Word: abzug
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...raucously passionate crusader for minority rights, Women's Lib and the antiwar movement, a truculent and courageous woman. To the less friendly, she comes on as a sumo liberal, a lady wrestler, Joan of Arc resurrected as an elemental yenta. No one, friend or enemy, denies that Bella Abzug has a certain presence...
...days. Invoking that device, she pushed through the proposal that the President be directed to furnish the Pentagon papers to Congress. She succeeded in getting a sex-discrimination amendment added to the Public Works Acceleration Act. It was vetoed by President Nixon, but is now being redrafted with the Abzug amendment intact. In the recent effort to censure CBS President Frank Stanton, Freshman Abzug wedged in among senior members to speak out for freedom of the press. She argues that the U.S. ought to get out of Viet Nam at once and get to work on urgent social needs, including...
...Bella Abzug might dismiss that last part as sexist condescension, but then again she might not. For all her rhinoceros qualities, she is deeply feminine (pace, Women's Lib) and, as former Campaign Manager Doug Ireland says, "vulnerable as a lady." She recently withstood withering political satire at a correspondents' dinner but burst into tears when someone mocked her robust figure. Arthur Goldberg is said to have won her over once by remarking that her pictures did not do her justice...
Interoffice Tyrant. Not the least contradiction of Bella Abzug is the way in which the female populist, labor lawyer and champion of the oppressed mercilessly oppresses her own staff. Some other politicians, most famously Lyndon Johnson, have been known to bully their workers, but Bella, with that perfect name, the Latin for wars and beauty, is an interoffice tyrant undreamt of since Caligula...
Loud Genius. Abzug comes by all of her contradictions honestly. The daughter of a Russian immigrant named Emmanuel Savitsky, she rang the cash register in his Live and Let Live meat market on Manhattan's Ninth Avenue as a girl, attended Hunter College and Columbia law school, where she was an editor of the Law Review. Before it was fashionable, she was a strong civil rights advocate who once defended a black man in Mississippi accused of raping a white woman. She was seven months' pregnant then and slept in a Jackson bus station one night sitting upright...