Word: blackmail
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kennedy's compulsive womanizing is of consequence not only for what it says about his character but also because it could have made him vulnerable to blackmail. Hersh suggests that it did, but never produces convincing proof. Why did Kennedy name Johnson as his running mate, despite Robert Kennedy's distaste for Johnson? Many historians have concluded that it was pure political calculation: Johnson could deliver Texas. Hersh thinks it was blackmail. He says that during a closed-door meeting with Kennedy, Johnson may have threatened to disclose J.F.K.'s dirty laundry, though Hersh doesn't know which laundry...
What ensues is a drawn-out mess of a plot, involving seduction, blackmail and some randomly inserted surrealistic interludes featuring Wallace Shawn as the devil. Nothing in the health-care industry, Lumet asserts, is what it seems, and everyone is out to make a quick buck. That's all well and good, but with material so decidedly unenlightening, Lumet as a filmmaker should at least present it in an entertaining or thought-provoking manner. Instead, he putters along, trying to convince the audience that they are seeing something...
...have on the Middle East--and the penetrating effect it would have on the Palestinians, moderate and radical alike. Such a stance would tell the Palestinian leadership that it finally had to choose. It could no longer wink at, make tacit alliances with, periodically unleash and generally use as blackmail the terrorists in their midst. It would finally have to choose between violence and peace...
...potential is there for some form of nukenapping--grabbing weapons for ransom or nuclear blackmail--or sales to rogue states or terrorists, or unauthorized launches by renegade commanders. Some Russians even fret about a nuclear civil war. If a region in Siberia were to declare its independence, a retired senior officer in Moscow speculates, "the entire missile force in the area might cut itself off from the chain of command and control and get reprogrammed to be able to launch at will...
...view goes something like this: Beijing believes it can export whatever it wants while barring imports on any pretext it chooses. It can undercut other manufacturing nations by the use of cheap labor. It can steal ideas and ignore copyrights without much risk of retaliation. And it can essentially blackmail multinational companies into transferring jobs and technology as the price of cracking open a market of 1.2 billion people. Taken together, those practices help account for the tripling of the U.S. trade deficit with China since Clinton took office, to $40 billion a year. In 1995, Intel chief Andy Grove...