Speaking in Weimar in November of 1938, Adolf Hitler paused in mid-harrangue to make a personal attack.

"I can assure this man," he declared, "who seems to live on the moon, that there are no forces in Germany opposed to the [Nazi] regime -- only the force of the National Socialist movement, its leaders and its followers in arms."

"This man," was Winston Churchill. And who was Winston Churchill in November of 1938? He was an ordinary member of Parliament -- distrusted by many members of his own party, excluded from office and, at the age of 64, widely regarded as finished.

But he retained a rhetorical power that even Hitler was forced to acknowledge.

Just weeks weeks earlier, Churchill had risen before a hostile Parliament to denounce the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich by Britain and France. In the infamous Munich agreement, the democracies had attempted to buy peace through appeasement. At the time, it looked like a good bargain.

But Churchill insisted that the British people should be told the truth, however unpalatable it was. "They should know," he thundered, "that there has been a gross neglect and deficiency in our defenses; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war ... they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have been for the time being pronounced against the Western democracies: 'Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.'"

Small wonder that the appeasers and the Nazis alike were desperate to shut him up.

But Churchill knew his own strength. In 1897, as a young cavalry officer stationed in India, we wrote an essay -- never published in his lifetime -- called "The Scaffolding of Rhetoric." In this essay, Churchill argued that whoever possesses the gift of oratory "Wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable."

Over forty years later, Churchill was formidable indeed. In the end, the power of his oratory overcame both the faint hearts in his own country and the armed panoply of the Third Reich.