Word: retrospective
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...instinct. His approach could have led to the type of breakthrough that happens only when leaders sweep aside details and discuss the big picture. Or it could have ended hopes for a limited agreement on European missiles and the use of Star Wars as a bargaining tool. In retrospect, the latter may have occurred...
...with Reagan's gung-ho activism. Finding some legal justification for them was another of those details that the President left to aides. The other tendency was to delegate disproportionate authority to subordinates who took a can-do approach, and then to let them operate with little supervision. In retrospect it seems absurd that so ostensibly minor a functionary as North would have been entrusted with such delicate matters as negotiating freedom for American hostages held in Lebanon and organizing a secret network to supply the contras. And not only seems -- it was absurd, and it got Reagan right into...
What we hadn't counted on, though, was that after a few drinks our fellow hijackers would get a tad unruly. In retrospect, Rutger and I shouldn't have insisted that the stewardesses waive the $2.50 mixed drink fee, because once we all started hitting the sauce in the way only free sauce can be hit, the expedition lost all sense of organization...
...should have been obvious, though, that the U.S. dealings with Iran would continue to bear fruit only so long as they were kept secret -- and that no maneuvers so momentous could be held under cover very long. In retrospect it is astonishing that so few people knew anything for a period as long as 14 months. But an essential part of the planning of intelligence operations is, or should be, what will be done and said when their covers are blown. And nobody in either Washington or Tehran seems to have given that much thought...
...laughs the 30-year-old grad student. While his thoughts about archaeology have changed in the past 15 years, his enthusiasm for the field has not waned. "We're getting, in many ways, beyond ourselves technologically. We need fields like archaeology and history that have some semblance of retrospect, some sense of perspective. I really do believe that we can learn from our mistakes...