text:
President Donald Trump had made Twitter his favored channel for sharing unflattering nicknames, insults, video montages and even policy decisions.
Trump's history in tweets
Washington, United States, Jan 9 – President Donald Trump had made Twitter his favored channel for sharing unflattering nicknames, insults, video montages and even policy decisions.
But he no longer has that soapbox, as the social platform permanently suspended his account, @realDonaldTrump, on Friday.
Here's a look back at some of his most memorable tweets:
– 'Fake News!' –
After just a few months in office, the Republican leader shared in July 2017 a video montage of him throwing a man to the floor during a wrestling match, with his opponent's face replaced by the logo for CNN. The tweet was shared hundreds of thousands of times.
Trump often used tweets throughout his term to denounce the "Fake News" media that he accused of leading a "witch hunt" against him.
– 'Much bigger' button than Kim –
In the second year of Trump's presidency, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un warned during a New Year speech that he had a "nuclear button" on his desk.
Infuriated, Trump dashed off a tweet against Kim, whom he had nicknamed "Little Rocket Man":
"North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the 'Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.' Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
– 'Sleepy Joe' –
During his four years in office, Trump used Twitter to ridicule his political opponents, labeling them with mocking nicknames.
President-elect Joe Biden became "Sleepy Joe." The Speaker of the House of Representatives was "Crazy Nancy" Pelosi. Adam Schiff, the chief prosecutor in Trump's impeachment proceedings, was "Shifty Schiff."
Former Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren was dubbed "Pocahontas," referring to her long claimed Native American heritage (she turned out to be only 16 percent Native).
Trump didn't hold back for himself, either, but in the opposite manner: he declared himself a "Very Stable Genius."
– Gone viral –
A month before the November 3 presidential election, the race between Trump and Biden was in full swing. Then, at 1 am, the president announced he had been diagnosed with the coronavirus.
"Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19," tweeted Trump, 74, referring to first lady Melania Trump. "We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!"
The tweet was "liked" nearly two million times, a personal record for the former real estate mogul. Soon after, Trump was hospitalized for three days.
– The end –
Likely unwittingly, Trump ended his Twitter reign on Friday when he announced he would not attend Biden's inauguration.
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th," he wrote.
The message, heavy with symbolism, was the last on his account to his approximately 88 million followers.


text:
TV GHOST - DISCONNECT (2LP)
Label: IN THE RED
Catalog no.: ITRLP0000243
Their third full-length displays a newfound maturity,
incorporating churning rhythms and psychedelic drone into a
lush torrent of gaseous keys, sprawling guitars and eerie
melody. Think 'Porcupine'-era Echo & the Bunnymen and 'Tago
Mago'-era Can running through a Cure 'Pornography' blender.
More TV GHOST...
TV GHOST - COLD FISH
LP (12"/10" Album) · IN THE RED · 11/08/2009 · in GARAGE / BEAT / SURF / ROCK'N'ROLL
A band who ushers in a vile & squalid new disposition to ugly art punk & carves out a black hole of pestilence that will delight its sufferers to no end. They effectively incorporate the licentious nuances of The Cramps' earliest scuzz, no wave's cacophony, & ... read more »
TV GHOST - MASS DREAM
CD (Compact Disc) · IN THE RED · 12/04/2011 · in GARAGE / BEAT / SURF / ROCK'N'ROLL
'Mass Dream' features what one could describe as a sludgy and punishing brand of art-punk. While sacrificing none of the band's scuzz-punk dementia, this album is far less dense and impenetrable than its predecessor. Blood-boiling, spastic and down right evil music.
An especially sludgy & punishing brand of art-punk. While sacrificing none of the band's scuzz-punk dementia, this album is far less dense & impenetrable than its predecessor. Blood-boiling, spastic & down right evil music.
More on the IN THE RED label...
CFM - STILL LIFE OF CITRUS AND SLIME
The debut solo-release from Charles Moothart (FUZZ, TY SEGALL BAND, MOONHEATS, CULTURE KIDS, GOGGS). Vinyl-edition.
DOUBLE - DAWN OF THE DOUBLE
Minimal garage-rock meets drone-dance?! The Double's line-up includes drummer JIM WHITE (DIRTY THREE, VENOM P STINGER) and guitarist EMMETT KELLY (CAIRO GANG, TY SEGALL & THE MUGGERS).
WOUNDED LION - WOUNDED LION
LP (12"/10" Album) · IN THE RED · 27/04/2010 · in POP / ROCK / WAVE / NOISE
Debut album from Los Angeles band follows a handful of singles on S-S, Gilgongo, and In The Red Records. Classic, no-frills American power-pop that blends '60s, '70s and '80s influences.
REATARD, JAY - SINGLES 06-07 (CD+DVD)
Price a bit higher. This is a collection of all his out-of-print material, re-mastered by the Tard himself. It's finally possible to hear these gems in one straight shot, sounding better than ever, without flipping over a pile of 7'' platters. (but isn't that the best?!- ... read more »
INTELLIGENCE WITH KELLEY STOLTZ - (THEY FOUND ME IN THE BACK OF)...
7" (7" Single/EP) · IN THE RED · 29/05/2012 · in POP / ROCK / WAVE / NOISE
...THE GALAXY'. - Released as a preview for the band's 'Everybody's Got It Easy But Me' album. This single sees THE INTELLIGENCE team up with San Francisco singer and multi-instrumentalist Kelley Stoltz on the A-side. The B-side is an otherwise unreleased track. Both sound ... read more »
LAMPS - UNDER THE WATER UNDER THE GROUND
The follow up to 'Lamps Lamps' offers some of the catchiest tunes the LA-based garage-noise band has written to date!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Sulaymān ibn ʿAlī al-Hāshimī () (c. 700–759) was an early Abbasid prince. He served as governor of Basra from 750 to 755.

Career
The son of Ali ibn Abd Allah ibn al-Abbas, Sulayman was a paternal uncle of the first two Abbasid caliphs al-Saffah (r. 750–754) and al-Mansur (r. 754–775), making him one of the "uncles" ('umumah) that held a high degree of influence during the early years following the Abbasid Revolution. In 750–1 he was appointed by al-Saffah as governor of the important post of Basra in southern Iraq together with its dependencies, as well as a number of other provinces including the Tigris districts, Bahrayn, Oman and Mihrajanqadhaq. In 753 the caliph also selected him to lead the pilgrimage for that year.

During his administration of Basra, Sulayman carried out extensive public works projects to develop the region, including building new canals and making improvements the local water supply. He also assisted Khazim ibn Khuzayma al-Tamimi during the latter's campaign against Kharijite rebels in Oman in 750–1 by providing him with ships to transport his army, and in 754 he allowed his brother Abd Allah take refuge in Basra after the failure of his rebellion against al-Mansur. He and Isa ibn Ali eventually delivered their brother to al-Mansur on the condition that his life be spared, but this agreement was quickly violated and the caliph surreptitiously put Abdallah to death.

Sulayman remained as governor until c. 755, when al-Mansur dismissed him in favor of Sufyan ibn Mu'awiyah. He died in Basra in October 759 at the age of 59, and was succeeded by several sons, including Muhammad and Ja'far.

Notes

References

700 births
759 deaths
Abbasid governors of Basra
8th-century Arabs

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Have a Story? 'Put It In A Song' Says New Artist Taylor Acorn
Despite growing up in a Seattle suburb, Taylor Acorn was surrounded by country music at a young age. Raised by a father who enjoyed the sounds and songs of Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson, Taylor appreciates him for introducing her to the country music scene. At the age of eight Taylor was hit with the great tragedy of losing her father to an unexpected accident, but found a way to express her love for him through her music. With writing as a coping method, Taylor hasn't stopped since. Originally a closet singer, it wasn't until her school announced that they were having a talent show when Taylor felt the courage to share her stories with her peers.
Once up on stage Taylor was a crowd favorite and as a perfect introduction to her as an artist Taylor just released her single Put It In a Song. Taking from experiences of her own along with a diverse collaboration of instruments, Put It In a Song places Taylor in a superior mood and she hopes it does the same for her listeners.
Taking on a new challenge Taylor recorded her first music video for Put It In a Song which created quite a buzz on YouTube. With a persistent attitude Taylor is bound for success, so make sure to follow Taylor on her socials @tayloracorn and watch her debut music video above.


This exercise requires players to perform repeated bouts of maximal sprints (in the case of the wide players, 20 metres, and in the case of the forward players, 10 metres. If sufficient rest is given to players between each repetition (about 30 seconds between each sprint) then all of the sprints will be performed at maximum speed. Of course, there is a lot of specificity and relevance to the sport in this exercise, because players are performing the exact type of running and movements they are required to do in an actual match.
This very simple exercise requires players to perform repeated bouts of maximal intensity jumps, in a soccer-specific way that includes the ball. Like with speed training, power or jump training must give players sufficient rest in between repetitions. In this case, about 5-6 seconds of rest between each jump is enough. One player can do 5-10 headers, before switching to become a server. 3 sets for each player as both server and header work well to develop power without over-using the muscles.
While it may seem a bit unconventional to think of 1 versus 1 training as "strength training", a closer look at the movements and intensities involved in this exercise presents a clearer picture for the rationale for its use to improve soccer-specific muscular strength. Performing a short sprint to a ball requires maximal acceleration immediately followed by a quick and powerful deceleration – to slow down, either to secure and protect the ball (if the player arrives first) or to defend and prevent forward play (if the player arrives second). These decelerations require very high eccentric strength in all of the major leg muscles, including the glutes, hamstrings, and quadriceps. When performed repeatedly over the course of multiple repetitions, high speed eccentric contractions will help to strengthen these lower body muscles and prepare them for the exact movements needed in match play. Once again, rest periods between repetitions are critical for this exercise, in order to allow for enough recovery for all players involved. Most of the plays in this exercise should last between 5-10 seconds, so 1-2 minutes of rest between each repetition is sufficient. Players can perform between 8-12 repetitions of this exercise.
This exercise, as well as other variations of small-sided soccer games, represents the best and most effective way to develop soccer-specific endurance. Small-sided games are effective at improving endurance as long as they are played at a high intensity. Coaches can ensure that the intensity is high by following the recommendations mentioned above. Prevent breaks in play by playing a new ball in immediately after a ball in played out. If the pace of the game starts to slow down, add a condition like minimizing touches to help speed it up. A simple protocol to work with is to play for 4 repetitions of 4 minute games, with a 3 minute rest period between each game.
The exercises described in this article represent just a few ways to incorporate the principle of specificity into soccer fitness training. Coaches and fitness coaches working with soccer players must strive to plan fitness exercises and training sessions that are as specific and relevant to the sport as possible, as this is the only way to ensure that improvements made during training will translate into improvements in match play.


text:
Felix Auger Aliassime Girlfriend Nina Ghaibi
September 10, 2021 September 10, 2021 by fabwag
Nina Ghaibi
This pretty young lady is Nina Ghaibi; the stunning girlfriend of Canadian tennis player Felix Auger Aliassime, he reached his career-high ranking of world #15 on July 12, 2021. Felix reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 2021 and semi-finals at the US Open.
In this article hide
Felix Auger-Aliassime Bio
Felix Auger Aliassime Parents
Felix Auger Aliassime father Sam Aliassime
Felix Auger Aliassime mother Marie Auger
Felix Auger-Aliassime Sister
Felix Auger-Aliassime ATP Timeline
Felix Auger Aliassime Net Worth
Felix Auger Aliassime Endorsements
Felix Auger Alissime Girlfriend
6'4″ Felix Auger Aliassime, was born in Montreal, Quebec in Canada on August 8, 2000. He is the youngest child of Sam Aliassime and Marie Auger. Felix's older sister is Malika (b. 1998) who is also a tennis player.
Both Felix and his sister Malike started playing tennis at a young age, both coached by their father; they subsequently joined the Académie de Tennis Hérisset-Bordeleau in Quebec.
Since turning pro in 2017, Felix Auger Aliassime (currently #21 in the singles world ranking), reached the quarterfinals at the 2018 French Open, defeated Stefanos Tsitsipas in straight sets at the 2019 Indian Wells Masters, in 2021 Felix Auger-Aliassime advance to quarterfinals at Wimbledon and semifinals at the US Open.
6'4 Felix Auger Aliassime is one of the children born to Sam Aliassime and Marie Auger.
Felix's dad Sam Aliassime hails from Togo in West Africa, he is a tennis coach who emigrated from his hometown settling in Montreal where he met his wife Marie Auger. Sam takes care of hischildren's careers; he trained with Felix until he turned 13.
"My mom isn't a sports fan, and my dad didn't know what hockey was until he got to Canada," Felix told ESPN. "Our parents wanted me to be a complete athlete, so we played all sports, but tennis always was at the top."
French-Canadian Marie Auger originally from Motreal is a children's psychology teacher, who even though didn't know much about sports made sure her children stayed grounded.
"I tried to be the balance at home. I have good communication with my kids and they know that they can confide in me. It is not always easy being the parent of a professional tennis player, but I have grown into that role. When Felix is playing in a tennis tournament, he is at work. I keep a positive attitude and make sure he feels supported, but I leave the tennis up to him."
"As a mother, I of course want my son to excel in the world of tennis, but I often focus on his attitude when he is on the court. Since he was a child, Félix has had an aura when he steps onto the court, he is passionate and driven, but also displays his sensitive side. He is not just a good player, he is a good person.
Felix Auger-Aliassime's older 5'10 sister Malika Auger-Aliassime was born on December 28, 1998, in Montreal, Quebec. She along her brother grew up in L'Acienne-Quebecker. Malika Auger-Aliassime started playing tennis when she was 6, and trained with her father Sam Aliassime for a long time; she later joined Académie de Tennis Hérisset-Bordeleau.
Malika turned pro in 2015, made her debut in September that same year at the Coupe Banque Nationale.
I always wanted to play in the WTA and I hope to pursue this dream at college. Tennis's not only my passion, it!d my life and I'm ready to give everything to succeed. I like to work hard and I'm persevering, perfectionist I think that's what make me different from others.
I never give up and I know the meaning of the word sacrifice. I'm not gonna lie, I've been hurt a lot two years ago and I had to stop one year, but that only make me stronger. I appreciate now every single minute on coart and I know that everything is possible if you believe in yourself.
Felix Auger-Aliassime won his first ITF junior singles title at the G3 in Querétaro and later the the G4 in Zapopan in February 2015.
Felix defeated Denis Shapovalov winning his first junior G1 title in College Park in August 2015.
Partnering with Shapovalop, Felix reached the second round and won the singles junior title at the US Open.
In 2017, Felix turned pro, reaching the final of the ITF Futures in Plantation.
Felix advanced to the semifinals of the ATP Challenger $75K in Drummondville.
At the age of 16, Felix won the 2017 Open de Lyon.
With Nicola Kuhn, Felix won his first ATP Challenger doubles title, at 2018, Hungary Challenger Open.
In February 2019, at the Rotterman Open, he made his debut in an ATP main draw.
Won the Rio Open after defeating Pablo Cuevas in straight sets on February 23, 2019.
Got a wild card to enter the Madrid Open.
He reached the finals at the Lyon Open but sadly lost to Benoit Paire in straight sets.
Became the 19th seed to enter Wimbledon in 2019, reached the third round after he was defeated by Ugo Humbert.
He lost to Denis Shapovalov at the 2019 US Open.
Reached the first round at the 2020 Australian Open after he was defeated by Ernest Gulbis.
Yoshihito Nishioka eliminated Felix in the first round of the 2020 French Open.
Aslan Karatsev defeated him in the fourth round of the 2021 Australian Open.
Andreas Seppi defeating him in the first round of the French Open.
He lost the finals of the 2021 Mercedes Cup against Marin Cilic, 7-6, 6-3.
At Wimbledon, Felix Auger-Aliassime reached the quarterfinals after defeated Zverev, Denis Shapovalov, but eventually lost to Matteo Berrettini.
Canadian tennis player Felix Auger Aliassime has a net worth estimated at $3.5 million. He has earned roughly 3,721,486 in prize money.
Felix Auger Aliassime had an endorsements deal with Nike, but after he parted ways with Nike Felix joined Adidas, as well as Babolat and Tag Heuer.
Big things are expected from this talented young athlete, but his girlfriend Nina Ghaibi is one talented gal herself.
Croatian stunner Nina Ghaibi was born on June 19, 2000; she has an older sister Cilia born on September 9, 1994, both sisters are equestrians. She is close friends with Croatian tennis player, Ajla Tomljanovic.
Certainly, Nina and her sister followed their dad's steps, Karim Ghaibi, 53, is an equestrian as well. Her beautiful mother Jasmina, 51, graduated from Barton College.
Nina and her family, reside in Huntersville, North Carolina.
You can find Nina Ghaibi on Instagram here.
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BJ Creative has been designing artwork in Stamford for over 11 years now. Designing artwork is a large amount of fun and translating customers visions in their mind to actual digital designs is a great joy. The artwork is built by us and awaits feedback from the client to improve and change to their final design.
Stamford, is based close to Peterborough, where there are many artwork design agencies all providing the same service.
Being based in Stamford, BJ Creative has had access to a lot of clients who were after a particular type of artwork design to meet their needs. We have designed artwork for Weddings, Birthdays, Home Decoration and Tableplans amongst others.
Artwork Design can be a personal choice and taste, it comes in many shapes and sizes, and the easiest way to find out if we can help you is to contact BJ Creative. From our base in Stamford, we are willing to travel to you for initial meetings and showing you the progress as you require.
However, if you are further afield, do not worry. BJ Creative has created artwork for customers we have never met in person - from the Cam to Leeds, artwork design is not limited by distance.


Exercise is beneficial in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), although studies to date indicate little effect on the elevated pulmonary pressures or maladaptive right ventricle (RV) hypertrophy associated with the disease. For chronic left ventricle failure, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) promotes greater endothelial stimulation and superior benefit than customary continuous exercise training (CExT); however, HIIT has not been tested for PAH. Therefore, here we investigated acute and chronic responses to HIIT vs. CExT in a rat model of monocrotaline (MCT)-induced mild PAH. Six weeks of treadmill training (5 times/wk) were performed, as either 30 min HIIT or 60 min low-intensity CExT. To characterize acute hemodynamic responses to the two approaches, novel recordings of simultaneous pulmonary and systemic pressures during running were obtained at pre- and 2, 4, 6, and 8 wk post-MCT using long-term implantable telemetry. MCT-induced decrement in maximal aerobic capacity was ameliorated by both HIIT and CExT, with less pronounced pulmonary vascular remodeling and no increase in RV inflammation or apoptosis observed. Most importantly, only HIIT lowered RV systolic pressure, RV hypertrophy, and total pulmonary resistance, and prompted higher cardiac index that was complemented by a RV increase in the positive inotrope apelin and reduced fibrosis. HIIT prompted a markedly pulsatile pulmonary pressure during running and was associated with greater lung endothelial nitric oxide synthase after 6 wk. We conclude that HIIT may be superior to CExT for improving hemodynamics and maladaptive RV hypertrophy in PAH. HIIT's superior outcomes may be explained by more favorable pulmonary vascular endothelial adaptation to the pulsatile HIIT stimulus.


Squawky Birds piano is a fun colorful musical instrument. You can play notes (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) and bird squawks together, just the notes, or just the squawks.
The keys light up and the birds change when touched. You can slide your finger across the keyboard, no need to lift your finger to play the next note.


Tour four cabins on Half Moon Lake and meet your neighbors!
Four pontoons - each transporting 8 "snoopers" and driver(s).
Each pontoon group will spend the afternoon together, traveling to 4 cabins on the lake.
Each stop will last approximately 30 minutes - just enough time to tour the cabin and enjoy a drink or appetizer with your cabin's hosts.
Let others tour your home!
Open your home to (4) groups of 10 people.
Meet 40+ of your lake neighbors.
Allowance for food/drink provided by Snoop Loop ticket sales.
Help raise money for our lake district and have a say in how it is donated.
Following the tour, hosts will be picked up by pontoon and enjoy their own private "snoop loop" visiting each others homes together!
WANNA HOST? - Email Joe at jlonsky@gmail.com or fill out the volunteer form below.
Free Snoop Loop admission for you and (1) guest.
Spend the day with 10 of your neighbors.
WANNA DRIVE? - Email Joe at jlonsky@gmail.com or fill out the volunteer form below.


text:
<?php

namespace Drupal\system\Tests\Update;

use Drupal\node\Entity\Node;

/**
 * Tests the upgrade path for page title being converted into a block.
 *
 * @see https://www.drupal.org/node/2476947
 *
 * @group system
 */
class PageTitleConvertedIntoBlockUpdateTest extends UpdatePathTestBase {

  /**
   * {@inheritdoc}
   */
  protected function setDatabaseDumpFiles() {
    $this->databaseDumpFiles = [
      __DIR__ . '/../../../../system/tests/fixtures/update/drupal-8.bare.standard.php.gz',
      __DIR__ . '/../../../../system/tests/fixtures/update/drupal-8.page-title-into-block-2476947.php',
    ];
  }

  /**
   * {@inheritdoc}
   */
  protected function setUp() {
    parent::setUp();
    // @todo Remove in https://www.drupal.org/node/2568069.
    /** @var \Drupal\Core\Extension\ThemeHandlerInterface $theme_handler */
    $theme_handler = \Drupal::service('theme_handler');
    $theme_handler->refreshInfo();
  }

  /**
   * Tests that page title is being converted into a block.
   */
  public function testUpdateHookN() {
    $this->runUpdates();

    /** @var \Drupal\block\BlockInterface $block_storage */
    $block_storage = \Drupal::entityManager()->getStorage('block');

    $this->assertRaw('Because your site has custom theme(s) installed, we have placed the page title block in the content region. Please manually review the block configuration and remove the page title variables from your page templates.');

    // Disable maintenance mode.
    // @todo Can be removed once maintenance mode is automatically turned off
    // after updates in https://www.drupal.org/node/2435135.
    \Drupal::state()->set('system.maintenance_mode', FALSE);

    // We finished updating so we can log in the user now.
    $this->drupalLogin($this->rootUser);

    $page = Node::create([
      'type' => 'page',
      'title' => 'Page node',
    ]);
    $page->save();

    // Page title is visible on the home page.
    $this->drupalGet('/node');
    $this->assertRaw('page-title');

    // Page title is visible on a node page.
    $this->drupalGet('node/' . $page->id());
    $this->assertRaw('page-title');

    $this->drupalGet('admin/structure/block/list/bartik');

    /** @var \Drupal\Core\Config\StorageInterface $config_storage */
    $config_storage = \Drupal::service('config.storage');
    $this->assertTrue($config_storage->exists('block.block.test_theme_page_title'), 'Page title block has been created for the custom theme.');
  }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Dust-free Kathmandu campaign challenged by road potholes
Published on : 3 March, 2020 9:03 am
The Kathmandu Metropolitan City is facing an adverse condition to operate broomer machine in inner roads. Potholes in inner roads are yet to be mended and the situation has posed a challenge to operate broomer service smoothly for cleaning up road dust.
The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) office has been operating seven broomer machines since a year in a bid to realise the plan of dust-free Kathmandu. But its results are seen only in major roads. The responsibility for the management of roads with eight metres width is of the KMC office. According to KMC Environment Department chief Hari Kumar Shrestha, the campaign to making Kathmandu dust-free has been challenged as potholes in auxiliary roads remain as it is.
However, the use of broomer in large roads continues. Main roads generally do not feature potholes. Works of maintaining roads' beauty are going on. Though the present condition is not sufficient to be satisfied, the condition of Valley roads has improved. The restoration of Valley roads is the priority of the government and in the past 100 days, 9,500 potholes were mended. However, the condition of inner and auxiliary roads has not improved yet.
The government aims to blacktop 85 kilometres of road in the Kathmandu Valley till the end of current fiscal year. KMC said the mending of small roads has not caught the attention of authorities concerned and it has been facing to clean those roads with the help of broomer machine. However, the dust pollution in the major roads has been gradually vanishing.


text:
Colorado senator gets heated at Ted Cruz on Senate floor over shutdown
Posted: 5:10 PM, Jan 24, 2019
Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat normally known for his reserved demeanor, lashed out at Republicans -- namely Sen. Ted Cruz -- over the partial government shutdown on the Senate floor Thursday.
"These crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take," Bennet said, responding to remarks made by Cruz.
Bennet noted that he "seldom" takes the floor to contradict a member because of his efforts to work in a bipartisan manner.
However, Bennet recalled when Cruz previously helped shut down the government. Cruz in 2013 notably worked to protest the Affordable Care Act, and in turn inspired votes that shut down the government for 16 days.
"When the senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my state was flooded. It was under water. People were killed. People's houses were destroyed. Their small businesses were destroyed, forever. And because of the senator from Texas, this government was shut down, for politics," Bennet shouted.
The government has been shut down for more than 30 days because Republicans and Democrats are at an impasse over President Donald Trump's demand for $5.7 billion to fund a border wall.
"How ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise that the President of the United States couldn't keep?" Bennet said.
He later continued: "This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, take it from the farmers and ranchers that were there, and have the Mexicans pay for it isn't true. That's why we're here," Bennet said.
On Thursday, two proposals to reopen the government failed in the Senate -- neither reaching the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.
"And now we're here with the government shut down over his broken promise while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. That's what they're doing," Bennet said.


text:
/**
* Post functions.
*
* @class post
* @module hexo
* @static
*/

exports.create = require('./create');
exports.render = require('./render');
exports.load = require('./load');
exports.publish = require('./publish');


text:
Evan Thomas
The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA
The Very Best Men is the story of the CIA's early days as told through the careers of four glamorous, daring, and idealistic men who ran covert operations for the government from the end of World War II to Vietnam. Evan Thomas re-creates the personal dramas and sometimes tragic lives of Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald, who risked everything to contain the Soviet threat. Within the inner circles of Washington, they were regarded as the best and the brightest. They planned and acted to keep the country out of war -- by stealth and "political action" and to do by cunning and sleight of hand what great armies could not, must not be allowed to do. In the end, they were too idealistic and too honorable, and were unsuited for the dark, duplicitous life of spying. Their hubris and naïveté led them astray, producing both sensational coups and spectacular blunders like the Bay of Pigs and the failed assassination attempts on foreign leaders in the early 1960s. Thomas draws on the CIA's own secret histories, to which he has had exclusive access, as well as extensive interviews, to bring to life a crucial piece of American history.
Program Air Date: December 17, 1995
BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Evan Thomas, why the title, "The Very Best Men"?
EVAN THOMAS: Well, it's slightly ironic. They were the very best men in the sense that they were bright, bold, brave men who did the very best they could to conquer communism for the CIA in the early 1950s. But things didn't turn out as well as they'd hoped. And it's a bit of a play on the best and the brightest. A lot of what they tried to do didn't turn out so well. But they were the very best in the sense that they were the smartest around and the boldest around and the most daring.
LAMB: Who were they?
THOMAS: They were a group of four senior officials at the CIA who ran what's called the clandestine service, the part of the CIA that carries out covert action, espionage, the sexy part of the CIA, if you will. They were the covert action specialists. Richard Bissell, who was the most famous, probably, of the group who ran the Bay of Pigs -- or ran the CIA into the Bay of Pigs; Frank Wisner, who began it all in the late 40s; Tracy Barnes, who never ran it but was assistant for all the big operations like Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs; and Desmond Fitzgerald, who ran the covert action part of the agency in the mid-'60s and was a sort of swashbuckling, glamorous figure.
LAMB: Where did you get the idea for the book?
THOMAS: I got it from writing "The Wise Men," which was a book that came out about 10 years ago about the old foreign policy establishment. Two of the wise men were Chip Bohlen and George Kennan. They were senior foreign policymakers after the war, and one of their friends was Frank Wisner. Frank Wisner killed himself in 1965, and I thought, "Boy, there's got to be a story in there." The man who started the CIA's clandestine service, who started the department of dirty tricks, as reporters later called it, shot himself. And I thought, "Why? What happened?" And I started pulling on that string and it led me to these four characters.
LAMB: Why did Frank Wisner kill himself?
THOMAS: The short answer is that he was manic-depressive. The more interesting and longer answer is that he tried to do too much. He tried to create this fantastic covert operation capability to fight the Soviet Union in the 1950s. We were up against a very tough foe: the KGB. And he had, at best, limited success and he had some tragic setbacks, particularly the Hungarian revolution in 1956. And it got to him. He went mad on the job.
LAMB: Where?
THOMAS: At the Central Intelligence Agency in his office down on the Washington Mall, in the tempos, they called them. They have their own, old temporary headquarters down on the mall, and he literally went nuts. He had to be escorted from the building and taken to a mental institution in Baltimore.
LAMB: So what kind of a story was it then?
THOMAS: Well, the story was a tragedy.
LAMB: I mean, was it a front-page story that he killed himself? Was it that big a deal?
THOMAS: He killed himself later. It wasn't -- you know, the press didn't cover the CIA in 1950. When he had his breakdown in 1958, nobody knew. Today, if the head of the clandestine service, the director of operations, was escorted from the building by men in white jackets, it would be all over The New York Times and C-SPAN and everywhere else. In 1958 the press just wasn't paying attention or they felt it was unpatriotic to pay attention to what the CIA was doing. And all of this happened without a murmur. He finally shot himself in 1965, and that got respectful editorials in The Post and The Times but no news play.
LAMB: What was the Georgetown Sunday Night Supper Club?
THOMAS: It was an odd institution. Right after the war, in Georgetown, all the smart set lived, all the really kind of glamorous people who'd gone to places like Harvard and Yale and worked for the kind of most exciting agencies -- and the CIA was the most exciting place to work. And every Sunday night was maids' night out. All these people were well-to-do, and the maids would go out and they would get together and have a potluck supper, at which they would drink a great deal.
It's hard today to imagine how much people drank in those days. Coming out of World War II they were so glad to be alive, Prohibition was over, they all drank like fishes and they had these raucous evenings until 3, 4 in the morning. And the people at them included Joe Alsop, famous, very powerful columnist at the time; Chip Bohlen, who was making our foreign policy; George Kennan, who was famous to many people as a kind of creator of American foreign policy after the war; and many of these CIA hands, including Wisner and Barnes. And they had these sort of raucous, almost fraternity-like at times, good time. They would fight and argue and have a great time.
LAMB: For someone who's never been to Washington, can you describe Georgetown?
THOMAS: Well, it's different. For a long time it was where the sort of attractive Democratic preppies hung out. It's a little bit a contradiction in terms. In Washington the sort of cool crowd in the 1950s were liberal Democrats, Stevensonian Democrats. They didn't like Eisenhower. They sort of put down Eisenhower as being dull, Midwestern, wore bad suits, didn't know the right wines. And the people who were sort of sharper and cooler tended to be liberal, but they were liberal interventionists. It was the kind of liberalism that doesn't really exist anymore. They wanted to save the world by conquering the world. They wanted a very active CIA and a very active State Department. They wanted America to be a great power, to take its rightful role running the world. And these people were, by and large, headquartered in Georgetown.
There are still remnants left. Mrs. Graham, who runs The Washington Post, still has dinner parties in Georgetown where she has policymakers and they eat good food and in a kind of a glamorous setting and everybody's vaguely self-satisfied.
And, you know, they're fun to go to, but they're a vestige of something that was once a very powerful institution. You cannot understand the CIA. In fact, you can't understand the government of the United States, at least the foreign policy part of it, unless you understand what Georgetown was like in the late 40s and early 50s: all friends, they all knew each other, they had gone to school together, they had been in the same clubs together, they were godfathers to each other's children, they drank together at the Sunday night supper. They were a world unto themselves and they made policy.
LAMB: On this program recently we had Ben Bradlee, and I want to make a connection here, because in that book we talked about Mary Myer ...
THOMAS: Right.
LAMB: ...and you in your book talk about Cord Myer.
LAMB: You also talk about the towpath along the canal on Sundays where everybody went down there. What's the connection between Mary Myer and Cord Myer and the towpath?
THOMAS: Right. Well, it's all stuff for conspiracy theorists. Cord Myer was this glamorous figure from St. Paul's and Yale who was in the CIA. He ran a division of the CIA. And his wife, Mary, was having an affair with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. And when she died, Ben Bradlee, who was married to Mary Myer's sister, went looking for Mary Myer's diary, was asked to find and destroy this diary. He found the diary, and it was a diary of her affair with the president.
Well, at the very same time when Bradlee's looking for Mary Myer's diary, James Jesus Angleton, of the CIA, is out there looking for the same diary. In fact, breaking into a barn, I believe it was, or a garage -- this is all recanted in Bradlee's book. Very creepily, Mary Myer died -- was murdered on the towpath. The conspiratorial significance of the towpath is that's where all the CIA guys used to go for Sunday walks with their kids and their dogs. After lunch on Sunday they would go down to the towpath and go for these long walks and talk to each other. So it's all kind of oddly, spooky connect the dots. I'm not sure it really means anything, but ...
LAMB: Is Cord Myer still alive?
THOMAS: Yes. He's still alive.
LAMB: Did you talk to him for this book?
THOMAS: Yes, I did. He's a very interesting figure. He's a sad story in some ways, a very glamorous figure who was the beau ideal of his generation. He was going to save the world -- a Marine, a hero, lost an eye on Tarawa, I think it was, or one of the islands in the South Pacific -- extremely idealistic; came into the CIA as a matter of idealism; became seriously anti-Communist, and his friends say somewhat warped and bent by it; became a sad figure over time ... a sort of cynical figure, a doubter. His friends -- this is a little harsh, but his friends say he spent a life too long in secrets. He got taken over by that strange world of the CIA and bent in some way. He lost his basic idealism and sense of hope.
LAMB: You say in the beginning that you interviewed 66 CIA agents -- current CIA agents or former?
THOMAS: Agents is a misnomer. Case officers and officials. An agent is somebody that the CIA hires to do their spying, usually a foreign national. These are all case officers or officials. The interesting thing about it was how free they were in talking to me. You would think the CIA would be clammed up. I mean, they're keeping secrets. But the Cold War is over. A lot of these men are older and facing their maker and thought, well, now's the time to tell my story. And also their personalities tended to be larger than life and lively. They are such a distinctive contrast to me with bureaucrats I see today in my day job, working for Newsweek, who tend to be pretty cautious, by and large. This group was not cautious. They were very bold, and they were bold in their actions as CIA officials in the 1950s. And by the time I got to them, they were pretty bold in talking to me. Only, I think, maybe five of them refused to talk at all. There's only one unattributed quote in the entire book. Everything else is on the record.
LAMB: And I wanted to ask you about that because I went back and found it where -- it's number 12 and chapter 21, and the unattributed quote is, "confidential interview." Why was that one out of the whole bunch?
THOMAS: This person was talking to me about the CIA's assassination plots in the early '60s and he didn't want it known that he knew of those plots at that time. He was describing a scene in which he's talking with Tracy Barnes about -- they were kind of laughing about the attempt at hiring the Mafia to kill Castro in the early '60s. And I think he felt he didn't want it generally known that he was witting, as they say, or privy to these plots at that time.
LAMB: You say that you are the first outsider journalist or historian ever permitted to see the CIA's own secret histories of its operations in the first two decades of its existence. How come? Why did they let you do it?
THOMAS: Well, the CIA was sort of fumbling around trying to figure out what to do after the Cold War ended. The operations directorate, the clandestine service, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. They don't have to tell you anything. But Congress was putting some pressure on them to open up, and so they decided three or four years ago to use me as a kind of guinea pig and allow me in to see some things. I by no means saw everything. What I saw were their own secret histories. The CIA has a whole history staff and they write secret histories that nobody can read because they're classified. It's kind of like librarians who love books so much they don't want anybody to read them.
But I was allowed to read these histories, which are interesting, but it's important to note they are incomplete; they're turgid. They're written by intelligence officers, not professional historians. They don't promise to be complete records. They are very interesting windows into the way the CIA viewed itself at the time. And I took them as that and I found some interesting tidbits. No shocking revelations.
Interestingly, to me, all the big secrets are out. Only in this country would we really know all the big secrets of our intelligence service. In fact, we probably know more about the CIA than we do about the history of the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Housing and Urban Development, because their scandals forced out their big secrets chiefly in the 1970s during the Church Committee hearings.
LAMB: You say that you signed an agreement to do what?
THOMAS: I signed a secrecy agreement. It was a complicated process. I was afraid that if they wanted me to sign an all-purpose secrecy agreement that would allow them to censor my book. I refused to do that. I hired a lawyer, Sven Holmes, who's now a federal judge in Oklahoma, who had been the chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He represented me for over two years in long negotiations. And we worked out a deal that worked this way. I wrote an entire book without any access at all. I submitted that book. This is based on my interview. I wrote a book based largely on sources that already exist and my interviews with old spooks. I submitted that manuscript, and I said, "You tell me what bothers you in this manuscript. What are you going to want to take out? What don't you like?" They gave me a list of about 50 items, and then we went through each one and I found basically public sourcing or convinced them these items were in no way a harm to the national security in all but, I think, about two cases.
Once we had settled that, we took that manuscript aside, and they made an agreement not to touch that, to ask for no further changes in that, but to just to accept what I had written. Then I was allowed in. I read their histories. I took notes. I submitted my notes to them. And they looked at that and they decided what, from my notes, they were going to let me print. They let me have just about everything. The thing that they're still sensitive about are some code names, for reasons I'm not entirely clear about. They're sensitive about code names, the identities of agents; they don't like to print that for obvious reasons. If I had read the record of them bribing a foreign official, they weren't to allow me to print that. But generally, they were pretty open. They allowed me to use specific details about covert operations all the way back. They withheld virtually nothing.
LAMB: How many wives of some of your principals did you talk to, that are still living?
THOMAS: All that are still living, which was to say, three of the four. Mrs. Fitzgerald was dead. Polly Fritchie did not tell me much. She was basically against the book, didn't want me writing about her husband.
LAMB: Who was Polly Fritchie?
THOMAS: Polly Wisner, Frank Wisner's widow, was against the book, still doesn't like it, wishes that I had never written it. It's personal. Her husband killed himself, and she didn't want me to write about it.
LAMB: Did she then marry Clayton Fritchie?
THOMAS: Yes. She's married to Clayton Fritchie.
LAMB: Still alive?
THOMAS: Still alive.
LAMB: Former...
THOMAS: Clayton Fritchie was, among other things, an aide to Adlai Stevenson in the early 60s, a former newspaperman, well-known around town. And he married Polly after Frank died -- after Frank killed himself in 1965. Some years later, Polly married Clayton. So she didn't talk to me. Mrs. John Lawrence, Tracy Barnes' widow, talked to me, and so did Mrs. Bissell.
LAMB: I should know this; I don't. But is Frances Fitzgerald the writer?
THOMAS: She's the writer. She's the daughter of Desmond Fitzgerald. Interesting connection. I mean, Frankie Fitzgerald is a really great writer, won a Pulitzer Prize for the book "Fire in the Lake" in 1973 or so. And she...
LAMB: About Vietnam?
THOMAS: About Vietnam. Her father was running the clandestine service of the CIA, heavily engaged in Vietnam, while she was over researching that book in 1967.
LAMB: There's a scene in here at the Sunday night supper club at Joe Alsop's where she's at the table, as I remember.
THOMAS: Actually, it's an offshoot of the Sunday night supper, which was not really a club; it was just known as the Sunday night supper. There's a great scene in which Alsop -- Joe Alsop was a great cold warrior -- is heartened by the idea of young men -- the next generation coming along to fight the next good fight in Vietnam, including Frank Wisner Jr., Frank Wisner's son, and other sort of Harvard-Princeton-Yale types who were in the foreign service -- Richard Holbrooke, who's a pretty important player today; that generation was coming along, and Alsop was, "Go get 'em."
And these guys -- the younger generation looked at Alsop and said, "Are you crazy? This war's a disaster. You're out of your mind." And a huge generational fight ensued, and Frankie's father, Desmond Fitzgerald, who was then running the covert action part of the CIA, looked at the young generation and said, "Oh, you're all so wet." He used the British upper-class put-down of the younger generation for being -- wet means kind of wimpy, soft, weak.
LAMB: There's another reference to wet affairs.
THOMAS: Wet affairs are as -- KGB assassination, blackmail -- it's the dirty end of covert action. The 13th Directorate of the KGB carries out wet affairs.
LAMB: Where did you grow up? What town?
THOMAS: I grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, a town that was full of people very much like the characters I wrote about.
LAMB: Where did you go to school?
THOMAS: I went to Andover at a boarding school. And I went to Harvard College and then to the University of Virginia Law School.
LAMB: And your father was in what? What was his...
THOMAS: He was a book publisher. Published people -- not this crowd, but published Chip Bohlen. He published books -- typically, memoirs of statesmen, public affairs books in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s.
LAMB: What was it like growing up in that home?
THOMAS: Well, I got a dose of what then passed for the American upper class. This town was full of people who had gone to Yale and ran Wall Street.
LAMB: Your hometown?
THOMAS: My hometown. It was a commuter town outside of New York, very self-consciously WASP and the kind of town that you read about in Cheever's short stories. I don't know if it's that way today, but it was in the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up.
LAMB: What role did your grandfather's public life play in your life?
THOMAS: It's a little complicated because my grandfather was a socialist, and this is one of these sort of "only in America" stories. My grandfather was a socialist and against private capital and private wealth or wanted to redistribute...
LAMB: Norman Thomas?
THOMAS: Norman Thomas. He married a wealthy woman and Norman Thomas, the great socialist, basically lived off clipping coupons, dividend checks, from US trust companies. He lived off of capitalism. So I grew up in a highly capitalistic world, even though my grandfather was a socialist. It was a kind of contradictory. It's sort of like -- I guess the analogy is the Fabians in 19th century England. You could live upper class but still preach socialism. And there was a vestige of this in this town, this kind of liberal idealism that these upper-class WASPs had -- a beau example would be John Lindsay in New York in the 1960s.
LAMB: Did I read that your grandfather ran six times for president?
THOMAS: Right. He did.
LAMB: What was the first year? Do you remember?
THOMAS: '24 through '48.
LAMB: He followed Eugene Debs.
THOMAS: Yeah. He was the sort of figurehead and spokesman for the Socialist Party from '24 to '48.
LAMB: What was he like?
THOMAS: Wonderful guy. He was full of stories. And he was a better grandfather than a father. I think my father was utterly neglected by him because he was always off trying to save the world, so my father never saw him or saw very little of him. By the time I came along as his grandson, he had all the time in the world to tell stories. And I got, from the combination of growing up around my grandfather, who had a social conscience and saw the world in a wider way, and growing up in this preppy little town, had an influence on me. I was sort of getting it from both sides.
LAMB: What kind of an influence?
THOMAS: I think it's one of the reasons why I write books like this. I'm interested in the sociology -- this sounds pompous -- but the sociology of the American upper class, such as it existed. I have a somewhat critical take on it. They -- they did some great things: Marshall Plan, Western Alliance, but they also did some stupid things, and I document them in this book, the Bay of Pigs and various CIA excesses. Hiring the Mafia -- what a crazy idea. Why the CIA thought they could hire the Mafia to kill Castro still almost escapes me, although I tried to write about it in this book. And I think that my background growing up in the 60s, going to Harvard at a time that it was pretty liberal, I had a liberal sensibility, but I came from a conservative background; and the combination gave me a sense of curiosity, a sort of a skeptical curiosity and fascination with the workings of the American aristocracy.
LAMB: Coming back to your grandfather again, I read somewhere that he was an anti-Communist.
THOMAS: He was a fierce anti-Communist. In the lefty battles of the 1930s, the Socialists early on saw that the Communists were bad guys. They were dictatorial and totalitarian, and my grandfather was very much a Democratic Socialist. He didn't want Stalin dictating to him. And he early on warned the left, "Don't fall for the Communists. Don't fall into that trap. They're" -- I'm being crude here, but "they're bad guys, and they're going to lead you astray."
LAMB: I wrote down a whole bunch of names, and I don't know that we can do this, but if we go through them -- maybe some of them fast to give you -- tell us who they are. Some of them have connections with today. You keep quoting in this book Tom Braden.
THOMAS: Tom Braden, who's known to many people as a TV and radio commentator, early on ran propaganda at the CIA and international organizations. He came out of Dartmouth, went to World War II; and the idealistic thing to do was join the CIA. So he did, and worked there for about four years.
LAMB: E. Howard Hunt.
THOMAS: E. Howard Hunt's famous for breaking into the Watergate. He was an early CIA operative. In the jargon of the time, he thought black. He always saw things in a kind of deceptive, deceiving -- or he always thought the CIA was being deceived and he always wanted to figure out how to trump them by doing something duplicitous. And he was a clever covert action operator; obviously, not clever enough, because they got caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in 1972. But early on, he was a clever CIA operative.
THOMAS: Yes.
LAMB: What's he doing now?
THOMAS: I read that he's in bankruptcy. I think he's having a hard financial time. I don't really know what he's doing. He's obviously retired. He's an interesting character, kind of a strange American character. He wrote 60 novels -- I think 60 novels -- often spy novels, mystery novels. He's kind of a delightful character who is always going to be a footnote in American history because he got caught in Democratic Party headquarters on June 19th -- was it June 1972? -- he got caught.
LAMB: What is Tom Braden doing now?
THOMAS: Braden is retired. I think he still does some journalism, but not as much. He used to be a pretty regular radio commentator. I don't think he does as much now.
LAMB: You also had a name that -- I think it's his son that ran for vice president -- but Endicott Peabody...
THOMAS: Yeah. Endicott Peabody was the famous rector of Groton. He was kind of the earl WASP.
LAMB: Let me stop you about -- about Groton. Where is Groton?
THOMAS: Groton School is a little tiny school that most people have never heard of, northwest of Boston, that was a kind of ruling-class preserve. The Morgans and the Vanderbilts and sort of the American ruling class of the late 19th century and early -- the Harrimans -- early 20th century sent their sons there to be educated and also to get a sense of public service. Endicott Peabody preached public service, and one reason why so many of these chaps went into the CIA or the State Department was what they learned in chapel at Groton School.
LAMB: And Frank Wisner, Des Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, Richard Bissell, did they all go to Groton?
THOMAS: Two of them went to Groton. Fitzgerald went to St. Mark's, which is the sort of sister school of Groton, and Wisner was a Southerner, a Mississippi boy, who came out of a variation on the American aristocracy, the kind of Mississippi version. His family literally built a little town in Mississippi, owned lumber mills down there, and they built the parks, the library, the school; they owned the place. And young Wisner grew up as almost a kind of feudal lord.
LAMB: You say you went to Andover. Where is that?
THOMAS: Andover is a boarding school not unlike Groton. It's a little bigger and a little bit less upper-crusty; north of Boston -- about 30 miles north of Boston.
LAMB: Who are some of the alums that we might know?
THOMAS: George Bush is the most famous one. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Henry Stimson, Humphrey Bogart.
LAMB: What's it like being at Andover compared to the regular public school? What's the difference?
THOMAS: There's a difference. The quality of education is good. I mean, the teaching is rigorous. But it is a world unto itself. When you go to a boys' boarding school, it is insular and this is not true today so much; they're co-ed and they're freer. But for many years, for a couple of centuries at Andover, they were isolated, insulated world where they have their own ethos, their own ethic, their own way of living and looking at the world and it's profoundly affecting to its graduates.
LAMB: Other names. Donald Gregg is in your book.
THOMAS: Donald Gregg was George Bush's national security adviser and ambassador to Korea, I believe, and an old CIA hand who was our man in Korea for many years; goes way back as a Far East hand.
LAMB: Did you talk to him?
THOMAS: Yes, I did.
THOMAS: I think he's running a Korea Friendship Society up in New York. I don't think he has any CIA contacts; he's an old Korea hand.
LAMB: Another name from the past that popped up in your book is the Reverend William Sloane Coffin.
THOMAS: Believe it or not, William Sloane Coffin, famous to all of us as a great anti-war protester, started in the CIA. He was running agents behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1940s.
LAMB: Where is he now?
THOMAS: I think he's living up in Vermont. I think he's retired, although he probably still preaches. I think he's still a -- probably has a social conscience and still trying to do good, but my memory is, I talked to him over the phone in Vermont.
LAMB: Where did you go that you had to go to the greatest lengths to get to in order to get this book written?
THOMAS: Most of these old spooks live within 20 miles of this studio, so it wasn't that tough. I did go to Paris to talk to Frank Wisner's old mistress, Princess Caraja, this Romanian princess that he took up with in World War II; kind of a romantic figure. I met her up in her garret in Paris. I guess that's about as exotic as I got.
LAMB: What's she all about today?
THOMAS: She's sitting there with her love letters -- older woman, you know, kind of an old grande dame who met Frank -- a very romantic story. Wisner was the OSS man. The OSS was the Office of Strategic Services, America's spy agency in World War II. And Wisner was sent to Bucharest -- excuse me, to Romania, to Budapest, in 1944, and he, early on, saw that the Russians were coming, and that was an important moment because everybody else was paying attention to the Germans. We were still fighting Germany. And Frank Wisner said next fall, it was going to be the Russians, because the Russians were trying to take over Romania.
And while he was there, he began a love affair with this Princess Caraja. Like a lot of wartime love affairs, it ended. But Joe McCarthy, the right-wing demagogue, and the FBI tried to use it against Wisner in the 1950s when they were out to get the CIA in bureaucratic warfare. The FBI basically tried to blackmail the CIA by saying to Frank Wisner and to Allen Dulles, who was running the CIA, "Remember Princess Caraja? We have information about her. She's a Communist spy." I don't think that was true, but they claimed it. "You'd better come up here and answer questions about it," all an intimidation attempt by the McCarthyites to get the CIA. To the CIA's credit, they stood up to it and refused to be blackmailed.
LAMB: How old is the princess today?
THOMAS: I'm guessing 70-something. She's an older lady.
LAMB: And when he had her as a mistress, what year was it?
THOMAS: 1945 -- winter of 1945.
LAMB: Was he married then?
LAMB: Was he married to Polly?
THOMAS: Yes, he was.
LAMB: Did she know about the mistress?
THOMAS: Yeah. She knows about it now. I don't think she knew about it at the time.
LAMB: Speaking of mistresses, you also tell us in the book that Allen Dulles had lots of mistresses.
THOMAS: He was famous for it. The...
LAMB: Was he famous then? And was it public then?
THOMAS: Nothing was public then. Nothing was public about the CIA. The press was completely in the dark.
LAMB: Did you make it public for the first time, that Allen Dulles...
THOMAS: No. No. This has been written about. Dulles is -- the joke was that his wife knew that he'd gotten a new lover because he'd go to Cartier and buy his wife a new diamond, and that meant that Allen Dulles had just gotten a new mistress.
LAMB: Who was he?
THOMAS: Allen Dulles was the kind of great -- they used to call him the great white case officer. He ran the CIA in the '50s during this high age when they were swashbuckling and he loved covert action and encouraged the kind of shenanigans that I write about in my book.
LAMB: And his brother?
THOMAS: His brother was John Foster Dulles, who was the secretary of state. It made foreign policy a lot easier in the 1950s, because when you had the head of the CIA and the head of the State Department as brothers, one could just pick up the phone, call the other and get the job done.
LAMB: Let me name a couple of countries you write about and give us some background on it. You spend a little time on Albania. Why?
THOMAS: Well...
LAMB: Where is Albania?
THOMAS: Albania is a little pocket of the world off of the Aegean Sea. It's north of Greece and south of Yugoslavia. And it was the CIA's first target for what they call rollback. The hope right after World War II, after the Iron Curtain fell, was to roll back the Iron Curtain. And the CIA's first target was the country of Albania, which they thought they could stage a revolution in. Frank Wisner parachuted a lot of agents in there, hoping to cement a revolution. It was a fiasco. All the agents were killed or, more typically, doubled. They were turned into Communist agents and played back the other way. It's a standard Communist trick, to capture a spy, double them and make them work against the side that he had come from. And this was the first operation. This was about 1949, '50, '51.
LAMB: In your book, what's new for someone that follows this whole story?
THOMAS: There are tidbits. What I wanted to do was bring stick figures to life. It's really a social history as much as anything else -- to make you understand that all the spooky stuff the CIA was doing had a human dimension, and the human dimension was this insular, clubby group that lived in Georgetown, that went to places like Groton, that had a certain mind-set, a certain ethic, and to try to explain that and to understand that. There are a few new operational details. Richard Bissell told me about an assassination plot against Sukarno of Indonesia. This is a little crude, but the CIA was going to give Sukarno a case of venereal disease somehow through -- Sukarno was a sex fiend who liked airline stewardesses.
LAMB: He's still around.
THOMAS: Not Sukarno.
LAMB: No, I'm thinking of Suharto.
THOMAS: Suharto -- Suharto.
LAMB: I'm sorry. You're right.
THOMAS: Sukarno was a well-known lover of sex who bragged about it, and he specialized in Pan Am stewardesses. And the CIA was going to somehow give a Pan Am stewardess a case of potentially lethal VD. This all sounds wacky. This is a plot that was never carried out. Bissell did tell me about it and one of his assistants confirmed it. It was interesting. Bissell, when he told me about this nutty plot -- Bissell is a very articulate man, speaks in whole paragraphs -- or was; he died a year and he was famous as a briefer.
But when he talked about assassination plots, he became very orotund and he became, in his words, circumlocutious. He described this plot to assassinate Sukarno by giving him a case of VD as an attempt to biologically immobilize Sukarno through the use of a female associate. It was typical of him when he began talking in this area. He wouldn't use the word assassination; he would say "executive action" or "this method of international rivalry." And his kind of ornateness and indirection told me that he really was still uncomfortable about it. He really wasn't proud of his involvement in these plots -- that even though he expressed no moral regrets -- specifically said to me, "I have no moral regrets. I have chagrin that they failed, but no moral regrets that we started or that we tried them" -- I don't really believe that. I think he was troubled by it. And one tip-off or one clue was the way he spoke so circumlocutiously.
LAMB: Where did you find him?
THOMAS: He had a little office above a shopping center in Hartford, Connecticut. He sat up there with his Greek histories. He loved Greek -- he was a great -- he's hard to describe. He believed in empire. He grew up as a wealthy boy. He went to Groton. He studied empire -- he studied Greek and British empire. And he believed that America's empire had come after World War II and he was the man to lead the Secret Service of the American empire. And in his old age, he would sit up there reading the history of the Peloponnesian Wars and Homer and Greek history and relive this empire that he wasn't able quite to replicate for the United States and the Cold War.
LAMB: How many days did you spend with him?
THOMAS: I spent about four days. He could talk all day long even though he was, then, 80 years old. He drank a lot. We would sit there drinking wine, and by the end of the day, I'd be looped and he seemed completely sober and always lucid.
LAMB: What years did you talk to him -- or what year?
THOMAS: I saw him in '92 and '93. And then I would talk to him -- I talked to him on the phone in '94. I would call him up with follow-up questions. He was, like all these men, a complete gentleman. You know, it's curious. It was Bissell's idea to hire the Mafia -- one of the truly crazy ideas in American government, to have the CIA hire the Mafia.
LAMB: What year?
THOMAS: 1960 -- September, 1960.
LAMB: How did he do it?
THOMAS: He got his chief of security to approach a cut-out, to go to Johnny Roselli, a mid-level mobster in Las Vegas, who then went to Sam "Mo Mo" Giancana, to deliver poisons to Castro.
LAMB: Sam Giancana, the same man who had Judith Exner's girlfriend...
THOMAS: Right. The plot thickens here, because the suspicion has always been that Judith Exner was somehow a liaison between then President Kennedy and Sam Giancana in their plots to either kill Castro or buy the vote in Cook County in the '60 elections.
LAMB: Judith Exner's still alive.
THOMAS: Yes, she is, and...
LAMB: How about Sam Giancana?
THOMAS: Dead. Killed in a mob hit while he was cooking Italian sausages in his basement in 19 -- right before he was set to testify before the Church Committee looking into CIA plots.
LAMB: Who was Church?
THOMAS: George Ch -- not George Church. Senator Church...
LAMB: Frank Church.
THOMAS: Frank Church -- excuse me -- was a Democratic senator who, right after Watergate, conducted a series of hearings looking into CIA abuses. After Watergate, it was like we picked up a giant rock -- the rock of government. We wanted to see everything scurrying around underneath. And one of the things they looked at was the CIA. And out of those hearings came sort of amazing stories about plots to make Castro's beard fall out or to assassinate Trujillo or Lamumba, various heads of state -- these were known as the family jewels, illegal acts undertaken over the years by the CIA in the service of their country.
LAMB: Did you talk to Judith Exner?
THOMAS: No, I didn't.
LAMB: And back to the Bissell story about the Mafia, how far did this go?
THOMAS: Oh, it went pretty far. I mean, they hired the Mafia, and the relationship went on for three or four years. I've always suspected, though, and particularly the suspicions of people that worked in the Justice Department at the time -- that this was all a scam by the Mafia. And it goes to an important issue about my men. They were urbane and sophisticated, but they were naive in a fundamental sense. They thought that you could hire the Mafia to kill Castro. I think the Mafia took them for the ride. I think the Mafia agreed to do this to pick up a marker against the United States government so if the Justice Department turned around and tried to prosecute Sam Giancana or Johnny Roselli, the mobsters could say, "Hey, we work for you. We're working for Uncle Sam." And, in fact, that's exactly what happened.
LAMB: How much did they get paid?
THOMAS: Nothing. We offered them -- I don't remember -- $50,000 or $100,000. They wouldn't take the money because they said it was their, quote, "patriotic duty," which further enhances my feeling that this was all a scam.
LAMB: Now the four men that you write about -- Frank Wisner, Des Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes and Richard Bissell -- three of them died by the time they were -- before they were 61 years old. And so the only one you talked to is Richard Bissell.
THOMAS: Correct.
LAMB: Paint a little picture of Frank Wisner.
THOMAS: Well, the key to him is that he was manic, in the best and worst senses. He had enormous energy. He flew. He was high. He used to call the CIA his mighty Wurlitzer. He could play any tune on it. He could plant newspaper stories or hire spies or stage coups or bribe foreign officials to spread the influence of the United States around the world. It was a wonderful kind of ideal, but it was an illusion. He couldn't really do these things, and a lot of them backfired. And when the crash came, when the downer from his mania came, it really came and eventually killed him.
LAMB: Who painted the best picture for you?
THOMAS: Of Wisner?
LAMB: Yes.
THOMAS: Oh, social friends, probably, in Georgetown -- his old social chums. Also the spooks, but the people who knew him best were his social buddies.
LAMB: Did you talk to Joe Alsop before he died?
THOMAS: Not about this book. I interviewed him for "The Wise Men," but I didn't -- he died before I really got going on this.
LAMB: I notice you credited Bob Merry for giving you material on Joe Alsop. And Ed Yoder wrote a book on Joe Alsop. What's the fascination with him?
THOMAS: He was the center of the universe. His dinner parties were the most important. I mean, the most important dining table in Georgetown and, hence, Washington and, hence, the world, was Joe Alsop's in the 1950s. Jack Kennedy, when he was president, would come for dinner there and hold forth, and it was a kind of forum. Alsop was a brilliant, loyal, belligerent, slightly sad homosexual who was an imperious figure. And he would say to Kennedy, "Now why aren't we doing enough about the Communists?" And Kennedy, sitting at his table, would try to answer him in quite specific detail. In those days, public officials trusted journalists and they would, over dinner, reveal state secrets, trusting those journalists not to print them. Different rules in the 1950s.
LAMB: Let me ask you about the business of homosexuality and a lot of the people that are talked about and the mistresses and all that. If you lived back in those years -- 50s, 60s -- did people know all these stories that are now in your book?
THOMAS: Yes and no. It was suspected that Joe was gay, but they didn't know, for instance, that he'd been caught in a honey trap by the KGB in Moscow in 1956. Joe's first trip to Moscow, he stupidly allowed himself to be set up by the KGB. They caught him in a honey trap and tried to blackmail him. To his credit, he refused to be blackmailed. He refused to have anything to do with the CIA. And he said, "Go ahead." You know, "Do what you will, but I'm my own man." That story was not known until many years later. However, it was generally known that he was homosexual. But that era, unlike ours, which is so exhibitionist, people had enormous respect for secrecy and privacy and they just let Joe alone.
LAMB: You quote Susan Mary Alsop a lot in the book. Is she his ex-wife?
THOMAS: Ex-wife. She married him in the early '60s, was married for a number of years and divorced him, I think, not necessarily because he was homosexual; I think it was more of a friendship and an arrangement -- but because he was difficult to live with. Joe was a hard guy to live with. He was a wonderful man in many ways -- loyal friend, brilliant, fun -- but difficult.
LAMB: Paint a picture of Desmond Fitzgerald.
THOMAS: He was often compared to a kind of Renaissance cavalier. He was romantic, swashbuckling, he had a sense of whimsy. He would always quote for Al -- quote from "Alice in Wonderland." When he was planning covert operations, he would quote from "Alice in Wonderland," and his aides would have to go look up these allusions to figure out what he was talking about. Very romantic figure -- smart but not always shrewd. It was Desmond Fitzgerald's idea to plant an exploding seashell near the beach where Castro went skin diving. Now why he thought Castro was going to pick up this particular seashell has never been clear. I think, in fact, this was, like so many of their plots, a plot they never carried out. But he was an overly ambitious, smart, romantic, very charming, somewhat cold spy master.
LAMB: Did you talk to his daughter...
LAMB: ...Frances Fitzgerald? And where is she today?
THOMAS: She is writing books in New York. Brilliant woman. She did not like this project at first.
THOMAS: Because she thought I was being too tough and sort of one-dimensional about her father. I painted a kind of a stick figure -- in an early draft which I showed her -- I painted kind of a stick figure version of her father that was harsh and kind of wrong. I talked to her a great deal after that and she flushed out a lot of the human details and gave me a better sense of him, as did various of his friends.
LAMB: What did she think of him?
THOMAS: She loved him. She was his rather distant daughter. When she was a little girl, her parents' marriage broke up. Desmond Fitzgerald was married to Marietta Tree, famous socialite, longtime mistress of Adlai Stevenson in later years. Marietta, then Peabody, the granddaughter of Endicott Peabody, the rector of Groton -- it's all a small world -- it's all one of...
LAMB: The father of Endicott Peabody Jr., who ran for vice president...
THOMAS: Right. Right. All one tiny world. The got married before the war. Desmond went off to war. When he came back, Marietta was having an affair with John Huston, the movie director. That was the end of that marriage. So Frankie -- daughter Frankie -- lost her father at a young age and didn't see as much of him as she would have liked; loved him very much; was close to him from afar; had a kind of romantic view of him. He was cold, but he was quite tender with her.
LAMB: Tracy Barnes?
THOMAS: Very swashbuckling figure; a great athlete at Groton and Yale. Grew up on the Whitney estate on Long Island with his own private golf course, so he was a par golfer by the time he was about 12 years old. Loved to jump out of airplanes, OSS hero in World War II, jumped behind enemy lines. Won a Silver Star by capturing a German garrison. Along with one other Frenchman, he went running around firing his carbine in the air scaring the Germans into thinking they were surrounded and they surrendered to just these two men. Barnes won a Silver Star for that; later became a very senior official in the CIA and played an important role in the Guatemala coup and in the Bay of Pigs.
LAMB: When you look back at these years, how much of that -- and you know what's going on today; you're the bureau chief at Newsweek -- how much of this is going on today? How many dinner parties do they have in Georgetown and CIA people who come out of Yale and Harvard and Princeton?
THOMAS: Much less. There is still a clubby feel to the CIA because it's insular, but it's not WASP. Mostly graduates of state universities. It's much more middle class. There are a lot of Mormons today in the CIA. They like Mormons because they have language skills, they've traveled a lot, they're good proselytizers. It's not Groton and Yale anymore. In fact, I doubt there's a single Groton graduate active in the CIA today. At the time, just to give you a sense of how important Groton school was to the CIA, the first significant coup in Iran was run by Kermit Roosevelt, class of '36, with assistance from Archie Roosevelt, class of '34. The second big coup a year later in Guatemala was planned by Tracy Barnes, class of '32, with assistance from Richard Bissell, class of '31. Bissell and Barnes planned the Bay of Pigs with assistance from John Bross, who was the senior prefect of the class of '32. The poisons that were mixed to kill Castro were mixed in a lab run by Cornelius Roosevelt, class of '34. I mean, Groton played a big role in the CIA in the 1950s.
LAMB: Graham Greene, "The Quiet American," and Edward Lansdale. Explain all that.
THOMAS: Edward Lansdale, known as "The Quiet American" or "The Ugly American" in Lederer and Brudick's novel by that name, was the real-life figure. Colonel Lansdale went to the Philippines and ran a counterinsurgency against Communist guerillas or leftist guerillas that became the model for the idea of you have to get their hearts and minds if you're going to defeat the Communists, you have to win their hearts and mind. The expression in Vietnam later became grab them by the nuts and their hearts and minds will follow. But at the time, it was get their hearts and minds through psychological warfare, by, oh, disinformation, blackmail. Lansdale was a great expert at this and he had a great success in the Philippines. They beat back the leftist insurgency. He was then sent to Vietnam, where he helped install President Diem. And Graham Greene ran into him in Vietnam in the mid-60s and wrote a book called "The Quiet American."
LAMB: Who was Graham Greene?
THOMAS: Graham Greene was a great British novelist who had a great sense of American character. And the thing that was interesting about "The Quiet American" was that Lansdale was a great idealist, kind of a good soul, but naive. He had a kind of naive, well-intentioned arrogance that the United States was going to save the world; that we knew best; that these Third World people didn't know best; that we could impose our democracy or our democratic ideals on them and they would gratefully accept them. Of course, this didn't happen -- didn't happen in Vietnam, didn't happen in many places.
LAMB: There's one scene that I remember you -- General Lansdale used to have -- is it Magsaysay? Is that the way you say it?
THOMAS: Magsaysay, which ...
LAMB: Slept in the same room with him for a while? What was that all about?
THOMAS: Right. In the 50s, the CIA station chief often ran the Third World country. The most powerful person in the country was not the head of state, not the American ambassador, it was the CIA station chief, because the CIA station chief had several things: cash -- they could bribe senior officials; they had -- this is a funny detail -- medical services. A lot of Third World leaders wanted American medical services. There was a part of the directorate of operations at the CIA that handed out medicine. They would cure the VD or the strange diseases that these guys had picked up. They'd fly them back to Sloan-Kettering to have their cancer treated -- very effective way of winning the loyalty, the allegiance of Third World leaders. And all through the Third World, the CIA was handing out bribes, medical services, occasionally blackmail, to get colonels, police chiefs and heads of state on the payroll. Lansdale was an example of this kind of station chief, and he literally slept in the same room as Magsaysay, who was the president of the Philippines.
LAMB: How long did that go on?
THOMAS: Several years. He helped get Magsaysay elected and was a wonderful sort of triumph of the West. They beat back the Communist party in a fair election; I don't think it was rigged. Magsaysay won in 1953 or '54, I think it was, and died tragically in a plane crash in about 1957.
LAMB: You meant ...
THOMAS: I'm a little rough on these dates, but that's the rough period.
LAMB: You mentioned Graham Greene, and then maybe it was Anthony Cave Brown's book, and I think you cite him in your book -- there was a picture of Graham Greene and Kim Philby together.
LAMB: Kim Philby's throughout your book, too.
THOMAS: Kim Philby is the famous mole, the third man. He's the early Aldrich Ames. Kim Philby was a well-born Englishman. He went to Westminster and Cambridge, and he rose up inside the British intelligence service. He was slated to be the head of MI6, the foreign intelligence service. He was working for the Kremlin the whole time. And he was finally caught, or at least flushed out, by the Americans in 1951 and sent back to Britain, although he was never arrested -- in fact, escaped to Moscow in 1959.
LAMB: Was Graham Greene ever a spy?
THOMAS: I think he was, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure of that. I think he was in the foreign service, but I'm not sure. He was spooky, certainly. I just don't know.
LAMB: After -- I mean, you went to Harvard; you went to Andover; you're the bureau chief of Newsweek and all that. I mean, when you look back at your past and you look at this, where do you come down on all this stuff? And what do you like and what don't you like?
THOMAS: Well, I'm torn about it. I admire the courage of these men. I admire their idealism, their sense of grandeur, which you don't find in Washington today. You don't find the same, "Boy, we're going to try to save the world here. We're going to be confident in our world leadership." You don't see that.
What I don't miss are the mistakes, obviously. These guys made a lot of mistakes. The Bay of Pigs was a fantastic blunder. It was profoundly humiliating to the president of the United States and dangerous. One reason why we had a Cuban Missile Crisis is the CIA spent so much time trying to kill Castro that Castro said to the Russians, "Sure, I'll take your missiles. The CIA's trying to kill me." I don't think those missiles would have been based in Cuba but for the CIA's nutty plots to try to kill Castro. So there was a real downside, to put it mildly, to what they did. They suffered from the ancient Greek disease of hubris, a kind of overweening arrogance. They were good and idealistic men who went too far. They were too brave, too -- too confident.
LAMB: What do you think of the CIA?
THOMAS: It's necessary. I think great superpowers have to have an intelligence service. You have to know what your enemies and your friends are up to. I think their technical intelligence is fantastic. The fact that our satellites can listen in on their phone calls -- and I sure want an intelligence service when there are terrorists out there who are capable of getting nuclear weapons that could conceivably blow up my hometown of Washington, DC. I definitely want an intelligence service. It's easier in the abstract, though, to say, "We should have an intelligence service," than to actually carry out intelligence operations. They often go wrong; they leak; they're insecure. It's hard in this kind of country to keep secrets. Our CIA has had a lot of mistakes.
LAMB: In the middle of your book, you tell a story about a tunnel.
THOMAS: The Berlin tunnel.
LAMB: Is that new?
THOMAS: No. It's been out. In fact, when it was discovered, the funny thing -- the Berlin tunnel was dug under the -- not the Berlin Wall, but from West to East Berlin in 1955 to tap into Soviet army land lines to listen in on the Russians to get some intelligence about -- well, what they really wanted to know was whether the Russians were going to attack. You have to remember the time. In 1955, we were really worried that the Soviet Union was going to attack Western Europe. There would be a massed tank attack of western Europe, and we wanted some intelligence. So we dug this tunnel, many yards, into the east sector of Berlin and tapped their phone lines. After about a year, the tunnel got discovered.
LAMB: Who was responsible for building the tunnel?
THOMAS: The British and the Americans. I think it was a British idea -- well, there's argument. The British claimed credit; the Americans claimed credit. I think it was a British idea. The money typically came from the United States and the engineering know-how came from the United States, but the Brits, who were good spies, I think, had the original concept. It got discovered after a year. And at the time, the CIA first thought, "Fiasco. Disaster. We've been caught with our pants down." But then they discovered something else. The people were so happy that we were doing something to fight communism that it was considered to be a great success. The headline in Time was called Wonderful Tunnel, and the Berliners were delighted that the CIA was fighting a secret war, that they were doing something against Communists. So even though it only lasted for a year before it got found, it was a great psychological boost to the West.
LAMB: How long have you been Newsweek bureau chief now?
THOMAS: Nine years.
LAMB: I read somewhere where you're going to leave that job.
THOMAS: Next year, after an even 10 years. I figure a decade is enough.
LAMB: What are you going to do?
THOMAS: I'm going to write articles for Newsweek. I'm going to stay at Newsweek. I'm going to have another title of assistant managing editor. And I am involved in management in New York, and I'll continue to go to New York one day a week and wear that management hat, but I won't run the bureau day to day. Somebody else will do that.
LAMB: What is your next book?
THOMAS: I'm thinking about it. I'd like to do something about the death of liberalism, looking, perhaps, at New York City in the 1960s. I'm fascinated by the hopefulness that there was in the early '60s. They were going to end poverty and end racism, and yet, by the end of the '60s, it had all sort of gone to hell. And I'm interested in exploring what happened in New York in the 1960s to make the sort of liberal hope founder.
LAMB: What time of day do you write?
THOMAS: I take a leave to write. I've always taken a three-month leave. I've done this three times now. And I just write as fast as I can for three months to get a manuscript down, to get a basic rough -- and I do mean rough -- draft. And then I spend a lot of time and odd hours reworking it: early in the morning, sometimes late at night, sometimes at lunch -- whenever I can get a spare hour.
LAMB: What's the hardest thing about writing a book?
THOMAS: For me, it's joy. I get a writer's high. I find it euphoric. The hardest thing is waiting for the reviews. That's what's hard about it. The doing of it for me is sheer pleasure.
LAMB: How do you feel about the reviews on this book?
THOMAS: Well, so far, so good. I mean, I got a great review in The Post and a very good review in the Daily Times, and now I'm nervously waiting for others.
LAMB: This is what the book looks like, "The Very Best Men" by Evan Thomas. Thank you very much for joining us.
THOMAS: Thank you.
William Rehnquist
Grand Inquests
Irving Bartlett
John C. Calhoun: A Biography
Morton Kondracke
Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease
Vartan Gregorian
The Road to Home: My Life and Times
Lester Thurow
The Inextinguishable Symphony


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text:
Rotary engine with cam-guided rotor
Alexander Shkolnik, Wilmington, MA (US); and Nikolay Shkolnik, West Hartford, CT (US)
Assigned to LiquidPiston, Inc., Bloomfield, CT (US)
Filed by LiquidPiston, Inc., Bloomfield, CT (US)
Filed on May 20, 2016, as Appl. No. 15/160,094.
Application 15/160,094 is a continuation of application No. 14/015,848, filed on Aug. 30, 2013, granted, now 9,353,623.
Application 14/015,848 is a continuation of application No. 13/551,032, filed on Jul. 17, 2012, granted, now 8,523,546, issued on Sep. 3, 2013.
Application 13/551,032 is a continuation of application No. 13/434,827, filed on Mar. 29, 2012, abandoned.
Claims priority of provisional application 61/469,009, filed on Mar. 29, 2011.
Prior Publication US 2016/0341042 A1, Nov. 24, 2016
This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.
Int. Cl. F03C 2/00 (2006.01); F04C 2/00 (2006.01); F01C 19/00 (2006.01); F01C 1/22 (2006.01); F01C 19/08 (2006.01); F01C 21/04 (2006.01); F01C 1/04 (2006.01); F01C 21/00 (2006.01); F01C 21/08 (2006.01); F01C 21/10 (2006.01); F02B 53/00 (2006.01)
CPC F01C 19/005 (2013.01) [F01C 1/04 (2013.01); F01C 1/22 (2013.01); F01C 19/08 (2013.01); F01C 19/085 (2013.01); F01C 21/008 (2013.01); F01C 21/04 (2013.01); F01C 21/08 (2013.01); F01C 21/106 (2013.01); F02B 53/00 (2013.01); F02B 2053/005 (2013.01)] 17 Claims
1. A rotary engine comprising:
a housing having a working cavity;
a shaft having an eccentric portion;
a rotor having a first axial face, and a second axial face opposite the first axial face, the rotor disposed on the eccentric portion and within the working cavity, the rotor comprising a first cam on the first axial face, the first cam having an eccentricity corresponding to the eccentricity of the eccentric portion of the shaft; and
a cover integral with, or fixedly attached to, the housing, the cover comprising a plurality of rollers, each roller engaged with the first cam, wherein the first cam guides the rotation of the rotor as the rotor rotates within the working cavity and orbits around the shaft.
9. A cycloid engine including:
a rotor having N lobes and a first cam rigidly attached to the rotor;
a housing having a corresponding set of N+1 lobe-receiving regions for successively receiving the lobes as the rotor rotates about an axis relative to the housing, the housing having:
(i) a first cover and a second cover axially disposed on first and second sides of the rotor, respectively, and a plurality of cam followers rigidly attached to the first cover or the second cover, each cam follower engaged with the first cam, wherein the first cam guides the rotation of the rotor as the rotor rotates within the housing;
(ii) a peak disposed between each pair of adjacent lobe-receiving regions, and
(iii) an intake port and an exhaust port;
a plurality of peak seals, at least one of the plurality of peak seals disposed on each peak and configured to maintain contact with the rotor throughout a period of rotation of the rotor, each peak seal being radially biased against the rotor throughout the rotation of the rotor, on account of a cycloidal geometry of the rotor and the lobe-receiving portions;
a first passageway defined in the rotor to communicate cyclically between the intake port and a working chamber, the first passageway configured to allow air to enter from a radial face of the rotor into the working chamber, the working chamber defined as a volume lying between two peak seals, the housing and the rotor; and
a second passageway, distinct from the first passageway, defined in the rotor to communicate cyclically between the exhaust port and the working chamber, the second passageway configured to allow exhaust gas to exit from the working chamber through the radial face of the rotor.