Roosevelt Archives | Page 2 of 3 | Richard M. Langworth

Churchill’s Rare Press Conferences

27 October 2010 Comments 0 Comments

I am completing an English assignment which looks at the speeches of Winston Churchill and would like to look at any radio interviews Churchill gave during World War II but have, so far, only been able to find speeches. Please could you advise me whether any such interviews are in existence? —E.L.

Churchill rarely gave interviews—only two that I know of as a young man, and those reluctantly. Speeches (live) were his preference. However, on his visit to Washington after Pearl Harbor, on 23 December 1941, Presidential Roosevelt ushered him into a presidential press conference, where he acquitted himself well.…

WW2 Abridged: Too Easy to be Good

22 August 2010 Comments 1 Comment

Der Spiegel’s “The Man Who Saved Europe,” a nine-part web-post by Klaus Wiegrefe, oddly reminds me of “The Complete Wrks of Wilm Shkspr (Abridged),” in which three actors present the audience with all of Shakespeare’s works in a couple of hours.

There’s nothing particularly novel or new in this series. Aside from the familiar attempts to cast Churchill as occasionally demoniac, it agrees that he “Saved Europe.” But one would do better reading about World War II on Wikipedia—or, if you have time, one of the good specialty studies, like Geoffrey Best’s Churchill and War—or, if you really want to know what Churchill thought, his abridged war memoirs.…

Churchill and “Gone With The Wind”

26 July 2010 Comments 2 Comments

I am a longtime Gone With The Wind collector and researcher, and give presentations at GWTW events. I’ve also been the GWTW Answer Lady on several websites. I was recently asked whether Churchill and Roosevelt had read Gone With The Wind. I found that FDR read quite a bit of the novel, but I couldn’t come up with anything about Churchill. I hope you don’t mind me tossing you this question. Maybe you’ve run across a mention of it. I assume that Churchill did see the film as FDR did on 26 December 1939, after the movie opened in Washington. GWTW…