Word: ii
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...done it before. America won World War II and the Cold War not by taking on all the enemies of freedom at once but by shrewdly isolating our greatest enemies, even though that meant cutting deals with some pretty nasty guys. We beat Hitler by allying with Stalin, and we beat Moscow in part by allying with Beijing. Today we need to beat al-Qaeda with the help of Iran, elements of the Taliban, perhaps Syria and maybe one day even Hizballah and Hamas. We need to isolate the violent jihadists who want to attack America rather than isolate ourselves...
...during which time he was among the greatest champions of children this country has ever known. He drove the growth of Boys Clubs of America and the creation of UNICEF; he led the campaign to get food to millions of civilians who faced a catastrophic famine after World War II. That's what he was good at - fixing things, like the engineer he was. By the time he died, he had tamed his critics and turned up as a regular on Gallup's list of the most admired men. How'd he do it? "I outlived the bastards," he said...
...taking notice of the atrocious living conditions most imprisoned Americans endured. Herbert Hoover, reviled for years because of his contribution to the Great Depression, earned a second chance when Harry Truman asked him to head the Famine Emergency Commission - responsible for distributing food to nations devastated by World War II - and another commission tasked with reorganizing the government and eliminating waste. President Carter, of course, established the Carter Center, devoted to supporting human rights around the world and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts; the 42nd President's Clinton Foundation, meanwhile, has concerned itself with eradicating AIDS...
...Whatever the reason, there's a spareness and gravity in Wyeth's art after World War II that would be his trademark for the rest of his career. His landscapes are more astringent and cooler. His portraits too. The people in those portraits are known to him. Most of them are family, like his son Jamie, who also became an artist, or neighbors like Karl and Anna Kuerner, a German-American couple he painted many times in Chadds Ford, and Christina Olson, the crippled woman in Christina's World whom he knew from around his summer home in Cushing, Maine...
...parchment of their faces and their Nordic inwardness - seem to inhabit some prelapsarian America, the one that existed before automobiles and television. Wyeth's popularity coincided with the disappearance of an older U.S., a nation of regions, localities and rural fastnesses that was overwhelmed and homogenized after World War II by the mass market and mass media. Which is why, even at their dryest and gravest, his pictures are inevitably flush with nostalgia...