Nov 20, 2008
Ordinarily this column is devoted to people I have known. Our current national crisis is an excuse for me to mention three exceptions.
I cannot say I really knew Winston Churchill, but once my father took me to see him when he was visiting Bernard Baruch in Manhattan. He had no idea who I was but I remember his voice: "You are a good little boy." I took the detached protocol as an oracle. On November 10, 1942, after El Alamein, Churchill had said that the North African campaign was "not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." On February 20, 1943, the German-Italian Panzer Army attacked the United States Army II Corps at the Kasserine Pass in west central Tunisia. Our troops were ill prepared and ill led, with poor coordination between air and ground forces and inadequate tanks. One thousand Americans were killed.