Word: toning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...despite its comforting tone, Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address* last week provoked an immediate chorus of grumbles, not the least of which emanated from leaders of his own party. A cadre of conservatives led by Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia argued hat the so-called freeze should be applied more evenly across the board to defense is well as domestic spending. In addition, lamented Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici of New Mexico, "even with a freeze, you've still got a big deficit problem out there." Senate Finance...
...years after Johnson's death, Robert A. Caro, already renowned for his biography of Robert Moses, has come forth with the first volume of a biography which through its scope and thoroughness, begins to explain the mystery of the man. Although Caro strikes a tone of undue self-righteousness in his account of some of Johnson's shadier moments, and too often takes such episodes as evidence of both moral and political bankruptcy, he has, on the whole, produced an admirable work. Taking 768 pages of text to tell the story of the first 33 years of Johnson's life...
...detail. He dwells on young Lyndon's dislike of school and disobedience of his parents to the point of tedium, seemingly overwhelmed by the rush of information from newly interviewed Johnson friends and classmates. Similarly, he loses a sense of proportion when he uses the same dramatic, overheated the tone to reveal both Johnson's finagling of a college election and multi-million-dollar Brown & Root schemes...
...biographer occasionally lapses into the tone of a prattling Sunday school teacher, creating a book with little sympathy for its subject. His assertion, for example, that Johnson's will to dominate arose out of his contempt for his parents, who "stuck by their ideals" and failed, does a disservice to the complex man he seeks to analyze. Caro insists that Johnson's conversion of a secret college social club into a political power on the Southwest texas campus revealed in the man a deviousness, a just for secrecy, and "a will of steel" plotting to "not only snatch existing power...
...ideals, despite the taint of corruption that surrounds his rise through the political ranks, the fact remains that, at least in the period covered by this book. Lyndon Johnson used his power to the great benefit of his Hill Country constituents. Caro fails to drive home this point; the tone of condemnation that ultimately emerges from his political squeamishness is the biography's only great flaw. Still, the book's thoroughness over-rules this blindness. If Caro's next two volumes are as compelling and groundbreaking as this one, he will have completed a work that, in its premise...