Word: needless
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...Vann, retired from the Army, was back in Viet Nam as a civilian "pacification officer" for the Agency for International Development. He opposed Westmoreland's attrition strategy because he believed it resulted in needless U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The U.S., he argued, should reform the corrupt Saigon regime and woo the peasantry. Despite his role as gadfly, Vann rose through the system, ultimately becoming the top U.S. adviser for central Viet Nam and the first civilian, according to Sheehan, ever to command U.S. troops in wartime...
...Needless to say, fragrance merchants are incensed. Michael Gould, president of Giorgio Beverly Hills, a subsidiary of Avon Products, plans to take "any steps necessary to protect our image." The puppy perfumery defends its products by noting that fragrance oils are not patented. Even so, says Byron Donics, president of Aramis, "we think they are barking up the wrong tree...
...Richard Goodwin, a former speechwriter and aide to L.B.J., has taken such recollections several steps further. In his memoir of the 1960s, Remembering America (Little, Brown; $19.95), Goodwin writes that Johnson was at times literally crazed and that his episodic madness helped propel the U.S. into "a needless tragedy of such immense consequences ((Viet Nam)) that, even now, the prospects for a restorative return remain in doubt." He brazenly diagnoses Johnson's large eccentricities as "incursions of paranoia," which led to leaps "into unreason" that "infected the entire presidential institution...
...Needless to say, things grow far, far more complicated than this, and DeLillo develops his intricate plot with cinematic bravura. There are flashes back and forward in time, and jump cuts between the conspirators and Oswald, who is growing up to become exactly the kind of person the CIA renegades had planned to invent: a malcontent and misfit with a known fondness for Castro and guns. Slowly, dimly, Oswald begins to realize that he is being watched, people have designs on his destiny. Someone who knows what is cooking spells it out for him: "You're a quirk of history...
...friend thinks that the desire--need?--to beliked is in itself an imperfection, a sign ofcowardice almost. Needless to say, I disagree.Getting along with others need not be the same asgoing along with them. Perhaps the most importantthing I have learned is when and how to shut up.Not every clever or cutting remark needs to gosaid. It's scary when I think of the cruel thingsI have said to people towards whom I felt nomalice. Given the set-up, I could not resist thepunchline...