"Dean Ing - Silent Thunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

credibility to the speaker. Ramsay cudgeled his memory and came up with two names
from Cornhusker rhetoric classes. George Whitefield; William Jennings Bryan. And
another which he had heard on old sound tracks: Adolf Hitler. Who was it? yes, randy
old Ben Franklin had written about Whitefield, a circuit preacher of modest intellect but
with such compelling emotional impact in his voice that most listeners turned out their
pockets on the spot? hypnotized, set afire with zeal, utterly convinced of Whitefield's
message. Other orators had specifically mentioned their envy of the Whitefield tremolo.

Bryan, a Nebraskan himself, was easy to remember because every school-kid in the state
found the man on their exams. Early in the Twentieth Century, William Jennings Bryan
had gained tremendous popular appeal with his oratory: half with the words, half with
his great, emotion-laden voice that trembled and fulminated. If the popular vote had
counted as much then as it did now, Bryan would have been President. Even then, he
damned near made it, despite an intellect that was tepid at best.

The charisma of Adolf Hitler was too well documented to doubt, and anyone who cared
to could audit old recordings of the man's fiery oratory. Ramsay's natural skepticism
asked it for him: could it really be that simple? Was it possible, before 1930, to construct
a vacuum tube device capable of taking a man with a strong message and adding
overwhelming credibility with enhanced resonance at the right frequencies or filtering of
unwanted voice tones?

Well, certainly it would not work on everyone; Parker's notes acknowledged that. The
question was whether it had worked on enough people to elect a Missouri senator? or an
American president. All you had to do was patch that device into a loudspeaker system.
And Walter Kalvin had been Rand's campaign manager.

The notes of Richard Parker, building on this possibly mythical Mainz diary, cited
suspicions by German moderates in early 1933 about the loudspeaker system of the
Reichstag, the German Parliament building where Hitler had risen to power. It became
impossible to check on those suspicions after the fire which leveled the Reichstag in
February, 1933, and a tunnel had been found from the Reichstag to the personal home
of Hermann Goering.

Mainz? again supposing the man and his diary had been legitimate, Ramsay reminded
himself? had claimed that only a few Donnersprache devices had ever existed. And that
Rudolf Hess, realizing the tremendous damage his idol Hitler had done through
Donnersprache, had stolen one of the sealed units and defected to the British in May,
1941.

One of Parker's notes cited a quote from the famed Shirer text in which Hitler,
discovering the flight of his most trusted accomplice, shouted, I've got to talk to Goering
right away! No wonder, Ramsay mused, if Goering and Hess had been the curators of
the Donnersprache machines.

But Hess, in a stolen Messerschmitt 110, had not landed as he'd intended in Scotland.
Bedeviled by weather and without a landing field for the skittish Messerschmitt, Hess had
parachuted to safety while the aircraft crashed. This much was history. According to the
Mainz account, Hess had either been unable to bail out with the Donnersprache unit, or
else it had been wrenched from his grasp when the chute opened. In either case, when