Word: truman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...states can do as they please behind their borders is nonsense in a world of borderless information and travel and communication. He has boiled down his thinking to a simple idea--call it the Kofi Doctrine--which has a chance of becoming as elemental to this century as the Truman Doctrine was to the last: Sovereignty is not a shield...
...ridiculous. But the Gores' kiss was so over the top as to command a new kind of attention. If the kiss was manipulative, it was daringly so. I search my memory for historical precedents.... Dick and Pat Nixon in Miami Beach in 1972? Bess and Harry Truman? Franklin and Eleanor? Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in "From Here to Eternity...
...Harry Truman seemed a dismal specimen right into middle age--a failed haberdasher condemned to live with his dreadnought mother-in-law, trapped in a W.C. Fields movie. Truman hardly looked much better by the time F.D.R.'s death made him President in 1945. Yet he did pretty well in the office...
...American presidency still inspires some reverence--an awe that may work in complex ways. Voters may put an apparent doofus in the White House yet trust that the presidency's sacramental, transformative powers will, so to speak, transubstantiate the doofus. Historical memory teaches that a base metal like Harry Truman, and therefore maybe even George W. Bush, might yet turn into gold--or, anyway, be raised to unexpected stature...
...hope for such alchemical results may originate in an anti-elitist assumption and an impulse to stick a thumb in the eye of power--the underlying reason, for example, for Jesse Ventura's election as governor of Minnesota or, again, for Truman's victory over the smug little man on the wedding cake...