Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Harry Truman took a liking to Joe Stalin, but when he got a case of the old dictator's best vodka, Truman gave it away, wondering about any man who would drink the stuff over bourbon. Truman watched with fascination as Secretary of State Dean Acheson verbally diminished Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, who had the idea he should be a larger figure around the White House...
Very early on, while others dismissed Hitler as an unimportant barbarian, Malcolm Muggeridge described the Nazi rise as a threat to civilization. He also fellow-traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 and found Joseph Stalin a dangerous influence. Sounding alarms to the readership of the Guardian had little effect-except on the Muggeridge style. Soon he was deriding his own trade: "The only fun of journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them or take them seriously. It is the ideal profession for those who find power fascinating...
Most people, in some corner of their mental luggage, carry images of F.D.R., Churchill, Stalin, Gandhi, De Gaulle, Mao and other archetypes as large in memory as Easter Island moai heads...
Right or wrong-and they have been both-left-wing intellectuals have never had much luck in America. The Depression seemed ready to trigger enduring class hatred. But radicals were mistaken about the benignity of Joseph Stalin and the possibilities of domestic Marxism. Their revolution was postponed. Then along came World War II, the postwar boom and millions of house-owning, boat-buying, TV-consuming workers, downtrodden all the way to the bank...
...vulnerable heart at the age of 36. Obsessed with suicide all his life, he finally, for no clearly discernible reason, "did away with himself as he would an enemy," as another poet, Marina Tsvetayeva, remarked. Official reservations about Mayakovsky's posthumous status were dissipated by Stalin in 1935, when he declared him to be the most talented poet of the Soviet era. "Indifference to his memory and to his work is a crime," he added menacingly...