Word: statesmen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bridge across the mutual incomprehension that was rending our society. Gently, they expressed their deep and passionate opposition to the war; but they had no idea how to end it. My problem was to translate inchoate ideas-however deeply held-into policy. Ours was the perpetually inconclusive dialogue between statesmen and prophets, between those who operate in time and through attainable stages and those who are concerned with truth and the eternal. I found it easier to respect these committed and consistent pacifists, who hated all killing, than those whose morality was selective, who condemned American military actions...
...paths might be parallel for only a fleeting moment. After that, they might well find themselves again on opposite sides. But one of the rewards of my public life has been that I could work with a great man across the barriers of ideology in the endless struggle of statesmen to rescue some permanence from the tenuousness of human foresight...
...ambivalent shown him some love? Would he have withdrawn deeper into the wilderness of his resentments, or would an act of grace have liberated him? By now it no longer mattered. Enveloped in an intractable solitude, he nevertheless saw before him a vista of promise to which few statesmen have been blessed to aspire, a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships and give new hope to emerging nations. He was alone in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle that was soon to turn into a precipice...
...then Energy Secretary James Schlesinger entered the deliberations and led them to a breakdown; the Mexicans said he used "colossus of the north" bargaining tactics. While in Mexico last February, Jimmy Carter tried to revive the talks, but Mexican President José López Portillo sniffed: "Presidents are statesmen, not merchants...
Eight American Presidents have died in office, including four who were assassinated. Most of the other 31 have eventually retired to their plantations or farms, their golf and their memoirs, their home towns in the heartland, there to play the comfortable roles of folk heroes and elder statesmen. The Soviet Union has no such tradition. The top leaders there either die on the job like Lenin and Stalin, or are ousted and relegated, like Georgi Malenkov, to diplomatic exile, or, like Nikita Khrushchev, to virtual house arrest and the ignominy of being an unperson. Since Khrushchev's overthrow...