Word: lyndon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...footnote once Congress voted; what mattered was that at last proper constitutional norms had been followed. How easy it had been during Vietnam (a war mounted under the dubious fig leaf of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to reject personal complicity in the carnage. Blame, as I do, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for the names on the wailing wall in Washington. But today, for the first time in my life, I freely accept, as an American citizen, responsibility for a war and the terrible human suffering that is its inevitable handmaiden...
...that the shield has become a storm, Schwarzkopf is running the show as commander of the allied forces. Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, fancying themselves cunning battlefield tacticians, liked to direct their generals hither and thither. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell know better. Desert Storm, says Cheney, "is basically Norm's plan. It's fundamentally Norm's to execute...
...clips have a grass-roots freshness (a dropout cheerfully concludes an impromptu lecture on the evils of the work ethic by saying, "So we struggle, in our own humble way, to destroy the United States"). And if there are some curious historical lapses (the show recounts the collapse of Lyndon Johnson's presidency without once mentioning Eugene McCarthy), the series makes a respectable stab at fulfilling the promise of its title. The decade does make a little more sense...
...Pinkerton's universe, centralized bureaucracy and Big Government are the Old Paradigm. The idea, of course, has been evolving since the abdication of Lyndon Johnson and the dawning realization that the American government does not have endless money to spend. In Pinkerton's New Paradigm, government would be subject to market forces as never before and people would be empowered to make their own individual choices (using school vouchers, for example), while government would be decentralized and decision making pushed down as close as possible to the level of the people affected. Programs would be judged by output rather than...
Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro. The second installment of what promises to be the longest and liveliest American political biography of modern times finds Lyndon Johnson transforming what were certainly not his finest hours into tarnished triumphs. To wit: avoiding World War II combat for as long as possible and then parlaying a few minutes under fire into a Silver Star; and stealing the 1948 Texas senatorial election with 87 questionable votes -- enough to earn him the nickname Landslide Lyndon...