Old Men Forget

One book we’ve been reading during the Iran negotiations is the memoir of Duff Cooper, a.k.a. Viscount Norwich. He was the First Lord of the Admiralty in the British government led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He resigned in 1938, the day after the Munich Agreement was inked. We’ve written about him several times, including on February 2014, when Senator Menendez hove into view as the leading Democratic opponent of President Obama’s appeasement policy. We’ve been savoring the book in the year that’s followed.Its title is “Old Men Forget,” which is taken from the battle speech Henry V gives, in Shakespeare’s play, before Agincourt. “Old men forget,” the King says, “yet all shall be forgot, / But he’ll remember with advantages, / What feats he did that day.” Yet Cooper hasn’t been remembered enough, though ne’er has he been more relevant than at this hour. His memoir records how he spent the days before Munich desperately trying to get the government to make “plain to Germany,” as he put it at one point, “that we would fight” if Hitler sprang upon the Czechs.Cooper was by no means the only one. The Opposition, Churchill, the American administration, even the Vatican, he writes, were giving similar advice. Chamberlain was rejecting it on the say of his ambassador in Berlin, Sir Arthur Henderson, to whom Cooper refers as “the hysterical Henderson.” The Times, then edited by Geoffrey Dawson, was particularly odious. It wasn’t hiring out its journalists to give guided tours of Nazi Germany the way the New York Times is doing now in respect of Iran. The London paper did plump for handing over the whole Sudetenland to Hitler.In mid-September, Chamberlain told the cabinet of his plan to meet with the Nazi in what turned out to be the Berchtesgaden. The cabinet approved his trip unanimously, though Cooper feared that if the Nazis “accepted the plan that we proposed, and the Czechs didn’t” Britain could be “represented as having betrayed and deserted the cause.” Sound familiar? It turned out the talking was the appeasement, and by the late September Chamberlain was off again to Bavaria, this time to Munich itself, where the pact was signed on the 29th.The prime minister returned on the 30th to English soil, where he held up a letter that he and Hitler had signed and declared “peace in our time.” The cabinet went into immediate session, and Cooper was having difficulty supporting its decision. He went to a dinner party that night, where, still a member of the government, he defended its policy. “I do so for the last time,” he wrote that evening. He went to Chamberlain in the morning and resigned, and then met with the King to do the same. George, at least, said he’d respected those who had the courage of their convictions.We don’t have in America — and the Sun doesn’t want — the kind of parliamentary system that obtains in England. Yet it is possible still to wonder who within the Obama administration will turn out to have the clarity of vision and courage that Duff Cooper had. With every passing day it grows more evident that the negotiations President Obama has set in motion are detached from substance; the President has been trapped by the parley into wanting an agreement more than the facts will support. Who will be our Duff Cooper?___________________Correction: “peace in our time” were the correct words spoken by Chamberlain. The quote was garbled in the earlier edition.

Old Men Forget

Old Men Forget

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