Word: leader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...House of Nehru rates one of the heftier chapters. Since India gained independence in 1947, its political destiny has been inextricably linked with this powerful family, whose scions have ruled the country with only two brief interruptions. There was Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister and an early leader of the durable Congress Party, his daughter Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv. Such was the family's sway that when Indira was assassinated in 1984, the 40-year-old Rajiv, a reluctant and unproven politician, was rocketed into high office on the strength of one credential: his name...
...arrested at the Mayday antiwar demonstrations in Washington in 1971, and spent three days locked up in the basement of the Department of Justice. Afterward he sought spiritual growth in a Sikh ashram in Massachusetts, where he remained for five years before revolting against the power-hungry leader...
...critics, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has been the perpetually shrinking statesman. Despite his formidable physical size, the Bonn leader has been derided for a political ineptitude that has time and again diminished his stature in West Germany and among Europe's leaders. Lacking the mettle of Margaret Thatcher, the imperial hauteur of Francois Mitterrand, and the wiles of his rival and coalition partner, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Kohl has made his mark as the Continent's veteran political survivor...
Given the demands of all those with an interest in reunification, charting a course on the issue requires any West German leader to navigate not with a telescope but with a kaleidoscope. One of Kohl's primary targets was West German voters, and he no doubt hoped to revive his dismal political fortunes. He faces a general election in December 1990, and at the moment his Christian Democratic Party's chances are rated as questionable. Since the tumultuous events leading up to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall began last August, Kohl has been attacked relentlessly for a flat-footed...
...East Germany, another audience whose interests Kohl undoubtedly weighed, was more mixed. The parliament in East Berlin fulfilled one of Kohl's prerequisites -- for its own purposes, to be sure, not in order to please Kohl -- by eliminating the Communist Party's monopoly of power. But East German leader Egon Krenz told TIME that "so long as both states remain in their political and military alliances, a confederation of the two states is simply not possible." Several of the country's new opposition parties also weighed in against the Kohl scheme because of their desire to maintain some kind...