Word: pentagonals
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Toward the end of winter, Washington seemed to be in the grip of the word "inevitable." A meeting at the summit was inevitable; a quick tax cut to brake the recession was inevitable; some kind of politically popular, high-subsidy farm program was inevitable; a wishy-washy Pentagon reorganization plan was inevitable. Last week the President, back in command of the Administration in all its divisions, proved in a busy week that there is nothing inevitable about anything when leadership provides its own direction. Items...
NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Lauris Norstad, flew into Washington, worked far into the night with Pentagon aides, conferred with President Eisenhower for two hours, left nothing undone in preparing for one of his most important duties: appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to urge approval of the Administration's $1.8 billion military-aid program. But when he arrived on Capitol Hill, four-star General Norstad found a near-empty hearing room, with only two of the 15 members of the Foreign Relations Committee on hand to greet...
...well have thrown its weight on the side of independence too soon; in Algeria it is arguable that out of deference to France the U.S. has held its hand too long. By refusal even to discuss eventual re-establishment of Japanese civil government in strategic Okinawa, the Pentagon has needlessly fed Asian distrust...
...hours that President Eisenhower lay unconscious during and after his operation for ileitis in June 1956, the Pentagon was seriously concerned about who could give the order to retaliate in the event of an enemy attack. The President's staff patched up a workable but probably extralegal procedure-Cabinet members stood by their telephones; air strike forces put on special alerts-and it was agreed that if the enemy did attack, the retaliation order would be given by a presidential standin, presumably Vice President Richard Nixon...
...word coming more and more into Pentagon usage is "overkill"-a blunt but descriptive term implying a power to destroy a military target not once but many times more than necessary. On Defense Secretary Neil McElroy's desk last week lay the paper plans that will soon add up to a problem of overkill: each of the services is ready to offer one or more complete weapons systems, each one promising to achieve nuclear annihilation of Russian targets. McElroy's problem: How much is enough-or to put it another way, how many times...