Word: apologist
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...only do I fully intend to be the greatest architect who has yet lived," Wright declared to a friend in the 1930s, "but the greatest architect who will ever live." Faced with such hubris, Secrest is ever the earnest apologist. "Few people," she writes about a similar outburst, "realized how compensatory those comments actually were." But if anyone should be excused his megalomania, it was Frank Lloyd Wright. He created dozens of masterworks, and his influence on a century of architecture is unequalled. Low-slung suburban houses, cathedral ceilings, wide-open interiors, the blurring of the indoor-outdoor distinction, office...
...taking office he promptly swore that "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went." But above all, Johnson wanted his Great Society, not a mess in Indochina. As Halberstam, hardly a Johnson apologist, explains it, "[h]e intended to secure the Kennedy legacy, prove his own worthiness to accept the torch by pushing the Kennedy legislation through Congress" and then move on to his own agenda. But "[a]ll that would take time, and for a start he wanted to hold the world...
There is, however, an important difference. Uranus is based on a novel by Marcel Ayme, not quite a Nazi apologist but by no means an oppositionist either. He wrote his book as a protest against the communist-led witch hunt for collaborators that followed the war. The film makes the case against the totalitarian intolerance of empowered Stalinism -- in French practice it often amounted to a settling of personal scores -- with persuasive force...
...admit that they shape the news to fit a liberal political agenda. His tirades against the Times even extend to making suggestions on decor: he wants the paper to take down its plaque honoring its 1930s Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, whom he accuses of being a "Pulitzer prizewinning apologist for Stalin." Another Pulitzer prizewinner on Irvine's hit list is CNN's Desert Storm superstar, Peter Arnett, who, according to Irvine, "may have done more than any other single reporter to help make Ho Chi Minh's morale-sapping strategy work." Arnett, of course, does not have a plaque...
...months leading up to the gulf war, Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed al-Mashat was Saddam Hussein's No. 1 apologist in the U.S. He appeared often on American TV, touting Baghdad's line while parrying questions from Ted Koppel and John McLaughlin. Then he vanished. Recalled to Baghdad shortly before the fighting began in mid-January, Mashat stopped first in Vienna, supposedly to seek medical treatment for his wife, and was not heard from again...