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Safire's Political Dictionary (σελ. 746):
too little and too late A criticism of inadequacy of resources interminably delayed.
“Too Late” was the caption of a famous 1885 Punch cartoon showing the belatedly dispatched relief column reaching Khartoum two days after the death of General “Chinese” Gordon at the hands of the African Mahdi.
The addition of “too little” to the words made a phrase both balanced and pointed. Professor Allan Nevins of Columbia was an early user in an article titled “Germany Disturbs the Peace” in the May 1935 Current History: “The former allies have blundered in the past by offering Germany too little, and offering even that too late, until finally Nazi Germany has become a menace to all mankind.”
The phrase was sharpened and popularized by David Lloyd George, who had served as Great Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I. On the day after the fall of Finland—March 13, 1940—the seventy-seven-year-old statesman told the House of Commons: “It is the old trouble—too late. Too late with Czechoslovakia, too late with Poland, certainly too late with Finland. It is always too late, or too little, or both.”
Throughout the early part of World War II, the phrase was used to deride Allied defeats and lack of preparation. Toward the end of the war, “enough and on time” was used to explain the reason for Allied successes. After the war, the phrase was used by an “out” party to attack policy on the grounds of inadequacy, which is a political attack permitting little counterattack. John F. Kennedy, campaigning in 1960, called an Eisenhower embargo on shipments to Cuba “too little and too late,” suggesting that the U.S. also “attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile...” In his memoirs of the Kennedy Administration, Ted Sorensen used the phrase in its current generic sense: “Kennedy’s error in 1960 on the ‘missile gap’ had been the result of the public’s being informed too little and too late—even after the facts were certain—about a danger which he had in good faith overstated.”
The danger of delayed decision was expressed in different words by Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson early in the Eisenhower Administration. “I have so many people in my department,” he said sadly, “who keep putting off decisions until the only thing left to do is the wrong thing.”
New York State Comptroller Arthur Levitt said in 1967 regarding a $2.5 billion transportation bond issue: “Too much, too soon” (the title of a 1957 autobiography by Diana Barrymore).
In 2007, as the rest of the world clucked sympathetically and dithered, President Bush announced sanctions on Sudan for continuing what he had earlier described as its genocide; the AP reported “advocacy groups and lawmakers wished the president had been harsher and wondered whether it was a case of too little, too late for Darfur. The violence has killed 200,000 people and forced 2.5 million more from their homes since it began in February 2003.”
The possibilities of this phrase, so much a part of our political language, are not yet exhausted. A use may even be found for “too little, too soon.”
