Word: fecklessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SOME CAN WHISTLE by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). Some of McMurtry's good books, like Terms of Endearment, have been turned into good movies. Alas, this novel, about a feckless millionaire TV writer discovering his daughter from a long-ago marriage, is not a good book. Wait for the inevitable screen adaptation...
...scandal is Samuel Pierce, Reagan's HUD Secretary. Though Pierce was the only black to serve in Reagan's Cabinet -- and its only member to remain in office throughout both Reagan terms -- the former President once greeted him as "Mr. Mayor" at a conference of mayors. Under Pierce's feckless leadership, HUD's budget was pared 70% (it stands at $14.9 billion for 1989). Little was done to halt a decline in the nation's inventory of low- income housing, from which 4.5 million units have disappeared since 1973. Critics charge that programs were dismantled, talented staffers were fired...
...long way toward defusing the anti- Americanism that has been an obstacle to U.S. policy in Latin America. But he paid a heavy price at home. The "giveaway" increased Carter's vulnerability on the right and softened him up for his eventual defeat in 1980. Last year's feckless attempt to oust Manuel Antonio Noriega turned into one of the fiascoes of the Reagan Administration...
...through a thick package of legislation that would trim the state's tangled bureaucracy, reorganize its disastrous finances and launch an ambitious program of educational reform. The measures were ramrodded into law by rookie Democratic Governor Gaston Caperton, 49, a man who is determined to upend the state's feckless political tradition and sell mountaineers something they haven't had in decades: hope...
...real focus of last week's rescue effort was not the would-be Defense Secretary but the President himself. Determined not to retreat in their first showdown with Congress -- and no less determined to squelch the spreading impression that Bush is off to a feckless start -- the President and his aides shifted their goal from saving Tower's nomination to tarring the Democrats with charges of character assassination and hypocrisy. Positioning themselves for the inevitable future battles over the budget and foreign policy, the Republicans hoped to rescue something from the wreckage of the Tower affair by lowering Congress...