Word: dirksenism
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...television performing. His manner, leavened by an exquisite sense of self-parody, conjured up Americana, suggestions of snake-oil peddlers, backwoods Shakespeareans, the gentle rapscallionry of Penrod Schofield's or Pudd'nhead Wilson's world. Before he died of a pulmonary embolism at 73, Everett McKinley Dirksen had himself become a unique object of Americana...
...everyone, of course, was charmed. As Republican leader of the U.S. Senate for the past ten years. Dirksen commanded the power to alter the directions of the nation, and sometimes he almost gave the impression of whimsicality in the causes he embraced. At times, he was a man of stupefying inconsistency. But then Dirksen always was fond of quoting Emerson on the hobgoblin of little minds. It was Dirksen, an old supporter of Joe McCarthy. who almost singlehanded kept the utterly superfluous Subversive Activities Control Board in business two years ago. It was Ev, too, who had been seeking...
...Mighty Oilcan. Dirksen was apparently serene about such political transmogrifications, which struck others as a trifle manic. "Change," he once observed, "is inherent to life. The only persons who don't change are dead, or involuntarily confined in mental hospitals." More than an ideologue, Dirksen was a total and masterly politician. His 35 years on Capitol Hill equipped him with intricate parliamentary skills, and his basic instincts were conciliatory. "The oilcan is mightier than the sword," he believed. Moreover, from his first days in Washington until his death, his primary concern went to the heart of public policy...
Died. Everett McKinley Dirksen, 73, pillar of the U.S. Senate and the Republican Party (see THE NATION...
Chase the Squirrels. Minority Leader Everett Dirksen tends to be more gregarious, but his home life is just as simple. He lives in rural Broad Run, Va., an hour out of Washington. "When he gets home from the Senate," says his son-in-law, Senator Howard Baker, "he changes into the most decrepit clothes you ever saw and gets out into his garden. He loves getting dirt under his fingernails." Baker adds that Dirksen "likes to sit out on the terrace with a bourbon in one hand and a BB gun in the other to shoo the squirrels away from...