Duff Cooper Quotes

Duff Cooper

Churchill wrote to his friend and colleague Alfred Duff Cooper that there were some “unpleasant features in this election which indicate the rise of bad elements.” He added, “Conscientious objectors were preferred to candidates of real military achievement and service.” Members of Parliament “who had done the most to hamper and obstruct the war were returned by enormously increased majorities.” And, “None of the values of the years before were preserved.

There was a spontaneous movement to raise a “National Fund of Thanksgiving” in Chamberlain’s honor, which he graciously turned down. Only Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned from the cabinet, and when in the ensuing Commons debate Winston Churchill, still a voice in the wilderness, began to utter his memorable words, “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat,” he was forced to pause, as he later recorded, until the storm of protest against such a remark had subsided.

One of my favorite “deep thoughts” on the topic occurred when one of my other bands, Loaded, was opening for Alice Cooper a number of years back. After one particularly successful show, we got to talking about Bon Jovi. In the song “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” the claim is made that “I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.” All? Let’s ponder. I have no doubt that Bon Jovi had played to a million people by the time “Dead or Alive” was released on Slippery When Wet in 1986. But did they rock them all? Couldn’t it be that some dudes brought their girlfriends to the show and weren’t necessarily into their music? What about some parents? Or maybe some people just didn’t get rocked? Hey, it’s happened to me. I’ve gone to gigs properly prepared to get rocked and it just didn’t happen.

Chamberlain was goaded into announcing major British rearmament. Now at Saarbrücken, Hitler bellowed that he did not intend to drop his guard since, in democracies, statesmen who worked sincerely for peace could always be replaced overnight by warmongers: ‘It only needs for Mr. Duff Cooper or Mr. Eden or Mr. Churchill to come to power in place of Chamberlain, and you can be quite sure that their aim would be to start a new world war. They make no bones about it, they admit it quite openly.

he may have crossed the borderline into insanity.” Henderson wasn’t in Hitler’s thrall. But did he think Hitler had dishonorable intentions toward Czechoslovakia? No. Hitler, he believed, “hates war as much as anyone.” Henderson, too, read Hitler all wrong.2 The blindness of Chamberlain and Halifax and Henderson is not at all like Puzzle Number One, from the previous chapter. That was about the inability of otherwise intelligent and dedicated people to understand when they are being deceived. This is a situation where some people were deceived by Hitler and others were not. And the puzzle is that the group who were deceived are the ones you’d expect not to be, while those who saw the truth are the ones you’d think would be deceived. Winston Churchill, for example, never believed for a moment that Hitler was anything more than a duplicitous thug. Churchill called Chamberlain’s visit “the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” But Hitler was someone he’d only ever read about. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain’s cabinet ministers, was equally clear-eyed. He listened with horror to Chamberlain’s account of his meeting with Hitler. Later, he would resign from Chamberlain’s government in protest. Did Cooper know Hitler? No. Only one person in the upper reaches of the British diplomatic service—Anthony Eden, who preceded Halifax as foreign secretary—had both met Hitler and saw the truth of him. But for everyone else? The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew

A few days were snatched early in March by Edwin Montagu Venetia, Duff, Patrick and me for a fishing spree to a primitive inn on the River Beauly.