September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 07

On June 17th, Speaker of the U.S. House of representatives John Boehner misquoted Churchill as he praised resigning Majority leader Eric Cantor: “Winston Churchill once famously said: ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.’ As one who suffered a tough defeat myself in 1998, I can tell you there’s plenty of wisdom in that statement.”  Boehner said that—Churchill didn’t.

There is wisdom in what Churchill really said: “you must put your head into the lion’s mouth if the performance is to be a success.” (London to Ladysmith, 1900).  “Success always demands a greater effort.” (13 December 1940 to Australian Premier Robert Menzies). “No one can guarantee success…but only deserve it.” (Their Finest Hour, 1949)

Margot Asquith dismissed Winston Churchill as “a dangerous maniac….Winston’s vanity is septic. He would die of blood poisoning if it were not for a great deal of red blood which circulates freely through his heart and stomach.” A backhanded compliment? Margot went on to label WSC “so poor in character and judgment, so insolent and childish, I hardly ever think of him as a danger.”

In 1916,  H.H. Asquith fell to Lloyd George as head of the World War I coalition government. “From her vantage point she created a ‘compelling’ record of her husband’s fall from grace—and revealed her disdain for a number of leading figures of the day,” reports the Daily Mail in a book review of Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-1916 (http://dailym.ai/1qccXTi).

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One look at her tells you all you need to know about Margot.  Her diaries seem to resurface every forty years or so. It wasn’t Churchill who brought “Squiffy” down, although the opposite could be argued.  Asquith had much to do with his own demise, given his lackluster leadership, and his habit of confiding his true thoughts less to his colleagues than to his lady friend Venetia Stanley.The Mail says nothing about Violet,  Asquith’s daughter by his first wife, who worshipped Churchill and wrote a good book about him, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, aka Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait (1966).