Word: wasps
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When he comes to the door, he's in his customary Wasp regalia, a button- down cotton shirt and white suede shoes. Quantities of nicotine and bourbon have produced his voice, a liquid Southern baritone that reminds you of his friend Shelby Foote. It's a voice he dispenses in small doses. What that means is that he can stretch a sentence into next week while he deliberates on his next syllable...
...most gratifying thing about the new George Plimpton biography, George, Being George (Random House; 423 pages), is that it is nearly as much fun as George Plimpton. For the bulk of his 76 years, Plimpton--the Wasp bohemian who quarterbacked the Detroit Lions, danced at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, set off more fireworks than a thousand juvenile delinquents and edited America's greatest literary journal for 50 years before his death in 2003--was educated society's unofficial mayor of good times. Who else could box a few rounds with Archie Moore, trade stanzas with Marianne Moore...
...hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags of a fallen soldier (the real Draper), abandoned his dirt-poor relatives and rose to the heights of swellegant, three-martini Wasp success on Madison Avenue...
Unlike the typical '60s reminiscence, Mad Men doesn't have a baby-boomer perspective. (Creator Matthew Weiner, 42, was born after the boomer cutoff.) Its sensibility is closer to artifacts of its time like The Apartment or John Cheever's Wasp-character-study stories. In Mad Men, the boomers are a market for Clearasil or the children of the Drapers and their friends, largely unseen and unheard. (In a new episode, Don instructs his grade-school-age daughter how to mix a Tom Collins for guests...
...opposing foreign policy teams of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had their genesis 46 years ago in the 1962 class of diplomatic trainees at the U.S. State Department. Anthony Lake, a Wasp from Connecticut, and Richard Holbrooke, the son of European-Jewish immigrants, arrived in Washington that summer, destined to become two of the best diplomats of their generation. They became close friends and were posted together to Vietnam one year later. Lake would later sign Holbrooke's wedding certificate, and Holbrooke eventually became the godfather of one of Lake's daughters. They also became competitors, rising together...