Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...costs. After being whisked about in Chaika limousines to meetings with Gorbachev and other leaders, the group was cautious but impressed. "The Soviets are much, much more open than when I negotiated with them in the past," said Henry Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford. Concurred Harold Brown, Jimmy Carter's Defense chief: "It's really quite a remarkable change...
...said very many critical things about us. Let us discuss them." Gorbachev was courtly with General David Jones, a retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declaring that "I very often quote from your remarks." The Soviet leader had a barbed compliment for Kissinger, the architect of the Nixon Administration's policy of U.S.-Soviet detente. Said he: "You are the author of many interesting things that are still operative. But some people, with your participation, are now trying to dismantle them...
...they had said, look, we don't think that people who do drugs are apt to be competent, then that would have been one thing. It's just barely conceivable that Nixon's men broke into Watergate because their boss needed a fix, or that Ivan Boesky was just trying to scrape some money together for another vial of crack. But the given rationalization, if any, was simply that drug takers are lawbreakers. Case closed...
REAGAN HAD CREATED A teflon presidency. Issues which would have destroyed most presidents seemed to roll off this one. (Imagine Carter or Nixon joking that the "bombing will begin in five minutes.") Most recently the president emerged from the Daniloff Affair and the Reykjavik non-summit touting the two events as policy touchdowns when they could more appropriately be considered safeties or touchbacks at best. The arms deal was provoked by the hubris the White House had developed over its ability to sell ideas...
Wills is a onetime Jesuit seminarian with a Ph.D. in classics from Yale who now teaches American history at Northwestern. In Nixon Agonistes (1970), he tracked a man contending for a lifetime with self-destructive impulses. With Reagan, he finds a subject wholly at peace with his past. Whatever is unpleasant is simply ignored, forgotten or invented. Reagan, for example, fondly remembers his Illinois childhood as "one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls." Wills, reared in the Midwest himself, knows the dark side of Twainiana, and he finds it in Tampico, Ill., one month after the Reagan family...