Word: restons
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Talese tends to overinterpret a bit. Still, whether he is studying bullpen pecking order, invoking the camphor-scented memory of Times past, or heightening the Reston-Daniel showdown, at his best he has an eye like a Hasselblad for detail and a novelist's feel for scene setting...
...leading characters as if they were dukes and dauphins of some royal court, dwelling upon their power drives at the expense of their unquestioned professional skill, he is at pains not to take explicit sides. Clearly Talese does not care for Daniel. Yet the book's main characters, Reston and Daniel, are not hero and villain but nearly equal protagonists. Daniel is shown as a careerist who cultivates worldly graces and helpful grandees. Against that, the reader can balance Reston's less blatant but equally tenacious ambition, and his curious notion that what is good for Reston...
...record, both men are classic American types, sprung to eminence from provincial poverty by their own exertions: Daniel from a soda-jerking job in Zebulon, N.C., Reston via an impoverished childhood in Scotland and a U.S. boyhood in the Midwest, partly spent working as a caddie. Readers in search of profundities and nuances will be more satisfied with the portrait of Reston, perhaps because Talese implies that Daniel's surface is Daniel. Reston's Horatio Alger idealism and Establishment pieties Talese wryly ascribes to a successful immigrant's fervor for his new-found land. In assessing...
...James Reston wrote on April 27, 1969, that "concessions made by faculties and administrators at ... Harvard to the use of force by campus militants have convinced officials here [in Washington] that justice is too serious a business to be left to university teachers and officials who submit to use and threat of force." But on the contrary, at the meeting of the Harvard Faculty on April 11, the resolution adopted by a vote of 395 to 13 said: "The Faculty of Arts and Sciences deplores the forcible occupation of University Hall on April 9. Responsibility for the events that followed...
...offensive, was intended primarily as a political signal to Hanoi, indicating Washington's eagerness to end the war. Fueling such speculation was Laird's admission that "private"-i.e., secret-talks aimed at a settlement are under way in Paris. In addition, New York Times Columnist James Reston claimed that Nixon may go further, by withdrawing as many as 100,000 troops this year...