Word: nixon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bringing down the Nixon White House couldn't have been easy. But that's the way it looked to a group of a group of Syrian and Palestinian writers whom I've been training to be journalists here in Damascus, when I recently held a screening of All the President's Men - the Watergate movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. By secretive Syrian standards, the conditions under which the crusading journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein worked seem impossibly ideal. The fact that there was a direct phone number to the White House switchboard filled my students with...
...than it has answered, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' prepared testimony was designed to make those questions even harder to answer. But experts agree on one aspect of the controversy. "Have [Administration officials] violated the Presidential Records Act?" asks Scott Nelson, a lawyer who represented the estate of Richard Nixon in a fight over his official papers. "There's no other conclusion I can reach." Says Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives: "The only question is whether they did it intentionally or sloppily...
...movie errs, it is in making a rather tenuous link between their enterprise and the Watergate scandal (it has to do with a relationship they uncover between Richard Nixon's brother and Hughes), which is supposed to grant their fraud a redeeming social value. The film also places a glamorous sheen on publishing that does not quite square with the slightly ink-stained realities of that world. But still...
...world's best interests for the U.S. to act as an intermediary between Israel and Hamas, which will require speaking directly to both sides, dealing with people who are perfectly comfortable issuing pro forma statements about Israeli "atrocities." Actually, President Giuliani would be ideally positioned, in a Nixon-to-China way, to broker a Middle East peace deal. The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently told me that he considers Giuliani a trusted friend. If Rudy said, "Ehud, time to talk," could Olmert say no? But would Giuliani ever have the patience to stow his combative moral absolutism...
...learn that most Justices, before drifting, stick to their initial ideology for at least a term or two. So why do Justices, legally sophisticated and surely familiar with their own minds, change at all? Some experts say it's the political environment (Chief Justice Warren Burger, appointed by Richard Nixon, was most liberal when Jimmy Carter was President and most conservative under Ronald Reagan). Others say Justices particularly skilled in persuasion sway their more malleable brethren. A more hopeful theory is that cases are so thoroughly briefed and argued by the time they reach the court that the truly compelling...