The needed quality in our nation's success is and always will be LEADERSHIP. No amount of money or political correctness can match the results of having the best Leader in place.
The United States has had many distinguished Leaders but presently, we are facing a Leadership deficit. If America is to forge a future worthy of our past, we need to find and elect real leaders.
Presently, our President is the diametric opposite of what Leadership should be. He promised " hope and change" and only delivered failure and a " Do as I say, not as I do" attitude. His complete failure to lead has been documented and is the reason why our country is more divisively split now than ever before.
Mitt Romney is in need of a charisma upgrade but offers a more measured approach along with well documented management skill set. He isn't Jefferson or Washington, but he is a much better manager than the lack-wit who has mucked up our country over the last 3 1/2 years.
NBC and Tom Brokaw will feature a documentary that gives us a lesson in what true leadership was back when the world faced the threat of World War II. From 1938 - 1941, England stood alone against Nazi Germany.
Sir Winston Churchill was the key leader England needed. He had failed previously but learned key lessons from each experience and was able to rally his countrymen to stand against the onslaught of the Battle of Britain.
" Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.."
Churchill's eloquent and tough-as-nails leadership held his country together. No American Leader since President John F. Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis has faced such a serious challenge. The majority of the nation's citizens in 1962 were concerned but didn't really understand how close the world came to annihilation until years later.
9/11 was a serious crisis and the country rallied behind President Bush, but Kennedy had to stare down the Russians who were threatening Nuclear War.
Americans got to see 9/11 as it happened and rallied behind our President but were able to count on a standing military who responded to the attacks. In World War 2, our nation and England had been on a peacetime status with diminished military forces when World War 2 happened.
Watch the special and take a lesson from History - Leadership makes the difference.
Leadership Under Fire
By SOHRAB AHMARI - Wall Street Journal
Their Finest Hour
Saturday, Aug. 11 at 8 p.m. on NBC
The word "hero" is thrown around lightly and frequently during Olympic season. But as Tom Brokaw reminds us in "Their Finest Hour," physical endurance and courage alone do not make heroes.
This remarkable documentary, set to air during NBC's regular Olympic programming, chronicles the heroism of Britain in the first two years of World War II, when, as Mr. Brokaw says, "England stood alone, when England was all that was left between liberty and tyranny." "Their Finest Hour" does not disclose any new historical facts. But by making extensive use of newly unearthed, color archival footage, plus the testimonies of British veterans, nurses and survivors, Mr. Brokaw pays tribute to Britain's "poetry of defiance" in the face of Nazi terror.
We meet a pilot who, at age 19, helped fend off the mighty German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain—the 1940 campaign by the Third Reich to break the Royal Air Force. "I never considered defeat," the pilot, now 93, tells Mr. Brokaw. "I don't think any of us ever did." A nurse recalls "the quiet courage of the men" and how that courage gave heart to the women.
Then came the Luftwaffe's merciless bombing of London and other cities. This was "a deliberate attempt by Hitler to terrorize London into defeat," the historian Andrew Roberts explains. All told the Nazi bombing of London left 40,000 dead, thousands more wounded and some two million homeless. But, Mr. Roberts says, Hitler "misunderstood the nature of the British people." St. Paul's Cathedral remained miraculously intact, and the newspaper headlines—"Is That the Best You Can Do, Adolf?"—testified to Britain's indomitable spirit.
The greatest symbol of that spirit was, of course, Prime Minister Winston Churchill—that "hard-drinking firebrand of vast experience and suspect judgment," as Mr. Brokaw puts it. (Though Mr. Brokaw doesn't pause to elaborate on that terse "suspect judgment" charge.) Churchill's mission was to ensure Britain would survive the Nazi onslaught long enough for the U.S. to enter the fray. "We are fighting by ourselves alone," he famously told his compatriots. "But we are not fighting for ourselves alone."
The wait was long and painful and the sleeping giant slow to awake. Militating against a U.S. entry into the war were isolationists led by the likes of Charles Lindbergh and his America First movement. "Let Europe fight its own battle," we hear one of Lindbergh's followers sneer. "They mean nothing to us." The rhetoric sounds eerily familiar to that deployed by contemporary proponents of isolationism of both the left-wing and right-wing varieties.
Today the athletes gathered in London and most of their spectators around the world take the special relationship between the U.S. and Britain for granted. The discomfiting question raised by Mr. Brokaw's documentary is: Will future generations of Britons and Americans appreciate the high price paid to forge it? There are no easy answers. Either way, this film might just be NBC's finest hour of Olympic programming
A quiet week and it leads into another here at the new workplace overseas.....
A good write up in the NYT about a presentation on the writings of Sir Winston Churchill, one of the key people who kept Democracy alive when it was most threatened in World War 2...I feel that without men like him, our world would have succumbed to horrors unimaginable in the mid-20th century.
I salute our greatest allies, the British and one of their greatest statesmen, Sir Winston Churchill.
Successes in Rhetoric: Language in the Life of Churchill
‘Churchill: The Power of Words,’ at the Morgan Library
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN - NY TIMES
Published: June 8, 2012
The orotund proclamations will be unavoidable at the new exhibition “Churchill: The Power of Words,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, because at the center of the gallery is a semi-enclosed theater. And from it, however muted, will emerge recordings of Winston Churchill’s voice, speaking to Parliament, to British radio listeners and to American audiences, breaking on the ear like waves, rising and falling with every breath, sometimes suspended unexpectedly in midair, other times rushing forward with renewed vigor.
If you enter that small theater to hear excerpts from eight of his landmark speeches more clearly, you will also see the words on screen, laid out in poetic scansion (“The whole fury and might of the enemy/must very soon be turned on us”), just as Churchill wrote them, to match the rhythms of his voice.
But ignore the sound, if you can, and leave it for last. For it is best first to be reminded just how important those speeches by a British prime minister really were, and what difference they made.
This isn’t a history exhibition, so you won’t be able to take their full measure; you won’t fully grasp how washed up Churchill’s political career was in the mid-1930s; how few in England were prepared to recognize what was taking place in Germany; how few were also prepared to think the unthinkable about war, scarcely 20 years after the continent was so stained in blood; and how visionary Churchill was, in knowing what would happen and in understanding what price would be paid.
So you won’t really be able to understand that there was a period — between Germany’s beginning to bomb England in 1940 (killing more than 40,000) and the United States’ entrance to the war at the end of 1941 — when England might well have fallen or made generous accommodation to German demands, had Churchill not been a master of words and ideas, rallying his “great island nation” as prime minister with promises of blood, toil, tears and sweat.
But you will see enough to get a sense of what his wartime leadership meant. And what the rest of this fine exhibition accomplishes is to show how Churchill’s words can seem the expression of a life force, mixing mercurial passions and extraordinary discipline, passionate devotion and exuberant self-promotion, extravagant indulgence and ruthless analysis. The show, which opened on Friday, helps put a life in perspective that even during the years after the Sept. 11 attacks has been energetically celebrated as an ideal and just as energetically derided by critics for its intemperate character.
More than 60 documents and artifacts have been gathered by Allen Packwood, the director of the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge, England, for this exhibition, also drawing on the holdings of Churchill’s house at Chartwell, Kent. There are few opportunities to see these documents on public display, even in England, though many have been digitized as part of the museum at the Churchill Center and Museum in London.
There are letters from Winston’s difficult childhood, when his wealthy American mother and neglectful, titled father sent him to boarding school at 8. (An early letter home from 1883 or ’84 is scrawled with a child’s “X’s” — kisses rarely returned by any but his beloved nanny.) And there is a report card in which the child, not yet 10, is described as “a constant trouble to everybody.”
But we see the adventurer and historian begin to evolve, courting danger in battle and then writing its history. (“I am more ambitious for a reputation for personal courage,” he wrote his mother in 1897, “than of anything else in the world.”) There are drafts of speeches that are mapped out like poetry, a sample of Churchill’s amateur landscape painting, his Nobel Prize in Literature from 1953 “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory.” (The onetime Prime Minister Arthur Balfour described Churchill’s three-volume history of World War I as a “brilliant autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.”)
Perhaps the most remarkable document here is a New York doctor’s prescription from Jan. 26, 1932. Churchill had been on a lecture tour when he was hit by a car at Fifth Avenue and 76th Street and needed medical assistance.
“This is to certify,” the doctor writes — this in the midst of Prohibition — “that the postaccident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times.” The quantity, the doctor continues, is “naturally indefinite,” but the “minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters,” or just over 8 ounces.
That “naturally indefinite” quantity would become one of Churchill’s trademarks, along with his cigars and the rhythms of his voice, which was heavily used in his political career. He was a candidate in 21 parliamentary contests between 1899 and 1955, losing 5 of them. But all of this — even the elaborate touch screens showing every document in the exhibition, along with other documents and transcriptions of handwriting — would inspire purely specialized interest had it not been for Churchill’s speeches and writings from the mid-1930s into the 1950s.
This was a rhetorical achievement, almost a musical one, in which Churchill’s innate optimism provided a kind of elevating promise even as he was trying to map out the scope of cataclysm. It was also a strategic achievement, for in his speeches we can see him demonstrating that there were choices to be made. And it was a political achievement because before the United States was involved in World War II, America had to be addressed as well, made to understand the stakes.
Churchill shaped a notion of the “English-speaking peoples” that proved fundamental because he understood that the English literary and political traditions had defined the very character of liberal democracy that was coming under threat. Churchill’s speeches declared an allegiance of language and of ideology. They also helped shape that allegiance, celebrating a particular heritage and its possibilities, while emphasizing its vulnerabilities and the need for its defense.
The achievement is a little like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, defining the stakes of the Civil War while reshaping the America’s conception of itself. There are a few comparisons between Churchill and Lincoln in these documents, which seem thoroughly appropriate. (President Roosevelt framed some lines by Lincoln as a 70th-birthday gift for Churchill in 1944.)
Churchill was attentive to the long line of historical ideas. And his ability to conjure that tradition for support is another reason individual setbacks were less crucial for him. Something larger was at stake. It wasn’t just a matter of opposition; it was a matter of what was being championed, even if the British Empire was in its twilight and the United States was beginning to bear the standard.
This was a reason Churchill urged the United States to claim European territory in the late days of the war, to prevent Stalin from gaining too much control. It was Churchill, in the wake of the war, who saw what was on the horizon. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he said in his famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Mo., “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” There would be no respite for the war-weary.
All this is latent in this marvelously compact and suggestive show. It also demonstrates why attempts to displace Churchill from a central position in recent history are misguided. Flaws and failings are plentiful in individual lives, as in cultures and civilizations, but there are more important things deserving recognition: traditions that run deep and wide, that justly inspire advocacy and allegiance and that might even lead, as Churchill promises, to “broad, sunlit uplands.”
Many might not remember how important artwork like the enclosed was to uniting our country during World War 2. Norman Rockwell was America's leading artist and his weekly artwork in the Saturday Evening Post was critical to the war effort. It would be helpful if we had a man like him around now. This is " The Four Freedoms", something we should all believe in as part of being Americans.
67 years ago, the measure of how much was at stake is evident...FDR was placing his faith and the fate of the free world in the hands of his military and that of the Allies. He knew that he needed not only their efforts, but the prayers and faith of a Nation.
This is the text of the D-Day speech he gave to the nation, which was really a call to National Prayer. Imagine what would occur if President Obama said to his advisers, " I'm going to lead the nation in a prayer today on airwaves..." His advisers would all fall over dead. But FDR knew that he needed to LEAD. His sense of what was right and what was needed was spot on.
Listen to the words of history and gain an appreciation of why we really have no leaders today in the White House, only a under-qualified community organizer who is keeping the seat warm. He is a poser, a con-artist, a charlatan.
FDR lead the nation out of a Great Depression and through a World War. We need LEADERSHIP like this but all we have a group of self-delusional and feckless politicians fighting over the job, each and every one of them wholly unqualified to stand in the place of the greatness of the Leaders we had in our past....it is to weep.
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D-Day Speech June 6th, 1944
The President of the United States
My Fellow Americans:
Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944
