Word: bureaucrat
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...give him away. Sensible policy. In Budapest's City Park one day in 1943, a little girl turned to him and said, "Jesus Christ was killed by the Jews, and because of that, all the Jews will be thrown into the Danube." The child adumbrated Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who months later took charge of the deportation and extermination of Hungarian Jews...
...take several hours to be admitted to the domain of Pakistan's Home Secretary for Baluchistan, the all-powerful and mercurial bureaucrat who decides which journalists are permitted to travel to the Afghan border. Along with two French photographers, I was finally allowed into his office. We weren't the only ones: aid workers, Japanese and Lebanese journalists, a senior civil servant from Islamabad, and a few tribal elders were all waiting, too. All of us were sitting in straight-backed chairs along the wall like humble supplicants in an Ottoman court, while the Home Secretary, Azmat Hanif Orakzai, fielded...
...inkling during my sophomore year in Historical Studies A-13: “China.” I don’t remember what material was discussed in the section devoted to bias in history; perhaps the journals of a court eunuch, a low-level bureaucrat or a scholar frustrated by failure in the exams. In any case, it was quickly resolved that all the sources before us were biased, fundamentally so. I remember feeling surprise at how easily 20-year-old students—many of whom had never taken a college-level history class—disposed...
...stationed as a journalist in Beijing in the late 1980s, I was stunned by how citizens still viewed non-Chinese as exotic, often frightening creatures. When I visited the northern city of Hengshui, one of what were then hundreds of areas officially "closed" to foreigners, a local bureaucrat seized my shortwave radio from my hotel room, examining it to ensure that it wasn't a two-way spy communications device. A memo accidentally left behind in my room instructed officials to "politely refuse any request Mr. Ignatius may have to leave the hotel." Suspicion of the outside was deeply ingrained...
...Across the Atlantic, the FBI waited. In Philadelphia a low-level bureaucrat named Richard DiBenedetto dangled, weightless with anticipation. For 16 years, across five countries, the Philadelphia district attorney's fugitive-and-extradition chief had hunted the man called Mallon with an obsession that would have impressed Captain Ahab. His name was not Eugene Mallon, as he had conned the French villagers into believing. Nor was he a British writer who had settled in remotest France for quiet inspiration. He was an American fugitive named Ira Einhorn, a man who had risen to fame during the late 1960s and early...