Word: vigor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Four years ago, radiating hope and youthful vigor, Republican John Vliet Lindsay held out a promise to New Yorkers to rescue their grimy, glittering metropolis from decades of Democratic decline. "I'm running for mayor be cause the city is in crisis," he told voters in his first mayoral campaign. "The streets are filthy. We'll rip down the cruddy slums in this town. There is crime. And people are afraid...
Gruening was the first Senator to attack the war in Vietnam, and to this day remains the only member of the Senate to have demanded a U.S. withdrawal. His speeches against the war have a clear-sighted moral vigor that we have learned not to expect from our politicians...
...although he won re-election in 1962, his age was a growing liability in a nation that values youth for its own sake. During Gruening's losing campaigns of 1968, he went to the extreme of taking a swim in the freezing Arctic waters to demonstrate his physical vigor. His age nevertheless appears to have brought on his narrow defeat in the Democratic primary last year...
...could have been avoided by wiser leaders. His approach to politics is largely unanalytical and moralistic: his radicalism, if it can be called that, is of a traditionally American sort. What distinguishes Gruening from his liberal colleagues in the Senate is not his ideology, but his extraordinary courage and vigor. He spoke out against the war in the strongest terms long before the other liberals were willing to do so, and he voted till the end against the war appropriations, even though the most prominent Senate doves have still not been able to bring themselves to this...
This lonely situation is occasionally relieved when he is asked to talk publicly about his work. If a man is what he does-and that is the American view -how satisfyingly stimulating it is to talk about one's work. The perceptive vigor in much of what 14 novelists have to say for themselves in this book seems to bear out this notion...