A bust of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was added Wednesday to the collection of statues in the U.S. Capitol.
The ceremony in Statuary Hall was the culmination of a controversy that began after President Barack Obama removed a Churchill bust from display in the Oval Office and replacing it with one of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Speaker John Boehner, presiding over ceremony, spoke with reverence of the former British Prime Minister.
"He considered our toilet paper too thin and our newspapers too fat," Boehner said of Churchill.
Rocker Roger Daltrey, co-founder and lead singer of The Who, performed at the dedication.
Boehner introduced him as "a member of rock royalty."
Secretary of State John Kerry reminded those gathered at the Capitol that it was in a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., that Churchill coined the phrase "Iron Curtain."
Boehner, in a statement released by the National Churchill Museum, said that "placing a bust of Churchill in the Capitol is a fitting recognition of his service to the cause of freedom and his friendship to the United States."
The bust, he said, would honor a "great statesman and . . . his legacy of persistence, determination, and resolve."
“Leave the past to history especially as I propose to write that history myself.”
