Word: blunter
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...latest series of French nuclear tests in the South Pacific, Australia's liberal daily the Australian declared last week, was "committed by a national leadership which displays the moral sense of a gang of street bashers." The words were blunter than most, but the sentiment was echoed around much of the world. After the French detonated their first bomb of the series two weeks ago at the lonely atoll of Mururoa, about 750 miles southeast of Tahiti, Peru broke off diplomatic relations with France. Last week 13 other nations, including Australia, Japan and Canada, sent protests to Paris...
...Letters were written to administrators, petitions were signed, and many members of the class of '72 fastened equal signs to their mortarboards. The new president of Radcliffe demanded equal admissions. Typically the powers that be capitulated and announced that a move toward equalization would begin immediately. Accordingly a larger, blunter-tongued group of women only two and a half times as smart as their Harvard counterparts settled down in Cambridge this Fall, some even in the previously all-male Yard. Only a few staid old grads lamented the sight of women-eating breakfast by themselves at, the Union...
...running mate if the Kennedy family had no objections. Shriver's wife Eunice, the most vigorous of the Kennedy sisters, was quick to set the record straight. "No," she reportedly said, "it's Bob's turn." Kennedy Aide Ken O'Donnell was even blunter. He sent word to Shriver that if any Kennedy clansman was going to run for Vice President, it would be Bobby, not "half a Kennedy." Four years later Hubert Humphrey wanted Shriver to accompany him on the Democratic ticket but turned instead to Ed Muskie, partly because, as Humphrey puts...
Right Angle. Painter Alfred Leslie is even blunter in his rejection of photographic aids. "In the 20th century," he says, "our reality comes through instrumentation. People believe things only when the things have been qualified by technology. So you can be convicted in court by a photo taken of you, even though 20 people say you were 100 miles away. This is because people feel that a photograph has more truth than personal testimony." Leslie's pictorial pragmatism is such that, for a current painting of the death of his poet friend Frank O'Hara...
...expertise. But Navasky, himself a Yale Law School graduate who taught legal research before becoming a journalist, argues that they represented "the code of Ivy League gentlemen." They revered genteel negotiation and the separation of powers even when the situation-as in dealing with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett-demanded blunter instruments. In the end, Kennedy's ranking aides were more hindrance than help in bringing innovation to the pursuit of justice...