Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...blunt with Reagan even in private. He did not tell the President he had been wrong to impose the sanctions or, as the high-strung Alexander Haig might have done, threaten to quit if the policy was not reversed. Instead, he acted more like a reassuring but lucid tutor with Reagan. He knew that the President would not abandon his wish to punish the Soviets. Shultz's basic stance was that restrictions on the export of advanced Western technology to Moscow, if the ban had the support of all NATO allies, would far more effectively prick the Soviet economy...
Only one vitally important officeholder remained exempt from the democratic process: Brazil's fifth consecutive military-appointed President, João Baptista Figueiredo, 64, who will not step down until 1985. Before the voting, Figueiredo, a folksy, blunt-spoken former cavalry general, hailed the elections as a vindication of his three-year policy of abertura (opening), the promise of a slow and gradual return of democratic freedom to Brazil. Said he: "We're going to stuff the opposition with democracy until they get indigestion...
...unusually blunt address two weeks ago, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Deane Hinton angered conservative Salvadoran businessmen by warning them that U.S. military and economic aid could be cut off if the country did not improve its record on human rights. Last week the Administration issued conflicting signals on whether the speech actually represented U.S. policy. "The President himself had questions about it," a senior White House aide said privately. "We drew him [Hinton] up pretty short...
...BALLOT CAN BE an amazingly blunt tool for conveying political preferences. Ronald Reagan took his party's 1980 landslide as a national endorsement of a very specific right-wing agenda, and over the next two years he and his congressional colleagues proceeded to enact a shocking amount of the 1980 Republican platform. The beating taken by conservative candidates in last week's midterm elections suggests Reagan's interpretation was too hasty and too sweeping. America two years ago now appears to have been demanding an end to four years of Democratic ineptitude, not signifying broad support for supply-side economics...
Many student editors feel equally combative. Visually, their papers are often cluttered and oldfashioned, but they argue their cases with blunt headlines and florid, Buckleyesque prose. Most are far more interested in opinion than in news. Says Roger Brooks, editor in chief of Princeton's year-old Madison Report (circ. 2,500): "I believe in saying what I think." Paul Davies, president of the Stanford Review (circ. 1,000), agrees: "We are here to balance student debate." Because many papers begin as personal vehicles, some are short-lived. Those that survive may evolve: the University of Wisconsin...