Churchill on republicans

If there's one thing that has always irritated the hell out of me, it's comparisons between the chimperor and Winston Churchill. The comparison is approximately as valid as that between a fresh turd and Mount Everest; sure, they may be on the same planet and roughly of the same shape, but that's where the similarities end. Just for starters, Churchill spoke English.

So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled across this in Lord Jenkin's biography of Churchill from a few years back.

His [Churchill's] cautiously hostile appraisal of Eisenhower was striking. They had got on thoroughly well during the war, and Churchill had greatly welcomed Eisenhower's appointment as the NATO Supreme Commander in April 1951. But although he was an admirer of Eisenhower as a political general he was much more critical of him as a general in politics. [...] He preferred Eisenhower with his much wider international experience to Taft as a 1952 Presidential candidate, but he was certainly not a republican partisan. On the Sunday after the election he told [his private secretary] Colville 'For your private ear, I am very disturbed. I think this makes war much more probable'. And eight months later he put the same thought to the same source in more explicitly political terms. 'Very disappointed in Eisenhower whom he thinks both weak and stupid', Colville recorded on 24 July (1953). 'Bitterly regrets that the Democrats were not returned at the last Presidential election'. Part, but by no means the whole, of the trouble was John Foster Dulles, the new Secretary of State. After a dinner with Eisenhower and Dulles at Bernard Baruch's New York apartment on 7 January (1953), the object of which was to promote warm and friendly relations with the incoming administration, Churchill on going to bed 'said some very harsh things about the republican party in general and Dulles in particular, which Christopher [Soames] and I [Colville] thought both unjust and dangerous."

- Jenkins, Roy, : Churchill: A Biography, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001, p. 848

Now imagine what Churchill would have had to say about George Bush, if he thought Eisenhower was 'weak and stupid'. Perhaps now is the time to reclaim Churchill as a friend of the Democratic Party.