Word: norstad
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...Much, Too Soon. By then, Larry Norstad was a marked man. In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower insisted on Norstad as War Department director of plans and operations. As such, he was the Army's representative in the dickering that preceded unification of the armed services, and with the late Admiral Forrest Sherman is credited with largely writing the unification act. But the newly independent Air Force, says one of his colleagues, "didn't know what the hell to do with him. He was too young to be Chief of Staff." The solution, finally arrived...
...turned out, Larry Norstad never commanded a squadron. In 1936, after four years of flying pursuit planes in Hawaii, he was brought back to the U.S. for staff duty, and by the time the U.S. entered World War II he was assistant chief of staff for Air Intelligence, with a growing service reputation as the headiest young staff officer in the Air Corps. From then on, his rise into the military stratosphere was at missile speed. Tapped by the Air Corps' General "Hap" Arnold ("I need somebody to help me do my thinking"), Norstad became a peripatetic planner. Starting...
...could plot this new course except statesmen and diplomats. But the man who knows most about the terrain ahead and who must lead NATO along the course the summiteers lay down is a lean, greying figure in U.S. Air Force blue. More than any statesman. General Lauris Norstad, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, knows and deals with the awkward big realities and the small difficulties of the NATO alliance-the insistence on selfish national objectives, the tendency to "let George do it." More than any diplomat, he influences the day-by-day progress of NATO-the integration of armed forces...
...This meeting is an event of the first order of magnitude," says Norstad. "It may be compared only with the establishment of NATO and the outbreak of the Korean war. It's all very well to make statements of principle, but now we must make a statement of the things we are doing, tangible things...
...Lauris Norstad has observed: "I get my formal directives on a piece of paper which I receive from the NATO Council. But my real directive is the confidence that nations place in this agency." If the Paris meeting can restore and reinvigorate that confidence, the meeting will be well held...