Word: bureaucrat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TWENTY-FIVE years, Richard Adams was a bureaucrat in Great Britain's Ministry for Housing and Local Government, mediating between federal housing policy and local sensibilities. This strong dose of reality perhaps explains the difference between England's two most famous modern fantasies-Watership Down and J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkein, a professor of English, invented a whole mythological world for his fairy-tale creatures to inhabit; they in turn, are more concerned with forces of good and evil than with practical necessities like food, clothing, and shieter. Adams's rabbits, on the other hand...
...great difficulty in being an administrator's son is that you see the men and women of the administration as individuals and not as stereotypes. This is not necessarily a problem when the words "administrator" or "bureaucrat" carry some connotations of dignity, or are, at least, neutral descriptions of occupational roles. Unfortunately, administrators and bureaucrats have fallen into general disrepute of late (much of it well-deserved), and the term "bureaucrat" has become positively pejorative. In the post-Watergate era, it is easy to understand why the image of the self-serving, over-cautious, callous, and arrogant bureaucrat has become...
...unpack it for three days and nights. He stayed right there working round the clock on a program to help save the food processors, some of whom sat in the office with him. They were frightened, humbled men. In the streets wherever Fortas walked were hungry, helpless people. No bureaucrat escaped the spectacle of despair...
...cafe fronting Rio's Copacabana, a French bureaucrat from Aerospatiale, sipping Campari and soda on the rocks, extols the virtues of the Exocet missile to a cadre of entranced Brazilian admirals. In a Persian Gulf capital, a U.S. military attache prepares a top-secret memo listing the weaknesses of the host country's armed forces. In the lobby of a Zurich hotel, a trader who arranges sales of slightly used rifles and mortars ?a "bedroom dealer" in the jargon of the trade?haggles softly with the representative of a Third World guerrilla movement...
...Teng Hsiao-ping, 70, the shrewd party bureaucrat who over the last year has performed many of Chou En-lai's duties, was promoted to First Vice Premier and elevated to vice-chairmanship of the Communist Party (there are five other Vice Chairmen). The appointment accelerated Teng's spectacular rise from utter disgrace during the Cultural Revolution (when he was branded "the No. 2 capitalist reader," after Lui Shao-chi) and gives him an official position that accords with the great power he wields. Many observers feel now that Teng has moved to first in line to succeed...