Word: nixon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Before television, few would have noticed Nixon's perspiration problem, or his basset-hound jowls, whose stubble shadow always read five o'clock. He had a pitchman's handsome baritone voice, and relied on it to counterfeit intimacy, but his oily modulations couldn't erase the public's suspicion of phoniness; a salesman can't close the deal if his prospective customers know what they're hearing is just a pitch. On TV, his stabs at an intimate geniality showed the effort more than the effect, as if invisible wires were pulling his mouth into a smile. This...
...Some people believe they are loved for what they are; others think they are accepted for what they do. Nixon, the classic grind, was in the second category, and that's part of the continuing fascination with him. His National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, said of Nixon: "Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?" Who knows whether he was loved? The important thing is that he thought he wasn't. He turned his hurt into pugnacity and focused his considerable intelligence on getting back at the swells, the Eastern establishment...
...Nixon's life was defined by a me-vs.-them resentment. In his mind, the 1960 presidential campaign was the battle of a Quaker poor boy, son of a grocer, against a Catholic rich kid, son of the whiskey merchant, and little Whittier College against mighty Harvard. (Yet after that very close election, which Kennedy won with some questionable vote counts in the crucial state of Illinois, Nixon overruled his aides' urging that he contest the result, saying that any delay in naming a new president would tear the country apart.) He felt scarred by outsider status even when...
...some revisionist lefties have pushed a different view: that Nixon was, in Noam Chomsky's words, "in many respects the last liberal president." He cinched an arms control deal with the Soviets and established detente with China. Nixon's domestic achievements, as Temple University political science professor Kevin Arceneaux has outlined, include "his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Occupation Safety and Health Administration, and support for the clean water act, school desegregation, and affirmative action." You could say that the conservative agenda of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations was to revoke, not FDR's New Deal...
...Nixon's Frost...