Word: naivet
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...sharp focus, remarking on incongruities that a resident takes for granted. Thus she recognized-and skillfully skewered -American bungling in Viet Nam (1967), though her later Hanoi (1968), likewise based on firsthand reporting, suffered from a Lincoln Steffens I-have-seen-the-future-and-it-works naiveté. In Medina, her third short book of war reportage, she turns an account of the acquittal of Lieut. William Calley's immediate superior into a disquieting meditation on the meaning...
...result of such neglect and naiveté, 41% of the blacks, 10% of the whites and 26% of both races had been or were pregnant. For this reason, the population commission has recommended that birth control information be freely provided for the nation's teenagers. To support the recommendation, the executive director of the commission, Charles Westoff, quotes a Manhattan teenager: "Refusal to provide education will not prevent sex, but it will certainly prevent responsible...
...later (and continuing) role as a painter laureate to the French Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, was made by Salvador Dali: "Picasso is a Spaniard-so am I! Picasso is a genius-so am I! Picasso is a Communist-nor am I!" For Picasso's political naiveté is extreme, and his role in the party has never been more than ornamental...
...NAIVETÉ ABOUT DIEM. The Pentagon papers reflect Washington's shallow perception of the complexity of South Viet Nam's problems and the U.S.'s limited ability to deal with them. Shortly before the 1963 coup that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem, the White House cabled to then Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge a lengthy set of instructions. Tidily organized under points A through M, the missive loftily proposed solutions for a country riven by political and religious strife and on the verge of military collapse. According to the cable's ungainly prose, Lodge was directed...
...tells how he first became aware last year that he was under attack from "a squadron of enraged Amazons, an honor guard of revolutionary vaginas." He admits to naiveté in visualizing his female adversaries as "thin college ladies with eyeglasses, no-nonsense features, mouths thin as bologna slices, a babe in one arm, a hatchet in the other, gray eyes bright with balefire." When he protests to chic Radical Chick Gloria Steinem that he doesn't know what Women's Lib has against him. she tells him tartly: "You might try reading your books some day." Manhattan...