Word: sams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Watergate ordeal cast up a score of minor and major villains, from third- rate burglars to reprobate White House movers and shakers. But for every two Watergate wrongdoers, the affair also produced a Watergate hero. No one was more celebrated or more fondly regarded than North Carolina's Sam Ervin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. "We could wind this up pretty soon if everyone would tell what he knows," drawled Ervin, as the hearings got under way twelve years ago, "but if we continue to play hide-and-seek, then it could take...
Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ervin was the son of a relentlessly upright lawyer. Young Sam was funny, and popular. An upperclassman at the University of North Carolina when Thomas Wolfe arrived at Chapel Hill, Ervin was the sort Wolfe later wrote about, the BMOCs who "talked--always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms . . . with a large, easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics...
...country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember some redeeming features in the Civil War . . . some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate." None? He was forgetting about the clear-sighted, right-minded, good-hearted leadership of Senator Sam Ervin...
There used to be a solid center that shamed the jesters and smothered the nonsense with dignity and a call to high ideals. Ike was in the White House. Sam Rayburn ran the House. Men like George Aiken and Richard Russell resided in the Senate. When they gathered to deal with critical issues they were not Republicans or Democrats or liberals or conservatives. They were men with a larger purpose than themselves. It seems too long a time since the likes of them...
...puppies, blind girls and the motorcycle gang his mother Rusty hung out with. "I look weird," says Rocky (Eric Stoltz, in a wonderfully authentic performance), "but otherwise I'm real normal." Better than normal. He shines in school, plays Cupid between his mom (Cher) and a rowdy old friend (Sam Elliott), and falls into tender love with a City Lights sweetie (Laura Dern) who can see only his good heart and humor. Metaphorically, Rocky is the beautiful soul hidden in every shy teenager with a bad case of zits...