Richard M. Langworth

“And this I would fight for: THE FREEDOM OF THE MIND To take any direction it wishes, undirected.” —John Steinbeck

December 7th, 1941: Canada First to Declare War

7 December 2017 Comments 1 Comment

At War on the 7th Apropos December 7th, my friend Randy Barber (Ontario) writes: “Recently, I purchased seven copies of a World War II Canadian Army newspaper called Khaki. I have a think to tell you about the 7th, from reading papers and the letters to the editor from 1944: In a question to the editor about which country first declared war on Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the answer was, not the United States or Great Britain (which declared war on December 8th). It was Canada, which declared war on December 7th. Thus endeth your history lesson for today.…

Read More Read More

Mr. Stern, Mr. Trump, Churchill Quotes and Misquotes

28 November 2017 Comments 0 Comments

November 27th— Writing in the Daily Beast, Mr. Marlow Stern praises Kristin Scott Thomas (“Clementine Churchill” in the new movie Darkest Hour) and announces: “Donald Trump is No Winston Churchill.” (Past doubt, but who is?)

Mr. Stern himself offers only one Churchill quote and gets it right: “A free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.” (Colliers, 28 December 1935.)

Bingo! That’s an obscure one. Forgive him for vastly exaggerating Churchill’s alcohol intake. (WSC’s “six whisky sodas” were described by his private secretary as “scotch-flavored mouthwash.”…

Read More Read More

Nashville (5). The Myth that Churchill Admired Hitler

4 November 2017 Comments 0 Comments

Part 5 of Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality examines multiplying fables between the two World Wars. Churchill was an alcoholic, we are often assured. He flip-flopped over Bolshevism. All Jews were communists, he said. He despised Gandhi. A closet fascist, he supported Mussolini. But one tall tale perhaps eclipses all the others. It is the idea that Churchill admired Hitler. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from Part 4…

Judging Hitler

It is important to understand just how right Churchill was about Hitler. In May 1935 the Führer wrote a revealing letter to the British newspaper magnate Esmond Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, one of his promoters.…

Read More Read More

Nashville (4). Churchill as Warmonger in World War I

28 October 2017 Comments 0 Comments

“Winston…has got on all his war-paint” (Asquith)

In 1914, the Great War arrives, and fables about Churchill multiply. A popular one, kept alive by pundits and historians, alike, is that Churchill led the warmonger party into World War I. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from Part 3...

Patrick J. Buchanan is an affable tory who wrote speeches for Nixon and ran quixotic campaigns for President of the U.S. three times in 1992-2000. (I voted for him once!) He’s an effective contrarian, and his debating skills are renowned.…

Read More Read More

Nashville (3). Churchill and Women’s Rights

23 October 2017 Comments 1 Comment

Votes for Women, Yeas and Nays

Among the more pernicious distortions of Churchill’s record is that he was a lifetime opponent of rights for women, including their right to vote. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from part 2….

In 1999 Time magazine explained that Churchill could not be “Person of the Century” because he “bulldoggedly opposed women’s rights.” In 2012 London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: “Churchill believed that women shouldn’t vote, telling the House of Commons that they are ‘well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.’”

As I show in my book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, Churchill never said those words, in or out of Parliament.…

Read More Read More

Nashville (2). Joyful Humbug: Churchill’s “Indian Forebears”

20 October 2017 Comments 0 Comments

Many of the Churchill family down at least through Sir Winston’s grandson believed that American Indian blood ran in their veins. Remarks to the Churchill Society of Tennessee, Nashville, 14 October 2017. Continued from part 1….

“Mama is part red Indian…”

No exception to the family belief (until she saw contrary evidence) was Churchill’s daughter Mary. “I remember my daughter Emma, playing with her friends,” Lady Soames recalled. “Suddenly she warned them not to misbehave. ‘Mama, you know, is part red Indian, and if we are naughty she will go on the warpath.’”…

Read More Read More

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

18 October 2017 Comments 1 Comment

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. …

Read More Read More

“Incandescent Brilliance:” Churchill and Hilaire Belloc

26 September 2017 Comments 1 Comment

“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.…

Read More Read More

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.”…

Read More Read More

Lt. Churchill: “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals”

17 September 2017 Comments 1 Comment

With colleagues I discussed which of young Winston’s early war books was derisively called, “A Subaltern’s Advice to Generals.” This was a popular wisecrack after his early works had the temerity to propose British military strategy in India, Sudan and South Africa. Churchill was in his mid-twenties at the time—but not reticent to speak his mind. Nothing we didn’t know here….

Malakand Field Force?

Without consulting references, I thought the “advice” line involved The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Churchill’s first book, 1898). I was influenced by its last chapter, “The Riddle of the Frontier.” Plenty of advice there, though it is as much political as it is military.…

Read More Read More