Word: gavin
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...nearly childlike smile needs no words to help it unfold the character's frail tenderness. Olympia Dukakis, as the maid who is at one point compared to a walrus and who never travels without her goldfish, often squawks excellently, although her accent seems queasy. Her face is powerful. Richard Gavin plays the nephew with grace, youth, and a good balance of strength and weakness; he makes an effective contrast to the old judge, played by the director. Ree Christiansen, the fierce sister, screws her icy nerves up so tightly that it is nearly distracting wondering whether she will break...
...Genial Manager." It was Lyndon Johnson's swift pencil that complicated the Gavin mess, since Gavin's fundamental reason for quitting-his failure to arouse sympathy for the Army's cause-was stuffed in at the end of the press statement. To make the mess messier, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker next day called a press conference to explain how it all started. Before Christmas, when Gavin sent word around that he planned to retire, Brucker called him into his office. "I urged General Gavin to be patient," explained Brucker in the tones of a genial office manager...
...bargained on, as Secretary Brucker told it, with West Pointer Gavin holding out for the Continental Army Command assignment, an anguished Brucker pleading that Gavin should at least stay on in his present job. At length Gavin promised to "reconsider," for despite his personal ambitions, he still felt strongly for the Army's cause...
...dawned on Lyndon Johnson's subcommittee that Johnson's statements plus Brucker's account of bargaining with one of his generals over a duty assignment had indeed done an injustice to the record of a distinguished soldier. Back to Capitol Hill next day went Jim Gavin for another run-through before the committee and another press statement. Said Gavin: "I can do better for the Army outside than in. I have no ax to grind. I am not unhappy with my Secretary. I am not going out to write and raise a rumpus and things...
With that, beribboned (two D.S.M.s, two D.S.C.s, a Silver Star) Slim Jim Gavin marched out of the hearing room, leaving behind, instead of a disturbing picture of an Army where high officials barter for stars, a picture of a passionate partisan who played the game and lost...