Word: saint
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...essay on Napoleon, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "He was no saint-to use his word, 'no capuchin,' and he is no hero, in the high sense." Napoleon had fulfilled an earthly career, at any rate. His life went the full trajectory. One could study the line of it and know, for better and worse, what the man was, and did, and could do. He inhabited his life. He completed it. He passed through it to the end of its possibilities...
First the murdered President became saint and martyr. But then the '60s arrived in earnest. In a study of tragedy, Critic George Steiner wrote, "The fall of great personages from high places (casus virorum illustrium) gave to medieval politics their festive and brutal character." The real '60s began on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, and they turned festive and brutal too. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out. His assassination became the prototype in a series of public murders: Malcolm...
...Frontiersman who became a minor patron saint of the Kennedy revisionists was Chester Bowles, the career diplomat. He thought that he had located a central problem with the Kennedy Administration. He feared that it deliberately, almost scornfully, detached pragmatic considerations from a larger moral context. To discuss the morality of actions was evidence of softness, and intellectuals with power in their hands cannot bear to be thought soft. Everyone carried the Munich model around in his head. One talked in laconic codes, a masculine shorthand; one did not, like Adlai Stevenson, deliver fluty soliloquies about the morality...
...York City's social and cultural elite. In a weird role reversal, the white upper-class Radical Chic back the Panther's spokesman into a corner with a barrage of questions. The Panthers have to be the diplomats, taming the enthusiastic "bunch of leaping, prancing, palsied happy-slobber Saint Bernards...
...nation's commitment. He was followed two days later by Vice President George Bush, who visited the site of the carnage wearing a helmet and flak jacket. On Thursday, Secretary of State George Shultz conferred with his French, Italian and British counterparts in the Paris suburb La Celle-Saint-Cloud. After a five-hour meeting under unusually tight security, at a secluded 17th century chateau, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson reiterated "the support of our governments for the Multi-National Force." In his nationwide address on television Thursday evening, President Ronald Reagan made the most forceful pitch...