Word: hooverness
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...alert to the shifting emotional weight and moral responsibilities in any relationship, especially in the quiet interplay of Hackman and McDormand, two ordinary middle-aged people searching awkwardly to be of use to each other. Hackman caps a brilliant career here as an FBI agent that both J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King Jr. could love. He takes the measure of this film: a watchmaker's craftsmanship, a marathoner's doggedness. With every confident frame, Mississippi Burning announces itself as a big, bold bolt of rabble- rousin', rebel-razin' movie journalism...
Only after the murders provoked a national outcry did the FBI enter Mississippi in force and begin a massive effort to undermine the Klan. Until then Director J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that the bureau was a strictly investigative agency forced FBI agents to invest far more energy in busting stolen car rings and foiling bank robberies than in probing even the most flagrant depredations against blacks. In 1961 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights suggested that since the bureau was often so closely linked to Southern law-enforcement officials, another group might take over the handling of civil rights...
That power finally sweeps away one's resistance to the film's major improbability. It asks us to believe that the FBI, in those days still under J. Edgar Hoover's dictatorship, would have mounted an elaborate sting operation to bring the murderers at last to some rough justice under federal anticonspiracy statutes. That seems unlikely, especially given Hoover's hatred of Martin Luther King and his allies. Still, narrow historical criticism somehow seems irrelevant to a movie that so powerfully reanimates the past for the best of reasons: to inform the spirit of today and possibly tomorrow...
...Phillips, the author of the prophetic 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, sees parallels between Bush and Harry Truman. Phillips contends that just like the Democrats this year, the Republicans ought to have won the 1948 election. Truman managed to mount one last crusade against the memory of Herbert Hoover, but the Republican triumph in 1952 was all but inevitable. "I don't see how George can play the populist role for too long," Phillips says. "If we get an economic downturn, he can't get away with pork rinds and Loretta Lynn...
...meantime, Democrats can console themselves by imagining Bill Bradley or Mario Cuomo as FDR to Bush's Hoover. Michael Dukakis can remind himself that it's better to be right than President...