Word: brinkley
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...last long, but within a few months, Henson was back on TV, puppeteering for another station, the local NBC affiliate. Soon he had his own five-minute program, called Sam and Friends. It aired live twice a day, once before the network news with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and later preceding the Tonight show, which at that time starred Steve Allen. Remaining in college, where he studied art and theater design, Henson produced Sam and Friends for six years. Assisting him was a fellow student named Jane Nebel, whom he married...
...easy, as well, to dislike Carter. Some of his Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason. However, in The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House (Viking; 586 pages; $29.95), historian Douglas Brinkley's verdict on Carter is mostly affirmative. In the first place, Carter's Administration, Brinkley believes, accomplished far more than critics have admitted. President Carter achieved the Camp David accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, a normalization in 1979 of Nixon's China initiative, and other strokes. And Carter's postpresidency, in Brinkley...
...Brinkley captures Carter's sometimes maddening authenticity--his commitment as a Christian, his moral clarity, stubbornness, occasional nastiness. But Brinkley often falls into the organ tones of hagiography, as if performing an oratorio for a living saint. (Every saint needs a Satan: Ronald Reagan comes off here, almost invariably, as an idiot and a disastrous President...
...White House years Carter would astonish aides by proofreading their memos to him. Brinkley should have set Carter to work on the book manuscript, asking him to comb out the unaccountable sloppiness ("criteria" for "criterion," "bravado" for "bravura" and many other errors, including the "Pakistani billionaire" on page 224 who turns into a "Palestinian billionaire" on page 225) and moments of inadvisable rhetorical wing-flapping, as when Carter "embraced leprosy eradication...
Whatever its imperfections, Brinkley's is a rich, energetic American story. His account of Carter's behavior during the run-up to the Gulf War is especially fascinating. Here is the anti-presidency brought to logical extreme: a direct collision, over the most serious issue (imminent war) between the former President and the sitting President. As Brinkley writes, "Carter was prepared to do just about anything to prevent a Middle East war, even if it meant working against his own government." Carter, close friend of Yasser Arafat (and, at one point, his virtual speechwriter) and hero in the Arab world...