The recent edition of Imprimis from Hillsdale College, where both Dr Eamonn Butler and I taught in the 1970s, contains the text of the speech John O’Sullivan made when unveiling the statue there of Margaret Thatcher earlier this year.
Sculptor Bruce Wolfe has captured Thatcher at the height of her strength and powers, as she looked in the 1980s when, together with her friend Ronald Reagan, she helped achieve such huge advances for freedom. O’Sullivan, a former speech-writer and assistant to Lady Thatcher, and editor of her autobiography, points out that she won the battle at home to restore faith in markets and personal effort, while helping to win the big battle abroad to bring down Communism’s evil empire, with all the oppression it had engendered.
These were legendary victories, and Hillsdale’s statue of her – the first in the USA – rightly honours a remarkable life and a towering achievement. O’Sullivan, now executive editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty recently published “The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World." The full text of his Hillsdale speech can be read here.
