Word: polished
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kalb started his career as a journalist with the Washington Star, covering the anti-Viet Nam protests of the late 1960s. He finds the parallels-and the contrasts-with the Polish situation intriguing. Describing the high emotion and palpable patriotism of the strike settlement signing in Gdansk, he says: "To grasp its improbability, try to imagine Attorney General John Mitchell and Antiwar Organizer Jerry Rubin after the November 1969 march on Washington standing together and singing the Star-Spangled Banner...
...shed coat and tie to speak before a backdrop containing the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the skyline of lower Manhattan. Scarlet-clad Korean girls sang God Bless America; an Irish war-pipe band in kilts played martial music from the homeland of Reagan's ancestors; and Polish dancers stepped out gracefully in their peasant regalia. Reagan's main coup was to present Stanislaw Walesa, 64, the father of the leader of the workers' protest in Poland, to the cheering crowd. Walesa, who lives in Jersey City, is not a U.S. citizen and has no political...
...begun to savor the remarkable triumph of the workers of Gdansk and the miners of Silesia in wresting a series of unprecedented reforms from the Communist government when there was unsettling news. There had been rumors all week long, perhaps inevitably in a Communist country, that the price for Polish Leader Edward Gierek might be stiff. One version had it that his entire Politburo had been called on the red carpet to Moscow. Nonetheless, in downtown Warsaw the country's parliament assembled on schedule to discuss and ratify the government's settlement with the striking workers. Then came...
Half a mile away, a less advertised meeting of the Polish United Workers' Party's central committee had been suddenly convened. Cars of the Politburo and committee members converged on the Party House, their white sandstone-faced headquarters. There, something quite different was going on, and, in the ease of hindsight, perfectly predictable. Indeed, the script had been used before. At 1:30 a.m. Saturday came the official announcement that the ailing Gierek-whose malady might be more political than physical-had been replaced. The new boss of the Polish Communist party, the country's ruling authority...
Square, squat and dour-faced, Kania is the only top Polish official of solely peasant stock. Raised in a village in southeastern Poland, he trained as a blacksmith, but in 1945 went to work for the Communist Party. In 1968, although he had little formal education, Kania was appointed head of the Central Committee's administrative department, where he ran the party machinery according to the wishes of the Politburo and the party secretaries. To satisfy so many constituencies, as he evidently did, Kania needed considerable bureaucratic skill-and the political finesse of a big-city mayor. As security...