Word: bureaucrat
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Because of the new Soviet leader's long career as chief administrator of the Central Committee and as Leonid Brezhnev's appointments secretary, many Western analysts had dismissed Chernenko as a faceless bureaucrat who would always be everyone's second choice for the job. Now he was being seen as the last-gasp leader of a gerontocracy intent on keeping the younger generation from moving too quickly into the corridors of power. Said a Western diplomat in Moscow: "If Andropov had lasted another four months, I don't think Chernenko would have made...
...Westerners who have met him are unimpressed. "He is a dullard," says Malcolm Toon, the tart-tongued former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, who met Chernenko at the SALT II talks in Vienna in 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration's National Security Adviser, remembers Chernenko as "a very cautious bureaucrat, very deferential to Brezhnev, not forceful, not dynamic." The fact that Chernenko was "the least competent, the least likely to innovate [of the contenders]," Brzezinski believes, is probably advantageous to the U.S. and perhaps for East-West relations...
...declared aspirations in politics, government, or "helping professions" technical psychology and social work). It is unfair, of course, to draw too rigid a conclusion from these broad categories. A lawyer handling small claims cases in Roxbury and a businessman bringing jobs to Detroit do more for society than a bureaucrat hiding cost overruns in the Defense Department. But the unfortunate fact is that most of us heading for the white collar service sector will work mainly to help ourselves and our socioeconomic kind...
Tens of millions have read it, in 62 languages: the story of Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat in the totalitarian state of Oceania. War with the world's two other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, is constant, although the pattern of hostilities and alliances keeps changing. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspaper stories to conform to current Party ideology. He uses the official language, Newspeak, a version of English being pared down to make unorthodox opinions impossible to conceive. Privacy has vanished. Waking and sleeping, Smith and all Party members are observed by two-way telescreens...
...before the House Budget Committee was Franklin ("Chuck") Spinney, the dogged Defense Department analyst who testified last February that weapon costs were being seriously underestimated and that the skyrocketing prices of sophisticated systems threatened to explode the military budget. At the time, the Pentagon protested that the whistle-blowing bureaucrat had ignored the effects of Reagan's cost-control initiatives. Budget Committee Chairman James R. Jones of Oklahoma consequently...