Baldwin, whose sagging English face gave him a certain resemblance to an amiable basset hound, was the most popular politician of the day. This fact in itself was a matter of no small wonder to his critics. As one historian has noted, Baldwin’s “indolence was a miracle in his time and a legend in ours.” The prime minister’s idea of a busy day was to avoid official papers in the morning and his fellow politicians at lunch and to spend his afternoons writing personal letters. Yet, in the eyes of the public, Stanley Baldwin could do no wrong. The average Englishman liked it that Baldwin found hiking more pleasant than thinking, doing nothing more pleasant than doing almost anything, and found foreigners as incomprehensible and beastly as he did. “Wake me up when you are finished with that,” Baldwin would say whenever foreign affairs were discussed at cabinet meetings.

On paper, Baldwin appeared badly overmatched by Churchill in the air debate. No one could imagine Stanley Baldwin saying anything as eloquent or clever as “I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers in Germany.” Nonetheless, Baldwin managed to hold his own—and, at some points in the debate, to more than hold his own. For this he owed no small debt to his second great attribute, luck. In the mid-1930s, Churchill was out of government and at the nadir of a long and checkered political career. To the public, he remained the Gallipoli man, the engineer of the ill-fated 1915 campaign that had produced little except three sunken battleships and misery and lamentation for mothers in Australia and New Zealand, whose sons had died in their thousands on the naked, sun-struck hills of Gallipoli. To the politicians, who knew Churchill more intimately, he was the witty, gifted, impulsive, erratic polymath who had two bad ideas for every good one and was unable to tell the difference between them. In a letter to a friend, Baldwin condensed Westminster and Whitehall’s view of the pre–World War Two Churchill into a few wonderfully malicious sentences: “When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts—imagination, industry, eloquence, ability—and then came a fairy who said, ‘No one person has a right to so many gifts’ and picked up Winston and gave him such a shake and twist that with all of these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why, while we delight in listening to him, we do not take his advice.” Not long after Baldwin wrote this appraisal, Churchill reminded the British public of just how bad his judgment could be. During the abdication crisis of 1936, even friends were baffled by his support for Edward VIII, a man of limited intelligence who gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-married American woman of limited character.

Baldwin’s strong performance on the air debate also owed something to his instinctive understanding of what an antiwar electorate would tolerate in the way of defense. In the mid-1930s, when “the bomber will always get through” was the eleventh commandment of military doctrine, the RAF proposed to spend its entire budget on a bomber force. But the bomber was an offensive weapon, and Baldwin’s political instincts told him that the 11.5 million Britons, half the national electorate, who had voted in the Peace Ballot of 1934–35, would find it as appalling as he did that “two thousand years after Our Lord was crucified,” European children should be immolated by incendiary bombs. During the war, Baldwin would be widely criticized for allowing Germany to gain a lead in the air—not least by Churchill, who, on hearing the Germans had bombed an iron factory owned by Baldwin, remarked that that “was ungrateful of them.” Nonetheless, and despite himself, Baldwin did bumble into one decision about airpower that, in retrospect, would prove farsighted. He pushed the RAF to pay more attention to the development of the fighter, not only because the fighter was much cheaper to build than the bomber—£5,000 to £10,000 per plane versus £50,000 for a bomber—but also because its defensive character made the fighter an acceptable weapon to an antiwar public. In the summer of 1940, when Britain’s survival hung on the performance of the RAF’s Fighter Command, Baldwin’s decision would serve his country well.

Just before noon on Saturday, March 7, 1936, Adolf Hitler stood at a podium in the Reichstag examining his speech notes. Modestly dressed in a simple gray field jacket that covered his wide hips, his brown hair neatly combed, his coarse features relaxed—in repose like this, Hitler could be the minor bureaucrat his father had been. “Altogether, he looks entirely undistinguished,” said a British official, who, like many British visitors to Germany in the 1930s, confused the polite, petite bourgeois figure they encountered in small gatherings with the public man. Hitler put down his notes and surveyed his audience: six hundred Reichstag delegates, almost uniformly big of body and bulging of neck. Then he began as he began many of his speeches, with a denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles. These perorations served him the way a warm-up serves an athlete. His eyes grew hypnotic; his clenched fists cut the air. His forelock became unstuck; his fleshy face tightened into an arc of anger; then the man at the podium disappeared, replaced by a wronged Germany in all its righteous wrath. Shouts of “Heil! Heil!” greeted the announcement that Germany was renouncing the Pact of Locarno and reoccupying the demilitarized Rhineland. Hitler raised his hand for silence; then he began again, this time in a lower, more resonant voice that partly obscured the grating Upper Austrian accent. “Men of the German Reichstag, in this historic hour, when in the Reich’s western provinces German troops are at this minute marching into their future peacetime garrisons, we are united—” The rest of his words were drowned out by more shouts of “Heil! Heil! Heil!” This time Hitler did not resist. He stepped back from the podium, folded his arms across his chest, and allowed himself to bathe in the adulation.