Word: vainly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Author Stacton has the knack of making even his novelist's liberties seem like living history. His John Wilkes Booth is all actor-shallow, vain and no more determined to eliminate Lincoln from the stage of history than to give John Wilkes a place on it. With his good looks, sonorous voice and flashy clothes, he could make himself attractive not only to women but to second-rate men who took him for a leader. To Booth, the cause of the South was the cause of gentlemen, and above all the little actor wanted to be recognized...
Korean women were advised not to wear jewelry, to "shun housemaids" and do their own housework, and to help "enlighten the public on the need for contraceptives." Korean men got the word to "refrain from exchanging vain tokens," to "avoid haggling over prices," and "to shake off the idea of making 'quick money.' " Both men and women were urged to greet each other each morning with the words "Let's reconstruct!" (foreign residents, including U.S. troops, "will also be encouraged to exchange this greeting"). To keep Koreans on their toes, there will be daily "reconstruction calisthenics...
...Hemingway intuitively felt a double betrayal of language and ideals. The first thing the Lost Generation lost was its faith in words, big words. Says Lieut. Henry, the hero of A Farewell to Arms: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain ... I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it." The big words were false, and life itself was "just a dirty trick," as the dying...
...enough, it was Nikita Khrushchev, epigrammatist, agriculturist, commissar, statesman-and now, it seemed, officially a war hero. It was the 20th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Russia. According to the new history of World War II just off the press, none other than Nikita pressed Stalin in vain to change his tactics before the Nazis attacked in 1941. And who saved Stalingrad? "Great meritorious service in that connection was performed by N. S. Khrushchev," political commissar on the Stalingrad front. With this advance buildup, the thousands in the audience gave Old Soldier Khrushchev round after round of cheers...
...investment of ?88 million sterling. But Stalin got a great hunk of Spain's gold reserve, and-in addition to the preparation for future political maneuvers-Stalin achieved his greatest triumphs of Communist propaganda, doublethink in action. "War for Peace" was his gimmick. It was not in vain that George Orwell fought in Spain. He served with the POUM, a Trotskyite outfit marked for liquidation, was wounded in battle-and thus lived to write 1984, in which "War Is Peace...