Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Khrushchev's threats took shrewd ad vantage of a moment which found the U.S.'s Middle East position in temporary disarray. In its attempts to rouse the area to the threat presented by a Communist-dominated Syria, the U.S. had displayed its power too nakedly, set Arab leaders off in a whipped-up frenzy of public denunciation of U.S. interference and pledges of confidence in Syria. As a result the bloc of "reasonable Arabs" - Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia - which the U.S. hoped to solidify had fallen into suspicious disorder. Jordan's King Hussein, plagued...
This is exactly what shrewd wheat farmers from Kansas to California did. Everyone joined the soil bank-and everyone piled on the sorghum. For the first time, the sorghum crop in Kansas was bigger than wheat-by 20 million bu. Result: with sorghum selling at $1.57 per cwt. on the free market and Government price supports at $1.83 per cwt., the U.S. will have to buy around 40% of the record crop at a cost of some $183 million in price supports. Then it will have to store the sorghum (if it can find space in wheat-filled granaries...
...Adversaries. Tito grows through the book from an awkward villager to a smooth party functionary to a puffed-up dictator wearing the most splendid uniforms since Göring. He alternately appears a shrewd peasant, a cold-eyed killer, a sentimental family man. There is rough humor as well as ruthlessness in him, courage but little real rashness, some pity but no compassion. His friends and enemies were men of great complexity. There was Milovan Djilas, the Montenegrin partisan who seemed determined to infuse some humanity into the Communist machine and today, from jail, is one of its more eloquent...
...pathetic little heroine of A Night of Levitation is a teen-ager who has fallen in love with a boarding-school teacher. Having been sent to an island resort to get over her infatuation, she promptly falls for a crude, shrewd young local fisherman. After a stolen hour of duel-like talk and romance by the sea, he simply lifts the money in her purse and disappears, leaving a note that reads...
Changing Masters. In the struggle for position after Stalin's death, Mikoyan showed supreme agility. He joined in the gang-up on Beria. As the original consumer-goods man he ought to have found Malenkov's breathing-spell policy congenial. But his shrewd nose for tactics told him not to commit himself to Malenkov. Although First Party Secretary Khrushchev might have seemed to Mikoyan a clodhopping countryman, Khrushchev had one prime quality that Mikoyan valued-political skill. Khrushchev could handle himself well in party scraps, and alone among Soviet leaders he could talk to the people. Outwardly...