Word: joking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Test of Strength. First Secretary Khrushchev could afford to joke to Malenkov if he had a mind to. He had chosen to make his battle for power public for more than a year now. Openly he had criticized the government ministries under Malenkov's control for inefficiency, for lagging production, etc. Pointedly he had demanded an increasingly harder Stalin line, as opposed to the soft line Malenkov had identified himself with...
...policeman-politician-executive rose to Minister of the Armed Forces, Marshal of the Soviet Union, and finally a full member of the Politburo. Medals jangling, he reviews Red Square parades, sometimes on horseback, but more recently, as his weight has increased, in a ZIS limousine. Soviet officers still joke that he does not know the difference between a mortar and a howitzer...
Fourteen Hours produced her first fan, a high-school girl in Oregon who started a fan club and kept Grace posted on new members. Grace thought it a hilarious joke. "We've got a new girl in Washington," she would cry in triumph. "I think she's ours, sewed up." In High Noon, her finishing-school accent sat awkwardly amongst the western drawls, and her beauty made little impact. What was more, from High Noon determined Grace Kelly got her first real self-doubts about her planned progress. Says she: "With Gary Cooper, everything is so clear...
Young men who are eager to brighten her after-hours life come away baffled. "If she doesn't think a joke is funny," one complained, "she doesn't laugh." Wolves are discouraged when Grace briskly pulls on her glasses (her lovely blue eyes are nearsighted) and assumes her Philadelphia expression. Some suspect that she is, as Oscar Wilde put it, "a sphinx without secrets." Publicity men despair of her. "A Grace Kelly anecdote?" said a friend. "I don't think Grace would allow an anecdote to happen...
...speak at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949, a Harvardman asked John Ely Burchard, now M.I.T.'s dean of humanities and social studies: "How did you persuade Winston to speak to those steam fitters of yours?" As Burchard well knew, there was a mite of truth in the joke, in spite of mighty efforts already made to broaden the humanities curriculum. Was the nation's top technical school still giving its students too narrow an education? Last week the M.I.T. faculty formally approved a new experiment that may eventually answer the question...