Tea at Trianon: The Reporter Who Knew Too Much

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

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

The Reporter Who Knew Too Much

I have been listening to some books by investigative journalist Mark Shaw on Audible concerning the assassination of JFK. Mr. Shaw presents his research in such a manner that the reader/listener can draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile he also builds a convincing case. Particularly interesting to me is the history of Dorothy Kilgallen, an Irish Catholic writer who has been practically forgotten. From All That's Interesting:

By the time she died in 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen had made a name for herself as a journalist, a radio broadcaster, and a popular game show panelist. But she planned to become known as something else: the reporter who revealed the real story behind the John F. Kennedy assassination.
A dogged journalist unafraid to speak truth to power, Kilgallen was deep into her own investigation about the president’s death when she died. She found the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed Kennedy alone “laughable” and spent 18 months speaking to sources and digging into the assassination.

Before she could publish anything, however, Kilgallen died from an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. But was it likely accidental, as newspapers reported at the time? Or had something more sinister taken place — and what happened to Dorothy Kilgallen’s pages and pages of research?
[...]
For 18 months, Dorothy Kilgallen set out to learn all she could about the Kennedy assassination. She found the Warren Commission’s 1964 conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the president alone “laughable” and set her sights on Oswald’s killer, Jack Ruby, who’d murdered the assassin on live television two days after Kennedy’s death. During Ruby’s 1965 trial, Kilgallen achieved what no other reporter could — an interview with Oswald’s alleged killer. (Read more.)

And here is a fascinating lecture by author Mark Shaw about the mysterious death of Dorothy Kilgallen.

Here are some really great reads/listens which I recommend to anyone who wants to know more about that time of American history. The Poison Patriarch inspired me to watch the Scorsese film The Irishman (2019) about the Mafia hit-man Frank Sheeran, a disturbing but brilliant film. Review HERE.