Word: vaughn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...University of Washington, took command of a Pan American 747 jumbojet and ordered the pilot to fly him to Hanoi. Thai-Binh's U.S. Government scholarship had been canceled at the Thieu regime's request, possibly because of Thai-Binh's antiwar activities. The pilot, Gene Vaughn, 53, flew into Saigon anyway, and Thai-Binh sent him a second order written in blood-apparently his own. It got him nowhere; he was shot dead by a vacationing American...
...LUNATICS are running the asylum these days, and lunacy is its own reward, sanity the only true crime. In Only Victims Robert Vaughn has compiled a history of the oldest permanent floating pogrom in America--the show business witchhunt...
...will do no good to look for villains or heroes or saints or devils, because there were none; there were only victims," said Dalton Trumbo. Vaughn's book proves Trumbo's sorry point: the Broadway and Hollywood figures he discusses are pitiable figures, betraying each other, groveling in the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) mud, victimizing themselves to save their earning power. The few heroes, those people who defended their integrity and friends, were the most obvious victims. If they refused to cooperate they were thrown into jail, blacklisted, and destroyed...
...Robert Vaughn has started with an embarrassment of riches, and somehow produced a poverty of ideas. He has as source materials thousands of pages of Committee testimony, hundreds of personal recollections from the victims of those days, and his own experience as an actor--he played Napoleon Solo in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." He tells us, at the very end of the book, that he has undertaken to do a study of blacklisting in the theatre, to the exclusion of motion pictures, television and radio, but he devotes most of his book to motion pictures, television and radio. Vaughn...
...VAUGHN originally wrote Only Victims as a doctoral thesis at USC, but it is hard to believe that it got through any faculty readings. The book is almost totally unedited for style and substance. His sentences are vintage Timeese, reeling this way and that, incorporating half a dozen half-formed thoughts into six lines, leaving the reader gasping for breath. Vaughn devotes almost all of his book to factual recountings of Committee hearings, going through day after day of testimony. Only Victims is at the same time fascinating and frustrating, for he never looks from the trees to the forest...