Word: retrospective
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bugging King's bedrooms. Far from a noble peacemaker, he was a hawkish enthusiast for dirty tricks and covert ops, so Machiavellian that -- according to Michael Beschloss's new book, The Crisis Years -- he may even have given his blessing to Khrushchev's building of the Berlin Wall. In retrospect, J.F.K. resembles Marrs' Galahad less than a gang leader like The Godfather's Michael Corleone -- the well- meaning son of a shadowy godfather (Joe Kennedy, with his bootlegging connections to the Mob), who can't escape his father's legacy or his family's cutthroat character...
...mental image of a major nation in decline is Britain. And, in retrospect, the British handled their decline pretty gracefully. In just a couple of generations Britain sank from economic and political superpower to second-rank member of a second-rank regional bloc. Yet the transformation happened without much domestic rancor, despite Britain's supposedly bitter class divisions. At worst, the general attitude was a certain sullen resignation. At best, there was a jolly, fatalistic insouciance. The Brits almost seemed to enjoy their ride down...
...cheerleader for the success of the Soviet experiment. "Every President since Dwight Eisenhower has been told that the Soviet Union ((had)) growth rates vastly in excess of ours," he says. The CIA regularly predicted that the Soviets were catching up. In the late 1970s, it claimed, absurdly in retrospect, that the Soviet economy was two-thirds the size of America's. While exaggerating the importance of communist regimes in such places as Angola and Nicaragua, the agency also completely missed the ethnic and nationalist time bombs inside the Soviet Union itself...
...RETROSPECT, Joe was pretty incongruous on a team like the Sox, a team overpopulated with archetypes of the Great American Crybaby...
Some technologies seem fated to succeed. The telephone. The automobile. The electronic computer. Each offered advantages over its predecessors so compelling that failure, in retrospect, seems almost unimaginable...