Word: thunderclap
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...always convincingly ad lib. The Bible Billy mentions constantly: "The Bible says . . . Now don't get mad at me. Billy Graham didn't say it. The Bible says it." (The word "Bible" rolls up from Billy's diaphragm and out over the audience like a thunderclap...
...flying a De Havilland DH-110, a twinjet, all-weather fighter. Before 120,000 spectators, including his young wife, Pilot Derry climbed to more than eight miles and dived, jets screaming, straight toward the crowd. Down he flashed at more than 700 m.p.h. When he leveled off, the double thunderclap of his shock waves-palpable as ocean breakers-crashed against the crowd's bodies and ears. Derry turned again to make a low pass. Then the crowd saw disaster: in eerie, total silence, the DH-110 disintegrated...
...Thunderclap. All this time Harry Woodring hung on to his job, helped by Franklin Roosevelt's chronic reluctance to fire anyone. Not until early 1940 did the blowoff finally come. At the President's instructions, Johnson had begun shipping arms and munitions to beleaguered Britain, by arbitrarily declaring them unfit for U.S. use and thus legally available for export. Woodring refused to permit such goings-on. But Roosevelt insisted, and Woodring resigned in a letter so bitter that it has never been published in full...
Then came the thunderclap. On the eve of the 1940 Republican Convention, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Republican Henry L. Stimson to head the War Department, Republican Frank Knox to be Secretary of the Navy. The move had obvious political advantages to Roosevelt, but he was also mindful of Hitler's sweep through Europe, and wanted the services of Stimson and Knox. It would be hard to tell who was angrier: the Republicans or Johnson. But he was still nursing another ambition: to be Vice President. Two weeks after the first blow fell he was shunted aside again at the Democratic...
...similar vision came to Merton during a Mass in 1940 at Havana: "It was so intangible, and yet it struck me like a thunderclap ... It disarmed all images, all metaphors, and cut through the whole skein of species and phantasms with which we naturally do our thinking ... [It was] far above and beyond the level of any desire or any appetite ... It left a breathless joy and a clean peace and happiness that stayed for hours, and it was something I have never forgotten...