Word: necked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much more than assess America's strengths and weaknesses and outline his legislative program for the coming year. The speech was designed as a campaign platform, a document that would help overcome his image as an indecisive leader. It was also crafted to help Ford in his neck-and-neck race with conservative Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination...
...from all that now in Waverly, Humphrey rises restlessly from his chair to pull a few dead leaves from a bouquet of flowers on the table. His face is somewhat puffy, his sensitive eyes watery at times, his neck baggy now under the thrusting jaw. But at 64, he looks fit -surprisingly so. Three years ago, Humphrey underwent a series of debilitating X-ray treatments for a bladder tumor that seemed precancerous. He had a severe reaction to the treatments and was flown from Waverly back to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. One staffer says he thought Humphrey was surely going...
...into the kitchen to tell Muriel that he has just received a phone call from Washington. "Mother, rumors are wafting all across the country," he says, a tone of mock drama in his voice. "The first one is that I'm dying of throat cancer." He clutches his neck. "The second one is that you're dying." "And the third is that you and I are getting a divorce." He stops for a moment. Then Muriel and Hubert Humphrey, the shrewd old family doctor who knows a bad diagnosis when he hears one, grin at each other...
...Birmingham when it snows you simply can't drive. You have to wait until it stops and starts to melt. Because in Birmingham it really does melt. It doesn't lie around, grotesquely, like huge lumps of frozen spit, for you to trip over and break your neck. There is a mystique about snow in the South. I think it is because it vanishes so fast. It doesn't stay and harden to annoy you with its grey horror, but leaves, like a good guest, without a trace, so it is sometimes even hard to believe it happened...
Bertrand Russell insisted on living in the best of all possible worlds and responded to imperfection as if it were a personal insult to his intelligence. That stubbornness made him the pain in the neck par excellence of modern times. Or perhaps, as Tait speculates, it made him a sort of saint - "God's gad fly, sent to challenge the smugness of the churches with a righteousness greater than their...