Word: gambler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Similarly, as the son of a professional gambler with a tragic genius for bucking a pair of aces against three deuces, California's Brown is perhaps the most cautious bet hedger in U.S. politics, rarely moves without holding a Pat hand. Running for one of the nation's biggest administrative jobs, he is a second-rate administrator with a notorious inability to make decisions. "He has limitless energy in meeting people but not the energy to cope with issues," says a top California Democrat. Adds a close friend lamely: "While...
Fifteen-year old Anthony ("writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool ... onlooker at his own ruin") spies Christine ("white tennis costume... dove gray fur jacket ... full of fun") in a tea-room, launching 18 years of unrequited love...
They meet again nearly two decades later amid the summer languors of the Riviera. Life has been rough. The adult Anthony is now a "writer, artist, translator, hack; gambler, sensualist, fool," and more importantly, has become an "onlooker at his own ruin." Cursed with a slim annuity adequate for subsistence but not for pleasure, he has slowly lowered himself into squalor "as by a rope." Christiane's failures have paced his own: two unsuccessful marriages (one to a South American millionaire, the other to a German industrialist) and a scandal of a perversity startling even to Paris...
Nasser the gambler has ever been ready to summon Russian help, which he thinks he is skillfully using without being used. It is a dangerous game he plays, and all the odds are against his winning in the end. Last week as the Russians practically smothered him with their kind of help-U.N. vetoes, hints of "volunteers," anti-Western Moscow demonstrations, threats of war-Nasser visibly fought shy of the Russian embrace. Here was a man who spread, and could continue to spread, lies and hatred of the West, but the paradox of an infinitely complicated situation was that...
...gambler in a hurry, Nasser has missed few tricks in conspiracy and demagoguery. Every sleazy political fugitive in Asia and Africa finds a place on his international bandwagon. He has so far converted Islam into his personal political instrument that the Nasser-appointed rector of Cairo's 1,000-year-old Al Azhar University, who is the nearest thing to a Moslem pope, seems to spend much of his time looking up Koranic passages to justify Nasser's policies. Nasser's hold on the Arab unity movement is further tightened by some 3,000 Egyptian schoolteachers...