Here’s to inspiration?
“What are you reading after the election?” a friend asked me last week. She asked me because she had picked a book specifically for the occasion. She was reading “Democracy in America.”
“De Tocqueville?”
“Yes,” she said. “When I had to read it for school it was boring. It’s not boring now.”
I told my friend that I was reading, oddly enough, with no conscious connection to the division in our country, a book on forgiveness. Author Fred Luskin points out on page one that forgiveness is peace, is about becoming empowered, and that everyone can learn to forgive. “Like learning to throw a baseball,” he says.
He then goes on to say what forgiveness is not. It is not about excusing unkindness or forgetting that you were hurt, or necessarily becoming friends with the other person. It is about ending the obsessive thinking. I may review that book someday. But what would I read next, in light of my friend’s question?
I headed to Blue Ridge Books, my local bookstore, in Hazelwood, one of the areas of Haywood County flooded by Helene. Here’s how you deal with mud that the floodwaters bring into your store, I found out from owners Jo and Allison. You scrape it up with dustpans. Then you mop and mop and mop.
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What caught my eye in the bookstore was “Elizabeth David’s Christmas,” a surprise because I am a little bit of a Bah Humbug about Christmas. There’s so much of it! But David’s book, with its soft pale green cover sitting apart from the other bright seasonal books, spoke of comfort and joy to me. Elizabeth David is considered England’s predecessor to Julia Child. She also knows that holiday cooking can be a bit much. I bought it, but I didn’t want to review it, so I headed to the library.
There, on the New Arrivals bookshelf, was the one — “Mr. Churchill in the White House” (Norton, 2024, 301 pp) by Robert Schmuhl. It tells the story of Winston Churchill’s visits to the White House, during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.
England had been at war with Hitler for two years when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next morning, British Prime Minister Churchill decided he wanted to meet with Roosevelt. “Delighted to have you here at White House,” cabled Roosevelt in response, though he worried about the significant danger of an Atlantic crossing because of German U-boats. Churchill did not hesitate. He knew that U.S. entry into the war would make the crucial difference, would probably save Europe, and that face-to-face discussion was the best way to advance his ideas on how to conduct the war. His proposed stay of “about a week” became three weeks.
Churchill came prepared with a detailed memorandum he’d written on the voyage over. The two leaders held a joint press conference almost immediately to emphasize their common cause, both men understanding that projecting a public picture of friendship was vital to morale and support for the war, and then got right to work with meetings. Informal talks often ran to 2 a.m. Churchill’s high energy and intelligence were both exhilarating and exhausting, and Roosevelt took several days to recover after this and subsequent visits.
The White House guest had a talent for making himself at home. To choose a room, he tested out every guest bed on the second floor living quarters, picking the Rose Room. He often worked propped up in bed, as did Roosevelt, and could be seen walking the halls late at night to check on a new cable or attempt another conversation. He asked immediately for the creation of a map room, and that became a daily stop for both men, who quickly called each other Franklin and Winston.
Christmas coincided with Churchill’s visit, and his first public appearance was the lighting of the White House Christmas tree. After a typically inspiring speech about “the commanding sentiment of comradeship” and the reality of the “deadly struggle,” Churchill returned to the occasion. “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” he said, and we adults can share in that “before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us.”
The American public and the press largely adored Churchill. That feeling only grew stronger with each White House visit during the war, reaching its peak in 1943, the second year of the war for the United States, when military preparation was beginning to pay dividends, and victory, though not imminent, seemed probable. Though the friendship between the two leaders could be strained, sometimes the bond was uncommonly deep. After a conference in Casablanca, Churchill said he could not watch Roosevelt’s plane take off. “If anything happened to that man, I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I’ve ever known.”
American General Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, Churchill was again prime minister, and another White House visit was in order. The world had changed. Churchill, always a military man, knew that the destructive capability of the new hydrogen bomb demanded the greatest efforts to keep the peace. And he knew that there was something to be gained from staying in the White House. Both men, in working so closely together, increased their respect for the other. Eisenhower wrote to a friend about Churchill, “I think I would say that he comes nearest to fulfilling the requirements of greatness in any individual that I have met in my lifetime.”
Encouragement is no minor gift. Eisenhower later wrote that Churchill “captured the imagination of all Americans. His indomitable courage and his indestructible belief in the society of free nations and in the dignity of free men became a symbol of our way of life. From him, America and all free lands gained added inspiration and determination to work for the maintenance of a just and enduring peace.”
Here’s to inspiration.
(Anne Bevilacqua is a book lover who lives in Haywood County. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
