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 the Baltic

19 March 2010 Comments 1 Comment

Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest Online finely describes the Museum of the KGB, established in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius to document the victims of Soviet occupation of the Baltic States from 1940 through 1991:

Yet those poor Lithuanian partisans who fought a hopeless guerrilla campaign against the Soviet occupation after 1945 kept waiting for us to show up,” Mead cointinues. “Apparently they made the mistake of believing all those fine words that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill wrote in The Atlantic Charter.

I have no doubt that Roosevelt and Truman were right to avoid war with the Soviet Union after World War Two…But war over eastern Europe in 1945 was unthinkable; containment was the best we could do.…