Word: verwoerds
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...week to the day after the assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the leaders of South Africa's ruling Nationalist Party met in the Parliament building in Cape Town to choose his successor. There were half a dozen candidates for the job, but it was never much of a race. The obvious front runner was beefy Balthazar Johannes Vorster, 50, Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons, and boss of the massive security organization that enforced South African apartheid...
...times change. In 1961, shortly after the Sharpeville massacre had set South Africa reeling, Verwoerd decided that authoritarianism was just what the nation needed, named Vorster as Justice Minister, and ordered him to snuff out racial violence. Setting to work with a vengeance, Vorster sent his cops swooping in to arrest African political leaders, beefed up his police force with more men and riot equipment, spent millions of dollars extending the police network of informers...
This was an attitude that any white leader of South Africa would have to come to terms with. To Verwoerd, the mixture of baasskap and benevolence came naturally. And evil as it was, it seemed to be a formula that could at least prevent an explosion of racial violence. The question was whether his successor could or would be able to govern in the same fashion...
...elsewhere, particularly in Europe, many people never doubted that Kennedy's murder was the product of a conspiracy involving either-there is a remarkably wide choice-the right wing, the left wing, the FBI, the CIA or the Dallas police force. When South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated last week in Capetown, officials hurriedly launched a series of anti-plot explanations to cut off the kind of who-killed-Kennedy rumors that have risen abroad...
Died. Hendrik Verwoerd, 64, Prime Minister of South Africa; by assassination; in Cape Town (see THE WORLD...