Word: dirksen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...work out what Californian S.I. Hayakawa delicately called "friendly" answers to the expected hostile questions. But when Alexander Meigs Haig Jr., Ronald Reagan's nominee for Secretary of State, finally sat down last week at the green baize covered conference table in packed Room 1202 of the Dirksen Office Building and faced the committee's 17 members, no sharp exchanges materialized...
There were doubts at first. The cost was in the billions in the days, to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, when a billion here and a billion there added up to real money. There was no guarantee the Soviets would not beat us to the moon with their bigger boosters...
...main reason for this change is the erosion of the leadership in the Congress. Party leaders have lost the power to tell their troops that something is really significant and to get them to respond accordingly. The days of Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen are gone. That has adversely affected the Congress's ability to do things even in very difficult circumstances involving the national interest...
...Republican Party in those days was not entirely speechless either. Connoisseurs of the genre remember the sublimely fogbound organ tones of Illinois' Everett McKinley Dirksen. In his early career, writes Biographer Neil MacNeil, Dirksen "bellowed his speeches in a mongrel mix of grand opera and hog calling." Over the years, he developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. Would he criticize an erring colleague? someone would ask. "I shall invoke upon him every condign imprecation...
...Dirksen's oratory succeeded in part because it functioned simultaneously as a satire upon oratory, in somewhat the way that Mae West has always been a walking satire upon sex. But all of and splendor, with his rapscallion rhapsodies and hints of the mountebank, could not conceal a small truth about what that ahead for the ancient discipline of rhetoric: an art that wanes into self-mockery is dying...