President Bush is reportedly reading Lynne OIsen's Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill To Power And Helped Save England. The President's self-identification with Winston Churchill has become legendary, albeit inexplicable to anyone outside of the Oval Office. (OK, so they both had dreams of empire, but otherwise?) So, it is the height of irony that Bush resembles no figure in this book more than Neville Chamberlain.
What?!?!? The Liberator of Baghdad likened to the Architect of Impeachment? The Great Shame of 1938 compared to the Triumph of 2003? Judge for yourself...
If the President read as far as p. 199 in Olsen's book, he came across this May 1940 quote from the Contemporary Review:
"It is remarkable that he [Chamberlain] continues to hold the Conservative forces as well as he does, but [his] grim imperviousness to events and narrow partisan determination neither to see nor to admit that anything has ever been wrong under his guidance...seems to have hypnotised a certain number of people into believing that it really has been so."
MP Harold Nicholson confided to his diary that Chamberlain "'...keeps on contending that the slightest enquiry is an insult to himself."
Meanwhile, Chamberlain himself told the British Ambassador to France that "...the idea of suspending Parliament 'makes my mouth water.'"
This and so much more led The New Yorker's Jant Flanner to conclude that "...never before in modern parliamentary times have the government and the country been so separated, with so little chance of either getting together or of getting rid of each other."
Sound familiar? Any chance that Olsen may have had something in mind other than President Bush's amazing resemblance to Winston Churchill? After reading Olsen's account of the Conservatives who stood up to a self-righteous, morally certain government of their own party, one that stifled dissent, brooked no criticism, and spied on its adversaries, one concludes that the best audience for her book just night be Congressional Republicans.