Word: jefferson
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That Mrs. Gandhi's government permitted the demonstrations, despite the ban on public gatherings of more than four persons, seemed an abrupt contradiction of the warm and friendly remarks she directed toward America a week ago when she praised "great fighters like Jefferson and Lincoln." She may now feel she needs the CIA as a scapegoat for India's current crisis...
...PORTABLE THOMAS JEFFERSON...
...invented the country 200 years ago have long since been enshrouded by the myths of textbooks and the mists of hagiology. The most elusive figure in that gentlemen's club of revolutionaries was Thomas Jefferson. Henry Adams wrote that every other American statesman could be portrayed with "a few broad strokes of the brush," but Jefferson "only touch by touch with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon shifting and uncertain flickers of semitransparent shadows." Many biographers have attempted to draw that chiaroscuro character, most recently Fawn Brodie in her Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate Biography...
Such interlunations, of course, remain-Adams' "shadows." But those aside, Jefferson possessed a resplendently Baconian intellect, a mind with all its windows open. The scope and subtlety of that mind is on full view in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, a superb collection of his letters and public writings. The reader can begin almost anywhere in the book and come away refreshed. Perhaps the best starting point is Jefferson's stately, passionate argument for independence: a declaration that issues from a ripe philosophical vision of the natural rights of man. His Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom begins with resonances...
Notes on the State of Virginia, a response to a series of questions posed by the secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia, is a mixture of guidebook, history, scientific ledger, philosophical treatise, vindication of American nationalism and casual introduction to Jefferson's opinions on practically everything. The Notes and the 79 letters included here are the most compelling part of the Viking collection...