Word: briens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ireland's representative to United Nations discussions of Palestinian refugees, Conor Cruise O'Brien sat between Israel and Iraq. That was 30 years ago, and the refugee problem, once bad enough, has grown worse than anyone would have imagined. O'Brien, a former member of the Irish parliament and ex- editor in chief of the Observer of London, now suggests that a solution to Middle East anguish may not even be possible. That so bleak a view is the basis for so enlightening a book can be attributed to the author's capabilities as a historian, journalist and political analyst...
...nearly 2,000 years a dispersed people kept telling one another, "Next year in Jerusalem." That turned out to be 1948, the year Israel actually became the autonomous homeland of the Jews. It is an oft-told story and one that is usually orchestrated for axes and grindstones. O'Brien is diplomatic but not impartial; he accepts the rationale of Israel and its right to defend itself against surrounding enemies. He sympathizes with Palestinians who feel they have had to pay for the persecution of Europe's Jews, but also believes that the Arabs are the victims of the vanity...
Still others, O'Brien among them, find bitter ironies, particularly when the ideals of religion are made to serve the expediencies of nationalism. In the Middle East, as in the author's own Ireland, mixing God and politics has been a formula for intractability. O'Brien carefully works his way to this point, noting that rhetoric does not always reflect reality. For example, the Jewish state derives its reason for being from ancient texts that have little relationship to liberal theories about the consent of the governed. Yet Israel is a vigorous democracy. By contrast, the 1968 Palestinian National Covenant...
...walking out repeatedly on Warners to press for higher pay and protest its grueling working conditions and bumper-to-bumper production schedule. For all his fame, Cagney had little taste for Hollywood night life. He liked best the company of a permanent band of actor buddies, including Pat O'Brien, Spencer Tracy, Ralph Bellamy and Frank McHugh. In private he could be shy and gentle. O'Brien called him a "faraway fella...
...Brien complained that proposed cuts in Federal student aid programs would especially harm this state, where the survey shows 155,668 people work in private higher education. "It's not something that will affect everyone equally. It will affect Massachusetts more," he said of the measure's nationwide impact...