Word: mythicize
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Locating the reality behind the myth is what TV documentarian Ken Burns does for a living, most famously in The Civil War, his hugely popular 1990 PBS mini-series. Yet even as he cuts through the myth, Burns doesn't shy away from the mythic. History, in his view, is full of seminal characters and emblematic stories, of great deeds that launched new eras and small discoveries that "changed everything." The Burns style has by now become as familiar, not to say formulaic, as an episode of Friends: the long, slow pans over archival photographs, the dramatically lighted talking heads...
...Republicans assembled in Dallas to renominate Ronald Reagan 12 years ago, the incumbent President had already achieved mythic status. He led his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, by an impressive 14 points in the opinion polls. The re-election campaign was considered to be a virtual formality. Even Reagan's opponents conceded his "magic" and had all but given up seething about it. "Not since Dwight Eisenhower," wrote TIME in its convention issue, "has the U.S. public felt such fondness for its leader." TIME's Hugh Sidey declared of Reagan, "He is a refrain from Stars and Stripes Forever...
...with the Whitewater attacks and other woes. In a new book about the presidential campaign, The Choice, Bob Woodward reports that Mrs. Clinton came to rely on Jean Houston, 55, a co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, who is described by Woodward as "a believer in spirits, mythic and historic connections to the past and other worlds." In one hour-long session in April 1995, Houston led the First Lady through an imaginary conversation with her idol Eleanor Roosevelt. As Hillary and some of her aides gathered around a table in the White House solarium, Houston encouraged Hillary...
...shaky start by accusing the Democrats of "hard-line views" and "extremism." Certainly nothing in the Democratic platform is as hard-line and extreme as the Republican call for executing abortion patients. But Dole wishes to make much of an episode at the 1992 Democratic Convention that has achieved mythic status in the abortion debate...
...reassuring applause of the "red and passionate" in the remote Far East. There he wins heady applause from his natural constituency of pensioners and those left out of the new, rambunctious Russian society, who share his visions of impending apocalypse and lap up communism's promise to restore a mythic past of civil order and financial security...