Leaders: Myth and Reality

by General Stanley McChrystal

Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize a decade after he led the Allies to victory over Nazi Germany, but he did not attend his 1953 award ceremony. Instead, Lady Churchill stood and curtsied to the Swedish king, who ceremoniously handed her the small stack of items that constitutes a Nobel Prize, topped by the medal itself, cast as a solid-silver mold of Churchill’s 1937 book, Great Contemporaries, reflecting the fact that Churchill’s Nobel Prize was for literature, of all things. Inscribed across that silver book was the award’s citation of his “mastery of historical and biographic description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” It was both ironic and telling that one of the twentieth century’s most lionized leaders received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his “brilliant” oration. It was ironic because of Churchill’s speech impediment as a child. And it was telling because it underlines how often leadership is rooted in communication and narrative.