Word: servant
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...Solid Civil Servant. In a city where everyone and his brother are cast in bronze, the federal employee requires no such memorial. He is more immovable than any statue, and he needs no horse or cannon for protection. He is also substantially protected from inflation and old age. And he is close to being recession-proof, living blissfully in what former Attorney General Griffin Bell calls "the land of the lotus eaters." Including the 9.1% pay raise that took effect in October, the average annual salary for federal white-collar employees is $23,000 in the capital area. Federal pensions...
That granitic certainty was propped up by a docile servant class, whose images occupy some of the book's most haunting pages. The bride of the second son of the first Baron Leconfield, for instance, undertook to photograph "all the dear servants at Petworth, 1860, when I came there." They include the butler, the underbutler, the park keeper, the keeper of the stallions, the coachman, the housekeeper. Lord Leconfield's valet, Lady Leconfield's maid, the French cook, the first groom of the chambers, and so on. Big houses often had as many as 50 people working...
...beginning of the end was World War I, and one of the casualties was the servant mentality; the upper class no longer had a lower one to lean on. The country house survived a little longer, and even had a renaissance during the '20s and '30s, when the Evelyn Waugh crowd made elfin sport amid the topiaries. World War II and all that followed it, most notably extortionate taxes and the declining British economy, finally put these gay places to rest. A book like this, which has pedestrian prose but enchanting pictures, is perhaps the best memorial...
...going to depend on who's running it. [My successor] has got to be somebody who has been declared acceptable to all the groups involved, and it has got to be a person with the experience and qualifications to do it. You can't get a civil servant to do it. You can't get a politician. It's got to be a soldier...
...lopsided vote of 153 to 24, with 19 abstentions. Banisadr had stated publicly that he considered Raja'i a bad choice. But he finally bowed to clerical pressures and nominated Raja'i at the "recommendation" of a parliamentary commission controlled by the I.R.P. Explained a senior civil servant: "Khomeini was becoming impatient. It was obvious that the more brazen-faced mullahs would...