Word: specialize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going on ABC less than a week after visiting the House Judiciary Committee and appealing directly to the American people on matters both of substance ("There is no excuse for perjury. Never, never, never") and style (Starr confessed to having seen "any number of" R-rated movies), the special prosecutor was practicing the sort of age-of-Oprah personality politics of which his nemesis Bill Clinton, that great white whale of a President, is master. Not only is this ethically dubious on Starr's part; it's stupid: Would Ahab challenge Moby Dick to a swim meet? Would Leon Jaworski...
Sarnoff next saw the potential of the iconoscope, a proto-television patented by Vladimir Zworykin in 1923. Within five years Sarnoff had set up a special NBC station called B2XBS to experiment with what came to be known as television. In 1941 NBC started commercial telecasting from station WNBT in New York City, but once again progress was delayed by war. Sarnoff served as communications consultant for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later named him a brigadier general. The title stuck. And in the halls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Sarnoff became known as "the General...
...good life ended in 1935. Thomas E. Dewey was appointed New York City special prosecutor to crack down on the rackets. He targeted Luciano, calling him "the czar of organized crime in this city," and charged him with multiple counts of compulsory prostitution. The trial was sensational. Tabloids went wild. Lucky vehemently denied being a pimp. "It's a bum rap," he said, a lament echoed down the years to modern Miami, where a few aging mobsters remember the man. "Nobody had anything bad to say about Charlie," one of them told...
...today's standards, Rozelle was vastly undercompensated, given the wealth he created for the NFL's owners. He was a special case: the business giant who didn't lust for financial fortune and overt personal dominance. But if the measure of business success is the creation of new enterprise, then Rozelle was one of the greats. Once, late in his career, after it was clear what he had accomplished, Rozelle was asked by a reporter if he had an ego. Pete Rozelle replied that if you took all the egos in pro sports--the players', the coaches', the owners...
Robert McCormick (1880-1955), owner of the Chicago Tribune, cultivated presidential enemies the way other men do orchids, winning Franklin Roosevelt's special hatred for publishing, on the eve of World War II, secret War Department plans that put the lie to F.D.R.'s professed neutrality. McCormick traveled the world aboard his own luxuriously outfitted B-17 bomber that included a swivel chair mounted in the plane's picture-window nose. From this vantage point, he offered readers his judgments of the nations of the earth, finding most of them filthy, lazy and wanting in Midwestern virtue. From Libya...