Notable Quotables - 03/14/1994

 

Hating the 80s: It Never Ends

"Money, not ideology, is the reason all modern spies sell out, according to one Senate intelligence committee study. Ames was strapped by a divorce settlement, and greed was a national pastime in the mid-80s."
- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas, March 7.

"The President had to play defense after reports of two more secret briefings that White House officials received months ago. The subject of those briefings: Clinton family ties to an Arkansas banking and real estate deal that went sour in the go-go '80s."
- Dan Rather, March 3 CBS Evening News.

Hillary: The Working Woman's Mascot?

"As much as we try to think otherwise, when you're covering some- one like yourself, and your position in life is insecure, she's your mascot. Something in you roots for her. You're rooting for your team. I try to get that bias out, but for many of us it's there."
- Time Senior Writer Margaret Carlson quoted in The Washington Post, March 7.

 

Cronkite on Conspiracies

"I think one of the absolute worst historical sins committed in recent years was that Oliver stone thing on JFK, the assassination of JFK. That totally distorted a major historical event. It indicted people for whom there's no evidence that indictment is required. It suggested conspiracies that nobody has ever established or proved."
- Walter Cronkite on CNBC's The Dick Cavett Show, March 4.

"Some of us were called in by Caspar Weinberger, when he was the Secretary of Defense. This was after Grenada, after the Grenada invasion, which again was not covered. We don't know the full story today. No reporters got in for three days. I don't know whether we really found a warehouse full of AK-47s there or not. Maybe we planted them there. I'm not saying we did, but we had three days to do it if we wanted to because we had no reporters get there at the beginning."
- Cronkite, same show, minutes later.

Henry Hyde Should Know Better

Former Quayle aide David Beckwith: "Henry Hyde said '[Bush] broke his promise when he moved his lips. He didn't tap the anger and frustration of the American middle class at the nanny state's endless intrusions into our lives.'"
Chicago Tribune Washington reporter Steve Daley: "...Henry Hyde is usually smarter than that. I think it's very easy for the Republican Party to look at George Bush and decide to blame the entire debacle on him. I think that the whole party - for Congressman Hyde or any of these guys to be talking about reaching out to the middle class after what they pulled off for 12 years - not very credible."
- Exchange on C-SPAN's Sunday Journal, March 6.

 

Rodney King, Family Man

"To his family, to his friends, he is not Rodney. They call him by his middle name, Glenn. He hurts inside. He's changed outside. Slimmed down, his 210 pounds resembling those of a pro football wide receiver. He leads his family with serious focus."
- Bernard Shaw anchoring the CNN special on Rodney King, Feb. 23.

"The past for him has drawn an unwanted spotlight of troubles... There was the alley incident with Hollywood vice police, who claimed King tried to run them down after allegedly picking up a transvestite male prostitute...King was arrested after his wife called police to say she had been injured and feared for her life."
- Same show, seconds later.

Eleanor: I'm A Moderate

"I also think I am, in the great scale of politics, I am maybe, I am in the broad middle. I'm not a screaming way-out liberal who can't find a home in our political ideology. What bothers me is this caller uses the word liberal as though it's some sort of epithet, and that really reeks of a past campaign that was run, you remember ACLU cards and all of that. George Bush ran on those issues very successfully in 1988. He came back in '92 and tried to run a similar version and it didn't work. I think we're beyond that."
- Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on C-SPAN's Journalists Roundtable, February 18.

 

Cuba's Advanced Health Care

"In the 35 years since the revolution, Cuba has developed what is easily the finest health care system in Latin America. One of the most cherished 'achievements' of the revolution, the health of the population has come to be a metaphor for the health of the body politic."
- Boston Globe reporter Sally Jacobs, February 28.

"In the absence of traditional medical supplies, herbal remedies known as 'green medicine' have become commonplace in Cuban hospitals and clinics. Lemon grass is used for circulation, bee pollen for cleaning wounds. Oregano syrup is used for colds, cola nut for stimulation. At one hospital, doctors are experimenting with yogurt and sugar remedies in place of antiseptic."
- Jacobs sidebar, same page.

 

Wishing Gorbachev Were Still in Charge

"Life has become so much worse for so many Russians under Democratic pseudo capitalism...the first market reforms and the erosion of state authority have fostered a brutal cowboy capitalism. It is manifest in the emergence of a lavish lifestyle amond a flamboyant and vulgar new class of businessmen, made up mostly of speculators, traders and outright criminals, all of whom are stealing the country blind...No freedom from fear and no freedom from want: Small wonder many Russians feel nostalgic for the days when there was bread and law and order."
- U.S. News & World Report Mortimer Zuckerman, March 7.

 

Killin's Sexy

"The first time I shot somebody, it felt, God, it felt great. I mean, years later, I read this like, magazine, and it likened the feeling to ejaculation, or orgasm, and I thought about it, and it really was....When John Wayne shoots somebody, he rides off into the sunset. Why can't I, you know? Young people don't make the logical connections that adults assume they make about those kinds of things. That's why you've got to get rid of the guns."
- Criminal-turned-Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall on ABC's 20/20, Feb. 18.

 

The West Gets Stoned

"It seems like there has always been a boom-bust cycle out West. Log it, mine it, graze it, develop it, until there is nothing left, and then just move on, because there's an infinite supply of land. Wrong notion. How do you change that? How do you break the cycle?"
- Today co-host Stone Phillips, February 21.

 

Gumbel Unloads

"Straight ahead in this half hour we'll talk about a new book called Lethal Passage. It deals with America's sickening love affair with guns."
- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, February 23.

 

President Touchy-Feely

"Around the global village, women cheered and grown men wept. At his press conference, [Gold medal-winning speed skater Dan] Jansen paused to take a call from the President, the man who's made America safe again for tears."
- Newsweek reporter David A. Kaplan, February 28.

 

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