Word: fiefdoms
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UNDER J. Edgar Hoover's dictatorial, 47-year rule, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has in the past been widely regarded as one of the finest law-enforcement agencies in the world. Yet now the 76-year-old director's fiefdom shows evidence of crumbling, largely because of his own mistakes. The FBI's spirit is sapped, its morale low, its initiative stifled. For the first time, there are doubts within the bureau and within the Administration about the FBI's ability to serve as an effective agency against subversion. An experienced former CIA agent, until...
...bloc was swept by the wave of destalinization, Ulbricht stubbornly refused to relax even slightly his rigid, autocratic rule. His decision proved correct, from a Communist viewpoint, when Hungary and Poland exploded in revolts. In 1961, after more than 3,600,000 East Germans had fled Ulbricht's fiefdom, he built the Wall that cut off the escape route for his remaining 17 million people...
EAST GERMANY: For the past seven years, Walter Ulbricht's fiefdom has been the East bloc's star performer, running up statistics that many capitalist countries would envy. From 1966 to 1970, foreign trade increased 60%; industrial output rose 37%, making East Germany the ninth greatest industrial power; and the national income gained 29% to reach $29.5 billion. The East German regime is all the more proud of this achievement because it was accomplished without granting an ounce more political freedom to the people, defying the generally accepted thesis that economic reform inevitably reduces political control. The East...
...most of her life, Frances Knight has been a Women's Liberation movement unto herself. By 1955, she had battled her way up through the undergrowths of Washington's civil service to the directorship of the State Department's Passport Office. She rules that fiefdom with a combination of efficiency and truculent passion rare in any bureaucracy...
Ordinarily, fashion designers are at the center of arguments over new styles. In the case of the midi, however, the dominant force is a publisher, the press lord of a tiny trade-journal fiefdom that churns out eight publications that few Americans have ever heard of?except for one. He is John Burr Fairchild, 43, the head of Fairchild Publications and the boss of Women's Wear Daily, the terror tabloid of the fashion world. Fairchild is a puzzling study of opposites. Though the columns of WWD are filled with the social doings of what he calls the "Beautiful People...