Word: splendorful
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Indeed, the imperial splendor of presidential travel sometimes stuns even Presidents-including Ronald Reagan. Before his summer vacation last year, Reagan demanded that his aides explain why nearly 200 Government employees had to be flown to California to stand by while he rode horses and chopped wood at his ranch. No way to pare the list, the aides replied: wherever he goes, the President must be in instant communication with any part of the world, guarded round the clock and accompanied by an ever growing press corps...
...finest navy the world had ever known, and its splendor was never more stirringly displayed. The year was 1897, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and the Royal Navy assembled at Spithead, off Portsmouth, for review. Decks scrubbed white, brasswork gleaming, wheelhouse glass sparkling, the ships stretched along the coast in four lines seven miles long. There were 173 in all, including more than 50 battleships. At the same time, 160 other units of the Queen's Grand Fleet were on patrol in every sea in the world...
...European voyagers recorded that a Thai royal tour through the waters of the old imperial capital, Ayutthaya, involved as many as 450 sumptuous teak barges, elaborately carved and gilded, with prows in the shapes of ornate serpents, birds and deities. Wrote one French envoy who witnessed the spectacle: "The splendor of the decorations, the variety of costume, the crowds of richly dressed spectators, the noise of the oars, and the shouts of the rowers, added to the music of innumerable instruments, produce a whole which would be difficult to parallel elsewhere." But rising maintenance costs gradually forced the royal barges...
...noticeably tense up while shaking hands with a woman. As if doing penance for a nation's (and a family's) mistreatment of him, Wills shows Ted trapped by each of the elements of the Kennedy mystique: sex, family, image, charisma and power. The other Kennedys died in the splendor of youth, before the faces and the myths had time to wrinkle. But Ted has endured...
High culture no longer seems to produce high religious art. But it is the religious impulse, absolutely authentic and rising to the point of visionary splendor, that dominates the show in Washington...