Word: shrewd
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Twelve-Hour Days. Like Nixon himself, Richardson is a shrewd administrative poker player, although he denies a charge that he hoards his chips. "I haven't lost out on much," he argues. For example, HEW's demands for school busing in Austin, Texas, and other desegregating cities might have been mandated by Supreme Court decisions, but it was Richardson who forestalled any agonizing delay by the Justice Department and the White House by simply informing John Mitchell that it had to be done...
...hopes for the Paris talks will now rest on William J. Porter, the highly skilled career diplomat who is expected to succeed Bruce. Porter, who has been U.S. ambassador to South Korea since 1967, is relatively unknown outside diplomatic circles. But behind a bland, pedantic appearance, he is a shrewd negotiator who is widely respected in the State Department and admired for his perceptive, sometimes earthy analyses. Nixon evidently was especially impressed by Porter's handling of recent negotiations to withdraw 20,000 U.S. troops from South Korea...
Nicholson manages a few nice touches. A scene of attempted rape late in the film conveys just the right feeling of psychotic tension. There is also a funny, if by now familiar, freak-out at the draft board and a shrewd performance by Bruce Dern as the basketball coach. Nicholson is not so fortunate with the other actors. Michael Margotta is scruffy and strident as the radical, William Tepper adenoidal in the role of the basketball player. Karen Black, playing the faculty wife, offers only a dreary variation on her basic Five Easy Pieces performance. It should be pointed...
...Israelis themselves are extremely uncertain, and accordingly uneasy about the answers to those riddles. In Washington, a U.S. official wonders whether Sa dat is not being more shrewd than moderate. Recalling Sadat's youthful reputation as a firebrand, the official mused: "You can't shed all your ideas, beliefs, and habits of thinking overnight." British Arabist Desmond Stewart, author of the recently published, The Middle East: Temple of Janus, says, "Where Nasser was a pacifist who spoke in bellicose terms, Sadat is a bellicose man who talks in pacific terms." Sadat's performance up to now as President, however...
...real rule of the country falls to a "Premier-Delegate." He is Sisowath Sirik Matak, 57, the shrewd and ambitious administrator who had been virtually running Cambodia anyway as Vice Premier and Lon Nol's closest confidant. Sirik Matak is not only a cousin, but also an old foe of Sihanouk, and he is widely assumed to have been the chief architect of the plot that ousted the prince 15 months...