Word: pentagonals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
President Eisenhower's quick anger swiftly communicated itself to the Pentagon, which found itself being turned inside out by buzzing brasshats trying to find out what all the shooting was about. They soon discovered that the original Post-Dispatch story had been vastly overblown, growing out of a highly theoretical study of the history and nature of national surrender, completely nonspecific as far as mention of the U.S. was concerned. It was inaugurated seven years before by the Rand Corp., a private research agency with Air Force contracts, and was finally published in book form last spring...
They'd Rather Die. Explanation quickly returned the White House pressure gauge to normal, but the Senate was already under full steam. Georgia's Richard Russell, whose prestige as chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee had suffered during the battle for a Pentagon reorganization bill (TIME, July 28), saw a chance to regain ground. Russell introduced a rider to an appropriations bill that would forbid the Administration the right to undertake any study of surrender. U.S. citizens, cried Dick Russell, "would prefer to die on their feet in the event of a nuclear holocaust than...
...trying fruitlessly to rack up a new continental "third force" under French leadership (see FOREIGN NEWS). At home there was pressure from State Department elements and congressional Democrats for a "more positive" approach to the U.S.S.R. that usually involved concessions to placate neutralist opinion. The Pentagon, on the other hand, was restless lest the diplomats tie the U.S.'s hands-and the very real strength of the deployed U.S. Armed Forces-by agreeing to negotiate too much and to make unnecessary concessions: "We've got 'em by the tail...
...DEFENSE DEPARTMENT. The Defense Department civil servants who, more permanent in the Pentagon than either politically appointed Secretaries or rotated military career officers, pervert the decision-making machinery. Though he does not name Defense Comptroller Wilfred J. McNeil, Gavin bombs the fiscal officer in the Pentagon who often rejects projects without understanding of military needs...
Such harassing fire, the restless reaction of a hair-trigger combat commander caught in the paper and politics of the peacetime Pentagon, tends to obscure the best of his book and the special brand of Army "wild blue yonder" that is the best of Jim Gavin. After a hard-eyed assessment of a U.S. Army that could be stopped by the "primitive" Red Chinese in Korea, he makes a passionate demand for the money and decisions to provide the West with an atom-armed and airmobile fighting force that can hold down Communist threats, big and little, by being ready...