Word: strongman
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...little like being the fastest gun in the West," mused Jesse ("Big Daddy") Unruh, speaker of the California Assembly and 265-lb. strongman of his state's Democratic politics. "Every punk who comes around wants to try you out for size." Unruh knew what he was talking about: he was, after all, being shot at from all sides...
...pretty secure when he fled to the U.S. after his overthrow in 1958. Tubby P.J. had left a lot of grandiose new buildings (including one of the world's grandest officers' clubs) behind him in Venezuela, but he had also left a lot of scars. A military strongman who gained dictatorial control of his country in 1948, P.J. poured Venezuela's rich oil royalties into an array of public works that made Caracas the most impressively prosperous-looking national capital in Latin America. But behind the building-boom facade, he operated a corrupt police state, with lush...
...Aureole, the dancers are all in white, stark against a backdrop lighting of limpid Mediterranean blue. Taylor, a blond, blue-eyed matinee idol, looks as if he could double as a circus strongman, and the trio of girls accompanying him are Nereids in semidiaphanous slips. The dancers move like sails on a summer sea, now lazing, now racing, sometimes capsizing, then righting themselves as they catch each new breeze of improvisation. There is no story line whatever, but the mood is as artless as love...
...more efficient, having shown administrative ability in the strategic-hamlets program. But the U.S. still doubts that any of the available alternatives to Diem would be a real improvement. American policymakers also suspect that a coup would only set off a chain reaction of other coups until some strongman finally emerged, and that in the meantime there would result a power vacuum in which only the Viet Cong could operate...
...mute," strong in power, silent in politics. Unlike many Latin American armed forces, it has yet to foist a military dictatorship on the country. In a century and a half, it has overthrown a Portuguese king, two Brazilian emperors, a president, a dictator, and even a would-be military strongman. But every coup, the brass likes to boast, was a direct translation of the popular will. True to tradition, the army today is an all-too-faithful reflection of the nation-divided, discontented and quarrelsome...