Word: coups
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Industrious and endowed with a spider's timing for the coup de grâce, Aranha was the "strong man" of the 1930 revolution which put dumpy little Getulio Dornellas Vargas into power. As No. 1 man, Vargas has been an old-fashioned South American dictator with newfangled ideas patterned on the academic peasant-paced authoritarianism of Portugal...
...thinks democracy concerns personal rights and liberties, not necessarily a parliamentary form of government. He has parried claims that Brazil brought Fascism to the Americas by referring to Britain's class system and to slavery under the U.S. Constitution. But he was disappointed and angry when a Vargas coup in 1937 shackled elective government. For three months Aranha and Vargas were on the outs. Then Brazilians circulated the story that Aranha, a crack pistol shot, had hinted that settlement of the break "depends on one man, on one revolver, on one bullet." When Aranha was named Foreign Minister three...
Immediate victims of this double coup de grâce were 1) some 450,000 auto workers, laid off; 2) 44,000 auto dealers (many of them civic leaders in their communities) and their 400,000 employes. In the dealers' holiday-decorated show rooms last week was the stillness of death. On Manhattan's famed automobile row new-car salesmen were thrown out like last year's license plates; in the huge show places of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, glistening cars mocked the vacant desks, the muffled telephones. Detroit's 300 dealers fired most...
...foes of Naziism, plunged the rest of the world into mutual slaughter so that Russia might be the sole survivor of the cataclysm. The day last June when Hitler turned on him, it became clear that all Stalin had bought was a mess of pottage. His great coup of World War II proved in 1941 a grim joke at the expense of Joseph Stalin...
...moored aircraft tender, blazing under repeated attacks, downed a Japanese plane on her own decks. Simultaneously her captain spotted a midget submarine's shadow within yards of his vessel. Hits were immediately scored and, as the sub's conning tower emerged, a destroyer administered the coup de gráce with depth charges. The tender then shot down a second plane. Motor launches from a vessel laid up for overhaul braved a steady hail of bullets and shrapnel, rescued scores of victims from the oil-fired harbor. Almost without exception officers and men exhibited quick thinking, coolness, coordination...