Word: war-hero
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Would Tom be better off today, with a war-hero presidential candidate casually talking about gaydar? You bet. A national conversation about tender subjects during a campaign does a lot to break the ice. In 1992, not only would no one bring up gaydar, but also the subject of gays in the military was not nearly the preoccupation it is this time. It's one reason President Clinton's initiative to change the policy came as such a shock and then failed, resulting in the "Don't ask, don't tell" compromise...
...ring on his finger, talks a blue streak and then says, "Whoa," as if snapping out of a trance. But he can be artful. Describing his opposition to the G.O.P.'s proposed across-the-board spending cut, he says, "It takes courage to eliminate pork-barrel spending," invoking his war-hero past without mentioning it. He sorts through the sillier items tucked into the recent appropriations bills--$1 million for peanut-quality research ("Can't the peanut people do that?"), $200,000 for sunflower studies in Fargo, N.D.--then thunders about $1 billion in military-construction projects the Pentagon never...
...current climate is between the White House and the military, Clinton's problems are not unique. "Almost every President has had trouble with the military and the Chiefs," says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. John Kennedy's war-hero status could not protect him from criticism when he refused to provide air cover for the Bay of Pigs landing. Lyndon Johnson's Joint Chiefs threatened a mass resignation over his policy of graduated escalation in Vietnam. And Dwight Eisenhower's five stars provided no cover when he tried to cut the Air Force budget. "When budgets go up, Presidents get along...
Tsongas did not make the final list of six candidates: Harris Wofford, who had pulled an enormous upset by winning a Pennsylvania senatorial election in 1991; Florida Senator Bob Graham; West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller; Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton; Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, a war-hero opponent of Clinton's in the early primaries; and Al Gore. The Tennessee Senator seemed an unlikely choice. A Southerner from a neighboring state, he hardly gives the ticket much balance, and Clinton had refused Gore's bid for support in Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. This time, though, Clinton developed such deep rapport...
...misfits who just happen to be gay. "I've got an extra tenderness. It's not legal," is the laconic observation of one homosexual who is attracted to a pornography fan. In the story Minor Heroism, an artistic child grows up under the disapproving eye of an emotionally remote war-hero father, a parent described forcefully as "sheer rock-facing...