Word: somberness
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Campaign Manager Larry O'Brien's Irish eyes were not smiling. Speechwriter Ted Van Dyk, ashen and somber, had lost his usual cockiness. Their man was not conceding. "I feel sufficiently at ease," said Humphrey, "that I want to get a good night's rest." But, like Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, he was heading for bed only to awaken and discover that voters in California (and Illinois in 1968) were electing his opponent to the presidency...
Many New Yorkers shared that somber view. The city's plight, of course, was not one of physical survival-though some cynics argued that New York's complex ills could only be cured if the metropolis were razed and rebuilt. Its breakdown this fall was one of spirit and nerve, a malaise that affected the tacit assumptions of trust and interdependence without which no organism so vast and disparate can possibly function. In what most responsible citizens concede to be one of the ugliest situations in memory, strikes and the threat of strikes pitted not only union against...
Robert Kennedy's somber vignette is part of his personal recollections of the missile crisis six years ago. McCall's, which publishes Bobby's "Thirteen Days" this week in its November issue, paid $1,000,000 for the 21,000-word manuscript. The private glimpses he gives of President Kennedy's ordeal are almost worth the money. In straight forward language, and with sharp perception, Bobby recounts the events that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the edge of nuclear...
...Instead he slowly turns the book into a rueful seminar on the possibilities that men have of ever "making good again" after various sorts of failure. In the process, the word Wiedergutmachung becomes a kind of pun that can be read on a number of levels, some hopeful, some somber: restoring to virtue a society that has lost its virtue; paying old debts; returning to success after losses in life or love...
...actor and a director are the play's most impressive assets. In the central role, Donald Pleasence gives a performance of atomic power and blinding virtuosity; Harold Pinter directorially chills the stage to doom temperature. The very first scene bursts on the playgoer with somber eclat. In an elegant private chapel, dim as a catacomb, a finger of light rests on Pleasence as he kneels rapt in prayer. The Verdi Requiem saturates the air like incense. Suddenly, the stage is ablaze with light, louvers are turning, and the backdrop becomes a penthouse view of Manhattan's skyscrapers...