“Why are you buying expensive pills over the counter?” asked Dr. John Mather. We were in an elevator during a 2001 Churchill Conference. “Don’t you have an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard?” He was then a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service and Assistant Inspector General at the Veteran’s Administration. I’d never thought my four years with the USCG worthy of anything special, but I did have my DD-214. Mather said I was entitled: “We issue cheap pills.”
In the lift with us was Luce Churchill, married to Sir Winston’s grandson.…
We all know how a certain American politician was nicknamed “Pocahontas,” years after claiming to be, without foundation, a native American. This has often been tried. Sometimes, however, it backfires. “A friend got his son into a better public school by declaring he was tribal,” a colleague writes. “Unfortunately, they didn’t tell the boy, who was then invited to an after-school meeting for those interested in Indians. My friend attempted to correct himself, but he found that in that city, you can change your racial identification only once.” (Who writes these rules?)
During a recent encounter with the medical world I received a questionnaire with the inevitable question, “Race.”…
Sufferers from “Churchill Derangement Syndrome” hold “Aryan stock” high among Winston Churchill’s appalling utterances. The remark rose again in correspondence with a journalist. I dug out for him the background of that remark, but his report omitted it. Out of context the quote is misleading, so I guess that’s just as well. But rather than write off several hours’ research, the facts might here serve to advance reality.
Wales in its Welsh Wisdom is thinking of moving statues of Churchill, Nelson and Gandhi to a museum, the Daily Telegraph informs us.…
Excerpted from “Angel of Deliverance: Churchill’s Tributes to Joan of Arc,” published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the complete article with endnotes and added illustrations, click here.
“Her gleaming, mystic figure…”Churchill waxed eloquent on Joan of Arc in 1938. His words would likely not pass with today’s minders of Political Correctness:
We see her gleaming, mystic figure in the midst of the pikes and arrows, and it needed not her martyrdom to win her canonization as a saint not only from the Pope but from the modern world.…
Journalist Leo McKinstry’s Churchill and Attlee is a deft analysis of a political odd couple who led Britain’s Second World War coalition government. Now, eighty years since the death of Neville Chamberlain, he has published an excellent appraisal in The Spectator. Churchill’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Chamberlain negotiated the 1938 Munich agreement. “Peace for our time,” he famously referred to it. In the end, he bought the world peace for a time.
Mr. McKinstry is right to regret that Chamberlain has been roughly handled by history. “The reality is that in the late 1930s Chamberlain’s approach was a rational one,” he writes.…
Excerpted from a Q&A post on the V1 for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the unabridged article, please click here.
Robert Lusser and the V1 “Flying Bomb”A journalist writes about the life of her grandfather, Robert Lusser, chief designer of the V1 flying bomb. She searched for what Churchill said about the V1 in his memoirs of the Second World War. “He mentions the weapon’s destruction in 1944 but nothing of what he thought of the V1 militarily. My grandfather’s papers suggest that Churchill praised the weapon after the war.…
