Word: middleman
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...standards, he characterized President Taft as "passive-positive," Truman as "active-positive" and Eisenhower as "passive-negative." Lest anyone accuse him of showing partisanship, Barber listed, along with Nixon, under the heading of "active-negative" a man whose "style failed him" and who knew "the disorientation of an expert middleman elevated above the ordinary political marketplace"-Lyndon Baines Johnson...
...Middleman. In the end, what Griffin's first week amounted to was more of Carson and Bishop. Any differences were subtle, to say the least. While Carson has Ed McMahon as his sidekick on the Tonight Show, and Bishop has Regis Philbin, Griffin uses his longtime TV majordomo, Arthur Treacher, as a kind of Jeeves. Carson prefers to stand out as the star of his own show, throwing out quips and gags, staging frequent offerings from the Mighty Carson Art Players, and frequently upstaging his guests. Bishop, on the other hand, uses his Los Angeles base to good advantage...
Griffin prefers to be conversational, a listener rather than a doer. "My most important task is to open people up verbally and extract information from them," he says. "I sit there as the middleman between guest and audience, asking questions I think the viewers would ask if they were in my place." While Carson is content to operate from New York City studios, with only occasional expeditions to the West Coast, Griffin insists that he will continue to get out of the studio and out of New York. "We want to show the viewer other parts of the world than...
...must be a bit subversive, as well as comic, ambiguous and heroic in order to play middleman in a world where everybody else appears as an extremist of one sort or another. Spender shows a certain fondness for "girls with hair like seaweed." He is as fascinated as a traveler from another planet by the rebel-rhetorical style, which he traces back to the beatniks: "It had the inspiration of some sustained fit of oaths from the mouth of a drunken Welshman." He even admires the way student-rebels combine "a passion for solitude with a love of being televised...
...violence before it becomes hopelessly harnessed to all the lethal weapons available. City planners try to bring some order out of the urban sprawl. The research institutes, or think tanks, recruit bold generalists or "futurists" to plot scenarios of the problems ahead. Modern society has produced all sorts of middleman and service jobs-public relations men, travel agents, pollsters and political-campaign experts, to cite a few. At another level federally financed antipoverty work has become a bona fide career for many people. And that, in turn, has helped to create specialists in the art of securing federal funds...