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London, England
70 years ago

On April 5, 1955, Winston Churchill resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the age of 80 — the oldest British Prime Minister of the 20th century. He had held the office twice: first from 1940 to 1945, when he led the country through its darkest hours; then again from 1951 to 1955, a second term that was marked by declining health, increasing reliance on alcohol, and a determination to hold on that outlasted his judgment.

The second term had been politically undistinguished compared to the first. Churchill had suffered two strokes, concealed from the public. His colleagues had been trying to ease him out for more than a year. The resignation, when it came, was characteristically his own: he chose the date, wrote his own announcement, and dined with the Queen the night before. He left office as he had entered it — on his own terms.

Churchill's departure from Downing Street was genuinely painful for him. He had defined himself through political power for over half a century. He had no real private life, no hobbies that sustained him in the way writing and painting had before the war. His doctor recorded that after the resignation, Churchill became increasingly melancholy, often sitting for hours without speaking, and said several times that there was nothing left to do.

The historical paradox of Churchill's career is profound. The man who is remembered as Britain's savior — who delivered the speeches that rallied a nation in 1940, who refused to negotiate with Hitler when almost everyone around him was considering it — was also the man who backed disastrous military campaigns at Gallipoli, who oversaw the Bengal Famine of 1943 with apparent indifference, who held views on empire that were reactionary even by the standards of his time.

He spent his last years at Chartwell, his country house in Kent, painting, dictating his memoirs, and slowly withdrawing from the world. He died on January 24, 1965, exactly 70 years to the day after his father Lord Randolph Churchill had died. He was 90. The state funeral that followed was the largest since the Duke of Wellington's — and the last of its kind.

On April 5, 1955, the man who had arguably saved Western civilization from Nazi conquest sat down from the table of power for the last time — and was diminished by it. Winston Churchill's life is an object lesson in the difference between a moment of greatness and a career, and in how both can belong to the same person.

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