Winston Churchill & Recovering the Lost Art of Manhood
Frank Miniter, editor of American Hunter, has a new book out called The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide: Recovering the Lost Art of Manhood. Miniter's perspective is that the traditional art of being a gentleman and being a man has been discarded by political correctness, and that both men and women are the poorer for it. It's an interesting and very readable book.
One section of it deals with Winston Churchill, my dad's hero, who Miniter sees as exemplifying some of the virtues of the traditional gentleman.
It's an interesting portrait of a flawed but inspiring man who made plenty of mistakes (Gallipoli, Gandhi, and opposing women's suffrage) but who overcame much (a speech impediment, failure in school, problematic parents) to be very successful.
All the while Churchill kept his sense of humor. One sample from Miniter's book dealt with England's Labor Party's nationalizations of parts of English industry after World War II. Miniter writes:
Churchill entered the men's room at the House of Commons to find his political rival Clement Atlee standing at the urinal. Churchill took a position as far away as he could from Atlee, only to hear Atlee jab, "My dear Winston, I hope that despite being adversaries in the House, we could be friends outside of it."
Churchill replied:
"Ah, Clement, I have no quarrel with you, but in my experience, whenever you see something big, you tend to want to nationalize it."
Another Churchill quote (not from Miniter's book) is described thusly:
Nancy Astor was a native Virginian who became Britain’s first woman member of the House of Commons. In the 1930’s she headed a clique in the House of Commons that found something to admire in Hitler’s Germany. Churchill described an Astorite as an appeaser "who feeds the crocodile hoping that it will eat him last." One time shortly thereafter, Churchill found himself at Cliveden, the Astor mansion.
After dinner Lady Astor presided over the pouring of coffee. When Churchill came by, she glared and said. "Winston, if I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee." "Nancy," Churchill replied to the acid-tongued woman, "if I were your husband, I’d drink it."
And while we're at it, click on the photo above for a nice clip about the Battle of Britain from the recent HBO movie about Winston Churchill, Into the Storm. To learn more about Miniter's book, click here.
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