Word: portraits
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...portrait of loyalty tested is the one used by Gates in his article, that of Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon's devoted secretary. She risked ridicule to explain (untruthfully, of course) why there was an 18-and-a-half minute gap in the Oval Office tapes, conjuring a picture of her acrobatic and spastic self pressing the wrong button of the recording machine while trying to answer the phone. As she saw it, she would have been nowhere without Nixon, and she would not betray him in his darkest hour to his enemies...
Gates praises Woods for her loyalty, but I wonder what kind of loyalty it really was. She chose loyalty to person over loyalty to country, deciding that the greater good of the country was not worth betraying the President for whatever crimes he had committed. Woods's portrait is where the question of loyalty becomes murkiest, and I'm not sure how many of us would point to her as an example of all that is good about loyalty...
...final portrait is that of George Stephanopoulos in a scene from the Clinton campaign documentary, "The War Room." The night before the November 1992 election, the phone rang at campaign headquarters with another sex scandal about to break on the other end of the line. Stephanopoulos calmly but urgently persuaded the caller that the allegation would not hold up in public and that coming forward was not worth the certain resultant embarrassment of the accuser. At that moment, it seemed, the full weight of the election's outcome was on the shoulders of a loyal campaign strategist, trying to quash...
...That portrait is real, all right, in places like Nigeria, Somalia, Burundi, Sudan, Kenya. But it is no longer the whole picture. Academics, diplomats and bankers who do business there talk seriously these days about an African renaissance. A grand word, it turns out, for the slow, fragile, difficult changes that are giving the continent a second chance. But the description fits. Out of sight of our narrow focus on disaster, another Africa is rising, an Africa that works: the Africa of Mozambique and Mali and Eritrea and Ghana, of South Africa and Uganda, Benin and Botswana, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast...
Since Nichols and Clinton have socialized together, the movie was dismissed in advance as an apologia. As it turns out, the director's understanding of Clinton allowed him to create a presidential portrait that in many ways is more damning than any right-wing caricature, because it feels so real. Largely completed before America had heard of Lewinsky, the film comments on the scandal in ways that are downright eerie. Just as the public doesn't know what actually happened between Clinton and Monica--or Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, for that matter--so the movie refuses to spell out what...