The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Misquoting an Ally

4.13.09 @ 6:01AM

A RED HERRING
Re: Geoffrey Norman's Ninety-Two Years and Counting:

Geoffrey Norman incorrectly quotes Winston Churchill that "America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War [I]" -- a favorite of neo-isolationists for many years.

This particular red herring is the very first entry in an appendix of unattributed quotations in my book, Churchill by Himself, together with the following note:

"Posted on the Internet in 2002, this quotation caused a stir. In 1942 a $1 million lawsuit was brought against WSC (who had denounced the quotation as fiction) by publisher William Griffin of the New York Enquirer. It was dismissed when WSC admitted to the interview but denied the statement."

My book contains numerous accurate Churchill remarks expressing exactly the opposite opinion, e.g.: "[There are] only two ways of winning the war, and they both begin with A. One is aeroplanes and the other is America.… Everything else is swept away." (Munitions Council, 4 September 1917). And: "the moral consqeuence of the United States joining the Allies was indeed the deciding cause in the conflict....Defeatist movements were strangled on the one side and on the other inflamed." (The World Crisis, Vol. 3, 1927).

Incidentally, the New York Enquirer later became the National Enquirer, which is still doling out the same quality material.
-- Richard M. Langworth
Editor, The Churchill Centre
www.winstonchurchill.org

NEW US VS. THEM
Re: George H. Wittman's Leading From Weakness:

What you didn't add is that the Obama administration switched to a British newspaper for its trial balloons because he is far more interested in what Europeans think than in what Americans think.

I guess we'll have to get used to it.

The old distinctions between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, though still marginally valid, have now been replaced by the new distinction:

Constitutionalists and internationalists.

Obama has put the Internationalists in the driver's seat.

Gee! Haw! Giddyap! Whoa!
-- A. C. Santore

SINGLE PAYER: BAD FOR YOUR CONSTITUTION
Re: Philip Klein's Obama's False Choices:

Letter to the Editor