Word: gruffness
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Kalinin's successor is gruff, bustling, 57-year-old Vice President Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik, who will now function both as President of the Union and as an alternate member of the policymaking Politburo. The Soviet Union's longtime trade-union chief, he is primarily the workers' man, where Kalinin was the peasants' champion. The son of a Leningrad janitor, he was the only member of the All-Union Soviet of Trades Unions Secretariat to survive the purge of 1937. As Russian leaders go, he has a wide horizon: he made two wartime excursions to trade-union...
...People. Mikolajczyk became the first peasant to be elected president of the Poznan Farming Association-an event that raised the provincial gentry's eyebrows. He also became a follower of Wincenty Witos, greatest of Polish peasant leaders. Grand, gruff old Witos watched his disciple with peasant skepticism. "Mikolajczyk is no peasant," he once growled. "He has neither the peasant's character, nor his sense of humor, nor his bad habits." But the peasants dissented. They kept voting for their Poznan farmer; in 1930 they sent him to the Sejm (Parliament) in Warsaw. When Witos was forced into exile...
...about automaking that he did not know, he set up a policy committee to supply him with the answers. On the cornmittee are: Labor-Relations Expert John Bugas, onetime director of the FBI's Detroit office and now the company's No. 2 policymaker; black-haired, gruff Mead L. Bricker, the production boss who "saved" Willow Run; John R. Davis, the cheerful, shrewd boss of sales and advertising; pint-sized R. H. McCarroll, now executive engineer but chief chemical engineer for 22 of the 30 years he has been with the corporation; Secretary Herman Moekle; Treasurer...
...minutes, the prisoner protested his innocence. But five high-ranking officers, conducting Canada's first war-crimes trial (TIME, Dec. 31), needed only half an hour to reach a verdict. Up rose tight-lipped Major General Harry W. Foster to read out the sentence in a gruff, soldierly voice. In more subdued tones, an American interpreter translated it for the prisoner. As the import of the words became clear, Kurt Meyer turned beet-red: for responsibility in the killing of 18 Canadian prisoners of war, death by a firing squad...
Only the practical G.B.S. would think of raising an Eliza Doolittle out of the gutter by correcting her gutturals. Only the paradoxical G.B.S. would suggest how much more insecure she is when bediamonded than when she was bedraggled. Only the perverse G.B.S. would select a gruff, self-centered, confirmed-bachelor of a phonetics professor for a fairy prince. But even Shaw leaves the door open for a fairy-tale ending...