Word: exampleâ
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...Erikson detected a "shrewdness [that] seemed to join his capacity to focus on the infinite meaning in finite things?a trait which is often associated with the attribution of sainthood." The rule that great leaders are summoned forth by great issues can be persuasively argued from, say, the Churchillian example???a brilliant, irascible aristocrat who was settling into a relatively unsuccessful old age when the war called him forth to embody a people's grand defiance...
...perhaps only Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt played comparable roles in profound crises that threatened the very survival of the society. But the phenomenon is wholly unpredictable; there have been numerous upheavals in human history?the medieval plagues in Europe, for example???in which the event did not summon a savior. Ireland's eternal troubles illustrate history's frequent refusal to beckon a great leader with...
...generally operated on the theory of a laissez-faire of merit. Despite its injustices?the disastrous schooling of the poor, for example???the diverse system has remained sufficiently open to allow leadership to rise from nearly every rank of the society. In fact, the WASP establishment has long wondered what went wrong, how it lost control to the coarse ethnic heirs of Jacksonianism. The dispossessed of American life are to be found in The Education of Henry Adams as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm...
...course, the middle public sometimes gets worked up too, but having more interest in preserving than in changing its way of life, it does not so much embrace causes as nurture discontent. When so wide a public feels frustrated?by inflation, for example???its collective fury is greatly feared by politicians. Since it has not paid attention to issues and details, it can be sweeping and unselective in its revenge, throwing out incumbents?competent and corrupt alike...
What politicians call "the Kennedy thing" is a psychological compound of iridescent myth and charisma, excitement and guilt, admiration and sometimes a morbid voyeurism. Even the blandest men in power?William Mc-Kinley, for example???can draw a maniac's fire. But the Kennedys are freighted with American legend and invite the passionate involvement of strangers. It shows in the grimy and lonely attention of people who have carved away pieces of the Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick for souvenirs, or those who have taken to the Kennedy Center like locusts, swiping prisms from the chandeliers, bits of the wall coverings...