Hello, I am the CEO of the Churchill Trust of Australia. I discovered this Churchill quote in your book Churchill: In His Own Words, page 238:

“I cannot but think we have much to be thankful for, and more still to hope for in the future.” WSC to David Lloyd George, 9 December 1918, cited in Langworth, Churchill: In His Own Words.

I understand we have been caught out in the past with Churchill quotes that were misattributed, so I would like to verify this. I wonder if it would be possible for you to provide some further information about its context? —Dr. Rachael Coghlan, CEO, Winston Churchill Memorial Trust of Australia, Canberra. A.C.T.

A: Verified, but not to Lloyd George

Dear Dr. Coghlan: Thank-you for writing. Your question is welcome because it uncovers an error in my book. A new, greatly expanded edition will be published by Hillsdale College Press this year—so I will be able to fix this.

The letter was not to Lloyd George but to Richard Lee, whom WSC called an “influential constituent.” He reprinted some of the words in The World Crisis. The complete letter is in Martin Gilbert, editor, The Churchill Documents, vol.  8, War and Aftermath, December 1916 to June 1919 (Hillsdale College Press, 2008). 432-33:

Winston S. Churchill to Richard Lee
(Churchill papers: 5/20)
9 December 1918, Ministry of Munitions

Dear Sir,
I am much obliged to you for your letter of December 6th. If the peace which we are going to make in Europe should lead, as I trust it will, to the​ liberation of captive nationalities, to a reunion of those branches of the same family which have long been arbitrarily divided, and to the drawing of frontiers in broad correspondence with the ethnic masses, it will remove for ever most of the causes of possible wars. And with the removal of the Cause, the Symptom, i.e. armaments, will gradually and naturally subside.

I cannot but think we have much to be thankful for, and more still to hope for in the future.

With regard to Russia, you have only to seek the truth to be assured of the awful forms of anti-democratic tyranny which prevail there, and the appalling social and economic reactions and degenerations which are in progress. The only sure foundation for a State is a Government freely elected by millions of people, and as many millions as possible. It is fatal to swerve from that conception.

Yours very faithfully,
Winston S. Churchill

This brief letter abounds with Churchillian wisdom. Had only we followed it. If only we were following it today….

False Quotes = Red Herrings = Churchillian Drift

There are indeed almost 200 common false attributions (“Churchillian Drift”). All are in my Appendix, “Red Herrings.” The list is now much longer, but I keep it up to date in four pages on my website beginning here.

Canberra, Australia, 7 December 1941

In 1991, on one of our Churchill Tours, we traveled to Australia. (This was something Sir Winston, to his regret, never managed.) Our host at the Memorial Trust of Australia was then-CEO Rear Admiral Ian Richards RAN.

Ian organised a lunch at the Botanical Gardens, a tour of  Parliament House and the outstanding Australian War Museum. We then enjoyed cocktails with U.S. Ambassador and Mrs. (recently the late) Melvin Sembler at the Embassy, and a dinner at the Commonwealth Club.

Mel Sembler told us a droll story. The Embassy, like most in Canberra, takes its style from its home country.  The American complex resembles the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg. The then-Ambassador laid the cornerstone on (wait for it)….7 December 1941, amidst the news from Pearl Harbor.

The Ambassador wired Washington: “What do we do now?”

The answer came by return telegram: “Finish building the thing, or the Aussies will think we’re on the run.”

A good story to dine out on….

Related reading

“Australia: National Anthems, Miscellaneous Ramblings,” 2023.

“Churchill Quotations for December 7th,” 2022.

“Western Australian Black Swans Thrive at Chartwell,” 2024.

“Vanishing National Anthems: ‘Advance Australia Fair,'” 2024.

“Churchillian (Or Yogi Berra) Drift,” 2013.

Garfield’s gripping novel: fictional biography?

The late, prolific Brian Garfield wrote this book four decades ago, yet I am still asked about it—and whether it could be true.

The story Mr. Garfield tells seems impossible—fantastic. An eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Creighton leaps a garden wall in Kent one day. He finds himself face to face with the Right Honorable Winston Churchill, Member of Parliament. He will later know the great man by the code-name “Tigger.” It is 1935.

Christopher, who continues to invade Chartwell, impresses Churchill with his audacity and pluck. Four years later, aged fifteen, he is recruited into the British Secret Service by a pair of spy-masters known as “Owl” and “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

Christopher’s climacterics

Garfield’s young warrior then accomplishes a succession of what Churchill might call “climacterics.” He warns that Belgium plans to surrender to Hitler. (One book reviewer said “without a fight.”) Advance knowledge of the Belgian collapse enables the British to pull off a fighting retreat, saving 338,000 French and English soldiers at Dunkirk.

But Christopher is just getting warmed up. Next, he finds secret U-boat pens in Ireland and blows the Germans’ most strategic cover for Atlantic warfare. Then he sabotages a friendly Dutch submarine and sends its crew to the bottom after it reports the Japanese battle fleet en route to Pearl Harbor. Churchill has concluded the Americans must not be warned—lest it enable them to avoid war. Back in London, Christopher finishes the job by murdering the only cipher clerk who has read the Dutch sub’s message. And she turns out to be one of his lady friends.

He engineers the assassination of Vichy’s treacherous Admiral Darlan, and tips off the Nazis to the Dieppe raid so they will meet it in force, convincing the Americans that it is too soon for a cross-channel invasion. Finally, when the D-Day invasion really is on, he steers the Germans into defending Calais and not Normandy. By which time Christopher Creighton is a good deal older, wiser, sadder and bloodier. But war is a dirty business!

Counter-factuals

The Belgian scenario is quite contrary to history. The Belgians fought bravely against overwhelming odds for several weeks in May 1940. Also, King Leopold issued warnings of his impending surrender in advance. The Germans never had secret U-boat pens in Ireland. (See for example Warren Kimball’s article, “That Neutral Island.” Dieppe was a disaster, but not by plan: Terry Reardon has carefully catalogued the many errors in its planning and execution. (All three of these articles are published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.)

Numerous conspiracy theories attend Pearl Harbor. One says Roosevelt knew and let it happen to get Congress to declare war. Another says Churchill knew, and kept the news from Roosevelt, so the Americans would be dragged in. This is simply silly. No American president, especially a lover of the Navy, would allow his country’s military to be so badly damaged. No British prime minister would withhold advance warning. Surely, an alerted American fleet and aircraft would have engaged the Japanese, and war would have happened anyway.

Read for entertainment, however….

But Brian Garfield spun a great yarn. Although the imagination strains over many conspiracies engineered by a boy, The Paladin is gripping, well-written and plausible. The Churchill Garfield describes tallies closely with the best accounts of his contemporaries. The vivid scenes at the “hole in the ground” (Cabinet War Rooms) are painted with authority. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Belgians and French, the British and German agents, are entirely believable. Brian Garfield is as plausible than Len Deighton, as exciting as Ian Fleming. His novel is splendid entertainment, and you should definitely add a copy to your library of tall tales.

Garfield set tongues wagging back in 1980, when promoting his new book. “The hero is a real person,” he wrote. “He is now in his fifties. His name is not Christopher Creighton.”

I’ve often thought that the Churchill novels of Michael Dobbs are so well scripted, so faithful to the real-life characters in them—and that we would not be surprised to see Dobbs’s scenes described as truth  by some careless future writer. Well, Brian Garfield had a twenty-year head start on Dobbs, and did him one better. In the 1990s, someone named “Christopher Creighton” surfaced, with a book about a secret raid on Berlin. We report, you decide.

A recent article suggests that Japan’s decision to surrender in 1945 was by no means unanimous. A few years ago, Sir Ian Kershaw said the same thing about Japan’s decision to go to war in the first place. Long before the war, Winston Churchill mused:

“What a story! Think of all these people—decent, educated, the story of the past laid out before them—What to avoid—what to do etc.—patriotic, loyal, clean—trying their utmost—What a ghastly muddle they made of it! Unteachable from infancy to tomb—There is the first and main characteristic of mankind.”—Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, 21 May 1928.

Kershaw, whose two-volume biography of Hitler is highly acclaimed, has written a fascinating book on what Churchill might call the “ten climacterics” of World War II: Britain’s decision to fight on in May 1940; Mussolini’s decision to attack Greece; Stalin’s decision to trust Hitler; Japan’s decisions to expand southward and to take on the United States; Roosevelt’s decisions to help Britain and to wage undeclared war against Germany; Hitler’s decisions to attack Russia, to declare war on the USA and to commit genocide in Europe.

Hull Reconsidered

I had no deep prejudices toward Cordell Hull until I read this book, but Kershaw paints Roosevelt’s Secretary of State the way Churchill allegedly painted John Foster Dulles: “He is the only bull I know who carries his china shop with him.”

As the clock ticked in late 1941, Hull frustrated negotiations at every turn. He rightly rejected the Japanese “Plan A,” amounting basically to letting Japan run amok in East Asia. Then he seemed to accept, but finally rejected, “Plan B,” which offered a pullback of Japanese forces from Indo-China and an agreement to vacate China “at an agreed future date.”

Nor was Roosevelt consistent: “While Hull and the State Department dampened prospects of an accommodation, the President himself appeared still open to the possiblity of one” (367). In his vacillating, don’t-tell-them-everything-you’re-thinking approach, he ran hot and cold on requested meetings with Japan’s foreign minister or Emperor. First FDR would hint that he wanted a “modus vivendi”; then he would play hardball, refusing to consider any terms by which he would normalize relations.

* * *

Finally Hull, without consulting either the military or unofficial allies like Britain (which might have had some useful warnings about piling up new enemies) replied with his “Ten Points,” including all previous demands and some new ones. In exchange for normalized relations Japan was required “to withdraw from China and Indochina, renounce extraterritorial rights and concessions dating back to the turn of the century, following the Boxer Rebellion, to recognize no Chinese government but that of Chiang Kai-shek, and effectively to abrogate the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy (369). Those were terms no Japanese government could accept. Also, Hull was unclear as to whether he also demanded Japan’s exit from Manchuria, where it had established the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1931. In fact he did not—but he didn’t bother to make this clear.

Too late FDR realized, “this means war”; he did not know Pearl Harbor would be a target, but he must have known he had backed Japan into a corner. Call me a cynic and you’ll be right: but if a modern President and his Secretary of State handled say China like Roosevelt and Hull handled the Japanese, and ended up getting into a war, there would be a full-scale outcry.

Hitler’s declaration of war

Kershaw carefully examines Hitler’s decision to declare war on America four days after Pearl Harbor. He reviews Hitler’s pronouncements and thoughts on the “American Union” from his earliest speeches. The Western Hemisphere never seriously figured in Hitler’s plans (despite the now-famous British forgery of a German map carving up South America).

Hitler thought the European armaments industry was greater than the American. “He had experienced American soldiers in the First World War [and believed] the Germans were far superior” (405). But longer term, he realized that Germany was on borrowed time. He knew when he invaded Russia that he must win quickly, compel Stalin’s surrender, and then finish off Britain with his full forces. By 1943, Hitler said, America’s mighty engine of industry would be fully engaged. Any hope in Germany for European mastery would be ended. Thus the Fuehrer warned his trigger-happy naval chief, Admiral Raeder, to avoid provocations in the Atlantic, even after Roosevelt had occupied Iceland and expanded the Atlantic security zone far to the east.

Why then did Hitler declare war after Pearl Harbor? Logic, Kershaw argues, played no part. The Tripartite Pact (Hitler’s stated reason) required Germany to declare war only if Japan had been attacked. The idea that he went to war to “fulfill a commitment” to Japan seems far-fetched. (When did Hitler honor commitments?) Pearl Harbor infuriated the Americans. Absent a German declaration, Kershaw suggests, Congress might not have declared war on Germany. Churchill’s rush visit to Washington after Pearl Harbor was predicated on his anxiety that America should adopt a policy of “Germany first.” Roosevelt would have preferred to put off that visit, lest Congress get the idea that Churchill was exerting undue influence on Administration policy.

Explaining the inexplicable

In declaring war, Hitler took little military advice other than that of Raeder. Yet even the Navy chief admitted that in December 1941 not one U-boat was anywhere near the United States. The German declaration astonished even sycophants like Goebbels. Many experienced soldiers privately (very privately) confessed they saw doom in Hitler’s act (383).

Why did Hitler do it? The answer, it seems, was a “shrug.” Hitler knew that sooner or later Germany would have to confront the Americans. Why not now? It proved fatal.

Despite his disdain of the Americans, Kershaw notes, Hitler by autumn 1941 had “contemplated for the first time the possibility of defeat,” saying “that if in the end the German people should not prove strong enough, then Germany deserved to go under and be destroyed by the stronger power.” (This reminds us of Hitler’s “scorched earth” orders to Speer as the Russians advanced on Berlin in 1945.) Kershaw sees Hitler’s war declaration as revealing. “Beneath the veneer, Hitler seems to have recognized that his chances of total victory had by now all but evaporated…. It was a characteristic attempt to wrest back the initiative through a bold move. But…doomed from the very outset to failure” (430).

Irrational rationales

“What a story!” Japan is of two minds about going to war. The United States is also of two minds—or is she? Between Roosevelt and Hull, it is hard to tell. Emperor Hirohito and his entire cabinet believe that if they go to war, they will probably lose. So…to war they go!

Hitler through December 1941 practices uncharacteristic restraint in not provoking the Americans. He couldn’t afford such a mighty enemy until the Russians were subdued. If America was involved, he surmised Germany would lose. Then…to war he goes.

Fateful Choices is a revealing commentary on the occasional (one hopes) irrationality of high-level decision-making. This book which ought to be read by our leaders (present and future), before they do something stupid. Again. 

See also: “Pearl Harbor +75: All in the Same Boat. Still.”

Seventy-five years ago today, Winston Churchill was pondering survival. Hitler gripped Europe from France to deep inside Russia. Nazi U-boats were strangling British shipping; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was advancing on Suez. Britain’s only ally beside the Empire/Commonwealth, the Red Army, was fighting before Moscow. America remained supportive…and aloof.

Eighteen months earlier he had become prime minister. No one else had wanted the task. “God alone knows how great it is,” he muttered, his eyes filling. “I hope that it is not too late.”

On the evening of December 7th, despondent over odds against him, Churchill was alerted to a radio broadcast. The Japanese had attacked the American fleet in Hawaii. Quickly he telephoned Washington: “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?”

“It’s quite true,” came the booming voice of his friend across the Atlantic. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor….We are all in the same boat now.” A supreme climacteric had occurred. For generations, Americans would ask where they were on December 7th, as we do now for 9/11.

“No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy,” Churchill wrote:

I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!…Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

Pearl Harbor not only awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve (as Admiral Yamamoto is said to have observed). It welded an enduring relationship among the English-speaking Peoples. Today we call it the Anglosphere: the great democracies—and by that I mean to include India—which share to a great extent the same values, the same ideals.

What are they? Churchill defined them: “Common conceptions of what is right and decent; a marked regard for fair play; especially to the weak and poor; a stern sentiment of impartial justice; and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law’—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking Peoples.”

To know the present, know the past

Churchill’s wisdom is Hillsdale College’s privilege, as publisher of his official biography, to refract. Every day we pour through his archive, spanning fifty years of global prominence. Every day we are struck, as biographer Martin Gilbert before us, “by the truth of his assertions, the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals, his humanity, and, most remarkable of all, his foresight.”

He was right, of course, 75 years ago. We were saved after all. “We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands. Let no man underrate our energies, our potentialities and our abiding power for good.”

The spirit of common purpose which Britain, America and the Commonwealth forged in 1941 serves today in countless relationships: commercial, economic, political, military: a fresh focus on national security in an un-national world. Whether the challenge is tyranny or globalization, fanaticism or free trade, our past is the key to our future. And hanging together, as the patriot Richard Penn said, is preferable to hanging separately.

Raymond Seitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, likes to picture the park bench in London where a sculptor placed a life-size bronze of Churchill and Roosevelt sitting together, smiling and shooting the breeze:

“They may be talking about where matters stand and how to handle things. They may be doing in someone’s reputation. Or maybe they’re recollecting that day a long time ago when they heard about Pearl Harbor and strapped their nations together in joint purpose. And maybe they’re saying that, even if today the ocean is different, we’re still in the same boat.”

Let no one underrate our energies, our potentialities, and our abiding power for good.

Per the previous post, I append for reader comment the contents of my next book, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality: What Churchill Stood For.

I have written on most of these matters in the past; the book recasts it afresh. I also acknowledge and cross-reference the work of experts who know far more than I, particularly in the fields of genealogy and medicine. I would be glad to hear your thoughts; please use the “contact” page.

The historian David Stafford wrote: “Myth only develops and takes hold when the time is right, and the climate has long been ripe for the emergence of myths about a wartime hero who stood firm against a totalitarian foe and smote an evil empire.”

Churchill myth is born both of exaggeration and criticism, created either to glorify the record or to belabor it. The former I suppose is somewhat less harmful, born of ignorance. The latter obfuscate the record and distract us from the truth, sometimes intentionally.

Paul Addison wrote, “Paradoxically, I have always thought it diminishes Churchill to regard him as superhuman,” Yet Professor Addison has no doubt about Churchill’s greatness. The most memorable words on that subject were by Churchill’s official biographer, the late Sir Martin Gilbert:

In every sphere of human endeavour, Churchill foresaw the dangers and potential for evil. Many of those dangers are our dangers today. Some writers portray him as a figure of the past, an anachronism, a grotesque. In doing so, it is they who are the losers, for he was a man of quality: a good guide for the generations now reaching adulthood.

The aim of this book is to skewer the most popular allegations about Churchill, to offer readers what he really thought and did, sometimes about matters that are still on our minds today—for as Twain wrote, history never repeats; but sometimes it rhymes.

Youth: Lady Randolph’s indiscretions…The parentage of Jack Churchill…The Menace of Education….The death of Lord Randolph…Women’s Suffrage.

Young Parliamentarian: The loss of  the Titanic…The unpleasantness on Sidney Street…”The sullen feet of marching men in Tonypandy“…Irish independence.

World War I: Warmonger image, peacemaker reality…Defense of Antwerp…Dardanelles and Gallipoli…Sinking the Lusitania…Chemical warfare...America’s involvement in the Great War.

Between the World Wars: “Taking more out of alcohol”…“The foul baboonery of Bolshevism”…Trial by Jewry…”Half-Naked Fakir“…”The Truth About Hitler.”

World War II: Broadcasting the war speeches…Refugees and enemy aliens…Torture as tool or terror…Bombing of Coventry…Pearl Harbor…The Holocaust…Famine in Bengal…Destruction of Monte Cassino…Overtures to Mussolini…Feeding occupied Europe…Firebombing Dresden.

Postwar Years: The fate of Eastern Europe…Nuking the Soviets…The Conservative Party…”Only to have accomplished nothing in the end.”

Appendix: “Things That Go Bump in the Night” (so far-fetched that they defy categorizing). Converting to Islam…A life twice-saved by Alexander Fleming...Engineering the Wall Street Crash…The myths of the Black Dog and an unhappy marriage.

Winston Churchill: Urban Myths and Reality: 

Not a day passes when Sir Winston Churchill, who proved himself indispensable when freedom needed him, is not accused of something, from alcoholism to war crimes—often without serious attribution, or through selective quotes, arranged and cropped so as to advance the preconceived notion.

On that electronic Speakers’ Corner we know as the Internet, Churchill bubbles in a gurgling, digital soup, where he can say anything, or do anything, from hiding his foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor to firebombing Dresden.

It is not that Churchill was never wrong. He was prominent on the political scene for fifty years. His mistakes like his virtues were on a grand scale—but the latter outweighed the former, and the quantity of the former is exaggerated.

Since Churchill wrote 15 million published words, and saved every scrap of paper in an archive of one million documents, he made it easy for some researchers to dig out and isolate what they say are feet of clay. But that same archive offers searchers for the truth the full context—one only has to do one’s research.

Alas not everyone does. Some who purport to be fair will first tee up Churchill as the savior of 1940—then tear him down with the familiar litany: his racist views; his penchant for chemical warfare; his desire to nuke the Russians; the rude things he said about Gandhi and women’s suffrage; the Dardanelles operation in World War I.

A well-known professor of history recently stated that Churchill hated the Conservative Party. Churchill served that party for most of his life and led it through his decisive and final years. How could this be an accurate summary of his views? All the more astonishing, this was proclaimed during a meeting of organizations supposedly devoted to Churchill’s legacy.

A recurrent slander is the claim Churchill sent the Army against striking miners in Tonypandy, Wales, recently restated by a prominent Member of Parliament. In fact he sent policemen, armed with mackintoshes–and was criticized by The Times for being too lenient.

A recent book by a distinguished historian suggests that Churchill disdained common people. It cites another Prime Minister providing a tow to a broken-down motorist and giving two children a lift. We are told: “It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill behaving in such a fashion.” It is not hard at all. Click here.

The aim of this book is to skewer the most popular outrageous allegations against Winston Churchill, and by so doing, to reveal what he really thought—about subjects and issues that are often still on our minds today.

Next: Synopsis of Chapters

There are many current anniversaries (Dardanelles 1915, VE-Day 1945, funeral 1965; Atlantic Charter and Pearl Harbor next year). So one-man Churchill plays are multiplying. I saw one recently in New Hampshire—and left grumbling. I will not criticize the actor, who made a passable attempt at impersonation. But his play script left much to be desired.

Who writes these scripts? Do they do any research? Typically, this one vacuums every famous quote it can cram into 90 minutes and gets so many wrong that one loses count. This is not new. Why meddle with Churchill’s immortal words—which are famous for way he expressed them? Why do writers, actors and politicians insist on misquoting him?

Mangled quotations mount up fast. The great speeches—Munich, Holiday Time in America (1939), Blood Toil Tears and Sweat, Fight on the Beaches—are sometimes convincingly delivered. But every one is spoiled by detail edits that occur willy-nilly. Example: it was “victory in spite of all terror,” not “all hardship.” Churchill was too good a writer to use “hardship” when he meant terror.

Setting’s Off

This presentation is set in the Cabinet War Rooms in April 1955. Churchill has gone there to ponder his decision to resign. But Churchill despised the War Rooms, spent only a few nights there during the Blitz. He left them, never to return, in 1945. Why not stick to the facts, and set the scene at Downing Street? Moreover, the date should be February or March, since he had long made his decision to resign by April—and did so on April 5th.

Churchill did not hesitate to go because of doubt about his successor, as the play suggests (though he later wondered privately whether Anthony Eden would succeed). He decided to leave after failing to engineer a summit conference with Eisenhower and the Russians. Curiously, one of the Russians mentioned is Gorbachev—who was 24 and just graduating from university in 1955.

As in many one-man plays, Sir Winston reviews his life, which in this play was nicely paced but full of errors. Lord Randolph Churchill did not die of syphilis. Nanny Everest was three years dead when Winston’s first book appeared. Omdurman was not the final charge of British cavalry. He became prime minister on May 10th not May 4th 1940, thirty not thirty-five years after 1910, and so on.

The play correctly suggests that Churchill held Prime Minister Baldwin, not Chamberlain, chiefly responsible for Britain’s insufficient rearmament in the 1930s, and repeats WSC’s private reflection that it would have been better had Baldwin never lived. But it misattributes Churchill’s 1938 remark “embalm, cremate and bury”—which referred to avoiding risks in national defense, not to Mr. Baldwin.

More Misquotes

More lines he never uttered: “if you’re going through hell, keep going”; “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”; and the famous exchange with G.B. Shaw over Shaw’s play (“Bring a friend, if you have one….I’ll come the second night, if there is one”). To be fair, it was only recently learned that Shaw and Churchill both denied that exchange. But it’s long established that Lady Astor threatened to poison F.E. Smith’s coffee, not Churchill’s. The famous Bessie Braddock encounter (“tomorrow I’ll be sober”) and the Attlee urinal crack likely did occur, but are so edited as to deprive them of their rapier impact.

There is no record that Churchill ever said God created France for its beauty and Frenchmen to balance it, or that Roosevelt told Churchill he used a cigarette holder to stay away from cigarettes. It is nowhere believed that the United States was “pro-Nazi” before Pearl Harbor. It is untrue that in 1955 Churchill was fretting over the costs of Chartwell (it was purchased by his friends for the National Trust in 1946, providing he could live out his life there); or that Churchill planned his own funeral.

What we watched in New Hampshire was a reasonably convincing portrayal, bringing out many of Churchill’s admirable characteristics, including magnanimity and appreciation for political opponents. But the counterfactuals and misquotes, together with the impossible setting, spoil this presentation for anyone with a little knowledge of the story.

It’s too bad, because the facts are broadly known, and a writer has only to run his screed past any one of a score of Churchill institutions or scholars, who would probably be happy to vet it for free. Get it right!