Word: pentagons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...less an authority than General David Shoup, retired Marine Corps Commandant and Medal of Honor winner, accuses the armed services of relishing war for the sake of self-aggrandizement, of making the U.S. "a militaristic and aggressive nation." Physicist Herbert York, former Pentagon chief of research, development and engineering, warns that Americans will face a "Frankenstein monster that could destroy us." Not only are military motives questioned, but military competence as well. The defense complex is indicted for being unable to develop weapons that work well enough, wasting money needed for civilian purposes, giving bad and dangerous advice...
...surpassing in notoriety "merchants of death," the term that grew out of Senator Gerald Nye's investigation of the arms industry in 1934. But the complex is not a well-organized, centrally directed entity. It is a vast, amorphous conglomeration that goes far beyond the Pentagon and the large manufacturers of weapons. It includes legislators who benefit politically from job-generating military activity in their constituencies, workers in defense plants, the unions to which they belong, university scientists and research organizations that receive Pentagon grants. It even extends to the stores where payrolls are spent, and the landlords, grocers...
...check of all proposed expenditures by Government agencies, it has accorded the Defense Department, the biggest spender of them all, special treatment that results in considerable freedom from stringent review. Congress, with its key military and appropriations committees headed by promilitary Southerners, has occasionally voted more money than the Pentagon requested. When McNamara announced the closing of 80 installations in 1964, he received 169 protests from Congressmen that same...
...chief of research and development, points to a central problem: "It is the constant fight between progress and being sure you never make a mistake." When to go into production and when to continue research is a problem that constantly bedevils Betts and his counterparts elsewhere in the Pentagon. "Make it, and you're a hero," he says. "Wrong, and you are up on the Hill." Men like Betts and John Foster, the research chief for the Defense Department, suffer nightmares that the other side may achieve some technological breakthrough that will leave the U.S. far behind in some crucial...
...picturesque region of forests, lakes and dairy farms, has long been an unassailable Republican stronghold. Before last week, the Seventh had not sent a single Democrat to Congress in this century, and it elected Melvin Laird to nine consecutive terms on Capitol Hill before he moved to the Pentagon. Thus, as the G.O.P. nominee in a special election held last week to choose Laird's successor, State Senator Walter J. Chilsen felt pretty good about his chances. Chilsen, 45, a former television newscaster from Wausau, felt so good, in fact, that he rather imprudently billed his campaign...