A Press Conference Yesterday and a Speech 64 Years Ago

Presidential press conferences are no longer events at which reporters seek real information.  Instead, they seek presidential admissions that the war is going poorly, should be stopped immediately, and was wrong from the beginning. 

At George W. Bush’s press conference yesterday, one of the reporters asked him why he had “drop[ped] your confident assertion about winning.” (Bush responded he is confident we will ultimately prevail).  Another reporter asserted that polls show “there is no clear mandate to continue being in Iraq in a military form” and asked him if he would continue on a path “in opposition to the will of the American people.” (Bush responded he did not think most Americans wanted to retreat).  A third reporter said Lyndon Johnson “didn’t sleep during the Vietnam War, questioning his own decisions” and asked Bush to “talk to us” about whether this has been “a time of painful realization for you.”  Bush answered that question as follows:

No, I haven’t questioned whether or not it was right to take Saddam Hussein out, nor have I questioned the necessity for the American people — I mean, I’ve questioned it; I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the right decision. But I also know it’s the right decision for America to stay engaged, and to take the lead, and to deal with these radicals and extremists, and to help support young democracies. It’s the calling of our time, Sheryl. And I firmly believe it is necessary.

And I believe the next President, whoever the person is, will have the same charge, the same obligations to deal with terrorists so they don’t hurt us, and to help young democracies survive the threats of radicalism and extremism. It’s in our nation’s interest to do so. But the most painful aspect of the presidency is the fact that I know my decisions have caused young men and women to lose their lives.

Last week Victor Davis Hanson noted that, in three years, we have removed a dangerous anti-American dictator whom every intelligence service thought was amassing weapons of mass destruction; have enabled the creation of an elected government in the heart of Middle East; and have killed many thousands of jihadists.  We are, he wrote, “in much better shape than during any of the crises that Churchill, Roosevelt, or Truman all weathered” in a war that killed “8,000 plus [per month] from December 1941 to August 1945.”  VDH wondered:

What to make of this mass depression over events on the ground [in Iraq]?  Our supposed setback surely is not comparable to the destruction of the entire French army in less than eight weeks in 1940, the flight of the British from Dunkirk, followed in the next 24 months by the surrender of two British armies at Singapore and Tobruk, all of which led to consideration of a writ of censure of Winston Churchill.

The military defeats and censure debate of 1942 are not widely remembered today, but Tobruk (in Libya) was a military disaster of staggering proportions.  The British lost 50,000 men — killed or captured — in a single day.  Not only had no one expected it; the British had in fact expected the opposite.  Moreover, it was the culmination of a series of defeats in a war that, in its third year, was not going well — disappointing those who had expected it to be over by 1942. 

Following Dunkirk and the loss of Singapore in the Far East, the catastrophic military loss at Tobruk resulted in a completely transformed situation throughout the Mediterranean.  The New York Times reported on July 3, 1942 that the censure debate regarding Churchill involved:

twenty-one hours of debate in which Mr. Churchill and most of his Ministers had been subjected to the most forthright and most outspoken criticism for being responsible through sins of omission or commission for a long series of defeats culminating in the most recent disaster in Libya.

Facing his critics at last, the Prime Minister flatly refused to relinquish his job as Minister of Defense, defended his direction of Britain’s war effort and attributed the desert debacle to the fortunes and hazards of battle. . . .

Mr. Churchill made no effort to minimize the extent of the disaster suffered already by British arms in North Africa or the gravity of the Axis threat not only to Egypt but to the whole Middle East.  He refrained from all predictions . . . [and] said he saw little reason for hoping the war would end this year, but, on the contrary, thought it would be a long war.

He compared the disaster in the Middle East to the fall of France, but he vehemently denied it was due to faulty planning. . . . [H]e said the fall of Tobruk in a single day was as great a surprise to him and the generals and chiefs of staff as it was to the people. . . .

In the past fortnight, he confessed with sadness, 50,000 men had been lost together with vast quantities of supplies which it takes four to six months to ship from here around the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt.

The Times included in its report this description of Churchill’s temperament during his speech:

Mr. Churchill was temperate and patient in his speech, which lasted ninety minutes, not even losing his temper when interrupted by Mr. Hore-Belisha, Sir John Warlaw-Milne, sponsor of the censure motion, and others who disagreed with his statements.  But he made it clear that while he approved of freedom of expression in Parliament it was his opinion that those who had transformed what should have been a council of war into an attack upon the government were spreading dismay among the friends of Britain, giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The above excerpt from the Times’ news report does not fully convey the eloquence of Churchill’s speech.  He began by characterizing debate over his conduct of the war in the preceding eight months: 

Everything that can be thought of or raked up has been used to weaken confidence in the Government; has been used to prove the Ministers are incompetent and to weaken their confidence in themselves; to make the Army distrust the backing they are getting from the civil power . . . [t]o represent the Government as a set of nonentities over whom the Prime Minister towers and then to undermine him in his own heart and, if possible, before the eyes of the nation — all this has poured out by cables and radio to all parts of the world and to the distress of all our friends and the delight of all our foes. . . .

Churchill addressed the criticism of “rosy” information about the war, and his prior erroneous prediction that Singapore would be held:

Complaint has been made that the newspapers have been full of information of a very rosy character.  Some members referred to that in the debate and that the government have declared themselves less fully informed than the newspapers. . . .  [T]he government is in fact more accurately but less fully or colorfully informed than newspapers . . .

I have never made any predictions except things like saying that Singapore would be held.  What a fool and a knave I should have been to say it would fall.

I have stuck hard to my blood, toil, tears and sweat – to which I have added muddles and mismanagements – and that I must admit is what, to some extent, we have got out of it.  I will say nothing about the future, except to invite the House and nation to face with courage whatever it may unfold.

Near the end of his speech, he noted that much harm had been done by the two-day debate on the war in Parliament the previous May, because “only hostile speeches are reported abroad and much play is made of them by enemy propaganda.”

If democracy and parliamentary institutions are to triumph in this war it is absolutely necessary that the governments resting upon them shall be able to act and dare, that the servants of the Crown and Parliament not be harassed by the nagging and snarling of disappointed men, that enemy propaganda shall not be fed needlessly out of our own hands, and that our reputation shall not be disparaged and undermined throughout the world . . . .

The press’s badgering of Bush on national TV yesterday called to mind another portion of Churchill’s speech 64 years ago:

The House can have no idea how its proceedings are represented across the ocean. . . . Gossip echoes from the smoking room, talks in Fleet Street are worked up into serious articles seeming to represent that the whole basis of British political life is shaken or is tottering.  A flood of speculation is let loose.  Thus I read streamer headlines like this:  “Commons demand Churchill return to face accusers” or “Churchill returns to supreme political crisis.”

One wonders what Churchill would have thought about Bush’s accusers, or the spectacle of prominent senators trooping off to see Syria in the midst of the war, or a prior presidential candidate showing up in Egypt to criticize the president’s decision to wage it, or a prior president hawking a one-sided blast against a Middle East democracy under similar terror attacks — and what his reaction would be if he learned they were all from the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.