All one could do in 1939 was pray and hope.
But this is hindsight. Winston Churchill appears in The End of Economic Man and is treated with great respect. Indeed, reading now what I then wrote, I suspect that I secretly hoped that Churchill would indeed emerge into leadership. I also never fell for the ersatz leaders to whom a good many well-informed contemporaries—a good many members of Franklin Roosevelt‘s entourage in Washington, for instance—looked for deliverance. Yet in 1939 Churchill was a might-have-been: a powerless old man rapidly approaching seventy; a Cassandra who bored his listeners in spite (or perhaps because) of his impassioned rhetoric; a two-time loser who, however magnificent in opposition, had proven himself inadequate to the demands of office. I know that it is hard to believe today that even in 1940 Churchill was by no means the inevitable successor when the “Men of Munich” were swept out of office by the fall of France and the retreat at Dunkirk.
Churchill’s emergence in 1940, more than a year after the book was first published, was the reassertion of the basic moral and political values for which The End of Economic Man had prayed and hoped. But all one could do in 1939 was pray and hope. The reality was the absence of leadership, the absence of affirmation, the absence of men and values and principle.
ACTION POINT: Face your own reality. What threats have you been avoiding? Put a plan in place today to solve these problems.
A Functioning Society
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker