Best of NQ 1999 Contents
  The Alec Baldwin Award
  Soft on Crime Award
  China Syndrome Award
  I Am Woman Award
  Media Hero Award
  Damn Those Conservatives Award
  Good Morning Morons Award
  Littleton Shop of Horrors Award
  Shooting the Constitution Award
  Politics of Meaninglessness Award
  See No Evil Award
  Politics of Personal Destruction Award
  Doris Kearns Goodwin Award
  Too Late for the Ballot
  Quote of the Year
  1999 Award Judges
  Press Coverage

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  Media Reality Check
  Notable Quotables
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The Best Notable Quotables of 1999:

The Twelfth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting



Doris Kearns Goodwin Award
(for Campaigning to Revive the
Camelot Myth)

First Place

Jonathan Alter "The star power has diminished. John Kennedy Jr. was the Sun God, the most charismatic of any of the Kennedy children. So that will lower their wattage some, but there are enough Kennedys out there making enough contributions that they will be part of the life of this country well into the next century."
-- Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter on the Kennedy family without John F. Kennedy Jr., July 23 Dateline NBC. [63]
Runners-up:


"I would say to conservatives out there, to Republicans, to anybody watching, whether they loved Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater or Franklin Roosevelt, whatever. What this family represents is the idea of heroism in politics."
-- Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, July 19 Hardball. [56]


"We Americans, even those among us who have never liked the Kennedys’ politics, have long been fascinated by the Kennedy mystique. Or as some call it, the Kennedy myth. The dictionary defines mystique as ‘an aura of heightened meaning surrounding something to which special power or mystery is given.’ A myth is ‘a traditional story dealing with ancestors or heroes,’ a story that ‘shapes the world view of a people or delineates the customs or ideals of a society.’ By those definitions, like it or not, there is a Kennedy mystique and their history is mythic....
"What we do know is that some of the aching grief the family feels tonight we feel because the mystique and the myth are deep within us. That’s 48 Hours for tonight, an American Tragedy."
-- Dan Rather concluding 48 Hours, July 19. [38]


"He was more than our ‘Prince Charming,’ as the New York tabs called him. We etched the past and the future on his fine face."
-- Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter, July 26. [37]


"With the death of JFK Jr., there is now only one survivor of Camelot. That, of course, is Caroline Kennedy, the little girl who walked her father to the Oval Office and rode a pony on the White House lawn. And now grown up with a family of her own, Caroline remains our only link to those golden years."
-- Today co-host Katie Couric, July 19. [36]

 

Too Late for Our Judging,
But Year-End "Best of NQ" Worthy

First Place

"It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to give up some of our sovereignty....
"Time will not wait. Democracy, civilization itself, is at stake. Within the next few years we must change the basic structure of our global community from the present anarchic system of war and ever more destructive weaponry to a new system governed by a democratic U.N. federation.....
"Our failure to live up to our obligations to the U.N. is led by a handful of willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation’s conscience. They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing."
-- Excerpts from a speech by former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to the World Federalist Association on October 19. Published December 3 in The Washington Times.

 

Quote of the Year

First Place

Bill Clinton


ABC News anchor Carole Simpson to Bill Clinton: "You’ve got the big plane, you’ve got the big house, you’ve got the cars, the protection. Aren’t you going to suffer great post-partum depression after you leave office?"....
Simpson to Clinton while inside Arkansas tomato factory: "I have to bask in this moment, for a moment, because I am here talking to the most powerful man on the planet, who was a poor boy from Arkansas..."
Clinton, cutting her off: "A place like this."
Simpson: "Place like this. I am an African-American woman, grew up working class on the south side of Chicago, and this is a pretty special moment for me to be here talking to you. How does it feel talking to me? That I made it, too, when people said I wouldn’t be able to?"
-- From Simpson’s taped interview with President Clinton, on ABC’s World News Tonight/Sunday, November 7. [82]


Runners-up:


"[W]e are in the middle of a primal American saga and the important part is yet to come. Bill Clinton may be merely the prequel, the President of lesser moment -- except, so to speak, as the horse she rode in on....I think I see a sort of Celtic mist forming around Hillary as a new archetype (somewhere between Eleanor and Evita, transcending both) at a moment when the civilization pivots, at last, decisively -- perhaps for the first time since the advent of Christian patriarchy two millenniums ago -- toward Woman."
-- Time’s Lance Morrow in a July 12 "Viewpoint" piece. [77]


"We were talking about -- speaking for all women, if I may, Toni Morrison wrote in The New Yorker that Clinton was our first ‘black President,’ and I think, in a way, Clinton may be our first ‘woman President.’ And I think that may be one of the reasons why women identify, because he does have a lot of feminine qualities about him: The softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing."
-- The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn on CNN’s Larry King Live, March 10. [70]

 

 


 

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