“Laboring forty years in the vineyard of his words, I am struck most by CHURCHILL’S JUDGEMENT. And as William Manchester wrote, ‘while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity.’” —RML
Winston Churchill and the Art of the Press Conference
I am completing an English assignment which looks at the speeches of Winston Churchill and would like to read press conferences or interviews Churchill gave during the Second World War. So far, I have been able to find only speeches. Please could you advise me whether any such interviews are in existence? —E.L.
Washington, 1941
Churchill rarely gave interviews—only two that I know of as a young man, and those reluctantly. Speeches (live) were his preference. However, on his 1941 visit to Washington, Franklin Roosevelt ushered him into his first press conference.…
The urge to proclaim one's virtue by inventing straw men is insidious, and creeps into many unexpected places. Churchill's true flaws are open to learned critique. But there's a difference between presenting "a broad range of views" and inventing myths. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors…many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others.” —Edward Winslow, Mourt’s Relation: A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, 1621.…
