Remembering Margaret Thatcher
/The Iron Lady I Knew Was Bendable
Published by Michael Novak in The Huffington Post on April 8, 2013
One evening during the end of Lady Thatcher's long run as Prime Minister, my wife Karen and I had dinner with her and Dennis at the mountain condo of mutual friends in Vail, Colorado. It was an intimate dinner, three couples in all, when just before dinner was called we gathered before the large picture window to marvel as a beautiful rainbow formed in the soft evening mist, and arched upwards toward the peak of the western mountains.
To me, that rainbow called back my feeling when Lady T first came to visit President Reagan at the White House, hardly a month after his inauguration. To the public, they said communism was even then being swept into the dustbin of history, an old and dead idea that had failed.
Full article at The Huffington Post.
The Victorian Lady
Margaret Thatcher's virtues
Published by Gertrude Himmelfarb in The Weekly Standard on April 22, 2013
I was at a reception at the British embassy here in Washington in the early 1990s, I believe, when I was introduced to Margaret Thatcher by John O’Sullivan, her friend and former “Special Adviser.” Gertrude Himmelfarb, he told her, had recently delivered the Margaret Thatcher Lecture in Tel Aviv on a subject dear to her, Victorian values. “But of course, I know Gertrude,” she replied, “we’ve met before. And what a great subject, Victorian values. Let me tell you about Victorian values.” Which she did, eloquently, perceptively, and at some length, while John vainly tried to move her on to more worthy guests who were waiting to greet her.
Full article at The Weekly Standard.
Margaret Thatcher Remembered
Published by Paul Adams in Ethics, Culture, & Policy on April 15, 2013
Here is a comment by Gertrude Himmelfarb on Margaret Thatcher's endorsement of "Victorian values--better yet, Victorian virtues"--a charge from critics that, like the epithet "Iron Lady," Mrs. Thatcher enthusiastically embraced. Himmelfarb points out that Thatcher was not an "individualist" who held an atomized view of the autonomous unencumbered self as the alternative to statist collectivism. In contrast, she stood in the line of those, like (in their different ways) Burke, Tocqueville, Acton, and Novak (as well as the popes from Leo XIII to John Paul II), who emphasized the importance of the intermediate structures or associations that stood between individual and state.
Full article at Ethics, Culture, & Policy.