Word: rolodex
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Gorbachev would obviously prefer presiding over the largest country on earth to becoming the custodian of little more than a drafty fortress on the banks of the Moscow River. His friend Bush would rather have one phone number in his Rolodex than a dozen...
That argument appealed both to Bush's pragmatism and to his inclination to look at the globe and think of the ultimate Rolodex. For Bush, those blotches of color stand not just for countries but for Presidents, Prime Ministers and potentates whom, in many cases, he knows well and calls by their first name. If a crisis erupts, Bush's instinct is to reach for a telephone. More trouble on the Turkey-Iraq border? Call Turgut Ozal. Another glitch in the trade talks? Call Toshiki Kaifu. For the past 2 1/2 years, the White House switchboard has often been more...
...city of midlife compromises. Bright-eyed young men and women flock to the capital, as they have since the New Deal, not because they want to make money but because they want to act on their political beliefs. They enter government; they master a specialty; they amass a Rolodex. Then maybe their party loses power or they find themselves lusting after a BMW on a bureaucrat's salary. Suddenly the former idealists are in the private sector, bartering what they learned in government in their new roles as lawyers, lobbyists, public relations consultants or (to use an old-fashioned term...
...other oddments from the time -- John John saluting at the funeral, Jack and Jackie on Cape Cod, who knows? -- bright shards that stimulate old feelings (ghost pangs, ghost tendernesses, wistfulness) but not thought really. The shocks turn into dreams. The memory of such pictures, flipped through like a disordered Rolodex, makes at last a cultural tapestry, an inventory of the kind that brothers and sisters and distant cousins may % rummage through at family reunions, except that the greatest photojournalism has given certain memories the emotional prestige of icons...
...with thumbnail biographies of figures making news overseas. "That guy isn't like that at all," he told an analyst who was profiling a foreign politician. "He goes back a long way with some of these cats," a senior official recounted. Two weeks ago, in a remarkable display of Rolodex diplomacy, Bush telephoned Kings Hussein of Jordan, Hassan of Morocco, Fahd of Saudi Arabia; Prime Ministers Turgut Ozal of Turkey and Margaret Thatcher of Britain; Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany; Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria; as well as the Pope -- anyone who might have...