Word: awkwardnesses
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...White House by the elective process since Martin Van Buren turned the trick in 1836. Humphrey is undismayed. Despite his relationship with Lyndon Johnson and his manful attempt to avoid the lassitude of his office, Humphrey inevitably found the vice-presidency frustrating and confining. "One of the most awkward offices ever created by the hand of man," he said once. "It is an unnatural role for an active politician...
...Offensive. One way or another, through a negotiated peace or a phased U.S. withdrawal, Abe Abrams will likely also be the man who presides over the end of the massive American presence in South Viet Nam. But for now, he must prepare to take over in that awkward age of wars, when negotiations seem about to begin and no one can know when or where they will end. In preparation for talks and bargaining stances, both sides are drawing up as favorable balance sheets as they can on where the war stands today...
Economics, diplomacy, statecraft, teaching, autobiography, satire and book reviewing are areas on which John Kenneth Galbraith has imposed his imperious rationality (TIME cover, Feb. 16). The Triumph, his first novel, is one of his less successful impositions. Strictly speaking, it is not a novel at all; it is an awkward attempt to put a fictional frame around a critique of U.S. foreign policy, which Galbraith feels is based on an indiscriminate fear of Communism. His characters are hardly more than clothespins colored to represent bureaucratic types. His locale is Puerto Santos, a banana republic where a moderate liberal ousts...
...also much, much more than this. It is a menace to us and to the entire world, free and chained alike. Consumed by an inner hunger, this grotesque shadow of his dedicated and martyred brother aspires to our highest office, the earth's most awesome responsibility. An awkward, ungainly member of an attractive family, he nevertheless generates a perverse sort of magnetism and hypnotism on those who have forgotten or never knew. Obsessed yet pitiful, cynical yet credulous, intense yet coy, this distorted Kennedy may succeed in his warped crusade, but if he wins, we shall all lose...
Without a solid physical structure to support it, the Lowell House production gambles all on the writing, and loses. The play itself bears little resemblance to anything one associates with the dramatic. Bogged down in an awkward effort to tie the plot to some unclear philosophical scheme, the first act is smothered to death by an endless procession of ponderous lines loaded with unsubtle metaphysical overtones. The story and even the identity of some of the characters remain pretty much in the dark. The dialogue, such as it is, is so poorly organized that each scene can produce little more...