Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Eighty-four American citizens and their families will be permitted to leave Cuba (the Americans had previously been free to go but not their Cuban wives and children). Castro also released the crews of two Miami-based boats (including the nephew of Bebe Rebozo, friend of former President Nixon's) that had been seized in Cuban waters with cargoes of marijuana, and promised to review the cases of seven Americans being held as political prisoners...
...Other States of Mind. But the anticipation of the meeting carries the reader through an otherwise rambling book that includes tales from Mee's boyhood, the story of his fight with polio, his theories on the recent death and inevitable rebirth of the republic, and imagined conversations with Nixon and "Exxon"--an archetypal business executive who informs Mee that present governments are outmoded and that multinational corporations will inevitably rule the world. They will, Exxon says, be responsive only to "the reality of economics, the reality of profit and loss statements, to the making and distribution and consuming of things...
...acquaintance Richard provides the cynic's stereotype of an inevitably cold and ambitious road to success, it is Nixon himself who becomes a target for the blame. Mee doesn't claim that Nixon personally brought down the republic, of course, noting that it had fallen long before, but Nixon becomes a focus of his disappointment in a string of broken presidential promises that stretch back at least through Johnson's administration...
...Nixon was certainly a worthy target on which to vent such feelings, and while it is highly unusual to write history in terms of personal rage, Mee somehow seems to capture an underlying anger that conventional histories of the Watergate era miss. He relates a mood with an effectiveness that no objective account could offer, but with an air of authority that a straight piece of fiction or biography would not provide. It is Mee's style that makes the book a cohesive and meaningful treatment of "the wounds that Watergate inflicted on the American psyche" (as the blurb...
HALDEMAN has become obsessed with all that has been written about him and the Nixon administration. When Mee meets him, Haldeman is suddenly no longer a man to be despised, a man to rage against; Haldeman is now grotesque, a man whose activity has become locked around one period in his life, when he was on hand to help twist American history. When Mee finally meets the enemy, the duplicitous villain he had expected turns out instead to be an object of pity. Watergate is an obsession for Haldeman, but Mee does not need to linger over those unpleasant details...