He was the Yankees' catcher in their glory days and come to think of it I can't think of another athletic hero whose habitual stance is squatting on his heels with two gloved hands pushed up in front of his chest. Somehow an heroic wicket keeper doesn't seem right either. His name is Yogi Berra and though he's long retired and is 75 he's not forgotten. Because every now and then there's a new Yogi-ism.
Nobody goes there any more.
And that's what I groaned to myself a day or two after the American spy plane crash landed on that Chinese island. There was never any need for one because the United Nations laid it down in its charter that to take any military action against an aggressor all five of the big nations in the Security Council must agree. And from the start the chances of the United States, the United Kingdom, China and France agreeing with the Soviet Union on anything like defining an aggressor or acting against one were remote. So, through the decades of the Cold War, from the day that the Soviet Union had the bomb, and the world had only two superpowers, the constant problem of American foreign policy has been how to contain the power of the Soviet Union and its ambitions - first to get to the Persian Gulf and dominate the oil fields on which Europe and the United States depended, to help the Germans prevent their domination by the Soviet Union and all the time to match or surpass the Soviets' nuclear power. Or Kennedy's highly idealistic, rhetorical challenges to Soviet power at a time when he knew that America had the nuclear edge.