Dec
22
He was
December 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I somehow missed the news of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s passing. His The Long Affair is one of the works that most closely resembles my own take of Thomas Jefferson.
For a funny anecdote about O’Brien, here is Rick Brookhiser.
I remember one editorial dinner at Van Galbraith’s (WFB must have been out of town). Much wine had been served, and Conor was declaiming against the third president. He banged his fist on the table and cried, “Jefferson was a sh*t! Jefferson was a sh*t!” I told this some time later to Dorothy Twohig, a wonderful historian and a gracious lady, who was working on the Washington Papers at the University of Virginia. She laughed, and then added sweetly, “Well, sometimes he was.”
Since then I have divided latter-day Federalists into two categories: the he-was, and the sometimes-he-was.