Word: statesmen
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...Luxembourg, the Harvard contingent will meet with about 400 scholars, statesmen and businessmen from across Europe and the United States, said Alexander Shustorovich '88 who organized the Harvard end of the conference...
Back when the telephone was a relatively new contraption, people often regarded it as too ephemeral for important communications. Averell Harriman and Robert Lovett, two great statesmen who had been Wall Street partners, talked on the phone regularly when they were apart and then would exchange letters the same afternoon, putting to paper what they had said. "As I told you over the telephone this morning . . . " they would typically begin. Back then, of course, the post was more efficient: the letter would usually arrive before the next morning's phone conversation...
Their successors, on the other hand, abandoned letters in favor of obfuscating memos when it came to discussing, say, the Viet Nam War. Some of the most candid records of that period come from times when a few of the old statesmen were called in for counsel and then, as was their wont, exchanged letters about what they had discussed...
...national penchant for exposing as quickly as possible everything done by public officials, which is codified by the Freedom of Information Act, is, on balance, a good thing for democracy. But it is not the best thing for history. It has taught statesmen to be very careful about what they put on paper. "For all its advantages, the FOIA inhibits people from writing," says Robert Donovan, whose noted biographies of Truman depended heavily on letters and frank memos. "Officials shred it all now. A lot of serious history is vanishing...
Despite such hip-shooting urgency, The Federalist proved so penetrating an explication of the Constitution that 50 years later Alexis de Tocqueville described it as a tour de force that "ought to be familiar to the statesmen of all countries." Almost 140 years after that, Historian Marvin Meyers, now retired from Brandeis University, called it the "most profound commentary on the original nature of the American regime, and the best single guide to the political mind of the founders...