I think that perhaps the classic propagandists of the - in the Second World War was Winston Churchill. He was extremely skilled and adept at it.
Churchill faced his own diminishing capabilities and increasing irrelevance by maintaining the sense that he was the only one who could solve whatever problem was before him. He was very often wrong, of course, but then he had spent so much of his life overcoming appalling mistakes, disasters, and rejections.
Winston Churchill was not entirely British. His mother was American, making Sir Winston part Iroquois Indian.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I have just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy.
I think there are good men and women in all decades. We've grown cynical. And look at what we do to all our heroes: Churchill, FDR, Kennedy, they all had affairs. But heroic things happen every day.
Ramesh Ponnuru and others say Obama is a conventional liberal. But conventional liberals don't come out for the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Conventional liberals don't return the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. Conventional liberals don't block oil drilling in America while subsidizing oil drilling in Brazil.
I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful.
John Kerry wants to be the hero in his own drama. He likes King Arthur and the Round Table. He likes the young swashbuckling Churchill, and he loved the early antics of Theodore Roosevelt.
One of the marvelous things about Churchill is that whatever he was doing, whether fighting or arguing or despairing or bouncing about full of energy, jokes are never far away.
I love Winston Churchill. I love the wisdom he had, the sagacity. I like people who are independent-minded. People who aren't part of clans or systems, who are talented and free, and able to do things without being corrupted by the system.
Churchill didn't dance around the Nazis; he called it fascism.
The implication that depressed people are fundamentally irresponsible is a deeply damaging and counterproductive one. Winston Churchill was a depressive. He didn't just fly planes; he was in charge of the Royal Air Force.
As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.
I love Winston Churchill; I think he had the grace of coming and the grace of leaving - when things were hard he was there, and when it was time to leave, he left.