Over the three decades, Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easily and celebrities who talked too much.
All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Carson's Nixon-Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedys. The public couldn't say whether they were on Johnny Carson's side or he was on theirs. All they knew was that they liked him and felt they knew him -- a claim most of those who were close to him in his life, including his wives, family and "Tonight" staff members, would not make with much confidence. They knew Carson was intensely private, a self-described loner who shunned the spotlight when off camera.
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