Word: factly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...storms that forever rage over foreign aid have all but obscured the fact that it is a relatively recent and radical experiment in international cooperation. Only for a couple of decades have the world's richer nations observed a general commitment to help the more than 100 less developed countries that embrace two-thirds of mankind. The results have been mixed, but there have been enough signs of success to merit strong support for the experiment. Yet after a year-long study sponsored by the World Bank, an eight-member commission headed by former Canadian Prime Minister Lester...
...Viet Nam war, in particular, has exposed the weaknesses of the briefing ritual. The requirement of brevity means that briefers must rely heavily on hard facts and statistics, even when dealing with subjects that defy quantification. Time and again, military briefers in Viet Nam have "proved" that the war was being won with the help of impressive "body counts" of enemy dead that were impossible to verify, let alone dispute. With the aid of computers, U.S. officials were equally sanguine about stating to the decimal point how many villages were "secure" in Viet Nam. Such was the faith...
...saying in Viet Nam is that there are only two ways to make general: by fighting or by briefing. It is no secret that General Earle Wheeler owed his elevation to Army Chief of Staff partly to the fact that he impressed President Kennedy with his skill as a briefer. Without exception, an officer is briefed before he goes on a mission and debriefed after it. Base commanders take great pride in showing off their briefing rooms and their graphics departments, which turn out an unending stream of impressive audio-visual aids. "When we briefed General Westmoreland," recalls one officer...
...ultimate in efficiency, but its acceptance by the military epitomizes the failure of briefings. Even without benefit of computer, the armed-services style of communication has become a ritual recitation of memorized details, a reduction of experience to a set of quantifiable data. The supposedly hard fact has been glorified; the untidy, elusive concept has been smudged into a supposedly measurable statistic...
...fifth and final stage is acceptance, when at last the condemned patient bows to his sentence. "I think this is the miracle," the seminar was told by one woman who had steadfastly refused to accept the fact of her impending death. "I am ready now and not even afraid any more." She died the following...