Word: gifts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...President was in a lively mood at a party celebrating the 90th birthday of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. When his wife Pat gave the tart-tongued daughter of Theodore Roosevelt two jars of Iranian caviar, Nixon indiscreetly confided that it was a gift "from the Shah to Pat and from Pat to you." Advised by the President to "eat it with a spoon," the irrepressible Mrs. Longworth replied: "I'll wallow in it"-an allusion to Nixon's celebrated comment: "Let others wallow in Watergate." Asked later about the party, Nixon's Watergate resentments surfaced in an attack...
...hardly likely to affect him now as a writer." Leonard Schapiro of the London School of Economics adds that "even if he is cut off from the living speech of Russia, he is now engaged in writing historical works, and there is no doubt that he has a tremendous gift of bringing history alive that is denied to us mere historians...
...Being 90 is a bore," says Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She pulls a twisted ivory narwhal tusk (a gift from Rear Admiral Peary) from a corner of her drawing room, brandishes it like a spear, strikes a Brunhilde pose-then roars with laughter at her performance, flashing an abundance of Roosevelt teeth. At 90, she is as defiantly unconventional as she was in the opening years of the century, when the nation was never sure whether to be delighted or mortified by her then shocking antics-donning riding breeches, driving an automobile, smoking cigarettes, jumping fully clothed into a swimming pool...
...museum-a four-story potpourri drawn from history, whimsy and a driving intellect. "Mrs. Longworth operates the most interesting disorderly house in Washington," an admiring guest once noted. Visitors encounter thousands of stacked books, a calendar of personal engagements from 1907, a 15-ft. tiger skin that was a gift from the Dowager Empress of China, a drawing of a Chinese tiger (she calls the beast "Dean Acheson" and notes, "He loved it when I said it looked like him"), an African voodoo mask slipped over the head of a replica of the Statue of Liberty...
...collection, explains Dr. Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, who frequently advised Rockefeller on what to buy, "is one that insists on the highest possible quality in the objects acquired and on their capacity to be understood and enjoyed by the interested layman." Included in the gift are some of the most striking South Indian bronzes and stone carvings of the 8th to 11th centuries left in private hands, such as a 10th-llth century figure of Krishna dancing on the hood of the cobra-demon Kaliya, holding up the creature's tail in a ripple...