2011 - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill’s Life Today: December 7th Quotes

7 December 2011 Comments 0 Comments

7 December 1936 (House of Commons): “May I ask my Rt. Hon. Friend [Prime Minister Baldwin] whether he could give us an assurance that no irrevocable step… [Hon. Members: “No!”] …that no irrevocable step will be taken before the House has received a full statement, not only upon the personal but upon the constitutional issues involved. May I ask him to bear in mind that these issues are not merely personal to the present occupant of the Throne, but that they affect the entire Constitution.” [Hon. Members: “Speech,” and “Sit down!”]

Churchill lost carefully built political capital by rising to defend Edward VIII, who was facing abdication over his insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson, a divorced American.…

Romney’s Churchill Gaffe: A Small But Not a Large Clang

4 October 2011 Comments 0 Comments

Writing for Business Insider on September 29th, Grace Wyler correctly reports a Churchill misquote by presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Defending himself from charges that he is a “flip-flopper,” Wyler writes, Romney confused “the Brit every Republican loves with the Brit every Republican loves to hate.” Here according to NBC is what Governor Romney said:

In the private sector, if you don’t change your view when the facts change, well you’ll get fired for being stubborn and stupid. Winston Churchill said, “When facts change, I change too, madam.”

Wyler accurately notes that this was said by John Maynard Keynes, “the British economist whose theories about government intervention in the economy [are] reviled by conservatives everywhere.”…

Joe Frazer, Father of the Jeep, Part 3

27 September 2011 Comments 2 Comments

continued from part 2…

Jesse Jones, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce, was a rugged Tennessean who was hard to meet and harder to know. Joseph Washington “Jeeps” Frazer was President of Willys-Overland, a scion of the Virginia Washingtons and Nashville Frazers; but this and more wouldn’t get him in to see Jesse Jones at Commerce. Seeing Jones required more powerful strategy.

On an urgent mission to Washington for his Jeep-building company, Joe Frazer had arrived one morning in 1943 and parked himself in Jones’s outer office, despite repeated warnings that the Secretary wasn’t likely to arrive until evening—if at all.…