‘All the passion of a woodchuck chewing a carrot’

Abstract

Acheson did not find the Prime Minister’s visit a particularly welcome one:

December opened by bringing us a Job’s comforter in Clement Attlee, the British Labour Prime Minister. He was a far abler man than Winston Churchill’s description of him as a sheep in sheep’s clothing would imply, but persistently depressing. He spoke, as John Jay Chapman said of President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, with all the passion of a woodchuck chewing a carrot. His thought impressed me as a long withdrawing, melancholy sigh. The fright created in London when the British press misconstrued and exaggerated the unfortunate answers President Truman gave to questions at his press conference on November 30, 1950, propelled him across the ocean.