Word: smiths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Smith, March...
...Douglas Smith, 57, does not easily change his mind. The eleven-year history of renegade white rule in Rhodesia stands as testament to his stubbornness. It was the jut-jawed Smith who, in 1965, led the self-governing British colony into making a unilateral declaration of independence in order to block London's intention of bringing about black majority rule. In the years that followed, Smith led white Rhodesia's dukes-up resistance to international pressure for change. But it was Smith, too, who finally agreed to accept reality. His epochal meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Henry...
...Gauging Smith's exact feelings has always been a difficult task. Passionately private, he has been described as an "extraordinary ordinary man." On several occasions during his long tug of war with London over its demands for representative democracy in Rhodesia he left British officials with the impression that he would give in, only to refuse later on. Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once called him the "most slippery political customer I've ever negotiated with." Says another of Smith's acquaintances: "Stubbornness has been that man's strong suit ever since...
...Smith's self-description is somewhat different. "I am a strong right-wing man," he once declared, "but that does not mean either that I am an extremist, or that I am explosive. Very often the extremists are the weak men, and they are the first to get up and run. I have certain values I believe in, quietly and firmly, without shouting or waving my arms about...
...Smith's values are those of most of the whites in a land whose colonization was relatively recent. A second-generation Rhodesian and his nation's first native-born Prime Minister, he is the son of a Scottish butcher and cattle rancher who arrived in Rhodesia in 1898. Smith was raised southwest of Salisbury in the small farming and mining town of Selukwe (pop. 7,900 blacks, 517 whites). His father, he has said, "was one of the fairest men I have ever met, and that is the way he brought me up. He always told me that...