Word: american
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hold everybody in the tent," a top aide explains. The Administration now seems committed to the politics of polarization. Viet Nam is the touchstone of division, the litmus test of loyalty. Nixon's aim is to demonstrate to Hanoi that the protesters do not speak for the American public, and so gain time and leverage for his plan for a gradual U.S. disengagement from Viet Nam. In the process, the Administration is splitting conservatives from liberals, drawing a line between dissenters and Americans who are sick of dissent-more so than of the war itself...
...belligerence, he also risks stirring up the hard-line right to renewed cries of "Not peace-victory!" He may exacerbate the tensions of a nation distraught and confused as it has not been since the Depression. That danger augurs ill for both his presidency and the American people, and could in the end make a compromise settlement in Viet Nam more difficult for Americans to understand and accept...
Agnew began by attacking television's postmortem analyses of Richard Nixon's Nov. 3 Viet Nam speech. "President Nixon delivered the most important address of his administration," said Agnew. "His hope was to rally the American people to see the conflict through to a lasting and just peace in the Pacific." But no sooner had Nixon finished his painstakingly prepared address, the Vice President complained, than "his words and policies were subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism...
Rhetoric aside, Agnew did touch on a major phenomenon. It is the strange, pervasive love-hate relationship that Americans seem to have with TV-the force that entertains them, unifies them by making them simultaneous witnesses to great events, and yet also brings them words and images they resent. Most often, of course, they are words and images beyond the control of the distant and suspect networks; they are the inevitable result of social upheaval, of change, or war. But in challenging the qualifications and motives of the TV news commentators and producers, Agnew brought to the surface questions that...
...news, they're talking about censorship." And, he added, "they'll come to newspapers next. They won't stop." David Brinkley, "liberal, but not very," is just as pessimistic about the Federal Government, "a clumsy, heavy-footed bureaucratic monster out of contact with the American people...