Word: doe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Liberia had always seemed a comfortably quiescent sort of backwater. Founded by freed American slaves in 1822, it had been ruled until Doe by an elite of their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, who ran everything. The U.S., in turn, used Liberia as a major outpost, building some $500 million worth of facilities, Voice of America transmitters for all of Africa, plus a navigational system and communications station...
...Master Sergeant Doe led a band of soldiers into the executive mansion, shot down President William Tolbert and later executed 13 of Tolbert's associates on the beach. High school dropout Doe thereupon became President, the first from one of the indigenous tribes, the Krahns. He accused his predecessors of corruption, but his main goal was the end of Americo- Liberian rule. "The choice we faced," recalls Richard Moose, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, "was either to move into the situation, which was universally considered out of the question, and take control -- or live with...
...officials took hopeful stock of Doe, who had been trained by U.S. special forces. Compared with Tolbert, Doe seemed refreshingly simple; he abandoned the presidential limousine for a Chevette. Officials also worried a lot in those days about the subversive efforts of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. When Doe let it be known that Gaddafi had made overtures, the U.S. hastened to increase its aid, from $19 million in 1979 to $72 million in 1983. The U.S. theory was that Doe could be surrounded by technical experts who would educate him and keep him in line. "He was just a young...
...officials put a good deal of pressure on Doe to go through the motions of democracy. They financed a commission to write a constitution for a return to civilian rule in 1985. They urged Doe to let opposition parties campaign against him in elections. But when early returns showed Doe losing heavily, he seized all the ballots and announced, two weeks later, that he had won 50.5% of the vote...
Reagan Administration conservatives argued that any move against Doe might lead him to seize the American installations. And this was the heyday of Jeane Kirkpatrick's theory that traditional dictatorships of the Third World were more amenable to democratization than totalitarian regimes of the left. Washington endorsed Doe's election. "To withdraw support for Liberia's economic development," explained Chester Crocker, then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, "would sacrifice the tentative steps taken toward representative government...