Word: apartness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that they are a study in contrasts is to put it most mildly. The two leaders are of comparable age. Reagan will turn 73 in February; Andropov will be 70 in June. Apart from having their fingers on the nuclear button, they share one other similarity: Reagan has never been inside the Communist world and Andropov has never been outside it. Otherwise, they differ in almost every...
...apart from what top Kremlin officials may say in public, the question remains: What are the Soviets really thinking? Though no definitive answer is possible, some U.S. experts believe that key Soviet military strategists consider a nuclear war "winnable." "What is most disturbing about what we observe from the Soviet command . . . system," Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle testified before a House committee, "is that it looks to us like one that proceeds from the belief that nuclear war could be fought...
...training and tradition, the U.S. Marines prefer going over the top to hunkering down in the trenches. Their indifference to digging in may have proved fatal, however, when a terrorist truck bomb blew apart Marine headquarters in Beirut on Oct. 23, killing 241 men. So concluded a highly critical report last week by the Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. The hawkish subcommittee, in a document approved by a vote of 9 to 3, charged the Marines with slack security and inadequate intelligence gathering, and accused the entire military chain of command of "very serious errors in judgment...
...white America, a black man's otherness is stamped indelibly on his face. Whether he runs the 100-meter dash or runs for President, whether he orates like Martin Luther King Jr. or drawls like Stepin Fetchit, his color sets him apart. For him the American melting pot can sear faster than it assimilates. And so he looks to his roots, finding solace in soul, while fixing an eye on the main chance of upward mobility. His tragedy is that, in both worlds, he may end up a stranger...
...great democracies cannot long tolerate such a void. In stable polities the most powerful forces, those that make for stability in the first place are centripetal. When the major parties pull apart, the political system, abhorring a vacuum, throws up a centrist alternative. In Britain, when the Tories' heart went hard and Labor's head went soft, a Social Democratic Party was born and quickly achieved remarkable strength. The S.D.P., however, had the advantage of being able to coalesce around the nidus of a small, old, still breathing third party, the Liberals. The U.S. is less hospitable...