Word: heroicize
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...never been to the South before. "The South had always frightened me," he wrote later. "I wondered where children got their strength -- the strength, in this case, to walk through mobs to get to school." Those were heroic days in the South, when obscure and unarmed people with names like Rosa Parks and James Meredith and Martin Luther King Jr. fought for black rights on obscure battlefields with names like Selma and Neshoba County. In one of those rare cases of the right man and time and place, Jimmy was there too, organizing, encouraging, marching, helping to "bear witness...
...strategically unsound. All three Richards have also moved on. Allen has been succeeded by five National Security Advisers. Perle is presiding over seminars at the American Enterprise Institute and working on a novel about bureaucratic infighting over national-security policy. Burt, who will probably resemble a less than heroic character in Perle's novel, is Ambassador to West Germany...
...heroic style. Here is Alexander the Great, who smashed the Persian Empire and led his devoted Macedonian phalanxes all the way to India. A fearless warrior, he was wounded eight times before succumbing to a fever...
...false-heroic style. Here is Adolf Hitler, who indulged himself in late- night monologues to his adjutants about vegetarianism, the old days in the trenches and the "sapping effects" of Christianity while his armies plunged toward disaster on the Russian front...
Nixon, however, emerges as neither a political cartoon nor a satire. Instead, it is a daring, complex and ultimately successful examination of the moment in 1972 when West met East on the tarmac at Peking, a heroic opera for an unheroic age. Although historical operas are not unusual (Verdi's Don Carlos, for example), it is rare for a new work to treat personages of such recent vintage. The topic is resonant, for the former President still arouses potent emotions in those whose political consciousness was forged by Viet Nam, Kent State and Watergate. But the Minnesota-born Goodman...