Word: langere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Miami Dolphins Center Jim Langer said that in July, the National Football League Players Association strike was barely a week old. In the end, Langer was right. Strike leaders had predicted that players would stay out indefinitely, that the owners would eventually cave in. Langer was one of the few veterans to cross the picket line then, but in the weeks that followed, dozens of veterans reported to training camp...
Still, there are supporters of behavioral profiles, often called "psychohistories." Retired Harvard Historian William Langer, former chief of research at the OSS, says that secondhand material can sometimes tell more about a person than his own words when he knows he is under analysis...
Perhaps the most famous behavioral analysis was the Hitler study done by Dr. Walter Langer, William's brother, for the U.S. Government during World War II. Declassified in 1972 and published as The Mind of Adolph Hitler, Langer's work proved uncannily accurate; he not only predicted Hitler's suicide, but also that "each defeat will shake his confidence and ... he will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability by stressing his brutality." In fact, Hitler began ordering mass slaughters of the Jews as his military position crumbled. But even Langer calls psychiatric profiles "90% guesswork...
Encouraged by Langer's accuracy, the Government has been using psychiatric profiles as a tool ever since. Though Ellsberg was the first U.S. civilian to get the treatment, intelligence experts regularly do analyses of world leaders, including Chairman Mao, Indira Gandhi, Archbishop Makarios, as well as Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev, Defense Minister Andrei Grechko and Military Theorist A.A. Sidorenko. Says one official: "Everything a person has written, what he reads, who influences him, his sex life, ailments and prognosis-everything goes into the making of a profile...
...chief rabbis-one of the Ashkenazic or Western tradition, the other of the Sephardic or Oriental tradition-were replaced in an election by younger men. New Ashkenazic Rabbi Shlomo Goren, 54, former chief chaplain of the army, as one of his first acts personally reviewed the Langer case. He learned that Borokovsky had been seen attending Christian services and was reported to keep pork in his home. Rabbi Goren convened a rabbinical court that declared that 1) Borokovsky's conversion was invalid, thus 2) Mrs. Langer's marriage to him was nullified and 3) her second marriage...