In 2009 Barack Obama replaced the Churchill Bust in the Oval Office with a picture of himself walking on water.
This week Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the Republican Congress moved a bust of Winston Churchill back to Washington DC, inside the US Capitol.
The Weekly Standard reported:
According to a congressional aide, Boehner discovered when he became House speaker in 2011 that the Freedom Foyer “had room for at least two more busts.” For months, “we had a running conversation about who we should place there. We kept coming back to Churchill.”
Boehner has been “a big fan his entire life, reading biography after biography,” the aide said. “Late one December evening, during a lull in legislative activity, we started researching a resolution to authorize the placement of the bust in the Capitol, and realized we were on the cusp of the 70th anniversary of Churchill’s address to Congress right after Pearl Harbor. We wrote the resolution and we rushed it to the floor to commemorate the occasion.”
Since Churchill is enormously popular in this country—among other things, his mother was American—the resolution was quickly approved with bipartisan support. Opposing it would have been politically awkward for Democrats, even if Obama might be irked. Churchill was made an honorary American citizen by President Kennedy in 1963 and given the first and only honorary U.S. passport.
Three Democrats spoke at the dedication in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall last week. They did not distinguish themselves. Secretary of State John Kerry insinuated that Churchill wouldn’t have condoned Republican tactics today. “This bust will remind us . . . progress comes only when we pursue it together,” Kerry said.
He told a Churchill story that many regard as apocryphal. “When he was invited to the White House to stay for a week, he stayed for months,” Kerry said. “He felt free to use President Roosevelt’s private bathtub, but no need to wear his bathrobe or any bathrobe when he was done.” The suggestion here is that Churchill exposed himself to FDR. Churchill denied the story.
Secretary of State John Kerry speaks in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013, during a ceremony to dedicate a bust of Winston Churchill. Senate and House leaders, as well as Kerry, gathered on Wednesday to dedicate the Churchill bust, which will now stand in the Capitol as a testament to the strength of the relationship between the US and the United Kingdom. (AP)
