Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Little Intrigue." A farmer's son with a small-town (Marne, Mich.) background, Cole joined the company 37 years ago, when he signed on for an engineering training program. One of G.M.'s brightest tinkerers, Cole was marked as a comer in 1952 when he was asked to fire up the then dowdy Chevrolet division. In a bare 15 weeks, he developed a lighter, snappier engine that he coyly boasted had "a little intrigue." It had enough to spur a new burst of sales, and four years later Cole was head of the division...
Surprising Guts. The campaign meanwhile has been slipping farther into irrelevance. While Stokes gibes at Taft for his monied background, Taft has hardly uplifted the campaign by harping on "carpetbagger" donations to Stokes from "people like Sammy Davis Jr." Nevertheless, the guttersniping has rebounded in Taft's favor, unstarching his early do-gooder image and unlimbering his political muscle. His record as a civil rights advocate is well known, and the unexpected vigor of his campaign has been impressive. "I think Stokes pushed him too far," said a Negro. "Taft has surprising guts...
...Worsts. She is just as uncompromising in her condemnations. Three years ago, while assistant curators winced in the background, she tore apart Architect Edward Durell Stone's Gallery of Modern Art stone by stone. She has panned designs for postage stamps and highway signs, and for good measure, aired her nominations for the "six worst man-made objects"-it was not such a daring list at that: Manhattan's Pan Am Building, Dali's Last Supper, the suburban builder's typical tacky house, some glass sculpture at Lincoln Center, a lamp with a violin...
...observed that a lot of guys who were idiots made millions of dollars. With my background and the confidence that I wasn't an idiot, I figured that I could do as well and get rich...
Containment by "X." Few diplomats have ever drawn on so rich a background in international affairs. From the time he joined the Foreign Service, after graduating from Princeton in 1925, Kennan shuttled from one sensitive crisis point to another. In 1933, he helped reopen the American embassy in Moscow, stayed on through the savage purges that soon followed and thus received, as he writes, "a liberal education in the horrors of Stalinism." He arrived in Prague on Sept. 29, 1938, the day of the Munich Conference. He was in Berlin from 1939 until Pearl Harbor, when the Nazis interned...