At the table Lacouture was declaring, with relish for his own pat phrases, that the President’s request for fifty thousand airplanes a year was “politically hysterical, fiscally irresponsible, and industrially inconceivable.” Even the German air force didn’t have ten thousand planes all told; and it didn’t have a single bomber that could fly as far as Scotland, let alone across the Atlantic. A billion dollars! The interventionist press was whooping it up, naturally, but if the debate in Congress could go on for more than a week, the appropriation would be licked. “We have three thousand miles
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