Word: despotically
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...Baby-Kisser. Periodically, Benevolent Despot Salazar permits Portugal to vote for a rubber-stamp National Assembly or a tame President. The elections are always won by Salazar's National Union Party, and the rules are peculiar: 1) the opposition may campaign for only 30 days, 2) traditionally, the opposition presidential candidates withdraw before election day, 3) anyone who is in opposition must submit to being labeled Communist. 4) Portuguese law firmly prohibits demonstrations of any kind in the streets...
...Crush the Despot!" Fortnight ago the pro-Nasser editor of the newspaper Telegraph (a man believed also to be a disciplined Communist) was assassinated outside his Beirut home. Who killed him? Nobody knew. Some suspected that he might have been murdered by the Communists themselves to create a martyr. The pro-Nasser National Front immediately called a general strike against the regime. "Crush the despot and save Lebanon!" cried chunky ex-Premier Saeb Salam...
...Fast. In any year, Khrushchev was as extraordinary a dictator as the world has ever seen. Not since Alexander the Great had mankind seen a despot so willingly, so frequently, and so publicly drunk. Not since Adolf Hitler had the world known a braggart so arrogantly able to make good his own boasts. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev did more than oversee the launching of man's first moons. He made himself undisputed and single master of Russia. Few men had traveled so far so fast...
...Columbia Pictures resounded with the whoosh of an outsized riding crop swung in anger. Scepter in hand, striding before two rows of Oscars at stiff attention behind his vast desk, Columbia's stubby and balding Boss Harry Cohn fumed with the king-sized wrath of the last Hollywood despot who still runs the studio he built. The year was 1953, the object of his wrath Rita Hayworth, Columbia's reigning love goddess; Rita had flounced out and left the studio with a costly stack of properties bought just for her. Before Cohn's desk, underlings watched...
...week's best drama was a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy. Jean Anouilh's version of Sophocles' Antigone was given a striking, modern-day adaptation by Worthington Miner on NBC's experiment-happy Kaiser Aluminum Hour. As Creon, Claude Rains was a fine old despot, and once even squeezed out a real tear. But Rains was all but overborne by the wooden acting of Hollywood Starlet Marisa Pavan. In the title role of the girl trying to bury her brother, Italian-born Marisa was lovely to look at, but she spoke as if she were...