Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prose now, about the 1988 campaign. White invented the form. He absorbed politics and hymned it in an act of reportage and imagination that was a variation on Walt Whitman. White's descriptions of the 1960 race are bardic, Homeric. Political bosses are "chieftains." The "clashes" between Kennedy and Nixon sound like something that occurred between Achilles and Hector outside the walls of Troy. The premise that gives his narrative its dramatic drive is a broad foundation of certitude about the rightness and pre-eminence of American power and, therefore, the absolute centrality of the presidential race in the drama...
...greatest issue of the campaign and almost unhorsed him in a race he won by less than 120,000 votes. It is a trivia question to ask which two islands off the coast of mainland China received inordinate attention during the second and third television debates between Kennedy and Nixon (Quemoy and Matsu). Both candidates dedicated to strong national defense. The Soviet Union and the Cold War and the nuclear threat dominated everyone's horizon, with anxieties rising over the U-2 spy plane that the Soviets shot down on May 1, 1960, and the Soviets' launching of Sputnik...
...television debates, the camera was endlessly kind to Kennedy, whose charm passed through the lens and directly into the American consciousness. Nixon fared badly on the camera. It exaggerated the depth of his eye sockets, picked up the sweat on his upper lip and the shadow of his heavy whiskers. Kennedy had the video sense to address the camera, and the American people, while Nixon addressed himself to Kennedy, as a pre-video debater would. Some had thought the 43-year-old Democrat a depthless rich-boy dreamboat who missed too many votes in the Senate. His only previous executive...
Herb Klein, Nixon's press secretary then, says, "We'd come into a city concentrating on a downtown noon rally. Pierre Salinger ((Kennedy's press secretary)) and I would compete to get the biggest crowd estimate out of the local police chief. The biggest difference between the two campaigns is that the candidates now are not exposed to the public the way they used...
Still, it is the old America too. The plane drops into cold drizzle at Green Bay, Wis., and there a crowd awaits that would have been no different from the people Kennedy or Nixon might have dropped out of the same sky to try to win. The band, a little forlorn in the night, is drums, electronic keyboard piano and electric guitar, and it sounds like a Milwaukee roadhouse on a Saturday night. It plays Happy Days Are Here Again. The scene is fervent and lonely...