Word: hairbreadth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Brothers Cohn-Bendit see it, the explosion of 1968-with its barricades, its bloody street battles, its crippling general strike-came within a hairbreadth of toppling Charles de Gaulle. "From the 27th to the 30th of May," they insist, "nobody had any power in France. The government was breaking up, De Gaulle and Pompidou were isolated. The police, intimidated by the size of the strike and exhausted by two weeks of fighting in the streets, were incapable of maintaining public order. The army was out of sight; conscripts could not have been used for a cause in which...
...said Richard Nixon to his party workers during the campaign. So he said again when he appeared before his followers to accept and savor his victory. Now he could forget the defeats, both the hairbreadth miss of 1960 and the humiliating rebuff of 1962. Now he could put behind him the fear that maybe he was, after all, a born loser. Now he could relish the fruits of unremitting labor for his party, of countless fund-raising dinners and victory banquets and formula speeches in remote towns. Now he could demonstrate to the nation-and perhaps to himself- just what...
Miller brought an admirable determination to his job. He could have retired two years ago, when he developed serious heart trouble. But he felt that his work was not done. "I want to move theological education one hairbreadth closer to reality," he told a friend...
What strings it all together is Coburn's hairbreadth escapes from a herd of foreign agents trying to kidnap him for the secrets in his head and the men from something called the Federal Board of Regulation trying to kill him for the same reason. Coburn romps spryly through the part, with the comic cooperation of Severn Darden as a friendly Russian spy with an Oedipal problem, and Walter Burke as the uptight head of the FBR who exhorts his faceless men (all under 5 ft.): "Kill him . . . the nation expects it ... think of your mothers." Coburn...
...much as a stubbed-toe casualty. There had been the heart-stopping suspense of Alan Shepard's first flat-arc flight in 1961, the terrifying uncertainty of John Glenn's reentry into the atmosphere in a heat-seared Mercury craft in 1962, and Gus Grissom's hairbreadth escape from drowning when his Liberty Bell 7 was swamped in the Atlantic. Then came the miraculously flawless series of ten Gemini trips, in which Americans repeatedly broke all records for survival in space, strolled blithely out into that brutal environment, and navigated their craft through the incredibly delicate maneuver...