Mr. Churchill Speaks Up

In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was moved to speak up in reply to the five U.S. Senators. Said he, to the House of Commons:

“So soon as the war is over, [Britain’s] soldiers will leave off fighting and the politicians will begin. Perhaps this is rather a pity, but at any rate it is not so bad as the example of some countries, which I would not venture to name, where the soldiers are fighting abroad and the politicians are fighting at home with equal vigor and ferocity. . . .”

Mr. Churchill’s oblique remark was welcomed in the U.S. with glee and resentment, depending on where the shoe pinched. It also served to emphasize one vast difference and one great interdependence of U.S. and British politics:

> In his speech, Winston Churchill promised that Great Britain, which has not had a general election since 1935, would have one a few months after war’s end. Observed New York Times Columnist Arthur Krock: “It is precisely because no such prospect can legally be held out in this country by the party in office that much of the ‘fighting’ is current on the political front in the United States. If the President runs for a Fourth Term next year, and is elected, he and his group will be in executive power for another four years, whether or not the end of the war and peace treaties intervene. . . . Opponents and critics of the executive government of the United States . . . would suspend much of the criticism in which they now indulge if it were not for the fact that the electors of 1944 will make another four-year decision that cannot be abridged.”

> By speaking out, Winston Churchill took his first overt role in U.S. politics. But willy-nilly, silent or not, Churchill has long been a potent force in U.S. politics. His unquestioned popularity in the U.S. has led many observers to consider him the President’s No. 1 political asset. But for that part of the U.S. public which sees John Bull under beds, he may well turn out to be the President’s No. 1 political debit.