Tea at Trianon: The Flynn Affair

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 3, 2017

The Flynn Affair

From The Federalist:

In 1972, then-presidential candidate George McGovern sent a campaign representative to negotiate with communist North Vietnamese leaders in an attempt to secure an early release of American prisoners. The negotiations, which consisted of two conversations in July and August leading up to the November election, proved to be ultimately unsuccessful, and the war between North Vietnam and the United States would go on for another three years.

During the Cold War, Sen. Ted Kennedy begged Soviet officials to intervene on behalf of the Democratic Party to defeat Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election. A KGB memo released in the 1990s revealed that Kennedy offered to visit Moscow and help the Soviets brush up their propaganda to deal with Reagan. In exchange, John F. Kennedy’s brother expected the USSR to intervene in the election against then-president Reagan’s re-election bid. You can read that memo in full here. (Read more.)