Word: dimmest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...eyed, haggard witness strode into the House Caucus room, two rows of standees in the rear strained forward to glimpse at the unwilling star of TV's dimmest hour. Charles Lincoln Van Doren folded himself uncomfortably into the witness chair, gulped some water, then stripped away the last layer of illusion separating him from the shills. "I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years," began Van Doren in a remarkable confession...
...immature. They seem all the more so when the exhibition's "naturalistic" section illuminates a paradox which unites these two emotional extremes. Suddenly all the shouting stops, all the drama ends and rigor mortis begins to set in. The least trickle of spontaneous life is suddenly replaced with the dimmest pedantry. The right word is not naturalistic but academic. Here is a depressing union of the accomplished hand and the earthbound...
When the non-Russian recruit enters the world of Conrad's professor, he is bound about with rules which at first seem incredibly naive. The details of conspiratsia involve the dimmest kind of drudgery. No thriller writer would condescend to invent a scene as clumsily conceived as the actual meeting of two spies in a Geneva street. One of them thus summarized his instructions from Moscow: "I was to be wearing a white scarf and to be holding in my right hand a leather belt. As the clock struck noon, I would be approached by a woman . . . holding...
...leadership tends to be confused with and contaminated by the conduct of Senator McCarthy. A large part of this identification can be credited to the fact that European democrats, inevitably thinking in terms of parliamentary government, have only the dimmest understanding of the U.S. separation of executive and legislative powers. Their lack of instruction is scarcely the fault of Senator McCarthy-or President Eisenhower-but the effect is not mitigated by this. The effect is that the President and the anti-McCarthy Republicans quite often seem to horrified European onlookers like rabbits transfixed by the headlights of an onrushing truck...
...trenchant analysis of scenario writers has brought the fascinating revelation that we win, primarily, not because the brass is so clever, but because our enemies are abysmally dumb. No piece of stupidity eludes them, and the dimmest of heroic intellects is more than a match for the whole general staff of any anti-U.S. army. Furthermore, Providence (Division of North American Affairs) has arranged that those nations that are first the enemies and then the allies of the United States regain their wits in time to help defeat the next moronic aggressor...