Dick Winters, 1918-2011

I found out today that on January 2, Major Richard "Dick" Winters passed away. He was 92 years old.

Major Winters was a relative unknown until Stephen Ambrose's 1992 history of the WWII service of Company E ("Easy"), 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, entitled Band of Brothers. The story is one of those that has to be read to be believed. The men of Easy Company--and their comrades throughout the 101st--parachuted into Normandy in the wee morning hours of D-Day. They cleared the Germans from Normandy. They parachuted into Holland during Operation Market Garden. They were surrounded, yet held out, around the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. They marched on, and took, Berchtesgaden--Adolf Hitler's summer retreat. They helped liberate concentration camps.

And then those survived came home. Some went to college, while others went to work. They married, had children, bought homes, and continued life, like all our World War II veterans, unsung and dignified. Major Winters, after winning the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions in Normandy, and after having led Easy Company for much of the war, went back to his home in Pennsylvania, where he eventually settled down on a quiet plot of land to live his life. Even today, his actions for taking out a number of German 88mm cannons behind enemy lines on D-Day are taught at West Point as ideal on-the-ground tactics.

Winters, from all that I've seen and read of him, was quiet, sharp, and self-effacing. He spent much of his life extolling his comrades-in-arms. I'm sorry he's gone. The world--quite literally--is better because of him, and ultimately, as a legacy, what more could one ask for?

Remembering The Iron Lady

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's downfall from the premiership of the United Kingdom. While often forgotten in the U.S. (and not even known by most people in my own generation), the career of 'the Iron Lady' stands out as one of the most impressive dossiers of principled accomplishment this century, perhaps only beaten by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Even the likes of Ronald Reagan did not accomplish for his country so much as she did for hers. Like FDR and Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher were two extraordinary politicians, united across the Atlantic, each leaving a continually echoing legacy. When Ronald Reagan left the presidency, the country in his wake had been radically altered in the rightward direction. Without Reagan conservatism, you'd have no Bill Clinton declaring that 'the era of big government [was] over'. You'd have no George W. Bush, and you'd have no Barack Obama.

Similarly, without Maggie Thatcher, there would have been no Tony Blair. There would've been no New Labour, no Gordon Brown, and no David Cameron. Most importantly, however, is that the trajectory of the United Kingdom may have gone in an opposite direction from today. The Iron Lady was forced from office in an intra-party no-confidence battle. Unlike her partner across the pond, she wasn't able to retire with popular dignity and a chosen successor. And the reason? It wasn't her local-government conservatism. It wasn't even her fiscal conservatism or her hawkish foreign policy against the Soviets. Instead, it was her policy to what would become the European Union. Ms. Thatcher's Tory opponents wanted the UK to forego the Pound Sterling and join the proposed common European currency. That notion was anathema to Thatcher; she didn't want to give an inch of the United Kingdom's sovereignty to fools on the Continent. It should be the British people who are both liable and responsible for their own currency, not the British people who are liable for but not given any control of the common currency. Given the fiscal demise of Greece and Ireland and the imminent fiscal demise of Portugal and Spain, the Lady's decision to avoid the Euro couldn't have been better. However, in 1990, those in her own party didn't see her precience.

So, on November 22, 1990, after the first ballot for the leadership of the Conservative party showed Thatcher ahead but with less support than expected from her Tory colleagues, the Lady announced that she would not be on the second ballot. She resigned, leaving a party that had thrown itself into needless disarray. It would remain that way until the present--the Tories are now again in power (though barely) after a thirteen year exile. However, the scars that her opponents left on the Conservative Party persist, only lightly plastered over, leaving the party as vulnerable as it has ever really been. What it needs now is a true successor to Thatcher, not the namby-pamby, spineless, career politician David Cameron.

Two excellent pieces on Thatcher's downfall from the Daily Telegraph: one and two.

One of Thatcher's final PMQ's: