Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...resignation demands, sent under the name of Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, were blunt: "The President has requested that you forward to him an indication of your personal plans or preferences regarding your possible service in the Nixon Administration. This should be accompanied by your pro forma letter of resignation to become effective at the pleasure of the President." The purpose, declared White House Special Counsel Harry Dent, is "to cut back and sharpen up. There's going to be a lot of change. The President is the quarterback...
CHURCHILL HIMSELF was not much to look at or listen to in his early days. When the poet, Wilfred Scawen Blunt met Churchill at age 27, he described him as "a little square-headed fellow of no very striking appearance." He had a severe lisp until his thirties, and, like Demosthenes, his skill in oratory was partly a consequence of his will to overcome it. Indeed, the two most distinctive and forceful presences in British public life in this century, those of Churchill and Bernard Shaw, were both artifices wrought by sheer will power. The expression of bulldog defiance which...
...Blunt Basis. The document was designed to promote discussion between the province's political leaders and the paper's sponsor, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw, on a new Ulster constitution. But the Green Paper makes clear that Britain will not be swayed from some specific intentions. Among them 1) Northern Ireland will remain part of Britain as long as a majority of its citizens want it to, but it will do so only on Britain's terms (which include continuing Westminster control of internal security); 2) the Catholic minority must have more...
Discussing his Green Paper at a press conference in London, Whitelaw contended that Ulstermen "must face facts as they are and not as they may either think they ought to be, or hope they would be." On that blunt basis, the political parties of Northern Ireland will be given until next March to evolve a formula for a new constitution. Before then, Ulster will be asked to vote on whether it wishes to remain within the United Kingdom or join with the Republic of Ireland. As a prelude to that plebiscite, the Dublin government plans a referendum on whether...
That kind of zest allows Mother Earth to orbit well above its material; the audience is able to forget that the writing was done with an instrument rather more blunt than that skywriter's chisel. ∎Laurence I.Barrett