Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Thompson, who has an eye on the White House himself, is discouraged but not defeated. "We've been stonewalled," griped committee spokesman Paul Clark, but he added, "There's still important material we haven't got" and "700,000 pages of documents to go through." Yet the sense of a lost opportunity is starting to infect the G.O.P. troops. "If the hearings are a success, fine, Thompson gets the credit," said a House leadership aide. "If they sputter and don't produce anything, Thompson gets the blame...
...endorsed by Bill Clinton and George Bush before him, will begin in 1999 with fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. The tests are supposed to serve only as a benchmark to assess educational progress, but they could one day lead to nationwide graduation standards. Now Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and IBM chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., co-chairs of last year's Education Summit, are adding to the pressure, enlisting companies to pledge that they will look at young applicants' academic records, including exit-test scores, rather than rely only on interviews and job-skill tests...
...Hunter Thompson launched himself at Parnassus much as he did at everything else, with guns blazing, a bulletproof heart and unflagging dead aim. Yet if the first dirty secret of the 350 or so youthful letters collected in The Proud Highway (Villard; 683 pages.; $29.95) is that the Unabomber of contemporary American letters was writing like a paranoid madman even in his teens, the second is that he was doing so because he was a well-read and ambitious man determined to claim his place in literary history. Meticulously keeping carbons of all his 20,000 letters, and taking himself...
Like all great wits, from Oscar Wilde to Gore Vidal, Thompson saw that a pose was more compelling than a personality, not least because it was more consistent. Thus 30 years before he was the defining "gonzo" subject of four biographies and a Hollywood movie, Thompson was a legend in his own mind, playing himself with mean authority. "I've dropped from 190 pounds to 170," he wrote as a teenager, "become a terrible case of nerves, become addicted to coffee--drinking about 20 cups a day--and had to give up cigarettes when I got up to 4 packs...
...Thompson somehow lived up to his brash self-advertisements, in part because he was able to reflect the dark and roiling energies of young America. As early as 1964, he saw Ronald Reagan as "the prototype of the new mythological American...who will probably someday be President." One year earlier he noticed that Richard Nixon was indestructible, "a vengeful Zero with nine lives." Thompson, in fact, was that loneliest of creatures, an idealist without illusions, ready to kowtow to no one and as contemptuous of beatniks and hippies as of the "rotarians" they rebelled against. Surveying the 1960s like...