Word: 6b
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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High in the North Atlantic sky in a three-year-old DC-6B one night last week, the foreign ministers of Russia, the U.S., Britain and France took off their jackets and settled down to talk business. The Westerners drank scotch, gin and tonic or "17 to 1" martinis; Gromyko drank Coca-Cola. The late John Foster Dulles, who put so much store by airborne diplomacy, might have derived wry satisfaction from the fact that it was his funeral that had finally broken the two-week-old impasse at Geneva, and enabled the ministers at last to talk informally...
Thus, as Nixon headed back home at week's end in an Air Force VIP DC-6B, Britain's press tacitly admitted that here, at least, was a man who knew his business thoroughly and therefore merited respect -in Britain, more than a casual recommendation, and for U.S.-British friendship more than a casual plus. Summed up the New York Times's London Correspondent Drew Middleton: "Nixon arrived billed as an uncouth adventurer in the political jungles, departed trailing clouds of statesmanship and esteem. In four days here filled with opportunities for the most horrendous mistakes...
...airlines lost interest in slower aircraft, and prices tumbled 40% to 60%. American Airlines, which has four DC-7s currently for sale and may have up to 25 more by July 1959, is asking $1,200,000 for an aircraft that cost $2,000,000 new. A DC-6B that cost $1,300,000 might have a trade-in value of $750,000, but would fetch far less in the open market...
...mood of the airport crowd was set an hour before the Nixons' silver-and-white Air Force DC-6B touched down. A pack of 200 students, skillfully whipped up by older men, hoisted bed sheets painted with the slogans of international Communism, blew rubber Bronx-cheer whistles and shouted, "Get out, Nixon!" When the good-will guests walked smiling down the plane's steps, The Star-Spangled Banner and a 21-gun salute were drowned in an ugly howl of hatred...
Only the junta, U.S. embassy officials and long lines of silent troops waited to see the Nixons off at the airport. At 5:09 p.m. the DC-6B flicked off the runway and turned north for Puerto Rico and U.S. soil. In Caracas the night before, Venezuela's Provisional President Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal, gloomily twirling a yellow pencil, had expressed his fervent regrets. "It is very sad," he murmured. "I shall never forget this thing all my life...