Word: polarizer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...actor; of pancreatic cancer; in Los Angeles. As Dr. Ben Casey, he was surly, sarcastic, short-tempered--and that's just how he treated his friends. Yet TV viewers in the 1960s couldn't get enough of the neurosurgeon or of Edwards, who portrayed the combative Casey as the polar opposite of his ratings rival, the saintly Doctor Kildare (played by Richard Chamberlain). Prior to Ben Casey, Edwards was a B-movie gangster. After, he appeared in forgettable film and TV work, including the inevitable Return of Ben Casey...
...POLES OF SUPPORT holding up Pat Buchanan are polar opposites. Bay, sister, spitfire campaign chairman, is the prototype of the postfeminist woman. She works round the clock, rears three kids on her own, yet insists that she's a traditionalist. Shelley, wife, constant campaign companion, is an unrepentant prefeminist. She defines herself almost exclusively through her husband and prefers it that way. For a premodern man like Pat, independence may be tolerable in a sister but never in a spouse...
...state senator Tom Hayden; Tom Proulx, the co-founder of the software company Intuit Inc.; and Ken Khachigian, a prominent adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As Khachigian says, "If you told me I'd be working with Zimmerman someday, I'd have said, 'No way!' We are polar opposites in ideology...
Americans in 1995 kept a wary, ambivalent eye on both Clinton and Gingrich, the famous fraternal twins of American power, yin and yang of the Baby Boom, polar extremes of Pennsylvania Avenue. A generation or two ago, leaders were father figures. For better and for worse, Clinton and Gingrich--powerful yet indefinably immature--give off a bright, undisciplined energy, a vibration of adolescent recklessness...
...jurors could honestly find the circumstantial evidence overwhelming, could they not also, just as honestly, find it unpersuasive? No, it was not the jury that was thinking in terms of categorical behavior; it was much of white America. And if that were so, the shock expressed at the polar reactions to the verdict was a Casablanca "shocked." Who was hiding what, from whom...