Word: stunt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lied his way into the Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., claiming swimming prowess he didn't have. He made the team, but then for a stunt he tried jumping into a pool from a balcony and landed on the deck, breaking both arms. Six months later, in 1988, Nelson Diebel won his first national title. Later he tattooed the Olympic rings on his hip and arrived at the '89 nationals with a double Mohawk -- one side dyed black, the other white. "Nelson's the wildest, most accident-prone human being who ever lived," says his coach, Chris Martin...
Ross Perot is fond of condemning Washington as "a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers and media stunt men." His disdain for politics- as-usual propels his anti-campaign. Yet Perot has turned over management of his crusade to a bipartisan corps of political pros who exemplify everything Perot says he opposes. Their efforts to transform Perot's volunteer army into a more traditional campaign brigade have sown widespread resentment and anger among his early enlistees...
...visitors to his 17th-floor office suite before a portrait of himself, commissioned and autographed by former Vietnam prisoners of war, so he could * say, "I don't think the POWS would have given me this if they thought what I had been doing for them was a publicity stunt." Like a salesman whose primary product is his own reputation -- as it was, in a sense, when he created EDS, the computer-services firm that made his fortune -- Perot hates adverse comment. He remembers the tiniest unintended factual errors by reporters and delights in haranguing them, and anyone else...
...candidate Richard Nixon pulled a similar stunt by hinting that he had a secret plan to bring Americans home from Vietnam. Almost exactly four years later, his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, proclaimed, "Peace is at hand!" What was really at hand was another election. Nixon won -- then unleashed the Christmas bombing...
When CBS hired a newly minted Univac to analyze the vote in the 1952 presidential election, network officials thought it a nifty publicity stunt. But when the printout appeared, an embarrassed Charles Collingwood reported that the machine couldn't make up its mind. It was not until after midnight that CBS confessed the truth: Univac had correctly predicted Dwight Eisenhower would swamp Adlai Stevenson in one of the biggest landslides in history, but nobody believed it. It is a defining moment in THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, a surprisingly satisfying five-part history of the computer that starts April...