Word: toweritis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tower debate aside, Nunn's essential bipartisanship is almost uniformly accepted by his colleagues. So much so that even before he took over Armed Services, no less a Republican partisan than Dan Quayle called Nunn the "de facto" head of the committee even though it was chaired by the G.O.P.'s Barry Goldwater...
...this adds up to a presidential run in 1992, it will not be the first time Nunn has clashed with George Bush -- or the second, considering that the fight over John Tower has been cast as a Bush-Nunn feud. In 1975, when President Ford selected Bush to head the CIA, Nunn and Senator Henry Jackson were concerned that Ford was helping Bush audition for a future vice- presidential race, perhaps even with Ford on the '76 ticket. "We felt strongly that the CIA shouldn't be used that way," says Nunn, and "we forced Bush to renounce his ambition...
...with the abundant talk of wine and women, the John Tower controversy last week could have had a song: Stand By Your Man. Tammy Wynette's paean of loyalty to hard-drinking, two-timing guys would have made perfect background music for George Bush as he pledged devotion to his apparently hopeless nominee for Secretary of Defense. But it could also have served as theme music for Republicans rallying around their wounded leader...
...effort was not the would-be Defense Secretary but the President himself. Determined not to retreat in their first showdown with Congress -- and no less determined to squelch the spreading impression that Bush is off to a feckless start -- the President and his aides shifted their goal from saving Tower's nomination to tarring the Democrats with charges of character assassination and hypocrisy. Positioning themselves for the inevitable future battles over the budget and foreign policy, the Republicans hoped to rescue something from the wreckage of the Tower affair by lowering Congress in the public esteem...
Bush had already begun standing fast for Tower while heading home from the Far East. "I haven't wavered one iota," he said aboard Air Force One, "and I don't intend to." Over the next several days he summoned more than a dozen Democratic Senators to the White House for a personal appeal not to slap away the hand he offered them at his Inauguration. Yet the Administration seemed to know that Tower was a lost cause. By Thursday, when the Senate began its rancorous debate on the nomination, the President's advisers admitted they had failed to lock...