Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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John F. Kennedy's promise in his Inaugural Address to "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty" was translated into policy as the Viet Nam War -- an unambiguous and, as it turned out, disastrous exercise in containment. Under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, the U.S. deputized friendly potentates to defend Western interests. The star example, alas, was the Shah of Iran. In that case, as in others, this latest form of containment led American policymakers to rely excessively on the dubious principle that the enemies of our enemies would make good enforcers...
Only three Presidents in this century have had the opportunity to campaign for their Vice President to succeed them. Dwight Eisenhower passed up the opportunity to exert himself on behalf of Richard Nixon, who lost in 1960. Lyndon Johnson was not asked to campaign for Hubert Humphrey, and he lost too. This time both the President and his Vice President feel they have something to gain by sticking together...
...NIXON IN CHINA (Nonesuch). A waltz across the Great Wall with Dick, Pat, Henry, Mao and the missus: last year's best new opera is this year's best new opera recording...
...tapes that prompted Richard Nixon's Watergate resignation in 1974 might never have existed had he not been such a klutz with gadgets. Nixon was reluctant to have his conversations recorded, writes former Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman in Prologue, a National Archives publication. But if there had to be a taping system, the President said, he wanted something simple -- like Lyndon Johnson's manually operated setup...
...when he didn't. Haldeman also fretted "that this President was far too inept with machinery ever to make a success of a switch system." The result: voice-activated tape recorders were installed in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room, and at Camp David. Writes Haldeman: "I think Nixon lost his awareness of the system even more quickly than I did." The machines, of course, forgot nothing...