Michael Malone - Weebly

national landmarks, which no one wanted either.
Ransom, however, had found a buyer; rather a
buyer had found him. In early 1969 someone
representing someone who represented something
governmental had presented himself at the bank with a
letter of introduction from one of the congenial
Washington acquaintances whom Ransom had met as a
result of his reliable, if unenthusiastic, support for the
Republican ticket the previous fall:
reliable because Bredforets and Ransoms had
always been dutiful citizens whose substantial
contributions to the GOP they considered as morally
obligatory as their donations to the Episcopal Church—
both those institutions being, in the family's inherited
judgment, as fundamental to the social order as gravity
is to the well-running of the universe. Nevertheless,
Ernest Ransom had not been enthusiastic, because in
1968 he could not bring himself to believe that either of
his party's candidates, Nixon or Agnew, were what he
could really call "gentlemen." Eight years earlier, in fact,
he had taken the unprecedented, and unrepeated, step
of secretly voting for a Democratic president, who, if