Word: backrooms
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...Irritation. But behind the Soviet smiles, irritation was rising. The British diplomats and political backroom experts who had urged Macmillan to go to Moscow had done so on the basis of a fatally naive and condescending assumption. Sublimely convinced that no diplomats in the world are as smooth as British diplomats, Macmillan's advisers seriously thought that Khrushchev might somehow be persuaded, three months before a showdown date he himself had set, to take the urgency out of a crisis Khrushchev had deliberately provoked to try the free world's nerve...
...thing about me, that is, that the one thing I want to do is my job. Some are always writing that I'm a back-room operator. They say I'm sensitive. How would you like your little daughter to read that you are a 'backroom operator,' a 'wirepuller' or a 'clever man'?" Again and again comes the complaint: "People don't understand ..." But his wife Lady Bird* does. Says she: "He is the most complicated, yet the simplest of men, and sometimes a really sad fellow...
...helped bring about integration in the parks, playgrounds, theaters and other public places of the nation's capital. A Justice Department brief helped persuade the Interstate Commerce Commission to outlaw segregation on interstate trains and buses. Brownell invited Southern transportation-company heads to Washington for behind-the-scenes (backroom) conferences about transit segregation in their cities. Result: more than 20 Southern communities have killed Jim Crow without fuss or fanfare...
...Stevenson was the daring young man on a political trapeze; in 1956 he has too often sounded like a prematurely elder statesman. In 1952 the backroom boys eyed him skeptically; now he has been maneuvered into the role of Democratic regular, identified with the record of indecision, inertia and total surrender compiled by Democratic Senate Leader Lyndon Johnson. On matters ranging from civil rights to the gas giveaway, Stevenson lowered his voice to the point of inaudibility; the effectiveness of his thrusts against the Administration has been dimmed by his tacit apologia for the Democratic record...
...where a housekeeper takes care of his two youngest children in a new house he has rented (no central heat, no bath, meals in the kitchen), the town elders glance up from their cards and shrug: "It's only Pierrot." But his organization men, waiting in the backroom, are excited and cordial, report happily of hundreds of new dues-paying members since election, listen while Poujade regales them with a bit of gossip from the big city and a lot of Poujade propaganda...