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The Best Notable Quotables of 1999:
The Twelfth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Doris Kearns Goodwin Award
(for Campaigning to Revive the
Camelot Myth)
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First
Place
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"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]
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Runners-up: |
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"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]
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"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]
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"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]
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"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]
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Too Late for Our Judging,
But Year-End "Best of NQ" Worthy
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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. |
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Quote of the Year
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First
Place |
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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]
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Runners-up:
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"[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] |
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"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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