Word: nixonization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...views but the difficulty faced by the Chief Executive in making his views prevail. The administrative practices of the Nixon Administration were unwise and not sustainable in the long run; fairness requires an admission that they did not take place in a vacuum...
...Nixon deserves great credit for tough decisions taken in the face of enormous public pressures; for his strategic grasp; for his courage. His administrative approach was weird and its human cost unattractive, yet history must also record the fundamental fact that major successes were achieved that had proved unattainable by conventional procedures...
...Richard Nixon was President when the conventional wisdom decried the exercise of power; his critics asserted that America would prevail if at all because of the purity of its motives. But it was precisely the unpredictable, idiosyncratic nature of a policy founded on this illusion that needed to be overcome. Emotional slogans, unleavened by a concept of the national interest, had caused us to oscillate between excesses of isolation and overextension. The new "morality" was supposed to extricate us from excessive commitments. But moral claims lent themselves as easily to crusades as to abstinence; they had involved...
What made the Nixon Administration so "unAmerican" was its attempt to adjust to a world fundamentally different from our historical perception. The impulses to lurch toward either isolationism or global intervention had to be cured by making judgments according to some more permanent conception of national interest. It was no use rushing forth impetuously when excited, or sulking in our tent when disappointed. We would have to learn to reconcile ourselves to imperfect choices, partial fulfillment, the unsatisfying tasks of balance and maneuver...
...some of his human impulses, who took the initiative to lead America toward a concept of peace compatible with its new realities and the perils of a nuclear age, and that the foreign leaders who best understood this were Mao and Chou, who openly expressed their preference for Richard Nixon over the wayward representatives of American liberalism. It was on the level of shared geopolitical interest transcending philosophies and history that the former Red baiter and the crusaders for world revolution found each other...