One of the books I am reading at the moment is DR Thorpe’s biography of Harold Macmillan.
In this year when so many heads of state or dictators have died or been toppled, one startling fact really jumped out at me – Roosevelt, Mussolini & Hitler died within less than three weeks of each other in April 1945.
I suppose I must have known – read, or been told - those dates sometime, somehow, somewhere, but I had never before put them together at all. In fact I think I thought that Mussolini had died earlier, sometime around the time of the Allied invasion & the Italian armistice; the image of his hanging body & the fate of his mistress are certainly lodged firmly in my memory bank.
But then I faced another uncomfortable moment – I could not confidently say who had taken over from FDR as President.
Anyone who has ever, like me, been a student of methods of scientific sampling (especially in human populations) will be very well aware of the disaster that befell opinion pollsters in the 1948 US Presidential election, when the New York Times ran with the front page headline that Dewey had beaten Truman. The error was put down to the fact that the poll on which this was based had been conducted solely by phone & thus among a biased sample of those from the more prosperous sections of society, not at all representative of the population as a whole.
So I could remember that that was Dewey v Truman, but which, if either, was the incumbent & indeed was Truman a Democrat?
On any other day I should probably have felt confident that I knew the answer to these last two questions; it was the new intelligence about the events of April 1945 which made me suddenly doubt other things I thought I knew about the chronology of all other events around that time.
Another fact I learned for the first time from Thorpe makes it easier to understand why the idea that Dewey had won seemed - through wishful thinking - to make sense to those eagerly awaiting the outcome of the election.
Stocks on the NYSE had surged in value on the news of FDR death – which, at a time when we are all (including the London Times) very cross about the behaviour of our financial services industries today, will cause sharp intakes of breath & suckings of teeth.
On which point there is another apt quote from Thorpe: The events of 1931 & its aftermath had confirmed Macmillan in his deep distrust of the City & the Treasury – he dubbed them ‘banksters’.
Which is wittier than our modern w...... epithet.
