Word: dinner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...smile could raise welts, and her dinner-table conversation regularly drew blood, some as blue as her own. She dismissed her cousin Franklin Roosevelt as "two-thirds mush and one-third Eleanor." When Columnist Joseph Alsop, another cousin, attributed grass-roots support to Wendell Willkie, the Republican hope to topple F.D.R. in 1940, she said yes, "the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs." It was she who demolished Thomas E. Dewey, the 1944 G.O.P. candidate, with the gibe that "he looks like the little man on the wedding cake...
...result was notice-me behavior -- eating asparagus with her fingers, while wearing gloves, at a White House dinner -- and a hardness to anyone who seemed less tough than she. Her shy, awkward daughter Paulina, for example, got little compassion. Alice let it be known that Paulina was the issue of her affair with Senator William Borah, not of her marriage to Speaker of the House Nick Longworth. It is not this home truth that evokes sympathy for Longworth, himself a philanderer and a drunk (as well as a superb amateur violinist), but the fact that he deeply loved the little...
...occurred to me, driving toward what was now my third interview with Nixon, at his home in Saddle River, N.J. (I had been there once before at a dinner last spring), that in fact I had always thought of Nixon as a comic character, a dark and serious American comic character, like someone out of Twain. Comic in the Checkers speech. Comic in the "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" farewell following his defeat in the California gubernatorial election in 1962. In the clownish 5 o'clock shadow of the first Nixon-Kennedy television debate...
...mentioned that my second visit with Nixon occurred at a dinner last spring in Saddle River. The ground outside his house was soaked with rain, and no sooner had I entered the living room than I realized that I had tracked great clods of mud on the yellow-white carpet. Flustered, I called to the butler and asked him to do what he could with my destruction while I cleaned off my shoes in the bathroom. When I went back to the living room, scared to death, the carpet was spotless. Not a trace of a stain anywhere. The yellow...
Whatever the result, this race could hardly be as dramatic as the 1971 contest, which set up Byrd's accession to majority leader six years later. The weekend before the vote, Kennedy relaxed over dinner, telling friends he had the job wrapped up. Meanwhile, Byrd was feverishly collecting chits, and believed he had a one-vote margin as long as he could count on the proxy of Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, who was near death in a Washington hospital. On the day of the vote, aides gave Byrd the signal that Russell was still alive and his proxy good...