Word: firsthand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...judges have theories and ideas and observations about crime, but policemen know. Because they are just ordinary men, the burden of knowledge generally makes them clannish, somewhat smug and unusually prone to divorce and suicide. In the case of Joseph Wambaugh, a sergeant in the Los Angeles police department, firsthand knowledge has led to a workmanlike first novel, short on nuance, but notably convincing. It follows three L.A.P.D. rookies through five years on the force, climaxing in the terrorized disorder of the police effort to contain the 1965 Watts riot...
...unexpected impact of Muskie's election-eve telecast in November had caused his strategists to take advantage of his early visibility and move up the long-scheduled tour by several months. The trip is also meant to build credits for him as a potential statesman, give him a firsthand feel for basic world problems and permit him to meet several world leaders...
...family letter addressed to her son Aymar, the only survivor of the seven children she had borne. With wit and unsentimental precision she recollected the exact details of a world that had vanished as if it never existed. What delights today's reader, though, is less the firsthand history (from the 1770s until Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815) than the self-portrait that slowly emerges. The Memoirs finally trace a cameo profile of aristocracy viewed from its better side and well deserving of the definition "grace under pressure...
Chicago's changeable weather poses other problems. Mrs. Terri D'Ancone, for example, lounges abed mornings until Husband Alfie returns from walking the family poodle and brings a firsthand, down-to-earth weather report. Other tenants rely on radio weathermen or phone for a taped rundown. The height itself worries few tenants; no acrophobe would ever think of moving in. Curtains are not really necessary, although residents use them simply to produce a sense of intimacy or to screen out the early-morning sun. One female tenant, flinging open her curtains one morning before donning a robe, confronted...
That argument by itself is a miserable failure. Student organizations, Harvard personnel offices, and underground journals are not engaged firsthand in the manufacture of public policy. The DAS, on the other hand, conducts cabinet-level activity in five underdeveloped countries. Unless one adheres to the memoir theory of history, which deems it permissible for top-level government decisions to be made in secret only to have them surface years afterward in the form of personal remembrances, then it is difficult to regard the DAS' reticence with anything but skepticism or distrust...