Word: moment
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sensing that the moment had come to strike, Fran?ois Mitterrand, the leader of the non-Communist left, next day made an open bid for power. Summoning the press to a gilded salon in the Hotel Continental, he called for the establishment of a provisional government of the left to prepare for the election of a President to replace De Gaulle. He suggested former Premier Pierre Mendès-France be leader of the provisional regime-a proposal to which Mendès-France quickly agreedèand announced his own intention to run for the presidency in the elections...
France, which had fallen apart with such appalling rapidity, now seemed to coalesce with the same amazing speed. Partly, it was the result of timing. By good luck or design, De Gaulle had chosen the proper moment to move: the striking workers were running out of money (the French unions have no strike funds), and the nation as a whole was tired of the inconveniences of living in an immobilized country. Partly, too, it was the response of a nation to a heroic leader. The turnabout illumined the dilemma of the majority in an age of instant communication, when extremists...
...suddenly, unaccustomedly weak and unworthy. They ache and protest with each shift on the damp sheets. The stitches pull; one is certain that all the vital sap must be flowing from the wounds the doctors have left open to drain. Each man knows that he has not slept a moment, and he quietly hates the men next to him who seem to be sleeping so soundly...
...there is some release, a pushing back, for a time, of the horizons. There is talk with one's neighbor, the compulsion to relive the moment when you were hit, to hear how it was when he was hit. The helicopter pilot tells over and over how the shattered AK-47 slug he is fondling came up through the armored floor of his chopper, ripped through his calf and embedded itself in the dashboard. As do the others, he reconstructs his adventure with the clarity of total recall-the surprise, the pain, the pleasure of having faced death...
Newly armed with history's biggest plurality, writes Wicker, Johnson at that moment was politically free to liquidate a war he had not started. By the 1968 election, Viet Nam might have become a dead issue, long overshadowed by Great Society triumphs. (Of course it might also have become a very live issue, had it been followed by other conflicts in Asia.) Instead, banking on his mandate, Johnson chose escalation, convinced that he could avoid a big land war by using "cheap" airpower to bomb the North. But the result, Wicker argues, was that Johnson simply created...