Word: human
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...does not have the regard of his fellow members, he is nothing, even in his own eyes. An equally high value is placed on loyalty. It is not always honored, to be sure, but it nevertheless remains a powerful binding force within the organization. Indeed, the very human characteristics of respect and loyalty, together with the organization's dynastic structure, offer some clues to its remarkable durability. Son follows father, underboss follows boss, and the line continues over the decades...
...hard to object to this rise in political standards; yet perfection has its limits. The man entrusted with high public office today operates under unprecedented strain: he may well feel personally responsible for the survival of much of the human race in the nuclear age. More than ever, he needs the kind of private release that the open frontier once provided. A successful politician often possesses immense energy that needs to be released. The obscure private citizen can lose control of himself in public. Nobody but his friends will care. The man in public life must exercise iron control...
...much purity begs to be tarnished. It is only human to want to tear down that which has been built up too far. Americans have borrowed their notion of statesmanship in large part from the Romans, who emphasized dignity and piety. Perhaps they should have taken some lessons from the Greeks as well, who knew better than to expect more than moderately good conduct from their leaders. A quest for perfection was hubris and ended in disaster...
Life, said John Kennedy, is unfair-and he might have added that it is especially unfair to politicians. Although they, in fact, have asked for it by seeking the glory and the burden of public service, they do have the right, simply as human beings, to privacy, relaxation and escape from responsibility. Politicians are bound to have their share of sins and foibles. Their problem, however, is not the foibles themselves but how to deal with them when they become public. The significance of the Chappaquiddick incident for Ted Kennedy is not whether he drank too much or planned...
...Blows. Nothing of the sort, says Vidal. "I do not prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality," he writes, "or, for that matter, heterosexuality to homosexuality . . . But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime." Vidal insists that "I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom." He calls Buckley one of those "morbid, twisted men" who are always "sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others...