Word: timberg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wrong," McCain told TIME. "All my life I have been offended by hypocrisy." His approach to many legislative issues can sometimes resemble the way he boxed while at the Naval Academy. "McCain would charge to the center of the ring and throw punches until someone went down," writes Robert Timberg in his account of McCain and four other notable academy grads of the Vietnam era. McCain's Manichaean take on the world may be effective in war, but it doesn't always work well on subtle issues like health care or tax cuts. "If you are against him, he sees...
Author Robert Timberg, now deputy Washington bureau chief of the Baltimore Sun, is himself an Annapolis graduate and Marine veteran of Vietnam. Covering the Reagan White House as the Iran-contra affair unfolded during the 1980s, Timberg "kept picking up echoes of Vietnam ... I remember thinking that perhaps Iran-contra was at least in part the bill for Vietnam finally coming due." Timberg had been told that the nightingale cannot perform unless it first hears a few notes from another nightingale. His conceit is that in the '80s, Ronald Reagan sang the nightingale's song of patriotism and military pride...
...Nightingale's Song cannily differentiates its five main characters, whose portraits have a novelistic fascination. North, for example: an authentic battlefield hero (brave, focused, cool under fire) who is also a hot dog and, suggests Timberg, perhaps unhinged in some surreal way that involves a dangerous mix of self-dramatization and stupidity. McCain: a raunchy screw-up and party boy who graduated near the bottom of his Annapolis class but magnificently rose to the occasion later. Poindexter: a brilliant student at the Naval Academy who suffered afterward, in Timberg's rendering, from a blind-side naivete about politics. McFarlane...
These questions hum in the background of Timberg's text: Does America need a warrior class? When? How trained? How protected from their own politicians? Should they be kept belowdecks like Ahab's harpooners and brought up only when there is a white whale to be killed? Vietnam was the white whale, sure enough...
...McCain, on the other hand, survived nearly six brutal years in Viet Cong captivity and once spat in the faces of startled Vietnamese dignitaries. McCain, now the senior Senator from Arizona, is one of five notable or notorious Annapolis graduates and Vietnam veterans whose interbraided destinies make up Robert Timberg's "The Nightingale's Song" (Simon & Schuster; 543 pages; $27.50), a story thatTIME's Lance Morrowfinds a "tough and fascinating study of war, heroism, politics and the American psyche at a profound cultural divide." Previous TIME Daily Campaign...