Beaten After Victory

In one of history's sharpest political twists, Churchill was voted out of office in July 1945, only weeks after Germany surrendered.

Voters were grateful for his leadership in war. But they wanted homes, jobs, and health care in peace. They chose Labour's promise of a welfare state over more wartime heroics.

He was not finished. Churchill returned as Prime Minister in 1951 at age seventy-six and held on until a stroke forced him to step down in 1955.

That same decade he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, honored for his histories and memoirs. The man rejected by voters had become a writer the world celebrated.