Sumner Welles and Churchill's Alcoholism

You see, Sumner Welles, who was the deputy undersecretary of state

here in the

United States in 1940, Sumner Welles visited Europe in March

1940 to make a desperate attempt to get peace.

He visited Hitler, he visited Mussolini, he visited Chamberlain, he visited their

undersecretaries, and he visited Winston Churchill.

March the 12th, 1940, he found Winston Churchill blind drunk

behind the

boardroom table in the Admiralty with an empty bottle of whiskey on the table, and

Sumner Welles wrote in his report, 12 pages long.

He began the report by saying, "Winston Churchill received me in a state

of

complete intoxication, a bottle of whiskey empty at the side of

him on the table,

incoherent, unable to speak." And at the end of the 12 pages,

he then writes, "By

this time, 90 minutes had passed, and Winston Churchill had become somewhat

more

sober." A scandalous state of affairs, you might think,

for somebody with the lives

of tens of thousands of British sailors in his, in his hands, Winston Churchill.

But more serious was the fact that Sumner Welles went back to America

and told

everybody what he had seen.

There was a side result, I write, of the Sumner Welles meeting with

Churchill that

did great harm. Welles put it about official Washington

the famous Englishman was

an alcoholic. He told Ickes that Churchill was a drunken bum.

He told Burleigh, that's Adolf Burleigh of the State

Department, that he'd found

the First Lord of the Admiralty quite drunk.

He was explicit about it in his report to Roosevelt, which I just mentioned.

The latter passed it around North America.

Roosevelt regretted to the visiting prime minister of Canada that Winston seemed to

be drinking too much. He amplified this a few days later to the

remark that

Churchill is tight most of the time.

"This is shameful," wrote Prime Minister Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime

minister, scandalized in his diary.

"This is shameful that he should have been in this condition

when Sumner Welles

went to see him. It's that arrogance and the assumed sup-" There's nothing

wrong

with arrogance. I've always said that it's aro- being arrogant

that makes us

British great, of course. We go to great expense

and trouble to make our children

arrogant. If we send our children to Eton

and they came back without arrogance, we

demand a refund, I think. That isn't, that isn't what exactly what the complaint

was against Churchill. The complaint was that he was drunk.

If you go to the archives and you get out the volumes of the Foreign

Relations of

the United States, which are the publications by the US Government

Printing Office

of the State Department papers, you'll find Sumner Welles' report,

this diplomat's

report on his visit with Churchill, and not a mention of Churchill's

drunkenness.

It's been cut out.

But if you go to the Roosevelt Archives in Hyde Parks in New York State, you'll

find Roosevelt's report from Sumner Welles,

the original document Sumner Welles

signed with those sentences included.

This is why I never use published volumes.

I never use diaries that have been printed somewhere else.

I never use the printed volumes of documents because you can be absolutely

certain that the bits that are vital to an understanding of history

have been cut

out.

If you look in the British Cabinet Minutes, for example, even

if you go into the

archives in Britain, you'll find this.

If you go into the, look in the British Cabinet Minutes in

1940, June 1940,

you'll find important paragraphs have been blanked out.

You're not given the original Cabinet Minutes,

and there's a 30-year rule operating

in England which says we can see all documents over 30 years old.

If you see the war Cabinet Minutes, you find that certain paragraphs have been

blanked out in the photocopies so you can't read them.

And it's only when you go and look in the private diaries of people

like Lord

Halifax, the foreign secretary, or Lord Beaverbrook,

or Neville Chamberlain, the

former prime minister, that you find out what Churchill

was saying that

afternoon. I've quoted it here in this book,

and you'll find it's interesting that

when Adolf Hitler made his great peace plan in the summer of 1940, Winston

Churchill in cabinet said,

"I think that we would be wrong not to accept Mr.

Hitler's peace offer."

It's not just David Irving saying it.

In other words, Winston Churchill himself said it in

that cabinet meeting, which is

why it's been blanked out so we can't read it, because it's embarrassing for us to

have to admit now to anyone who can find the original w- quotations by Churchill or

Lord Halifax's diary that we could have got out of the war in

1940 with the British

Empire intact.

If the war had ended in 1940, how many of those 6 million,

or whatever figure you

say is the right one, would have died?

Because all of them, whoever died, however many it was, from

1940 onwards, they all died in that period from 1940

onwards. If the war had ended, the other Holocaust, Mr.

Churchill's Holocaust, if that had ended in 1940 in June,

the killing of

millions of innocent people, whatever side, German, French, Poles,

Belgians,

Hungarians, the bombing war, the extermination of

minorities, whatever it was, wouldn't have taken place.