Word: agnew
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inhibit a good ranter. But ranting is not always entertaining. Often it is embarrassing, even shaming. Sometimes, if it issues forth from a politician or religious zealot with ambitions, it becomes sinister. The U.S. has a fairly rich tradition of ranters, from Thomas Paine to Joseph McCarthy to Spiro Agnew (whose ranting was actually a satire on the form) to Louis Farrakhan. A citizen named Peter Muggins caught the essense of the rant in an intense if repetitious letter to Abraham Lincoln: "God damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell...
...Today Agnew is glad to see a mutual understanding between the soldiers and the physicists. He is annoyed by those of his former colleagues at Los Alamos who believe that science struck a perilous bargain with the military during the war. That was the thrust of Rabi's reunion speech: "We gave away the power to people who didn't understand it and were not grown up enough and responsible enough to realize what they had." Rabi's speech "really irritated me," says Agnew, who was at that same reunion and whose own speech declared that the Japanese "bloody well...
...while," Agnew says, "I really was aching to get in the war. Pure and simple. I wanted in especially because all my classmates and my friends in Denver were in. We had an all-city softball team. My catcher got killed in the war--a guy named Howard Erikson. And all the other kids--Bob Hogan, who would have made, maybe, an All-America golf and/or football player, he got killed. Everybody was gettin' killed. Or they were off fighting someplace. And of course, the neighbors wanted to know where I was. And my parents said they really didn...
...solely to effect that surrender is another question. After Europe, the nation had its bellyful of war, and the assumption of the times was if the Bomb could bring peace in one shot, then use the thing. But a strong impulse for retribution must have applied as well. Harold Agnew was not alone in feeling that the Japanese "bloody well deserved" Hiroshima. There is also a theory that the U.S. used the Bomb as much to frighten the Soviets, with whom it was about to divide the world, as to win the war with Japan. More have dismissed this theory...
...Diego, Rosenblatt found Harold Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "He had been in the instrument plane that accompanied the Enola Gay to Hiroshima, and he had also watched the first atomic chain reaction in Chicago in 1942. He was a witness to the whole progress of the atomic...