Word: melvin
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...Kissinger was obsessed with undermining the influence of Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers by denigrating them behind their backs and excluding them from major policy matters. "Cutting out Mel Laird is what we did for a living," says former Kissinger Staffer Laurence Lynn. Hersh says that Laird was bypassed in the decision to bomb Cambodia...
Like other social comedies that brighten critics' lives about once a year (Breaking Away, Melvin and Howard, Atlantic City), Diner is a microscope-not a megascope-movie, as admirable for what it avoids as for what it accomplishes. Writer-Director Barry Levinson looks back on the Eisenhower era with affectionate understanding, and without straining for apocalyptic climaxes or Zeitgeist generalizations. He is content to observe these five guys who congregate late each night at the Fells-Point Diner, content to display them in all their modest, wisecracking, friend-loving glory. An evening at Diner is like a night...
...Melvin Maddocks...
From Macchiavelli to Melvin Laird, which is a not inconsequential span of experience, the historical record suggests that survival is easier for those leaders who stay out of the way of political steamrollers. Indeed, the successful statesman is usually one who is agile enough to dance ahead of great surges of human feeling and direct them to his own purposes...
Machiavelli defined his ideal prince as a head of state with a "flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate." Melvin Laird, the consummate congressional pol who served Richard Nixon as Secretary of Defense, lived by the rule that a wise man never says no to the inevitable and rarely encounters a situation that cannot be turned in some way to his advantage. In 1970, for example, a helicopter-borne rescue team penetrated North Viet Nam's air defenses but found that its quarry-U.S. P.O.W.s held at the Son Tay prison camp-had been moved to parts...