A Politico story today (Aug. 3, 2017) reports Trump says he has a better relationship with European leaders than any American president ever has had. Really? He has a better relationship with Theresa May than FDR ever had with Winston Churchill — that was his name wasn’t it? The PM of England who declared in Commons in May 1940, “We shall never surrender.”
Really? He has better relationships with European leaders than President Eisenhower, who pretty much knew them all for years before becoming president in 1953, having led the Allied Expeditionary Force that liberated Western Europe from the Nazi yoke during WWII and who then put his five-star uniform back on in 1949 to serve as the first commander of NATO?
Well then, isn’t it obvious that the president has better relationships with European leaders than any president ever has? After all, he only had to spend a few hours with PM May to cement their so obviously dear and close friendship and partnership.
Trump and May have spent the lesser part of a day together in their several encounters, whereas when FDR met a PM, the one named Churchill, for the second time at Placentia Bay off Newfoundland in August 1940, the meeting lasted three days (see below for reference to their first encounter).
To cement the new friendship, the PM had a combined Angle-American church service aboard H.M.S. Prince of Wales with many from the cruiser U.S. Augusta joining the full 1600-member British ship’s company and the military commanders of both nations in attendance to show they had common interests and to make a deliberate statement of mutual belief and purpose (Prince of Wales was sunk Dec. 10, 1941 by the Japanese with the loss of some 350 men who prayed 15 months before with the prime minister and the president).
Then, before returning from what history records as the Atlantic Conference, the one going back to Washington, the other to London, they signed The Atlantic Charter — the aspirational document that under-girds all that followed in the ensuing years. All the agreements and organizations and agencies founded with the intention of keeping the world from a future universal conflagration. These include the U.N., the World Bank, the IMF, NATO — you know — all that stuff that made the last century the American Century.
(In the course of their acquaintance FDR reminded Churchill they had met before, in 1919 at a large dinner at the Paris Peace Conference when FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy under President Wilson and Churchill held the powerful posts of Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air in the Liberal Party cabinet of Lloyd George {in his 50 plus year political career he was a Conservative, then for 25 years a Liberal, and then again a Conservative}. It fell to FDR to observe at Placentia Bay that Churchill, in 1919 a much more exalted figure, had in fact met him then and treated him shabbily, though FDR did not put it in quite such un-equivocal terms).
As the years passed following that first mid-Atlantic meeting they became more and better acquainted; so much so that, as recounted by historian Joe Meacham in “Franklin and Winston”, Churchill had already developed the deep appreciation of the president that had him to say to a key aide as he turned away from lift-off of FDR’s plane on the return trip from their January 1943 Casablanca Conference:
“It makes me far too nervous. If anything happened to that man, I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend, he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I’ve ever known.”
To state the obvious, that is remarkable praise from Churchill, of whom most who had known and knew him could and probably would have said, “He is the greatest man I’ve ever known.”
Very soon after Pearl Harbor the PM became “The Man Who Stayed for Dinner”, arriving two weeks later on Dec. 22 for what became a 3-week stay at the WH, the visit during which he and the president together lit the national Christmas tree , Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress (famously and with good humor remarking to the gathered members that had he, son of an American mother and English father been instead the son of an English mother and American father, “I might have got here on my own”.
The two leaders stayed up late, very late night after night — FDR keeping Churchill’s late hours to the alarm of everyone around him and particularly Eleanor — up late every night drinking, smoking, talking and deciding grand strategy ( Churchill, as was his custom, used to being up to 3 and 4 a.m. doing some of his best work in “the wee small hours of the morning”, and being far from London, slept in. FDR did not have that luxury as he had to be up early to begin each presidential day. (His ever-deepening relationship with Churchill over the years did much good for allied and post-war causes and purposes, but not much good for FDR’s declining health).
In those weeks together as 1941 turned the page into 1942, they and their advisors agreed the principal Anglo-American war strategy to defeat Germany first, then Japan. They also signed a successor document to the Atlantic Charter entitled, “A Declaration of the United Nations,” setting out the purposes of the grand alliance fighting the Axis powers — for the first time, announcing a United Nations.
Then the president and the PM really hardly saw one another again until – until when? Until later that year, 1942 when Churchill hustled back to the states and spent most of June and part of July at the White House and Hyde Park.
Then they only saw each other again well hardly ever unless you count Casablanca, Washington and Hyde Park at least two times more: And then at Quebec twice, in Cairo, on Malta, at Tehran, at Yalta; and, of course they cabled pretty much if not daily then nearly so and talked by phone not infrequently, and sent emissaries back and forth relentlessly and kept advisors, each to the other, close to hand and were attended by one another’s adult children, often together, all across the world.
No, FDR’s relationship with Sir Winston Churchill hardly compares with Trump’s relationships with the European leaders he has insulted, disparaged and mocked. Hardly compares. Who could possibly have had closer, better relationships with him than FDR had with Churchill (a man we are told Trump admires but clearly knows very little about as he knows so little about so much).
How many other, better comparisons could be made to the European leadership relationships of Ike? Of John F. Kennedy, of Ronald Reagan, of Bill Clinton, of George H.W. Bush? Dozens actually concerning other presidents and their European counterparts in the time since FDR and the PM met in an ever-expanding friendship to save the world.
Think about Trump being president in 1940 and the war years. Can you imagine? No, it is beyond contemplation, much less comprehension.
We can only imagine but it is not hard to imagine Trump mocking and poking ridicule at Churchill’s ever-present black and white bow ties, his frock coats, drinking and cigar smoking, sleeping in his birthday suit, sleep masks, painting hobby, gruff erudite voice. And don’t you know, he would have done all that and poisoned even the chance of a relationship. And Churchill? We can only surmise from his life and eloquence that he would have given as good and better as he got — but would have been giving it to a man who cannot take it.
But Trump, Trump knows none of this history because he knows nothing. And even if he did, he would still make the profoundly stupid, self-absorbed boasts he boasts.
Knowledge is an unsettling thing. Knowledge makes us reason. Knowledge makes us think. Reason and thinking give us pause to ponder choices, directions and purposes. Absent reason and thinking there is chaos — chaos riding the winds.
In the howling winds in the tunnels of ignorance that make for the unsettled underworld of the collective fuddled mind that is the universe of his mobs, thinking and reasoning are enemies.
Every president, sometime during his presidency, has needed friends at a critical moment but also understood how alone a man (and someday a woman will be) in that office.
Indeed Trump, unlike his predecessors, has left himself alone, all alone in diplomacy and international relations. Not likely, not at all that Vladimir Putin will ever be a guest at the White House for three weeks and we can but shudder at what would result if he were. Not likely that despots like Erdogan of Turkey, Sisi of Egypt, Orban of Hungary, Le Pen of France, Kaczynski, or the confused Italians tossing their nation to and fro, will be there if he needs them. It is not their nature to be helpful. It is their nature to be exactly the opposite.
No, Trump, you do not have the best relationships any president ever has had with European leaders. More likely you have their mistrust, distrust, loathing and fear of your incomprehensible, remarkable and remarkably stunning ignorance.
A president without friends in the world is a grave danger to the world. He is a calamity for the United States of America.
Peeling the Onion 
A rational examination and response to an irrational statement made by an irrational man who excels at being dangerously stupid.
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Wow!
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Thanks.
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Lyrical phrasing: “In the howling winds in the tunnels of ignorance that make for the unsettled underworld of the collective fuddled mind that is the universe of his mobs, thinking and reasoning are enemies.”
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Thank you, that’s why the sentence has the least possible punctuation.
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