The first meeting of the Churchill Club was held November 12, 1985, featuring keynote speaker Robert Noyce, inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of Fairchild and Intel. More than 275 attended that first program.

The Club was founded by Rich Karlgaard, now publisher of Forbes magazine, and Tony Perkins, now Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring Communications. Together, Tony, Rich, and a group of friends from the Ed Zschau senate campaign, built an organization dedicated to producing programs where "important people say important things". As a Churchill Club speaker, then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton suggested that America needs a nation of Churchills-leaders rather than followers.

Why Churchill?

Perhaps there is no historical personage who would more heartily approve of this endeavor than the Club's namesake, Winston Churchill. Reared in the tradition of parliamentary democracy, Churchill's character and career personify the democratic values of open discourse and freedom as well as what is now called the "entrepreneurial spirit"-attributes epitomized in Churchill's own qualities of intelligence, creativity, risk-taking and boundless energy. His vision, perseverance, and wit provided the bridge necessary to bring together great leaders, opinions, ideas, and events. In fact, Churchill is just the sort of freely achieving personality that highlights democracy at its best. In America, we will gladly adopt him as our own and more particularly as the namesake of the Club.

To read more about Winston Churchill from Club Historian Michael Perkins, click here.

To join the Club, click here.