Word: softener
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...Bobby Baker scandal, the relationship between the Johnsons' business interests and the FCC and the Tonkin Gulf deception lets L.B.J. off the hook. Miller also fails to reflect strongly enough the extent of the damage caused by Johnson's Viet Nam policy. Eulogistic gloss tends to soften some of the harder truths. Perhaps this is the nature of oral biography. At one point the author notes that "memory is a gentleman." True. But when memory serves legend more than history, it becomes a gentleman's gentleman. -By R.Z. Sheppard
...Three years later, the Shah married Soraya Esfandiari, a beautiful Iranian commoner. He divorced her in 1958, again because the union failed to produce an heir. In 1959, he married Farah Diba, then a 21-year-old architecture student in Paris. Sensitive and compassionate, Farah sought to soften the harsh policies of her husband when possible. She is the mother of his four other children: Crown Prince Reza, 19, Princess Farahnaz, 17, Prince Ali Reza, 14, and Princess Leila...
...will summon private butlers if desired. New Orleans offers the 100-room, family-run Pontchartrain Hotel, with one of the country's best Creole restaurants. Boston's pride is the 257-room Ritz-Carlton, where a houseman will lay a fire in one's suite to soften the shock of a New England winter...
...decorator, having to his credit the nearly total redecoration of the White House for President Chester Arthur, and was concentrating on his glassmaking. He saw new opportunities in the invention of the incandescent bulb. Working with Thomas Alva Edison, he realized that something was needed both to soften the brightness of the new light and to conceal the bulb's unlovely shape. He came up with the lampshade that is perhaps his most famous design...
...they nonetheless felt compelled to make their position clear in terms of what they perceive as dangerously rising tensions in the Middle East and, particularly, the impasse they suspect is being caused by election-year politics in the U.S. Explained British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, obviously trying to soften the seeming rebuke to Carter: "We really are trying to supplement what the U.S. is doing, to do something very, very positive-to stop talking just in a few abstract terms and try to clothe those terms with practical reality. And we'll do it, as always, in partnership...