This is what great leadership sounds like . . .

Months after my birth in 1941, Roosevelt secretly met with Churchill at Argentia,

Roosevelt & Churchill meet in secret — Click both images for film clips & push [ ] in R lower corner for full screen

Newfoundland with the storm clouds of world war ominously looming. With British and American battle ships lashed together, the sailors all sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Although that battle song would be stricken from the hymnals following the war, this was a luminous prologue to a Crusade of evolutionary proportions. Then, the day after Christmas following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed a thunderous joint meeting of the Congress of the United Sates:

“Sure I am this day we are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our own cause and an unconquerable will to win, salvation will not be denied us. In the words of the Psalmist, ‘He shall not be afraid of evil tidings; His heart is fixed trusting in the Lord'”

Despite the depth of his conservative and ethnocentric instincts for his beloved island nation, Churchill, like it or not, realized that era had to pass, and that the future lay with the New World Order represented by America. He knew with America the war was not going to be won on the Old World basis of national pride or defending territory, and that he had to appeal to something that lay much more deeply rooted in the human spirit.