Joseph P. Kennedy Archives - Richard M. Langworth

Churchill’s “Wrung Like a Chicken”: Who Said It First?

5 July 2021 Comments 0 Comments

“Wrung Like a Chicken” is excerpted from an essay for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. For the original text including more images and endnotes, please click here. Subscriptions to this site are free. You will receive regular notices of new posts as published. Just scroll to SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW. Your email address is never given out and remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Ottawa, 30 December 1941

In his first and as it proved only address to the Canadian Parliament, Winston Churchill brought down the house in words which will live as long as his story is told:

The French Government had at their own suggestion solemnly bound themselves with us not to make a separate peace….…

A Fresh Look at the Churchills and Kennedys by Thomas Maier

4 August 2015 Comments 0 Comments

When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys, by Thomas Maier. New York: Crown Publishers, 784 pages, $30, Kindle Edition $11.99. Written for The Churchillian, Spring 2015.

The most touching and durable vision left by Mr. Maier comes toward the end of this long book: the famous White House ceremony in April 1963, as President Kennedy presents Sir Winston Churchill (in absentia) with Honorary American Citizenship—while from an upstairs window his stroke-silenced father, Joseph P. Kennedy, watches closely, with heaven knows what reflections:

Whatever thoughts raced through the mind of Joe Kennedy—the rancor of the past, the lost opportunities of his own political goals, and the tragic forgotten dreams he had once had for his oldest son, could not be expressed.…