to Grant at Appomattox, shows the mouth and the eyes still human and humorous, while the rest of the face has been entirely parched by war.
