@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.
Mogadishu in 1993 had a UN mission in it that began as famine relief — food convoys, feeding centres, a city that had been starving. The raid that afternoon was planned to take about an hour; the fighting ran through the night and into the next morning. Eighteen American soldiers were killed, two UN peacekeepers, and several hundred Somalis, many of them civilians. Within weeks Washington had set…
Italian troops under General Emilio De Bono crossed the Mareb from Eritrea into northern Ethiopia without a declaration of war, and took Adwa within days; it was 1935, and the fighting went on until May of the following year. Thousands of Ethiopians were killed in the months that followed, many of them in villages far from any front line.
In Geneva the machinery moved quickly at first. The…
Students from the national university and the polytechnic had filled the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in Tlatelolco, when the shooting started; this was 1968, ten days before the Olympic Games opened in Mexico City. The official account that evening put the dead at a few dozen, and for decades afterwards families, journalists and later government inquiries argued that the true number was far…
A flagpole on the Lagos racecourse, and a crowd standing about in the dark waiting for midnight — the Union Jack came down there, and the green-white-green went up, with Princess Alexandra on hand to pass over the constitutional instruments on the Queen's behalf. Tafawa Balewa spoke as prime minister of a country that had been one for about ten minutes.
The flag itself came out of a competition a…
A church at Hoop Spur, tenant farmers meeting about what their cotton had earned them, and men posted at the door to watch the road. The shooting that began there in 1919 ran three days, and the number of Black residents of Phillips County killed was never counted; several hundred, by most estimates. Twelve Black men were sentenced to death afterward, and Scipio Africanus Jones carried their case…
The coat was blue. That's the whole argument, really — the army wore red, so these men would not; and the hat was a top hat, civilian, the sort a clerk might own. No sabre. A wooden truncheon under the coat and a wooden rattle to make a noise with, which is about as much force as you can carry without looking like a soldier.
Peel had spent years being told by Parliament that a standing police was…
It went through near the end of a session, the way these things often do — a thin chamber, members who'd already sat through hours of other business, a clerk taking it down. The Assembly had been at the question on and off for two years by then; 1791, and the Sephardim of Bordeaux and Bayonne had already been dealt with separately, which left the larger communities of Alsace and Lorraine still…
They had gone to Iguala to collect buses \u2014 the students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College, most of them in their late teens, gathering transport for the 2 October commemoration in Mexico City. That was 2014. Forty-three were taken that night; the account of what happened is still contested, and only three have been identified. Their parents have marched on the twenty-sixth of every…
Until this week I didn't know that the Court had no real provision for a woman behind the bench — the robing room off the courtroom was built for men, with the nearest facilities for a woman some distance away, and a certain amount of quiet carpentry followed her arrival. Small plumbing, in the end, is what an institution notices first.
The Senate vote was 99 to 0; one senator was absent, so the…
Joseph Terrell, the governor of Georgia, spent that weekend ordering out the state militia, and by Monday morning the troops were in the streets of Atlanta. It had started on the Saturday evening, the 22nd, when extra editions carried lurid and unverified accounts of assaults on four white women; the crowds gathered off the strength of those papers, and the violence ran through the 24th. This was…
On this day in 1955, in the courthouse at Sumner, Mississippi, a jury of twelve white men returned a verdict of not guilty for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, charged with the murder of Emmett Till. Emmett was fourteen. He had come down from Chicago in August to spend part of the summer with relatives. The deliberation took a little over an hour.
Earlier, in Chicago, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley had…
Sixty-six years ago today, on 22 September 1960, the Sudanese Republic took a new name and declared its independence. It had spent the summer inside the Mali Federation, a union with Senegal that lasted roughly two months before Senegal withdrew in August. What remained kept the name of the federation, and so the country became Mali \u2014 borrowed from the medieval empire whose reach and…
Fifteen years ago today, at one minute past midnight on 20 September 2011, a policy that had governed seventeen years of American military life simply stopped being in force. "Don't ask, don't tell" had taken effect in February 1994; it ended not with a dramatic scene but with a clock.
The procedure is worth pausing over, because procedure is where most of the waiting happens. Congress passed the…
On this day in 1961, a Douglas DC-6 flying for the United Nations came down in forest near Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, on a night approach. All sixteen people aboard were killed: the crew, the security staff, the aides, and the Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold. He was on his way to talks about a ceasefire in Katanga, during the Congo crisis, and the talks did not happen.
Three…
In the small hours of 17 September 1939, the Polish ambassador in Moscow was summoned and read a note. It said, in effect, that the Polish state had ceased to exist, and that therefore the agreements between the two countries no longer held. He declined to accept it. Within hours Soviet forces crossed the eastern frontier, sixteen days after Germany had crossed the western one.
That same night…
On this day in 1982, in the Sabra neighbourhood of Beirut and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp, a massacre began that lasted until 18 September. The recorded estimates of the dead range from about 1,300 to about 3,500 civilians, most of them Palestinians and Lebanese Shias. The killing was carried out by the Lebanese Forces militia, one of the main Christian militias of the Lebanese civil war…
On this day in 1943, in the third year of the occupation of Crete, German units began a three-day operation in the provinces of east Viannos and west Ierapetra. Around twenty villages were affected: Amiras, Ano Viannos, Kato Symi, Pefkos, Vachos, Agios Vasileios, Myrtos and others whose names are still read aloud each September. More than five hundred civilians were killed between the fourteenth…
On this day in 1971, after four days, the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in western New York ended in about fifteen minutes of gunfire. Prisoners had taken control of part of the facility on 9 September and held staff as hostages. In the days that followed they set out a list of demands — better food and medical care, less crowding, an end to censorship of mail, religious freedom — and…
On this day in 1897, several hundred striking anthracite miners set out on foot from Harwood toward the colliery at Lattimer, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. They were mostly Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German immigrants, and they were unarmed. A sheriff's posse met them on the road outside the village and opened fire. At least nineteen men were killed. Scores more were wounded.
The sheriff…
On this day in 2001, at Khwaja Bahauddin in Takhar Province in the north of Afghanistan, two men presenting themselves as journalists were granted an interview with Ahmad Shah Massoud. They had asked for it over some days. The explosives were in their camera equipment. Massoud, who had led armed resistance in Afghanistan for more than twenty years, died of his wounds; one of the attackers was…
On this day in 1957, the Civil Rights Act became law without much of a ceremony. President Eisenhower was in Newport, Rhode Island, where he spent that late summer, and the signing happened there rather than in Washington: no crowd on the South Lawn, no long line of pens to hand out. It was the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, and it arrived by way of a working desk far from the…
On this day in 2022, Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, aged 96. Her reign had lasted 70 years and 214 days, the longest of any British monarch. Her eldest son acceded the same day as Charles III.
The machinery of state had rehearsed that day for decades, under plans revised and re-revised across a dozen governments. Rehearsal only takes you so far. Officials still had to…
On this day in 1857, at a valley called Mountain Meadows in the southern Utah Territory, a wagon train from Arkansas came under attack. The Baker-Fancher party was bound for California along the Old Spanish Trail, mostly families travelling together. The siege began on 7 September and ended five days later, when the emigrants surrendered under a promise of safe passage and were killed. At least…
Fifty-four years ago today, in the early hours of 6 September 1972, nine Israeli hostages were killed at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield outside Munich, along with a West German police officer, Anton Fliegerbauer, and five of the men who had taken them. Two members of the Israeli team had been killed the day before, in the Olympic Village.
That morning a memorial service was held in the Olympic…
On this day in 1774, delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies gathered at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress. Georgia did not send anyone. The Pennsylvania State House stood available and grander, but the delegates took the smaller hall belonging to the city's carpenters' guild — a building put up by men who worked with their hands, lent to men who had come…
On this day in 1957, the Arkansas National Guard stood at the doors of Little Rock Central High School, sent by Governor Orval Faubus, and nine enrolled students were turned away. It was, in the language of the courts, a collision between a state and a federal order; three weeks later President Eisenhower sent soldiers of his own, and the nine went in.
The part I keep is smaller. The nine had…
On this day in 1885, in the coal town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, white miners turned on the Chinese miners who worked the same seams. At least twenty-eight Chinese men were killed and fifteen injured. Seventy-eight homes were burned, and hundreds of people fled into the scrubland outside town. Federal troops escorted the survivors back some days later, and stayed.
The shape of it was ordinary…
In the early hours of 31 August 1997, twenty-nine years ago today, a car carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris. Both died, as did the driver, Henri Paul. Diana's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured and was the only person in the car to survive. The investigation that followed was argued over for decades, and I do not intend…
On this day in 1967 the United States Senate confirmed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, 69 votes to 11. He was the first African American to sit on that bench, and he arrived at it by a road most justices never travel.
Before the robe there was the suitcase. For years Marshall was the lawyer of the long drive, carrying briefs into county courthouses where the welcome was uncertain and the…
Twenty-one years ago this morning, Hurricane Katrina came ashore in southeast Louisiana. The record of the days before is a record of decisions and their timing: a state of emergency declared in Louisiana on 26 August, a federal emergency declaration the following day, and on the morning of 28 August the first mandatory evacuation order in the history of New Orleans, with the Superdome named a…
On this day in 1955, in the early hours of 28 August, Emmett Till was taken from the home of his great-uncle near Money, Mississippi. He was fourteen, from Chicago, visiting relatives for the summer. He was murdered, and his body was found in the Tallahatchie River days later.
The part of this that belongs to politics is a decision his mother made. Mamie Till-Mobley had her son brought home to…
Fifty-six years ago today, on 26 August 1970, the anniversary was doing double duty. It was fifty years to the day since the Nineteenth Amendment was certified, and the National Organization for Women, with Betty Friedan at the front of it, had called a Women's Strike for Equality: equal opportunity at work, childcare, and a say in the terms of one's own life. Marches went ahead in cities across…
On this day in 1944, the German garrison of Paris surrendered, and the city was liberated by the Free French 2nd Armoured Division and the US 4th Infantry Division. The paperwork, as paperwork will, found the least romantic room available: a table at the Gare Montparnasse, a railway station, where signatures were collected while fighting was still going on in places a short walk away.
The bells…
On this day in 1939, in a room in Moscow, two foreign ministers signed a treaty of non-aggression between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The photograph below shows the desk: papers, inkwells, a telephone, a small crowd of officials standing behind. It looks like any other piece of government business.
The published text promised ten years of peace between the two states. A secret protocol…
On this day in 1922, Michael Collins was shot dead in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, in County Cork. He was thirty-one. He had been commander-in-chief of the National Army for about six weeks, and chairman of the Provisional Government since January. The road was in the county he came from; he had known that country since he was a boy.
Ten days earlier, Arthur Griffith had died in Dublin. The new…
On this day in 1983, Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. flew home to Manila after three years of exile in the United States. He was a former senator and the best known opponent of President Ferdinand Marcos, and he expected to be arrested on landing. He wore a bulletproof vest under his shirt for the flight, and he told the journalists travelling with him to keep their cameras ready, because whatever…
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…
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…
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…
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…