Word: decorum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Typically, meetings of a group like this are exercises in official decorum, with Cabinet members presenting the President with lists of options and no one speaking out of turn; White House officials say that on Wednesday the Oval Office was a swirl of activity. Chairs were dragged in from the hallway; the President's advisers leaned over one another and volunteered their assessments as more raw intelligence reports flowed in. Bush asked whether the weather might impede an attack on Saddam, how quickly U.S. forces could carry out the mission and how an early strike could affect the rest...
...Decorum was shattered at the Arab summit in Doha last week when Izzat Ibrahim, the Iraqi envoy, lashed out at Kuwaiti diplomat Mohammed Sabah al-Salem: "Shut up, you monkey ... Curse be upon your mustache." Those are fighting words in a region where men have been cultivating whiskers since the Ottoman Empire. More than a badge of manhood, the mustache is practically a totem: to seal a deal Iraqis literally swear by them; to compliment a man they say "an eagle could land on his mustache." During the Iraq-Iran war, facial hair was an extension of the military uniform...
...even muted,” she says. “Sometimes we just worry a bit about her feelings. It’s not just a new territory for us, it is for them as well. We are all doing a good job, it seems to me, figuring out decorum and ground rules. We are a department filled with people who trust and respect each other...
Bush's Secretary of State COLIN POWELL, a moderate in an Administration full of hard-liners, has maintained near perfect decorum with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in public. But the three men fought pitched battles behind the scenes over most of the Administration's foreign policies. For the first time this year, Powell started winning a few. Powell, 65, has long taken exception to the conservatives' muscular brand of unilateralism, arguing instead that the U.S. should act in concert with allies. He scored a crucial victory in August when he persuaded President Bush to engage the U.N. before attacking...
...younger sister of Elizabeth II, Margaret chafed at the bounds of Windsor decorum but had her fun at the margins all the same. Her 1950s romance with Royal Air Force Group Captain Peter Townsend was cut off by family order because he was divorced. She rebounded smartly, collecting a circle of posh friends--including Peter Sellers, with whom she spent long evenings around the piano with a cigarette holder and cocktail shaker--and making a second home on the Caribbean island of Mustique. A 1960 marriage to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon, ended in divorce...