Word: earnestness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When he was offered a place on the House Un-American Activities Committee, earnest Dick Nixon had quite a wrestle with himself. On such occasions, he paces up & down, lights one cigarette after another, talks to the ceiling, suddenly whirls around as if he were trying to catch his problem unawares with a new grip. The committee's reputation was low. Its chairman was J. Parnell Thomas, eventually to be indicted and jailed for fraud. Nixon's friend and fellow Congressman, California's Donald Jackson, recalls how Nixon came into his office and started pacing. "He felt...
...daughters (Patricia, 6, and Julie, 4) a picnic on a hot day, they wound up in his air-conditioned Senate office. Nixon just misses being handsome (he has fat cheeks and a duckbill nose), but he is what women call "nice-looking"; he gives an impression of earnest freshness...
...considered as a debate between the parties, the Democrats came out ahead. Backward-looking though their line was, it was coherent, consistent and easy for the voter to understand. But the Republicans were not really arguing with the Democrats; the Republicans were arguing with each other. In the deeply earnest conflict over political principle that raged at the Republican Convention, it was expedient for both sides to sound as conservative as possible, and, as a result, the party as a whole sounded far more conservative than...
Then negotiations began in earnest. Left alone, the two parties had all but reached agreement when Truman summoned Murray and Fairless to the White House...
Where Vittorini excels is in matters that are more real than romantic. He brings to life the hostel in which Mainardi and his fellow boarders eat, sleep, gossip, quarrel, and exchange adolescent dogma on everything from Homer to modern politics. He gets down pat the earnest remarks that bubble from sophomoric lips ("I absolutely agree with the ancient Greeks"). He knows how hard it is for any boy to keep a secret, and how the fears and fond hopes of a father and mother cling like leeches to a boy's guilty skin. He knows just how rumor rules...