Richard M. Langworth - Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian

“Buckley said, ‘it is the roar we hear when we hear his words.’ Past doubt. CHURCHILL DID NOT WIN THE WAR. His greatest achievement was that for eighteen months, when Britain and the Commonwealth stood alone, he didn’t lose it.” —RML

Nashville (1). Winston Churchill: Current Contentions and Things That Go Bump in the Night

18 October 2017 Comments 0 Comments

NASHVILLE, OCTOBER 14TH— The Churchill Society of Tennessee kindly invited me to talk about Winston Churchill: Myth and Reality and the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. Our hosts, John and Karen Mather and Dick and Linda Knight, could not have been more thoughtful, kinder and more generous to Barbara and me. If I performed anything for them or Mr. Churchill, that’s only a poor contribution in an attempt at requital. *** As a bonus, I was honored by a portrait by Shane Neal, a brilliant Nashville artist and a gent, as their way of saying thanks. In discussing Churchill’s art, Shane was joined by fellow artist Joseph Daily, who painted some forty portraits of the Churchill family and their friends in England. Over 100 turned up at the Brentwood Country Club, in black tie or kilt, mine included.…

“Incandescent Brilliance:” Churchill and Hilaire Belloc

26 September 2017 Comments 0 Comments

“To Belloc this generation owes big glimpses of the Homeric spirit. His mission was to flay alive the humbugs and hypocrites and the pedants and to chant robust folk-songs to a rousing obligato of clinking flagons….” He later concluded that Liberal reforms merely offered the “propertyless worker perpetual security…in exchange for the surrender of political freedom.”

Excerpted and condensed from “Great Contemporaries: Hilaire Belloc,” for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the full article click here.

_______________

Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc

(1870-1953)—writer, sailor, poet, friend of Churchill—helped fuel Churchill’s passion for the survival of free government. Anti-statist, anti-collectivist and anti-establishment, he deplored the servitude of the industrial wage-earner and longed to reconcile his two great loves, “the soil of England and the Catholic faith.”

Born in France but educated at Birmingham and Oxford, he served with the French Artillery before becoming a naturalized British subject in 1902.…

John Peck, 1945: General Eisenhower asks if the war is over….

22 September 2017 Comments 1 Comment

Col. Gault (Military Assistant to General Eisenhower, 29 April 1945): “John Peck, is that you? The General told me to ask you if the war is over.”

Peck: “I beg your pardon?”

Gault: “Seriously, we’ve got a press message here which says quite clearly that it’s all over. If so, nobody has told the General and he thought you would be the most likely to know at your end.”

Peck: “Well, if it has ended, nobody has told the Prime Minister either.”

Gault: “Do you think we had better carry on?”

Peck: “Yes, I think so.” [John then went back to sleep, and the war went on.]

Joys of The Churchill Documents

It is a privilege to help edit and proof Hillsdale College‘s final document volumes in the Churchill official biography.…