Word: legendizes
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...legend of the man is safely sheltered these days behind high fences of respect. Were the real Washington on hand today, that might not be the case, and therein may lie a lesson. We have in this nation erected standards for our public people that dim anyone's glow if he or she falls short of perfection. It is reasonable, then, to wonder if people can enter public life and make a difference as they did in the first years of the Republic. Even as our expectations have grown, our respect for and sympathy with Presidents have diminished...
...runs a parallel espionage operation using "illegals." Such agents assume a false identity, complete with a false personal history, or "legend," so they can penetrate deeply into a foreign setting. They often remain inactive for years before receiving an assignment from Moscow. Illegal Agent Rudolph Herrmann slipped into the U.S. by way of Canada in 1969 and, while posing as a freelance photographer, arranged information drops for other spies. FBI agents caught up with Herrmann because of a blunder by his KGB contact and turned him into a double agent. Herrmann "officially defected" in 1980, after receiving orders from Moscow...
...Merlin, the hero is observed just before the Arthurian legend, when the world is a crystalline Stonehenge and miracles are the order of the day. His teacher is a sage (played by Edmund Lyndeck, a seasoned performer). The faun who haunts his dreams (Rebecca Wright) is a comet from American Ballet Theater. And his enemy, the wicked Queen, is Chita Rivera, a blast furnace best remembered from West Side Story. In the classic tradition, gorgon and wise man vie for the magician's soul and the privilege of influencing the unseen Arthur, the once and future king...
...indeed quite a man. From the Irish precincts of Buffalo, he rose to become a battlefield legend in World War I as commander of the "Fighting 69th" infantry. After the war he grew rich as a lawyer for moneyed interests, constantly dashing off on shadowy foreign missions of commerce or diplomacy. He was a Republican candidate for Governor of New York, acting Attorney General of the U.S. under Calvin Coolidge and an oft-mentioned presidential possibility. When Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to form a civilian intelligence service at the outset of World War II, Donovan followed the dictum...
Anthony Cave Brown, a Briton whose 1975 book, Bodyguard of Lies, described the intelligence work that preceded the 1944 Normandy invasion, has done an appropriately heroic job of separating the leader from the legend. Brown had some advantages over his ill-fated predecessors, among them Donovan's private papers and his wife's 65-year diary. The result is a memo-studded, overweight history of the OSS, relieved by tales of counterespionage and by the story of Donovan himself...