Articles by Lewis E. Lehrman
- How Lincoln and Churchill Put National Unity First - The two war-time leaders both needed to unite their own skeptical allies and across the aisle to their opponents. It was a juggling act requiring enormous political dexterity. In the days after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in April…
- Wartime Leadership Lessons From Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill - By LEWIS E. LEHRMAN / HISTORY NEWS NETWORK March 5, 2018 Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill were great war leaders in the Civil War and World War II. But they were also politicians who had attained their high offices under…
- Lincoln and the Power of Silence - Stamford Advocate Op-ed for February 12, 2018 “Known for their speaking abilities, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill often knew when and why to be quiet. “Solomon says there is ‘a time to keep silence,” President-elect Lincoln told the Indiana Legislature…
- Declaration of Independence - Stamford Advocate July 4, 2017 “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” President Abraham Lincoln declared at…
- Memorial Day and Our Soldier-Heroes - Memorial Day, May 29, 2017 “Every day was Memorial Day for President Lincoln during the Civil War. “Men…, by fighting our battles, bear the chief burthen of saving our country” the President wrote in July 1863.1 They would give the…
- Jefferson’s Declaration - July 4 Op-Ed for Putnam County News & Recorder “Thomas Jefferson was a student of the classics, science, and history. The Virginia planter and lawyer was a scholar, a thinker, a writer — but he was no speaker. He was…
- Lincoln’s Ambition (and Churchill’s) - Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 2017 ““Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” declared Abraham Lincoln in announcing his first political campaign in 1832. “Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no…
- Churchill’s Fourth of July - Putnam County News and Recorder, July 2017 “I shall always remember how each Fourth of July my Mother would always wave an American flag before my eyes,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill told Congress in December 1941. Churchill, the romantic, was…
- Lincoln & Churchill: Action This Day - Putnam County News & Record, February 12, 2018 “Churchill in his memoirs discussed his investigation of German radio beam guidance. “I gave all the necessary orders that very day in June for the existence of the [German] beam to be…
- Tensions Rippled Through D-Day Invasion Planning - June 6, 1944 “Doubts would plague the preparations for Operation OVERLORD in World War II — the long-awaited cross-channel invasion of German-occupied Europe. “The Prime Minister and some of his chief military advisers,” recalled General Dwight D. Eisenhower, “looked upon…
- Churchill, Roosevelt & Company: Studies in Character and Statecraft - January 30, 2017 – Foreward Lee Polevoi The work of a handful of men had a decisive impact on the outcome of WWII. Lewis E. Lehrman’s Churchill, Roosevelt & Company is a richly detailed history of the Anglo-American alliance, in which the…
- ‘Stand Firm’: Lincoln’s Advice to a Nurse, the Union and Himself - February 10, 2017 – The Wall Street Journal “Large crowds have gathered in the streets. The pervading spirit among the masses is resistance to Lincoln’s administration, and everywhere that determination is manifest.” In February 1862, Abraham Lincoln ’s two youngest boys, Willie…
- The Prime Minister and the General: Churchill and Eisenhower - Spring 2016 – Finest Hour When Winston Churchill died in January 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided not to attend the funeral. Startled by LBJ’s decision, Dwight D. Eisenhower was equally surprised that he, the top Allied commander in Europe during the Second…
- Lewis Lehrman Analyzes Two Great War Leaders - March 15, 2016 – The Churchill Centre Author and Lincoln Scholar Lewis Lehrman discusses with the Chartwell Bulletin his forthcoming studies comparing Sir Winston Churchill with Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. CB: How did your interest in Churchill begin? LL:…
- Lincoln and Churchill: Preparation for Greatness - February 12, 2016 – Putnam County News & Recorder “If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him,” declared…
- Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, Wartime Leaders - February 12, 2016 – National Review In his July 4 message to Congress in 1861, President Lincoln wrote that the secession crisis “forces us to ask: ‘Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?’ Must a government, of necessity, be…
- Lehrman op-ed: Lincoln and Churchill — statesmen of war - February 12, 2016 – Greenwich Time “We cannot escape history,” President Lincoln declared in his Second Annual Message to Congress in December 1862. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance,…
- The Civil War: A People’s Contest - July 4, 2015 – Putnam County News & Recorder On July 4, 1861, the U.S. Congress convened in special session. Its first act was to receive a “Special Message” from the President about the onset of the Civil War. For several weeks,…
- July 4th, The Declaration of Independence — With a Russian Inspiration - July 4, 2015 – Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate Fireworks have long been part of the Independence Day celebrations in the United States. The Continental Congress specifically authorized a fireworks display for July 4, 1777 — the first anniversary of the signing…
- Lehrman: American tradition has Russian inspiration - July 2, 2015 – Stamford Advocate Fireworks have long been part of the Independence Day celebrations in the United States. The Continental Congress specifically authorized a fireworks display for July 4, 1777 — the first anniversary of the signing of the Declaration…
- Lewis Lehrman: The April death of two presidents - April 14, 2015 – Stamford Advocate At Hyde Park, New York, on April 15, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was laid to rest at his beloved family home. On the very same day 80 years earlier in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed…
- The Root of the Matter - February 12, 2015 – Putnam County News & Recorder Winston Churchill wrote and spoke millions of words, but he admired those who could quickly get to the essence of an argument. He once said: “Anything worthwhile can be put on one side…
- Lincoln’s Patience and Ambition - February 12, 2015 – Harrisburg Patriot News When 23-year-old Abraham Lincoln won election as his militia company captain in the Black Hawk War, the new officer told a friend: “I’ll be damned, Bill, but I’ve beat him!” Preparing to run for president…
- Lehrman: The danger of underestimating Lincoln - February 11, 2015 – Stamford Advocate Abraham Lincoln “saw through other men who thought all the while they were instructing or enlightening him, with a sort of dry, amused patience,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “He…
- Lehrman: The danger of underestimating Lincoln - December 4, 2014 – Greenwich Time On Dec. 8, 1941, U.S. Ambassador John “Gil” Winant dined with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Chequers. Uncharacteristically, Churchill tuned the radio to the 9 p.m. BBC news. Together, they heard a vague report of a…
- Lehrman: U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James - December 4, 2014 – Greenwich Time On Dec. 8, 1941, U.S. Ambassador John “Gil” Winant dined with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Chequers. Uncharacteristically, Churchill tuned the radio to the 9 p.m. BBC news. Together, they heard a vague report of a…
- Winston’s Declaration - Seventy years ago, the landing of Allied soldiers continued on Normandy’s beaches – four weeks after the initial D-Day landings on the French coast.
- Lincoln, Churchill & D-Day - President Abraham Lincoln, a student of Shakespeare's tragedies and histories, surely could have understood, in the overtures of Henry V, what transpired 80 years later in the invasion of Normandy.
- Churchill and Lincoln: Men of Principle; Men of Ideas - By Lewis E. Lehrman In February 1943, now 68 years of age, Winston Churchill flew to Algiers after meetings in Turkey and Egypt. He slept in a rigged up bunk in the hold of his very cold airplane (there were…
- Churchill and Lincoln: Glow Worms Walking a Tightrope - As young men, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill found themselves awkward among women. For much of his life, Churchill's female confidante, in addition to his wife, was Violet Bonham Carter. She was an accomplished politician and the daughter of Lord Herbert H. Asquith, British prime minister from 1908 to 1916.
- Toasting Winston Churchill’s Birthday - Winston Churchill turned 69 on November 30, 1943 -- only eighty years ago. The toasts at the summit conference in Teheran were interminable that night. It was the third night of the first summit attended by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, then 62, Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 61.
- Lincoln & Churchill at War - As warlords, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill accepted the duty, for cause and country, to send young men to their death. In bloody conflicts separated by eight score years, both commanders-in-chief were especially sensitive to the death of their fighting men -- familiar, too, with the grief of their family and friends.
- Churchill and Lincoln – Never Give Up - "Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days."
Thus spoke Winston Churchill to the students of Harrow School on October 29, 1941. The British prime minister visited the school, and made this speech, fewer than six weeks before the United States would enter World War II. Churchill spoke only one year after Britain had victoriously defended itself against the relentless Luftwaffe bombing of London. But for English bravery, the Battle of Britain could have ended the war before America joined it.
- Churchill and Lincoln: Guardians of Democracy - On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War. Four score years later in April 1945, the Allied coalition in Europe effectively strangled the Nazi war machine. German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30. A week later on May 7, 1945, German military authorities surrendered to the Allies at Rheims, France.
- Winston Churchill and the Fourth of July - “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
- Winston Churchill and Independence - Near the end of World War I, Winston Churchill spoke on the "142nd anniversary of American independence.” The occasion was a Liberty Day rally in London on July 4, 1918. For the first time in history, Britain and America were allies in war. While recognizing the Anglo-American political tradition in fighting tyranny, Churchill used his speech to celebrate the union of long-held principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence by which America had explained its reason for breaking off from the British crown.
