Word: winant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ambassador and Mrs. Winant took a modest four-room flat in London, stood on the roof watching the brutal bombing attacks of 1941's spring. Often he walked all night through the streets when bombers were overhead, talking to the people...
England liked Gil Winant, and showed it by dropping him out of public notice. At a luncheon shortly after his arrival, the crowd insisted on a speech; he stood up, shifted his weight from one long leg to the other through four straight minutes of agonizing silence, finally said softly: "The worst mistake I ever made was in getting up in the first place." After that they usually let him alone...
Honest Gil. Winant's absentmindedness, honesty and great human kindness are legendary. He refused pay for his first two days on the Social Security Board because he had done some private business on those days; he emptied his pockets for handouts, was eternally grateful to waiters who brought him a second cup of coffee...
...Winant in London. At Bristol airport, when Winant arrived, he was supposed to be welcomed by the Duke of Kent, but the Duke had not yet appeared. Winant obligingly climbed back in his plane, to keep from embarrassing the Duke. As Ambassador to the knee-breeched Court, Winant is unworldly and unkempt as ever. He arrived with one grey suit, which promptly fell into baggy-kneed disrepair. His conversations are brief sentences between long, groping pauses, long minutes of staring at the floor...
...arrived in an England that had grown tired of ruddy Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's cheerful salesmanship. And Kennedy had slept out bombings safely in the country, had returned to the U.S. to talk a sort of anti-British isolationism. Winant's modesty, his sincerity, washed the bad taste out of England's mouth...