Word: penchants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...start in the Iowa caucuses. For a year he has been working at an election-year pace, taking only Sundays off. He has visited Iowa so often -- 27 times since 1985 -- that he has been nicknamed "Iowa's seventh Congressman" (the state has six). The boyish-looking lawyer's penchant for work is well known: after arriving in Washington in 1977, he quickly rose through Congress to become chairman of the House Democratic Caucus in 1984. He was the co-sponsor with New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley of the Bradley- Gephardt tax-reform proposal, one of the prototypes...
WILLS DEFINES Reagan's appeal the same way Roland Barthes defined myth: "He is a durable daylight `bundle of meanings,"' Wills writes. "Reagan does not argue for American values; he embodies them." Gifted with his salesman father's Irish blarney and his sermonizing mother's penchant for moral crusading, Reagan articulates and seems to embody values Americans prize most. He can josh with an audience and then preach to them. Self-deprecating, humble, unpretentious, charming and--most importantly--a financial and social success, Reagan stands as the "fulfillment of America's ideal--Everyman suddenly put in charge of the nation...
This will be in sharp contrast to Casey, who resented having to testify on Capitol Hill and was notorious for his mumblings and evasions. An unpublished Intelligence Committee draft on Iran found that Casey was "less than candid" in his testimony just before his hospitalization. Casey's penchant for hiding clandestine operations also led to clashes with Congress. The 1984 mining of Nicaraguan harbors, for instance, was a foreign relations disaster that spurred the legislators to cut off aid to the contras...
...study finds that even a penchant for conservatism seems to have a genetic base. One of the eleven traits, traditionalism (respect for authority, rules, standards and high morals), was discovered to be 60% inherited. Among other traits listed at more than 50% were vulnerability or resistance to stress, dedication to hard work and achievement and the capacity for being caught up in imaginative experiences...
...past few years these tendencies have combined with two others that were almost bound to cause trouble sooner or later. One is a penchant for covert actions that fit in with Reagan's gung-ho activism. Finding some legal justification for them was another of those details that the President left to aides. The other tendency was to delegate disproportionate authority to subordinates who took a can-do approach, and then to let them operate with little supervision. In retrospect it seems absurd that so ostensibly minor a functionary as North would have been entrusted with such delicate matters...