Word: ascent
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...MEANS OF ASCENT by Robert A. Caro; Knopf; 506 pages...
...state of Israel since the years immediately after its founding in 1948. Last year 12,923 arrived from the Soviet Union; this year the government expects between 70,000 and 100,000, and some Israeli officials estimate that up to 700,000 Soviet Jews might make aliyah, the "ascent" to Israel, over the next three to five years. The prospect fills Israeli leaders with joy: immigration has slumped, and in some recent years it has been equaled and possibly surpassed by emigration. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir spoke for many of his fellow right-wing politicians when he said, "Big immigration...
Last week Volume II, Means of Ascent, began to run in the New Yorker. The excerpt details a shameless pattern of deceit in L.B.J.'s early career. Among the juicier disclosures is how Johnson, as a noncombatant in World War II, was able to parlay 13 minutes under enemy fire into a Silver Star, which he then had repeatedly presented to himself at public ceremonies. Alice Glass, who according to Caro was Johnson's mistress as well as the lover of one of his most influential supporters, had a more realistic view of Lyndon's war. "I can write...
Contestants in the hero game had to produce results to keep their wealthy backers interested, and Herbert makes it clear that Peary feigned a "farthest north" record at about the time Cook, astonishingly, was counterfeiting a first ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley). To what degree Peary admitted to himself that he was a fraud is unknown. So is the extent to which Matthew Henson, his unswerving black assistant, understood the fudging. Herbert writes sympathetically of all these voyagers, whose real accomplishments were extraordinary. They were married to the Arctic, and perhaps the truth of the matter was that if they...
Khomeini's ascent to power worked a remarkable change in a man who had once seemed a gentle, if extraordinarily zealous, cleric. During the upheaval that toppled the Shah, Khomeini urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn...