Word: toweritis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...embarrassing violation of his repeated pledges never / to negotiate with terrorist regimes, but Reagan simply denied it. "We did not -- repeat, did not -- trade weapons or anything else for hostages," he said. After a three-month investigation, however, a presidential review board headed by former Texas Senator John Tower found that the "initiative became in fact a series of arms-for-hostages deals...
Reagan cooperated with the Tower commission, but when asked whether he had specifically approved Israeli sales of U.S. missiles to Iran, he first said that he had, then that he had not, then that the "simple truth is, I don't remember." On the basis of such evidence, the Tower commission condemned Reagan's careless "management style" and complained that the "President did not seem to be aware of the way in which the operation was implemented...
Naive critics of the CIA link would like to make the university an Ivory Tower hidden from the pressures of the nation and the nation a similar tower hidden from the pressures of the world. But in this dangerous international environment, we must play the game of the Soviet bloc--which has used all forms of espionage and covert action in its perpetual competition with the United States for world predominance--in order to preserve the freedoms and liberties we enjoy. To think otherwise would be foolhardy and unrealistic, something not unusual to many hiding from the real world behind...
...craters left by German V-bombs. Squares and courtyards were bulldozed flat. Planners who felt that London was too dense and dark decided that new buildings should reach up high in search of light. They rose, in fact, to the 52-story, 600-ft. level of the NatWest Tower, dwarfing the 365-ft.-high St. Paul's dome. According to Gavin Stamp, architecture critic of the London Daily Telegraph, "Wren's skyline was lost, not owing to any conscious decision, but to a sort of collective fit of absence of mind...
Much of the ugliest architecture is in and around the City, London's financial district. Some of the worst examples: the crude, polygonal Stock Exchange tower; the gloomy, 35-acre concrete jungle of Barbican Center, which includes apartments, shops, offices and a cultural center; and the cheap glass series of towers constituting London Wall. In other London districts examples also abound, many built with public funds. One of the least distinguished is the coarsely slablike headquarters of the Department of the Environment, which may help explain its failure to advance the cause of quality architecture...