Word: goodwin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film has drawn fire for its historical inaccuracies -- and, indeed, events spanning nearly three years have been telescoped into a few weeks, while the role of investigator Richard Goodwin has been vastly exaggerated. But the real problem is the easy Hollywood cliches into which history has been transformed. The Van Doren clan is a caricature of effete Waspishness, Goodwin a garden-variety TV-movie crusader. Herb Stempel, who blew the whistle on the scandal, is reborn as perhaps the most offensively stereotyped Jew in modern American cinema. To gauge the injustice, one has to go back to the actual tapes...
...Redford and company, however, the scandal foreshadows just about every mess from Vietnam to Watergate. Near the end of the film, after the congressional hearings have exposed the rigging, an associate congratulates | Goodwin. "For what?" he scoffs, upset that the top TV execs have denied any role in the affair. "I thought we were going to get television. The truth is, television is going to get us." It's the film's most disingenuous line. The bigwigs may have escaped punishment, but the scandals rocked TV as nothing before or since: quiz shows vanished from the air, ethical standards were...
...explicitly acknowledged, this torment seems to have been the inspiration for A Map of the World (Doubleday; 390 pages; $22), a mischievous and unsettling marital melodrama by Jane Hamilton, whose first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. Hamilton introduces us to Alice and Howard Goodwin, a handsome Wisconsin couple -- she a school nurse, he a dairy farmer -- who are the parents of two little girls and who could be exhibited at the state fair in the perfect-marriage pavilion...
Those who disagree include no small number of the people the ACLU claims to be representing: the tenants of public-housing projects. In the Robert Taylor Homes just south of Stateway Gardens, Ray Goodwin, 9, describes how one of his friends was gunned down on the monkey bars in a neighborhood playground "because he didn't want to be in a gang." Says Goodwin: "I want the sweeps. There be too many guns in our buildings." Around Easter they went off at an especially horrifying rate: after a truce between the Black Disciples and Gangster Disciples gangs apparently broke down...
...real complaint is that the violence initiative doesn't go nearly far enough. Some laboratory should be looking for the racism gene, or the homophobia gene. Goodwin was right; the inner city is a jungle. But so are the corporation, the newsroom and the White House staff. The language of trial lawyers or bond traders in full testosterone fury is as bloodcurdling as any mugger's. When it comes to social carnage, the convenience-store stickup can't compare with a leveraged buyout, trickling-down unemployment, depression, anger, alcoholism, divorce, domestic abuse and addiction. I'd like to see white...