Word: dourness
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...late, however, Washington has come to life with a special Nixonian flavor. Spiro Agnew has become a walking oratorical event, exhaling sulphurous prose on behalf of the Great Silent Majority. Attorney General John Mitchell's dour podsnappery as Southern strategist and antidissenter cheers the forces of law and order and dismays liberals. Mitchell himself has remained as invisible as before. But his wife Martha has emerged as one of the dominant figures on the Washington scene, and her tart tongue has enlivened a lot of cocktail parties (see box, page...
Looking even more dour than usual, Couve showed up at a rally of young Gaullists three days after his defeat and attributed the loss to pointless naysaying. "Since I represented something constructive, the answer had to be non, as always, non, the eternal non" he said bitterly. As one of only two former aides who have seen De Gaulle since his retirement (ex-Defense Minister Pierre Messmer is the other), Couve also had a few things to say publicly about the general's plans. De Gaulle realized, reported Couve, that any political meddling on his part "would make...
...Morris. Margaret Tyzack, as Jolyon's cousin Winifred, marries a ne'er dowell. And then there's Soames, Winifred's brother, who looks like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and a character from Dark Shadows. Soames, done to a turn by Eric Porter, is a dour sort, with never a thought of sex in his legal mind. Ah, but tune in the next week, when Soames meets Irene, portrayed by Nyree Dawn Porter...
...river of rented limousines flowed up to United Nations headquarters in Manhattan last week and disgorged delegates for the opening session of the General Assembly, a dour-faced old man stood across the street holding aloft a hand-lettered sign: THE U.N. is A FARCE. Nobody seemed to take notice except a group of high-school students waiting for a bus nearby. One of them tore out a page of notebook paper, scribbled a few words on it and hoisted his rejoinder: DON'T KNOCK...
...heavyweight!" The President was not, of course, speaking of sport but of politics, and his eye was not on the scales. Two years later, John Mitchell, the Attorney General, is still the heavyweight in Nixon's hierarchy, although to many outsiders he seems more like the heavy. Dour, taciturn, formidably efficient, Mitchell comes across to liberals and civil libertarians as a hard-lining prosecutor with all the human graces of the Sheriff of Nottingham...