Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Master of the Peace. For the historians Author Morris supplies page on page of fascinating new facts, and for the general reader he supplies plenty of human interest. The Peacemakers tells a tall but true and often heroic tale of three shrewd Yankee traders-John Jay, John Adams and Ben Franklin-who sat down with the biggest double-dealers in Europe and played a bad hand so skillfully that they made off with the better part...
...Shrewd was scarcely the word for Adams when he arrived in Paris early in 1780 to take up his duties as U.S. peace commissioner. He was green, scared, pompous, moralistic and tactless. Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, who intended to be "master of the peace," gave a sharp tug on the purse strings and "persuaded" the Continental Congress to divide its peacemaking powers among five commissioners.* A little later he also forced Congress to instruct its commissioners "to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace without the knowledge and concurrence of the ministers of France." To make sure these incapacitating...
...basic trouble with the play is that it is merely a shrewd exercise in Broadway marketing research. A vast number of New York theatergoers are Jews who savor a Borscht Belt humor and are traditionally susceptible to worthy causes-of which the hottest, currently, is the Negro's plight and rights. This mating of comedy, conscience and commerce fails to generate any excitement...
...with some of his closest advisers. Bobby Baker turned out to be a money-hungry charlatan. Walter Jenkins, Moyers' overworked predecessor as top staff man, was arrested in a Washington Y.M.C.A. men's room and booked on a morals charge. Moyers is honest, resilient and, above all, shrewd enough to insist on getting away from his man-killing job whenever possible. He insists on spending all the time he can with his family. Invited to Camp David for a weekend with Lyndon and his entourage on one occasion, he said: "I'm sorry, Mr. President...
...trustee of the Brookings Institution and Occidental College and as a director of the Stanford Research Institute. Though his rimless glasses and whisper-quiet voice give him the air of a professor (he once declined an offer from the Harvard Business School to become one), Carter is still a shrewd salesman. When he was asked to raise 12 million to help build the Los Angeles Art Museum, he persuaded 23 acquaintances to donate $125,000 and up by offering to name a gallery after each and urging: "Here's a chance to leave your footprints in the community...