Word: striver
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many at Brookline High, Harvard was the next rung on the striver's cursus honorum. Joe Kennedy, the President's father, who had moved to Brookline to launch his banking career, went to Harvard for its social benefits, and sent his sons there for the same reason. Academic matters were secondary. The social benefits of Harvard were a reason for Michael Dukakis not to go there. He believes deeply in meritocratic distinctions, which are blurred (if not reversed) by social influence. He went, instead, to the Quaker school Swarthmore, where his love for discipline would be rewarded. The school also...
Though Robertson professes astonishment at his victories, he is in fact neither surprised nor fazed by his success. He is a different species of candidate, a disarming striver whose supreme self-confidence rests heavily on the belief that "God has a plan for everyone." In his case, this includes running for President. Those truly amazed are conventional Republican sachems who had regarded him as no more than a colorful nuisance. They have watched his partisans in four states marry religious fervor with organizational energy to win local contests that are normally ignored. Richard Bond, deputy campaign manager for Bush, says...
Nonetheless, in film after profligate film he described the fatal charm of the bourgeoisie for any working-class striver, or anyone too idealistic to recognize its strangling power. In 1978 Fassbinder was lucky enough to find a pair of screenwriters, Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, who set this theme in '50s Germany, and retooled it with more dexterity than Fassbinder had shown in his own scripts. The result of this collaboration was a trilogy-Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982)-that blended movie melodramas with acerbic sociology, and revealed the curse behind...
...Twain published them, and provided Julia Grant, finally, with security for life. True to Grant's own estimate of his accomplishment, the Memoirs do not mention the White House years. McFeely's own masterly work does, however, making those years and all the others in this stubborn striver's life a microcosm of the 19th century republic. Within it the biographer succeeds in making his flawed hero a man whom modern Americans "would recognize if they met him in a crowd...