Word: talleyrand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...instantaneous communication via space satellite, the art of diplomacy is still practiced, as it was in the days of Talleyrand or Machiavelli, face to face, man to man. That is why Cyrus Roberts Vance, 61, the cool, gray professional who serves as the U.S.'s 56th Secretary of State, last week found himself tossing and twisting on a blue and green sofa bed some 35,000 ft. over the Sahara desert. He was on the move once again, in a white and blue Air Force Boeing 707 outfitted like a flying foreign ministry, with its own cryptographic machines...
Returning to the throne from which his grandfather, Alfonso XIII, was ousted in 1931, Juan Carlos at 38 has the dual task of dismantling nearly four decades of dictatorship while attempting to establish his own legitimacy as chief of state. Unlike his Bourbon ancestors, of whom Talleyrand said, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing," Juan Carlos proved a retentive student during his years as monarch-in-waiting...
...Talleyrand said that no one who had not lived before 1789 knew how good life could really be. 1975 will probably never be thought of by anyone as such a critical dividing point in history. 1976 has a better chance. It is, after all, the two hundredth anniversary of the end of the Roman Empire in the west. Sobering thoughts--for Harvard and the world...
Like Ford and Brezhnev, Europe's Big Four representatives had an impressive supporting cast. Although France was a defeated power, it was ably served by its adroit, persuasive Foreign Minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord-whom Napoleon had once called "a piece of dung in a silk stocking," presumably because of his tendency to shift allegiances. Also present were some 32 minor German princes, representatives of the Pope, the Sultan of Turkey and numerous special interest groups (including the Jews of Frankfurt). They were accompanied by an extravagant collection of wives, mistresses and servants, and so much...
...whose purpose in life has been to dissipate a fabulous century-old fortune. "It was very satisfying," he says of this experience. He is old now, and penniless, with only his courtliness and wry smile left, but he defends his dead friend Stavisky before the Parliamentary inquiry much as Talleyrand might have defended himself before a revolutionary tribunal: you didn't know what it was like to live, he testifies, if you hadn't lived in Stavisky's world. In the end, he tilts the film's sympathies towards Stavisky, towards a feeling that these hollow thirties--when every glass...