Word: affair
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more than any other event, it was the multifaceted Watergate affair, the worst political scandal in U.S. history, that dominated the news in 1973. As it gradually unfolded, involving more and more areas of President Richard Nixon's Administration, it revealed a shocking disdain for both the spirit and the letter of the law at the highest levels of Government. Ultimately, not only the primacy of the rule of law on which the American system rests but the presidency of Nixon stood challenged, plunging the U.S. into a grave governmental crisis. Fittingly, it was the American legal system, which...
Certainly, if justice is not seen as prevailing by most Americans in the many trials still to emerge from the affair, a deepening cynicism and a rootless everybody-does-it syndrome of irresponsibility for individual acts may be Watergate's more lasting legacy. Whatever the outcome?most crucially including the fairness and thoroughness with which the President's political fate is resolved?millions of Americans will still consider the result wrong. Watergate thus is bound to leave a lingering bitterness among at least a minority of Americans...
Other characters in the Watergate drama, most notably the President around whom the whole affair revolved, played major roles. Yet Nixon, to his own detriment, never took charge of the scandal, continually reacting to events rather than shaping them. The remarkable Senator Sam Ervin, who rose spectacularly as a national folk hero in chairing the historic Senate Watergate hearings, employed literary allusions and unabashed outrage to effectively belittle the many evasive and amoral Nixon men who came before...
...scandal ballooned well beyond a political burglary and its coverup, wide-ranging allegations against Nixon himself became part of the sordid affair. They included contentions that Nixon had: 1) intervened in an antitrust action against ITT in return for political contributions; 2) raised milk support prices and reduced dairy imports for similar considerations...
...until 1937 that, as a student enjoying the first years of a prolonged love affair with New York, he glimpsed his first Mondrians in the Gallatin collection. "I haven't seen a painting since I first saw Mondrian that gave me one single idea about form, composition, anything," asserts Smith...