Capturing Churchill, to a V

In subsequent displays, we come to appreciate Churchill as soldier, strategist and statesman.

During World War I, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he encouraged the modernization of the armed forces, with tanks and planes. But he is most remembered at this stage in his career for promoting an ill-fated naval attack on Germany's ally, Turkey, by sending ships through the Dardanelles. The strategy was a miserable failure. As penance, Churchill resigned his post -- under pressure -- and returned to the front lines as an officer in the infantry.

His career encompassed Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. He hobnobbed with Lawrence of Arabia, Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin.

As secretary of state for the British colonies in the early 1920s, van Ee says, Churchill was instrumental in determining the boundaries of countries in the Middle East, such as Iraq. He brokered the negotiation for Irish independence and helped set up the political boundaries and leadership for what became the British-mandated Palestine.

In one hand-edited note for a 1938 radio address, he wrote, "People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now."

He became prime minister in 1940, just as the Nazis invaded France. In a haunting photo from a year later, Churchill is seen hunched over, pacing on a ship against a backdrop of grayness and fog. He is returning from the Atlantic conference with Roosevelt.

And he was an artist. From 1916 until his death in 1965, Churchill painted several hundred pictures, mostly oils. This facet of his geodesic life is represented in the exhibit by a soothing still life of flowers, on loan from Sen. John Warner of Virginia.

Though his leadership during World War II may have been his finest legacy, Churchill lived for two decades after the Allied victory. There are photos of Churchill with Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

In those years, van Ee said, Churchill was a prophet of the Cold War. He warned Americans that the Soviet Union was encroaching on Eastern and Central Europe.

You can see vitality in the eyes of the young, smooth-skinned and willowy Churchill and in the old, wrinkled and thickset man. You can see it in his writing and his speeches, and in the reactions of people, such as Herblock of The Washington Post, to his whirlwind force.

And you can see it in Mary, there on the deck of the ship and yesterday at the library before Bush's remarks. Churchill's only surviving child, Lady Soames, as she is known, was in town for the opening. She sat on a sofa in the library, drinking tea.

Her late husband, Christopher Soames, was British ambassador to France and governor of Rhodesia when the country was handed back to the people and became Zimbabwe.

In a blue suit, eyes dancing, Lady Soames said she was delighted with the exhibit, which goes a long way toward capturing the energy of her father.

She recalls that when he was at Chartwell, the family's country home where she grew up, her father woke early and read the daily newspapers for 45 minutes every day. He conducted business while there, but he also delighted in being outdoors. He loved to build with bricks. He fashioned ponds and waterfalls. He entertained fascinating people at his home. He scratched the family pigs on their backs with his walking stick. And after dinner, when everyone had gone to bed, he would go back to work and read and write and answer mail until the wee hours.

He was a very disciplined man. "Though he always did what he wanted," she says, "a man who wasn't disciplined would never have been able to do everything he did."