Word: rayburnisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Long has been lucky. Twice, formal indictments were voted against him by a grand jury in Baltimore accusing him and two other legislators of committing 45 "over acts" in connection with a bribery-kickback scheme during construction of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. And twice, the U.S. Attorney's indictment recommendation was denied by John Mitchell's Justice Department with no explanation given. Mitchell, of course, was the architect of Nixon's Southern Strategy...
...week long Ford had gained stature mostly by doing nothing. His reaction to the frantic Reagan maneuvering had been low-key. Perhaps he had learned the old wisdom of Texan Sam Rayburn's curt advice: "The three most important words in the English language are 'wait a minute.'" Since his hasty pardon of Nixon, Ford has typically moved slowly, listened widely to advice and pushed steadily on, waiting for his adversaries to slip. Reagan did so last week. Ford just puffed on his pipe. He asked the S.O.S. and Chowder and Marching Club (Republican hail fellows from...
...scene hardly befitted the pure white Georgia marble and serene proportions of the U.S. House of Representatives' Rayburn Office Building. There in a darkened hearing room last week, the House Subcommittee on Communications, along with assorted other members of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, sat looking at two flickering TV screens. They were watching four male strippers, dressed only in top hats and white ties, undulate to a bump-and-grind version of Baby Face. Also on the program were Annie ("I've tried them all") Sprinkle's consumer guide to sex toys readily available from...
...THIS weren't enough, Steinberg includes an appendix consisting of particularly cogent remarks by Rayburn, which he calls "Rayburnisms." It includes profundities like "The size of a man has nothing to do with his height" and "Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build...
...obsession with glorifying Rayburn, Steinberg ignores not only his faults but also important questions about him. He offers no convincing explanation for Rayburn's support of the New Deal, his torpedoing of John Kennedy's attempt to gain the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1956 or the failure of his only marriage after three months. A biographer with a critical eye could probably make Rayburn reasonably interesting, but Steinberg is unable to step back far enough from his subject to handle his account in a balanced and scholarly manner. Steinberg, in short, lacks the ability that Lyndon Johnson described...