Word: sphinx
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...Sphinx with a Monocle. The saga of the German army in politics from 1918 to 1945 is the story Oxford Historian John W. Wheeler-Bennett tells in The Nemesis of Power. When it was published in London last month, British critics bravoed. Proclaimed the Observer: "The most important book on Germany published since the war." Said the Sunday Times: "In all the literature about the Weimar Republic and the Nazis, there has been nothing like it." Grand in scope, minute in documentation (829 pages), Nemesis of Power may not get the U.S. readers it deserves, but it will hold those...
Among the first to strut by is the brilliant, bemonocled chief who led the army through the early post-World War I years. Steel blue of eye, trap-tight of lip, Hans von Seeckt was called "the Sphinx." The Sphinx's two rules for the Reichswehr as a political power: it must be 1) "above party," and 2) "a state within a state." In the early '20s, Seeckt kept the telephone pact with the Socialists, at the same time busied himself with building up the cadres of a new German army and a new armament industry-both...
...great Sphinx lay in fleeting twilight. In the background loomed the Pyramid of Cheops, majestic monument to human striving for eternity. Over the entire scene hovered the breath of the silent desert, the hush of ages. Then a voice spoke...
Died. Otto Lebrecht Meissner, 73 ("Sphinx of the Wilhelmstrasse"), enigmatic Man Friday to three successive heads of the German state after World War I; in Munich. Meissner got an Iron Cross in World War I, in 1923 became Socialist President Ebert's trusted State Secretary, was kept as confidant by Hindenburg, and a behind-the-scenes negotiator between Hindenburg and the up & coming Nazis. He turned up after Hitler's 1933 rise to power as a gaudily uniformed Minister of State for the new Führer. Tried and acquitted as a war criminal after World...
...Sphinx & Thumper. Eisenhower has his own operational code for bridge: "Play every hand," he says, "as part of a lifetime bridge career. The result is more slams, less sets, and a fine average record." He will take reasonable chances based on a knowledge of mathematical odds; when alternative lines of play are before him, he chooses the one with the more favorable odds (for an example, see box on a recent Eisenhower slam bid). His defensive play can be rough and bold. Recently he went all the way to six hearts to prevent his opponents from taking...