Word: disdain
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...Midwest has long been Nixon country. For years, millions in the heartland have felt that the President was one of them, embodying the simple traits they admire so much: purposeful ambition, pride in country, respect for family and church, plus a dash of disdain for the culture pushers from the East. But to these same people today, he is a much diminished man. His troubles are like a disgrace in the family. Few people want to disavow him completely, and some of the old affection lingers. Most citizens are embarrassed, perplexed and, most of all, saddened...
...Portney held a "cavalier attitude toward [the] audience." Instruments will fall out of tune, especially when it's very hot, and in my view Portney's decision to stop and tune in the cadenza (where a pause matters far less than in the body of the piece) showed not disdain for the audience, but consideration for its members' ears...
...such course. As Democratic Senator Adlai E. Stevenson aptly summed up the sorry situation last week: "By denying the special prosecutor access to the White House tapes, Mr. Nixon gives the American people no reason for confidence that they will ever know the whole truth about Watergate. By his disdain for the orderly processes of the law, he gives us no reason to believe that justice will be done." The Nixon argument that the real issues were the preservation of the constitutional separation of powers and Executive privilege could have some remotely redeeming merit; but it was hardly enhanced...
What Bridges catches best is the peculiar tension of the classroom, the cool terror that can be instilled by an academic skilled in psychological warfare. His Ivy League Olympian is Kingsfield, a professor of contract law who passes along scholarship with finely tempered disdain. In an original bit of casting, Kingsfield is played by Veteran Theater and Film Producer John Houseman. It is a forbidding, superb performance, catching not only the coldness of such a man but the patrician crustiness that conceals deep and raging contempt...
Hughes does not mention Watergate. Late in his book, with great precision and restraint, he analyzes the follies of Nixon and Johnson over Viet Nam. Among them: misinterpretation of history, extravagance of purpose, blindness to cost, arrogance, deceit, disdain for Congress and the twisting of patriotism - this last, Richard Nixon's appalling variation on the McCarthy era's theme that any disagreement with U.S. policy amounts to some kind of treason. Hughes points out, though, that the presidential methods employed to get embroiled in the war were almost exactly like the methods used by earlier Presidents - among them...