Word: breslin
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...LIKE to be played for a sucker." Tip O'Neill, House Majority Leader, didn't like it at all when he discovered that Nixon and Agnew had been lying not only to the American people, but to other old-time politicians like O'Neill himself. Jimmy Breslin didn't like it much either, and he went down to O'Neill's office in Washington this past summer to get a new angle on Watergate, an already overworked subject. How the Good Guys Finally Won is all about deceit, politics, and how the truth will...
...that summer there were Good Guys and Bad Guys. The good ones were those who, Breslin says approvingly, knew how to manipulate what he calls "the mirrors and blue smoke." O'Neill, and politicians like him, knew how to make men see in the mirrors and blue smoke of politics exactly what he wanted them to see. When politicians like Nixon began to lose control of these instruments of power, they were able to see in the mirror only what they wanted to see. They could no longer make others see it, too, and the mantle of power fell from...
...Breslin's hero of the impeachment summer is Tip O'Neill, Leon Jaworski and John Sirica don't enthrall him. Breslin has no taste for the intricate semantic entanglements of lawyers, and prefers the nitty-gritty politician, where he feels all action originates. His interpretation of some of the events of late last summer is an inverted version of most newspaper analyses. While most editorials agreed that the lining up of votes against Nixon in Congress was due to the unanimous Supreme Court decision, Breslin maintains that the 8-0 vote was based on the justices' knowledge that the Congress...
Because of his belief in the superior power of the politician, Breslin revels in the fact that his hero, O'Neill, never went to law school. Breslin is looking for the single man who shapes history, the man who gets to the front, finds the essential difficulties, and starts the gears turning toward their solution. And he picked O'Neill as that man for the summer of 1974, because as early as January 1973, before anyone else. O'Neill was predicting that "impeachment is going to hit this Congress," and because he made other politicians on both sides...
None of the books conclusively answers the lingering Watergate question: How could so many clever men around Nixon profess to believe him long after most of the press and public found his story incredible and his claims of protecting the presidency a self-serving fraud? Breslin, perhaps unfairly, contends that Texan Charles Alan Wright, Nixon's constitutional expert, simply learned too late that "when the client is a liar and you believe him, he takes you down with him." Osborne doubts that Nixon's third lawyer, St. Clair, was ever as naive about the President's guilt...