Word: blondin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...months, reports Lewis, the President had been defending his Viet Nam policies by repeating what Lincoln once said to a group of critics during the Civil War. Likening himself to a French acrobat named Blondin who was famed for crossing Niagara Falls on a tight rope, Lincoln asked: "Suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had to put it in the hands of Blondin to carry across Niagara. Would you shake the cable, or-keep shouting at him, 'Blondin, stand up a little straighter - Blondin, stoop a little more - lean a little more...
That story suited L.B.J. fine, wrote Lewis. "It constituted an almost perfect pitch for a silence-is-golden plea while he continues his effort to win the Viet Nam war with present policies." But the story didn't suit Lewis, whose sleuthing disclosed that Blondin was an imperturbable craftsman. He was a child prodigy on the rope at six. By the time he tackled Niagara at 36, he was able to go across once on stilts, another time with both feet in a sack, once again with a man on his back. On one occasion he sat down...
...Clearly then," writes Lewis, "Blondin was not a man who would be upset by jeers from the bleachers. After all, he knew a damnsight more about the art of tightrope walking than anybody else in the world." If Blondin could calmly eat an omelet high above Niagara's roar, Lewis asked, "why should Johnson-the smartest political acrobat of the 1960s-allow himself to be upset by his Viet policy critics...
...gets unusually literate reportage from 60 Paris staffers, 300 provincial stringers and 100 part-time foreign correspondents. Among his staff are former athletic stars such as Marcel Hansenne, an assistant editor who finished third in the 800-meter run in the 1948 Olympics; and intellectuals such as Antoine Blondin, a novelist who won the Prix Interallié in 1959 and now writes a regular column of slangy, pun-filled and often sarcastic observations. Reporters must scrape along on salaries of $300 to $350 a month, and even top editors earn only $800 to $1,000; yet many of them quit...
Ironically, the resort's reputation was redeemed by one of the world's great artists. In 1859, when France's Blondin started strolling the 1,300 ft. from the U.S. to the Canadian side of the gorge on a 2-in.-thick tightrope, rubbernecks flocked across the continent to gawk. For two summers, while spectators placed bets on his fate (and sometimes cut his supporting cables to improve the odds), the dapper Frenchman sashayed back and forth on his rope, drinking champagne (he once cooked an omelet 150 ft. above the falls), turning somersaults, pushing a wheelbarrow...