Friday, February 15, 2013

Opening paragraphs................

Woodrow Wilson had very few friends, and that bothered him.  People considered him "cold and removed," he groused.  He wished journalists would write about his lighter side - his love of baseball, his gift for mimicry, his flair for limericks - but instead they depicted him as a bloodless "thinking machine."  He longed for a nickname.  Perhaps if he had kept his birth name, Thomas, he mused, people would call him "Tommy" and thus find him more approachable.  Theodore Roosevelt was known as "Teddy," and no one ever called him cold and removed.
Peter Beinart:  The Icarus Syndrome:  A History of American Hubris

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