Word: wilmot
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From East Africa to Capitol Hill, a lot of lofty political leaders have a working relationship with Businessman James Wilmot. James who? His name is scarcely a household word even on his upstate New York turf. But Wilmot's otherwise unprepossessing office, in a cinder-block building at the edge of the Rochester airport, contains a profusion of photographs showing him with people in high places...
...Wilmot is a hustling, self-made millionaire. Wearing one of his entrepreneurial hats, he is the principal owner of Wilmorite Inc., a Rochester construction and real estate firm. Elsewhere Wilmot is best known as the chairman and chief stockholder of Page Airways Inc.; it does a brisk business (1977 revenues: $59 million) operating terminals for private planes at nine busy locations, including Washington's National and Dulles airports. But what made Page special and Wilmot very rich was the firm's role as the worldwide sales agent for Grumman Corp.'s twin-jet Gulfstream...
...John Wilmot was one of the most clever Court poets during the reign of Charles II, and in many ways he represents the very nature of the Restoration: he was lewd, selfish, disdainful and he had no sense whatsoever of right and wrong. In that era Hobbes made it fashionable to have a rational disregard for religion, the only binding force for an otherwise criminal aristocracy. Any power Parliament had gained during Cromwell's Commonwealth dissipated with the return of Charles II, for whom Rochester saved some of the most vicious barbs--as in this epitaph...
Rochester seems to have had the best of all possible worlds during his short life. His father, Henry Wilmot, was a royalist exiled to France during the Commonwealth, while his mother was the former wife to an important Parliamentary figure. Between the two, young John Wilmot was able to enjoy a relatively unscathed youth reading the classics, going to Oxford when he was only thirteen and graduating the following year with a Master of Arts. But whatever favors Rochester might have received because of his family's dual politics, his sharp wit and merciless opinions garnered him plenty of attention...
...Wilmot graduated from Oxford in 1661, travelled in Europe for a few years and was immediately received into the king's Court upon his return in 1664. By the following spring he had already begun to make an infamous name for himself: he kidnapped Elizabeth Mallet, an heiress whom he was courting. Charles II sent Rochester to the Tower for this, his earliest offense, although it took only three weeks to appease the king and set the prankster free until his trial came up. War broke out with the Dutch, Rochester volunteered, and soon released himself from further punishment...