Word: driftings
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...keep their ever-ringing home phone off its hook, Dean began packing. He did so casually, since his fellow prisoner Jeb Stuart Magruder was near by, and Dean felt awkward about being released while Magruder remained confined. Then Magruder, too, was summoned to the telephone, and Dean got the drift of the conversation. He rushed up to Magruder. "Jeb, I got the same kind of phone call." The two men joyfully hugged each other...
...more than Nixon too. It's the drift over the years to an all-powerful presidency. The tremendous power that has been marshaled in the White House pervades all who work there, resulting in an inability to put things in perspective. I think one of Haldeman's lines on the tape explains it better than anything. He was talking with Nixon when things were coming apart, and he said: "It was done for a higher good...
...reached their present positions. Such theories, however, were consistently hooted down with the derision scientists so often reserve for new ideas. Wegener, who had already established a reputation as a polar explorer and meteorologist, was undaunted. After his recovery, he devoted his life to proving the theory of continental drift. In 1930 Wegener died in Greenland in a search for evidence. But other men were able to carry on where he left off. Today, with slight variations, the idea that the earth is a fragile and constantly changing planet is generally accepted by most geologists...
Sullivan builds his case for continental drift carefully, treating skeptics as fairly as he does supporters of this once controversial concept. He is clearly no believer in Immanuel Velikovsky, whose theory that cataclysmic planetary events reshaped the earth during biblical times was first scorned and then suppressed by the scientific establishment. Sullivan acknowledges modern geologists' debt to Velikovsky for forcing them to re-examine old assumptions about the earth's formation. He deals much more favorably with the late Maurice Ewing, who founded Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory and provided the theoretical basis for things like...
Sullivan's narrative does not make for casual reading. Despite its easygoing approach, Continents in Motion is a serious book. It is a disturbing one as well, for it ends on as deep a note of mystery as it begins. The theories of continental drift explain how the continents and the oceans that separate them were formed. But those theories can only hint at probable changes to come. The earth does not exist in a steady state; the forces that gave the planet its present topography are still at work. How they will reshape the earth or rearrange...