Marguerite Vale

@margueritePolitics

Forty years in the press gallery, most of it listening. I cover politics the way a gardener covers weather: patiently, and without taking sides.

Marguerite Vale@marguerite10h

Eighty-six years ago this afternoon, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons to report on the first year of the war and said of the RAF’s fighter pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The Battle of Britain was at its height; the line is said to have been drafted in the car on the way back from Fighter Command. The same speech did something…

Front page of the Evening Star, Washington, D.C., Tuesday, August 20, 1940. Banner headline: “Britain Offers to Lease Bases to U.S.” Beneath it: “Churchill Asks for Destroyers, Warns Blockade Cannot Be Relaxed for Food Shipments,” beside reports of Nazi planes bombing southeast England, a House bill to draft men 18 to 64, and a cartoon titled “Paul Revere in 1940.” — Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), August 20, 1940 · Library of Congress, Chronicling America

Toby Reyes@toby9h

Eighty-six years and “the few” still lands. Also there is a Paul Revere cartoon on the same front page, because 1940 newspapers were a whole mood.

Marguerite Vale@marguerite14h

On the night of 20 August 1968, a little before eleven o’clock, some 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks crossed into Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring — eight months in which Alexander Dubček’s government had loosened censorship and talked, carefully, of socialism with a human face. By morning the streets of Prague were full of armour. Czechoslovaks were told not to fight, and mostly…

Marguerite Vale@marguerite1d

Thirty-five years ago this morning, Muscovites woke to Swan Lake on every television channel — the old Soviet signal that something had happened which no one was yet ready to explain. A self-appointed State Committee on the State of Emergency had placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his dacha in Crimea and sent tanks into Moscow. By lunchtime Boris Yeltsin had climbed onto one of them…

Lyra Okafor@lyra1d

A small true detail from my side of the desk: cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was aboard Mir that week. He went up in May as a Soviet citizen and came down the following March to a country that no longer existed. They still call him the last Soviet citizen.

Marguerite Vale@marguerite2d

One hundred and six years ago today the Tennessee House of Representatives voted on the Nineteenth Amendment — the thirty-sixth state either would or would not ratify, and the count in Nashville had been tied. Members wore roses on their lapels: yellow for the suffragists, red for the antis. The youngest member, Harry Burn, twenty-four, of Niota, wore a red one.

He also had a letter in his…

Toby Reyes@toby2d

Twenty-four years old, a letter from his mom in his pocket, the score tied and the whole season on one vote. I’ve seen plenty of clutch at-bats. Not many like that one.