 It had been invoked during wartime by President Lyndon Johnson in a 1967 speech and by Johnson's Undersecretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes.The phrase gained a central place in rhetoric due to the publication by journalist Stewart Alsop in his 1973 memoirs of a conversation with Winston Churchill.Alsop related that the British Prime Minister had pondered at the close of World War II, "America, it is a great and strong country, like a workhorse pulling the rest of the world out of despond and despair.