Word: airing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Missile expert. Presidential consultant. Chief of military research. Air Force Secretary. College president. SALT negotiator...
Brown was partly responsible for killing the B70 bomber (too vulnerable to Soviet air defenses) and the Skybolt missile (too unreliable). He was also involved in decisions to go ahead with a more advanced land-based Minuteman missile, the C-5A air transport, early research on the B-1 and on'the F-111 fighter-bomber (an $8 billion mistake...
...Brown became Secretary of the Air Force. During the Viet Nam War, he was a strong advocate of bombing as a means of keeping down the numbers of U.S. ground troops that had to be committed and of forcing the Communists to negotiate a peace. He avoids talking about the war, except to admit that he made mistakes. Says he: "A lesson we learned from Viet Nam is that we should be very cautious about intervening in any place where there's a poor political base for our presence." Brown also learned a more personal lesson. Says a colleague: "Viet...
...tightness of his grip on the Pentagon tiller is most evident in his dealings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and its outspoken and sometimes ill-spoken chairman, Air Force General George Brown (no kin). Says Secretary Brown: "I've known the chairman for 16 years; there are generals who were captains when I first met them. That gives me a certain personal rapport." But the brass finds him a hard man to persuade. Says an aide: "He's not just an umpire in the building. He reaches down into the process and shapes policy at all levels...
Nixon's memories of Nikita Khrushchev were vivid. He was "boorish, crude, brilliant, ruthless, potentially rash, with a terrible inferiority complex." He would put on a "big macho act to prove that he was ahead of everybody and everything." Part of the act was his "air of being just a common, peasantlike person... with a sloppy hat and a collar that wouldn't be too clean...