Word: defeating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...displayed the good loser's grace under pressure and sheer joy in struggle. "I am a little beat up," he reported after a serious air crash in 1954, "but I assure you it is only temporary." Overall, he may have lacked the truly good loser's ability to anticipate defeat and keep alternate courses open...
...some ways, politicians do this better than other losers, perhaps because they can plan ahead in multi-annual cycles. Nixon's switch from defeat to law to renomination is a case in point. In his years of political exile between the wars, Winston Churchill distracted himself from defeat by tapping a wide range of other interests: painting, bricklaying, authorship and breeding butterflies. At the same time, he never once doubted his capacity to lead the nation...
Unsuccessful presidential candidates often achieve high status in other careers, as did John W. Davis, the Democrat who lost to Coolidge in 1924 and is remembered as one of the country's top constitutional lawyers. Thomas E. Dewey twice survived defeat in the presidential race to resume a prosperous career in the law. Instead of berating the man who beat him, Wendell Willkie went on a global fact-finding mission for F.D.R. After losing the Democratic nomination to John F. Kennedy in 1 Adlai Stevenson gracefully became Kennedy's Ambassador to the U.N. Ex-President Herbert Hoover, rejected...
...many ways defeat is a better teacher than success, which often tempts winners to keep repeating the tactics that achieved their triumphs. Defeat, on the other hand, is both a humbling and a corrective process. It compels a man to examine why he lost and, beyond that, to dis cover what he has left. The great theme of Greek tragedy is the inevitability of defeat and the triumph of surviving...
...only beginning to understand that lesson. The most divisive issues of the day?the baffling war in Viet Nam, the Negro's bitter contest for his rights?take much of their heat from the national refusal to entertain the mere possibility of defeat. Why can't the world's mightiest military power vanquish a tiny and underdeveloped Asian state? Why does it suffer a humiliating act of piracy by the North Koreans? Why don't the cops just go in there and re-establish law and order...