Word: blunt
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...most Western European nations these days, no party commands an absolute majority, and most must rule by coalition. The net effect of coalitions is usually to dull debates, to narrow ambitions and to blunt the cutting edge of bold politics. Rivalries that would otherwise be threshed out in the open, are fought out instead inside Cabinet meetings. Cabinets fall unexpectedly and new ones must be formed. Examples of these processes at work last week...
...Soviet economic offensives, the "revolution of rising expectations" in underdeveloped countries, resentment against budget deficits at home-an old-fashioned struggle for bureaucratic empire was shaping up in Washington to complicate matters. Apparently with the unspoken O.K. of newly appointed Commerce Secretary Lewis Strauss, the Commerce Department's blunt, contentious Assistant Secretary for International Affairs Henry Kearns, 47, onetime California Chevrolet dealer, is trying to invade the State Department's foreign economic policy domain, ruled over by rich, polished Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs C. Douglas Dillon...
...This blunt proposal to wipe out freedom's most exposed outpost in Europe set off a flurry of excited headlines. Western diplomats had been expecting some kind of trouble over Berlin. Four days before, at a press conference, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had taken pains to be explicit: "We are most solemnly committed to hold West Berlin-if need be, by military force." London, Paris and Bonn were just as forthright. In West Berlin, citizens inured to crises went their rounds unflustered...
Hays tried to blunt the attack with another Southern Governor's endorsement, got Mississippi's James Plemon Coleman, an old friend, to come to his rescue. "The South needs you in her great struggle," announced Coleman bravely. Nevertheless, Hays lost by 1,200 votes out of 60,000. Last week Brooks Hays revealed how precarious has become the Southern moderate position. Said he of Coleman, already under attack at home: "I hope the people of Mississippi won't hold him responsible for my views...
Monty is short with politicians, blunt with those who differed with him. But he shows a sense of humor even about war's more annoying cufuffles, i.e., flaps. And his reflections are diverting, whether he praises female nurses over male, defines the qualities of a good commander (including "an inner conviction which at times will transcend reason"), or sets down what a nation needs to survive the cufuffles of history ("a religion and an educated elite...