Word: wrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thatcher government insists that it has a moral duty to try to prevent Wright from setting a dangerous precedent. "It has nothing to do with freedom of speech," says a senior official, "but everything to do with the notion that if you're a secret agent, you bloody well stay secret." Still, it is one thing to stop an agent from violating his vow of secrecy and quite another to try to bar reporting about allegations that are now public. "To fail to distinguish between Mr. Wright's obligations to the government and the press's right to publish seems...
...meeting in the White House Oval Office, Ronald Reagan and George Shultz sealed a surprising accord with House Speaker Jim Wright and other congressional leaders. Three days later, in a grand reception room at the National Palace in Guatemala City, five Central American Presidents, including Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega Saavedra, proclaimed they had reached their own "historic compromise." And so, after six years of undeclared war between the U.S.-backed contras and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the battle last week suddenly became one between two rival peace plans for the region...
Although Secretary of State Shultz proclaimed that the Reagan-Wright plan was "not a ploy," there was reason for skepticism. The Administration has a history of announcing peace initiatives whenever contra funding is up for renewal. Late in 1984 a memo from John Poindexter, then Deputy National Security Adviser, to his boss, Robert McFarlane, set out a deceptive scheme: "Continue active negotiations but agree on no treaty and act to work out some way to support the contras either directly or indirectly. Withhold true objectives from staffs...
Nevertheless, Speaker Wright felt the time was ripe on all sides for a sincere diplomatic push: the Administration knew it could have trouble winning more contra aid; Congress was looking for ways to avoid a bruising clash; the rebels appeared to be making little headway on the battlefield; and the Sandinistas were experiencing severe economic problems and the prospect of waning Soviet support...
...Wright, who has a mixed voting record on contra aid, was receptive when visited last month by the Administration's new lobbyist on the issue, Tom Loeffler, a former Texas Republican Congressman. The two Texas pols, longtime friends despite their partisan differences, produced a plan that in effect offered the Sandinistas a stark choice: join in serious negotiations now or face a possible new infusion of U.S. military aid to the contras...