Word: swanberg
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...anti-Kane forces achieved their goal: the movie flopped. In the long run, of course, Hearst lost. What people know of him today is what they remember from the movie; the definitive biography, by W.A. Swanberg, is titled Citizen Hearst. But Welles lost too. His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, is a magnificent shard in its surviving form; RKO pulled Welles off the film, cut it by a third, hired a hack to shoot a new ending. He was now "Hollywood's youngest has-been," condemned to haunt Hollywood and other film capitals till he died looking for work. People...
...medicines to be found in the sea, but more people will die of starvation than by the diseases these might cure. If we are to survive, our primary focus must be worldwide population control. Where do we go after we have depleted the resources of the seas? BARBARA J. SWANBERG Brainerd, Minnesota...
...board of trustees or president sometimes did. President Nicholas Murray Butler was so distressed by what he considered offensive and lascivious in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls that he refused to submit the award recommendation to the trustees. The trustees refused to approve W. A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, so Swanberg got a later consolation prize for an inferior biography of Henry R. Luce...
...Swanberg, Norman Thomas was "that bird many people now consider all but extinct, an honest politician." Thomas refused to compromise his firm democratic, egalitarian, and civil libertarian ideals, even when his stands alienated many of his supporters. A case in point was his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II on the grounds that it would result in repression and fascism at home and the shoring up of imperialist regimes (Britain and France) abroad. Even those of his supporters who disagreed with his position in this case--and in others in which he was more prescient--could not help...
...this is perhaps why Swanberg, even while admitting Thomas's flaws, so clearly respects and admires Thomas, a man of, in a phrase he once used to characterize a friend, "uncommon common decency." For although he was sometimes mistaken, occasionally naive, Thomas served as America's conscience, educating and reminding her citizens of their government's failure to live up to her ideals in a way no marxist-idealogue could have. If Thomas's is a history of failure, it is less of a story of personal flaws than of the failure of the American political system...