Word: national
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the President announces his intention to speak to the citizenry on a matter of national concern, it is the President's audience gathered in front of their TV sets. It is therefore presumption, bordering on arrogance, that network officials feel it is within their province to select certain well-known commentators who will also address the nation immediately after the President's remarks and advise the people that the President is wrong. This is not reporting the news...
...went through almost exactly the same ritual a year ago to spring Commander Lloyd Bucher and the 81 other surviving Pueblo crewmen. However laudable the end, the routine is disquieting: a nation's word ought not to be solemnly pledged and then disavowed. Yet the technique has the virtue of saving face for both sides, and suggests that the U.S. may be acquiring the sophistication of Oriental civilizations. There may be a touch of this in President Nixon, who combines rhetoric about success in Viet Nam with steady U.S. troop withdrawals...
Instead, Unruh by his narrative and personal dialogue in the interview seemed to be admitting his own errors, not those of the nation. His explanation was not a political polemic: it was a politician's admission that he had suffered under illusions which had led him to a faulty decision. If education is in a kind of self analysis, then Unruh was indeed explaining his education over the last several years...
...ADDED feature of the Song My issue is the insight if offers on the way we as a nation evaluate human life. Our justification to kill a human being defending his own country apparently depends on his sex and age. We are outraged at the death of a child, it seems, to a degree proportional to the bigness and brownness of his eyes. It is evil to kill women and children, but not to widow and orphan them. We publicly empathize with them while we sanction the killing of those who would free them from foreign occupation...
...FIGURE of 20 per cent is an arbitrary one, based on a rough percentage of black and other minority people in the nation's population. It had become clear in the course of the struggle against the construction industry that blacks must demand that a specific minimum number of workers be hired. Phrases such as "increased participation," "substantially larger numbers," "renewed efforts," and "good faith" (reminiscent of those Harvard has used) have too often proved empty rhetoric in the past...