Word: contra
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Author Robert Timberg, now deputy Washington bureau chief of the Baltimore Sun, is himself an Annapolis graduate and Marine veteran of Vietnam. Covering the Reagan White House as the Iran-contra affair unfolded during the 1980s, Timberg "kept picking up echoes of Vietnam ... I remember thinking that perhaps Iran-contra was at least in part the bill for Vietnam finally coming due." Timberg had been told that the nightingale cannot perform unless it first hears a few notes from another nightingale. His conceit is that in the '80s, Ronald Reagan sang the nightingale's song of patriotism and military pride...
...Poindexter: a brilliant student at the Naval Academy who suffered afterward, in Timberg's rendering, from a blind-side naivete about politics. McFarlane: a saintly self-diminisher, subverted by thoughts of his own unworthiness but cherishing immense ambitions. When McFarlane attempted suicide in 1987 under the strain of Iran-contra, it was by the strangely unmartial means of a Valium overdose...
Neither McCain nor Webb had anything to do with Iran-contra. Webb, another true battlefield hero (Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts), was no hot dog but rather, in many ways, the smartest and best of the bunch. After the typically bitter homecoming from the war, he forged a career as a novelist, writing the best battlefield novel of Vietnam, Fields of Fire. During the Reagan Administration, he had a brief and stormy tenure as Secretary of the Navy...
That's the face of a real government conspiracy: the Watergate burglars getting caught because James McCord boneheadedly taped open locks at the Democratic National Committee offices. E. Howard Hunt and Charles Colson, Iran- contra's Oliver North and Fawn Hall-these are not exactly criminal masterminds...
However, "Contra Pose" does not work well as an opening piece. Its challenge to the form and structure of ballet dampens the following, more traditional works in the program...