Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Great Communicator. Gorbachev's greeting to his visitors, noted Conte, was almost fulsome. He had been well briefed by aides, and spoke through an interpreter from color-coded typed notes. He made his points firmly, often with emotion and at times with humor and a trace of sardonic wit; Conte recorded that he even hit the table with his fist for emphasis. One of the charmed visitors called him quite an actor. The meeting ran on for almost four hours, even though it was only scheduled...
...best look yet at a man who described himself as "someone whose principal work-and-amusement is writing, and reading and thinking about things." He had a love affair with learning, and he gave his correspondents glimpses of this passion that were enhanced by vivid imagination and caustic wit...
Regan has indeed kept his wit. After a newspaper story last week reported "tension" between him and Bush, Regan remarked to the Vice President, "You and I have to cut out this feuding." Bush asked what it was they were feuding about. "I'm not sure over what, but it's in the paper," said Regan. Later, visiting Reagan in his hospital bed, Regan told him, "Mr. President, you've got to tell George to stop picking on me," before showing Reagan the story and assuring him that there was nothing to it. Regan's joshing approach defused in advance...
...hundreds of books a year since then on arms control, arms negotiations, plans for peace, manuals on how to survive nuclear catastrophes. In the past two or three years, an entire intellectual community has been born around the Bomb, a portable Algonquin Round Table (minus the wit) made up of such people as McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Harold Brown, Robert McNamara and several retired military leaders, many of whom were among the policymakers who originally protected the secrecy of the Bomb and who have now gone public with strategic theories and proposals for arms limitations...
...fact, the exercise in coming to terms with death is leavened by humor—Dr. Bearing seizes all opportunities to display her own capacious wit, even mocking her deathbed scenes (“I never thought my life would be this corny”). The overall tone of the production, however, is grim; the jokes are more of a defense mechanism than the product of a genuinely insouciant attitude toward life...