Word: apologia
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Jimmy Carter thinks it has all gone too far. As early as 1789, John Adams delivered an apologia for the imperial presidency to which some Americans might subscribe even today. Wrote Adams in a letter to President George Washington: "If the state and pomp essential to this great [office] are not, in good degree, preserved, it will be in vain for America to hope for consideration with foreign powers." Now, 37 Presidents later, the "state and pomp" of the presidency have come to include everything from the elegant Air Force One to the presidential seal emblazoned on ashtrays, cowboy boots...
...from a sense of sin and self-denial. The stricture against eating the apple and the sword in Tristram and Iseult's bed are both powerful sharpeners of appetite. This is not artistic news, though the observation is now unfashionable. That being so, whether Marry Me is part apologia or all fictional serrmonette, one of its points could well be dismissed as the higher hedonism in a nutshell (forbidden fizz is always the sweetest). A pity. The book may be a brief for moral absolutism cleverly put in terms that Masters and Johnson might take to heart. Timothy Foote...
Well, says Willie-now 75 and sprung-it's a good line. But the fact is that some reporter made it up. Thus Sutton declines credit for the most perceptive self-analysis since Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. Obviously he is an autobiographer devoted to veracity at all costs...
...publication date appears too clever by half, almost coinciding with completion of the presidential primaries and a still faintly possible last-minute "draft Humphrey movement." But Education is no campaign document. It is more an apologia, a mea culpa for the Nixon trauma that Humphrey believes he could have spared the nation, a cry for understanding of a tragic flaw in character that prevented him from doing...
ANOTHER BOOK on Watergate should have trouble justifying its existence. The profusion of literature inspired by Watergate can be grouped into three general categories: first, the apologia of the accused; second, the narratives of media and congressional heroes who scaled the White House walls of secrecy; and third, the chastening "outsider" voices of post-Watergate analysis. Until Clark Mollenhoff's book, however, a chasm existed between the first perspective--that of government "insiders"--and the second and third points of view--those of media people, congressional investigators, judges, lawyers, and political scientists...