Word: potentate
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Border Dispute. The Bombay riots were a classic example of regional chauvinism. In recent years, at least 50 regional-minded organizations called senas (armies) have sprung up across India. The most potent of these is Bombay's Shiv Sena, formed in 1966 by a hot-tempered political cartoonist named Bal Thackeray.* A fierce anti-Communist who admits to an admiration for Adolf Hitler's nation-building abilities, Thackeray emerged as a political force in 1967, when he and his followers engineered the defeat of Krishna Menon's bid for re-election to Parliament. Since that time, Thackeray...
Greek-born Tom Pappas has made a lifetime habit of cultivating the powerful. Now a cherub-faced, grandfatherly figure of 69, he has become a power himself -though not always quite so potent as he likes to let on. He says: "Spiro followed my advice and switched from Rockefeller to Nixon." The largest U.S. firms seek his aid before doing business in Greece, where Pappas counts as the best-connected American citizen around. His close ties with Greece's strongman, George Papadopoulos, and the ruling military junta have made him an unofficial representative of Athens in Washington...
...conservationists were led by California's potent Sierra Club. Though it originally supported the idea, the club bridled at the project's Disneyland proportions (proposed 1978 capacity: 8,000 skiers, 3,300 overnight visitors). It claimed that such numbers would cause overcrowding, might result in erosion from road drainage and upset the ecological balance of the 20-sq.-mi. resort valley. It also objected to the construction of an essential access road through 8.5 miles of the Sequoia National Park...
...Dumb. Others besides campesinos have experienced this unique presidential abrazo. Tin exports account for 78% of all Bolivia's foreign exchange, and tin miners are thus a potent group that strikes frequently. During one protest against Barrientos in 1967, the President went down into the mines to confront them. An angry miner held out a dynamite stick and, to scare the President, threatened to blow the assemblage higher than Bolivia's Andean Altiplano. Barrientos grabbed the stick, held it out to be lit and called the miner's bluff. Last year Barrientos took charge in the jungle...
...criticizing American automobiles as death-traps. Later, of course, Nader wrote Unsafe At Any Speed. Anticipating issues and revealing hidden crises is hardly new to Nader. But the report on the Federal Trade Commission published this January by seven law students working with Nader may be his most politically potent project...