Word: shrewd
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...maturing of the baby boomers coincides with two other crucial factors: 1) the explosion of computer technology, and 2) the recrystallization of the American past and myth that is taking place under Ronald Reagan's shrewd symbolic leadership. For all the potentially sinister aspects of computer technology as a tool of surveillance, the brilliant new electronics can serve individuality in liberating ways. The era of mass production implied uniformity. People were said to "conform" in the way that products conformed to one another, each identical. Now computers, at the speed of light, can make distinctions among individuals. Computers can integrate...
...Profile. Schmertz is the public relations fellow who earns praise for Mobil Oil's sponsorship of public television's Masterpiece Theater and mixed notices for Mobil's disputatious ads in newspapers and magazines. He believes in practicing contentiousness on the press. His advice is often shrewd: "If there's something you want to hide, but are required to disclose, put it in a press release . . . Most journalists find it hard to take seriously what you give them willingly." If your boss appears on 60 Minutes, Schmertz says, he should be as wary of "Harry Reasonable" as of "Mike Ambush...
Cuomo's mind is swift and shrewd, almost awesome in its ability to grasp and retain material. He takes a lot from his voracious reading. "This morning," he wrote recently in his diary, "I read an hour or so of The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham's novel about a restless man searching for inner understanding). It always had good meanings for me." Another morning he rereads portions of Thomas Jefferson's autobiography. "One thing struck me," wrote Cuomo, "the logical forcefulness of his debate...
...impasse. "Impasse," the Governor says, like a finicky lexicographer emending an improper usage, "means no progress. None of that." After the meeting, in his office, Cuomo will punch out telephone calls himself. He rings the mayor of Niagara Falls. He is out. He calls his son Andrew, a shrewd 28-year-old lawyer who ran Cuomo's campaign for Governor and is in many ways his father's alter ego. The Governor mentions the name of a potential political appointee. Andrew likes the candidate and the idea. Good. It is settled...
Packwood, who until two weeks ago seemed the least likely champion of sweeping reform, raised his arms in triumph. Joining hands in the committee room celebration was an unlikely combination of allies: Russell Long, the shrewd Louisiana Democrat who for 37 years in the Senate has played the fine print of the tax code like a fiddler at a fais-dodo; Majority Leader Robert Dole, who once argued that tax reform was a lower priority than deficit reduction but who now promises to push through the measure on the Senate floor next month; and Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Democrat...