Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Campaign Director Bill Casey, a renowned Wall Street buccaneer, been left there rather than given the CIA as spoils. Jimmy Carter's sad history might have been different had he kept his campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan out of the White House loop. And John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's campaign head and later Attorney General, was such a misfit in power that he ended up in prison...
...Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinnis sketched a scene of Richard Nixon backstage at the Mike Douglas Show in 1967. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like this to get elected," Nixon said to Roger Ailes, the program's producer. Ailes, then 28, shot back, "Television is not a gimmick." The following year, Ailes was hired to help create the "new" Nixon. In 1984 he helped prepare Ronald Reagan for his second debate with Walter Mondale, giving him the effective quip "I'm not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth...
...curious, often unruly marriage between politics and television, there are certain charged moments that flicker in the national memory. Richard Nixon tense and sweaty debating an unruffled John Kennedy. Ed Muskie's frozen tears in the snows of New Hampshire. Ted Kennedy groping for meaning and a verb in an interview with Roger Mudd. Ronald Reagan squaring his jaw and asserting, "I'm paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" Who cares that the man's name was actually Breen? It was great television...
Paradoxically, televison's "defining" moment is not usually defined at the time. The moment gains resonance through hindsight. The original memory is adjusted and tinkered with by what comes afterward. Reviewing the Kennedy- Nixon debates reveals that Kennedy was almost as nervous and stilted as Nixon. In the end, the benefit Bush can draw from his tangle with Rather will depend on whether viewers recall it as a moment of justified indignation or as a peevish attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Iran-contra affair. It could go either way, for in fact it was both...
...Jersey. That, of course, is not journalism. But otherwise respectable reporters and commentators come close sometimes to the circus form of opinion slinging. Consider the McLaughlin Group, presided over by the amiably thunder-browed ex-Jesuit John McLaughlin, who once worked as a speechwriter in Richard Nixon's White House. The McLaughlin Group is great fun, but brawly -- alive with spitballs, hoots of derision, melodramatic postures, overshouts...