Word: 54th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...entirely. For the specific historical events the film narrates -- the formation, training and terrible blooding in battle of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first black fighting unit enlisted in the Union cause -- are little known yet resonant with high symbolic significance. The 54th, led by an idealistic 25-year-old white man, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick skillfully blending shyness and tenacity), had to fight to fight. Their white comrades-in-arms were full of contemptuous prejudice against them, and the high command was afraid to arm black men who had their own bitter racial grievances (many were runaway...
...best when it shows their proud embrace of 19th century warfare at its most brutal. Director Edward Zwick graphically demonstrates the absurdity of lines of soldiers slowly advancing across open ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the face of withering rifle volleys and horrendous cannonade. The fact that the 54th finally achieves respect (and opens the way for other black soldiers) only by losing half its number in a foredoomed assault on an impregnable fortress underscores this terrible and brutal irony...
...quarterback or a political pro, Jack Kemp has always been nimble and quick. Those qualities came in handy last week, as he dealt with the scandal at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has billowed from a candlestick into an inferno. Before celebrating his 54th birthday with 54 cakes from admiring employees, the beleaguered HUD chief wryly conceded, "When I first took the nomination from President Bush, I wanted to make HUD a high-profile agency. I don't think this is what I had in mind...
...only son, Benigno III ("Noynoy"), 26, was one of her emissaries to the Communists. Aquino attends no more than three formal dinners a week, and the day on which the historic cease-fire with the Communists was signed found her marking what would have been her husband's 54th birthday with Cardinal Sin and her one-year-old grandson Justin Benigno. Being a grandmother, she says, makes her happier than being President...
...where President Aquino took her oath of office ten months ago. She was not present for the historic moment. Instead, along with her friend and adviser Jaime Cardinal Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, she attended a ceremony that morning marking what would have been her slain husband Benigno's 54th birthday...