April 7, 2015

Finest Hour 123, Summer 2004

Page 16


“Shocking and awful,” wrote Kevin Whitelaw in U.S. News for 17 May, about the horrific images of Iraq prisoner abuse. Blame us: Finest Hour helped verify the Churchill quotation deployed in his lead: “Eight decades ago, British commanders called in punishing air-strikes to put down a fierce insurrection in one of its most unruly colonies. After pumping money into Iraq to support a deeply unpopular occupation, Colonial Secretary Churchill was fed up. ‘We are paying 8 millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano, out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.’” The text of Churchill’s complaint, to David Lloyd George, is in “Wit & Wisdom,” page 37.

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Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt were homophobes,” writes John Derbyshire in National Review Online for May 14th. With respect to Churchill we doubt this claim sticks. His longest friendship, with the homosexual Eddie Marsh, his private secretary and literary collaborator, lasted nearly fifty years. Marsh appears more frequently than anyone else in the Chartwell visitors’ book. When he died in 1953 Churchill, who seemed to outlive everybody, wrote: “He was a master of literature and scholarship and a deeply instructed champion of the arts. All his long life was serene, and he left this world, I trust, without a pang, and I am sure without a fear.”

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A horse named Action This Day was entered in the May 2004 Kentucky Derby, writes member Mike Robinson: “I hope he gives a good account of himself before the ‘colonists.’” Not too bad: Action This Day closed from dead-last to sixth, more or less like Churchill in 1937, recovering from the Abdication Crisis.

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Churchillians in Shanghai must not miss “M on the Bund” restaurant, at the top of the old Nissan Shipping Building. Proceed to the Glamour Bar (which has an engaging view of the historic Bund) and you can order the house specialty: the “Churchill Martini.” (Ignore the fact that WSC despised cocktails, and is known to have furtively dumped Roosevelt’s martinis in the W.C. This may have something to do with the fact that FDR used two-thirds vermouth—yech!)

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Newsweek’s Evan Thomas on the young John Kerry (Democratic nominee for President): “The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While others were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, Kerry was discussing George Kennan’s doctrine of containment.” His father introduced John to such luminaries as Monnet and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill….” The full story is at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/02/opinion/main603542.shtml.

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According to Campbell Brown in the Asbury Park Press, Winston Churchill refused to travel on Friday the 13th. If WSC held firm to his dictum, this would have happened at least one day but no more than three days per year. Every year has at least one Friday the 13th, but no year has more than three.

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ZymoGenetics chief executive Bruce Carter, a British-born biologist who likes to quote Churchill, says balancing the interests of researchers who made the company reputation with those of the developers who will cement its future is one of his most critical jobs, like Fighter Command vs. Bomber Command.

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