Word: chieftain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...legislative staffers lost their jobs, Speaker Willie Brown ascended the rostrum of the ornate, walnut-and-velvet California state assembly chamber and, with a trembling of his smartly tailored shoulders, broke down and wept. Veteran assemblymen who have known him for 25 years as a tough-minded political chieftain were amazed. "It's a tragedy that we have to let these people go," Brown sobbed. "This place will not be the same...
...final choice to become Republican national chairman and replace the ailing Lee Atwater. Ever since former drug czar William Bennett turned down the post last month, claiming it might conflict with his lucrative speechmaking and book-writing plans, the Administration has been floundering in search of an acceptable party chieftain...
...policeman who seized power in a military coup in 1969, sealed his own fate by depending more and more on his kinsmen and overreacting to any challenge to his autocratic rule. Former U.S. diplomat Chester Crocker, a professor at Georgetown University, calls Siad Barre an "old-style, feudal, tribal chieftain." The country is ethnically homogeneous -- 98.8% are Somalis -- so there are no significant tribal hatreds. But its 8 million people are split into rival clans that have been battling one another for centuries...
Christmas seemed to come early in Colombia last week as one of the country's most wanted drug lords turned himself in at a church 14 miles south of Medellin. Fabio ("Fabito") Ochoa Vasquez, 33, was the first chieftain of the so-called Medellin cartel to surrender under the terms of a decree announced by President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo last week. Ochoa is wanted in the U.S. for masterminding the 1986 slaying of federal witness Adler (Barry) Seal in Baton Rouge, La. He is also linked to drug-trafficking activities with former Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega...
...Bennett yearns for more ideological battles and more challenging adversaries. He is joining the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and he plans to write a couple of books on education and on his stint as drug czar. There was speculation in Washington that the next antidrug chieftain would be one of the high-profile Republicans who were defeated on Nov. 6. There was also talk at the White House of a successor with a military background. Whoever gets the job will have plenty to do. Americans still spend billions on cocaine and other illegal substances...