Word: truman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course of a few days on the job as an investigative reporter for a Los Angeles daily, Irwin Fletcher (Chevy Chase) presents himself to various sources as G. Gordon Liddy, Harry S. Truman, Igor Stravinsky, Don Corleone and Arnold Babar (as in the elephant). He also makes up a few monikers: Mr. Poon from the SEC, for example, and John Coctosea ("it's Scotch-Rumanian"). Sometimes he does not bother with name-dropping; he just gets a false beard or teeth from the novelty store and skips blithely into and out of trouble...
Onetime tourist regalia, a fanciful means of selling what Writer DeSoto Brown calls "the paradise business," Hawaiian shirts flared into full fashion in the 1950s: President Harry Truman, grinning broadly, appeared on the cover of LIFE wearing a typical eye-popper in 1951. Not long after, the vibrancy of the colors and liveliness of the prints became synonymous with yokeldom and ugly Americanism, what every cartoon American tourist would wear under his camera straps and over his walking shorts, sandals and nylon ankle socks...
...Harry Truman understood all this, explaining that his job was to "persuade people to do what they ought to do -- and which they sometimes don't do -- without being persuaded." But not even Truman imagined that so much of the presidency one day would be devoted to saying no so many times...
Reagan is a man of certitudes. Not since Harry Truman, very possibly, has a President been so confident he was right. There are plentiful hazards in that, but also many assets for a democratic leader. Reagan would not have chosen as one of his favorite messages the Reinhold Niebuhr line that Carter used to quote: "The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world." Reagan is not a big ambiguity...
Clark Clifford, the former Truman aide who has monitored the political mayhem for four decades, looked out his office window at the White House last week and said, "There is a greater stridency than I remember. We are in a troubled period." The late Vice President Hubert Humphrey, himself battered by a wave of national protest, foresaw the problem years ago. "The first sign of a declining civilization," he fretted, "is bad manners...