Word: klerk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...combination of African nobility and British aristocracy. He has the punctilious manners of a Victorian gentleman. (His aides sometimes chastise him for rising from his chair to greet everyone who approaches him.) His patrician nature is on display most prominently in his dealings with President F.W. de Klerk, whom he has often treated as a kind of bumbling equerry. At the end of the first day of negotiations for a new constitution in 1991, Mandela gave De Klerk a withering dressing down: "Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited minority regime, as his is, has certain moral standards to uphold...
...colleague to discuss an issue. However, he is not a man who is mired in details. Although Mandela did not even see a television until the 1970s, he understands the importance of mass-media images, and will make gestures of large symbolic content, as when he grasped De Klerk's hand at the end of their recent debate and said he would be proud to work with his opponent -- a man he has publicly labeled untrustworthy. He is gracious, amiable, gentlemanly, ever the host, always the subtle master of the situation...
...fortunes of apartheid-forever whites have been declining steadily since the all-white referendum on reform in 1992, when moderates gave President F.W. de Klerk's National Party a landslide victory over the diehards led by the Conservative Party. Since then the number of active right-wing organizations has declined from...
...Defense Force, and will begin to absorb former enemies from guerrilla armies like the A.N.C.'s Spear of the Nation. Things were changing so fast, a South African Broadcasting Corp. interviewer lost track of who was President, Nelson Mandela, who will be sworn in next week, or F.W. de Klerk, the incumbent. He turned from talking with De Klerk to sign off, saying, "Well, there's State . . . former State Pres . . . well, State President de Klerk, Mr. de Klerk . . . not former...
...pittance, ignored their housing and barely pretended to educate them. Blacks were not second-class citizens but third or fourth class. Suddenly last week, by agreement, the whites stepped back and passed the government to that eager but ill-prepared majority. "I feel a sense of achievement," said De Klerk, the Afrikaner who made himself into the country's last white President. "My plan has been put into operation...