Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Woodward simply pried into Hollywood with the same tools he used to dissect the Nixon Administration. If nothing else, this is a fair book...
...often is, that comes out of p.r. magazines like People or Rolling Stone. We're talking serious, nuts and bolts journalism, the kind that will look, say, at the life of a John Belushi with the toughness with which a seasoned political writer will look at Richard Nixon. Perhaps because it only serves to show how human the stars are, how frail they are like the rest of us, this kind of toughness seems unwelcome in our sometimes squeamish culture. This was made clear by the howls of outrage from the pundits and letter-writers that greeted the portions...
...aren't used to dealing with real reporters, rather than flaks, who should have shut up when Woodward knocked on their doors. The point here is that Woodward approached his prey with the careful, methodical reporting with which he approached his more traditional, acceptable Washington targets--from the Nixon Administration to the Supreme Court. Just as All the President's Men or The Breinren offered a window on tablesus, broader than the subject at hand, Woodward uses Belushi as a lever to probe the entertainment industry, and the portrait he paints is more terrifying even than the one we expected...
...book is written in the novel-like, no-attribution form that Woodward and Bernstein did much to popularize--and for which they took much flak--in The Final Days, their account of the end of the Nixon Administration. As American Lawyer editor Steven Brill has written, the style irritates formalist journalists who cringe if no "he recalled" or "she added" appears after an incident...
...little-known running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had undergone electroshock therapy doomed whatever tiny chance of success the Democrats had. In the wake of the furor, which resulted in Eagleton's being replaced by Sargent Shriver, one poll showed confidence in McGovern plummeting by 25%. In 1952 Richard Nixon's alleged association with a political slush fund became an embarrassment for Dwight Eisenhower, though not a fatal one. More recently, Senator Robert Dole was judged by some pollsters to be a drag on Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign because he alienated voters with barbed rhetoric...