Ouch.
I’ve just started reading Lynne Olson’s new book Troublesome Young Men, which tells the story of the dissident Tory MPs who helped battled Stanley Baldwin’s and then Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies and helped lay the ground for Winston Churchill’s crisis rise to the premiership in the summer of 1940.
Today Olson has a piece in the Outlook section of the Post arguing that for all his self-comparisons, President Bush much more resembles Neville Chamberlain than Churchill. She’s certainly on the mark in noting Chamberlain’s mix of inexperience in foreign affairs and certainty that he, and only he, was the one who could manage the crisis of Hitlerism.
The Chamberlain analogy only goes so far. But she’s quite good in noting the many ways that Bush is really nothing like Churchill.
