Word: characterized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gail Sheehy seems to think so, and her recently-released Character: America's Search for Leadership proceeds from this assumption. Responding to many Americans, even certain members of the media, who believed that the press had gone too far in reporting the Gary Hart scandal of last year and had...
Moreover, Sheehy astutely but unoriginally points out, some of our most recent presidents have been victimized not by bad policies, but by dangerous "character flaws." Richard Nixon's downfall was not Watergate, the argument goes, but his own feeling of paranoia that led him to order the break-ins. Likewise...
In Character, Sheehy makes a hardly novel argument that the characters of each of these six presidential candidates and of Reagan are the result of a single event or individual that had a profound impact on the candidate's development. The devastating injuries which Bob Dole received during his service...
Sheehy does occasionally put her thorough reporting skills to good use, producing some well-written chapters about the so-called "character flaws" of the candidates. Her opening chapters on Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson are incredibly damning, but she then settles down to portray Dole, Gore and Dukakis in a...
Which leads one to ask what exactly Sheehy's purpose is. Is it to expose the character flaws in our candidates so as to ensure that, heaven forbid, Jackson or Bush won't make it to the White House? Is it to set forth any coherent idea as to what...