Word: fingertip
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Contact by Fingertip. Unruffled by all of this political sniping, Magsaysay took off for a Sunday plunge into the provinces, where his popularity is untouchable. Leaving Malacanan Palace at 6 a.m., he sped north into Tarlac province. Wherever a group of Filipinos had gathered along the roadside to wave and cheer, Magsaysay stuck out his hand and Filipinos would reach out and fleetingly brush his fingertips. Their faces lighted up at the contact; so did his. Whenever the crowd was as big as 200, Magsaysay popped out to shake everybody's hand, then walked down the road...
...Fingertip Understanding. A far more significant achievement was his success in winning the confidence of U.N. delegates in hundreds of quiet sessions in his spick, pine-paneled office on the 38th floor of the U.N. Building. He absorbed the opinions and aspirations of delegate after delegate with a clear-eyed sympathy that rapidly earned him a reputation for brilliance, discretion and impartiality. Hammarskjold does not pretend to be impartial at heart ("You love some things and you loathe others"), but he does his best to bring to his job the objectivity of a good historian. "The public," says he, "never...
...time, Hammarskjold has become one of two men who really have fingertip understanding of the entire U.N. (The other: his executive assistant, Andrew Cordier, a husky, onetime professor from Indiana who has been described as "a Wallace Beery with brains.") Wisely, Hammarskjold never employed too nakedly this power. "If I think a man is being foolish," he says, "I may have to tell him. But I can't, as you say, blow my top. I have to be frank, but without heat...
...that it is some kind of clandestine wedding between Nordic melancholy and Parisian pornography, he admits, comes close to truth. "For . . . there is in existentialism a shocking sensualism, an erotic realism, a tearful and throbbing meeting of skin against skin, which, so characteristically French, appreciates propinquity of heart and fingertip." At the same time existentialism contains "a sentiment of constantly living over cracking earth, or at the foot of live volcanos, or in a land where people fight two wars in every lifetime...
...raised in China for the first ten years of his life, conjures up the flowering mists, brooding mountain masses and gorge-shadowed surfaces of the Yangtze as if from a child's vivid book of memories. Equally vivid and enlightening is the image of two cultures once fingertip close in friendship, destined by later history to draw back and ball their fists in sad and bitter enmity...