Word: cannoneering
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...about 30 minutes the planes were unmolested as they attacked the palace with four bombs, eight rockets and cannon fire. Meanwhile, loyal ground troops, anticipating a full-scale revolution, hastily ringed the palace grounds with tanks. Minesweepers patrolled the Saigon River. Then two loyal pilots from the Bienhoa air base, twelve miles north of Saigon, gave chase, but on the ground in Saigon no one knew if the new arrivals were friends or foes. Antiaircraft fire from tanks, minesweepers, and even policemen's pistols was indiscriminate. Despite the confusion, most of the people went about their business with conventional...
...papers, impose curfews, arrest people suspected of helping the Reds. And when the army opens a local offensive against the guerrillas, who infiltrate everywhere, its fire is bound to be indiscriminate. "I think the Viet Cong have done many wrong things," said one delta peasant, "but we dread the cannon shells of the army because they fall anywhere...
...expert poker player, a talent that endeared him to Jack Garner, who was later called "a poker playing, whisky-drinking, evil old man" by John L. Lewis, and whose own political career had been given a hefty bipartisan push forward by a poker-playing Republican, "Uncle Joe" Cannon. McCormack became a Garner protégé. At the beginning of McCormack's second full term, the Democrats took control of the House, and McCormack went to Speaker Garner with a timid request for an assignment to the Judiciary Committee. "Hell," growled Garner, "we want you on Ways & Means." McCormack...
Joseph Guerney ("Uncle Joe") Cannon was a bearded, tyrannical Illinoisan who firmly believed that the majority should rule-and that the Republican Party should be the perpetual majority. He welcomed and roundly misused the Reed Rules, became the House's greatest despot-but managed to maintain a host of loyal friends in both parties. He once blandly ordered a third roll call on a motion because "the Chair is hoping a few more Republicans will come in." Eventually, the House revolted against Cannon, stripped him of many of his princely powers, and hobbled the speakership...
Champ Clark, a Missouri lawyer, was the Democratic floor leader in the insurrection against Uncle Joe Cannon. When he became Speaker, he was hamstrung by his own handiwork, and his fellow Democrats were reluctant to restore the powers that Clark had helped take from Cannon. He went a long way, however, toward restoring the speakership to its former prestige, and was noted for his rapid rulings. He never liked to explain his decisions, he said, because, like a country judge he had known back in Missouri, he might make the right ruling but give the wrong explanation...