Word: deft
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Moor's deft way with words seems to be an inheritance from his mother, whose odd way of speaking he lovingly records. Here she instructs an artist to paint her children's nursery with episodes drawn from Hollywood cartoons: "Give me boulders that only temporarily flattofy you when they drop down on your head, bombs that give black faces only, and running-over-empty-air-until-you-looko down. Give me knottofied-up rifle barrels, and bathfuls of big gold coins. Never mind about harps and angels, forget all those stinking gardens; for my kiddies, this is the Paradise...
...First Lady in modern politics -- on a day when a Senate committee was grilling one of her former Little Rock legal colleagues about Mrs. Clinton's Whitewater work -- he went the reporter one better, saying his wife was the most controversial First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. It was a deft and flattering reference to a First Lady who was famous for her blunt candor and who was harshly criticized for her unusually high visibility during FDR's administration. As for the budget, Clinton said that if congressional Republicans would only put off resolving key policy differences on Medicare, Medicaid...
...constitutional and legal crisis" between the branches if Rubin continues to jigger the federal books without congressional approval. So far, the Treasury Secretary has foiled the G.O.P., which has refused to raise the federal debt limit until it gets a budget deal, by making a series of deft accounting moves that have kept the debt just under the authorized ceiling of $4.9 trillion...
...huge cast of good actors, James Woods stands out as steely Bob Haldeman, and Joan Allen suggests in deft brush strokes a Pat Nixon condemned to stand by her ungiving man. Hopkins, though, is a failure. He finds neither the timber of Nixon's plummy baritone, with its wonderfully false attempts at intimacy, nor the stature of a career climber who, with raw hands, scaled the mountain and was still not high or big enough...
...gamesmanship led him to the New York Times. His first job: correspondent during the London blitz. He went on to win a Pulitzer chronicling the birth of the U.N. and, in 1953, became the paper's Washington bureau chief. As a thrice-weekly columnist, he gained fame for his deft prose, solid reporting and enviable access, but the latter often came at a price. In 1961, at President John F. Kennedy's request, he withheld what he knew of plans involving an obscure Cuban inlet called the Bay of Pigs. Reston later helped nurture the Times's op-ed page...