Word: questionability
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Just what kind of country Americans want is, of course, the big question-and the answer remains curiously elusive. Americans have traditionally stressed optimism, a faith in the future, what John Kirk calls "progress, pragmatism, respect for achievement, a belief that rising wealth and expanding technology would ultimately dissipate most individual and social problems." Yet Americans have seldom examined those values long enough to see the possible inner contradictions. In part, they were too busy carving for themselves a share of the country's peerless abundance. Men with fabulous opportunities for self-advancement had no time for self-inspection...
...Britain is bothered by a rising impatience at the cost of maintaining the Commonwealth and, more important, at what the Daily Sketch called the "cheek" of members that presume to question Britain's policies. The nation that once ruled over a quarter of the globe is now desperately retrenching, and a great many Britons might agree with the Spectator: "What we must do is to act on the very threat that many of our partners have used against us too successfully in the past. We should withdraw our membership...
...Question of Honor. Some claims, to be sure, were exaggerated. The fishing captain whose sighting helped in the recovery of the bomb from the sea demanded $5,000,000; he got only medals from two grateful governments. Francisco Alarcon Cano, whose private school was shuttered for six weeks because a bomb fragment landed on his patio, sought $733 in lost tuition. He got nothing. "We may have made a mistake," says a 16th Air Force officer of the schoolmaster's case. "But the door is always open if he wants to come back." The point that escapes the Americans...
...billed her farewell speech to the National Press Club as "The Swan Song of a Lame Duck." But Liz Carpenter, 48, Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary, might better have called it "The Last Hurrahs." There were plenty: "The big question is what Senator McCarthy plans to do. When reporters ask, he doesn't say anything. But he does let them kiss his ring ... I offered myself to Governor Walter Hickel as a national monument. He took one look and said, I don't believe in conservation just for conservation's sake...
...made it clear that a public figure-and especially a 49-year-old bachelor-is still a private person. "I do not think it's your damned business what a particular person thinks about me, or how we behave," he snapped to the press. "Perhaps the police could question the women you have been seen with...