Word: comedownance
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This was a smashing comedown for James Riddle Hoffa. Only 77 hours earlier he had swaggered into the McClellan hearings like a crowing cock into a coop of capons. At first he had arrogantly demanded permission to edit and change the records of the hearings-a barefaced attempt that would enable him to square his imminent testimony with later established fact. For a while Hoffa had even seemed to be in charge. He led Michigan's bumbling Democratic Senator Pat McNamara, Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and New York's Ives down a primrose path. There...
...Comedown. When it came time to examine NATO's defenses, there was little argument, but not much cause for cheer. Faced with the economic crisis brought on by Suez, Britain told the council frankly that it could no longer maintain its defense expenditures, which are currently running at $4.2 billion a year or 9% of the total national product. France admitted that there was no prospect of bringing back the four divisions it pulled out of NATO's shield for service in North Africa...
...comedown was considerable from the high hopes of Lisbon in 1952, when the NATO council set a goal of 65 "ready" divisions. In 1954 NATO cut back its hopes, adopted a "new look" strategy based on the use of tactical atomic weapons behind a thin "plateglass" shield of infantry, and put the new target at 30 divisions. The plate glass was getting thinner all the time. Last week NATO could field only 15 "shield" divisions, of which five were U.S., four British, to defend the line from the Alps to the Baltic...
Assuming the offer genuine, it represented a major concessio−and comedown−by E.O.K.A. In Athens it was described as giving the British a chance to save face. In London it was seen as vindication of Harding's stern policy of military repression of terrorism. E.O.K.A., said the British, had been sobered both by its losses of men and material and by the fact that the Greek Cypriot populace, which once gave E.O.K.A. almost unanimous approval, has been increasingly distressed by bombings, riots and curfews. (In the past few weeks several Greek Cypriots, including an ex-member...
...week's end, before the Hoppegarten meeting was over, even East zone bettors had taken their meager supply of marks to the betting booths of West Berlin's Mariendorf trotting track. For a true horseplayer, this was a terrible comedown...