Word: whoppers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Laughter in the Gallery. The response in the U.N. hall to Khrushchev's oratorical whopper was stunned silence, broken once or twice by incredulous laughter from the press gallery. And this came close to summarizing unspoken official reaction throughout the West. For diplomatic reasons, no one wanted to come right out and say "nonsense," but the fact remained that Nikita's demand for total disarmament was so absurd and impractical as to be insulting. It paid no more than token heed to the all-important Western insistence that any disarmament agreement is meaningless and dangerous without an ironclad...
Next year's budget will be another whopper: 20th will make 40 pictures worth $60 million, among them The Greatest Story Ever Told, John Brown's Body and The Battle of Leyte Gulf...
...last week came the shamefaced admission that so-called bourgeois economic laws were right, after all, and the Communists themselves perpetrators of an economic whopper. The Central Committee of the Communist Party, in a two-week meeting at the mountain resort of Kuling, formally conceded that nearly every one of it's 1958 production figures had been false (see box). And the errors were no small ones: if the new figures were to be trusted, all the hardship of the communes had produced only a 35% gain in grain, not the 102% Peking had boasted of, and there...
...Senate Appropriations Committee reported out the year's whopper: the $39,594,339,000 Defense Department appropriation-$346,139,000 more than the White House had asked, with the Army getting the biggest bonus. Included in the bill were an extra $380 million nuclear carrier for the Navy, $85 million more for the Air Force's Atlas missile, and $309 million for the Army's Nike-Hercules and for Army equipment modernization. The Defense Department was directed to keep the Marine Corps at 200,000 men instead of the budgeted 175,000, keep the National Guard...
Khrushchev also praised John Foster Dulles as "a great political figure," but of course his compliment had a Communist twist to it. Khrushchev's bare-faced whopper: in his last days, chatting with Mikoyan, Dulles had reversed his policy and accepted Russian domination of Eastern Europe. Dulles was not alive to answer so gross a fairy story,* and Khrushchev added kindly, "To make such a declaration required courage." The State Department noted tartly that Khrushchev's menacing insults to Italy and Greece hardly fitted in with his pre-summit stance of trying to ease tensions...