Word: avuncularity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...little trombone and tennis on the side. Most Enron employees didn't know who he was until relatively recently. As head of Enron Capital Management--his job in 1997 and '98, when he was named CFO--he wielded his power across a very narrow band. In contrast to the avuncular Lay and the brilliant Skilling, Fastow was a PowerPoint executive whose number-crunching talent far exceeded his managerial and people skills. Indeed, when Fastow was charged with running an actual business--he was named managing director of Enron Energy Services in 1996--he botched it, and Skilling had to reel...
Vajpayee doesn't much believe it, though. He suspects the crackdown Musharraf has begun on the terrorists will prove merely cosmetic. So he too has made a sharp shift, throwing off his almost avuncular detachment to launch a scary game of military brinkmanship. Pride and domestic politics lie behind that stroke; his party is facing an important state election, and the hard line he has adopted may help at the polls. But Vajpayee also owns a taste for boldness that he has demonstrated before. In 1998 he was the Prime Minister who ordered the atom-bomb tests that made India...
Then came the attacks of Sept. 11. In the view of many experts on terrorism, it was al-Zawahiri as much as bin Laden who launched them. Placid looking, almost avuncular--especially for a man who has been sentenced to death in absentia by the Egyptians--al-Zawahiri, 50, is by choice a less visible symbol of terror than bin Laden. Three years ago, at a small press conference in the Afghan city of Khost, bin Laden announced the formation of the World Islamic Front for the Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, an umbrella group of radicals from across...
...that's what Thompson's job has become, and the confusing and sometimes conflicting information coming out of Washington has caused some who remember the avuncular and authoritative former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop to wince. "There has been a breakdown in the public-diplomacy aspect of [the bioterrorism] issue," says Elisa Harris, a veteran of the Clinton Administration's National Security Council. "What's needed is a constant, calming presence...
...chamber known for its self-impressed, vacuum-packed politicians, the avuncular Hastert has some natural advantages. Raised in northern Illinois, where he grew up on a farm, he's lived virtually all of his 59 years in his sprawling commuter district west of Chicago, which also includes Ronald Reagan's hometown. Heavyset and rumpled, Hastert looks a little like comedian Drew Carey. In public his staff addresses him as Mr. Speaker, but in private he prefers that they simply call him Denny. He shuns the Beltway talk-show-and-cocktail circuit and, at the end of the week, usually catches...