2011 - Richard M. Langworth

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.…

Joe Frazer, Father of the Jeep, Part 2

23 September 2011 Comments 0 Comments

continued from part 1…

Seeing an opportunity to run his own company, Frazer took control of moribund Graham-Paige in 1944, and two years later merged its automotive interests with a new corporation he and Henry Kaiser had formed, leasing and then buying the gigantic ex-bomber factory at Willow Run, Michigan. During Frazer’s 1946-48 presidency, Kaiser-Frazer was the fourth largest car producer in the world, and ranked eighth in production by make, ahead of all other independents. He stepped down as an active officer in 1949. The company never again recorded a profit.…