Word: elan
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...current economy cuts began. The Bureau of the Budget has excellent esprit, mostly because it has many jobs in the higher pay grades and advancement comes quickly. The status of chiefs can be important. At the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which attracts a high proportion of idealists, elan plummeted when it became obvious that the Administration was cool to the goals of many department officials...
...conventional politics. Summer started, school ended, and predictably most of the student volunteers have forsaken figurative for littoral beaches. But those who remain are hard at work registering voters, gathering petitions, computerizing, analyzing their mistakes in the spring primaries, interested in winning on the issues rather than losing with elan. Their principal goal in November is to elect a Congress that will end the Viet Nam War and turn the nation's attention and efforts to the achievement of racial reconciliation, a better environment, the restoration of the cities and similar social issues...
...Lost Elan. John W. Gardner's essay is the bridge book to the past. It comes closest to the old American liberal attitude of decent expectation. Yet the title clearly implies that a vital national elan has been lost−and must be found again before the American dream may be further pursued. In fact, the slightly retreating titles of Mr. Gardner's previous books reflect the pressure of the times. From the absolute of Excellence (1961) he has strategically withdrawn to Self-Renewal (1964), No Easy Victories (1968), and now The Recovery of Confidence...
...sure, Le Clézio asks big questions, such as What is Life? with an earnest lyric gift. At times he captures the bubble-like transiency of youth with touching Gallic elan ("Who wrote 'I love you' on a cigarette paper and then smoked it? Who picked a flower and put it in a glass of water? Who ate a vanilla ice on September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour?"). He is also adept at playing those "In" games...
...Awful Choice." The McCarthys are the newest national political family in the race, but they have come on with elan. Abigail McCarthy, 53, a matronly former schoolteacher, is as independent-minded as her husband. Though plagued by virus attacks earlier this spring and then by gallstone trouble, she has stumped valiantly through all the primary states, frequently on heavy schedules of her own. Even so, she candidly admits that she did not want Gene to run for President. "But I have an awfully bad record," she adds. "When he decided to run for Congress, I thought it was nice being...