Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Named for Jacob Sverdlov, a leader of 1917's Red Revolution, credited in Soviet history books with having ordered the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family at Ekaterinburg, later renamed Sverdlovsk (where Pilot Francis Powers' U-2 went down...
...State Department. I did not independently check that fact." What nobody had bothered to tell Dryden was that President Eisenhower and his aides had earlier decided that the State Department would handle all the "publicity." Two days after Khrushchev's gloating announcement that Russians had captured U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers, Secretary of State Christian Herter contradicted the weather-flight story, owned up to U.S. espionage, but announced that Washington authorities had had no knowledge of the flights...
...said Gates. When the news first broke, he advised the President that if Khrushchev knew all about the U-2-and at that time, the U.S. had no information that Pilot Powers had been captured-it would be better that "the presidency should not be involved in an international lie, particularly when it would not stand up with respect to the facts." After Herter's disclaimer of presidential responsibility, Gates recommended that the President should take full responsibility. Ike did reverse the U.S. line again and publicly take the blame...
...legend is an irritating grandiloquence and an equally bothersome coyness about his subject's personal life. Saint-Ex's mistress, for instance, is chivalrously called "Madame X," and her long and intense affair with him is left vague. Still, the biography has its value; the author, a pilot himself, knew Saint-Ex when they were both in flying school. Although, with typical exuberance, he calls his subject "a genius among the great men of his era," he is no hero-worshiper where Saint-Ex's flying is concerned...
...tall, shambling French aristocrat was a good pilot, in Migeo's estimation, but not a great one, despite great skill and daring. Saint-Ex's grievous flaw, one that involved him in a dozen crashes and near-crashes, was his absentmindedness. He flew for release, if not escape, and once released, his thoughts did not linger on altimeter or compass. His magnificent Flight to Arras is as much a meditation as it is the log of a dangerous reconnaissance mission into German-occupied French territory. With German fighters closing in, the aviator muses for paragraphs about the country...