The greatest generation met the challenge head on.
Via Lifezette:
In his larger-than-life lifetime, Winston Churchill — who is portrayed by Gary Oldman in the new film “Darkest Hour” — made 16 visits to America. He traveled here as a soldier, a tourist, and a lecturer, but the late prime minister’s visit to America in 1941 as a wartime leader was his most important.
The speech he gave on December 26, 1941 may have been his most important, too, though certainly not as well-known as his “Iron Curtain” speech from 1946 in Fulton, Missouri.
The story of that trip back in the winter of 1941 is worth telling. It revealed a lot about not just Churchill’s status as a great leader and statesman but as a salesman — and an indefatigable one.
The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill, who had just turned 67, packed his bags and headed straight for the United States. It would be the most important sales trip of his life — and perhaps the most important sale of the 20th century. The stakes for his home country and the world could not have been higher.[…]
Churchill’s boat docked in Norfolk, Virginia, just two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He immediately flew 140 miles north to National Airport in Washington, D.C., where President Roosevelt himself greeted him. Churchill spent the next few days at the White House as a house guest — a self-invited house guest, no less — doing what he did best: talking, drinking, smoking, and keeping Roosevelt up until the wee hours of the morning.
“It was astonishing to me that anyone could smoke so much and drink so much and keep perfectly well,” Eleanor Roosevelt said of Churchill.
Having successfully bonded with Roosevelt, and having mapped out some important war time planning, Churchill moved on to an equally important objective: bonding with the U.S. Congress and the American public and selling them on the importance — and the inevitability — of a combined America and England to combat the Axis Powers.
For days on end, Churchill worked on his big speech, honing and crafting it in ways only he could. One thing Churchill knew for sure as he was preparing was this: Without the American people on his side, his home country was lost.
He began the greatest sale of his life to a joint session of Congress with these words:
The fact that my American forebears have for so many generations played their part in the life of the United States, and that here I am, an Englishman, welcomed in your midst, makes this experience one of the most moving and thrilling in my life, which is already long and has not been entirely uneventful. I wish indeed that my mother, whose memory I cherish, across the vale of years, could have been here to see.
Churchill then made clear our countries were connected by much more than a common language.
I may confess, however, that I do not feel quite like a fish out of water in a legislative assembly where English is spoken. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy. “Trust the people.” That was his message. I used to see him cheered at meetings and in the streets by crowds of workingmen way back in those aristocratic Victorian days when as Disraeli said “the world was for the few, and for the very few.” Therefore I have been in full harmony all my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly and I have steered confidently towards the Gettysburg ideal of government of the people, by the people, for the people.
HT: Tuskers