Madden Mischief

“Me, myself and I,” Rita teased me when I told her what had inspired me to read Larry P. Arnn’s insightfully engrossing book about one of, perhaps THE world’s greatest of, war heroes, Winston Churchill.

Churchill was certainly one the most eloquent statesman who ever lived, who didn’t just hold, but epitomized the high office he held during the most challenging of times in history, World War II. 

I told my beautiful Brazilian, mostly supportive, but occasionally antagonistic in a friendly sort of way, wife, that Churchill had made a famous prophetic speech on my birthday, October 5^th.  If you don’t mind, I’ll omit the year as I still look and act much younger than that year would imply.

It was titled “Disaster of the first magnitude” and in it Churchill described the
Munich Agreement as “a total and unmitigated defeat.” He stated that it gave
Hitler everything he wanted with the “sacrifice [of] Czechoslovakia.” In his
speech, Churchill correctly predicted that the Munich Agreement and Nazi
aggression would draw Britain into war within “a very few years.” And he was
right as rain, and how it did pour.

Arnn, who is also the president of Hillsdale College, writes how when Churchill was a robustly ambitious young man in his twenties, he would trot off to then one of the most dangerous spots, South Africa.  He would go as a war correspondent to cover the Boer War.

To his mother Churchill wrote, “Bullets . . . are not worth considering.  Besides I am so conceited I don’t believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”

Earlier he had written “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to get shot at without result.” 

Then after being nearly killed once in an ambush, his mood abruptly turned spiritually pragmatic: “I think more experience of war would make me religious.”   Me too.  I feel the same way sometimes when I feel threatened. 

Churchill reminds me of a writer, Frank Glassner, whose Vox Populi blogs I like to read, not at all minding their length, for like Churchill besides prolific, he’s eloquent.

But as Arnn affirms, thank heaven Churchill was where he was when the most hellish of all wars broke out, as there was no more superior warlord than he.

Tom Madden is PR warlord who won’t give up fighting for exhilarating media exposure for clients of his brave public relations firm TransMedia Group until their businesses or themselves are famously successful.  When he’s not promoting clients, he’s writing blogs and soon his seventh book, “As America’s Hippest, Is Catholicism Now Coolest?”