Word: blunderer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marcos Péerez Jiménez made his biggest blunder by getting himself "reelected" President in a me-or-nobody plebiscite last Dec. 15. This cynical insult to the nation's honor drove air-force men to try a New Year's uprising. That revolt was crushed, but it touched off a rapid sequence of plots, civilian riots and student demonstrations that reached their inevitable climax last week...
...Blundering Theorist. For five years Minister of Interior Vallenilla Lanz, 45, had been Perez Jimenez' chief flatterer, political soothsayer and official philosopher. Suave, well educated (at Paris' Sorbonne) and bookish, Minister Vallenilla mixed ideas from Mussolini, Thorstein Veblen and the U.S. fad of technocracy into a theory justifying dictatorship as the happiest state for Venezuelans. In working out what he called a "New National Ideal," Francophile, anticlerical Vallenilla Lanz led the dictator into many a blunder. One was December's unpalatable yes-or-no plebiscite for a second five-year term. Another was a conflict with...
...Ritual & Blunder. Moving to order the political disorder left in the Middle East by the withdrawal of France and Britain, the U.S. briefly seized the initiative by proclaiming the Eisenhower Doctrine of aid to any Middle Eastern land asking for help against Communist attack. The President's pledge and the Sixth Fleet's presence gave Jordan's spunky young King Hussein heart to eject ministers talking of Soviet alliance and to line his country up in the ranks of the West. But when the Soviets countered with a coup that put proCommunists on top of Syria's army...
...have any detectable effect, though some said they might give it to a baby with colic if the family had no other sedative in the house. The Rev. Dr. Albert P. Shirkey of Washington's Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church was outraged. "I feel it was a terrible blunder to prescribe 'toddies for toddlers,' " he intoned from the pulpit. "To give [alcohol] to children is to have them grow up with a taste for it-maybe a craving for it. Who knows but from so innocent a beginning another alcoholic joins the ranks...
...Kuwatly and the military leaders who put him in power have no interest in letting Syria become a base for either Russian or American operations. The anti-colonialism in the Middle East expressed itself not in Communism, but in an assertion of Arab unity. It would be a major blunder if the United States appeared to be the enemy of this unity and allowed Russia to become its protector...