History has been kind to Winston Churchill, but historians recently have not. Two new biographies of Britain's wartime prime minister characterize him as a racist.
"Churchill," by Clive Ponting, published Thursday, and "Eminent Churchillians," by Andrew Roberts to be published in July, reflect a new strongly critical attitude among some writers to Britain's portly, cigar-chomping leader.Ponting, a former Defense Ministry civil servant, says Churchill was an alcoholic racist with near-fascist views akin to Italy's Benito Mussolini.
Churchill, prime minister from 1940-45 and 1951-1955, died in 1965 at age 90 hailed as one of the world's greatest statesmen.
He was not always so popular and spent most of the 1930s as a rank-and-file member before becoming prime minister. Details of his heavy drinking and other traits have long been known but have not until now been so harshly criticized.
"He wrote so much about himself that his interpretation of his own life has become the accepted one," Ponting told The Associated Press by phone.
"We're 30 years on from his death. We have a new perspective on history and there's a lot of information that has come out in archives, public and private.
"He was a racist. He saw the world as divided into races and the white Anglo-Saxon was at the top. He called the Chinese `pigtails' and `chinks' and the Indians `baboons.' "
He describes Churchill as "almost a fascist, very close to Mussolini in his views of how to run a state."
Roberts, in an article published last month in The Spectator magazine, said Churchill was racist and tried to stop nonwhite immigration to Britain.
But Martin Gilbert, chosen by the family as Churchill's official biographer, told The Times that Roberts' interpretation was "a complete misreading of the man. Churchill was the man who struggled against the racism of the Colonial Office."
Reviewer Richard Gott, writing in The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday, defended Churchill.
"The taste now is for knocking copy: Churchill the racist . . . Churchill the glutton," Gott wrote. Since 1990, five biographies of Churchill have appeared, he said. The Ponting and Roberts books, Gott said, "have conjured up a new and more sinister portrait of the wartime leader than anything published since the old man died."