Word: nixonization
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...anecdote has fostered a mix-and-match parlor game. Nixon: first-rate mind, second-class temperament. Reagan: second-rate mind, first-class temperament. Perhaps only Lincoln tops the class in both categories. But as we go down the homestretch in this presidential election, voters seem to be making up their minds as much by evaluating the dispositions of the candidates as their position papers. Voting for President is the most intimate vote we ever make; we're deciding whom we want in our living room for the next four years...
...reel them in, push them back, reel them in. I mean, it wasn't just intimidating them; it was also reeling them in. The number of times we hear him on the telephone tapes telling friends and enemies, "I love you." This is an unusual thing to hear ... Nixon, I think, is another good example, where in public he could, with some exception, be quite statesmanlike. He could be the world statesman. You listen to him in private, and it's a very different person...
Riley: Two other examples: with Richard Nixon, I mean, it's impossible to think about Watergate without thinking about Nixon's temperament, his sort of dark sense of enemies everywhere. And Bill Clinton--[his] failure was a deeply personal failure with Monica Lewinsky, and it's a failure of discipline. I mean, this is a man who knew that ... for years there were people out to get him, and he, even in that environment, didn't have the personal discipline necessary to avoid creating a problem that ... for all of history will...
Every man is a moon, Mark Twain liked to say, with a dark side he doesn't show anybody. The set speeches and careful debates tell us only how candidates want to be seen. Nixon could be a statesman in public and a hit man in private. Eisenhower was the amiable uncle - except that it was known around the White House that if the President was wearing a brown suit that day, stay away or risk his wrath. His reputation as an indifferent manager evaporated once scholars got a look at his papers, which showed a much more engaged...
...stood for a pleased or outraged What!? Stone made his rep, or his rap sheet, with ferocious retakes of recent American history: the Vietnam War in Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth; the investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination in JFK; and, in Nixon, the life of the only President to resign his office. All those subjects allowed for a certain ambiguity, but Stone - a dramatist first, dispassionate chronicler never - pushed political views that might have been lopsided but usually resulted in terrific films with an adrenaline rush...