Word: instinctive
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...violated all Jimmy Carter's instincts ?his political instinct for the charitable gesture, his personal instinct for compassion?to break his own campaign promise and cut off the golden flow of U.S. grain to the Soviet Union. But at the same time he was filled with rage and frustration at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and particularly by what he felt was Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev's lying justification of it. He stalked around the White House, bristling with anger. "Because of the way that I've handled Iran, they think I don't have the guts...
...living gently off his pension and his wife's inheritance. His mind is free to pursue W.H. Auden and Thomas Love Peacock, but his soul, forged at West Point, still hears distant thunder. "Leadership is never good when it is self-conscious," he says. "The President should respond instinctively to events -but the instinct is really educated intellection, and it has to be harnessed to a natural appetite for decision...
...austere theologian who little more than a year ago was totally unknown in the West he now menaces. But Khomeini's carefully cultivated air of mystic detachment cloaks an iron will, an inflexible devotion to simple ideas that he has preached for decades, and a finely tuned instinct for articulating the passions and rages of his people. Khomeini is no politician in the Western sense, yet he possesses the most awesome?and ominous ?of political gifts: the ability to rouse millions to both adulation and fury...