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A quiz that matters
Foreign-policy experts come up with the real questions George W. Bush should answer.
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[12/13/99]

Who killed Betty Van Patter?
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[12/13/99]

Revenge of the nerd
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Clueless in Seattle
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Who were those masked anarchists in Seattle?
The media has blown the story, but there's a growing fringe of activists who believe property destruction isn't "violent," and are bent on convincing the rest of us.
By L.A. Kauffman
[12/10/99]

Complete archives for News

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1) As Chace writes, "his grades rarely rose above a C average."

2) Political conventions.

3) Woodin, president of the American Car & Foundry Co., was appointed because he had contributed $10,000 to Franklin Roosevelt's campaign. He had no banking experience. The appointment showed that in politics, money talks and big-bucks contributors get paybacks from the politicians they fund.

4) Acheson objected to the Republican effort to red-bait FDR's New Deal by tagging it as communism. "It seems to me utterly fantastic to suggest," Acheson said, "that Communism is in any manner involved in this campaign. It serves only to arouse spirit of bigotry ... I am against any party which inflames this spirit."

5) The presidency.

6) c) "Not compromise but decision."

7) Fifteen minutes.

8) Harry Truman.

9) These international monetary accords, negotiated in 1944 in New Hampshire, established the economic and financial underpinnings of the postwar world and set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

10) False. Acheson shortly thereafter said the Truman administration was not committed to "an ideological crusade" everywhere around the world. Years later, he explained that in the early days of the Cold War such rhetoric was necessary because it was "clearer than the truth."

11) b) Eisenhower. Four years later, when Eisenhower was the Republican presidential nominee, Eisenhower opportunistically blasted Acheson and the Truman administration for inviting the attack on South Korea by putting it outside "America's so-called defensive perimeter."

12) No. He later said, "I felt that advisors were of no use and so consulted none. I understood that I had responsibilities above and beyond my own desires." When asked about Alger Hiss, Acheson referred to a New Testament passage calling for compassion and said, "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." He was vilified by political foes for this.

13) "... never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

14) Vietnam. At the time the French were trying to quell a nationalist-communist movement there, and Acheson didn't believe the French could succeed.

15) d. "asinine." He thought Kennedy's obsession with Castro's Cuba was, Chace writes, "a distraction from the central strategic concerns of the United States."

16) The United States didn't know that Soviet troops stationed in Cuba possessed tactical nuclear weapons and were authorized to use them should the Americans invade. The presence of these weapons were not disclosed until 1993.

17) Distrust the predictions of the U.S. military.

18) "You can tell the president -- and you can tell him in precisely these words -- that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass."

19) Biographies of statesmen, such as Benjamin Disraeli. Fiction by Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens. Books on the Civil War. And Thucydides' "Peloponnesian War."
salon.com | Dec. 13, 1999

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