Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...providential coincidence. Mitchell's surprise attack fitted in perfectly with a decision reached at the White House earlier in the week at the urging of Goldwater. California's Bill Knowland. New Hampshire's Styles Bridges and other right-wing Republicans. With the McClellan committee's sordid revelations still vivid in the public mind, argued Goldwater & Co., it was good election-year politics to assault the Kennedy-Ives bill and try to pin a soft-on-labor rap on the Democrats. Decided Dwight Eisenhower: "Let's fight." Said Goldwater: "It's the only political issue...
...electric chair without death." The danger signal was an open-palmed slap, slap, slap on the bald dome, often followed by the saliva-flecked roar, "You are a broken reed I" If Gulbenkian was something of a solid gold Scrooge, he also had Scroogian fears. According to Young, the sordid 1920 murder of a Manhattan pawnbroker named Gulbenkian, no kin, scared him out of ever visiting the U.S. He reputedly kept a ton and a half of gold in his London safes, presumably against a rainy day. An electrified barricade surrounded his Paris home, together with innumerable burglar alarms, watchdogs...
...want to think about those sordid things," writes Nathan Leopold. He may have written this memoir partly to help ease his burden of guilt about "those things," though the book reads less like a cathartic confession than the garrulous, sometimes querulous recollections of a man who had all the time in the world and seems to think that his audience has as much...
...town, respected by all and loved by his wife Sarah and their children, David, Mary, Jonathan, Ruth and Rebecca. They eat a Thanksgiving turkey, talk about God and gratitude. Then the disasters strike. Playwright MacLeish stage-manages them deftly with a tabloid editor's eye for sordid shock effect and a flexible poetic line to match. Two drunken soldiers blurt out news of the death of David; a news cameraman snaps a picture of J.B. and Sarah while a reporter is telling them that Mary and Jonathan have been killed in an auto accident; two cops break the news...
...Accuse! (M-G-M). The Dreyfus Affair was a tremendous social and political upheaval that rumbled on long after the legal proceedings (1894-1906) were closed, and in the process almost shattered France's Third Republic. In / Accuse!, the sordid, splendid story is told on the screen for at least the sixth time. Mistakes have been made in the picture: the political repercussions of the affair are scarcely suggested, and the fateful social struggle which it dramatized is fobbed off with some anti-Semitic dialogue and a few shots of screaming headlines and howling mobs. What survives...