Word: olympio
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...Sylvanus Olympio, 60, President of Togo, the nightmare began shortly after midnight. Disturbed by strange sounds in his comfortable house in the capital city of Lomé, Olympio grabbed a pistol and went to the head of the stairs. There, to his consternation, was a crowd of mutinous soldiers crowding the floor below. Barefoot, clad in shorts and sport shirt, Olympio leaped through a window onto the soft, sandy earth of his garden...
...made it to the U.S. embassy compound next door. In the graveled courtyard, Olympio found a parked Plymouth sedan belonging to the embassy, and crawled in. There, in the early morning sunlight, he was spotted huddled beneath the steering wheel by one of the mutineers. Crying "All right, you have me!", Olympio surrendered and, prodded by rifle butts, was hustled down the driveway, past a mango tree and through the green gate. There he balked. Sergeant Etienne Eyadema, commander of the rebel detachment, later declared: "He could not stay there. There would have been demonstrations. He would not move...
...that morning, U.S. Ambassador Leon Poullada drove up to the embassy building, found President Olympio lying in a pool of blood just outside the compound. There were red finger smears on the gate, as if he had struggled to rise. As embassy aides carried the corpse into the courtyard, fat lizards scuttled away across the gravel and lounging Togolese soldiers watched silently from a nearby street corner...
...what we are looking for is not so much getting rid of a foreign ruler as to improve our standard of living, working for a better life. We must now actually prove to our people that we can have a better life from now on." After talking to Olympio, President Kennedy's thoughts followed in similar vein. Flying west to address a crowd of some 90,000 in the football stadium of the University of California in Berkeley, the President mused on the hopes and problems of the world's newer nations. "As new nations emerge from...
...Suite at the Waldorf Tower, his guests included Cabinet ministers from such countries as Nepal, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Ethiopia. When tiny Togo gave a cocktail party at the Plaza Hotel, who should pop in but pudgy Nikita Khrushchev, all smiles. Both dazed and gratified, Togo's Premier Sylvanus Olympio offered the understatement of the week by observing that Khrushchev is a "very calm man" to whom "you can say anything at all and he will not be angry...