Word: vital
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from hardscrabble beginnings into far-flung real estate and broadcast empires with assets ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In almost every instance, those holdings are dominated by a single dynamic individual who decides how the money will be spent and who strives, above all, to keep vital donations flowing from the faithful...
Lieut. Colonel Oliver North spent nearly three years coordinating arms purchases and helping to raise money for the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua. But none of North's secret activities may prove as vital to the rebels as his testimony before the Iran-contra committees. As millions of Americans watched on television, North pleaded passionately for support of efforts to overthrow Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista junta. He was even permitted to deliver his patented fund-raising pitch, minus the projection of 57 slides that usually accompany the spiel. Holding a photograph of a makeshift contra grave, North, his voice choking...
Moreover, Poindexter said, his extraordinary exercise of authority did not end with the contra diversion. As the scandal was breaking last November, Poindexter testified, he destroyed a piece of vital evidence: a covert-action finding, drafted by the CIA and signed by the President in December 1985, that retroactively approved Israel's shipments of U.S. arms to the Iranians. The document, said the admiral, depicted the weapons transactions as a straight arms-for-hostages swap with Iran rather than a diplomatic effort to establish contacts with Iranian moderates, as the President has maintained. "I thought it was politically embarrassing," said...
This new outlook, Gorbachev argues, is required in an atomic age. "Nuclear deterrence demands the development of new approaches, methods and forms of relations between different social systems, states and regions," he told the Communist Party Congress last year. "It is vital that all should feel equally secure." Says Professor Robert Legvold, director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University: "This is a historic juncture. Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader to link national security to mutual security, to argue that the U.S.S.R. cannot achieve security at the expense of its main rival...
...exactly what knowledge will be vividly taught? Cultural Literacy is obviously meant to provoke serious debate. But when it leaves the theoretical and lands on the practical, it executes a pratfall. Hirsch and two academic colleagues offer a 64-page appendix of references that constitutes their version of vital information. They never do get around to telling the reader that Brownian motion is a random movement of microscopic particles suspended in liquids or gases, that Walter Pater said we should burn with a hard gemlike flame and that comme il faut means proper. They are too busy moving their curriculum...