Word: shawcross
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WILLIAM SHAWCROSS, who wrote this week's cover story, first encountered George Soros in Sarajevo four years ago, as the philanthropic billionaire was being shepherded out of the line of sniper fire. Soros was on a mission to give $50 million to rebuild war-torn Bosnia, and Shawcross was researching U.N. peacekeeping for an upcoming book. Shawcross was immediately intrigued by the international money manager. "A very cool character, but quite passionate about Sarajevo," he recalls. "He called it the world's largest concentration camp...
...wanted in Asia for driving down currency values, the activist financier George Soros isn't showing any signs of giving up yet. He's now targeting American social problems with a lot of initiatives likely to draw retaliation on several fronts. TIME's William Shawcross reports in this week's cover story that Soros is giving $15 million over five years to groups that oppose America's "war on drugs"; $5 million in grants to help cut the incarceration rate; $50 million to help fellow immigrants get citizenship; $20 million to improve care for the dying and $25 million...
...themes stand out in this lumpy but fast-reading unauthorized biography, which gets the record straight yet seems to miss the inner man. (Shawcross, a British writer perhaps best known for his savaging of Henry Kissinger's Cambodia policy in Sideshow, managed to interview his subject. Murdoch read the manuscript but refused to comment on it.) One is that Murdoch is a daring but occasionally imprudent gambler, usually with other people's money. In 1990 News faced a liquidity crisis caused by the recession, a huge drop in advertising revenues, and Murdoch's reliance on short-term loans...
...second Rupert byte, if Shawcross can be believed, is that this restless entrepreneur, who controls so much of what the world reads and watches, seems to be utterly banal of mind. Apart from the family he dotes on, Murdoch apparently has no interests other than minding his properties and seeking new ones...
Murdoch sees himself as a radical provocateur. Yet the onetime student who kept a statue of Lenin in his Oxford digs is now a confirmed Thatcherite. "He deals in simplicities, and simplicities can be dangerous," Shawcross writes piously, referring to Murdoch's unshakable faith in the blessings of an international free market and the imposition of American values and products on the rest of the world...