Word: toning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...developments last week. One was the announcement that the much delayed meeting between Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, widely seen as a prelude to a summit in the U.S. later this year, will begin on Sept. 15. The other was the upbeat tone struck by Kenneth Adelman when he announced his resignation as director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Said Adelman, a skeptical critic of many arms-control proposals: "I want to leave at a time when it was clear that things were coming up roses...
...ignored, cut out of some of the Reagan Administration's most crucial foreign policy decisions. For the U.S. as well, the witness Shultz bore was painful. His blunt description of "guerrilla warfare" within the Administration, his public denunciation of the way things were run and his refusal to tone down his criticism would have been extraordinary coming from a junior bureaucrat. Coming from the nation's top Cabinet officer, they were unprecedented...
...Iran and divert them to the Nicaraguan rebel forces. He claimed to have exercised this authority without ever telling the President, so as to protect Reagan from the "politically volatile issue" that subsequently exploded on them. "I made the decision," Poindexter declared in an even, matter-of-fact tone. "I was convinced that the President would, in the end, think it was a good idea. But I did not want him to be associated with the decision...
...must become a "real superpower." Implicit in that phrase is a stunning confession: take away its 3.7 million men under arms and its 25,000-odd nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union would be a Third World country. There is a note of alarm, even shame, and a growing tone of impatience in the way he talks about the society and economy over which he presides. A new specter haunts the land of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the specter of apostasy imposed from above. What Gorbachev calls a "revolution" is to be accomplished by the beginning...
...performances match the tone. Cox and Ferrer are two sides of the same counterfeit corporate coin, and Kurtwood Smith (the most prominent punk) is one baaad malefactor. Weller, as the one good gunslinger in town, manages to convey emotion through the merest slit in his helmet. But the film is less an actors' showcase than a smart, grim satire. The only TV program to be seen is a slapstick variety show. Commercials peddle the 6000 SUX, the car of the future that brags about getting only 8.2 m.p.g., and a holocaust home-video game called Nukem. Giggly anchors read news...