Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...heart of the Pentagon, a heavy oaken door leads to the supersecret National Military Command Center. No one gets through the door without presenting a color-coded Joint Chiefs of Staff identification badge, which armed guards scrutinize under ultraviolet light. In one section of the two-story center, shifts of officers and men from all four of the armed services maintain a round-the-clock vigil. A red telephone links them directly to the White House; a beige phone can instantly reach any U.S. military commander anywhere in the world. Mounted on one wall are half a dozen computer...
Jackson and other congressional admirers have been saving Rickover's programs-and Rickover-from the Pentagon ax since 1953. The Navy had devised a none too subtle ploy to force the crusty, cantankerous then captain into retirement by reducing him to working out of a converted ladies' room and twice passing him over for promotion. But many on Capitol Hill shared his dream of an all-nuclear fleet, no matter what the cost. At their insistence, the Navy moved him to better quarters and eventually promoted him to full admiral. Since 1965, when he reached retirement...
...briefings, he insists on reading the background studies and documents himself before making a decision. As he zips through them?nearly as fast, it sometimes seems, as a computer scans punch cards?he pencils questions and comments along the margins in his almost microscopic handwriting. Next he peppers the Pentagon's experts with still more questions, until he is satisfied that he has squeezed the subject dry. "No one can snow him," boasts an aide...
Brown needed only six years to earn his bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees in physics, as well as a lasting reputation as a grind and a loner. Comments a Pentagon wag: "I hear his mother had to put him out now and then to sun him." The legend is not far from the truth, but he did find time to become a determined swimmer and tennis player...
...served as the senior U.S. adviser at nuclear test-ban negotiations with the Soviet Union. Recalls an associate: "He was intense, bright, driving and dynamic, but neither patient nor comfortable with people." In 1961, Brown became one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids." At 33, he was given the Pentagon's third highest civilian job, director of defense research and engineering...