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8f7b613
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Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.
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participation
government
secrets
democracy
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Garry wills |
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d002522
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Groves, with his eye for sizing up people who could get things done, saw the deep ambition Oppenheimer covered with his surface charm.
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personality
leadership
impression
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Garry Wills |
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64ba6c0
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Arthur Schlesinger admits that JFK "succumbed to the fake omniscience of insiders". Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle."
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myopia
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Garry Wills |
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c088022
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God initiates the salvation of man to express the Father's love, not a punitive deflecting of the Father's anger.
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Garry Wills |
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86dd20c
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The advantage of a permanent emergency for the executive is that even trivial things can routinely be accomplished by the crisis presidency. If everything is an emergency, all power is emergency power.
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leadership
emergency
reaction
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Garry wills |
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98641bf
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Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments.
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Garry Wills |
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d7fae3f
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Inefficiency is to be our safeguard against despotism.
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us-constitution
separation-of-powers
us-government
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Garry Wills |
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0f38855
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You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. --GILBERT CHESTERTON
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Garry Wills |
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441a83e
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The tapes are the real man--mean, vindictive, panicky, striking first in anticipation of being struck, trying to lift his own friable self-esteem by shoving others down. Murray Kempton said he wanted to leave no fingerprints, but he went about it in such a way as to leave his fingerprints all over his story. Nixon's real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero. He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.
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Garry Wills |
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c7b66fe
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interlocutor--a
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Garry Wills |
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c6bb172
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Talmud, the Halakha, the Qur'an, the Bible, the (Sikh) Granth Sahib--as "true and accurate in all particulars."4 How could a dying religious attitude, scheduled for elimination by the end of the twentieth century--already, as it were, being measured for its coffin--dance away from the dirge with renewed vitality? More pointedly, how could this escape"
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Garry Wills |