Word: statecraft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kate Simon's travel books and her autobiographical portraits, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, are admired for their good sense, wit and pithy grace. These qualities serve her well as a popular historian of a period that has set the Western world's standards for art, culture, cynical statecraft and consumer spending. The legacy of the Italian Renaissance is never far from contemporary tastes; its style and egocentricities survive wherever easy money, ambition and ideas flourish. Lofty mindedness and low animal cunning rarely had a better stage on which to interact. As Simon puts it, "The susurrus of silks...
...White House and sex on the presidential yacht. Her version of John Kennedy gives new meaning to the Bay of Pigs affair, as the randy Commander in Chief leaves his lover mad and languishing in a Swiss sanatorium. Elsewhere in this view of Washington below the Beltway, sex and statecraft are cranked up to date. "The real story at the heart of politics and male power was their wives and lady friends," thinks Deena Simon, the gossip columnist with a nose for news but practically no nose. "Just ask Gary Hart...
Progressing from the impersonal panoply of statecraft to an almost hallucinatory intimacy of soulcraft, the libretto depicts Nixon as emotionally repressed and socially awkward but acutely aware of his role in history. Mostly written in couplets, the lyrics may sometimes be elliptical, but they are psychologically observant and very singable...
This comes from centuries of Kings, Popes and Presidents acting out the gap between principles and applied statecraft. Says Guy Sorman of Paris University's Political Studies Institute: "Most Frenchmen believe that political power and foreign policy should be Machiavellian. Today when President Mitterrand is called a Florentine -- meaning a Machiavellian -- it is meant largely as a compliment. What Frenchmen dislike is naivete...
...defeat in his campaign to provide aid for the Nicaraguan contras, and his popularity rating dipped noticeably in the last job-performance polls. With his big legislative battles over the budget and tax reform still in front of him, Reagan had doubtless hoped that an interlude of high-visibility statecraft in Europe would provide a boost to his domestic standing. The Bitburg fiasco did precisely the opposite, causing unwelcome distractions and unnecessary embarrassments. The episode could hardly bring the Reaganaut march to a halt, but it will make the going harder...