Word: albatross
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...Albatross. The case against Dean Acheson was based primarily on his Asiatic policy. Assistant Secretary Dean Rusk uses a phrase-"the error of the fatal flaw." Says Rusk: "There are probably some major problems of international relations that are beyond human capacity to think through. There are hundreds of major premises pulling in all directions ... The policymaker is constantly haunted by the error of the fatal flaw...
Around the State Department, the old animus against Chiang Kai-shek still persists, for Chiang is the symbol of a mistake, hanging like the ancient mariner's albatross around the U.S. neck. The U.S. had shrunk from any embroilment in Asia. The Korean intervention was not actually Asiatic policy but a 180° turn from it; it was carried out to make a moral point. As a matter of basic policy, the U.S. had determined, as it did in World War II, that the place it would much prefer to fight, if it has to fight, is in Europe...
Wrong Airport. But what about MacArthur and what about Formosa? The question flapped along like the albatross as the Independence stuck her blue nose into the thick haze over Washington the next morning, passed over the fog-shrouded National Airport and landed instead at Andrews Air Force Base, twelve miles away (thus forcing Bess Truman, Secretaries Acheson and Snyder and the rest of the welcoming delegation to streak across town behind sirens). No one who knew Douglas MacArthur suspected that Harry Truman had talked him out of his conviction that Chiang Kai-shek should be shored up and Formosa defended...
...shot down his first German plane, an Albatross single-seater, on April 29, 1918. He dove his Nieuport out of the sun until he was less than 150 yards from his quarry before he opened fire...
...Rousseau, Proust and others." By 1944 Paris-born Author Nin had arrived in Greenwich Village, privately published three books, and decided to "convert and transpose the diary of 65 volumes into a full, long novel . . ." Like her other two published novels Ladders to Fire (1946) and Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart reads more like a diary than a novel-but a diary in which nothing actually happens...