May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 29

11th International Churchill Conference, Banff, Alberta, 25 September 1994 – “The Truth is great, and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not”

Excerpted from Churchill Proceedings 1994-1995 (published 1998). For the complete text of this speech please see: http://bit.ly/mF8Aeo.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

By William A. Rusher

Although only in my teens in the late Thirties, I was politically aware, watching the developments in Europe as war approached. I found an early hero in Mr. Churchill. The first thing I remembered about him was in an article by Vincent Sheehan, who wrote: “When you see him coming he reminds you of an army with banners fluttering. Your first impulse is to get out of his way.”

When I was sixteen, I remember my mother dashing into my room one morning and saying, “Bill! Wake up! Hitler’s invaded Poland and the dirty devil’s on the radio. Come and listen.”

It was September 1st, 1939. I was soon able contemporaneously to listen to liberty’s reply—those great wartime broadcasts by Winston Churchill, over the inadequate shortwave of those days. I can’t tell you how they lifted the spirit.

Fast forward to 1946, when I was waiting to enter a Harvard Law School class for returning veterans, and met a fellow Churchillian, Henry Anatole Grunwald, an Austrian immigrant working as a copy boy at Time. He later became editor-in-chief of Time and U.S. Ambassador to Austria. In 1965 he edited one of the finest tributes, Churchill: The Life Triumphant, published by American Heritage.

Henry Grunwald intrigued me with a discovery of his: an unpublished despatch filed by the Time correspondent in Athens in December 1944, when Churchill had arrived there to try to set up a democratic government under the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos, uniting the disparate fighting elements.

Met on arrival by Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Scobie, the British officer commanding, Churchill began asking questions. According to Time‘s man, Churchill asked: “Who is this Damaskinos? Is he a man of God, or a scheming prelate more interested in the combinations of temporal power than in the life hereafter?”

Scobie replied, “I think the latter, Prime Minister.”

Churchill said, “Good, that’s just our man.”

Archbishop Damaskinos was duly named premier and Churchill, of course, met him during that visit to Greece. Gerald Pawle, in The War and Colonel Warden, recounts an episode which occurred right before their meeting. It is a tradition in the Royal Navy that on Christmas Eve members of the crew dress up and go around the deck japing and joking, and occasionally, at random, tossing a colleague into the sea. They wear very strange costumes. On this occasion one of them was dressed up as a hula dancer, with a grass skirt and brassiere with red and green lights that blinked on and off. They had been isolated from the VIP area, but nonetheless they wandered a little close just as official party including the Archbishop arrived on board.

Now Damaskinos stood well over six feet, and of course he was wearing a miter that reached a good foot or more above that. He had a long, flowing black cloak and a huge, bushy grey beard. The sailors looked at him and beheld a fellow celebrant! Massing happily, they advanced on the Archbishop with every intention of tossing him into the sea.

They were deterred with difficulty, and the Archbishop went on to Mr. Churchill’s cabin, where it was politely explained to him who these people were and what the tradition was. It is said that he looked as if he had fallen among a group of lunatics.

Churchill, like all heroes, has his detractors, but I don’t worry about this at all. If there is anything certain in history, it is his place and stature. For one thing, his career was simply so long! Let me give you an example.

After World War II, Attlee’s Labour government wanted to curb the power of the House of Lords. Attlee had the poor judgment to quote what Churchill, as a member of the 1911 Liberal cabinet, had said when the Liberals had first curbed the Lords’ powers. Churchill had called the Lords “one-sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee.”

Churchill replied: “Really, I do believe there ought to be a statute of limitations on my remarks. I’m willing to be held responsible for anything I’ve said for the past thirty years, but before that I think a veil should be drawn over the past.” How many politicians last long enough to make that particular request?

As long as humanity admires courage, eloquence and tenacity, Churchill will be remembered and honored—and these are virtues which will come into fashion again, ladies and gentlemen.

I know we have a tendency to be discouraged about how things are going—although in our time, you know, they haven’t gone all that badly. The Soviet Union lies in ruins. Free market economics, which I wouldn’t have given you a plugged nickel for at the end of World War II, is now so popular that even Red China calls its policy “Market Socialism,” whatever that is. These are big victories. Still there is much that is worrisome. I’m sure Churchill, if he were here, would encourage us to “never despair” and “never give in.” That is why I think he would enjoy a little quatrain by the 19th century British poet Coventry Patmore, with which I like to end my talks, because it is upbeat, optimistic and true.

For want of me the world’s course will not fail. When all its work is done the lie shall rot. The Truth is great and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not.