Word: nixonize
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...Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Hamlet, battled Young Turk Jack Kennedy for the party's presidential nomination. "You have a very noble and eloquent and witty man, a superior man, who is just a ditherer, to be blunt about it, up against a real political operator, on the order of Nixon. So we have a Stevensonian character and a Nixonian character. But they're not thinly disguised portraits, they're archetypes. Just for fun I made the political operator with a totally virtuous private life, perfect husband, everything, and the good guy has the biggest mess of a private life going...
Public information and records laws were enacted around the country in the mid-'70s as part of an effort to restore public confidence in government after the turbulence of Nixon and the Watergate...
Summers' book is so unrelievedly hostile, so committed to satanizing the strange man from Whittier, that I find myself wanting to defend Nixon - which is quite a novel impulse for me. Even Oliver Stone, who has a minor genius for mischievous dark cartooning (as in his contemptible movie "JFK," with its hallucinations of kitchen-sink conspiracy), treated Nixon as a complex and in some ways sympathetic figure. H.R. Haldeman had it about right when he compared Nixon to "a multifaceted quartz crystal. Some facets bright and shining, others dark and mysterious. And all of them constantly changing as the external...
David Gergen, who in one way or another has served every president from Nixon to Clinton, offers a shrewd, balanced look at Nixon in his new book, "Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership." Gergen describes Nixon's mysterious bright side/dark side personality - a bully and political crook, much given to anti-Semitic rant, who at the same time was a visionary in foreign policy (China and all of that), far more progressive in domestic matters than anyone remembers, and, before self-destructing, "among the best of modern presidents...
That may not be saying much. If you consider what we know now about the presidents who served from January, 1961 to August, 1974 (John Kennedy's Addison's disease and Dr. Feelgood drugs and relentless risky sex; Lyndon Johnson's grandiosity and paranoia, and Richard Nixon's blackly coiled weirdness) - why you have to wonder how the Republic survived...