What Churchill And Orwell Had In Common: Both Could Say, 'My Side Is Wrong'

"Journalist Tom Ricks used to write about the present. His reports on the U.S. military won him two Pulitzer Prizes, and his 2006 book, Fiasco, was basically a takedown of U.S. policies in Iraq."

"But Ricks says the wars following Sept. 11 wore him down; so he left daily journalism, moved to an island off the coast of Maine and wrote a history called Churchill and Orwell — as in the British prime minister and the author of 1984."

"According to Ricks, both Winston Churchill and George Orwell lived through World War II and had a shared outlook on the war. 'At a time not unlike today — when people were wondering whether democracy was sustainable, when a lot of people thought you needed authoritarian rule, either from the right or the left — Orwell and Churchill, from their very different perspectives, come together on a key point: We don't have to have authoritarian government.'"

"Another key point, he says, is that they were 'both willing to say, 'No, my side is wrong on this.'"