Word: ordeal
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...pledges to uphold the Constitution, and then calls for an "era of national renewal." He leaves the platform, with the U.S. Marine Band playing Hail to the Chief, and minutes later a plane half a world away finally lifts off from a Tehran runway, thus ending an ordeal that has sapped the nation's confidence for 444 agonizing days. Hollywood would not have touched such an improbable melodrama, but so it happened last week, and Ronald Wilson Reagan was the leading...
...began the end of the hostages' ordeal amid the cavalcade of Inaugural festivities that had started Saturday night. From the opening fireworks to the last dance, it was the biggest, most lavish, most expensive presidential welcome ever. All told, an estimated $11 million was spent on the eating, drinking and merrymaking (Carter's Inaugural celebration cost $4.8 million). Like all Inaugurals, none of it came out of taxpayers' pockets. Corporations and individuals gave the Presidential Inaugural Committee $8 million in interest-free loans, which will be partly paid off from the sale of souvenirs and tickets...
...mild treatment compared with the savagery inflicted on many Iranians during the Shah's rule and then later under Khomeini, though unconscionable nonetheless. But during a wrenching visit with the 52 at the U.S. military hospital in Wiesbaden, West Germany, Carter became appalled at the hostages' descriptions of their ordeal...
These are among the frightening and sordid circumstances of imprisonment reported by the 52 hostages in phone calls to their families during their first hours of liberty, or related by hostages who had been released months ago and at last felt free to speak. The full story of their ordeal is far from told. The first fragmentary reports indicated that the hostages were not subjected to the physical tortures that Iranians have inflicted on each other for centuries, but the Americans did suffer relentless psychological abuse and physical mistreatment that ring in American ears as a tale of horror...
Once the embassy was captured, the worst period of the hostages' ordeal began. Fresh details of the early days of captivity were disclosed last week by some of the eight black men and five women who were released after 16 days by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini as a propaganda move, and by Richard I. Queen, 29, the embassy's vice consul, who was let go last July because he was suffering from multiple sclerosis...