Word: idealist
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Larry Seidman is even less like Burt Ross, as a leader, than Pete Weiner was. He is an idealist; he shuns the word because it is a political handicap, and so is a self-conscious idealist, but he is an idealist nonetheless. If Young Dems is ever to make a place for itself in Harvard student politics, the club must first, he maintains, define exactly what it is both to itself and to the rest of the college. That is what the club has failed to do in the past, and that, at least, is what Seidman hopes...
Perhaps Ulam understands Lenin as a completely intellectual idealist, but this clashes with earlier statements about Lenin's pragmatism. Furthermore, Ulam dehumanizes his subject by denying him any disenchantment or disillusionment, claiming that his ideology would not tolerate...
...having him defend himself and his book in a mock trial by acting out the role of the knight of the woeful countenance. The indictment is modishly mock-cynical a la 1965; not the worst of the evening's sentimentalities is: "I charge you with being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man. How plead you?" With this cue, the good grey don (Richard Kiley) whirls into his act. He tilts at windmills, mistakes an inn for a castle where he is to be knighted, swears that a barber's basin is a golden helmet...
...abroad, including a small, constantly changing, necessarily anonymous group of American youths who have joined with European contemporaries to spirit East Germans through the Berlin Wall. Adventure is also constantly produced in the name of scientific exploration, but whatever the admixture of other causes, the true adventurer is an idealist only by the way; he is really after adventure for its own sake...
...convictions about foreign aid would seem to be those of a crusading idealist were it not for the English sensibility she injects in every thought. Although she has a firm grasp on economic realities, her feelings are largely visionary. "I mean," she said, "we give billions for a dubious defense and billions more for the moon but almost nothing for the world we have now, which is the only one we have, isn't' it? Of course a lot of disturbing things happen with foreign aid, but you don't scrap a whole program when one rocket blows...