April 15, 2015

Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004

Page 38

By Michael McMenamin

“Churchill for Dummies,” by Michael Lind, The Spectator, 24 April 2004
“The Real Churchill,” by Adam Young, Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org)

Winston Churchill in 2004 has once again come under attack from the right and the left—a not unfamiliar position. The new attacks both originate in America. Both are prompted by opposition to the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, as well as the frequent invocation of Churchill’s words by American politicians who supported the war.

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The left-wing attack, in The Spectator, was by Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. (www.newamerica.net) which claims its politics are “radical centrist.” The right-wing attack was posted on the website of the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org) on 27 February 2004 by Adam Young, “co-founder of The Resume Store, a Canadian-based service offering resumes and cover letters.”

Who are these people and why are they attacking Churchill? A brief explanation is in order.

Lind takes aim at “neoconservatives” in the Bush administration whom Lind, a former neoconservative himself, holds responsible for the Iraq war. Most neoconservatives are former Democrats, so think of Lind’s piece as a food fight among former colleagues.

Young’s assault, also aimed at “neocons,” comes from the libertarian right, which usually favors a non-interventionist foreign policy, absent an attack on American soil. While not so well known or influential as other libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute or the Reason Foundation, the Mises Institute scholars advocate an isolationist foreign policy as well as stricter immigration controls which strongly echo the arguments of Patrick Buchanan. The only two just wars, in their view, were the American Revolution and the Civil War (from the South’s point of view).

Those who admire Churchill do so for a variety of reasons, most of which do not involve the great man’s political thought. As a consequence, Churchillians can be found among many political persuasions, e.g., in the United States, Democrats like Chris Matthews and Gretchen Rubin, the Clinton Treasury Secretary’s daughter and recent author of Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill; libertarians like Steven Hayward, author of Churchill on Leadership; Republicans like Jack Kemp and George W. Bush; neoconservatives like Fred Barnes and William Kristol of The Weekly Standard; and in the United Kingdom, Roy Jenkins from Old Labour and Tony Blair from New Labour; and Tories as disparate as Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine.

I note this because I do not assume Churchillians share a common view on the Iraq war or the subsequent occupation which occasions these attacks on Churchill. Nor do I believe we all share a common view of Churchill himself. But I believe we all welcome the introduction of Churchill, and whatever light he and his life can shed on contemporary issues, because Churchill knew a lot about a lot, and was rarely without an opinion: frequently right, sometimes wrong, rarely uncertain.

What we do agree on and don’t like is when people distort Churchill’s record and beliefs for their own purposes, whether they be from the left or right or in between. And that is what has happened here. These two disparate attacks share the same premise: If neocons admire him, there must be something wrong with Churchill.

Full disclosure. I am and have been for over twenty-five years a contributing editor of Reason magazine, the American libertarian publication. As a consequence, I agree with many positions of the Mises Institute, but their take on World War II and Churchill is not one of them.

Mr. Lind first. A few of the factual inaccuracies in his assault from the left in The Spectator have been addressed elsewhere in FH (see Ampersand, page 47). But the ugly ad hominem, if not anti-Semitic, nature of other ill-informed comments by Lind should not go unremarked. Lind writes that Churchill was “a social Darwinist who preferred Jews to Arabs” and that “while most Americans think of Churchill as the foe of the Nazis, many right-wing Jews in the United States and Israel revere him for his role in promoting European-Jewish colonization of Palestine at the expense of the Arabs.”

Lind does not provide a definition of “right-wing Jews” as there are many left-wing Jews who are also Zionists, but the phrase “European-Jewish colonization” is a clue as to where Lind is coming from. Churchill was a Zionist who favored a homeland for the Jews in Palestine but, selectively quoting from a 1920 Churchill essay on “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” Lind would have us believe that Churchill’s Zionism was fueled by an underlying anti-Semitism: “Churchill ranted that Jews were behind world revolutions everywhere….Jews [were] denizens of the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America.”

The purpose and context of Churchill’s article were quite different from that implied by Lind, who is openly hostile to Israel and believes Yasser Arafat is being treated unfairly. The 1920 article was intended by Churchill, and seen at the time by his many Jewish friends, as an antidote to the blood libel anti-Semitic tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” then enjoying wide circulation in Europe and the United States, in large part financed by the American automobile mogul, Henry Ford. Contrast Lind’s characterization of Churchill’s attitude towards Jews with the following excerpt from Churchill’s article:

Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world….There are all sorts of men––good, bad and, for the most part, indifferent––in every country, and every race. Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct….

Lind doubtless agrees with the close Churchill friend who told Martin Gilbert (Churchill’s “hagiographer” in Lind-speak) that “even Winston had a fault…he was too fond of Jews.”

Lind is not too fond of Jews, at least not those who “colonized” Palestine at the expense of the Arabs, and he shares with Adam Young both a hostility to American “neocons” and a fondness for selective quotes without context. They even use the identical excerpt, allegedly from a 1937 Churchill essay, to claim falsely that Churchill was something of a Hitler appeaser (Lind) or had outright “reversed himself” on Hitler (Young):

One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.

I don’t doubt that Churchill wrote this, though the quote doesn’t appear where they say it does. Here’s what Churchill did say about Hitler in Great Contemporaries, an essay which first appeared in The Strand magazine in November 1935, which belies the claims of both Lind and Young:

It is not possible to form a just judgment of a public figure who has attained the enormous dimensions of Adolf Hitler until his life work as a whole is before us. Although no subsequent political action can condone wrong deeds, history is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods, but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler….It is enough to say that both possibilities are open at the present moment. [Written in 1935.]

It is likely that neither Lind nor Young ever read the original article. Cheap shots are easier to make when you don’t have, or avoid deploying, all of the facts.

Let’s turn now to Adam Young who tells us he believes in something he calls “honest history.” He assures the reader that Churchill was “a menace to liberty, and a disaster for Britain, for Europe, for the United States of America, and for Western Civilization itself….[t]he Winston Churchill we’re told about is not the Churchill known to honest history, but rather a fictional version of the man and his actions….”

That’s the wind up. Here’s the pitch:

With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. Winston Churchill must be ranked with Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western civilization.

Dear, oh dear. It is perhaps but a minor quibble I have with the honest history school that this is Young’s first mention of Woodrow Wilson or Herbert Hoover anywhere in the article—men whom, incidentally, Churchill did not hold in the highest regard, even if he would never have placed them in the same category as Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin.

What Young doesn’t say is that his article is neither new nor original. Rather, it is a heavily condensed footnote-free rehash of a 10,000-plus word essay by Ralph Raico, “Rethinking Churchill,” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories. (Transaction Publishers, 1999), a book which itself arose from a Mises Institute symposium.

Raico is a history professor at Buffalo State College and a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute. So, as a Churchill critic, think of Young as “Raico Lite” or, if you prefer, as “Mini-Me” to Raico’s Dr. Evil.

Young advances several major points: Churchill had no political principles; he was an opportunist who sought power at all costs; he loved war and his hatred of Germany led him to reject a negotiated peace in May 1940 which directly led to the Holocaust. (Yes, I kid you not.)

Churchill’s Political Principles

Young lets Churchill’s enemies define him, quoting The Spectator in 1911: “We cannot detect in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue.”

But how about The Glasgow Herald in 1924, when Churchill was running as a free trade “Constitutionalist” with Conservative Party support, which called him “a predestined champion of the individualism which he has served all his political life under both of its liveries”?

Lifting a passage from Professor Raico, Mr. Young claims that Winston Churchill “lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of true, classical liberalism.” Raico himself makes the point more clearly:

In 1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.” This, however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue. Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of classical liberalism. In particular, he never understood that, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor. Peace, not war, is the father of all things.

Mises and Raico are wrong and Churchill is right. The story of the human race is war and the relatively recent creation of the market economy based on free, peaceful and voluntary exchange between people is an antidote to war which has yet to be fully accepted by those on the left and right who believe force, individually or institutionally, is a better way to organize society.

It is important to recognize, in evaluating Churchill’s political thought, that throughout his life, he identified with the Democratic Party in America and not the Republicans. This is because at the turn of the century, while Churchill was coming of age, his chief political mentor was a free-trade, laissez-faire Democrat, the New York Congressman Bourke Cockran. The Republicans had been the party of government in the United States since the Civil War, the party of privilege and protection, completely within the control of big business and the high tariffs they demanded. The Democrats, with their strength in the agrarian South and the working class in industrial big cities of the North, were the party of free trade. While that was to evolve over the course of the twentieth century so that the core of free traders today are largely Republican, and the protectionist enclave resides within the Democratic Party, the change did not occur in Churchill’s lifetime.

Young dismisses Churchill and the modest social reforms the Liberal Party introduced in the eight years before World War I providing insurance against sickness, unemployment and old age as nothing more than “a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and America.” Raico is more nuanced, but the message is the same.

The fact is, of course, that Churchill’s early support for a “minimum national standard” below which people would not be allowed to fall and above which they would be able to compete freely, makes him no more a collectivist or socialist than Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan or even Milton Friedman. As Paul Addison accurately summarizes in Churchill on the Home Front:

[T]he most consistent strand in his rhetoric was his exposition of the virtues of capitalism. It was always a form of capitalism in which the state maintained a balance between the classes, and sought to shield the poor and the working-class through fiscal or social policy. Churchill, in Kenneth Morgan’s phrase, stood for “free enterprise with a human face.” Beyond this he detested all peacetime plans for the regulation and control of the economy. They smacked to him of regimentation and dictatorship. Churchill was often dismissed as an adventurer but it was, of course, this quality of individualism for which, above all else, he stood.

Churchill and Power

Young and Raico accuse Churchill of being an opportunist who sought only power. Young disagrees with President Bush’s post-Iraq comparison of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Churchill as a man who sought “the right thing and not the easy thing” (page 29). No, says Young, “Churchill was above all a man who craved power…to advance himself no matter what the cost.” (Raico made the same observation even before the Iraq war.)

Young and Raico are wrong again. Young is no student of Churchill and shows no signs in his article of having read anything about him besides Raico’s essay. Raico has read widely, if selectively, about Churchill (citing critical Churchill biographers John Charmley and Clive Ponting nine times and David Irving and Dietrich Aigner six times). But the charge is transparently false to anyone familiar with the five periods during Churchill’s career where he did not hold a cabinet or sub-cabinet position.

• 1900-06: The Tories were in power and, as a young Tory, Churchill did nothing to ingratiate himself with them. Openly ambitious and disrespectful of his elders, he criticized their conduct of the Boer War, supported army retrenchment and reform, and was instrumental in the Liberal Party’s defeat of War Secretary Brodrick’s proposal for a large standing army capable of serving as a European expeditionary force. He supported and argued for free trade, ignoring the pointed political advice of Conservative elder Joseph Chamberlain to “study tariffs.” None of this was calculated to win him power.

• 1915-17: Churchill was crushed, and even depressed, by the Tory revenge in 1915, forcing him from the Admiralty. He could have stayed home in a modest Cabinet position, but chose instead to take a commission in the Army, rejecting a higher rank so he could command forces under fire in the front line. He didn’t return to power until his friend Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister.

• 1922-24: Defeated for re-election in 1922, Churchill was out of power and out of Parliament. He did nothing to curry favor with the ruling Conservatives during the 1923 election, campaigning as the free trader he always was. When the Liberals, in January 1924, embraced collectivism and struck a deal with the Socialists to bring Ramsay McDonald and the Labour Party to power, Churchill left the Liberals and worked to unite free trade Liberals with the Conservatives, but never at the expense of free trade. He ran as a “Constitutionalist” with Conservative support in November, 1924, but did so without compromising his free trade principles. The new Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made him––to his surprise––Chancellor of the Exchequer, free trade and all.

• 1929-39: India, the rise of Nazism, Palestine, German rearmament, the Abdication: rarely has one politician, so prominent in his party, taken so many positions contrary to the party line. Reasonable people may disagree today on the positions Churchill took. But to state that he placed power over principle is laughable.

• 1945-51: Churchill clearly wanted to return to power and replace the Socialists, which he eventually did in 1951. But he used the same individualist rhetoric which had helped usher him out of power in 1945. An opportunist would have softened his words the second time around—yet Churchill campaigned in 1951 on the individualist themes he had espoused all his life: “We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait his place until his turn comes.”

Though addressing different issues at different time, the 76-year-old Churchill of 1951 bears a remarkable resemblance to the 29-year-old Churchill of 1903 whose political thought had been, in his own words, “powerfully influenced” by the classical liberal views of his Irish-American mentor, Bourke Cockran. Where in all this is Churchill the opportunist?

Churchill’s Love of War

Whether you admire Churchill’s will and political courage or bear him a pathological hatred, it usually all comes down to May 1940. It unquestionably does with Raico, whose world view is that of the old Republican right, the isolationists and members of America First, who wanted to avoid U.S. involvement in another European war, no matter what the cost. These non-interventionists of the 1930s believed U.S. involvement in World War I was a mistake as well. These were and are honorable positions, held by honorable people, to whom Raico, in his blind zeal, brings no honor.

Both Young and Raico hold Churchill responsible for American involvement in World War I. As Raico says, “While Winston had no principles, there was one constant in his life: the love of war,” citing Churchill’s playing with soldiers as a boy; attending Sandhurst “instead of the universities”; and his statement to Violet Asquith during the early days of World War I, “I cannot help it––I love every second I live,” the last quote, of course, being something quite different from love of war itself.

Contrast that with the young Churchill’s speech in the House in the spring of 1901 attacking his own party and “Mr. Brodrick’s Army”–– the creation of three regular army corps ––because he opposed having a standing army ready at a moment’s notice to engage in a European war:

[A] European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and the exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

This is the man whom Raico would have us believe “loved war as few modern men ever have.”

Raico also accuses Churchill before the Great War of “spreading wild rumors of the growing strength of the German navy just as he did in the 1930s about the build-up of the German air force.” Young echoes Raico: “Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and, during the crises that followed, used every opportunity to fan the flames of war.”

Really? Young’s bibliography references Robert Massey’s excellent book, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, a source Raico does not cite. But anyone reading Massey will not find support for the Raico thesis that Churchill used “every opportunity to fan the flames of war.” From Massey, one learns that it was on Churchill’s watch that the Admiralty abandoned its policy of maintaining a navy as strong as the next two naval powers combined, reducing that to only a 60% superiority over the German fleet.

Churchill’s first speech as head of the Admiralty “offered conciliation and compromise” to the Germans as well as a “naval holiday,” i.e., a halt in building new battleships. Inasmuch as the British fleet was already 60% larger than the German fleet, the British could cancel four dreadnoughts, the Germans two and, Churchill suggested, maybe France, Italy, Austria and Russia might follow suit. But the Germans didn’t bite and, says Massey, worked behind the scenes “to prevent an official British proposal for a Naval Holiday from reaching Berlin.”

Raico/Young claim that during the Twenties “Churchill denounced all calls for Allied disarmament even before Hitler came to power and held the “protracted fantasy” that a defeated Germany would submit forever to the shackles of Versailles. Both, of course, are wrong. Again.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill worked in 1925 to defeat in the cabinet a defense pact with France aimed at Germany. Churchill’s view was that no defense pact with France should be concluded unless it included an arrangement with Germany as well.

This was, in fact, acknowledged by Churchill as “appeasement” of Germany’s legitimate grievances at a time before that word had acquired negative connotations.

Churchill believed the same thing about the unrealistic level of German reparations, but could do nothing to alleviate them without the United States offering relief to their former allies—something the United States resolutely refused to do.

For Young and Raico, of course, Churchill can do nothing right. Ever. Here is Raico’s take on Churchill in the Thirties:

Though a Conservative MP, Churchill began berating the Conservative governments, first Baldwin’s and then Chamberlain’s, for their alleged blindness to the Nazi threat. He vastly exaggerated the extent of German rearmament, formidable as it was, and distorted its purpose by harping on German production of heavy-bombers.

Raico and his disciple don’t mention what the “purpose” of German rearmament was, only that the British should have had no concern because it didn’t include heavy bombers. But far from “exaggerations,” Churchill’s warnings were based on intelligence estimates from his private sources within the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments and accurately reflected what the government thought it knew at the time about Nazi rearmament.

So we come to May 1940, and the principal Raico-Young thesis: Churchill should have cut a deal with Hitler in May 1940 and, because he didn’t, Churchill was the one responsible for the Holocaust. Again, I’m not making this up. Here’s Raico:

Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him––the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European Jewry. It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate. (italics added)

Raico cites in a footnote a Goebbels diary entry in March 1942 to support his claim that Churchill “doomed European Jewry”:

Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime….[T]he fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe–– and that’s only right.

By March 1942, my memory is that Hitler had invaded Poland (1939); invaded France, Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium (1940); thought about but passed on England (1940-41); invaded the Soviet Union (1941); and declared war on the United States (1941). But Raico says it’s Churchill who’s responsible for the Holocaust because he didn’t seek peace terms in 1940!

What really upsets Raico about Churchill is that, by holding out as he did, America eventually joined the war against Hitler. Here Raico is right in my view, but why is he upset? The answer is communism. Raico believes that communism and the Soviet Union were a much greater threat than the Nazis: “But it has yet to be explained why there should exist a double standard ordaining that compromise with one dictator would have been morally sickening, while collaboration with the other was morally irreproachable.”

This was a common theme of the isolationists in the late 1930s and remains one today; see, e.g., Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire. The reason why communism was a lesser threat in 1940 was explained quite lucidly by John Lukacs in his 1992 book, The Duel: 10 May-31 July 1940: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler:

In spite of its international pretensions and propaganda, communism did not go very far outside the Soviet Union….Alone among the great revolutions of the world ––consider only how the American and French revolutions had soon been emulated by a host of other peoples, in Latin America and in Western Europe, often without the support of American or French armies––Communism was unable to achieve power anywhere outside the Soviet Union until after the Second World War.

Lukacs then explains why, even before Hitler, authoritarian dictatorships posed a greater threat than communism to market democracy. Specifically, in the twenty years before 1940, liberal parliamentary democracy had failed and been abandoned in scores of countries all over the world. Churchill saw this himself at the time, telling the House in February 1933:

The world is losing faith in democracy….Look at Europe. Much more than half of Europe has degenerated in this century, from Parliaments so hopefully erected in the last, into arbitrary or military governments, and the movement is steady everywhere.

Lukacs expanded on his theme in his 1999 book, Five Days in London, May 1940, noting that in 1940 Hitler represented to many a wave of the future: “[H]ad Hitler won the Second World War, we would be living in a different world.”

What kind of world? Revisionists need to answer that.

Lukacs makes a good case that Hitler, as “the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century,” would have inspired, if not imposed, a new populist, nationalist (and racist) paradigm for the world based on National Socialist Germany, replacing the market democracy paradigm which prevails in varying degrees throughout much of the world today. Remember Churchill’s 1940 prophecy of a “New Dark Age” protracted by “perverted science,” and imagine a world with a Nazi atomic bomb and no Manhattan Project.

Raico is not big on counterfactuals, i.e., alternate history or what might have been. The most you get from him is a 1948 Hanson Baldwin quote that with Britain and the United States out of the fight, the Nazis and the Soviet Union would have fought each other “to a frazzle.” If that’s the best Raico can do, one can see why he shuns counterfactuals. Without the distraction of the British in North Africa to tie up the Afrika Corps, and without material support from the United States and Great Britain, it is difficult to imagine the survival in 1941 of the Soviet Union—which was made up then of the same constituent ethnic elements which so eagerly spun away from Moscow in 1989.

More importantly––and back for a moment to Raico’s defamatory claim about Churchill’s responsibility for the Holocaust––British neutrality after having negotiated peace in May 1940 would only have hastened, not deterred, the German invasion of Russia. It is important to recall that, while there were concentration camps in Germany and Poland before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the SS death squads and the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews began after, not before, the invasion of Russia. Imagine what Hitler could have accomplished if he had invaded the Soviet Union sooner, and without a worry that Allied troops would one day uncover the ghastly secret the Nazis did so much to conceal.

One can imagine what Young and Raico think about Churchill’s conduct during the war and any deals he and Roosevelt made with Stalin in order to defeat the Germans. Leaping back in time, Young even repeats at this point Lind’s false claim of Churchill supporting the use of “poison gas” against the Arabs in the 1920s (see page 36).

And, of course, Raico and Young believe Churchill was responsible for involving the U.S. in the Cold War. Echoed by Young, Raico writes:

With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own policy, there was only one recourse open to Churchill: to bring America into Europe permanently. Thus, his anxious expostulations to the Americans, including his Fulton, Missouri “Iron Curtain” speech.

Give me a break. Truman invited Churchill to Missouri to give the speech. The Americans vetted and had an advance copy of what Churchill was going to say. Churchill wasn’t even in power during any of the early formative years of the Cold War. Britain’s foreign policy was in the hands of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin. The British government supported the Americans and Churchill supported the British government. But the Cold War and the strategies behind it were conceived and conducted by the United States—with Great Britain a very junior partner. Predictably, no mention is made by Young or Raico of Churchill’s unsuccessful effort, in the wake of Stalin’s death, to secure a summit conference between the old allies and the new Soviet leadership.

Both Lind and Young are openly motivated by their opposition to the Iraq war and, in Lind’s case at least, an opposition to the State of Israel. What Churchill would have done about Iraq were he in Tony Blair’s position we cannot say. Few of Churchill’s many admirers outside the Bush administration would dare venture an opinion. Reasonable people can differ on this.

Ralph Raico’s position is unreasonable. He hates Churchill (and “hate” is not too strong a word, as more than one acquaintance of Raico has used that word to me) precisely because of May 1940. Without that, he believes––and I agree––America would not have gone to war with Germany. While Raico could have lived with the consequences of a Nazi triumph, most people in the western world, including Winston Churchill, preferred not to.

The world which resulted from Churchill’s stubborn courage is better for it, and that world, unlike Lind, Raico and Young, is perfectly willing to accept the judgment of history—a judgment echoing Mary Soames’s note to her 90-year-oldfather in his last days: “In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving, generous father, I owe you what every English-man, woman & child does––Liberty itself.”

Lind, Raico and Young owe him the same. But in their zeal to attack their political opponents today, they chose, in their ignorance, to dishonor the man who made it possible for them to do so. Churchill would have understood. Gnats don’t bother giants.

Mr. McMenamin, a Cleveland attorney, heads The Churchill Centre’s Northern Ohio affiliate and is a FH contributor.