I’m a research librar­ian for The Wash­ing­ton Post, cur­rently based in the paper’s New York City bureau. A reporter has asked me to source a quote attrib­uted to Win­ston Churchill and I’m hav­ing some dif­fi­culty in doing that. I was won­der­ing if you might be able to help me.  The quote is: “Amer­i­cans can always be relied upon to do the right thing — after they have exhausted all other reme­dies.” —R.D.

The word­ing usu­ally quoted is, “The Amer­i­cans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other pos­si­bil­i­ties have been exhausted.” It is all over the Inter­net, but with­out reli­able attribution.

I included this quo­ta­tion in the “Red Her­rings” appen­dix of Churchill by Him­self because I have been unable to track it to date. First, Churchill would never never said it pub­licly; he was much too care­ful about slips of pri­vate opin­ion involv­ing close allies. Sec­ond, though I have been told that it came from Sir John Colville’s mem­oirs, I can’t find it there, nor did Sir John men­tion it to me in our con­ver­sa­tions. Nev­er­the­less it may well have been said in some pri­vate moment, for Churchill did have those sen­ti­ments from time to time in World War II. Bottom line: still in doubt.

A sim­i­lar remark we can estab­lish came oin 9 Decem­ber 1941, when a col­league urged a cau­tious approach to the Amer­i­cans after Pearl Har­bor and Amer­i­can entry into World War II. From Churchill by Him­self, page 118:

Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were woo­ing her; now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!

Ref­er­ence is Arthur Bryant, ed, The Turn of the Tide 1939-1943, from the diary of Lord Alan­brooke (New York: Dou­ble­day, 1957), page 231.

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