Word: focuses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...provide this protection to all. Moreover, attempts to restrict the spread of bomb building know-how have failed: If a junior at Princeton can design a bomb, and a journalist can find the plans to one in a public library, any nation can. As a result, American policy should focus on limiting the spread of the plutonium that is the prerequisite of any nuclear weapon as the only way to curb proliferation...
...thus are capable of extraordinary feats of both creativity and destructiveness. Their sheer numbers alone would have guaranteed that we would have had unusual fashions in music and art, abnormally high crime rates, and new social and religious movements. The war in Vietnam and race relations provided a special focus for many of those energies and imbued more of them with a political cast than might otherwise have been the case...
There was a great frustration at the end of the '70s; one couldn't easily capsulize what went on. The '60s seemed so neat and why couldn't w neatly summarize what had gone in the '70s? Why was there no focus? Why do we seem to be all of a sudden lacking major critical voices who can define for us what happened? Whether such clarity was ever good and whether or not it will return, I just don't think anybody knows...I grew up at a time when things did seem clear and there were sides to take...
...hostage crisis, some Western analysts believe, Khomeini is torn two ways. He seized on the Shah's admittance to the U.S. for medical treatment as a heaven-sent opportunity to focus all popular discontent and criticism on two hated scapegoats, the deposed monarch and the Americans, and incited a wave of fury that culminated in the seizure of the U.S. embassy. (Some intelligence sources think that the Ayatullah genuinely feared the Shah might die of cancer before Khomeini could exact his revenge.) But Khomeini did not think through the consequences, and?implausible though it now seems?may actually be looking...
...hard to contend that reporters should behave simply as vacuums, Hoovering about the halls of power after random crumbs. A story without a focus--be it the filth of the meatpacking industry, the sinister evil of Joe McCarthy, the links between political espionage and government officials--does not deserve to be called reporting. It is repeating what others have told, even if what they have said is pointless or silly. At best it is crude history ("History on the run," Woodward called it during his Harvard appearance), but historians too usually look for a way to focus their work...