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.”)

A Stern list…

The list of Presidential tweets quoting Churchill, as provided by Mr. Stern, suggests a middling score on the accuracy meter. Many fall into the category of “Churchillian Drift.”

These are pure fiction: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life” … “If you’re going through hell, keep going” … “Socialists think profits are a vice. I consider losses the real vice” … “Success is not final, failure is not fatal” … “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” … “However beautiful the strategy you should occasionally look at the results” … “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference” … “Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.”

So who coined those? Who knows?  As a wise man once said: “If you don’t know the author of a choice quote, credit it to Churchill, Einstein, Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. Everybody will be impressed, and they all said so much that nobody knows the difference.” But Churchill rarely indulged in gratuitous flatulence and preaching.

* * *

Some of the President’s Churchill tweets are close, but Churchill’s exact words are better: “Each one [of the neutral nations] hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last” (20 January 1940) … “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary” (7 March 1916) … “The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion” (21 September 1938) …“…never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense” (29 October 1941).

The President’s versions of these were minor deviations, but he did get one exactly right: “The price of greatness is responsibility.” (Harvard, 6 September 1943). We all of us might ponder that one.

“The Untold Story of Mussolini’s Fake Diaries” (Daily Beast, 12 April 2015) evaluates Mussolini’s supposed diaries, letters or documents peddled over the years, while raising some incriminating charges, or suppositions, about Winston Churchill:

Before the war, Churchill offered Il Duce a deal. After the war, British intelligence tried to destroy their correspondence…. When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 he tried, in a series of letters, to dissuade Mussolini from joining the Axis powers. He was ignored. Three weeks later Italy joined Nazi Germany and declared war on Great Britain. Although there would have been copies in London of the Churchill-Mussolini exchanges, none has ever turned up and in April 1945, somebody in London was very anxious that Mussolini’s copies should never see the light of day.

There was no “series of letters.” Churchill himself published his only letter to Mussolini (16 May 1940), trying to persuade the Duce to stay out of the war—and Mussolini’s negative response (18 May) in 1949.¹ (Incidentally, Italy joined the Axis in 1936, not 1940.)

Of course there were at least three faked letters, published in the past, and referred to by conspiracy books. One of the more recent, Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolini alla luce del processo Guareschi (2010), was exploded by reviewer Patrizio Giangreco, who illustrated the alleged Churchill letters. Complete with inauthentic letterheads and fake signatures, they are almost laughable in their amateurishness.²

The Daily Beast states that Churchill, en route to Lake Como for a painting holiday in September 1945, stopped in Milan to stand bareheaded at Mussolini’s unmarked grave. No evidence is offered, nor does it seem likely: Churchill flew from London September 2nd and arrived at Como the same day³—but I’m sure the conspiracists would claim that his vigil at Il Duce’s grave was “covered up.”

Churchill is said to have flown to Milan under the cover name “Colonel Warden,” which the Daily Beast suggests was his pilot’s name. In fact, Churchill had used “Warden” as a codename for himself and his family (“Mary Warden”) since early in the war. It likely stemmed from his 1941 appointment as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.⁴

Churchill, we are then told, arrives at his villa on Lake Como, “owned by none other than Guido Donegani…an industrialist and Fascist collaborator,” who was “interrogated by British intelligence and later released.” Churchill meets with Donegani, who apparently hands him the incriminating letters, papers or diaries—they are variously described.

The author adds that he enlisted official biographer Martin Gilbert to authenticate the diaries, letters, or whatever they were: “Gilbert, the historian, concluded that the correspondence had been retrieved and handed over to Churchill but it never turned up in the Churchill archives and was never seen again.”

This is passing strange, since Sir Martin Gilbert dismissed the idea of secret Mussolini correspondence, and nothing in his writings suggests Donegani met with Churchill. Writing to his wife the day after he arrived at Como, Churchill says the villa belonged to “one of Mussolini’s rich commercants who had fled, whither is not known.”⁵ (Again, the conspiracists would probably say this was a smokescreen.)

The so-called Mussolini Diaries are labeled “Fake” in the article’s title, so one must suppose there is no argument. There are a confusing number of references to various people who tried to peddle them, including one who ran away when hailed at an airport. An Interpol agent who investigated the story is quoted as saying Italians “needed people to believe that the diaries were forged” because otherwise “they would encourage a revival of the Mussolini cult and Fascism.”

How those faked 1940 letters, or other documents from 1945, would, if genuine, have revived Fascism is difficult to understand. Perhaps the best rejoinder is that of the historian Andrew Roberts:

Leaving aside the fact that Churchill would not by that stage have wanted or needed peace with Mussolini, one charge goes that the relevant documents are in a waterproof bag at the bottom of Lake Como. So, when one takes issue with them, the conspiracy theorists say, “go and look.” Of course, if you don’t find anything, they just say, “you haven’t looked hard enough.”⁶

Endnotes

1. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (London: Cassell, 1949), 107-08.

2. Patrizio Giangreco, “Leading Churchill Myths: ‘Churchill Offered Peace and Security to Mussolini,’” Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11, pp 52-53/57. (The letters were first published in Candido in 1954.)

3. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7 Road to Victory 1941-1945 (Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 134.

4. Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1984), II 344. Lady Soames to this writer, 2005.

5. Gilbert, Road to Victory, 344, and conversations with this writer, 2010.

6. Andrew Roberts, “Churchill’s Reputation,” remarks at the Cabinet War Rooms, London, 16 November 2005.