Word: careerist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...drives at the expense of their unquestioned professional skill, he is at pains not to take explicit sides. Clearly Talese does not care for Daniel. Yet the book's main characters, Reston and Daniel, are not hero and villain but nearly equal protagonists. Daniel is shown as a careerist who cultivates worldly graces and helpful grandees. Against that, the reader can balance Reston's less blatant but equally tenacious ambition, and his curious notion that what is good for Reston and the Times is good for the U.S. as well. This peculiar confusion of allegiances, Talese suggests...
...volunteer armed force would seem to have something for everybody. For the Pentagon, it would provide a careerist body of men staying in the ranks long enough to learn their jobs and do them well; as it is, 93% of drafted soldiers leave the service when their two-year tour of duty ends. For constitutionalists, a volunteer army would affirm the principle that free men should not be forced into involuntary servitude in violation of the 13th Amendment. For philosophers, it would restore freedom of choice; if a man wants to be a soldier...
Nixon has also addressed himself to the possibility that a careerist army might become a seedbed for future military coups. That danger is probably inherent in any military force, but, as the President-elect points out, a coup would necessarily come from "the top officer ranks, not from the enlisted ranks, and we already have a career-officer corps. It is hard to see how replacing draftees with volunteers would make officers more influential." Nixon might have added that conscript armies have seldom proved any barrier to military coups. Greece's army is made up of conscripts...
Irksome though he finds it to be party to such legerdemain, Fannie Mae's taciturn president, J. Stanley Baughman, explains simply: "We do what we have to do." Pittsburgh-born Baughman, an up-through-the-ranks federal careerist since 1933, made his mark among mortgage men by turning the depression-born Home Owners' Loan Corp. from a money loser into a profit maker. Taking over Fannie Mae in 1950, he tightened up loose operating procedures, chopped his staff while the work load doubled, won a reputation as an administrator who could say no without ruffling too many tempers...
After 24 years as a State Department careerist, Mann, 53, intends to take a long rest and write a book. If it .resembles his career, the book should be hard-hitting, controversial and influential...