Word: errand
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Both Lucas and Considine reported that MacArthur was disappointed in Dwight Eisenhower, whom he described as "once a man of integrity." General George Marshall, who was Secretary of Defense during the Korean War, was "the errand boy of the State Department." General Matthew Ridgway, who took over command of United Nations forces after MacArthur's dismissal, was a "chameleon," who "did a complete flip-flop in 24 hours" when he discovered that Washington opposed Mac-Arthur's war strategy. General Maxwell Taylor was "an ambitious man who will never do anything to jeopardize his career...
Anyone who discusses Perry Miller and his work, it seems, turns sooner or later to his metaphor of the New England "errand run into the wilderness"; it fits the man almost as well as his material. Miller himself used the phrase to describe the Messianic impulse which characterized colonial America. His friends and colleagues, contributors to this memorial issue of The Harvard Review, employ it to catch something of the impression he made...
...errand into the scholarship of American history was perhaps as finally ambiguous as the earlier Puritan one, but it shared the same energy, and it expressed itself in a series of irreplacable books. Miller's abrupt inspiration on the banks of the Congo in 1926, what he called a "sudden epiphany," moved him--drove him, really--toward a surpassingly profound re-definition of the elusive American mind. In the process, in his New England "laboratory," he began to work out his own technique for the study of the history of ideas. As the legend grows, what he achieved...
Donald Fleming also takes up the theme of Miller's errand in "Perry Miller and Esoteric History." His first sentence strikes close to the heart of "the method": "The unmistakable impulse at work in all of Perry Miller's writing is his determination to get beneath the surface of his materials and reveal an esoteric pattern." One may quarrel with Fleming's word "esoteric," but there is no denying the accuracy of his insight; it was no private reality that Miller pursued, however, simply a difficult one. His remarkable announcement that all of Jonathan Edwards must be read...
...Admiration. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson tapped Mansfield as assistant Senate majority leader. Because Johnson was really his own whip, he needed nothing more than an agreeable errand boy, and Mansfield seemed to fit the bill. Mansfield accepted-but reluctantly, and only out of his personal admiration for Johnson (he supported L.B.J. against Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination...