Word: strengthe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With the air of a man who is sure of his own strength, Mississippi's wily old demagogue John E. Rankin rolled his stupendous veterans' pork barrel onto the floor of the House, and defied the quaking Congressmen to throw it out. What old John wanted was $90 monthly at 65 for every veteran, whether he needed it or not. The cost would add up to something like $125 billion over the next 50 years. But determined John Rankin had posed his colleagues an agonizing choice between conscience and constituents...
...Pacific bases which the Navy had asked to retain at war's end, only Guam-Saipan was still active, and Guam's personnel had been halved. Adak, Leyte, Manus and Iwo had been abandoned or left in housekeeping status: Kodiak had become a minor base. Pacific fleet strength had also been sharply cut back. Three carriers and six cruisers were headed for mothballs, leaving only a handful of combat ships to guard the supply lines to the occupation forces in Japan...
Even with its reduced strength, the Pacific fleet should be able to handle any threat directed against the U.S. itself. But U.S. allies in the western Pacific were understandably reluctant to lose the morale effect of U.S. forces on the spot. And Navy men were as sad as if they were leaving an old friend. For 27 years, the Pacific had been the Navy's ocean. They would miss its warm waters and its good weather. Said one admiral wistfully: "The Atlantic is a hard, cruel ocean...
Elsewhere last week there were signs (see below) that the Kremlin, acting on the experience of the last two years, was probing at weak spots where Western strength could not easily be brought to bear...
...successive Sundays, Frenchmen voted on candidates for their local Conseils Généraux, which vaguely resemble U.S. state legislatures in function. The results analyzed this week showed that the Communists still had nearly 25% of the popular vote. But without losing much numerical strength in the electorate, Reds faced a worsened position in French politics. Whenever a Communist had a chance of getting elected, all other parties tended to combine against him. In the last (1945) cantonal elections, Communists got 184 seats; this time, anti-Red coalitions held Communist victories to 37. The Gaullists...