Date:    Mon, 8 Jun 1998 14:32:34 EDT
<br>From:    Allan Metcalf <AAllan[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AOL.COM>
<br>Subject: Man the ships
<br>
<br>Looks like we need some clarification here from _America in So Many Words_ by
<br>David K. Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf, published recently by Houghton
<br>Mifflin. Here's the entry for 1956:
<br>
<br>1956 Brinkmanship
<br>
<br>   How do you fight a war without going to war? After ten years of COLD WAR
<br>(1946) with the Soviet Union, that was a paradox we were still trying to
<br>resolve. But President Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles,
<br>had no doubts about it. "The ability to get to the verge without getting into
<br>the war is the necessary art," Dulles said in an interview early in 1956. "If
<br>you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from
<br>it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."
<br>   There was good reason to be scared. Both the United States and the Union of
<br>Soviet Socialist Republics were armed and dangerous. The United States had
<br>tested its first hydrogen bomb in 1952, the U.S.S.R. in 1953. Both sides had
<br>long-range aircraft to deliver the bombs. Neither side was deterred by the
<br>fear of nuclear winter (1983), an idea whose time would not come for thirty
<br>more years. In classrooms, the best we could do for our schoolchildren was to
<br>hold "duck and cover" drills so they could practice shielding themselves from
<br>the flash and blast of a distant atomic bomb.
<br>   Not every American favored going to the brink. Former governor Adlai
<br>Stevenson of Illinois, who would again be nominated as the Democratic
<br>candidate to run against Eisenhower, criticized Dulles in a speech in February
<br>1956: "No, we hear the Secretary of State boasting of his brinkmanship--the
<br>art of bringing us to the edge of the nuclear abyss."
<br>   That word brinkmanship was modeled on the gamesmanship of Stephen Potter's
<br>1947 book, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship or the Art of Winning Games
<br>Without Really Cheating. The sporting and humorous connotations of the suffix
<br>-manship applied to such a serious subject imply that the practitioner of
<br>brinkmanship is playing with catastrophe. Though the cold war is over, high-
<br>risk politics is not, and brinkmanship has remained a vivid word to describe
<br>it.
<br>