March 18, 2015

Finest Hour 160, Autumn 2013

Page 11

By Richard M. Langworth
Twitter @rmlangworth • www. richardlangworth.com

“If we lose faith in ourselves…then indeed our story is told.” —WSC, Royal Society of St. George, 24 April 1933


Former basketball star Dennis Rodman returned from Pyongyang September 7th, professing his love for North Korean demigod Kim Jong Un (“an awesome kid…my friend for life”). Despite having earlier called on Kim to free one of his up to 200,000 political prisoners, Rodman now says it’s none of his business:  “Ask Obama about that. Ask Hillary Clinton. Ask those [a……s].”

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everyone has the right to make a fool of himself, and North Korea’s use of poor Mr. Rodman is no concern of mine. But the incident did remind me of what Alistair Cooke wrote about people whose first impulse is to hurl expletives at their country. Frequently they are persons whose fame and fortune is owed to the opportunities that their country gave them, who might otherwise be under the radar of awesome kids like Kim Jong Un.

Mr. Cooke was explaining the Marshall Plan to an audience which had never heard of it. “The Marshall Plan,” he said, was a “vast system of loans and gifts to battered old Europe that made possible not only her recovery but also, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson was well aware, the healthy growth of a generation of young Europeans with lungs powerful enough to exercise in withering denunciation of this Secretary, who looked like a Spanish grandee and was, they swore, an American imperialist who had spawned the Marshall Plan as a fat insurance racket.”

But that generation wasn’t new. Here is Churchill, speaking in 1933:  “The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within…. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. [They] come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians.”

*****

Now we are on the eve of a conference on Churchill and U.S. presidents. Perhaps we may meet some brainy people there. But we have some brains of our own. To that end this issue offers views on Churchill and three presidents by scholars present but not presenting in Washington, which may serve as background to the deliberations. One article, by June Hopkins, sheds new light on her grandfather, Franklin Roosevelt’s key man, linchpin of an alliance.

I asked for the two articles on Wilson and Hoover in unabashed self-interest. For I was invited to a panel discussion of his relations with U.S. presidents up to Roosevelt—a vacuuming (Hoovering?) of his encounters with all the presidents from McKinley to Hoover. So now I may quote the learned findings of Messrs. Lyons and Wernecke, who have done the groundwork! I am sure however that the presentations on Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower will offer more opportunity for brainy people to find and display Churchill’s feet of clay. Heaven knows he wasn’t perfect. let him make one slip—and bang.

Churchill, we are often assured, set out to create his own legend through his books; but legends are often exploded by the dogged efforts of historians to ferret out the truth. The greatest tribute to Winston Churchill is that a multitude of attempts by brainy people to knock him from his pedestal have failed to alter history’s judgment.

I am old and rather jaded. Only a few speeches resound to me over the years. I think of them whenever some bizarre episode like Rodman’s occurs.

All are on our website, but if you can’t find one, I will email it to you:  Alistair Cooke at Bretton Woods, lord Mountbatten at Edmonton, grace Hamblin at Dallas, Martin Gilbert at the Holocaust Museum, William Buckley at Boston, Fitzroy Maclean at Argyll,  Anthony Montague Brown at London….and Winston Churchill, at the Royal Society of St. George, back in 1933 (when I was not quite on the scene):

“If, while on all sides foreign nations are every day asserting a more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade, we remain paralysed by our own theoretical doctrines or plunged into the stupor of after-war exhaustion, then indeed all that the croakers predict will come true, and our ruin will be swift and final.”

One retort to the croakers begins on page 26.

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