Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  When fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, King Victor Emmanuel III, was not particularly concerned. "If we win," he said, "I shall be Emperor of Ethiopia. If we lose, I shall be King of Italy." Of course, Italy lost World War Two, and after the Italian people abolished the monarchy via a plebiscite, he ended up being neither.

  The monarchic temperament is more a matter of breeding than of actual position or power. The last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Karl I, III, and IV (1st of Austria, 3rd of Bohemia, 4th of Hungary respectively) abdicated at the end of World War One, and when he died, his eldest son Otto became heir to the Hapsburg throne(s). He was forbidden to enter any of the three "kingdoms" to which he had a dynastic claim, and lived in relatively penurious exile in Italy and France. Nonetheless, Hapsburg royalists, and Otto himself, regarded him as the legitimate claimant to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

  By 1938 another Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had established himself as the single most important person in European politics. When the imperial pretender was asked his opinion of Hitler, the monarchic temperament came to the fore. "Having not yet having had the opportunity to receive Herr Hitler," Otto replied blandly, "I cannot say."

  PRIME MINISTERS

  Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and future prime minister of the United Kingdom, was Napoleon's principal opponent at the Battle of Waterloo in June of 1815. As both the French and British forces arranged themselves for the coming battle, Napoleon rode back and forth before his troops upon his grey charger, waving his hat and encouraging his men. But he unwittingly rode within range of the British guns, and a young lieutenant asked Wellington if he might try a shot which, if successful, would have ended the conflict then and there. "Certainly not!" Wellington snapped. "Commanders of opposing armies have better things to do on the brink of battle than to take shots at each other." The ensuing battle left 63,000 men dead or wounded.

  Benjamin Disraeli, later 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, was prime minister of the United Kingdom twice, the first time in 1868. Though in later years Queen Victoria came to adore her beloved "Dizzy" (especially after he arranged for her to be proclaimed Empress of India), she at first took a personal dislike to him. At the customary dinner given by the Queen to honor the new PM, the entire meal was, perhaps intentionally, poorly prepared; in fact, the temperature of the food testified to the fact that it had been cooked much earlier in the day and had been left sitting around.

  Needless to say, Disraeli was too dignified and proper to evince annoyance at the personal affront. However, after he drank the traditional champagne toast, he turned to an associate and, in a whisper loud enough to be heard around the room, said, "At last! Something warm!"

  Disraeli was a Jew by birth and upbringing bur converted to the Church of England in his teens. His Christian adherence notwithstanding, both he and his political opponents were acutely aware of the ambiguous status attending upon his ethnic background. In one somewhat confrontational exchange in the House of Commons, one MP sought to put him "in his place" by contrasting Disraeli's recent British pedigree with his more deeply rooted one. "I remind you, Mr. Disraeli," he said, "that my ancestors were present at the signing of the Magna Carta."

  "I commend you for your ancestors," Disraeli replied. "Mine were present at the proclamation of the Ten Commandments.”

  On occasion tragedy can segue to humor. A good example of this can be seen in the death of the prime minister of Australia, Harold Holt, in December of 1967. Holt and some friends were walking along a beach known for its dangerous undertow (or “riffs”) when he spontaneously stripped off his shirt and plunged in for a swim. He was never seen again. Two days later the government pronounced him dead. No remains were ever recovered—"If you drown out here you become part of the food chain pretty quickly," one Australian observed—but Holt was later commemorated in the capital city of Canberra with the dedication of a public facility in his name. It is a municipal swimming pool. (Perhaps this tells us something about Australians.)

  Ramsey MacDonald, the first Socialist prime minister of Britain (in 1929 and again from 1931 until 1935), was well known for the impenetrability of his rhetoric. His turgid, convoluted, desultory speeches often left his audiences applauding politely in stunned confusion. (Winston Churchill once commented that one of MacDonald’s speeches was “… like the peace of God. It passeth all understanding.” A good example of this is the following excerpt from a speech he delivered to the House of Commonsregarding the unemployment problem. (Needless to say, the author did not record this from memory. He looked it up.)

  "Schemes must be devised, policies must be devised if it is humanly possible to take that section, those unemployed who are not shortly to be reabsorbed into industry, and to regard them not as wastrels, not as hopeless people, but as people for whom occupation must be invented somehow or another, and that occupation, although it may not be in the factory or in large-scale industrial activity or in large-scale organized industrial groups, nevertheless will be quite as effective for themselves mentally, morally, spiritually, physically, than, perhaps, if they were to have been included in this enormous mechanism of humanity which is not always producing the best result, and which, to a very large extent, fails in producing those good results that so many of us expect to see from a higher civilization based upon national wealth which, when comprehended, or apprehended, must needs lead to an inevitable conclusion. We are faced with the question of what to do in respect to this question, to that question, and to the other question, but perfectly obviously, after we have faced the more superficial aspects of the several questions, we need to know in relation to a complete plan what we are actually giving and what we are actually getting. Therefore, when the departmental, or rather, the compartmental, exploration has gone on to a certain extent, it cannot be completed until somebody, coordinating all the problems, sets out in one statement and declaration the complete scheme, once devised, that the House (of Commons) can pass to give hope for the future—until that scheme has been placed before you, you cannot possible hope to complete your examination of the departmental, or rather, the compartmental problems and questions. This is indeed itself a problem that must be faced."

  If the reader can make heads or tails of this excerpt... well, to quote Rudyard Kipling, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

  Engelbert Dollfuss was chancellor (i.e., prime minister) of Austria from 1932 until his assassination in 1934; he was also effectively a dictator from 1933 until his death.

  The establishment of the Dollfuss dictatorship was made possible by the Austrian national quality of Schlamperei, which means a kind of slovenly good-naturedness occasionally succumbing to irrational fits of emotion. In 1933, when Dollfuss was already chancellor, a debate in the Austrian parliament on a very important topic was about to conclude with a vote. The chamber was equally divided between the Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists, each with 81 members; despite the similarity of the parties' names, they were the radical left and radical right, respectively. Just as the members began to deposit their written ballots in the Ja or Nein box, a socialist deputy left the chamber to go to the men's room. A colleague, realizing he would miss the vote, hurriedly filled out ballot for him; but in his haste he not only signed the wrong name on the ballot, he also placed it in the wrong box.

  The measure failed by a vote of 81 to 80. Outraged, the speaker of the house (who was constitutionally prohibited from voting), a Social Democrat, screamed a resignation at the members and stormed out of the chamber. Left in control were the two deputy speakers, one a Social Democrat, the other a Christian Socialist. Each put forth his own name to be elected speaker, and each received, of course, 81 votes. Hurling imprecations at each other, both of them also resigned, and the house adjourned in pandemonium.

  What no one seemed to have considered was that according to the Austrian constitution, only the speaker or one of the deputy speakers could reconvene the parliament, and they had just all resig
ned. Dollfuss was thus left in place as a chancellor without a parliament. He proceeded to rule the country by decree, a dictator in fact if not in name. Never in History has the need to urinate had so deleterious an effect upon government.

  Otherwise intelligent leaders have upon occasion a remarkable lapse of judgment. In 1936, Hitler ordered German troops into the Rhineland, an area of Germany on France's border that had been demilitarized by the Versailles Treaty. This action is generally regarded as Hitler's first aggression, and the last opportunity to stop him short of a general war. When the French approached their British ally to coordinate opposition to the act, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin dismissed their concerns by saying, "Jerry is only walking into his own back yard." ("Jerry" was an English nickname for Germans.) And when two years later Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede to Germany a territory called the Sudetenland, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain indicated a disinclination to defend the Czechs from the German demand to dismember their state by referring to the whole problem as "a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing." Prague is 642 miles from London; and the people involved in the quarrel, the Czechs and the Germans, are people about whom, one surmises, the English knew at least something.

  (One of the most remarkable and interesting of all British prime ministers was Winston Churchill, about whom anecdotes exist in droves. What follows are a mere handful.)

  The British are renowned for their unflappability and the redoubtable "stiff upper lip," which foreigners sometimes misperceive as a lack of emotion. In a possibly apocryphal story which nonetheless has been found in numerous sources, it is related that Winston and Clementine Churchill were attending a dinner when a cinder from his cigar fell onto the fringe of his coat and began to smolder ominously. When Mrs. Churchill pointed out to him that his coat was on fire, Churchill said, "Thank you my dear. Let me know when it reaches my lapel."

  Among Churchill's most vocal opponents in British politics was Lady Astor, a woman of American birth who was the first female to be elected to the House of Commons. Their mutual animus was as much personal as it was political. When, for example, Churchill briefly grew a moustache while a renegade member of the Liberal Party, and she informed him that she liked neither his moustache nor his politics, he responded that, given the current political situation and her lack of attractiveness, she was likely to come into contact with neither of them. And, more famously, she and Churchill were both in attendance at a social gathering at which Churchill had rather too much to drink, which was not uncommon. Lady Astor approached him, feigned disgust and said, "Mr. Churchill! You are very drunk!"

  "Lady Astor," he replied, "you are very ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow."

  Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt became fast friends during World War Two, but an incident early in their acquaintance might have proven to be a major impediment to their relationship were it not for Churchill's quick wit.

  Churchill arrived in Washington for his first visit as prime minister in March of 1941, and Roosevelt, who had corresponded with him but had never met him, was eager to talk. Churchill, however, was exhausted after his trans-Atlantic journey, which was considerably more arduous in 1941 that it is today, and wanted to take a bath and a nap before meeting with the president. As a distinguished guest whose presence would not be announced until two days later, Churchill had the unique honor of being a guest in the White House rather than staying in the British Embassy as diplomatic propriety would ordinarily dictate. He was thus at FDR's mercy.

  After having the staff show Churchill to his room, Roosevelt waited what he regarded as a decent interval and then took the elevator to the third floor and after a pro forma knock, wheeled himself in to find Churchill standing in the middle of the room, cigar in one hand, glass of scotch in the other, stark naked. FDR stammered a flummoxed apology, but Churchill diffused the tension by spreading his arms wide and saying, "His Majesty's prime minister has nothing to hide from the president of the United States."

  The British prime minister is a member of the House of Commons, a body that corresponds roughly to the U.S. House of Representatives. (If the U.S. were a parliamentary democracy, our prime minister would be the Speaker of the House, an idea which, considering our recent speakers, is enough to send shudders down the spine of any intelligent person.)

  In any event, as leader of our closest ally in the Second World War, Churchill was invited to address a joint session of Congress in the House chamber. He began his address by saying, "As many of you may know, while my father was British, my mother was American. Had the situations been reversed, I might have gotten into this room on my own."

  Churchill was generally able to control his drinking in that he was never out of control even when inebriated. One significant exception to this general rule was the first personal meeting he had with Marshal Josef Stalin, Communist dictator of the Soviet Union. (This was before the two men met with their third ally, FDR, in 1943.)

  Churchill and Stalin met with their staffs during the day, dined with each other and smaller entourages in the evening; and then, both men being night owls, met privately with only Stalin's translator present, drinking and smoking into the wee hours of the morning. When Churchill awakened the next afternoon, he realized with shock and chagrin that he had an only foggy memory of their pre-dawn conversation. Not knowing what he may or may not have committed himself to, he immediately wrote Stalin a three-page letter expressing concern and confessing his memory lapse, in an attempt to undo whatever damage he may have done.

  An hour later he received a hand-written note from Stalin, which his own translator read to him in English. Churchill did not understand why his translator was trembling until he heard Stalin's words:

  My dear Prime Minister: There is no reason to concern yourself regarding our very pleasant evening. There was no harm done by either of us, on either side, in any way. I was as drunk as you were, perhaps drunker. No notes were taken, no commitments made, no agreements signed. And the translator has been shot. - Truly, J. V. Stalin

  PRESIDENTS

  Some presidents have delightful senses of humor (Lincoln, JFK, FDR, and Reagan come immediately to mind), while others (e.g., Adams, Carter, Ford, Hoover, et al.) seem to have had none at all. Thomas Jefferson, all of his other magnificent qualities notwithstanding, falls into the latter category. It has been reported that during a hiatus at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1776, Jefferson was discussing agriculture with Benjamin Franklin. One quality these two shared was that they were both interested in everything; one difference between them was that, unlike Jefferson, Franklin had a great sense of humor and could never resist a straight line. Jefferson commented that he had planted cabbages in his vegetable garden at Monticello (of course, he hadn't planted them himself; his slaves did it) and was annoyed that every night rabbits came out and nibbled away at the first row of cabbages. Franklin suggested he could solve the problem by not planting the first row. Jefferson didn't get the joke.

  Neither Jefferson nor John Adams attended the Constitutional Convention because they were both engaged in diplomatic missions, Adams as ambassador to Britain and Jefferson as ambassador to France. They had become close in Congress during the Revolution, and drew even closer during their European sojourn. (So close, in fact, that the widower Jefferson asked John and Abigail Adams to care for his little daughter Patsy for a time. They readily complied.)

  One famous story, told in numerous variations, refers to a visit Jefferson paid to Adams in London. (After the long voyage from America to Europe, crossing the Channel to go from Paris to London must have seemed a like a canoe ride in the Potomac.) Both men were strolling through Covent Garden on an afternoon when King George III and his entourage were doing the same thing. The king saw them, gazed at them as they bowed deferentially, and then turned his back on them and walked on. Etiquette would have obliged George to acknowledge their presence with at least a polite regal nod, so the turning of his back was a deliber
ate snub.

  Adams was a volatile fellow, easily offended and sensitive to insults. He grew red in the face at the king's discourtesy and might have said or done something inappropriate had not Jefferson, a phlegmatic man at all times, placed his hand upon Adams' shoulder and said, "Mr. Adams, Mr. Adams, becalm yourself. We won the war, did we not?"

  The religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers are a topic of great argument of late, and both sides in the argument are wrong. Those who claim that they were all devout Christians are wrong; those who claim they were all Enlightenment skeptics are wrong. Many of the Founders were indeed traditional Christians, such the Congregationalist John Hancock, the Episcopalian Richard Henry Lee, and the Catholic Charles Carroll. Others, like John Adams and Samuel Adams and (possibly) Benjamin Franklin, were Unitarians, i.e., Christians who rejected the idea of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Others, like Thomas Jefferson and (again possibly) Benjamin Franklin, were Deists, i.e., men who believed in God as a Creator (and also believed in heaven, hell, and the resurrection), but did not believe that God actively intervened in human affairs.

  The religious beliefs of George Washington are unknown, because he was a reticent man and only spoke when necessary. We know that he prayed at Valley Forge, but we also know that there were no clergy present at his deathbed.

  We also know that he went to church (Episcopalian/Church of England) every Sunday, but did not take Communion. We do not know why and Washington never discussed it. But when the priest politely recommended that he not absent himself from the Lord's Supper, Washington resolved the problem by ceasing to attend services as which Communion was served.