Word: tragical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sitting alone in a perimeter observation tower in Viet Nam when I heard of the tragic and violent death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy [June 14]. How and why can death be so prevalent in an advanced civilization such as ours? At that moment, my attention became fixed on the M-60 machine gun which rested, black and suddenly very ugly, in front of me. I wondered when I would have to kill or be killed...
...more are bought each year, some twothirds through the mails?"as easily," in Lyndon Johnson's words, "as baskets of fruit or cartons of cigarettes." Said Maryland's Democratic Senator Joseph Tydings last week in an appeal for more effective legislation to curb this traffic: "It is just tragic that in all of Western civilization the U.S. is the one country with an insane gun policy...
Never an intellectual, Bobby nonetheless read a great deal, particularly after Dallas. While Jack would read simply for delight, Bobby would always choose a writer who had something practical to tell him. Aeschylus, who introduced the tragic hero to literature, was his "favorite poet." On the death of Martin Luther King Jr., he used the lines: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Asked once why he strove so hard, Kennedy again quoted from Aeschylus: "When...
...Robert Kennedy was really a good deal more than a healthy spectator sport, more than a major reformist influence in American society, more than a sympathetic, concerned friend, even more than what Jack Paar called "the most beautiful man I ever knew." In a tragic historical sense, Robert Kennedy was one of the few, and surely the most effective of America's political leaders who liberated themselves from the strangling moralisms of the 1950s. Bob Kennedy got over Communist watching, shucked the blinders of Cold War interventionism, and found ghetto residents more enlightening Congressional witnesses than labor racketeers. Sometime...
...analysis of the Viet Nam tragedy is the fact that it was written before Johnson's recent abdication-an event that might have balanced some of Wicker's more emotional judgments. That is not the only omission in what Wicker candidly calls an "imaginative reconstruction" of two tragic presidencies. Author of six published novels, Wicker is too prone to select the facts that intensify his drama. He scarcely mentions Kennedy's exciting effect on the national mood and his great coup in the Cuban missile crisis. Wicker almost totally overlooks at least the possibility that Johnson...