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“... the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is ...”

“... new sort of assessment was growing fashionable in the West. Comparing missile and warhead totals, Robert McNamara warned, was no longer useful; the point was that overwhelming slaughter and destruction would be caused if only a tiny fraction of an enemy’s missiles got through. How do you use a weapon which can neither be fired against an enemy nor ...”

“... discovered the scandal was about to break. How had Macmillan allowed things to reach this point? Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence, was especially appalled, knowing what he did about the access Profumo had been granted. Davenport-Hines doesn’t acknowledge either that the Americans were at it themselves. A home-grown sex and spies scandal was ...”

“... talks. Trimble knew he would have to accept Mitchell, but he played along with Paisley and Robert McCartney, the maverick integrationist Unionist, to use their objections to Mitchell as a bargaining chip when it came to the rules and procedures of the talks. When Mitchell took the chair – Godson describes well the hardline Unionists’ rage – a ...”

“... 1960s in the Pentagon, one of the cerebral ‘whizz kids’ on the staff of the defence secretary Robert McNamara. McNamara was a wonk, confident that no mystery could withstand statistical analysis, and Enthoven was the chief wonk’s wonk, crunching numbers to judge whether the new weapons the generals wanted were ...”

“... exchange on the would-be strategic bombing of Germany, in which Portal plays brilliant-stupid McNamara (X bombers, dropping Y bombs, will ‘defeat’ Germany in Z days), while Churchill shows an exquisite understanding of the dialectical interplay of war and of its paradoxical logic. Memo to aspiring strategists: read the Portal-WSC exchange of memoranda ...”

“... downward thrust of Asian Communism’ detected by the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies). That Communism was somehow involved in the war was not news, but out of politeness I wrote ‘Munich?’ in my notebook. Already shopworn by 1966, the Munich analogy never dies. It puts Hitler on the other side. Attleboro produced impressive ...”