Word: mu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Lusty Statesman. Luis Muñoz Marin (TIME Cover, May 2, 1949), who provides the sense of leadership, is a man with a bear's body and the somber visage of a St. Bernard. On the crystal chandelier over his desk nests a pair of birds that fly in and out of the always open door. "He is kind to animals," says his wife Inez, "and even kinder to humans." His salary is $10,000 a year. His wealth, as itemized before the 1956 election, consisted of $562 and a house with 16 years...
...Spartan scorn for the good life. Last week he returned from a vacation cruise aboard the yacht of a wealthy friend. Was he by any chance accepting a questionable favor? "Only demagogues," snaps Muñoz, "cannot afford to be seen anywhere except drinking bad gin with a man who has no shoes on." He has a mighty temper and lusty tastes. There is only one liquor he is cool toward -much to the distress of the promoters of Puerto Rico's excellent rums. After chain-smoking most of his life, he gave it up nine years...
Vice President Nixon says Muñoz is "a man all of us can be immensely proud of." Even Angel Ramos, publisher of San Juan's anti-Muñoz daily El Mundo, says: "I don't think the hemisphere has a greater statesman." In 1956 the Freedom House Award (earlier winners: Eisenhower and Churchill) went to Mu...
...Muñoz said: "There comes a moment when a reasonable, intelligent man who wants to serve people says to himself. 'I want to see what's true about this fixed idea of mine.' " Muñoz' own honest reappraisal forced him early in the '30s to begin hedging on the desirability of breaking away from the U.S. "I want my people to want independence," he explained to a friend in those days. "Once they do that, they will set powerful forces in motion and may bring things to the point where independence is unnecessary...
...when he formed his Popular Democratic Party and ran for the island Senate, Muñoz had decided that "status is not the issue." To the jíbaros, the country men, he promised labor laws and land reform instead of independence. He urged voters to "lend me your vote" rather than sell it to the opposition. His followers called him El Vate (The Bard) and elected him to office. In those days, needlewomen who worked at home in the island's second biggest industry after sugar were getting just 3? for hemming a dozen handkerchiefs...