Lindy Boggs, congresswoman for Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district from 1973 to 1991 and widow of Hale Boggs, who was first elected to the House in 1940 and who was House Majority Leader when he was lost in a plane crash in 1972, died last weekend.

She was a wonderful person and in this American Spectator blogpost Quin Hillyer shows why. She was incredibly gracious and, I believe, as Quin does, utterly sincerely so. When she said, “I am so glad to see you,” she really was. She did not seem to have a bad word to say about anybody, but that was not because she was naive. Hale Boggs was elected in 1940, the youngest member of Congress, by running against the rascals who inherited the political machine of the brilliant but unscrupulous Huey Long. And for some years she lived in a house, inherited I believe from an elderly relative, on one of the yeastiest blocks of Bourbon Street. She was under no illusions, but she seems never to have been disillusioned.