Word: aback
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Nixon: I was somewhat taken aback by Mr. Kennedy's final words. He is running down our great country at a time when we can't afford to be divided. More disturbingly, he used a word starting with "st" and ending with "ks" to describe the situation created by President Eisenhower. That kind of word is not becoming to a candidate for the highest office in our great country. That kind of word should not be used to describe the position of the United States to a television audience of mothers and children. I only went to a state university...
...Taken Aback. But in London last week a butler was shrilling secrets from the housetops. His name: Thomas Albert Cronin, 44. His former employer: Mr. Antony Armstrong-Jones, an ex-photographer and present husband of Princess Margaret. On a double-truck spread in the weekly People, Cronin poured out the reasons he left his royal job after only 25 days at Tony and Meg's Kensington Palace residence. With butlerian unctuousness, Cronin declares that the exposé is for him "a painful task" but necessary to preserve the "dignity of the royal family and my own reputation...
Cronin first met young Armstrong-Jones in 1958 when Cronin was buttling for U.S. Ambassador "Jock" Whitney, and Armstrong-Jones arrived to take some photographs. "I will say at once," wrote Cronin, clearly in the grip of a remembered passion, "that I was taken aback by Mr. Jones's manner of dress. His coat, if memory serves me, was of leather, and unbuttoned; his trousers much too tight, and of an eccentric material." Cronin confesses that "I betrayed my disapproval on my face and in the unenthusiastic way I announced him to the Ambassador...
...Taken aback. Rockefeller ran away from this suggestion. "I have stated my positions on the questions I have posed," he said. "I invite the Vice President to state his. To do this, he does not need me to interrogate him on television...
...good gay farce that Novelist Fifield has chosen not to write. As the crystal ball clouds, the plot turns metaphysical. The countess half-believes in contact with a psychic realm that goes far beyond trickery or even telepathy. At a table-rapping seance, the countess herself is taken aback when her dead son's voice materializes. Finally, her crystal ball reveals tragedy in a bull ring, and a picador is killed...