Word: deskbound
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...succumbed to the prolonged arguments of Winston Churchill, who insisted on attacking the "soft underbelly of Europe," it was Marshall who got him to change his mind in favor of an assault across the English Channel. Marshall's fondest hope was that he could break out of the deskbound frustration of the staff planner to command the Normandy invasion, but Franklin Roosevelt turned him down: "I wouldn't sleep at night with you out of the country...
Battle for the Bomb. A Reserve lieutenant commander, Strauss headed for Washington at the outbreak of World War II to do deskbound Navy duty. Bad eyesight, the result of a boyhood rock fight, kept him out of shooting war. In wartime Washington, he originated the morale-building idea of awarding an "E" (for Excellence) pennant to outstanding war plants, helped set up the Office of Naval Research, wound up with the rank of rear admiral and the top medals a chairborne warrior could win: Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit...
Mustered in a hurry, the journalist army trained its eyes on the riotous color of Cuba in ferment. Rivers of copy surged onto the front pages, but the meaning of Cuba's sudden agony was left to deskbound editorial writers. They fired from the hip. Batista, the deposed tyrant, was condemned. Castro, the idealistic liberator, rated approving choruses, relieved only here and there by a suspicious question. In the next phase, as the tattoo of rebel firing squads stitched a new pattern on the face of Cuba, and the landscape was no longer boldly black and white, U.S. readers...
Between World Wars, Strauss prospered in the Wall Street investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Named an AECommissioner by Harry Truman in 1946 after serving as a deskbound rear admiral in World War II, he won a reputation for independent hardheadedness by pushing for an H-bomb program in 1949 against the combined opposition of his fellow AECommissioners and the physicists of the General Advisory Committee. Strauss won that bitter fight (with invaluable help from Physicist Edward Teller) just in time to keep the Soviet Union from gaining an H-bomb monopoly. After 1953, as Eisenhower's AEChairman...
...about time the Army, Navy and Air Force got together on the subject of "What price heroism," and lowered the boom on the deskbound members of the armed forces medals and awards sections...