Last week a Palm Beach friend, a country club Republican, gave me a copy of the Weekly Standard. She urged me to read “A World in Crisis, what the thirties tell us about today” by its opinion editor, Matthew Continetti. The predicate of this overly long article seems to be that the fate of the universe hinged upon a little-known traffic accident involving Winston Churchill on the upper east side of Manhattan in the early 1930’s. Unlike a Thomas Hardy novel, in this instance a chance mishap worked out for the best. Or so Continetti would have the reader assume. Churchill was crossing Fifth Avenue at 76th Street in the late evening of December 13th, 1931 on his way to Bernard Baruch’s apartment for a pow-wow, when he looked the wrong way, crossed against the light, and was sideswiped by a car going 30 mph. The hapless statesman spent over a week in Lenox Hill hospital recovering from a sprained shoulder, some facial lacerations, and a mild concussion, all of which required a doctor’s prescription for “alcoholic spirits especially at meal times.”
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