Nehru Archives - Richard M. Langworth

legacy — Presentation of Churchill’s honorary citizenship, 9 April 1963. L-R: Acting Secretary of State George Ball, Lady Ormsby Gore, British Ambassador Sir David Ormsby Gore, Winston Churchill (grandson), Naval Aide Tazewell Shepard, President Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Randolph Churchill. Photo by Cecil Stoughton.

A Fresh Look at the Churchills and Kennedys by Thomas Maier

4 August 2015 Comments 0 Comments

When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, by Thomas Maier. New York: Crown Publishers, 784 pages, $30, Kindle Edition $11.99. Written for The Churchillian, Spring 2015.

The most touching and durable vision left by Mr. Maier comes toward the end of this long book: the famous White House ceremony in April 1963, as President Kennedy presents Sir Winston Churchill (in absentia) with Honorary American Citizenship—while from an upstairs window his stroke-silenced father, Joseph P. Kennedy, watches closely, with heaven knows what reflections:

Whatever thoughts raced through the mind of Joe Kennedy—the rancor of the past, the lost opportunities of his own political goals, and the tragic forgotten dreams he had once had for his oldest son, could not be expressed.…

Churchill as Racist: A Hard Sell

27 February 2012 Comments 2 Comments

Racist still? In “To See Humans’ Progress, Zoom Out” (The New York Times, 26 February 2012), Professor Steven Pinker asserts that for all their faults, educated people today are getting better:

Ideals that today’s educated people take for granted — equal rights, free speech, and the primacy of human life over tradition, tribal loyalty and intuitions about purity — are radical breaks with the sensibilities of the past. These too are gifts of a widening application of reason.

Fair enough, but to contrast what educated people were like in the bad old days, Prof.…