30 November 2011
CAJ note: These excerpts are from an article written by B. Daniel Blatt in 2010 on the 136th anniversary of Churchill’s birth. We can also recommend The Citizens of London, a book that “reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London.”
…On November 30, 1874, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, his mother the former Jennie Jerome, the second daughter of the American financier Leonard Jerome. His very parentage thus embodied the special relationship between the United States and United Kingdom.
Indeed, it was Churchill himself who coined the term to describe the relations between the two powerful Anglophone democracies…
…First elected to parliament in 1900 as a Tory, he broke with his party over tariffs, preferring free trade and the Liberals. He would rejoin the Conservative Party in 1925, staying with the Tories, through his two terms as Prime Minister and until the end of his life. Noting that Churchill “stood for Parliament under six labels,” one of his biographers, Paul Johnson wrote that “He was not a party man. . . . His loyalty belonged to the national interest, and his own.”
And Churchill saw the British national interest clearly linked to that of the United States and Western democracies…
…Returning from Buckingham Palace after the King officially named him Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, W.H. Thompson, Churchill’s bodyguard, sat silently with the then-new head of British government. In Five Days in London: May 1940, historian John Lukacs reports how Thompson broke the silence:
“I only wish the position had come your way in better times for you have an enormous task.” Tears came into Churchill’s eyes. He said to Thompson: “God alone knows how great it is. I hope it is not too late. I am very much afraid it is. We can only do our best.”
Churchill the faced a challenge that few in history have faced. And he met it first with tears and then steely resolve. Advice to us all…
Read the entire article at Gay Patriot.
