A Matter of Opinion

 

On John Wayne: “By a confluence of audience demand and commercial production, the Wayne that took shape in the transaction between the two expressed deep needs and aspirations that took ‘Wayne’ as the pattern of manly American virtue.’’ (In John Wayne’s America)

On Ronald Reagan: “Even young people who did not grow up with Reagan, or grow up hearing him on the radio or watching him at the movies, have accepted his version of the past as their own best pledge of the future. That is not as surprising as it might seem. A visit to his past is always a pleasant experience. Visiting Reaganland is very much like taking children to Disneyland, where they can deal with a New Orleans cut to their measure. It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better is one immunized against any troubling incursions of a real New Orleans, a real racetrack, the real American West.” (From Reagan’s America)

On William F. Buckley: “Bill had a voracious sense of life himself and he swept you up in it. She [Wills’ wife Natalie Cavallo] sensed that right from the beginning and, of course, I found it confirmed over and over with other people. He was dangerously charming. I’m glad she warned me early on.” (In The Wall Street Journal)

On the Kennedys:“The Kennedys represented what it was just becoming fashionable to call ‘charisma,’ the glamour of power, the unashamed assertion of their personal privilege, not as an adjunct to class or tradition or ideology but simply because it was theirs.” (From The Kennedy Imprisonment)

On Lincoln: “Lincoln was so shrewd at sizing people up. He was a terribly gifted lawyer and was famous for his courtroom reading of everybody. He scared the pants off his clients thinking he was giving away the whole case, but he knew if he could bring the nub of the matter to the jury, the case was won. As a military leader, the book shows how much he studied and used his knowledge of people to play against each other and how when he found someone like Grant, he stuck to him like a burr.” (At a UC Berkeley event)

On Nixon: “It should be clear by now why I chose my title. I had Milton’s Samson Agonistes in mind. The Samson of the early scenes in that play is trudging around his millstone, chained to his sweaty task as others mock him, a man dreaming of revenge after being done in by the glamorous Delilah. John Kennedy was Nixon’s glamorous Delilah. Nixon was actor and contender, protagonist in his own
ongoing psychodrama, always the sweaty striver who felt
his strivings were unappreciated.” (From Nixon Agonistes)