Word: nixons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TWENTY years ago, Joe McGinnis explained to the nation how our presidents could be sold to us like so much soap. The same soap-peddlers who gave us President Richard Milhouse Nixon have now also given us President-elect George Herbert Walker Bush. They marketed the same product twice, and the nation bought it both times...
...blacks that the G.O.P. staked out more than 20 years ago, when the party of Lincoln recast itself as the embodiment of the white backlash. It started with Barry Goldwater railing against Earl Warren's Supreme Court and civil rights legislation. Then, as the long hot summers blazed, Richard Nixon courted voters with a "law-and-order" harangue. Ronald Reagan kept it up with his allusions to "welfare queens" and the "strapping young buck" using food stamps to buy a T-bone steak...
...preach salvation and world peace in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary and -- three times -- the Soviet Union. Last April he conducted his first tour of mainland China, where his wife Ruth was raised by missionary parents. Prior to the arduous three-week visit, he was briefed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger; during it, he was the second foreign dignitary (after Corazon Aquino) to be received by new Premier Li Peng...
There is merit to this argument, but American elections are never quite the low-risk Tweedledee-vs.-Tweedledum contests they sometimes appear to be. It is sobering to recall that even the landmark struggle between Kennedy and Nixon was once widely belittled as an echo, not a choice. As Kennedy partisan Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote at the time, "The favorite cliche of 1960 is that the candidates . . . are essentially the same sort of men, stamped from the same mold, committed to the same values, dedicated to the same objectives...
...anger, glibness, distortion, evasion, hostility and self-righteousness. Effective Presidents, for the most part, do not taunt and humiliate adversaries when conducting diplomacy or pursuing legislation. In war, yes, but war is a last resort. A President's task is to reconcile, to include. Hence, Richard Nixon, a bareknuckle anti-Commie on the way up, spent as much time at his first summit trying to persuade Leonid Brezhnev that they would both be winners with an arms-limitation agreement as he did espousing the U.S. position. John Kennedy early in his presidency grew heated and called Big Steel men "s.o.b...