Two moving obituaries on Tacitus' website: popular historian and Churchill biographer William Manchester, and now Ronald Reagan (timeline of his life) both passed away after long and debilitating diseases.
We will never see the third volume of William Manchester's "The Last Lion": apparently he had completed a 100,000 word draft by 1995, when declassification of British wartime secret documents made much of what Manchester wrote obsolete. Being the uncompromising craftsman that he was, he shredded his manuscript and started over from scratch: but disease and now death stayed his hand forever. Two excerpts from the unfinished draft made their way into WW II compilations. Perhaps another historian shall be willing to let his ego take a back seat and complete the draft. (Just like the minor composer and Mozart pupil Süssmayr is now remembered --- if at all --- for completing the 80% finished score of Mozart's "Requiem" KV 626.)
I remember Reagan being reviled among Belgian leftists and leftoids (then including yours truly) with a vehemence rivaling that which they now apply to Bush Jr. (up to and including comparisons with the H-monster), and Belgians of all political stripes condescendingly ridiculing about Reagan's alleged lack of high culture. History gave this "unsophisticate" the last laugh when the "Evil Empire", faced with yet another costly arms race by the Strategic Defense Initiative, collapsed under its own weight. A liberal Democrat who switched party allegiance ("I did not leave the Democrats, they left me"), he was a lifelong believer in the American Dream:
They say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems, that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view.
May their souls be gathered into the bond of life.
UPDATE: The Gipper and the Hedgehog was written months ago as a book review, but is still a fitting tribute to the "amiable dunce" hedgehog who out-thought all the "nuanced, sophisticated" foxes. Why the title?
[I]n Isaiah Berlin’s essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" [...] Berlin, musing on an obscure line penned by the Greek poet Archilochus, argued it was a modern typology. Archilochus wrote that the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing. Berlin characterized foxes as running hither and yon, taking actions that are unconnected by any guiding principle and that may even be at odds with one another. "Hedgehogs, on the other hand," writes Schweizer, "relate everything to a single central vision."
Go read the whole thing. And also this moving tribute by his erstwhile speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
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