Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...around. There's Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and Gandhi marching to the sea to make salt. Winston Churchill with his cigar, Louis Armstrong with his horn, Charlie Chaplin with his cane. Rosa Parks staying seated on her bus and a kid standing in front of a tank near Tiananmen Square. Einstein is in his study, and the Beatles are on The Ed Sullivan Show...
Ruhollah Khomeini--his given name means "inspired of God"--was born to a family of Shi'ite scholars in a village near Tehran in 1902. Shi'ism, a minority sect in Islam, is Iran's official religion. Like his father, he moved from theological studies to a career as an Islamic jurist. Throughout his life, he was acclaimed for the depth of his religious learning...
Almost nobody knew his name. Nobody outside his immediate neighborhood had read his words or heard him speak. Nobody knows what happened to him even one hour after his moment in the world's living rooms. But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square--June 5, 1989--may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined...
Nine years after the June 4 incident, moreover, it's unclear how much the agitators for democracy actually achieved. Li Peng, who oversaw the crackdown on them, is still near the top of China's hierarchy. Jiang, who proved his colors by coming down hard on demonstrators in Shanghai, is now the country's President. And on a bright winter morning, Tiananmen Square is still filled, as it was then, with bird-faced kites and peasants from the countryside lining up to have their photos taken amid the monuments...
What does surprise is the near virginal conviction of this sophisticated Pole that Providence has kept a watchful eye on him. His recovery in 1981 from an assassin's bullet the Pope would probably not term miraculous only because fastidious Catholic theology frowns on the use of that word, except when the theological department of weights and measures has been there with all its paraphernalia of skepticism and given an O.K. Still, he is known to believe that the good Lord had a hand in his survival, and he is said to believe that he is fated to be Pope...