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Larry Arnn gives a send off to Martin Gilbert, historian.
In summer 1940, as war raged, the British government sent several hundred children, including 3-year-old Martin Gilbert, to safety in Canada. The children berthed aboard the Duchess of Bedford in a 50-ship convoy, and after the destroyer escort turned back, the convoy was attacked by the Germans and five ships sank.
The Duchess sailed on safely, past the icebergs of Labrador, “marvelous for children to behold [and] among my first memories,” Gilbert wrote. Soon after, another boat with 77 children evacuees was sunk by the Germans, drowning them all, and the scheme was abandoned.
In summer 1944, Winston Churchill —who from the start had disliked the idea of sending British children overseas, calling it a “scuttle”—arranged for many of the young evacuees, including Gilbert, to return aboard an American troopship from New York.
Churchill specifically asked the Admiralty to make sure, amid other responsibilities in the aftermath of the Normandy landings, that there be enough life jackets for the extra children.
So began the life of Sir Martin Gilbert, who died at age 78 on Tuesday in London. He is best known as Churchill’s official biographer. He served as adviser to Prime Minister John Major and was soon after awarded knighthood in 1995. …
Weekly Standard has more on Gilbert.
The passing of Sir Martin Gilbert at the age of 78 marked a sad milestone. He achieved popular acclaim as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, the man whose in-depth eight-volume biography served as the gold standard reference work about the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He also was a prolific writer of Jewish history, an observer of world events, and an author of many atlases. He was an excellent researcher, with a keen eye to detail, who skillfully distilled complex issues into flowing narrative with popular appeal.
Gilbert took on the role of official historian of Churchill in 1968 after Churchill’s son Randolph died. Randolph began the official biography of his father, leading a team of researchers, which included Gilbert beginning in 1962. Randolph and his team wrote two volumes of the biography, and they were disjointed and not very well written. I once asked Gilbert why Randolph’s volumes were so lacking, and he said that Randolph had great ideas but wasn’t disciplined in his execution. Gilbert was, to say the least, more disciplined, and he executed Randolph’s plan very well. …
As does the Washington Post.
Martin Gilbert, who documented the life of Winston Churchill, the events of World War II and the Holocaust, the founding of the state of Israel and the course of the 20th century in more than 80 volumes that made him known as a preeminent historian of his era, died Feb. 3 in London. He was 78. …
… The grandson of Eastern European Jews, Mr. Gilbert grew up in England during the momentous events that he would later document, meticulously and tirelessly, as one of the most prolific scholars of modern history. “He writes books,” a reviewer once observed, “the way the rest of us write shopping lists.”
“He had a unique way,” said Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, “of absorbing a plethora of details, personalities, facts, figures and weaving them into a coherent whole and making them utterly accessible both to the historian who would learn tremendous detail from his work and to the layperson who . . . would be captivated by his style.”
For a jarring juxtaposition, we move to Matthew Continetti’s post on the problems experienced by Martin Scorsese as he tried to create a Bill Clinton biopic. Written in the style of a Hollywood script we are left to wonder how the same culture created Martin Gilbert and President Pig.
…“I’ve worked with Keitel, De Niro, Pesci, Liza Minelli, with Jerry Lewis—Jerry Lewis—Sharon Stone, Brad Pitt, Willem Defoe and Day-Lewis and Cameron Diaz and Nick Cage and DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey—some of the surliest, most Method-obsessed, prickly bat-s—t crazy sons of bitches on the planet. And they have nothing on these people. Nothing. A producer credit for Chelsea, yeah. Maybe I’ll name the frigging granddaughter key grip. That will make grandma glow.”
Scorsese arrives at his destination: A brownstone in the middle of the block. He walks up the front steps and unlocks the door.
The camera pushes in as he speaks so that his face and the phone fill the frame by the end of the monologue.
“Here’s the thing, you know, the thing is, they are terrified about losing. Absolutely terrified. Her book went nowhere, she can’t fill a room unless she’s talking to Goldman Sachs, they are yesterday’s news and they are so obsessed with projecting an aura of inevitability they won’t allow any message to go out that they haven’t already pre-approved and, you know, groped. That’s why they killed the television shows, went after the authors, why they won’t let me make the movie I want to make.”
A pause. We hear him opening the door.
“And you know why they’re terrified? They know this is it. This is the final go-around. End of line.”
He listens for a moment, and then laughs.
“Yeah. Exactly. The Last Waltz.”
Scorsese leaves the frame. We hear the door close.
And we fade to black.
Ed Morrissey posts on yet more history nonsense from President Trainwreck. The Democrat party has a lot to answer for between Pig and Trainwreck.
The Washington Post reports on the blowback, with critics arguing that the President of the United States has more important tasks than finger-wagging about events from 600 or more years ago … like developing a national strategy to fight the threats in this century:
“Obama’s remarks spoke to his unsparing, sometimes controversial, view of the United States — where triumphalism is often overshadowed by a harsh assessment of where Americans must try harder to live up to their own self-image. Only by admitting these shortcomings, he has argued, can we fix problems and move beyond them.
“There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith,” he said at the breakfast.
But many critics believe that the president needs to focus more on enemies of the United States.
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called Obama’s comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt at a wrongheaded moral comparison.”
What we need more is a “moral framework from the administration and a clear strategy for defeating ISIS,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.”
Also at the Post, Aaron Blake notices that Obama refuses to link Islam to present terrorism in the same way he linked Christianity to the Crusades and slavery, and that even Democrats are beginning to tire of it: …
The head of the Gallup organization has just discovered the unemployment figures are lies. This has been plain to see for years.
Here’s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.
Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.
None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment. …
… There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie. …