"Tar Baby" was the name given by the State Department to Nixon's policy of strengthening contacts with Pretoria. The allusion was to the famous Uncle Remus story in which Brer Fox tries to capture Brer Rabbit by making a tar baby. Brer Rabbit hits the tar baby with his hands, feet, and head and becomes totally stuck to it. The policy option, described as a partial relaxation of penalties against the white supremacist governments and derived from NSSM: 39, was based on the judgement that white supremacy was enduring and that Washington should accommodate itself to that reality. If Washington was to be an influence for enlightened change, so the President's reasoning went, it must do so by offering the "carrot" and eschewing the "stick". This policy would have to be pursued ad infinitum to get it to work.
Famous quotes containing the words tar, baby and/or option:
“The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
The gunner and his mate,
Loved Mall, Meg, and Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate;
For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, ‘Go hang!’
She loved not the savour of tar nor of pitch,
Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch:
Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“the gentleness of wine in his fingertips,
where do these hands come from?
I was born a glass baby and nobody picked me up
except to wash the dust off me.
He has picked me up and licked me alive.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)