Word: strongmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Change of Life. Nobody at first expected much from the latest in a long line of Thai strongmen. A man with a notorious eye for the ladies, he was known as a hard-drinking army boss who had once shocked a dinner party at a Western embassy by slapping a bottle of cognac on the table and swigging from it all evening, explaining that his host's liquor was lousy. His sideline was running the lucrative national lottery. But after ousting Strongman Pibulsonggram, Sarit went off the bottle and then to work, house-cleaning Thailand from top to bottom...
Last week Duvalier called the citizens of his impoverished Negro nation to the polls, ostensibly to choose a new Parliament. Duvalier, like all strongmen, thought Parliament talkative, unfriendly and obstructionist (he eviled five members, jailed five others). Then he dissolved both houses and decreed the election of a single, 58-seat chamber. The only candidates who managed to get on the ballots were well-known Duvalier partisans. Only one candidate came out swinging against the regime, and he withdrew for "personal reasons" on election eve. Voting-day squads of police spread a dragnet for anti-Duvalier Haitians, most of whom...
...scenes at the U.N., Adlai Stevenson moved to achieve greater rapport with responsible neutralists in the Afro-Asian bloc, by backing their resolutions on agenda issues instead of floating his own. The State Department talked of the new U.S. hope of helping to establish broad-based governments instead of strongmen in troubled areas. In a tough memorandum to West Germany, the U.S. warned all its traditional allies that they must bear a greater share in the burden of providing foreign aid to the world's have-not nations...
State Department strategists have reluctantly concluded that President Joseph Kasavubu is too ineffectual to rally his nation behind him. The earnest Colonel (now Major General) Joseph Mobutu, on whom the U.S. once pinned its hopes, has turned out to be erratic, unreliable, and one of the weakest strongmen who ever stumbled into power. Wild-eyed Patrice Lumumba, though clubbed by his foes and languishing in jail, disconcertingly continued to command wide loyalty, not only among the Congolese, but also among other African leaders as well. Since Lumumba refused to disappear politically, U.S. strategists concluded that he could no longer...
...long as our fellow citizens do not acquire the talents and virtues which distinguish our brothers to the north, a radical democratic system, far from being good for us, will bring ruin upon us." When he died in 1830, Bolivar left the country to a long line of strongmen. In 1908 Juan Vicente Gómez, "Tyrant of the Andes," began a 27-year reign. That same year, in the poverty-ridden town of Guatire, 40 miles from Caracas, a child was born to a wholesale grocer's accountant and amateur poet named Luis Betancourt.* Pleased that his second...