THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 1, 1997 TAG: 9701010254
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: 56 lines
With the New Year upon us, politicians and pundits deplore cynicism that they say prevails today.
But the politicians who try to dupe the American people are cynics. The people are as hopeful as ever in looking for leaders; meanwhile, they have learned to be skeptics.
The test of a first-rate intelligence ``is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,'' wrote novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.
That often tests the voters.
Focusing on presidents, some critics assert that people's faith subsided after Kennedy's presidency. ``All the presidents following Kennedy were turkeys,'' says one.
But why exclude Kennedy?
His administration blundered at the Bay of Pigs, entered Vietnam, narrowly averted the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy, a womanizer, consorted with a gun moll and, it's said, sent messages via her to a mobster.
Coming after plain-spoken Harry Truman and platitudinous Ike, Kennedy, we know now, was the first turkey. That was our kindergarten in learning about politicians.
Back then we didn't have the benefit, or burden, of revelations privy to today's voters about all presidents, past as well as present.
Only recently documents disclosed that Robert McNamara and Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay favored a nuclear strike against Cuba.
And what of Lyndon Johnson and the falsified counts of bodies and Richard Nixon slip-sliding into Watergate and deeper into Vietnam?
Amid the 1968 campaign, columnist George Sokolsky informed the Norfolk Forum about the Nixon-McGovern race. My job, moderating, was to sum up his views.
``It sounds,'' I said, ``as if he has given us a choice of a fool'' - at that, the audience thundered approval - ``and a knave.''
A baffled silence ensued. They hadn't fathomed Nixon's depths.
The most serious charge against Jimmy Carter is piosity; but Ronald Reagan and George Bush were complicit - or blind - to the Iran-Contra conspiracy, a peril far greater than Watergate.
Last year voters were hard put to decide between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Dogging Clinton was an unending toll of marital infidelities and fiscal irregularities. He shows amazing agility recouping at the polls.
With Dole, some voters couldn't accept his new-found role as tax cutter and an inept campaign style.
His camp held its breath lest The Washington Post, among others, disclose Dole's fling at infidelity. But the oft-called ``liberal main-stream press'' held back.
The gap narrowed near the close because Democratic fund-raising wrongs troubled voters. They shrank from a mandate for Clinton and kept Congress in the GOP's hands but reduced Newt. They kept contending with opposing ideas.
My New Year's toast is to the American people, ever searching for the right path, everlasting.