World Leaders Encyclopedia

Ba Maw

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born Feb. 8, 1893, Maubin, Burma [Myanmar]

died May 29, 1977, Yangôn

politician who in 1937 became the first Burmese premier under British rule; he later was head of state in the pro-Japanese government during World War II (August 1943–May 1945).

Ba Maw was educated at Rangoon College, Calcutta University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Bordeaux, Fr., where he received a doctorate in 1924. Admitted to the English bar the same year, he first came into prominence as defense lawyer for the Burmese rebel leader Saya San in 1931.

During the early 1930s Ba Maw became a prominent opponent of Britain's plan to remove Burma (Myanmar) from the jurisdiction of the Indian viceroy, since he believed that a separate Burma would receive a much smaller measure of self-rule than India as a result. In 1934, however, he reversed his position, agreeing to support the pro-separationists in a coalition government. That year he was made minister of education for Burma. When the new constitution, providing for separation of Burma from India, went into effect on April 1, 1937, he became the first premier, and he held office until he was defeated by a coalition in February 1939.

After his defeat, Ba Maw allied with other Burmese leaders to form the Freedom Bloc, which opposed Burma's participation with the Allies in World War II. In August 1940 he was arrested by the British for sedition and remained in prison until the Japanese invasion in 1942. During the Japanese occupation (1943–45), he was adipati (head of state) of a theoretically independent Burma, although the country was actually a Japanese satellite. He fled to Japan when the Allies reentered Burma. After a brief time in an Allied prison, he returned and unsuccessfully attempted to reenter politics. He later retired to private life.

Babangida, Ibrahim

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born August 17, 1941, Minna, Nigeria

Nigerian military leader, who served as head of state (1985–93).

Born in northern Niger state, Babangida received military training in Nigeria, India, Great Britain, and the United States. He rose through the ranks and was known for his courage—he played a major role in suppressing an attempted coup in 1976 when he walked into a rebel-held radio station unarmed.

After Murtala Mohammed became the military head of state in 1975, Babangida joined his Supreme Military Council. He played a significant role in the coup that replaced the civilian government of Shehu Shagari with the military regime led by Muhammad Buhari. However, deep dissatisfaction with Buhari's restrictive governance led Babangida to oust Buhari in August 1985. Babangida lessened the governmental control of the press and released a number of detainees from the former civilian government. However, he faced the same economic problems that Buhari had struggled with and the same domestic dissatisfaction. He came to an agreement with the International Monetary Fund and received new loans from the World Bank, but the resultant devaluation of the naira, the local currency, led to social unrest, which he addressed by dissolving part of the National Labour Council and temporarily closing the universities.

Babangida announced early in 1986 that a civilian government would be formed by 1990, later extending the date by two years to allow more time for preparation. He decreed that no politicians from the civilian regimes or office-holding military officials could stand as candidates. He allowed no political parties during the transition period and approved only two political parties when campaigning began. Expressing dissatisfaction with the process of fielding new political parties, the Babangida government created its own parties, the National Republican Convention and the Social Democratic Party. As a further move to show that he was firmly in control, Babangida dissolved the Armed Forces Ruling Council in favour of smaller bodies and dismissed many of his closest military colleagues. An attempted coup in April 1990 led by Major Gideon Orkar, who represented various northern Muslim states in their attempt to secede from what they perceived to be a corrupt and—most important—non-Islamic country, was quickly contained. Babangida later announced that Nigeria had suspended its membership in the Islamic Conference Organization amid speculation among southern Nigerians that he was trying to make the country Islamic.

Civilian elections were finally held in 1993 and apparently won by businessman Moshood Abiola. However, Babangida did not agree with this assessment, annulled the elections, and then handed control of the country over to an interim civilian panel headed by businessman Ernest Shonekan. Babangida stepped down from government.

Babangida was instrumental in changing the orientation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Although it had been strictly an economic body, Babangida succeeded in having ECOWAS use ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) troops to protect Nigerian citizens in Liberia when civil war broke out there.

Bachelet, Michelle

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born September 29, 1951, Santiago, Chile

In full Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria Chilean politician, president of Chile (2006– ). She was the first woman president of Chile and the first popularly elected South American woman president whose political career was established independent of her husband.

Bachelet's father was a general in Chile's air force, and her mother was an archaeologist. In 1973 her father was arrested for opposing the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power and was tortured for several months before suffering a heart attack and dying in custody in 1974. Michelle Bachelet, then a medical student at the University of Chile, was arrested (along with her mother) and sent to a secret prison, where she also was tortured. Released into exile in 1975, Bachelet lived in Australia before moving to East Germany, where she became active in socialist politics and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1979 she returned to Chile and subsequently completed her medical degree.

Although Bachelet's family history made it difficult for her to find employment in Pinochet's Chile, eventually she joined a medical clinic that treated victims of torture. After Pinochet was ousted from power in 1990, she became active in politics, particularly in the medical and military fields. In 1994 she was appointed an adviser to Chile's minister for health, and she subsequently studied military affairs at Chile's National Academy of Strategy and Policy as well as the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C. Bachelet also was elected to the central committee of the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista). In 2000, when President Ricardo Lagos Escobar was inaugurated as Chile's first socialist president since Salvador Allende in 1973, Bachelet was appointed health minister, and in 2002 she became the first woman to lead the defense ministry.

In 2005 Bachelet was selected by the Socialist Party as its presidential candidate. Her campaign focused on meeting the needs of the country's poor, reforming the pension system, promoting the rights of women, and recognizing constitutionally the rights of the indigenous Mapuche people. She also promised continuity in foreign affairs, especially regarding Chile's close ties with the United States and other Latin American countries. Important in a country where Roman Catholicism is strong, Bachelet's campaign had to counter her professed agnosticism and the fact that she was a divorced mother of three. She led the first round of voting in December 2005 but failed to receive a majority, which was required to win outright. In the runoff on January 15, 2006, she defeated the conservative candidate Sebastián Piñera, winning 53 percent of the vote, and she was sworn in as president in March.

Bakr, Aḥmad Ḥassan al-

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born 1914, Tikrīt, Iraq

died Oct. 4, 1982, Baghdad

president of Iraq from 1968 to 1979.

Al-Bakr entered the Iraqi Military Academy in 1938 after spending six years as a primary-school teacher. He was a member of the Baʿth Socialist Party and was forced to retire from the Iraqi army for revolutionary activities in 1959. He became prime minister for 10 months following the Baʿth coup of 1963 and replaced President ʿAbd ar-Rahman ʿĀrif in the Baʿth coup of July 17, 1968. Thereafter he governed in concert with the Baʿth leader Saddam Hussein. His truculent foreign policy effectively isolated him from his Muslim neighbours, and his total opposition to any diplomatic solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute brought him into conflict with more moderate Arab heads of state.

Al-Bakr's border claims against Iran made it impossible to bring the Iraqi Kurds under control until an agreement was reached in 1975. His economic policy began with a cautious continuation of the former regime's five-year plan but turned toward industrial expansion as oil revenues increased. After suffering a heart attack in 1976, al-Bakr delegated most administrative matters to Saddam Hussein, who succeeded him on July 16, 1979.

Balaguer, Joaquín

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born September 1, 1907, Villa Bisonó, Dominican Republic

died July 14, 2002, Santo Domingo

in full Joaquín Vidella Balaguer y Ricardo lawyer, writer, and diplomat who was vice president of the Dominican Republic (1957–60) during the regime of President Hector Trujillo and was president from 1960 to 1962, 1966 to 1978, and from 1986 to 1996.

Balaguer earned a law degree from the University of Santo Domingo and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris. Between 1932 and 1957, he held numerous executive and diplomatic posts in the Dominican government under the Trujillo regime. As secretary of education under Hector Trujillo, brother of dictator General Rafael Trujillo, he established free universities and expanded educational and library facilities. He was sworn in as president when Hector Trujillo resigned because of illness. As General Rafael Trujillo still effectively held all power, Balaguer, who was only the nominal president, could effect little real change or reform. After Rafael Trujillo's assassination in 1961, Balaguer tried to liberalize the government, and the Organization of American States (OAS) lifted the economic sanctions that had been imposed during Trujillo's dictatorship. But Balaguer's changes went too fast for the trujillistas and not fast enough for those who demanded the immediate restoration of civil liberties and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The country disintegrated into violence, and a short-lived military coup forced Balaguer to resign in 1962 and take refuge in the United States.

Balaguer returned to the Dominican Republic during the U.S. military intervention of 1965 and ran successfully for president in 1966, campaigning on a platform of peace and moderate, orderly change. Having close ties to the business community, Balaguer achieved steady economic growth while implementing some modest social reforms. He was reelected to the presidency in 1970 and 1974, but these latter terms were marred by political violence, assassinations of government opponents, inflation, and alleged electoral fraud. Balaguer lost the 1978 presidential race (the first election since 1966 to allow the major opposition party to be represented) to Silvestre Antonio Guzmán. Balaguer also lost the presidential elections of 1982, but he regained the presidency in the 1986 elections and was reelected in 1990. During his presidency he undertook an unprecedented public-works program, building roads, bridges, schools, housing projects, libraries, museums, theatres, parks, and sports complexes. All this caused heavy debts and an endangered economy. Balaguer again won the presidency in 1994 amid charges of electoral fraud. Under intense international pressure, however, he agreed to serve only two years of his term and in 1996 left office. In 2000 he ran for a seventh presidential term but was defeated.

Balaguer's many books on Latin American history, politics, and literature included La realidad Dominicana (1947; Dominican Reality) and Historia de la literatura Dominicana (1955; “History of Dominican Literature”).

Balewa, Sir Abubakar Tafawa

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born 1912, Bauchi, Northern Nigeria

died January 1966, near Ifo, Nigeria

Nigerian politician, leader in the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), and the first federal prime minister. A commoner by birth, an unusual origin for a political leader in the NPC, Balewa was both a defender of northern special interests and an advocate of reform and Nigerian unity.

Balewa was a teacher by profession and was one of the first Northern Nigerians to be sent to London University Institute of Education (1945). On his return in 1946 he was elected to the House of Assembly of the Northern Region and in 1947 was one of five representatives to the Central Legislative Council in Lagos. He was reelected to the assembly in 1951 despite the hostility of some conservative amīrs of the generally Muslim north.

From 1952 until his death Balewa served in the federal government: he was minister of works and of transport in the middle 1950s, and then, as leader of the NPC in the House of Representatives, he was made the first prime minister of Nigeria. After the preindependence elections of 1959, he again became prime minister in a coalition government of the NPC and Nnamdi Azikiwe's National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons. As prime minister of independent Nigeria, he was sharply circumscribed in his powers by those delegated to regional premiers. He proved unable to mitigate the growing tensions of 1964–66, manifested by a partial boycott of the election in 1964, army unrest, and outbreaks of violence in the Western Region. He was killed in the first of two Nigerian army coups in 1966.

Balladur, Édouard

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born May 2, 1929, İzmir [Smyrna], Turkey

French neo-Gaullist politician, prime minister of France from 1993 to 1995.

Balladur graduated from the prestigious National School of Administration in 1957 and went to work for the Council of State as a junior official. In 1962 he joined the Office of Radio and Television Broadcasting (ORTF). The head of ORTF recommended him to Prime Minister (later President) Georges Pompidou, and during the 1960s and '70s Balladur was a member of Pompidou's staff. After Pompidou's death in 1974, Balladur worked in industry, becoming chairman of two subsidiaries of the national electric company.

From 1984 to 1988 Balladur served as councillor of state, and he was an adviser to Jacques Chirac, the leader of the neo-Gaullist party Rally for the Republic (RPR). In 1986 Balladur was elected to the National Assembly as deputy for Paris, but he gave up his seat to join newly appointed Prime Minister Chirac's cabinet as minister of economy, finance, and privatization. A political moderate, Balladur had helped develop the formula for “cohabitation,” the sharing of power between Socialist President François Mitterrand and Chirac's conservative government. As finance minister he launched an ambitious privatization program; oversaw the easing of controls on prices, capital, and labour; and supported the introduction of a single European currency.

Chirac's government left office in 1988, and Balladur was reelected to the National Assembly. In March 1993, after conservatives won an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly, President Mitterrand appointed Balladur prime minister. Balladur was popular with the people, and in 1995 he announced his bid for the presidency. Many voters, however, were upset that he was running against Chirac, his former mentor, and Balladur placed third after the first round of voting. He subsequently gave his support to Chirac, who later won.

Banda, Hastings Kamuzu

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born c. 1898, near Kasungu, British Central Africa Protectorate [now Malaŵi]

died November 25, 1997, Johannesburg, South Africa

first president of Malaŵi (formerly Nyasaland) and the principal leader of the Malaŵi nationalist movement. He ruled Malaŵi from 1963 to 1994, combining totalitarian political controls with conservative economic policies.

Banda's birthday was officially given as May 14, 1906, but he was believed to have been born before the turn of the century. He was the son of a peasant and received his earliest education in a mission school. He attended college in the United States, where he received his medical degree in 1927. He then took another medical degree at the University of Edinburgh (1941) and practiced in London from 1945 to 1953.

Banda first became involved in his homeland's politics when white settlers in the region demanded the federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in 1949. Banda and others in Nyasaland strongly objected to this extension of white dominance, but the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was nevertheless established in 1953. In 1953–58 Banda practiced medicine in Ghana, but from 1956 he was under increasing pressure from Nyasa nationalists to return; he finally did so, to a tumultuous welcome, in 1958. As president of the Nyasaland African Congress, he toured the country making antifederation speeches and was held partly responsible by the colonial government for increasing African resentment and disturbances. In 1959 a state of emergency was declared, and he was imprisoned by the British colonial authorities. He was released in 1960 and a few months later accepted British constitutional proposals granting Africans in Nyasaland a majority in the Legislative Council. He was minister of natural resources and local government in 1961–63, and he became prime minister in 1963, the year the federation was finally dissolved. He retained the post of prime minister when Nyasaland achieved independence in 1964 under the name of Malaŵi.

Shortly after independence, some members of Banda's governing cabinet resigned in protest against his autocratic methods and his accommodation with South Africa and the Portuguese colonies. In 1965 a rebellion broke out, led by two of these former ministers, but it failed to take hold in the countryside. Malaŵi became a republic in 1966 with Banda as president. He headed an austere, autocratic one-party regime, maintained firm control over all aspects of the government, and jailed or executed his opponents. He was declared president for life in 1971. Banda concentrated on building up his country's infrastructure and increasing agricultural productivity. He established friendly trading relations with South Africa and other neighbours through which landlocked Malaŵi's overseas trade had to pass, and his foreign-policy orientation was decidedly pro-Western.

Widespread domestic protests and the withdrawal of Western financial aid forced Banda to legalize other political parties in 1993. He was voted out of office in the country's first multiparty presidential elections, held in 1994.

Bandaranaike, S.W.R.D.

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born Jan. 8, 1899, Colombo, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka]

died Sept. 26, 1959, Colombo

in full Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike statesman and prime minister of Ceylon (1956–59), whose election marked a significant change in the political history of modern Ceylon.

Educated at the University of Oxford, he was called to the bar in 1925. After returning to Ceylon, he entered politics and, in 1931, was elected to the newly formed legislative assembly, the State Council. In 1947, as a prominent member of the governing United National Party (UNP), he was elected to the new House of Representatives and appointed minister of health and local government. He resigned from the government and the Western-oriented UNP in 1951 and was re-elected in 1952 as the founder of the nationalist Sri Lanka (Blessed Ceylon) Freedom Party, becoming leader of the opposition in the legislature. Four years later he formed the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP; People's United Front), a political alliance of four nationalist-socialist parties, which swept the election; he became prime minister on April 12, 1956.

The MEP advocated a neutralist foreign policy and strong nationalist policies at home. Sinhalese, the language spoken by the majority community, replaced English as the official language of the country, and Buddhism, the majority religion, was given a prominent place in the affairs of state. By amicable agreement the British relinquished their military bases on the island, and Ceylon established diplomatic relations with communist states.

A disgruntled Buddhist monk, Talduwe Somarama, shot Bandaranaike on Sept. 25, 1959, and he died the following day. After the 1960 elections, his widow, Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike (q.v.), became prime minister.

Bandaranaike, Sirimavo R.D.

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born April 17, 1916, Ratnapura, Ceylon [now Sri Lanka]

died October 10, 2000, Colombo, Sri Lanka

in full Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike stateswoman who, upon her party's victory in the 1960 Ceylon general election, became the world's first woman prime minister. She left office in 1965 but returned to serve two more terms (1970–77, 1994–2000) as prime minister. The family she founded with her late husband, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, rose to great prominence in Sri Lankan politics.

Born into a wealthy family, she married the politician S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1940 and began to interest herself in social welfare. After her husband, who became prime minister in 1956, was assassinated in 1959, she was induced by his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to become the party's leader. The SLFP won a decisive victory at the general election in July 1960, and she became prime minister.

Bandaranaike carried on her husband's program of socialist economic policies, neutrality in international relations, and the active encouragement of the Buddhist religion and of the Sinhalese language and culture. Her government nationalized various economic enterprises and enforced a law making Sinhalese the sole official language. By 1964 a deepening economic crisis and the SLFP's coalition with the Marxist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (“Ceylon Socialist Party”) had eroded popular support for her government, which was resoundingly defeated in the general election of 1965. In 1970, however, her socialist coalition, the United Front, regained power, and as prime minister Bandaranaike pursued more radical policies. Her government further restricted free enterprise, nationalized industries, carried out land reforms, and promulgated a new constitution that created an executive presidency and made Ceylon into a republic named Sri Lanka. While reducing inequalities of wealth, Bandaranaike's socialist policies had once again caused economic stagnation, and her government's support of Buddhism and the Sinhalese language had helped alienate the country's large Tamil minority. The failure to deal with ethnic rivalries and economic distress led, in the election of July 1977, to the SLFP's retaining only 8 of the 168 seats in the National Assembly, and Bandaranaike was replaced as prime minister.

In 1980 the Sri Lanka parliament stripped Bandaranaike of her political rights and barred her from political office, but in 1986 President J.R. Jayawardene granted her a pardon that restored her rights. She ran unsuccessfully as the SLFP's candidate for president in 1988, and after regaining a seat in parliament in 1989 she became the leader of the opposition.

Bandaranaike's children, in the meantime, had become major political figures within the SLFP. Her son, Anura P.S.D. Bandaranaike (b. 1949), was first elected to parliament in 1977 and had become the leader of the SLFP's right-wing faction by 1984. He was frustrated in his bid to become the party's leader, however, by his sister Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (b. 1945), who held left-wing views and was favoured by their mother for the leadership. In response, Anura defected from the SLFP and joined the rival United National Party (UNP) in 1993.

Chandrika had been active in the SLFP before marrying the film actor Vijaya Kumaratunga in 1978, and after his assassination in 1988 she rejoined her mother's party. She soon came to head its left-wing faction, and a string of electoral victories propelled her to the leadership of an SLFP-based coalition that won the parliamentary elections of August 1994. Chandrika became prime minister, and in November of that year she won the presidential election over the UNP candidate. Chandrika appointed her mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, to serve as prime minister in her new government, which mounted a major military campaign against Tamil separatists in 1995. Failing health forced Bandaranaike to resign her post in August 2000. Shortly after voting in the October parliamentary elections, she suffered a heart attack and died.

Bani-Sadr, Abolhasan

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born March 22, 1933, Hamadān, Iran

also spelled Abū al-Ḥasan Banī-Ṣadr Iranian economist and politician who in 1980 was elected the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was dismissed from office in 1981 after being impeached for incompetence.

Bani-Sadr studied religion and economics at the University of Tehrān and spent four years at the Institute of Social Research. He was leader of the anti-shah student movement in the early 1960s and was imprisoned twice for political activities. Wounded in the unsuccessful uprising of June 1963, he traveled to France and continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he obtained a doctorate and later taught. A fervent Islamic nationalist and revolutionary economist, he published the results of his studies in the 1970s.

Bani-Sadr joined Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's entourage during the latter's exile in France. After civil unrest forced the shah to flee Iran, the two men returned to the country on February 1, 1979. Khomeini assumed control of the country and appointed a government, naming Bani-Sadr deputy minister of economy and finance in July and full minister in November. On January 25, 1980, Bani-Sadr was elected the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the following month Khomeini appointed him chairman of the Revolutionary Council, Iran's policy-making body.

As president, Bani-Sadr struggled against enemies in the clergy, such as Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei—who sought to reduce him to a figurehead—and against inexperienced departmental executives. He was forced to accept Mohammad Ali Rajaʾi, not a man of his choice, as prime minister in August. The two men were soon at odds as Bani-Sadr refused to accept many of the prime minister's cabinet nominations. Then in September, Iraq invaded Iran, sparking the Iran-Iraq War (1980–90). On October 31, Bani-Sadr wrote a letter to Khomeini complaining that incompetent ministers were a greater danger to the country's security than was Iraqi aggression. He also noted in this missive that his warnings of a worsening economy and his insistence on the need to reorganize the armed forces were being ignored. The letter, as well as Bani-Sadr's opposition to Iran's holding American hostages taken from the U.S. embassy in Tehrān some time earlier, angered members of the Majles (parliament), who impeached him on June 21, 1981. The following day Khomeini—angered further by Bani-Sadr's negotiations with the Mojāhedīn-e Khalq (Persian: “People's Fighters”), an antigovernment group—dismissed him as president and ordered his arrest on charges of conspiracy and treason. Bani-Sadr fled to France, where—along with Mojāhedīn-e Khalq leader Massoud Rajavi—he helped establish the National Council of Resistance, a group dedicated to overthrowing the Khomeini regime. In 1984 Bani-Sadr left the coalition because of a dispute with Rajavi.

Bao Dai

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born Oct. 22, 1913, Vietnam

died Aug. 1, 1997, Paris, France

original name Nguyen Vinh Thuy the last reigning emperor of Vietnam (1926–45).

The son of Emperor Khai Dinh, a vassal of the French colonial regime, and a concubine of peasant ancestry, Nguyen Vinh Thuy was educated in France and spent little of his youth in his homeland. He succeeded to the throne in 1926 and assumed the title Bao Dai (“Keeper of Greatness”). He initially sought to reform and modernize Vietnam but was unable to win French cooperation.

During World War II the French colonial regime exercised a firm control over Bao Dai until the Japanese coup de force of March 1945, which swept away French administration in Indochina. The Japanese considered bringing back the aging Prince Cuong De from Japan to head a new quasi-independent Vietnamese state, but they finally allowed Bao Dai to remain as an essentially powerless ruler. When the Viet Minh seized power in their revolution of August 1945, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues judged that there was symbolic value to be gained by having Bao Dai linked to them. The Viet Minh asked Bao Dai to resign and offered him an advisory role as “Citizen Prince Nguyen Vinh Thuy.” Finding that the Viet Minh accorded him no role, and distrustful of the French, Bao Dai fled to Hong Kong in 1946. There he led a largely frivolous life, making appeals against French rule.

In 1949 the French accepted the principle of an independent Vietnam but retained control of its defense and finance. Bao Dai agreed to return to Vietnam in these circumstances in May 1949, and in July he became temporary premier of a tenuously unified and nominally independent Vietnam. Reinstalled as sovereign, Bao Dai continued his pleasure-seeking ways and became generally known as the “Playboy Emperor.” He left the affairs of state to his various pro-French Vietnamese appointees, until October 1955 when a national referendum called for the country to become a republic. Bao Dai retired and returned to France to live.

Barak, Ehud

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born February 12, 1942, Mishmar HaSharon kibbutz, Palestine [now northern Israel]

original name Ehud Brog soldier and politician who was the prime minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001.

Barak was born in a kibbutz that had been founded by his father, an emigrant from Lithuania, in 1932. Barak was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1959, thus beginning a distinguished military career (he changed his name at this time). He was a commander in battles in the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) but became especially known as the leader of special forces units that conducted commando raids. These included a group of soldiers (with Benjamin Netanyahu among them) who stormed an airliner hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas at Lod International Airport near Tel Aviv in 1972, freeing all the hostages. Barak served as head of military intelligence, and in 1991 he became chief of General Staff. In 1994 he participated in the negotiations that resulted in a peace accord with Jordan. When he retired in 1995 as a lieutenant general, the army's highest rank, he was the most decorated soldier in Israeli history.

Barak had received a B.Sc. degree in physics and mathematics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1968) and an M.Sc. degree in economic engineering systems from Stanford University in California (1978). He turned his attention to politics in the mid-1990s. Under Labour governments he was minister of the interior in 1995 and minister of foreign affairs in 1995–96. He was elected to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in May 1996. In June 1997 he became head of the Labour Party and two years later ran for prime minister under the coalition One Israel, which included Labour as well as the Gesher Party and Meimad, the latter a spin-off of the National Religious Party. Barak emphasized economic and other domestic issues, including education and health services, as well as relations with the Palestinians and with Syria and Lebanon. The withdrawal of minor candidates late in the campaign allowed a face-off between incumbent Netanyahu, of the ruling Likud party, and Barak. On May 17, 1999, Barak won an easy victory with slightly more than 56 percent of the popular vote. At the same time, smaller parties increased their seats in the Knesset. The election results were seen as a turning away from the hard-line policies, particularly in relations with the Palestinians, pursued by Netanyahu.

As prime minister, Barak pledged to establish peace in the Middle East, and in September 1999 he reactivated peace talks with Palestinian leader Yāsir ʿArafāt. The two men signed a deal that called for the creation of a final peace accord by September 2000 as well as the transfer of more Israeli-occupied territory in the West Bank to Palestinian control. In December 1999, Barak resumed peace talks with Syria after more than three years of deadlock, and he also ended Israeli's 17-year occupation of southern Lebanon.

Beginning in the summer of 2000, however, Barak faced a series of crises. In July his coalition collapsed after three parties quit, leaving him with a minority government. Later that month he narrowly won a vote of confidence in the Knesset. In September violence erupted in the West Bank and Gaza, seriously threatening the peace talks. Barak met with ʿArafāt, but the resulting cease-fire agreement was all but ignored. As fighting continued, Barak announced a time-out from peacemaking. The move was thought to appease the growing opposition to Barak's government, especially that led by Ariel Sharon, the Likud party leader. In December 2000 Barak resigned as prime minister, and a new election was slated for February 2001. Barak ran for reelection but was criticized by many Israelis for his inability to halt the violence and for allegedly making too many concessions during the peace talks. At the polls, they overwhelming cast their ballots for Sharon. After receiving only 37 percent of the vote, Barak announced his resignation both as the Labour Party leader and as a member of the Knesset.

Batista (y Zaldívar), Fulgencio

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born January 16, 1901, Banes, Cuba

died August 6, 1973, Marbella, Spain

soldier and dictator who twice ruled Cuba—first in 1933–44, when he gave the nation a strong, efficient government, and again in 1952–59 as a dictator, jailing his opponents, using terrorist methods, and making fortunes for himself and his associates.

The son of impoverished farmers, Batista worked in a variety of jobs until he joined the army in 1921, starting as a stenographer. He rose to the rank of sergeant and developed a large personal following. In September 1933 he organized the “sergeants' revolt”; it toppled the provisional regime of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, which had replaced the dictatorial regime of Gerardo Machado y Morales. Batista thus became the most powerful man in Cuba.

An astute judge of men, Batista preferred to consolidate his control through patronage rather than terror. He cultivated the support of the army, the civil service, and organized labour. Ruling through associates the first few years, he was elected president in 1940. While greatly enriching himself, he also governed the nation most effectively, expanding the educational system, sponsoring a huge program of public works, and fostering the growth of the economy.

Retiring from office in 1944, he traveled abroad and lived for a while in Florida, where he invested part of the huge sums he had acquired in Cuba. During the eight years that he was out of power in Cuba, there was a resurgence of corruption on a grand scale, as well as a virtual breakdown of public services. His return to power through another army revolt in March 1952 was widely welcomed. But he returned as a brutal dictator, controlling the university, the press, and the Congress, and he embezzled huge sums from the soaring economy. His regime was finally toppled by the rebel forces led by Fidel Castro, who launched their successful attack in the fall of 1958. Faced with the collapse of his regime, Batista fled with his family to the Dominican Republic on Jan. 1, 1959. Later he went into exile on the Portuguese island of Madeira and finally to Estoril, near Lisbon.

Beatrix

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born January 31, 1938, Soestdijk, Netherlands

in full Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard queen of The Netherlands from 1980.

The eldest of four daughters born to Princess (later Queen) Juliana and Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, Beatrix went into exile with her family when the Germans overran The Netherlands in World War II, and she spent the war years in Britain and Canada. When Juliana ascended the throne in 1948, Princess Beatrix received the title of heiress presumptive. From 1956 to 1961 she attended the State University of Leiden, studying mainly social sciences, law, and history.

In 1965 her betrothal to a German diplomat, Claus George Willem Otto Frederik Geert von Amsberg (b. 1926—d. 2002), caused a national furor because of his past membership in the Hitler Youth and the German army, even though he had been cleared by an Allied court. On March 10, 1966, they were married, and the hostility dimmed with the births of Willem-Alexander (1967), Johan Friso (1968), and Constantijn (1969), the first male heirs in the House of Orange since 1890.

In 1980 Queen Juliana abdicated, and Beatrix ascended the throne on April 30. She was noted for her involvement in a number of social causes and proved a popular monarch. In 2004 Johan Friso married without the approval of the Dutch government, thus giving up any claim to the throne.

Begin, Menachem

2010-03-05T06:53:00.001-08:00

born August 16, 1913, Brest-Litovsk, Russia [now in Belarus]

died March 9, 1992, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

In full Menachem Wolfovitch Begin Zionist leader who was prime minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983. Begin was the co-recipient, with Egyptian president Anwar el-Sādāt, of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace for their achievement of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that was formally signed in 1979.

Begin received a law degree from the University of Warsaw in 1935. Active in the Zionist movement throughout the 1930s, he became (1938) the leader of the Polish branch of the Betar youth movement, dedicated to the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. When the Germans invaded Warsaw in 1939, he escaped to Vilnius; his parents and a brother died in concentration camps. The Soviet authorities deported Begin to Siberia in 1940, but in 1941 he was released and joined the Polish army in exile, with which he went to Palestine in 1942.

Begin joined the militant Irgun Zvai Leumi and was its commander from 1943 to 1948. After Israel's independence in 1948 the Irgun formed the Ḥerut (“Freedom”) Party with Begin as its head and leader of the opposition in the Knesset (Parliament) until 1967. Begin joined the National Unity government (1967–70) as a minister without portfolio and in 1970 became joint chairman of the Likud (“Unity”) coalition.

On May 17, 1977, the Likud Party won a national electoral victory and on June 21 Begin formed a government. He was perhaps best known for his uncompromising stand on the question of retaining the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which had been occupied by Israel during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Prodded by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, however, Begin negotiated with President Anwar el-Sādāt of Egypt for peace in the Middle East, and the agreements they reached, known as the Camp David Accords (September 17, 1978), led directly to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that was signed on March 26, 1979. Under the terms of the treaty, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula, which it had occupied since the 1967 war, to Egypt in exchange for full diplomatic recognition. Begin and Sādāt were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1978.

Begin formed another coalition government after the general election of 1980. Despite his willingness to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt under the terms of the peace agreement, he remained resolutely opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In June 1982 his government mounted an invasion of Lebanon in an effort to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its bases there. The PLO was driven from Lebanon, but the deaths of numerous Palestinian civilians there turned world opinion against Israel. Israel's continuing involvement in Lebanon, and the death of Begin's wife in November 1982, were probably among the factors that prompted him to resign from office in October 1983.

Belaúnde Terry, Fernando

2010-03-05T06:48:00.001-08:00

born October 7, 1912, Lima, Peru

died June 4, 2002, Lima

statesman, architect, and president of Peru (1963–68, 1980–85), known for his efforts at democratic reform and his pro-American stance.

Belaúnde, a member of a distinguished aristocratic Peruvian family, studied architecture in the United States and France in 1924–35 and practiced briefly in Mexico before returning in 1936 to Peru, where he became a noted architect and founded the architectural magazine Arquitecto Peruano (“Peruvian Architect”). He served in the Chamber of Deputies (1945–48) while his father, Rafael Belaúnde Diez Canseco, was prime minister. After a military coup in 1948 overthrew the government, the younger Belaúnde returned to his post as dean of the School of Architecture in the National University of Engineering.

Belaúnde helped establish the National Democratic Front and was its representative to parliament in Lima in 1945–48. With the restoration of free elections in 1956, he ran for president on behalf of the newly formed Democratic Youth Front; he was defeated but made a surprisingly strong showing. Shortly thereafter this party was renamed Popular Action (Acción Popular). In the new election of June 1963, Belaúnde received 39 percent of the vote and set about forming a reformist coalition. His program of land reform and road building to open the Amazon River valley to settlement progressed, but he was frustrated in much of the rest of his domestic policy by a Congress under opposition control. His administration sought to maintain close relations with the United States, supporting its Alliance for Progress program for development of Latin America.

Public outcry over an agreement with an American corporation, the International Petroleum Company, on the development of oil fields in northern Peru led to Belaúnde's deposal by a military junta in October 1968. He fled to the United States, returned to Peru in December 1970, and was again exiled from January 1971 until his return in January 1976. In May 1980, in the first presidential elections since his deposal, he defeated 14 other candidates. Although he returned freedom of the press to Peru, Belaúnde was baffled by a high inflation rate, a huge foreign debt, and violent attacks by the Shining Path terrorist group. Resentment over his austerity measures and his inability to control the military in its fight against terrorists led to his crushing electoral defeat in May 1985. Belaúnde, a prolific writer, was the author of La conquista del Perú por los Peruanos (1959; Peru's Own Conquest).

Ben Ali, Zine al-Abidine

2010-03-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

born September 3, 1936, near Sousse,

Tunisiaarmy officer and politician who became president of Tunisia in 1987.

Ben Ali was trained in France at the military academy of Saint-Cyr and at the artillery school at Châlons-sur-Marne. He also studied engineering in the United States. From 1964 to 1974 he was head of Tunisian military security, a post that took him into top government circles. In 1974 he began a three-year term as military attaché to the Tunisian embassy in Morocco. He then returned to Tunisia to become head of national security, and in 1980 he became ambassador to Poland. After his return, he was appointed state secretary for national security in 1984 and a cabinet minister in 1985. Ben Ali had gained a reputation as a hard-liner in suppressing riots in 1978 and 1984, and in 1986 he became minister of the interior, taking an active role in rooting out the Islamic Tendency Movement, a violent fundamentalist group. In October 1987 President Habib Bourguiba appointed him prime minister. Bourguiba, who had ruled Tunisia since its independence from France in 1956, was ill and considered by many to be unfit to continue in office, and on November 7 Ben Ali deposed him in a peaceful coup.

Ben Ali was expected to favour a somewhat less secular government than Bourguiba's, with a more moderate approach toward religious fundamentalists. In elections held on April 2, 1989, he received more than 99 percent of the votes. In 1991, however, he banned the Al-Nahḍah (“Renaissance”) party and called for the suppression of Islamic militants, and from this point on he came under increasing criticism for his human rights policies. As head of the Democratic Constitutional Rally (Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique), he won reelection in 1994, 1999, and 2004, each time with more than 90 percent of the vote.

Ben Bella, Ahmed

2010-03-05T06:45:00.001-08:00

born Dec. 25, 1918?, Maghnia [Marnia], Alg.

principal leader of the Algerian War of Independence against France, the first prime minister (1962–63) and first elected president (1963–65) of the Algerian republic, who steered his country toward a socialist economy.

Ben Bella was the son of a farmer and small businessman in Maghnia in the département of Oran. There, he successfully completed his early studies at the French school and continued his education in the neighbouring city of Tlemcen, where he first became aware of racial discrimination and also mingled with the fringes of the nationalist movement.

He was conscripted into the French army in 1937, served in World War II, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre (1940) and the Médaille Militaire (1944). On his return to Maghnia, Ben Bella resumed his nationalist activities, refusing to be intimidated by the French authorities' confiscation of his farm. He left Maghnia, joined Messali Hadj's underground movement, and soon became one of the “Young Turks” who, after the rigged election of Governor Marcel-Edmond Naegelen (1948), considered illusory any hope of achieving independence democratically. He founded with his friends in Messali Hadj's party, the Organisation Spéciale (OS), whose aim was to take up arms as quickly as possible.

After robbing the post office at Oran (1950) to obtain funds for the nationalist movement, Ben Bella was sentenced to prison, but he managed to escape after serving only two years of his term. He went underground again and moved to Egypt, where he was promised help by the revolutionary supporters of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In November 1954 Ben Bella and the Algerian émigré leaders resident in Egypt, who had met secretly in Switzerland with those leaders who were still living in Algeria, came to two major decisions: to create the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale [FLN]) and to order an armed insurrection against the French colonists.

Ben Bella played an important political role in the leadership of the FLN, simultaneously organizing the shipment of foreign arms to Algeria. In 1956 he escaped two attempts on his life, one at Cairo and the other at Tripoli, Libya. In the same year, he was arrested in Algiers by the French military authorities while in the process of negotiating peace terms with the French premier, Guy Mollet.

His imprisonment (1956–62) kept him dissociated from those errors of military conduct committed by the FLN, and, when he was freed after the Évian agreements with France were signed in 1962, his reputation was intact.

The situation in independent Algeria was chaotic. The leaders of the FLN had formed a conservative provisional government (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), while the party's congress at Tripoli had elected a socialist-oriented government at the end of the war. It was this latter “Bureau Politique” that Ben Bella ran.

The intervention on his behalf by Colonel Houari Boumedienne, chief of the Army of National Liberation (Armée de Libération Nationale [ALN]), assured both the success of the Bureau Politique and of Ben Bella, who was elected unopposed and with an immense majority to the presidency of the Algerian republic in 1963.

Ben Bella reestablished order in a country disorganized both by the massive departure of French colonists and by the clashes of armed groups. He created a state out of nothing and set aside one-quarter of the budget for national education. Above all else, he inaugurated, under the title autogestion, a series of major agrarian reforms, including the nationalization—but not the direct state control—of the former colonists' huge farms.

Ben Bella allied himself with the anti-Zionist Arab states and developed cultural and economic relations with France. He also extricated the country from an important border dispute with Morocco.

Ben Bella's method of government pleased the Algerian people, but the effects of his policies were not always as beneficial as his generous intentions. Through lack of either time, political lucidity, or planning, Ben Bella governed from day to day in a series of improvised acts, some of which—like his appeal to Algerian women to donate their jewelry to the state—were more spectacular than useful. Ben Bella was unable to restore the FLN, nor was he able to win for it that popular support that would have helped to keep Boumedienne in check.

On June 19, 1965, Ben Bella was deposed in a coup led by Boumedienne, who installed himself as president; Ben Bella was detained and had little contact with the outside world for 14 years. Following the death of Boumedienne in 1978, restrictions on Ben Bella were eased in July 1979, though he remained under house arrest. On Oct. 30, 1980, he was freed. He spent 10 years in exile, returning to Algeria in 1990.

Ben-Gurion, David

2010-03-05T06:43:00.003-08:00

original name David Gruen

born Oct. 16, 1886, Płońsk, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]

died Dec. 1, 1973, Tel Aviv–Yafo, Israel

Zionist statesman and political leader, the first prime minister (1948–53, 1955–63) and defense minister (1948–53; 1955–63) of Israel. It was Ben-Gurion who, on May 14, 1948, at Tel Aviv, delivered Israel's declaration of independence. His charismatic personality won him the adoration of the masses, and, after his retirement from the government and, later, from the Knesset (the Israeli house of representatives), he was revered as the “Father of the Nation.”

Ben-Gurion, born David Gruen, was the son of Victor Gruen, one of the leaders in Płońsk of the “Lovers of Zion,” a movement that was disseminating among the oppressed Jews of eastern Europe the idea of the return to their original homeland of Israel. Zionism fascinated the young David Gruen, and he became convinced that the first step for the Jews who wanted to revive Israel as a nation was to immigrate to Palestine and settle there as farmers. In 1906 the 20-year-old Gruen arrived in Palestine and for several years worked as a farmer in the Jewish agricultural settlements in the coastal plain and in Galilee, the northern region of Palestine. There he adopted the ancient Hebrew name Ben-Gurion. Suffering the hardships of the early pioneers, including malaria and hunger, he never lost sight of his goal. It was owing to his efforts that the 1907 convention of his Zionist socialist party, Poale Zion (“Workers of Zion”), included the following declaration in its platform: “The party aspires to the political independence of the Jewish people in this land.”

With the outbreak of World War I, the Turkish governors of Palestine, their suspicions aroused by his Zionist activity, arrested Ben-Gurion and expelled him from the Ottoman Empire. During the height of the war, he traveled to New York, where he met and eventually married the Russian-born Pauline Munweis. In the last stages of World War I, the British supplanted Turkish rule in the Middle East; and with this change the Jewish settlers and their friends and supporters abroad began to realize that Zionism could rely for future assistance on Britain as well as on the wealthy and influential segments of American Jewry. Following the British government's publication on Nov. 2, 1917, of the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a “national home” in Palestine, Ben-Gurion enlisted in the British army's Jewish Legion and sailed back to the Middle East to join the war for the liberation of Palestine from Ottoman rule.

The British had already defeated the Turks when the Jewish Legion reached the battlefield, and, when Britain received the mandate over Palestine, the work of realizing the “Jewish national home” had begun. For Ben-Gurion, the “national home” was a step toward political independence. To implement it, he called for accelerated Jewish immigration to Palestine in the effort to create a Jewish nucleus that would serve as the foundation for the establishment of a Jewish state. That nucleus was the Histadrut—the confederation of Jewish workers in Palestine founded in 1920 by Ben-Gurion (who was elected its first secretary-general) and his colleagues. The Histadrut rapidly became a central force in social, economic, and even security affairs, attaining the position of a “state within a state.” Ten years later, in 1930, a number of labour factions united and founded Mapai, the Israeli Workers Party, with Ben-Gurion at its head. In 1935 he was elected chairman of the Zionist Executive, the highest directing body of world Zionism, and head of the Jewish Agency, the movement's executive branch.

As the Jewish settlement strengthened and deepened its roots in Palestine, anxiety mounted among the Palestinian Arabs, resulting in violent clashes between the two communities. In 1939 Britain changed its Middle East policy, abandoning its sympathetic stand toward the Jews and adopting a sympathetic attitude toward the Arabs, leading to severe restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Ben-Gurion reacted by calling upon the Jewish community to rise against England, thus heralding the decade of “fighting Zionism.” On May 12, 1942, he assembled an emergency conference of American Zionists in New York City; the convention decided upon the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine after the war. At the end of World War II, Ben-Gurion again led the Jewish community in its successful struggle against the British mandate; and in May 1948, in accordance with a decision of the United Nations General Assembly, with the support of the United States and the Soviet Union, the State of Israel was established.

David Ben-Gurion became prime minister and minister of defense. Through internal political struggles that incensed both the right and the left, he succeeded in breaking up the underground armies that had fought the British and in fusing them into a national army, which became a model and symbol of the maturing Israeli nation and an effective force against the invading Arab armies from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. Although the fighting ended with an Israeli victory, the Arab leaders refused to enter into formal peace negotiations with the Jewish state.

Ben-Gurion viewed the newborn state as the direct continuation of Jewish history that, in his opinion, had been interrupted 2,000 years earlier when the Roman legions had crushed the Hebrew freedom fighters and banished the Jews from Palestine. He saw the Jews' period of exile as a prolonged interlude in the history of Israel and declared that they had now regained their rightful home. In order to strengthen and develop the young nation, Ben-Gurion presented the people of Israel with a series of challenges: the absorption of mass immigration from all over the world; the assimilation of newcomers of diverse communities and backgrounds; the creation of a unified public education system; the settlement of the desert lands. In his foreign policy, he adopted an independent and pragmatic course. He used to say: “What matters is not what the Gentiles will say, but what the Jews will do.” His defense policy was firm, and he answered violations of the cease-fire agreements by neighbouring Arab states with military reprisals.

His stronghanded policy inspired little sympathy for him from the governments of the United States and Britain. They preferred more moderate leaders such as Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, and Moshe Sharett, who was elected prime minister for a brief term (1953–55) when Ben-Gurion temporarily retired from office. Striving to gain a foothold in the Middle East, the U.S.S.R. alienated Israel by providing the Arabs with vast quantities of arms. At that time, Ben-Gurion found an ally in France. During the war in Algeria, France encountered the opposition of the united Arab front, led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and consequently drew closer to Israel, supplying it with considerable amounts of military equipment; when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, French initiative brought Israel to join the Franco-British military campaign against Egypt. On Oct. 29, 1956, following a secret visit to France and a meeting with French and British leaders, Ben-Gurion ordered the army to take over the Sinai Peninsula, while France and Britain were making an abortive attempt to seize the canal. Israel subsequently withdrew from Sinai after having been assured freedom of navigation in the Strait of Tiran and de facto peace along the Egyptian-Israeli border, which was to be supervised by a special United Nations force.

Following the Sinai campaign, Israel entered a period of diplomatic and economic prosperity. Ben-Gurion was head of government until 1963. During his last years of office, he initiated several plans (which proved fruitless) for secret talks with Arab leaders with a view to establishing peace in the Middle East.

In June 1963 Ben-Gurion unexpectedly resigned from the government for unnamed “personal reasons.” His move apparently resulted in part from the bitter internal controversy between his supporters and his rivals in the party, who rose against him for the first time because of the political implications of the 1954 “Lavon Affair,” involving Israeli-inspired sabotage of U.S. and British property in Egypt. The affair led Ben-Gurion in 1965 to leave Mapai with a number of his supporters and to found a small opposition party, Rafi, at the head of which he fought, with little success, against his successor, Levi Eshkol.

In 1970 Ben-Gurion retired from the Knesset and from all political activity, devoting himself to the writing of his memoirs in Sde-Boqer, a kibbutz in the Negev. He published a number of books, mostly collections of speeches and essays. Through most of his life he had also engaged in researches into the history of the Jewish community in Palestine and in the study of the Bible.

Berlusconi, Silvio

2010-03-05T06:43:00.001-08:00

born Sept. 29, 1936, Milan, Italy

Italian media tycoon and twice prime minister of Italy (1994; 2001–06).

After graduating from the University of Milan with a degree in law, Berlusconi became a real-estate developer, amassing a considerable fortune by the 1970s. He created the cable television firm Telemilano in 1974 and four years later mounted the first direct challenge to the national television monopoly. In 1980 he established Canale 5, Italy's first commercial television network, and by the end of the decade Berlusconi-created stations dominated Italian airwaves. Berlusconi also diversified his business holdings, acquiring department stores, movie theatres, publishing companies, and the AC Milan football team. He consolidated his empire under the umbrella of the Finivest holding company, a vast conglomerate that grew to control more than 150 businesses.

In 1994 Berlusconi founded Forza Italia (“Go, Italy!”), a conservative political party, and was elected prime minister. Faced with conflict of interest and other charges, he resigned after only seven months in office. He was later convicted of fraud and corruption, though he was acquitted of tax evasion. Despite the convictions and criticism of his control of much of the Italian media, he remained the leader of Forza Italia. Promising tax cuts, more jobs, and higher pensions, he led a centre-right coalition to victory in the 2001 national parliamentary elections and again became prime minister.

Once in office, Berlusconi faced a number of challenges. He supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and his decision to send troops became increasingly unpopular, especially after an Italian intelligence agent was killed by U.S. forces in 2005. Berlusconi also faced criticism as the country's economy continued to struggle. After his coalition fared poorly in regional elections in 2005, Berlusconi resigned and won a vote of confidence in parliament. He subsequently formed a new government. In April 2006 he ran for reelection, but his coalition was defeated by a centre-left bloc headed by Romano Prodi. Berlusconi challenged the results, and an Italian court later upheld Prodi's victory. Berlusconi resigned in May.

Betancourt, Rómulo

2010-03-05T06:42:00.001-08:00

born Feb. 22, 1908, Guatiré, Miranda, Venezuela

died Sept. 28, 1981, New York City

left-wing, anti-Communist politician who, as president of Venezuela, pursued policies of agrarian reform, industrial development, and popular participation in government.

While a student at the University of Caracas, Betancourt was jailed (1928) for his activities against the dictatorial regime of Juan Vicente Gómez. Released after a few weeks, he continued to demonstrate against Gómez and was exiled, remaining abroad until 1936. During this period he wrote a book about his experiences and briefly joined the Communist Party in Costa Rica.

He returned to Venezuela in 1937 but was again exiled in 1939; he was permitted to return in 1941, in which year he helped found Acción Democrática, a left-wing anti-Communist party that came to power in 1945 following a coup against the government of Gen. Isaias Medina Angarita.

Appointed provisional president after the coup, Betancourt established a new constitution and inaugurated a program of moderate social reform, providing land for the peasants and exercising greater control over the petroleum industry. He resigned in 1948 to permit the election of a successor, but a coup a few months later, led by Marcos Pérez Jiménez, drove him once again into exile.

Betancourt spent the next 10 years in the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica, directing the remnants of the outlawed Acción Democrática. Jiménez was overthrown in 1958, and Betancourt returned to Venezuela and was elected president. Harassed by pro-Cuban Communists on one side and frightened conservatives on the other, he steered a middle course, passing an agrarian law to expropriate large estates, initiating an ambitious program of public works, and fostering industrial development to prevent complete dependence on petroleum revenues. He retired as president in 1964 and lived for eight years in self-imposed exile in Switzerland, finally returning to Venezuela in 1972 and campaigning unsuccessfully for reelection to the presidency in 1973. At the time of his death he was visiting New York City.

Bhumibol Adulyadej

2010-03-05T06:41:00.001-08:00

also called Phumiphon Adunlayadet, or Rama Ix

born Dec. 5, 1927, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.

ninth king of the Chakkri dynasty, which has ruled or reigned in Thailand from 1782.

He was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn and was born while his father, Prince Mahidol of Songkhla, was studying at Harvard University. He succeeded to the throne after his older brother Ananda Mahidol, who had been king since 1935, was found dead of a bullet wound on June 9, 1946. He was married to Princess Sirikit Kitiyakara in April 1950 and was formally crowned on May 5, 1950.

The absolute monarchy was abolished in Thailand during the reign of King Prajadhipok as a result of the revolution of 1932. King Bhumibol, therefore, wielded little real political power, although the constitution named him as head of state and commander of the armed forces. His most important function was to serve as a living symbol of and a focus of unity for the Thai nation. After the government of Sarit Thanarat in the late 1950s, the king led an active ceremonial life, frequently appearing in public and moderating between extreme parties in Thai politics. Bhumibol's designated heir to the throne was his only son, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn.

Bhutto, Benazir

2010-03-03T22:59:00.001-08:00

born June 21, 1953, Karachi, Pak.

died December 27, 2007, Rawalpindi, Pak.

Pakistani politician who became the first woman leader of a Muslim nation in modern history. She served two terms as prime minister of Pakistan, in 1988–90 and in 1993–96.

Bhutto was the daughter of the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was the leader of Pakistan from 1971 until 1977. She was educated at Harvard University (B.A., 1973) and subsequently studied philosophy, political science, and economics at the University of Oxford (B.A., 1977).

After her father's execution in 1979 during the rule of the military dictator Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, Bhutto became the titular head of her father's party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and endured frequent house arrest from 1979 to 1984. In exile from 1984 to 1986, she returned to Pakistan after the lifting of martial law and soon became the foremost figure in the political opposition to Zia. President Zia died in August 1988 in a mysterious plane crash, leaving a power vacuum at the centre of Pakistani politics. In the ensuing elections, Bhutto's PPP won the single largest bloc of seats in the National Assembly. She became prime minister on Dec. 1, 1988, heading a coalition government.

Bhutto was unable to do much to combat Pakistan's widespread poverty, governmental corruption, and increasing crime. In August 1990 the president of Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, dismissed her government on charges of corruption and other malfeasance and called for new elections. Bhutto's PPP suffered a defeat in the national elections of October 1990; thereafter she led the parliamentary opposition against her successor, Nawaz Sharif.

In elections held in October 1993 the PPP won a plurality of votes, and Bhutto again became head of a coalition government. Under renewed charges of corruption, economic mismanagement, and a decline of law and order, her government was dismissed in November 1996 by President Farooq Leghari.

She was assassinated on 27 December 2007, after departing a PPP rally in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, two weeks before the scheduled Pakistani general election of 2008 where she was a leading opposition candidate. The following year she was named one of seven winners of the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.

Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali

2010-03-03T22:58:00.001-08:00

born Jan. 5, 1928, near Lārkāna, Sindh, India [now in Pakistan]

died April 4, 1979, Rāwalpindi, Pak.

Pakistani statesman, president (1971–73), and prime minister (1973–77), a popular leader who was overthrown and executed by the military.

Born into a noble Rājpūt family that had accepted Islām, Bhutto was the son of a prominent political figure in the Indian colonial government. He was educated in Bombay and at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1950). Bhutto studied law at the University of Oxford and then practiced law and lectured in England. Upon his return to Pakistan (1953), he set up a law practice in Karāchi, where he was appointed a member of Pakistan's delegation to the United Nations in 1957.

After Mohammad Ayub Khan seized the government in 1958, Bhutto was appointed commerce minister and then held other cabinet posts. After his appointment as foreign minister (1963–66), he began working for greater independence from Western powers and for closer ties with China. His opposition to the peace with India after the 1965 war over Kashmir caused him to resign from the government, and in December 1967 he founded the Pakistan People's Party. Bhutto denounced the Ayub Khan regime as a dictatorship and was subsequently imprisoned (1968–69).

After the overthrow of the Ayub Khan regime by General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, national elections were held in 1970. Although Bhutto and his party won a sweeping electoral victory in West Pakistan, the biggest election winner was the Awami League, an East Pakistan-based party that had campaigned for full autonomy for East Pakistan. Bhutto refused to form a government with this separatist party, causing a nullification of the election. The widespread rioting that followed degenerated into civil war, after which East Pakistan, with the help of India, emerged as the independent state of Bangladesh. After West Pakistan's humiliating defeat by India in this military conflict, Yahya Khan turned the government over to Bhutto on Dec. 20, 1971. Bhutto placed his predecessor under house arrest, nationalized several key industries, and undertook the taxation of the landed families in his first acts as president. After the new constitution (1973) made the presidency largely ceremonial, Bhutto became prime minister. In both capacities, he had also filled the Cabinet posts of foreign affairs, defense, and interior. His government, retaining martial law, began a process of Islāmization.

Sensing that the public was turning against his rule by decree, Bhutto ordered new elections in 1977 to obtain a popular mandate. His party won by a large majority, but the opposition charged him with electoral fraud. The government was seized by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, the army chief of staff, on July 5, 1977. Soon afterward Bhutto was imprisoned. He was sentenced to death (March 18, 1978) on the charge of having ordered the assassination of a political opponent in 1974; after an appeal to a higher court, Bhutto was hanged, despite appeals for clemency from several world leaders. He was the author of The Myth of Independence (1969) and The Great Tragedy (1971).

Blair, Tony

2010-03-03T22:57:00.001-08:00

born May 6, 1953, Edinburgh, Scotland

in full Anthony Charles Lynton Blair British Labour Party leader who became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1997.

The son of a barrister, Blair graduated from St. John's College of the University of Oxford in 1975 and was called to the bar the following year. While specializing in employment and commercial law, he became increasingly involved in Labour Party politics and in 1983 was elected to the House of Commons. His entry into politics coincided with a long political ascendancy of the Conservative Party (from 1979) and Labour's loss of four consecutive general elections (from 1979 through 1992).

Entering Labour's shadow cabinet in 1988, Blair became the most outspoken of those party leaders calling for Labour to move to the political centre and deemphasize its traditional advocacy of state control and public ownership of certain sectors of the economy. In 1992 John Smith was elected Labour leader, and he appointed Blair shadow home secretary. After Smith's death in May 1994, Blair was elected the new leader of the Labour Party in July. By mid-1995 he had revamped the Labour Party's platform, obtaining unprecedented commitments to free enterprise, anti-inflationary policies, aggressive crime prevention, and support for Britain's integration into the European Union. Blair summed up his reforms—often opposed by members of his own party—by describing the party as New Labour. Under his leadership, the Labour Party heavily defeated the Conservatives in nationwide municipal elections held in May 1995 and won a landslide victory over the Conservatives in the general election of May 1997. Blair enjoyed a 179-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest majority of any party since 1935. He became the youngest prime minister since 1812.

His government carried out several reforms that had been promised in the party's manifesto but also accepted some Conservative policies that had been implemented in the previous 18 years. His first major initiative—and perhaps his boldest—granted the Bank of England the power to determine interest rates without government consultation—a policy that had not appeared in the party's platform. His government also immediately signed the Treaty on European Union's Social Chapter and turned its attention to brokering a peace agreement between republicans and unionists in Northern Ireland. Blair initiated reforms in the House of Commons, modernizing the format of “Prime Minister's Question Time,” during which the prime minister answers questions from members of Parliament. During his first year in office, he organized referenda that created devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales and developed a joint committee to coordinate constitutional and other policies with the opposition Liberal Democrats.

In May 1998 Blair led a successful referendum campaign to create a new assembly for London and to establish the city's first directly elected mayor. That year Blair also helped to negotiate the Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement), which was ratified overwhelmingly in both Ireland and Northern Ireland and which created an elected devolved power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland for the first time since 1972. Blair also eliminated all but 92 of the hereditary members of the House of Lords as the prelude to more-extensive reforms of that chamber. In 2001 Blair led the Labour Party to a 167-seat majority in the House of Commons—the largest-ever second-term majority in British electoral history.

After the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Blair allied the United Kingdom with the United States and its president, George W. Bush, in a global war against terrorism. In early 2003, following passage by the United Nations Security Council of a resolution mandating the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, Blair and Bush tried without success to persuade other Security Council members that continued weapons inspections would not succeed in uncovering any weapons of mass destruction held by the Iraqi government of Ṣaddām Ḥussein. Despite deep divisions within the Labour Party—several ministers resigned and 139 Labour members of Parliament voted in favour of a motion opposing the government's policy—and strong public opposition to a war with Iraq, Blair, with Bush, led a coalition of military forces in an attack on Iraq in March 2003. When military inspectors failed to uncover weapons of mass destruction in the country after the coalition's victory, the Blair government was accused of distorting (“sexing up”) intelligence on which it had based its claim that Iraq was an imminent threat. Notwithstanding lingering public dissatisfaction with Blair's policy in Iraq, Blair led the Labour Party to its third successive general election victory in May 2005.

Bokassa, Jean-Bédel

2010-03-03T22:56:00.001-08:00

born Feb. 22, 1921, Bobangui, Moyen-Congo, French Equatorial Africa [now in Central African Republic]

died Nov. 3, 1996, Bangui, Central African Republic

also called Bokassa I African military leader who was president of the Central African Republic (1966–76) and self-styled emperor of the Central African Empire (1976–79).

The son of a village headman, Bokassa attended local mission schools before joining the French army in 1939. He distinguished himself in the French conflict in Indochina, and by 1961 he had achieved the rank of captain. At the request of President David Dacko, Bokassa left the French armed forces to head the army of the newly independent Central African Republic. On Dec. 31, 1965, Bokassa used his position as supreme military commander to overthrow Dacko; he declared himself president of the republic on Jan. 1, 1966. Bokassa initially spearheaded a number of reforms in an effort to develop the Central African Republic. He sought to promote economic development with Operation Bokassa, a national economic plan that created huge nationalized farms and industries, but the plan was stymied by poor management. He later became known for his autocratic and unpredictable policies, and his government was characterized by periodic reshuffles in which the power of the presidency was gradually increased.

In December 1976 Bokassa assumed the title Emperor Bokassa I and changed the name of his country to the Central African Empire. He was crowned a year later—in emulation of his hero, Napoleon I—in a lavish ceremony that cost more than $20 million. By this time Bokassa's rule had effectively bankrupted his impoverished country, and his reign as emperor proved to be short-lived. Following the substantiation of international charges that Bokassa had personally participated in a massacre of 100 schoolchildren by his imperial guard, French paratroops carried out a military coup against him that reestablished the republic and reinstated Dacko as president (September 1979). Bokassa went into exile, first traveling to Côte d'Ivoire but later settling in France.

Bolger, James Brendan

2010-03-03T22:55:00.001-08:00

born May 31, 1935, Opunake, North Island, New Zealand

New Zealand farmer and politician who served as prime minister of New Zealand from 1990 to 1997.

Bolger was born to newly arrived Irish Roman Catholic immigrants who had taken up dairy farming in Taranaki province. He left school at age 15 to help his parents on their farm. His first involvement with politics was with a local branch of Federated Farmers. Bolger moved to central North Island in 1963, established a farm of his own, and from that base became vice president of Federated Farmers Waikato (provincial) division and won election to Parliament with the National Party (NP) from 1972. After Bolger stood for three years in opposition to Norman Kirk's one-term Labour government, he was appointed undersecretary both for agriculture and fisheries and for Maori affairs by the new prime minister, Robert Muldoon.

As labour minister in the next two Muldoon governments, he championed a bold assault on compulsory unionism. He made unsuccessful challenges for the posts of deputy leader in 1981 and leader in 1984 before replacing Jim McLay as party leader in 1986. The following year he failed to upset David Lange in the August triennial elections. The NP won the 1990 elections by a landslide, and Bolger became prime minister. Reconciliation with the Maori was a major concern, and in 1994 his government reached an agreement with the Tainui, a North Island Maori tribal federation, for lands and resources taken from the Maori in the mid-19th century. Bolger's popularity increased in 1995 when he opposed French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

In the 1996 elections, which were the country's first under the mixed-member proportional system, the NP failed to win a majority and was forced to form a coalition with the New Zealand First Party (NZFP). Although Bolger continued as prime minister, he began losing support as critics charged that he gave the inexperienced NZFP too many cabinet positions. In addition, his health and educational policies were not popular, and a pension reform, a compulsory retirement savings plan, was rejected in a referendum in September 1997. In November Bolger resigned as prime minister and as leader of the NP. Jennifer Shipley was named head of the party, and on December 8, 1997, she became New Zealand's first female prime minister.

Bolkiah Muʿizzaddin Waddaulah, Haji Hassanal

2010-03-03T22:51:00.000-08:00

born July 15, 1946, Brunei Town [now Bandar Seri Begawan], Brunei

29th sultan of Brunei.

Hassanal Bolkiah was the eldest son of Sultan Sir Haji Omar Ali Saifuddin. He was educated privately and later attended the Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, England. In 1961 Sir Omar named him crown prince, and when Sir Omar abdicated six years later, Hassanal Bolkiah became sultan on October 5, 1967, his coronation taking place on August 1, 1968. For the next decade, however, his father remained the power behind the throne. After the death of his mother in 1979, his father withdrew from public affairs, and the sultan quickly took the dominant role in the administration of Brunei. He made frequent trips throughout the country to listen to his subjects as well as to promote himself as ruler. In anticipation of independence from Britain, he began to create a native bureaucracy, replacing British expatriates in the civil service with Bruneians, and he cracked down on corruption.

After having held Brunei as a protectorate for 95 years, the British formally withdrew on January 1, 1984. Although there were minor disagreements over matters such as the management of Brunei's huge investment portfolio, relations between the two countries continued to be friendly. Sir Omar died in 1986, and on October 5, 1992, the sultan, who also acted as prime minister and as the minister of defense and of finance, celebrated the 25th year of his reign. He continued to rule under a state of emergency declared by his father in 1962. In the 1980s and 1990s the sultan regularly appeared at or near the top of lists of the world's richest individuals, his fortune deriving from Brunei's oil and gas.

Bosch, Juan

2010-03-03T22:49:00.001-08:00

born June 30, 1909, La Vega, Dominican Republic

died November 1, 2001, Santo Domingo

in full Juan Bosch Gaviño Dominican writer, scholar, and politician elected president of the Dominican Republic in 1962 but deposed less than a year later.

Bosch, an intellectual, was an early opponent of Rafael Trujillo's dictatorial regime. He went into exile in 1937 and in 1939 founded the leftist Dominican Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Dominicano; PRD). The PRD was the first organized political party of the Dominican Republic and the only one with a constructive program ready to implement after Trujillo's death in 1961. Bosch, a dazzling and charismatic orator, won a landslide victory in the elections of December 20, 1962. He was the first politician to directly address the peasantry, a heretofore ignored group that gave him an overwhelming majority in the election. Bosch not only appealed to the poor but also cut across class lines to win the favour of the middle class and intellectuals.

Entering office on February 27, 1963, Bosch faced serious problems at the outset of his term. The United States was at odds with Fidel Castro's government in Cuba and leery of the slightest hint of leftist politics in the Caribbean. This fear was fed by damaging reports of the new regime from a skeptical U.S. ambassador in the Dominican Republic. Bosch's constitution of April 29, liberal and democratic, alienated four powerful groups in the country: landholders, even small ones, were frightened by his prohibition against latifundia (large plantation-type farms); the Roman Catholic church was angered by the secular nature of the constitution; industrialists felt the constitution was worker-oriented; and the military considered that its powers were curtailed. On September 25, 1963, the military deposed Bosch. Two years later his followers staged a rebellion in hopes of returning Bosch to power. The United States, fearful of a communist revolution, sent troops to end the revolt.

After a two-year exile in Puerto Rico (September 28, 1963–September 1965), Bosch was allowed to return and reluctantly agreed to take part in the new elections. Fearful for his safety, he campaigned half-heartedly, making no public appearances, and lost to Joaquín Balaguer, the conservative candidate with heavy backing from the United States. Bosch and his party abstained from participating in the 1970 elections, but by 1973 the PRD wanted to rejoin the political process. Bosch resigned from the PRD and formed a third party, the Party of Dominican Liberation (Partido de la Liberación Dominicana). In subsequent presidential elections, Bosch repeatedly lost but claimed vote fraud. He last ran for president in 1994, finishing third.

His term in office was too short for a judgment of his effectiveness as president, but Bosch's contribution to his country's political development was of paramount importance. After 31 years of dictatorship, Bosch created a genuine political party, forcing the opposition to do the same, and enabling his country to have legitimate, representative elections.

Bosch was a respected historian and essayist, having written mostly on Dominican and Caribbean politics. He also wrote novels and a biography, Simón Bolívar (1960).

Botha, P. W.

2010-03-03T22:48:00.001-08:00

born Jan. 12, 1916, Paul Roux, S.Af.

died Oct. 31, 2006, Wilderness, near George

in full Pieter Willem Botha prime minister (1978–84) and first state president (1984–89) of South Africa.

A native of the Orange Free State, he studied law at the University of Orange Free State at Bloemfontein from 1932 to 1935 but left without graduating. Already active in politics in his teens, he moved to Cape Province at age 20 to become a full-time organizer for the National Party. He was elected to Parliament in the National landslide of 1948. By 1958 he was deputy minister of the interior, and thereafter (1961–80) he was successively minister of commercial development, Coloured affairs, public works, and defense. He succeeded to the prime ministry upon the resignation of B.J. Vorster in 1978.

Botha's government faced serious foreign and domestic difficulties. The coming to power of black governments in Mozambique, Angola, and Zimbabwe gave new energy to black South African nationalists and the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO). Other developments led to frequent black student and labour unrest in South Africa itself, especially in 1980. Botha responded with a military policy that included frequent South African raids combined with support for antigovernment groups in the border states, seeking to weaken the Angolan, Mozambican, and Zimbabwean governments. Botha also refused to withdraw from Namibia, though he continued negotiations on the question.

He combined this foreign policy with a program of reforms at home—such as the policy of granting “independence” to various black homelands—that were meant at once to mollify international public opinion while dividing his nonwhite domestic opposition. A key point in this program was the promulgation of a new constitution, which granted very limited powers to Asians and Coloureds but which made no concessions to the black majority. Though the proposed reforms maintained white supremacy, to which Botha was fully committed, the right wing of the National Party split away in protest in 1982 to form the Conservative Party. Botha was still able to get the constitution passed by referendum of whites in 1983. The following year he was elected under the new constitution as state president by an electoral college selected from the racially segregated, white-dominated Parliament. During his term in office, Botha sought (with limited success) to find some middle ground between those who fully supported apartheid and the increasingly frustrated and militant nonwhite population; although his actions alienated many National Party supporters, they were not enough to appease those seeking the end of apartheid. Early in 1989 Botha fell ill and resigned his post as party leader, but he did not yield the presidency until he faced opposition not only from the National Party but from within his own Cabinet. He was succeeded by F.W. de Klerk, who introduced radical policy changes that led to the dismantling of the apartheid system and paved the way for the country's first multiracial elections in 1994.

In 1995 a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in South Africa to review atrocities committed during the apartheid years. Botha was summoned before the commission in 1997 but refused to participate. He was fined and received a suspended sentence, which was later appealed and overturned.

Boumedienne, Houari

2010-03-03T22:45:00.000-08:00

born Aug. 23, 1927, Clauzel, near Guelma, Alg.

died Dec. 27, 1978, Algiers

original name Mohammed Ben Brahim Boukharouba army officer who became president of Algeria in July 1965 following a coup d'etat.

Boukharouba's service to Algeria began in the 1950s, during his country's struggle for independence from France, when, after studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo, he joined the rebel forces and adopted the name Houari Boumedienne. The rebels divided the country into military districts, and Boumedienne commanded the one around Oran. In 1960 he became chief of staff of the National Liberation Front, and he centred his efforts on raising an Algerian army in Morocco and Tunisia, out of reach of the French.

After a peace treaty was signed with France in March 1962, tension among the Algerian leaders increased, and that September Boumedienne occupied Algiers in support of Ahmed Ben Bella. Ben Bella became president later in the year, and Boumedienne was named minister of defense and vice president. Conflicts developed between the two leaders, and in June 1965 Boumedienne effected a coup against Ben Bella and installed himself as president. Boumedienne lacked widespread popular support, and he governed at first through a 26-member revolutionary council. As a result his leadership was weak and indecisive, but after an attempt by military officers to overthrow his regime failed in December 1967, he asserted his direct and undisputed leadership of Algeria.

In 1971 he imposed state control on the oil industry, at the cost of ending Algeria's special relationship with France. He risked war with Morocco in 1975 by trying to gain territorial access to the Atlantic across the Spanish Sahara (later Western Sahara). In 1976 his government issued a National Charter and then a new constitution, both adopted by referendum. Negotiating important industrial contracts with Western countries and at the same time maintaining close but independent relations with the Soviet bloc, Boumedienne became a leading figure in the nonaligned movement.

Bourguiba, Habib

2010-03-03T22:43:00.001-08:00

born August 3, 1903, Al-Munastīr, Tunisia

died April 6, 2000, Al-Munastīr

in full Habib ibn Ali Bourguiba architect of Tunisia's independence and first president of Tunisia (1957–87), one of the major voices of moderation and gradualism in the Arab world.

Bourguiba was born—the seventh child of Ali Bourguiba, a former lieutenant in the army of the bey (ruler) of Tunisia—in a small fishing village. At an early age, he was sent to Tunis, where he received a good education in Arabic and in the foundations of Islam, as well as in French and in Western thought.

Between 1924 and 1927 Bourguiba studied law and political science at the Sorbonne, in Paris, where he established contacts with a number of French liberals and with Algerians and Moroccans who were working for the independence of their countries.

For seven years after his return to Tunis in 1927, Bourguiba practiced law, and in 1932 he founded a nationalist newspaper in French. In 1934, when it became apparent that the leading nationalist political group, the Destour (Constitution) Party, was unable to make headway in the struggle for Tunisian independence from France, Bourguiba and his younger colleagues established the Neo-Destour Party, with Bourguiba as its secretary-general. He would become its president 14 years later.

After 1934, Bourguiba was the central figure in the Tunisian national struggle. A pragmatist, he believed in doing things in stages, and his gradualist policy came to be known as “Bourguibism.” It was he who in one word formulated the demands of the Tunisians: independence. Under him the people came to identify with the national movement that had been almost a monopoly of the urban elite. An exceptionally able organizer, Bourguiba not only established branches of the party in out-of-the-way villages but, realizing that the French government would resort to repressive measures, also saw to it that a new set of party executives would always fill the vacuum created by arrest or exile. Between 1934 and 1952 nine such groups succeeded one another, thus keeping the struggle alive; Bourguiba himself spent about 10 years in detention during this period (1934–36, 1938–42, 1952–55).

Imprisoned in Vichy, France, at the outbreak of World War II, Bourguiba refused to throw in his lot with the Axis powers unless they declared Tunisian independence first. He was convinced that the Allies would win the war and strove to keep Tunisia neutral. In 1945–46 and 1951 Bourguiba traveled extensively in the Middle East, the United States, East Asia, and Europe, publicizing the cause of Tunisian independence.

When, in 1952–54, the Tunisian nationalists increasingly took to terrorism, the French government became seriously concerned. Repression ceased to be effective, and in 1954 the government of Pierre Mendès-France began negotiations with Bourguiba; in April 1955 he secured autonomy for his country from Edgar Faure, Mendès-France's successor. Foreign affairs and defense were reserved for France.

On March 20, 1956, Bourguiba, following his policy of gradualism, concluded—with Guy Mollet, the French premier—a treaty giving Tunisia its independence. In 1957 agreement in principle for the evacuation of the French forces from Tunisia, except Bizerte, was reached. After the abolition of the monarchy in 1957, Bourguiba was elected president of Tunisia. Two years later he gave Tunisia a constitution that, while retaining Islam as the state religion, abolished polygamy, controlled divorce, and attempted to make certain that the month-long Fast of Ramadan did not curtail workers' productivity.

Bearing in mind the need to economize, as well as the danger from military coups, Bourguiba kept the Tunisian army small. Tunisia's defense expenditures never exceeded 10 percent of the budget, while education and agriculture usually received 25 percent each and health even a little more. One of the most successful of his projects was the settlement of about 50,000 nomads in southern Tunisia, which under French rule had been governed by a military administration. Bourguiba divided the country into 14 provinces under civilian administration with modern administrative laws.

Because Tunisia depended for its development on foreign aid from various sources, Bourguiba observed a policy of neutrality. Intellectually, culturally, and educationally, however, Tunisia leaned toward France. Yet after independence two incidents imperiled Tunisia's close ties with that country.

In 1961, probably in response to pressures by other Arab leaders, Bourguiba asked France to evacuate Bizerte, which, according to the agreement on independence (1956), was to remain a French military and naval base. When the French did not immediately respond, he ordered an attack on their forces, who returned the fire. Bizerte was finally evacuated more than two years later but at the cost of more than 1,000 Tunisian lives. The nationalization of all land still owned by French settlers in 1964 further strained relations with France. The evacuation of Bizerte caused economic loss to Tunisia by cutting off a source of revenue from France, but Bourguiba gained in prestige.

For many years Bourguiba was a controversial figure in Arab politics, primarily because he took a courageous and independent stand against “unanimous” decisions or dictates by the Arab League but also possibly because he cut a figure on the international scene far bigger than in his own country. Bourguiba believed in a moderate form of socialism. In the mid-1960s Tunisia tried a strict form of agricultural cooperatives and state control of trade and industry, but the result was disastrous, and Bourguiba returned to his more deliberate methods. In 1975 the Tunisian National Assembly made him president for life.

Bourguiba's health began failing in the 1970s, and with this the question of his succession emerged. In 1986 the elderly leader began acting erratically, dismissing close advisers and his handpicked successor, Prime Minister Mohammed Mzali. In early 1987 he appointed Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the minister of the interior, to the prime ministry after the latter had firmly suppressed Islamic fundamentalists who had planned to overthrow the government. In November 1987 Ben Ali removed Bourguiba from the presidency on the grounds that the aged leader had become too ill and senile to effectively govern the country any longer.

Brandt, Willy

2010-03-03T22:42:00.001-08:00

born December 18, 1913, Lübeck, Germany

died October 8/9, 1992, Unkel, near Bonn

original name Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm German statesman, leader of the German Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) from 1964 to 1987, and chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his efforts to achieve reconciliation between West Germany and the countries of the Soviet bloc.

Brandt passed his university entrance examination in 1932. A year later, however, when the Nazis came to power, his activities as a young Social Democrat brought him into conflict with the Gestapo, and he was forced to flee the country to escape arrest. It was at this time, while living in Norway and earning a living as a journalist, that he assumed the name Willy Brandt. When the Germans occupied Norway he escaped to Sweden, where he remained for the duration of World War II. After the war he returned to Germany as a Norwegian citizen and for a time was press attaché at the Norwegian mission in Berlin.

Pressed to return to politics, he became a German citizen again and, after a period as Berlin representative of the Social Democratic Party Executive Committee, was elected a member of the federal parliament in 1949. Eight years later he became the mayor of West Berlin (1957–66), a post in which he achieved world fame. He showed great moral courage when in 1958 the Soviet Union demanded that West Berlin be given the title of a demilitarized free city and especially when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. He succeeded Erich Ollenhauer as chairman of the SPD in 1964 and campaigned for the office of chancellor of West Germany three times—in 1961, 1965, and 1969.

When the grand coalition government of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the SPD was formed in 1966, Brandt became foreign minister and vice-chancellor. His party improved its performance at the federal election in 1969 and formed a coalition government with the small Free Democratic Party, pushing the CDU into the role of opposition party for the first time. His government's first major decisions included the revaluing of the West German mark and the signing of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The year following his election as chancellor, Brandt concentrated on foreign affairs, and he particularly sought to improve relations with East Germany, other communist countries in eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, formulating a policy known as Ostpolitik (“eastern policy”). His efforts led to a treaty with the Soviet Union in August 1970 calling for mutual renunciation of force and the acceptance of current European borders; to a nonaggression treaty with Poland in December 1970 recognizing the Oder-Neisse Line as Poland's western boundary; and to the Big Four agreement in September 1971 on the status of Berlin. His treaty with Poland was controversial; detractors claimed that it signaled West Germany's acceptance of the permanent loss of those eastern lands stripped from Germany after World War II, while supporters praised it for opening the possibility of reuniting West and East Germany and stabilizing relations with eastern Europe. A firm supporter of a united Europe, Brandt exerted his influence to break down French objections to enlarging the European Economic Community (EEC). More than any other statesman he helped promote the entry of Britain and other countries to the EEC.

Brandt resigned in May 1974 after his close aide Gunther Guillaume was unmasked as an East German spy. He remained the chairman of the SPD until 1987 and was also head of the Socialist International (the Social Democrats' umbrella organization) from 1976 to 1992. From 1979 he also headed the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, known as the Brandt Commission, a prestigious independent panel that studied world economic policies.

Brandt received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his continuing work toward reconciliation between West Germany and East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. He wrote several books, including Willy Brandt in Exile: Essays, Reflections and Letters, 1933–1947, translated from the German by R.W. Last (1971), and People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, translated by J.M. Brownjohn (1978). The latter comprises Brandt's political memoirs.

Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich

2010-03-03T22:41:00.001-08:00

born Dec. 19, 1906, Kamenskoye, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Dniprodzerzhynsk, Ukraine]

died Nov. 10, 1982, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

Soviet statesman and Communist Party official who was, in effect, the leader of the Soviet Union for 18 years.

Having been a land surveyor in the 1920s, Brezhnev became a full member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1931 and studied at the metallurgical institute in Kamenskoye (now Dniprodzerzhynsk). After graduating (1935), he worked as an engineer and director of a technical school and also held a variety of local party posts; his career flourished under Joseph Stalin's regime, and by 1939 he had become secretary of the regional party committee of Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipropetrovsk). During World War II Brezhnev served as a political commissar in the Red Army, advancing in rank until he became a major general (1943) and head of the political commissars on the Ukrainian front.

After the war he again held posts as chief of several regional party committees in Ukraine. In 1950 he was sent to Moldavia as first secretary of the Moldavian Communist Party with the task of sovietizing the Romanian population of that recently conquered territory. In 1952 he advanced to become a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU and a candidate member of the Politburo.

When Stalin died (March 1953), Brezhnev lost his posts on the Central Committee and in the Politburo and had to accept the position of deputy head of the political department of the Ministry of Defense with the rank of lieutenant general. But in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, who had gained full power in Moscow, made Brezhnev second secretary of the Kazakstan Communist Party (1954), in which capacity he vigorously implemented Khrushchev's ambitious Virgin and Idle Lands Campaign in Kazakstan. Brezhnev was soon promoted to first secretary of the Kazakstan Communist Party (1955), and in 1956 he was reelected to his posts on the CPSU Central Committee and in the Politburo. A year later, after he had loyally worked against the “antiparty group” that attempted to remove Khrushchev, Brezhnev was made a full member of the Politburo, and in 1960 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet—i.e., the titular head of the Soviet state. In July 1964 he resigned that post to become Khrushchev's assistant as second secretary of the Central Committee, by which time he was considered Khrushchev's heir apparent as party leader. Three months later, however, Brezhnev helped lead the coalition that forced Khrushchev from power, and, in the division of spoils that followed, Brezhnev became first secretary (after 1966, general secretary) of the CPSU (Oct. 15, 1964). Following a brief period of “collective leadership” with Premier Aleksey Kosygin, Brezhnev emerged clearly as the dominant figure.

As head of the party Brezhnev left many affairs of state—e.g., diplomatic relations with noncommunist states and internal economic development—to his colleagues Kosygin and Nikolay V. Podgorny, chairman of the Presidium. Brezhnev concentrated on foreign and military affairs. When Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček tried to liberalize its communist system in 1967–68, Brezhnev developed the concept, known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the right of Soviet intervention in cases where “the essential common interests of other socialist countries are threatened by one of their number.” This doctrine was used to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies in 1968.

During the 1970s Brezhnev attempted to normalize relations between West Germany and the Warsaw Pact and to ease tensions with the United States through the policy known as détente. At the same time, he saw to it that the Soviet Union's military-industrial complex was greatly expanded and modernized. Under his leadership, the Soviets achieved parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons, and their space program overtook the American one. A huge navy was fitted out and the army remained the largest in the world. The Soviet Union supported “wars of national liberation” in developing countries through the provision of military aid to left-wing movements and governments.

But Brezhnev's unceasing buildup of his defense and aerospace industries left other sectors of the economy increasingly deprived of funds. Soviet agriculture, consumer-goods industries, and health-care services declined throughout the 1970s and early '80s as a consequence, resulting in shortages and declining standards of living.

In 1976 Brezhnev was made marshal of the Soviet Union, thus becoming the only other party leader after Stalin to hold the highest military rank. The system of collective leadership ended with his dismissal of Podgorny as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in May 1977 and Brezhnev's election to that position the following month. He thus became the first person in Soviet history to hold both the leadership of the party and of the state. In 1979 Brezhnev reached agreement with U.S. President Jimmy Carter on a new bilateral strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II), but the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and soon afterward the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (December 1979) in an effort to prop up a faltering communist government there. Brezhnev's government also helped plan General Wojciech Jaruzelski's suppression of Poland's Solidarity union in December 1981. His efforts to neutralize internal dissent within the Soviet Union itself were similarly determined.

Brezhnev retained his hold on power to the end despite his frail health and growing feebleness. He gave the Soviet Union a formidable military-industrial base capable of supplying large numbers of the most modern weapons, but in so doing he impoverished the rest of the Soviet economy. After his death, he was criticized for a gradual slide in living standards, the spread of corruption and cronyism within the Soviet bureaucracy, and the generally stagnant and dispiriting character of Soviet life in the late 1970s and early '80s.

Brundtland, Gro Harlem

2010-03-03T22:40:00.001-08:00

born April 20, 1939, Oslo, Norway

politician who served three terms as prime minister of Norway in the 1980s and '90s and later was director general of the World Health Organization (WHO; 1998–2003). Trained as a physician, she became identified with public health and environmental issues and with the rights of women.

The daughter of a physician and politician, she received an M.D. degree from the University of Oslo in 1963 and a master's degree in public health from Harvard University in 1965. She then worked as a public health officer for the city of Oslo and for Oslo schools. A member of the Labour Party, she was minister of the environment from 1974 to 1979, and she was first elected to the Storting (parliament) in 1977. In 1975 she was elected deputy leader of the party and in 1981 its leader.

When the Labour prime minister resigned in 1981, Brundtland was appointed to the post, the youngest person and first woman to become prime minister of Norway. She served for only nine months, because Labour lost the elections held later that year. She returned as prime minister in 1986–89 and served again in 1990–96 until her resignation. Brundtland never had fewer than 8 women in her 18-member cabinet and, overall, is credited with securing better educational and economic opportunities for women in Norway. In 1983 she became chair of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development, which in 1987 issued Our Common Future, the report that introduced the idea of “sustainable development” and led to the first Earth Summit. In 1998 she became director general of the WHO, where she tackled global pandemics such as AIDS and SARS; her term ended in 2003.

Bruton, John

2010-03-03T22:39:00.001-08:00

born May 18, 1947, Dublin, Ire.

in full John Gerard Bruton prime minister (taoiseach) of Ireland from December 1994 to May 1997.

Bruton was educated at Clongowes Wood College and then studied economics at University College and law at King's Inns in Dublin, qualifying as a barrister in 1970. He joined the Fine Gael party in 1965, and he was elected to the Dáil (lower house of Parliament) for Meath, where he farmed, in 1969. He served as a parliamentary secretary in the government of Liam Cosgrave (1973–77), and when Garret FitzGerald led another Fine Gael–Labour Party coalition into office in 1981, Bruton became minister for finance. His budget imposed an immensely unpopular value-added tax on children's shoes that led to the fall of the government. He also served in FitzGerald's second government as minister for industry and energy (1982–83), minister for industry, trade, commerce, and tourism (1983–86), and minister for finance (1986–87). In the last capacity, he proposed a budget that gave the Labour Party an excuse to leave the government before the 1987 general elections. Bruton became party leader in 1990. He failed to negotiate a deal with Labour after the 1992 elections but, following the collapse of the Fianna Fáil–Labour government in 1994, returned his party to power as part of a coalition with the Labour Party and Democratic Left. The coalition remained in force to contest the 1997 elections, which were indecisive. After the elections, Bruton served as acting taoiseach until the Dáil convened in late June and elected a Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democrats government.

Buhari, Muhammad

2010-03-03T22:37:00.001-08:00

born December 17, 1942, Daura, Nigeria

Muhammad also spelled Muhammadu Nigerian military leader, who served as head of state (1985).

Educated largely in Katsina, Buhari took military training in Kaduna as well as Great Britain, India, and the United States. He was involved in the military coup that ousted Yakubu Gowon in 1975 and was appointed military governor of North Eastern state (now Borno) that same year. He was appointed federal commissioner for petroleum resources by General Olusegun Obasanjo, who became military head of state when Gowon's successor, Murtala Mohammed, was assassinated in 1976. By 1977 Buhari had become the military secretary at Supreme Military Headquarters, which was the seat of government. By September 1979 he had returned to regular army duties and commanded a division based in Kaduna. Although elected government had returned to Nigeria in 1979, military dissatisfaction with what it perceived as corrupt politicians led to another military coup on December 31, 1984; Buhari was chosen unanimously to be the new head of state.

Insurmountable economic problems plagued the Buhari regime as petroleum prices collapsed in the face of expanding foreign debt. Buhari instituted austerity measures that caused severe hardship to the average Nigerian. In addition, political corruption continued unabated, with politicians escaping to Western countries with millions of dollars in government money. In an effort to stop dissension, Buhari instituted restrictions on the press, political freedoms, and trade unionists. By August 1985 even the military had had enough, and Ibrahim Babangida took control of the government. Buhari was detained in Benin City but was released at the end of 1988. In 2003 Buhari ran for president; he was defeated by the incumbent, Olusegun Obasanjo.

Bush, George

2010-03-03T22:35:00.001-08:00

Introduction

born June 12, 1924, Milton, Massachusetts, U.S.

In full George Herbert Walker Bush politician and businessman who was vice president of the United States (1981–89) and the 41st president of the United States (1989–93). As president, Bush assembled a multinational force to compel the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War.

Early life and career

Bush was the son of Prescott Sheldon Bush, an investment banker and U.S. senator from Connecticut, and Dorothy Walker Bush, scion of a prominent St. Louis, Missouri, family. (Her father established the amateur golf competition known as the Walker Cup.) The young Bush grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended private schools there and in Andover, Massachusetts. Upon graduation from Phillips Academy, Andover, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. He served from 1942 to 1944 as a torpedo bomber pilot on aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II, flying some 58 combat missions; he was shot down by the Japanese in 1944. For his service he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. In January 1945 he married Barbara Pierce (Barbara Bush).

Following the family tradition, Bush attended Yale University, graduating in 1948. His membership in the Skull and Bones secret society there later became an issue that his critics used as evidence of elitism. Rejecting a position in his father's firm, he moved with his young family to Texas and became a salesman of oil-field supplies. He cofounded the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company (1951), the Zapata Petroleum Corporation (1953), and the Zapata Off-Shore Company (1954). In 1959 he became active in the Republican Party in Houston, and after losing a campaign for the U.S. Senate to Democrat Ralph Yarborough in 1964, Bush was elected in 1966 to a safely Republican seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He gave up the seat in 1970 to run again for the Senate. He was defeated again, this time by Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, Jr. Shortly after his defeat, Bush was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (UN; 1971–72). In 1973, as the Watergate Scandal was erupting, Bush became chairman of the Republican National Committee. In this post, he stood by President Nixon until August 1974, when he joined a growing chorus of voices calling on the president to resign. Later that year, President Gerald R. Ford, who had nominated Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, named a disappointed Bush chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing—which was then the senior U.S. representative in China, because relations between the two countries did not permit the exchange of ambassadors. He served in this capacity until he was asked to head the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976. As CIA director, Bush took steps to ensure that the agency's activities did not exceed congressional authorization. When Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, Bush resigned and returned to Texas, where in 1979 he announced his candidacy for president.

Vice presidency

After declaring that his opponent, the more popular and conservative Ronald W. Reagan, would have to practice “voodoo economics” in order to increase federal revenue by lowering taxes, Bush abandoned his campaign for the Republican Party's presidential nomination in May 1980 and threw his support behind Reagan, who then chose Bush as his running mate. The Reagan-Bush ticket defeated the Democratic ticket of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale by a wide margin in the 1980 presidential election. Bush won Reagan's loyalty, and the two were reelected in 1984 for a second term in an even greater landslide than that of 1980.

As vice president, Bush traveled more than a million miles as the administration's representative. When asked about his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair—in which the Reagan administration, in violation of congressional edict, used funds from the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund Contra rebels fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua—Bush claimed that he was “out of the loop,” though he did admit knowing about the arms sale to Iran. In 1987 he published an autobiography, Looking Forward (written with Victor Gold).

An early and leading candidate for the Republican Party's nomination for the presidency in 1988, he secured the nomination and, together with his running mate, Dan Quayle, defeated the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, winning 53 percent of the popular vote to Dukakis's 46 percent. Although Bush had called for “a kinder, and gentler, nation” in his speech accepting the nomination, his campaign was negative, at one point criticizing Dukakis with a phrase—“card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union”—reminiscent of that used by Senator Joe McCarthy. Bush also won supporters with his pledge to continue the Reagan economic program, repeatedly stating: “Read my lips, no new taxes!” (See primary source document: Inaugural Address.)

Presidency

Upon assuming office, Bush made a number of notable senior staff appointments, among them that of General Colin Powell to chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. His other important policy makers included James Baker as secretary of state and William Bennett as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In the course of his presidency, he also nominated two Supreme Court justices, David H. Souter (to replace the retiring William J. Brennan) and the more controversial Clarence Thomas (to replace Thurgood Marshall).

From the outset of his presidency, however, Bush demonstrated far more interest in foreign than domestic policy. In December 1989, he ordered a military invasion of Panama in order to topple that country's leader, General Manuel Antonio Noriega, who—though at one time of service to the U.S. government—had become notorious for his brutality and his involvement in the drug trade. The invasion, which lasted four days, resulted in hundreds of deaths, mostly of Panamanians, and the operation was denounced by both the Organization of American States and the UN General Assembly.

Bush's presidency coincided with world events of large proportion, including the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. In November 1990 Bush met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Paris and signed a mutual nonaggression pact, a symbolic conclusion to the Cold War. They signed treaties sharply reducing the number of weapons that the two superpowers had stockpiled over the decades of Cold War hostility.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. Bush led a worldwide UN-approved embargo against Iraq to force its withdrawal and sent a U.S. military contingent to Saudi Arabia to counteract Iraqi pressure and intimidation. Perhaps his most significant diplomatic achievement was the skillful construction of a coalition of western European and Arab states against Iraq. Over the objections of those who favoured restraint, Bush increased the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region to about 500,000 troops within a few months. When Iraq failed to withdraw from Kuwait, he authorized a U.S.-led air offensive that began on January 16–17, 1991. The ensuing Persian Gulf War culminated in an Allied ground offensive in late February that decimated Iraq's armies and restored Kuwait's independence. (See primary source document: Operation Desert Storm.)

On the strength of his victory over Iraq and his competent leadership in foreign affairs, Bush's approval rating soared to about 90 percent. This popularity soon waned, however, as an economic recession that began in late 1990 persisted into 1992. Throughout this period, Bush showed much less initiative in domestic affairs, though he initially worked with Congress in efforts to reduce the federal government's continuing large budget deficits. A moderate conservative, he made no drastic departures from Reagan's policies—except in taxes. In 1990, in a move that earned him the enmity of his conservative supporters and the distrust of many voters who had backed him in 1988, he reneged on his “read my lips” pledge and raised taxes in an attempt to cope with the soaring budget deficit.

Bush's policy reversal on taxation and his inability to turn around the economy—his failure to put across what he called “the vision thing” to the American public—ultimately proved his downfall. Bush ran a lacklustre campaign for reelection in 1992. He faced a fierce early challenge from Patrick Buchanan in the Republican primary and then lost votes in the general election to third-party candidate Ross Perot. Meanwhile, Bush's Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, hammered away at the issue of the deteriorating economy. In the oft-repeated words of Clinton strategist James Carville, the key issue of the day was “the economy, stupid!” Bush, the first vice president since Martin Van Buren in 1836 to succeed directly to the presidency via an election rather than the death of the incumbent, lost to Clinton by a popular vote of 37 percent to Clinton's 43 percent; Perot garnered an impressive 19 percent of the vote. In trying to explain how Bush—always an active man and an avid jogger—could have run such a lifeless campaign and performed so poorly in formal debates with Clinton, some analysts postulated that Bush was hampered by medication he had been taking to treat his atrial fibrillation, reportedly caused by Graves disease. Bush's campaign managers vehemently denied the theory.

In his last weeks in office, Bush ordered a U.S. military-led mission to feed the starving citizens of war-torn Somalia, thereby placing U.S. marines in the crossfire of warring factions and inadvertently causing the deaths of 18 soldiers. Equally as controversial was his pardoning of six Reagan administration officials charged with illegal actions associated with the Iran-Contra Affair.

Retirement

Bush and his wife, Barbara, returned to Houston on the day of Clinton's inauguration and had little formal involvement with the Republican Party thereafter. His son George W. Bush, a popular two-term governor of Texas, successfully ran for president in 2000, becoming only the second son of a president to win the White House; the first was John Quincy Adams in 1824. Another son, Jeb, was elected governor of Florida in 1998.

Bush, George W.

2010-03-03T22:31:00.001-08:00

Introduction

born July 6, 1946, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.

In full George Walker Bush 43rd president of the United States (2001– ). Narrowly winning the electoral college vote over Vice President Al Gore in one of the closest and most controversial elections in American history, George W. Bush became the first person since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to become president despite having lost the nationwide popular vote. He was narrowly reelected in 2004, defeating Democratic challenger John Kerry. Before assuming the presidency of the United States, Bush was a businessman and served as governor of Texas (1995–2000).

Early life

Bush was the oldest of six children of George Bush, who served as 41st president of the United States (1989–93), and Barbara Bush. His paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut (1952–62). The younger Bush grew up largely in Midland and Houston, Texas. From 1961 to 1964 he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the boarding school from which his father graduated. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University, his father's and grandfather's alma mater, in 1968. Bush was president of his fraternity and, like his father, a member of Yale's secretive Skull and Bones society; unlike his father, he was only an average student and did not excel in athletics.

In May 1968, two weeks before his graduation from Yale and the expiration of his student draft deferment, Bush applied as a pilot trainee in the Texas Air National Guard, an assignment that made it less likely that he would have to fight in the Vietnam War than if he had become a member of the regular military. Commissioned a second lieutenant in July 1968, he became a certified fighter pilot in June 1970. In the fall of 1970, he applied for admission to the University of Texas law school but was rejected. From May to November 1972, Bush worked in Alabama on the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican William Blount, a friend of Bush's father. While in Alabama, Bush was suspended from flight duty for failing to take an annual physical exam, and he never flew again. His service records indicate that he missed at least eight months of duty in Alabama or in Texas between May 1972 and May 1973. Nonetheless, an early discharge was granted so that he could start Harvard business school in the fall of 1973. Bush's spotty military record resurfaced as a contentious campaign issue in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

After receiving his M.B.A. from Harvard in 1975, Bush returned to Midland, where he began working for a Bush family friend, an oil and gas attorney, and later started his own oil and gas firm. He married Laura Welch (see Laura Bush), a teacher and librarian, in Midland in 1977. After an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978, Bush devoted himself to building his business. With help from his uncle, who was then raising funds for Bush's father's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush was able to attract numerous prominent investors. The company struggled through the early 1980s until the eventual collapse of oil prices in 1986, when it was purchased by the Harken Energy Corporation. Bush received Harken stock, a job as a consultant to the company, and a seat on the company's board of directors.

In the same year, shortly after his 40th birthday, Bush gave up drinking alcohol. “I realized,” he later explained, “that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people.” His decision was partly the result of a self-described spiritual awakening and a strengthening of his Christian faith that began the previous year after a conversation with the Reverend Billy Graham, a Bush family friend.

After the sale of his company, Bush spent 18 months in Washington working as an adviser and speechwriter in his father's presidential campaign. Following the election, he moved to Dallas, where he joined a group of investors buying the Texas Rangers professional baseball team. Although Bush's investment, which he made with a loan he obtained by using his Harken stock as collateral, was relatively small, his role as managing partner of the team brought him much exposure in the media and earned him a reputation as a successful businessman. When Bush's partnership sold the team in 1998, Bush received nearly $15 million.

Governor of Texas

In 1994 Bush challenged Democratic incumbent Ann Richards for the governorship of Texas. It was a hard-fought race in which Bush received the support of some prominent Democratic and Hispanic politicians. Bush won the election 53 percent to 46 percent, the first person ever to be elected a state governor whose father was a U.S. president. A major issue in the campaign concerned an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1991 into Bush's sale of all his Harken stock in June 1990, just days before the company completed a second quarter with heavy losses. Bush's failure to report the sale until well after the reporting deadline prompted an SEC investigation into illegal “insider” trading (taking advantage of information not available to the public), which did not find any wrongdoing, though questions remained regarding its thoroughness.

As governor, Bush increased state spending on elementary and secondary education and made the salaries and promotions of teachers and administrators contingent on their students' performance on standardized tests. Fulfilling a campaign promise to toughen the state's juvenile justice system, his administration increased the number of crimes for which juveniles could be sentenced to adult prisons following custody in juvenile detention and lowered to 14 the age at which children could be tried as adults. Throughout his tenure he received international attention for the brisk pace of public executions in Texas relative to other states. Fulfilling another campaign pledge, Bush signed into law several measures aimed at tort reform, including one that imposed new limits on punitive damages and another that narrowed the legal definition of “gross negligence.” With his reelection in 1998, Bush became the first Texas governor to win consecutive four-year terms.

Bush formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on June 12, 1999. He described his political philosophy as “compassionate conservatism,” a doctrine that combined traditional Republican economic and social policies with concern for the underprivileged. He quickly gathered the endorsement of a large number of Republican officeholders and raised more money than any other Republican or Democratic candidate, collecting approximately $100 million for his primary election campaign. His running mate was Dick Cheney, former chief of staff for President Gerald Ford and secretary of defense during the presidency of Bush's father. Despite his refusal to give direct answers to questions about his drinking and possible use of illegal drugs (he said that, at the time his father was president, he would have passed a background check going back 15 years, to 1974), Bush survived a vigorous challenge in the Republican primary from Senator John McCain and won the Republican nomination, taking a strong lead in public-opinion polls over Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee; Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate; and political commentator Patrick Buchanan, the nominee of the Reform Party.

As the general election campaign continued, the gap in the polls between Bush and Gore narrowed to the closest in any election in the previous 40 years. On election day the presidency hinged on the 25 electoral votes of Florida, where Bush led Gore by fewer than 1,000 popular votes after a mandatory statewide machine recount. After the Gore campaign asked for manual recounts in four heavily Democratic counties, the Bush campaign filed suit in federal court to stop any further recounts. For five weeks the election remained unresolved as Florida state courts and federal courts heard numerous legal challenges by both campaigns. Eventually the Florida Supreme Court decided (4–3) to order a statewide manual recount of the approximately 45,000 “undervotes” (i.e., ballots that machines recorded as not clearly expressing a presidential vote). The Bush campaign quickly filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to delay the recounts until it could hear the case; a stay was issued by the court on December 9. Three days later, concluding (7–2) that a fair statewide recount could not be performed in time to meet the December 18 deadline for certifying the state's electors, the court issued a controversial 5–4 decision to reverse the Florida Supreme Court's recount order, effectively awarding the presidency to Bush. By winning Florida, Bush narrowly won the electoral vote over Gore by 271 to 266—only 1 more than the required 270.

After Gore conceded defeat, Bush struck a conciliatory tone, promising to reach out to Democrats and declaring that “I was not elected to serve one party but to serve one nation. Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests.” With his inauguration, Bush became only the second son of a president to assume the nation's highest office; the other was John Quincy Adams (1825–29), the son of John Adams (1797–1801). (See primary source document: First Inaugural Address.)

Presidency

Bush was the first Republican president to enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. Taking advantage of his party's majority, in June 2001 Bush signed into law a $1.35 trillion tax-cut bill, which passed Congress despite fierce opposition from Democrats. Only two days before the bill was signed, however, control of the Senate formally passed to the Democrats following Republican Senator James Jeffords's decision to leave his party and become an independent. Subsequently, many of Bush's domestic initiatives, including his plan to introduce educational vouchers, encountered significant resistance.

In foreign affairs, the Bush administration announced that the United States would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol on reducing the emission of gases responsible for global warming (the United States had signed the protocol in the last days of the Bill Clinton administration) because the agreement did not impose emission limits on developing countries and because it could harm the U.S. economy. The administration also withdrew from the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and attempted to secure commitments from various governments not to extradite U.S. citizens to the new International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction it rejected. To many of Bush's critics at home and abroad, these developments reflected a dangerous unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy.

In February 2001 U.S. and British warplanes bombed targets in Baghdad in defense of the no-fly zones established in northern and southern Iraq after the First Persian Gulf War, in 1991. The incident foreshadowed events that would dominate Bush's presidency two years later.

The Bush administration's first major challenge came on September 11, 2001, when four American commercial airplanes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, destroying both towers and collapsing or damaging many surrounding buildings, and a third was used to destroy part of the Pentagon building outside Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after passengers apparently attempted to retake the plane. (See September 11 attacks.) The crashes—the worst terrorist incident on U.S. soil—killed some 3,000 people and prompted calls around the world for a global war on terrorism. (See primary source document: Declaration of War on Terrorism.)

Domestic security and the fight against terrorism subsequently became the chief focus of the Bush administration and the top priority of government at every level. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the administration requested, and Congress passed, the USA PATRIOT Act, which significantly expanded the search and surveillance powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law-enforcement agencies. Hundreds of resident aliens and some U.S. citizens were arrested and detained, some on questionable grounds, as the country scrambled to tighten security and to prepare for possible additional attacks. To coordinate these actions, the administration formed a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which began operating on January 24, 2003.

Bush accused radical Islamist Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qaeda (Arabic: “the Base”), of responsibility for the September 11 attacks (in a videotape in 2004 bin Laden himself acknowledged that he was responsible). He also charged the Taliban government of Afghanistan with harbouring bin Laden and his followers. Bush built an international coalition against terrorism and ordered a massive bombing campaign, which began on October 7, 2001, against terrorist and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. After U.S. forces routed al-Qaeda and forced the Taliban from power, the Bush administration began working with Afghanistan's various ethnic and political factions to establish a stable regime there. For his handling of the country's response to the terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan, Bush received high job-approval ratings.

In September 2002 the administration announced a new National Security Strategy of the United States of America. It was notable for its declaration that the United States would act “preemptively,” using military force if necessary, to forestall or prevent threats to its security by terrorists or “rogue states” possessing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons—so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” Bush simultaneously drew worldwide attention to Iraqi President Ṣaddām Ḥussein and to suspicions that Iraq had attempted to develop weapons of mass destruction in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions. In November 2002 the Bush administration successfully lobbied for a new Security Council resolution providing for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. Soon thereafter Bush declared that Iraq had failed to comply fully with the new resolution and that the country continued to possess weapons of mass destruction. For several weeks the United States and Britain tried unsuccessfully to secure support from France, Russia, and other Security Council members for a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq, though administration officials continued to insist that earlier resolutions provided sufficient legal justification for military action. As debate in the Security Council dragged on, antiwar sentiment outside the United States increased dramatically, leading to massive peace demonstrations in several major cities throughout the world, especially in Europe. Finally Bush declared an end to diplomacy. On March 17 he issued an ultimatum to Ṣaddām, giving him and his immediate family 48 hours to leave Iraq or face removal by force; he also indicated that, even if Ṣaddām relinquished power, U.S.-led military forces would enter the country to search for weapons of mass destruction and to stabilize the new government.

After Ṣaddām's public refusal to leave and as the 48-hour deadline approached, Bush ordered the war on Iraq, called Operation Iraqi Freedom, to begin on March 20 (local time). Although U.S. and British forces encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance from irregular Iraqi fighters, they quickly overwhelmed them and the Iraqi army, and by mid-April they had entered Baghdad and all other major Iraqi cities and forced Ṣaddām's regime from power. Stabilizing postwar Iraq, however, proved difficult; in the months immediately after the war, one U.S. soldier, on average, was dying daily as a result of attacks by Ṣaddām loyalists and other Iraqis opposed to the occupation. Meanwhile, hundreds of sites suspected of housing or producing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were investigated. As the search continued into the following year, critics of Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused both of having exaggerated the threat posed by Ṣaddām in order to win public support for the war. Ṣaddām, who had gone into hiding during the invasion, was captured by U.S. forces in December 2003.

In domestic affairs, the U.S. economy entered a recession in 2001 and continued to falter. Fears over war and terrorism, widespread corporate accounting scandals, some of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history, problems besetting the travel and tourist industries following the September 11 attacks, and the final bursting of the “bubble economy” of the late 1990s all contributed to consumer uncertainty and a prolonged downturn in the financial markets. The surpluses in the federal budget in 2000 and 2001 had turned into huge deficits by 2003 because of the slowing economy; increases in spending, particularly defense spending related to the war on terrorism; and the tax cut of 2001. Between 2001 and 2003 the economy lost nearly 2.1 million jobs. Bush's chances of implementing his policies improved greatly after the 2002 midterm elections, in which the Republican Party regained a majority in the Senate and maintained its majority in the House of Representatives. In May 2003 Bush won approval of a second tax cut of $350 billion.

In 2004 Bush focused his energies on his campaign for reelection against his Democratic challenger, U.S. Senator John Kerry. Waging an expensive campaign marked by partisan and personal rancour, the candidates entered the fall elections in a virtual dead heat, according to opinion polls. Bush's key campaign platform was his conduct of the war on terrorism, defined by the war in Iraq, which Kerry countered was poorly planned and executed. In an election that illustrated stark divisions among voters, Bush defeated Kerry with a slim majority of the electoral and popular vote.

Buthelezi, Mangosuthu G.

2010-02-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

born August 27, 1928, Mahlabatini, Natal, South Africa

in full Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi Zulu chief, head (1972–94) of the nonindependent black state of KwaZulu, and leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

Buthelezi was descended from the Zulu royal line through the legendary King Cetshwayo. He attended South African Native College (now University of Fort Hare) and was a member of the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANC). His political activities brought about his expulsion from school, but he completed his degree in history and Bantu administration at the University of Natal. He assumed his role as the hereditary chief of the Buthelezi clan of Zulus in 1953 and was accepted in that role by white authorities about four years later.

Though he initially opposed the creation of black homelands (then called Bantustans), Buthelezi won election as chief minister of KwaZulu in 1972. In 1975, having broken with the African National Congress over (among other things) its espousal of violence and economic sanctions to end the government's policy of apartheid, Buthelezi revived Inkatha yeNkululeko yeSizwe (National Cultural Liberation Movement), founded in 1924 by his grandfather, King Dinizulu, as a Zulu cultural movement. Buthelezi rejected full independence for KwaZulu and continued to work within the white establishment to end apartheid.

After the South African government lifted its ban on the ANC in 1990 and began signaling its willingness to disband the apartheid system, Buthelezi became engaged in a fierce struggle for political leadership with the ANC and its allies for the allegiance of black South Africans. As a result, thousands were killed in clashes between Inkatha and ANC supporters in Natal province in the years 1990–94. Meanwhile, Buthelezi converted his cultural movement into a political party, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), in order to compete in South Africa's first inclusive parliamentary elections, which were held in 1994. His party received about 10 percent of the total vote, and Buthelezi was appointed minister of home affairs in a coalition government formed by ANC leader Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president. After Mandela left office in 1999, Buthelezi continued to hold the post in President Thabo Mbeki's government until 2004.

Caetano, Marcello José das Neves Alves

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born Aug. 17, 1906, Lisbon, Port.

died Oct. 26, 1980, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

premier of Portugal from September 1968, when he succeeded António de Oliveira Salazar, until the revolution of April 1974.

Trained as a lawyer, Caetano served with Salazar (then the finance minister) in 1929 and helped to draft the Constitution of 1933 and other legal documents of the New State. He was minister of the colonies (1944–49) and deputy prime minister (1955–59) before leaving political life to become rector of the University of Lisbon.

When Salazar suffered a stroke in 1968, Caetano was appointed prime minister. He admitted an opposition and rectified the Constitution but was unable to curb inflation or appease his critics. Foreign criticism of his African policy and dissatisfaction in the army led to the “Revolution of the Flowers,” which in 1974 overthrew the New State and drove Caetano into exile. He settled in Brazil and served as head of the Institute of Comparative Law, Gama Filho University, Rio de Janeiro, until his death.

Callaghan (of Cardiff), James Callaghan, Baron

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born March 27, 1912, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England

died March 26, 2005, Ringmer, East Sussex

original name in full Leonard James Callaghan British Labour Party politician, who was prime minister from 1976 to 1979.

Callaghan entered the civil service at age 17 as a tax officer. By 1936 he had become a full-time trade-union official. After serving as a lieutenant in naval intelligence during World War II, he entered Parliament in 1945, representing the Welsh constituency of Cardiff South. Between 1947 and 1951 Callaghan held junior posts at the Ministry of Transport and at the Admiralty. When Harold Wilson's Labour government was formed in 1964, Callaghan was named chancellor of the Exchequer. In this capacity he helped secure in 1966–67 international agreement to a system called Special Drawing Rights, which in effect created a new kind of international money. He resigned from the Exchequer in 1967, when he was forced to devalue the pound sterling. He then served as home secretary until 1970. In Wilson's second government in 1974, Callaghan was named foreign secretary; and in 1976, upon Wilson's resignation, Callaghan succeeded him as prime minister, largely because the Parliamentary Labour Party considered him the least divisive candidate.

Throughout his ministry (1976–79), Callaghan, a moderate within the Labour Party, tried to stem the increasingly vociferous demands of Britain's trade unions. He also had to secure the passage of unpopular cuts in government spending early in his ministry. His reassuring public manner came to be criticized as complacency when a series of labour strikes in 1978–79 paralyzed hospital care, refuse collection, and other essential services. In March 1979 his government was brought down by a vote of no confidence passed in the House of Commons, the first such occurrence since 1924. At the subsequent general election, Callaghan's party was defeated. On October 15, 1980, he resigned as leader of the Labour Party, to be succeeded by Michael Foot. He was created a life peer in 1987 and published an autobiography, Time and Chance, the same year.

Campbell, Kim

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born March 10, 1947, Port Alberni, B.C., Can.

byname of Avril Phaedra Campbell Canadian politician, prime minister from June to November 1993.

Campbell was educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., 1969) and at the London School of Economics. She taught political science for six years before returning to the University of British Columbia to pursue a law degree; upon graduation in 1983 she practiced law in Vancouver for two years before devoting herself full-time to a political career.

Campbell ran unsuccessfully as a candidate of the Social Credit Party for the British Columbia provincial legislature in 1983 and in May 1986 was defeated in a bid for the Social Credit provincial leadership. In October 1986, however, she won a seat in the provincial legislature as the Social Credit member for a Vancouver riding. Two years later, she switched parties and was elected to the federal parliament as a Progressive Conservative. Then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney appointed her minister for Indian Affairs and Northern Development in 1989. In 1990 she became justice minister and attorney general; her tenure was marked by several legislative successes, including strengthening Canada's gun-control laws and passing a tough rape law. Her appointment as defense minister in January 1993 was seen as a signal of Mulroney's confidence in her political future, especially when he announced his own retirement shortly thereafter. Campbell was selected by a party convention to replace Mulroney and became Canada's first woman and first West Coast prime minister, in June 1993. She left office in November of that year, after the Progressive Conservative Party suffered a major electoral defeat. In December 1993 she resigned as party leader.

Carl XVI Gustaf

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born April 30, 1946, Stockholm, Sweden

In full Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus king of Sweden from 1973.

The only son of King Gustav VI Adolf's eldest son, Prince Gustav Adolf (who died in an air crash in 1947), Carl Gustaf became crown prince in 1950, when his grandfather acceded to the throne. He studied at military cadet schools, at the University of Uppsala, and in France and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1968. He married Silvia Sommerlath in 1976, three years after his accession. The royal couple had three children, Crown Princess Victoria (b. July 14, 1977), Prince Carl Philip (b. May 13, 1979), and Princess Madeleine (b. June 10, 1982).

Carl Gustaf's accession occurred when the role of the Swedish monarchy was being radically altered. Under the constitution prior to 1975, the king played a formal role in the administration of the country; for example, he presided over councils of state, signed government decisions, commanded the armed forces, and appointed someone to form a new government upon the resignation of the current administration. The new constitutional laws, enacted in 1973 and made effective on Jan. 1, 1975, relieved the king of all these duties, leaving him with a solely symbolic function.

Carter, Jimmy

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born October 1, 1924, Plains, Georgia, U.S.

in full James Earl Carter, Jr. 39th president of the United States (1977–81), who served as the nation's chief executive during a time of serious problems at home and abroad. His perceived inability to deal successfully with those problems led to an overwhelming defeat in his bid for reelection. After leaving office he embarked on a career of diplomacy and advocacy, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002. (For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see presidency of the United States of America. See also Cabinet of President Jimmy Carter.)

The son of Earl Carter, a peanut warehouser who had served in the Georgia state legislature, and Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse who went to India as a Peace Corps volunteer at age 68, Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology before graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1946. After marrying Rosalynn Smith (Rosalynn Carter)—who came from Carter's small hometown, Plains, Georgia—he embarked on a seven-year career in the U.S. Navy, serving submarine duty for five years. He was preparing to become an engineering officer for the submarine Seawolf in 1953 when his father died. Carter resigned his commission and returned to Georgia to manage the family peanut farm operations.

Beginning his political career by serving on the local board of education, Carter won election as a Democrat to the Georgia State Senate in 1962 and was reelected in 1964. In 1966 he failed in a bid for the governorship and, depressed by this experience, found solace in evangelical Christianity, becoming a born-again Baptist. Prior to running again for governor and winning in 1970, Carter at least tacitly adhered to a segregationist approach; however, in his inaugural address he announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over” and proceeded to open Georgia's government offices to blacks—and to women. As governor he reorganized the existing maze of state agencies and consolidated them into larger units while introducing stricter budgeting procedures for them. In the process he came to national attention, finding his way onto the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of both good government and the “New South.”

In 1974, just before his term as governor ended, Carter announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Although lacking a national political base or major backing, he managed through tireless and systematic campaigning to assemble a broad constituency. In the aftermath of the Watergate Scandal, which had raised widespread concern about the power of the presidency and the integrity of the executive branch, Carter styled himself as an outsider to Washington, D.C., a man of strong principles who could restore the faith of the American people in their leaders. Ironically, Carter's moral stance and candour caused a small stir when, during the campaign, he admitted in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.”

Winning the Democratic nomination in July 1976, Carter chose the liberal U.S. Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. Carter's opponent was the unelected incumbent Republican president, Gerald R. Ford, who had come into office in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate. Many believed that the close race tipped in Carter's favour after Ford stumbled in a televised debate by saying that eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union. In November 1976 the Carter-Mondale ticket won the election, capturing 51 percent of the popular vote and garnering 297 electoral votes to Ford's 240.

Beginning with his inaugural walk with Rosalynn down Pennsylvania Avenue, Carter tried to reinforce his image as a man of the people. (See primary source document: Inaugural Address.) He adopted an informal style of dress and speech in public appearances, held frequent press conferences, and reduced the pomp of the presidency. Early on in his administration, Carter introduced a dizzying array of ambitious programs for social, administrative, and economic reform. Most of those programs, however, met with opposition in Congress despite the Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. On one hand, Congress, in the post-Watergate environment, was more willing to challenge the executive branch; on the other, Carter the populist was quick to criticize Congress and to take his agenda to the American people. In either case, Carter's difficulties with Congress undermined the success of his administration, and by 1978 his initial popularity had dissipated in the face of his inability to convert his ideas into legislative realities.

Two scandals also damaged Carter's credibility. In summer 1977 Bert Lance, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of Carter's closest friends, was accused of financial improprieties as a Georgia banker. When Carter stood by Lance (whom he eventually asked to resign and who later was acquitted of all charges), many questioned the president's vaunted scruples. Carter's image suffered again—though less—in summer 1980 when his younger brother, Billy (widely perceived as a buffoon), was accused of acting as an influence peddler for the Libyan government of Muammar al-Qaddafi. Senate investigators concluded that, while Billy had acted improperly, he had no real influence on the president.

In foreign affairs, Carter received accolades for championing international human rights, though his critics charged that his vision of the world was naive. Carter's idealism notwithstanding, his major achievements were on the more pragmatic level of patient diplomacy. In 1977 he obtained two treaties between the United States and Panama that gave the latter control over the Panama Canal at the end of 1999 and guaranteed the neutrality of that waterway thereafter. In 1978 Carter brought together Egyptian President Anwar el-Sādāt and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, and secured their agreement to the Camp David Accords, which ended the state of war that had existed between the two countries since Israel's founding in 1948. The difficult negotiations—which lasted 13 days and were salvaged only by Carter's tenacious intervention—provided for the establishment of full diplomatic and economic relations on condition that Israel return the occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. On January 1, 1979, Carter established full diplomatic relations between the United States and China and simultaneously broke official ties with Taiwan. Also in 1979, in Vienna, Carterand Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a new bilateral strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II) intended to establish parity in strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems between the two superpowers on terms that could be adequately verified. Carter removed the treaty from consideration by the Senate in January 1980, however, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. He also placed an embargo on the shipment of American grain to the Soviet Union and pressed for a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics due to be held in Moscow.

Carter's substantial foreign policy successes were overshadowed by a serious crisis in foreign affairs and by a groundswell of popular discontent over his economic policies. On November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and took the diplomatic staff there hostage. Their actions, in response to the arrival of the deposed shah (Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi) in the United States for medical treatment, were sanctioned by Iran's revolutionary government, led by Shīʿite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A standoff developed between the United States and Iran over the issue of the captive diplomats. Carter responded by trying to negotiate the hostages' release while avoiding a direct confrontation with the Iranian government, but, as the crisis wore on (documented nightly on American television by a special news program that would become the influential Nightline), his inability to obtain the release of the hostages became a major political liability. The failure of a secret U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages (which ended almost before it began with a crash in the desert of a plane and helicopter) in April 1980 seemed to typify the inefficacy and misfortune of the Carter administration.

On the home front, Carter's management of the economy aroused widespread concern. The inflation rate climbed higher each year he was in office, rising from 6 percent in 1976 to more than 12 percent by 1980; unemployment remained high at 7.5 percent; and volatile interest rates reached a high of 20 percent or more twice during 1980. Both business leaders and the public at large blamed Carter for the nation's economic woes, charging that the president lacked a coherent strategy for taming inflation without causing a painful increase in unemployment.

The faltering economy was due in part to the energy crisis that had originated in the early 1970s as a result of overdependence on foreign oil. In 1977 the president, whose mistrust of special interest groups such as the oil companies was well known, proposed an energy program that included an oil tax, conservation, and the use of alternative sources of energy. The House supported the program but the Senate quashed it. Moreover, one of those alternative sources, nuclear power, seemed much less viable after the disastrous meltdown of the core reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March 1979.

In July 1979 Carter canceled a major policy speech and instead met with a wide cross section of American leaders at Camp David. In the nationally televised speech that followed that meeting, Carter spoke of a “crisis of spirit” in the country, but most Americans were ultimately no more interested in rising to the challenge of a national “malaise” than they were in Carter's suggestion that they needed to lower some of their expectations. (See primary source document: A National Malaise.) Still, Carter was able to fend off the challenge of Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. However, the public's confidence in Carter's executive abilities had fallen to an irretrievable low. Above all else, he was generally seen as indecisive. In the elections held that November, Carter was overwhelmingly defeated by the Republican nominee, a former actor and governor of California, Ronald W. Reagan, who pointed to what he called Carter's “misery index”—the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate, whose sum was over 20—and asked two poignant questions that the public took to heart: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and “Is America as respected throughout the world?” In the landslide, Carter won only 41 percent of the popular vote and 49 votes in the electoral college (third-party candidate John Anderson captured 7 percent of the vote). In the late 1980s, allegations surfaced that the Reagan campaign had made a secret agreement with the government of Iran to ensure that the hostages were not released before the election (thus preventing an “October Surprise” that might boost Carter's election chances); however, in 1993 a congressional subcommittee found the evidence inconclusive. Moreover, Reagan invited Carter to greet the hostages in Germany after their release on January 21, 1981, the day after Reagan's inauguration.

In his final months in office, Carter was able to push through important legislation that created a “superfund” to address environmental disasters and that set aside some 100 million acres (40 million hectares) of land in Alaska to protect it from development. Carter would also be remembered for his inclusion of women and minorities in his cabinet, including Andrew Young, the African American former mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, who played a prominent though controversial role as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

At the conclusion of the president's term, the Carters returned to their hometown. Rosalynn, who had taken an active role as first lady—not only acting as an adviser to the president but also attending cabinet meetings when the subjects under consideration were of interest to her—joined her husband in establishing the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, which included a presidential library and museum. Carter served as a sort of diplomat without portfolio in various conflicts in a number of countries—including Nicaragua (where he successfully promoted the return of the Miskito Indians to their homeland), Panama (where he observed and reported illegal voting procedures), and Ethiopia (where he attempted to mediate a settlement with the Eritrean People's Liberation Force). He was particularly active in this role in 1994, negotiating with North Korea to end nuclear weapons development there, with Haiti to effect a peaceful transfer of power, and with Bosnian Serbs and Muslims to broker a short-lived cease-fire. His efforts on behalf of international peace and his highly visible participation in building homes for the poor through Habitat for Humanity established in the public mind a much more favourable image of Carter than had been the case during his presidency. After leaving office, Carter also became a prolific author, writing on a variety of topics, including his presidency, the Middle East, and his Christian faith. He also wrote a collection of poetry.

Castro, Fidel

2010-02-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

born August 13, 1926/27, near Birán, Cuba

in full Fidel Castro Ruz political leader of Cuba (from 1959) who transformed his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Castro became a symbol of communist revolution in Latin America. He held the title of premier until 1976, when he became president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers.

Castro was born in the Mayarí municipality of what was then Oriente province, the easternmost in Cuba. His father, Angel Castro y Argiz, an immigrant from Spain, was a fairly prosperous sugarcane farmer in a locality that had long been dominated by estates of the American-owned United Fruit Company. Angel Castro had two children by his first wife and five more children by his cook, Lina Ruz González. Fidel was one of these five children, and Raúl, who later became his brother's chief associate in Cuban affairs, was another.

Fidel Castro attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba, Oriente province, and then the Catholic high school Belén in Havana, where he proved an outstanding athlete. In 1945 he entered the School of Law of the University of Havana, where organized violent gangs sought to advance a mixture of romantic goals, political aims, and personal careers. Castro's main activity at the university was politics, and in 1947 he joined an abortive attempt by Dominican exiles and Cubans to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. He then took part in urban riots that broke out in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948.

After his graduation in 1950, Castro began to practice law and became a member of the reformist Cuban People's Party (called Ortodoxos). He became their candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives from a Havana district in the elections scheduled for June 1952. In March of that year, however, the former Cuban president, General Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás and canceled the elections.

After legal means failed to dislodge Batista's new dictatorship, Castro began to organize a rebel force for the task in 1953. On July 26, 1953, he led about 160 men in a suicidal attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba in hopes of sparking a popular uprising. Most of the men were killed, and Castro himself was arrested. After a trial in which he conducted an impassioned defense, he was sentenced by the government to 15 years' imprisonment. He and his brother Raúl were released in a political amnesty in 1955, and they went to Mexico to continue their campaign against the Batista regime. There Castro organized Cuban exiles into a revolutionary group called the 26th of July movement.

On December 2, 1956, Castro and an armed expedition of 81 men landed on the coast of Oriente province, Cuba, from the yacht Granma. All of them were killed or captured except for Castro, Raúl, Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, and nine others, who retreated into the Sierra Maestra of southwestern Oriente province to wage guerrilla warfare against the Batista forces. With the help of growing numbers of revolutionary volunteers throughout the island, Castro's forces won a string of victories over the Batista government's demoralized and poorly led armed forces. Castro's propaganda efforts proved particularly effective, and as internal political support waned and military defeats multiplied, Batista fled the country early on January 1, 1959. Castro's force of 800 guerrillas had defeated the Cuban government's 30,000-man professional army.

As the undisputed revolutionary leader, Castro became commander in chief of the armed forces in Cuba's new provisional government, which had Manuel Urrutia, a moderate liberal, as its president. In February 1959 Castro became premier and thus head of the government. By the time Urrutia was forced to resign in July 1959, Castro had taken effective political power into his own hands.

Castro had come to power with the support of most Cuban city dwellers on the basis of his promises to restore the 1940 constitution, create an honest administration, reinstate full civil and political liberties, and undertake moderate reforms. But once established as Cuba's leader he began to pursue more radical policies: Cuba's private commerce and industry were nationalized; sweeping land reforms were instituted; and American businesses and agricultural estates were expropriated. The United States was alienated by these policies and offended by Castro's fiery new anti-American rhetoric. His trade agreement with the Soviet Union in February 1960 further deepened American distrust. In 1960 most economic ties between Cuba and the United States were severed, and the United States broke diplomatic relations with the island nation in January 1961. In April of that year the U.S. government secretly equipped thousands of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro's government; their landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, however, was crushed by Castro's armed forces.

Cuba also began acquiring weapons from the Soviet Union, which soon became the island nation's chief supporter and trade partner. In 1962 the Soviet Union secretly stationed ballistic missiles in Cuba that could deliver nuclear warheads to American cities, and in the ensuing confrontation with the United States, the world came close to a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its nuclear weapons from Cuba in exchange for a pledge that the United States would withdraw the nuclear-armed missiles it had stationed in Turkey and no longer seek to overthrow Castro's regime.

In the meantime Castro created a one-party government to exercise dictatorial control over all aspects of Cuba's political, economic, and cultural life. All political dissent and opposition were ruthlessly suppressed. Many members of the Cuban upper and middle classes felt betrayed by these measures and chose to immigrate to the United States. At the same time, Castro vastly expanded the country's social services, extending them to all classes of society on an equal basis. Educational and health services were made available to Cubans free of charge, and every citizen was guaranteed employment. The Cuban economy, however, failed to achieve significant growth or to reduce its dependence on the country's chief export, cane sugar. Economic decision-making power was concentrated in a centralized bureaucracy headed by Castro, who proved to be an inept economic manager. With inefficient industries and a stagnant agriculture, Cuba became increasingly dependent on favourable Soviet trade policies to maintain its modest standard of living in the face of the United States' continuing trade embargo.

Castro remained premier until 1976, when a new constitution created a National Assembly and Castro became president of that body's State Council. He retained the posts of commander in chief of the armed forces and secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba—the only legal political party—and he continued to exercise unquestioned and total control over the government. Castro's brother Raúl, minister of the armed forces, ranked second to him in all government and party posts.

Castro's early attempts to foment Marxist revolutions elsewhere in Latin America foundered, but Cuban troops did eventually serve as proxies for the Soviet Union in various Third World conflicts. From 1975 to 1989 Cuban expeditionary forces fought in the Angolan civil war on the side of the communistic Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. In 1978 Cuban troops assisted Ethiopia in defeating an invasion by Somalia. In the 1980s Castro emerged as one of the leaders of the Third World and the nonaligned nations, despite his obvious ties to the Soviet Union. He continued to signify his willingness to renew diplomatic relations with the United States if that nation would end its trade embargo against Cuba. In 1980 Castro released a flood of immigrants to the United States when he opened the port of Mariel for five months. The 125,000 immigrants, including some criminals, strained the capacity of U.S. immigration and resettlement facilities.

In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev began to undertake democratic reforms and eastern European countries were allowed to slip out of the Soviet orbit, Castro retained a hard-line stance, espousing the discipline of communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took him by surprise and meant the end of generous Soviet subsidies to Cuba. Castro countered the resulting economic decline and shortages of consumer goods by allowing some economic liberalization and free-market activities while retaining tight controls over the country's political life.

In late 1993 Castro's daughter sought asylum in the United States, where she openly criticized her father's rule. The following year, economic and social unrest led to antigovernment demonstrations, the size of which had not been seen in Cuba in some 35 years. Shortly thereafter Castro lifted restrictions on those wanting to leave the country, and thousands headed for the United States in the largest exodus since the 1980 Mariel “freedom flotilla.” In 1998 Castro allowed Pope John Paul II to visit the island nation for the first time.

Ceaușescu, Nicolae

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born January 26, 1918, Scornicești, Romania

died December 25, 1989, near Bucharest

Communist official who was leader of Romania from 1965 until he was overthrown and killed in a revolution in 1989.

A prominent member of the Romanian Communist youth movement during the early 1930s, Ceaușescu was imprisoned in 1936 and again in 1940 for his Communist Party activities. In 1939 he married Elena Petrescu (b. Jan. 7, 1919, Oltenia region, Rom.—d. Dec. 25, 1989, near Bucharest), a devout Communist. While in prison Ceaușescu became a protégé of his cell mate, the Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who would become the Communist leader of Romania beginning in 1952. Escaping prison in August 1944 shortly before the Soviet occupation of Romania, Ceaușescu subsequently served as secretary of the Union of Communist Youth (1944–45). After the Communists' full accession to power in Romania in 1947, he first headed the nation's ministry of agriculture (1948–50), and from 1950 to 1954 he served as deputy minister of the armed forces with the rank of major general. Under Gheorghiu-Dej, Ceaușescu eventually came to occupy the second highest position in the party hierarchy, holding important posts in the Politburo and Secretariat.

With the death of Gheorghiu-Dej in March 1965, Ceaușescu succeeded to the leadership of Romania's Communist Party as first secretary (general secretary from July 1965); and with his assumption of the presidency of the State Council (December 1967), he became head of state as well. He soon won popular support for his independent, nationalistic political course, which openly challenged the dominance of the Soviet Union over Romania. In the 1960s Ceaușescu virtually ended Romania's active participation in the Warsaw Pact military alliance, and he condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces (1968) and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (1979). Ceaușescu was elected to the newly created post of president of Romania in 1974.

While following an independent policy in foreign relations, Ceaușescu adhered ever more closely to the communist orthodoxy of centralized administration at home. His secret police maintained rigid controls over free speech and the media and tolerated no internal dissent or opposition. In an effort to pay off the large foreign debt that his government had accumulated through its mismanaged industrial ventures in the 1970s, Ceaușescu in 1982 ordered the export of much of the country's agricultural and industrial production. The resulting drastic shortages of food, fuel, energy, medicines, and other basic necessities drove Romania from a state of relative economic well-being to near starvation. Ceaușescu also instituted an extensive personality cult and appointed his wife, Elena, and many members of his extended family to high posts in the goverment and party. Among his grandiose and impractical schemes was a plan to bulldoze thousands of Romania's villages and move their residents into new apartment buildings.

Ceaușescu's regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on antigovernment demonstrators in the city of Timisoara on Dec. 17, 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest, and on December 22 the Romanian army defected to the demonstrators. That same day Ceaușescu and his wife fled the capital in a helicopter but were captured and taken into custody by the armed forces. On December 25 the couple were hurriedly tried and convicted by a special military tribunal on charges of mass murder and other crimes. Ceaușescu and his wife were then shot by a firing squad.

Chamorro, Violeta Barrios de

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born October 18, 1929, Rivas, Nicaragua

née Violeta Barrios newspaper publisher and politician who served as president of Nicaragua from 1990 to 1997.

Chamorro, who was born into a wealthy Nicaraguan family (her father was a cattle rancher), received much of her early education in the U.S. states of Texas and Virginia. In 1950, shortly after the death of her father, she returned to Nicaragua, where she married Pedro Joaquim Chamorro Cardenal, editor of the newspaper La Prensa, which was often critical of the Somoza family dictatorship. The Chamorros were forced into exile in 1957 and lived in Costa Rica for several years before returning to Nicaragua after the Somoza government declared an amnesty.

On January 10, 1978, Pedro Chamorro, who had continued to criticize the Somozas and had been imprisoned several times during the 1960s and '70s, was assassinated. His death helped to spark a revolution, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which toppled the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. A member of the Sandinista ruling junta in 1979–80, Violeta Chamorro soon became disillusioned with the Sandinistas' Marxist policies, and later she became an outspoken foe. She took over La Prensa, which was frequently shut down during the 1980s and was banned completely for a period in 1986–87. During the 1980s she was accused by the Sandinistas of accepting money from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which was then providing support to opposition groups and directing the Contra rebels in their guerrilla war against the Sandinista government.

An end to the guerrilla war was negotiated in the late 1980s, and free elections were scheduled for 1990. Chamorro, drafted as the presidential candidate of the 14-party National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositor; UNO) alliance, won a surprisingly easy victory over President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, head of the Sandinistas. She was inaugurated on April 25, 1990, becoming Central America's first woman president.

During her presidency Chamorro reversed a number of Sandinista policies. Several state-owned industries were privatized, censorship was lifted, and the size of the army was reduced. At the same time, she retained a number of Sandinistas in the government and attempted to reconcile the country's various political factions. Many credit her conciliatory policies with helping to maintain the fragile peace that had been negotiated. Barred from running for a second term, she retired from politics after her term ended in January 1997.

Chamoun, Camille (Nimer)

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born April 3, 1900, Dayr al-Qamar, Lebanon

died Aug. 7, 1987, Beirut

Chamoun also spelled Shamʿun political leader who served as president of Lebanon in 1952–58.

Chamoun spent his early political years as a member of a political faction known as the Constitutional Bloc, a predominantly Christian group that emphasized its Arabic heritage in an attempt to establish a rapport with the Muslim groups. By the late 1940s Chamoun had emerged as one of the bloc's most prominent members. When his expectations of succeeding Bishara al-Khuri as president of Lebanon were denied in 1948 by a renewal of Khuri's term, Chamoun began to organize a parliamentary opposition. By the summer of 1952 he had made an alliance with Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, and had won extensive support throughout the country. That September a general strike forced Khuri's resignation, and Chamoun was elected president. Although Jumblatt had helped secure his election, Chamoun ignored him when it came to formulating government policies.

As president, Chamoun reorganized governmental departments in an attempt to realize a more efficient administration. In some respects his regime was thoroughly democratic; the press and rival political parties, for example, enjoyed full freedom. But Lebanese political life remained geared to serving special interests, and Chamoun's reforms bore little fruit.

Chamoun faced a crisis in 1956 when Muslim leaders demanded that he break relations with Britain and France, which had just attacked Egypt over rights to the Suez Canal. Chamoun not only refused to do this but also named a pro-Western minister of foreign affairs. In May 1958 armed rebellion broke out in Beirut, supported mostly by Muslim elements. The Lebanese army commander, refusing to quell the rebellion, acted only to prevent its spread to other areas. Chamoun appealed to the United States for aid, and U.S. marines landed near Beirut in July, ending the military threat to the government. Demands persisted that Chamoun resign; he refused but did not seek a second term. After a brief retirement he was elected to Parliament in 1960. When civil war erupted in 1975, he became involved in defending Lebanon against Syrian intervention and held a succession of ministerial posts, including minister of finance in 1984–85. He supported a plan for the creation of provinces along religious lines.

He published several autobiographical works, including Crise au Leban (1977; “Crisis in Lebanon”) and Mémoires et souvenirs (1979; “Memories and Remembrances”).

Chandra Shekhar

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born 1927, Ibrahimpatti, India

politician and legislator who served as prime minister of India from November 1990 to June 1991.

Shekhar was a leading member of the Socialist Party before he joined the ruling Congress Party in 1964. He was a member of India's upper legislative chamber, the Rajya Sabha, from 1962 to 1967, and he held a seat in the lower chamber, the Lok Sabha, in 1977–79, 1980–84, and from 1989 until he became prime minister. Shekhar split with the leader of the Congress Party, Indira Gandhi, in 1975 and spent time in prison during the national emergency she subsequently declared.

In 1977 Shekhar became president of the Janata Party, which headed a coalition government under Prime Minister Morarji Desai from 1977 to 1979. In 1988 Shekhar's Janata Party merged with several other opposition parties to form the Janata Dal Party under the leadership of V.P. Singh, who subsequently became prime minister. After leading an internal rebellion against Singh, Shekhar broke with the Janata Dal Party on Nov. 5, 1990, and quickly formed the Janata Dal–Socialist faction. With the support of Rajiv Gandhi's Congress (I) Party, he replaced Singh as India's prime minister on Nov. 10, 1990, as head of a weak minority government. He resigned the office on March 6, 1991, after the Congress (I) Party withdrew its support, but he remained in office as a caretaker until national legislative elections could be held in May and June.

Chávez, Hugo

2010-02-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

born July 28, 1954, Sabaneta, Venezuela

in full Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías Venezuelan politician, who became president of Venezuela in 1999.

After graduating from a Venezuelan military academy in 1975, Chávez entered the army. He became increasingly critical of the government, which he viewed as corrupt, and in 1992 he helped stage an unsuccessful coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez. He was imprisoned and exiled from political life until 1994, when President Rafael Caldera pardoned him. An admirer of Simón Bolívar (“the Liberator”), Chávez subsequently cofounded the left-wing Movement for the Fifth Republic. In 1998 he ran for president, promising to end political corruption, revive the stagnating economy, and make sweeping constitutional changes to bring “true democracy” to the country. His platform proved popular with the poor, who accounted for some 80 percent of the population, and Chávez won a landslide victory.

After taking office in 1999, Chávez oversaw the passage of a new constitution that greatly expanded his powers, reorganized the judiciary, and replaced the existing legislature with the National Assembly. He also increased control of the oil industry, using its revenues to fund his “Bolivarian Revolution,” which included free education, low-cost housing, and health care. The creation of a new legislature led to another round of national elections in 2000, and Chávez won a landslide victory amid charges of electoral fraud. Critics accused him of assuming dictatorial powers, and a series of antigovernment strikes culminated in a military coup on April 12, 2002, in which Chávez was ousted. Two days later, however, he was returned to power. Unrest with his government continued, and opponents forced a recall election in August 2004. Backed by the urban poor and rural peasants, Chávez easily won the election.

Much of Chávez's foreign policy centred on strengthening ties with other Latin American countries, especially Cuba. Following the 2002 coup, which he claimed was supported by the U.S. government, Chávez's relationship with the United States grew highly contentious.

Chen Shui-bian

2010-02-11T07:31:00.000-08:00

born February 18, 1951, Tainan county, Taiwan

Wade-Giles romanization Ch'en Shui-pian lawyer and politician who served as president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2000. He was a prominent leader of the proindependence movement that sought to establish statehood for Taiwan.

Born into a poor farming family, Chen won a scholarship to National Taiwan University and graduated with highest honours from its law faculty. He entered private practice and soon became one of Taiwan's leading attorneys. His first encounter with politics came when he defended eight protesters who opposed the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang; KMT), the island's ruling party and onetime champion of Taiwan's eventual reunification with the mainland. Chen lost the case but thereafter was associated with the opposition movement.

Chen first ran for public office in 1981 and won a seat on the Taipei City Council. In the mid-1980s he spent eight months in prison on charges of libeling a KMT official. He subsequently joined the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Chen later served in Taiwan's legislature (1989–94) before being elected mayor of Taipei in 1994. He was defeated in his bid for reelection in 1998, but the loss freed him to pursue the DPP's presidential nomination in 2000. His campaign stressed the importance of Taiwan's national identity, and, while the more strident members of his party called for strict independence, Chen himself chose his words carefully, trying to assuage China's concerns. Chen was well-received by voters, who elected him and ended the KMT's 55-year rule of Taiwan.

In October 2000 Chen halted construction of a nuclear power plant, angering members of the KMT-controlled legislature. In the ensuing political crisis, the country's economy faltered as investor confidence waned. Chen relented in February 2001, and work resumed on the power plant. His decision was unpopular with members of the DPP, who also disapproved of his vow not to seek independence as long as China did not threaten to attack the island.

By 2002 the relationship between Chen's government and China had soured over Chen's reluctance to develop closer economic ties with China and his return to proindependence rhetoric. As he prepared to run for reelection in 2004, Chen made further moves toward independence, including a redesign of the country's passport that used the word Taiwan on its cover. He was narrowly reelected in March 2004, the vote coming one day after he and his running mate, Vice President Annette Lu (Lu Hsiu-lien), were shot and slightly wounded while campaigning in Tainan.

Chernenko, Konstantin Ustinovich

2010-02-11T01:00:00.001-08:00

born Sept. 11 [Sept. 24, New Style], 1911, Bolshaya Tes, Yeniseysk, Russian Empire [now in Krasnoyarsk kray, Russia]

died March 10, 1985, Moscow

chief political leader of the Soviet Union from February 1984 until his death in 1985.

Born to a Russian peasant family in the Yeniseysk region of Siberia, Chernenko joined the Communist Party in 1931. Trained as a party propagandist, he held several administrative posts before becoming head of agitation and propaganda (agitprop) in Moldavia (1948–56), where he was first noticed by Leonid Brezhnev and brought to Moscow to head a similar department for the party's Central Committee (1956–60). When Brezhnev took over the party in 1964, he made Chernenko his chief of staff. Chernenko was a full member of the Central Committee from 1971 and of the Politburo from 1977.

An old-line conservative, Chernenko traveled extensively with Brezhnev and was considered his aide, confidant, and, by some observers, his heir apparent. After Brezhnev's death, however, he was unable to rally a majority of the party factions behind his candidacy to be head of the party and lost out to Yury V. Andropov, the former KGB chief, who became general secretary on Nov. 12, 1982. However, Andropov had become mortally ill by the following August, and after his death six months later, Chernenko succeeded him as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on Feb. 13, 1984. On April 12 he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Like his predecessor, Chernenko began showing signs of deteriorating health shortly after taking office. His frequent absences from official functions because of illness left little doubt that his election had been an interim measure, and upon his death he was succeeded by Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Chiang Ching-kuo

2010-02-11T00:56:00.001-08:00

born March 18, 1910, Ch'i-k'ou, Chekiang province, China

died Jan. 13, 1988, Taipei, Taiwan

son of Chiang Kai-shek, and his successor as leader of the Republic of China (Taiwan). His father's death in 1975 was followed by a caretaker presidency until March 21, 1978, when Chiang Ching-kuo was formally elected by the National Assembly to a six-year presidential term; he was reelected to a second term in 1984.

The son of Chiang Kai-shek and his first wife (whom Chiang Kai-shek subsequently divorced), Chiang Ching-kuo attended primary school in China and was arrested several times during his youth for involvement with revolutionary activities. In 1925 he went to Moscow, where he studied at Sun Yat-sen University. At that time his father was one of the leaders of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), which included many Communists, but in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek dissolved the Nationalist–Communist alliance. Chiang Ching-kuo denounced his father's actions and soon was selected for advanced studies at the Central Tolmachev Military and Political Institute in Leningrad, from which he graduated. While employed in one of a number of minor jobs that he held in the Soviet Union, he met the Russian woman whom he married in 1935.

Chiang Ching-kuo again denounced his father's policies in 1936, but he later claimed that he was forced to do so and also to remain in the Soviet Union. When, early in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek formed a new United Front with the Chinese Communist Party, father and son were reunited in China.

During the war with the Japanese that followed the formation of the second United Front, Chiang Ching-kuo held various military and administrative posts in the Nationalist government. After 1941 his father came to rely increasingly on his advice, and when the Communists gained control of mainland China in 1949, father and son moved to Taiwan (Formosa), where they reestablished the headquarters of the Nationalist government, continuing to style it the Republic of China (according to the 1946 constitution). There Chiang Ching-kuo was given control of the military and security agencies of the Nationalist government, and in 1965 he became Minister of National Defense, with command of the army. In 1972 he was appointed prime minister by his father.

During his father's illness (1973–75) and after his own election to the presidency in 1978, Chiang moved to eliminate governmental corruption and favouritism and to broaden the government's base by bringing more native-born Taiwanese into the legislative and executive branches, which were dominated by former mainland Chinese officials of the Nationalist Party. Chiang tried to maintain Taiwan's vital foreign-trade relationships as well as its political independence, since many members of the international community, including the United States, broke diplomatic relations with his country in the 1970s in order to establish ties with China. In the 1980s Chiang remained opposed both to Taiwanese recognition of the Chinese Communist regime and to negotiations for his country's reunification with the mainland.

Chiang Kai-shek

2010-02-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

born October 31, 1887, Chekiang province, China

died April 5, 1975, Taipei, Taiwan

Wade-Giles romanization Chiang Chieh-shih , official name Chiang Chung-cheng soldier and statesman, head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and subsequently head of the Chinese Nationalist government in exile on Taiwan.

Chiang was born into a moderately prosperous merchant and farmer family in the coastal province of Chekiang. He prepared for a military career first (1906) at the Paoting Military Academy in North China and subsequently (1907–11) in Japan. From 1909 to 1911 he served in the Japanese army, whose Spartan ideals he admired and adopted. More influential were the youthful compatriots he met in Tokyo; plotting to rid China of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, they converted Chiang to republicanism and made him a revolutionary.

In 1911, upon hearing of revolutionary outbreaks in China, Chiang returned home and helped in the sporadic fighting that led to the overthrow of the Manchus. He then participated in the struggles of China's republican and other revolutionaries in 1913–16 against China's new president and would-be emperor, Yuan Shikai.

After these excursions into public life, Chiang lapsed into obscurity. For two years (1916–17) he lived in Shanghai, where he apparently belonged to the Green Gang (Qing Bang), a secret society involved in financial manipulations. In 1918 he reentered public life by joining Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. Thus began the close association with Sun on which Chiang was to build his power. Sun's chief concern was to reunify China, which the downfall of Yuan had left divided among warring military satraps. Having wrested power from the Qing, the revolutionists had lost it to indigenous warlords; unless they could defeat these warlords, they would have struggled for nothing.

Shortly after Sun Yat-sen had begun to reorganize the Nationalist Party along Soviet lines, Chiang visited the Soviet Union in 1923 to study Soviet institutions, especially the Red Army. Back in China after four months, he became commandant of a military academy, established on the Soviet model, at Whampoa near Canton. Soviet advisers poured into Canton, and at this time the Chinese communists were admitted into the Nationalist Party. The Chinese communists quickly gained strength, especially after Sun's death in 1925, and tensions developed between them and the more conservative elements among the Nationalists. Chiang, who, with the Whampoa army behind him, was the strongest of Sun's heirs, met this threat with consummate shrewdness. By alternate shows of force and of leniency, he attempted to stem the communists' growing influence without losing Soviet support. Moscow supported him until 1927, when, in a bloody coup of his own, he finally broke with the communists, expelling them from the Nationalist Party and suppressing the labour unions they had organized.

Meanwhile, Chiang had gone far toward reunifying the country. Commander in chief of the revolutionary army since 1925, he had launched a massive Nationalist campaign against the northern warlords in the following year. This drive ended only in 1928, when his forces entered Beijing, the capital. A new central government under the Nationalists, with Chiang at its head, was then established at Nanking, farther south. In October 1930 Chiang became Christian, apparently at the instance of the powerful westernized Soong family, whose youngest daughter, Mei-ling, had become his second wife. As head of the new Nationalist government, Chiang stood committed to a program of social reform, but most of it remained on paper, partly because his control of the country remained precarious. In the first place, the provincial warlords, whom he had neutralized rather than crushed, still disputed his authority. The communists posed another threat, having withdrawn to rural strongholds and formed their own army and government. In addition, Chiang faced certain war with Japan, which, after seizing Manchuria (Northeast Provinces) in 1931, showed designs upon China proper. Chiang decided not to resist the coming Japanese invasion until after he had crushed the communists—a decision that aroused many protests, especially since a complete victory over the communists continued to elude him. To give the nation more moral cohesion, Chiang revived the state cult of Confucius and in 1934 launched a campaign, the so-called New Life Movement, to inculcate Confucian morals.

In December 1936 Chiang was seized by one of his generals who believed that Chinese forces should concentrate on fighting the Japanese instead of the communists. Chiang was held captive for some two weeks, and the Sian (Xian) Incident, as it became known, ended after he agreed to form an alliance with the communists against the Japanese invaders. In 1937 the mounting conflict between the two countries erupted into war (see Sino-Japanese War). For more than four years China fought alone until it was joined by the Allies, who with the exception of the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in 1941. China's reward was an honoured place among the victors as one of the Big Four. But internally Chiang's government showed signs of decay, which multiplied as it resumed the struggle against the communists after the Japanese surrendered to the United States in 1945. Civil war recommenced in 1946; by 1949 Chiang had lost continental China to the communists, and the People's Republic of China was established. Chiang moved to Taiwan with the remnants of his Nationalist forces, established a relatively benign dictatorship over the island with other Nationalist leaders, and attempted to harass the communists across the Formosa Strait. The chastened Chiang reformed the ranks of the once-corrupt Nationalist Party, and with the help of generous American aid he succeeded in the next two decades in setting Taiwan on the road to modern economic development. In 1955 the United States signed an agreement with Chiang's Nationalist government on Taiwan guaranteeing its defense. Beginning in 1972, however, the value of this agreement and the future of Chiang's government were seriously called in question by the growing rapprochement between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Chiang did not live to see the United States finally break diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979 in order to establish full relations with the People's Republic of China. After his death in 1975 he was succeeded temporarily by Yen Chia-kan (C.K. Yen), who was in 1978 replaced by Chiang's son Chiang Ching-kuo.

Among the reasons for Chiang's overthrow by the communists, one frequently cited is the corruption that he countenanced in his government; another was his loss of flexibility in dealing with changing conditions. Growing more rigid in his leadership over the years, he became less responsive to popular sentiment and to new ideas. He came to prize loyalty more than competence and to rely more on personal ties than on ties of organization. His dependence on a trusted clique also showed in his army, in which he favoured narrow traditionalists over many abler officers. Chiang initially maintained his position as republican China's paramount leader by shrewdly playing off provincial warlords and possible Nationalist rivals against each other and later by his adroit cultivation of American military, diplomatic, and financial support for his regime. His overthrow by the communists can perhaps be traced to his strategy during World War II; he generally refused to use his U.S.-equipped armies to actively resist China's Japanese occupiers and counted instead on the United States to eventually defeat Japan on its own. He chose rather to preserve his military machine until the time came to unleash it on the communists at the war's end and then crush them once and for all. But by that point Chiang's strategy had backfired; his passive stance against the Japanese had lost him the prestige and support among the Chinese populace that the communists ultimately gained by their fierce anti-Japanese resistance. The morale and effectiveness of his armies had decayed during their enforced passivity in southwestern China, while the communists had built up large, battle-hardened armies on the strength of their appeal to Chinese nationalist sentiment. Finally, it can be said that Chiang “lost China” because he had no higher vision or coherent plan for making the deep social and economic changes needed to bring Chinese society into the 20th century. From his purge of the Nationalists' communist partners in 1927 and his subsequent alliance with the landowning and mercantile classes, Chiang inexorably followed an increasingly conservative path that virtually ignored the plight of China's oppressed and impoverished peasantry. The peasants formed almost 90 percent of China's population, though, and it was their support, as demonstrated by the communist victory, which proved crucial in once more establishing a strong central government that could achieve the modern unification of China.

Chirac, Jacques

2010-02-10T06:48:00.000-08:00

born November 29, 1932, Paris, France

in full Jacques René Chirac French politician who was twice elected as the country's president (1995, 2002) and twice served as prime minister (1974–76, 1986–88).

Chirac, the son of a bank employee, graduated from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1954, served as an officer in the French army in Algeria (1956–57), and earned a graduate degree from the École Nationale d'Administration in 1959. He then became a civil servant and rose rapidly through the ranks, serving as a department head and a secretary of state before becoming minister for parliamentary relations in 1971–72 under President Georges Pompidou. He was first elected to the National Assembly as a Gaullist in 1967. After serving as minister for agriculture (1972–74) and of the interior (1974), Chirac was appointed prime minister by newly elected President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974. Citing personal and professional differences with Giscard, Chirac resigned from that office in 1976 and set about reconstituting the Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic into a neo-Gaullist group, the Rally for the Republic (RPR). With the party firmly under his control, he was elected mayor of Paris in 1977 and continued to build his political base among the several conservative parties of France.

Chirac's first campaign for the presidency in 1981 split the conservative vote with Giscard and thereby allowed the Socialist Party candidate, François Mitterrand, to win. In parliamentary elections held in 1986, the coalition of right-wing parties won a slim majority of seats in the National Assembly, and Chirac was appointed prime minister by Mitterrand. This power-sharing arrangement between the two posts was the first of its kind in the history of the Fifth Republic, in which previously the president and the prime minister had always belonged to the same party or the same electoral coalition.

In this arrangement, known as cohabitation, Chirac, as prime minister, was responsible for domestic affairs, while Mitterrand retained responsibility for foreign policy. Chirac's most important achievement during his second term was his administration's privatization of many major corporations that had been nationalized under Mitterrand. He also reduced payroll and other taxes in an effort to stimulate job creation in the private sector. As the candidate of the centre-right RPR, Chirac ran for the presidency against Mitterrand and was defeated in runoff elections in May 1988, whereupon he resigned the post of prime minister. Remaining mayor of Paris, he made his third run for the presidency in May 1995 and this time defeated the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin.

As president, Chirac tried to cut spending and thereby reduce the government's budget deficits so that France could qualify to participate in a single common European currency, the euro, which replaced the franc as France's sole currency in 2002. His proposed austerity measures, which included freezing the wages of public-sector employees and reducing some social welfare programs, provoked a massive general strike in late 1995. Nonetheless, Chirac continued to pursue policies of fiscal austerity despite unemployment that had reached record levels by early 1997. Hoping to win a mandate for his program, Chirac called for parliamentary elections in May 1997, but voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the left. His conservative coalition lost its majority in the parliament, and the Socialists were able to form a new coalition government with their leader, Jospin, as prime minister. Chirac also drew protests after authorizing nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995 and 1996. Despite presiding over a party accused of illegal fund-raising and being criticized for various ethical lapses, he won the first round of France's presidential balloting in 2002 over nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen and over Jospin, whose third-place showing eliminated him from the second round. With near-universal support from the political establishment in the second round—including from the French Communist Party and Jospin's Socialist Party—Chirac was easily reelected president, winning 82 percent of the vote to Le Pen's 18 percent—the largest margin of victory in any French presidential election.

The early part of Chirac's second term was dominated by U.S.- and British-led efforts to force the government of Ṣaddām Ḥussein in Iraq to comply fully with United Nations Security Council resolutions requiring it to abandon any weapons of mass destruction. In November 2002 France backed a U.S.-sponsored resolution mandating the return to Iraq of weapons inspectors, who had been withdrawn in 1998. In early 2003, after U.S. President George W. Bush declared that Iraq was in breach of its obligations under the resolution, Chirac, along with the governments of Germany and Russia, offered a proposal to toughen the inspections regime, a plan that was rejected by the United States as ineffective, given Iraq's earlier lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors. Despite this and later efforts by Chirac to prevent a war with Iraq, a U.S.-led coalition attacked the country in March 2003. In 2004 Chirac signed into law a controversial measure that prohibited head scarves and other religious symbols in state schools.

Chrétien, Jean

2010-02-10T06:47:00.001-08:00

born January 11, 1934, Shawinigan, Quebec, Canada

in full Joseph-Jacques-Jean Chrétien Canadian lawyer and Liberal Party politician, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003.

The 18th of 19 children of a working-class family, Chrétien studied law at Laval University and was called to the bar in Quebec in 1958. Long interested in politics, he was first elected to the House of Commons in 1963 and was reelected thereafter through 1984. In the successive administrations of Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Chrétien became a parliamentary secretary to the prime minister in 1965, a minister of state in 1967, and minister of national revenue in 1968. He served as minister of Indian affairs and northern development from 1968 to 1974 and in 1977 became the first French Canadian to hold the post of minister of finance. Known as an incisive and shrewd administrator, he went on to serve as minister of justice and attorney general (1980–82), minister of energy (1982–84), and deputy prime minister (1984).

After losing to John Turner in a contest to succeed Trudeau as head of the Liberal Party, Chrétien resigned his seat in the House of Commons in 1986. He was reelected to Parliament in 1990 and took over the leadership of the Liberals that same year. Chrétien led his party to a landslide victory over the governing Progressive Conservative Party in national elections on October 25, 1993, and became prime minister of Canada on November 4. In 1995 he weathered a major crisis as voters in Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking province, narrowly rejected secession. Quebec independence remained a central concern, though the movement had weakened by the end of the 20th century. Chrétien's government focused on reducing the budget deficit, and in 1998 it passed Canada's first balanced budget since 1970. Chrétien was reelected in 2000, the first Canadian prime minister since 1945 to win three consecutive majorities. His relationship with the United States was sometimes tense, underscored by his refusal to commit Canadian troops to the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003. In social policy, he pursued progressive reforms, drafting a law in 2003 that would recognize same-sex marriages. Chrétien retired as prime minister in December 2003.

Chun Doo Hwan

2010-02-10T06:46:00.000-08:00

born Jan. 18, 1931, Naechonri, Korea [now in South Korea]

Korean soldier and politician who was president of South Korea from 1980 to 1988.

Born into a peasant family, Chun entered the Korean Military Academy in 1951. Following his graduation in 1955, he became an infantry officer and in 1958 married Lee Soon Ja, daughter of Brigadier General Lee Kyu Dong. Chun commanded a South Korean division in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and rose rapidly through the ranks. After Park Chung Hee seized power in 1961, Chun served as domestic-affairs secretary for the junta (1961–62) and, with the nominal restoration of civilian government, as chief of personnel of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA; 1963). He served in various other official posts and was made a general in 1978.

After the assassination of President Park in 1979, Chun took charge of the investigation of his death. He arrested several suspects, including his rival, the army chief of staff, General Chung Sŭng-hwa (December 1979), and he purged many of Chung's supporters in a virtual coup by one military faction against another. Although the official president was Choi Kyu-hah, Chun emerged as the real authority, and in April 1980 Chun became head of the KCIA. In May the military, under Chun's leadership, dropped all pretense of civilian rule, declared martial law, and brutally suppressed democratic civilian opposition in the city of Kwangju.

After President Choi resigned on August 16, Chun resigned from the army and on August 27 became president. With the country still under martial law, Chun pushed through a new constitution in late 1980 that allowed him to rule with a firm hand.

Chun's rule was punctuated by several crises, notably a financial scandal in 1982 that forced him to replace half his Cabinet and an assassination attempt in Myanmar (Burma) by North Korean agents in 1983 that resulted in the deaths of several other top aides and ministers. As president, Chun devoted his efforts to maintaining economic growth and political stability. South Korea continued its export-led economic growth under Chun, and the nation industrialized rapidly.

Chun was unable to serve more than one seven-year term as president under his 1980 constitution, and in 1987 he picked Roh Tae Woo to be the candidate of the ruling Democratic Justice Party. He retired from politics after being succeeded by Roh in 1988. Despite public gestures of atonement for abuses of power during his presidency, Chun could not distance himself from the lingering public memory of his actions. In December 1995 both he and Roh were indicted on charges related to their involvement in the 1979 coup and the uprising in Kwangju in 1980 and for accepting bribes while each was president. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death in August 1996. Chun's sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment, and he received a presidential pardon in December 1997.

Ciller, Tansu

2010-02-10T06:45:00.001-08:00

born 1946, Istanbul, Turkey

Turkish economist and politician, who was Turkey's first woman prime minister (1993–96) and the first female to head a Middle Eastern Muslim country.

Ciller was born to an affluent family in Istanbul. After graduating from the University of the Bosporus with a degree in economics, she continued her studies in the United States, where she earned graduate degrees from the Universities of New Hampshire and Connecticut and attended Yale University. Ciller returned to Turkey to teach and, at age 36, became the nation's youngest full professor. Together with her husband, she amassed some $60 million through real estate speculation.

Ciller joined the ruling True Path Party (Doǧru Yol Partisi; DYP) in 1990. The following year she was elected to parliament and was named economics minister in Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel's coalition government. Although she advocated greater privatization of state-owned firms and a balanced budget, it was during her tenure as economics minister that government debt soared and the country suffered a downgrading of its international credit rating. Despite these woes, Ciller was selected to replace Demirel as prime minister in 1993.

As she assumed power, Ciller faced the growing violence of Kurds in southeastern Turkey and the pressing need to reduce government spending. In 1995 the DYP's coalition collapsed, but Ciller stayed on as caretaker prime minister until 1996, when her party and the Motherland Party formed a coalition that promptly fell apart. Ciller was reelected as the DYP's leader in 1999, but, after the party fared poorly in the 2002 elections, she stepped down.

Clark, Helen

2010-02-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

born February 26, 1950, Hamilton, New Zealand

New Zealand politician who became prime minister in 1999. She was the first woman in New Zealand to hold the office of prime minister immediately following an election.

Clark, the oldest of four children of George and Margaret Clark, was raised on a sheep and cattle farm in Te Pahu, west of Hamilton. She left home at age 12 to attend Epsom Girls Grammar School in Auckland. After graduation, she enrolled in the University of Auckland, where she received bachelor's (1971) and master's (1974) degrees in political science and taught from 1973 to 1981.

Clark joined the Labour Party in 1971 and during the following decade held a variety of positions within the party. In parliamentary elections in 1975, she was selected as the Labour candidate for a seat that was considered safe for the conservative National Party. Although she lost that election, she was elected to Parliament from a different constituency in 1981. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Select Committee (1984–87), she played a major role in the country's adoption of an antinuclear policy, which effectively ended the ANZUS Pact and led to reduced military ties between New Zealand and the United States. In 1987 Clark became a member of the cabinet, holding at various times the portfolios of housing, conservation, labour, and health. In 1989–90 she served as deputy prime minister, and in 1990 she was appointed to the Privy Council, becoming the first woman in New Zealand to hold those offices.

After the National Party's return to power in 1990, Clark became deputy leader of the opposition in Parliament. In 1993 she was elected head of the Labour Party—becoming the first woman in New Zealand to head a major party—and thus served as leader of the opposition. In 1999, when the Labour Party was able to form a governing coalition, Clark was elected prime minister. Holding the portfolio of arts and culture herself, she appointed an extraordinarily diverse cabinet, including 11 women and 4 Maori. As prime minister, Clark addressed many controversial issues, including Maori rights, same-sex civil unions, and prostitution, which was legalized in 2003. Her government also opposed the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq in the Second Persian Gulf War. She was reelected prime minister in both 2002 and 2005, the first New Zealand prime minister to secure three consecutive terms in office.

Throughout her career, Clark enjoyed a reputation as a skillful politician and a capable advocate of nuclear disarmament and public health policy. For her work on peace and disarmament, she was awarded the Peace Prize from the Danish Peace Foundation in 1986.

Clark, Joe

2010-02-10T06:41:00.000-08:00

born June 5, 1939, High River, Alberta, Canada

byname of Charles Joseph Clark prime minister of Canada from June 1979 to March 1980, the youngest person ever to win the post.

Clark obtained a B.A. in history (1960) and an M.A. in political science (1973) from the University of Alberta and taught political science there from 1965 to 1967. He had been active in politics since 1957 in support of the Progressive Conservative Party; from 1962 to 1965 he was national president of the Progressive Conservative Student Federation. In 1967 he directed the campaign organization that brought Peter Lougheed to power as premier of Alberta, and from 1967 to 1970 he served as executive assistant to Robert Stanfield, then the Conservative leader in the House of Commons. Clark himself was first elected to Parliament in 1972, and he was elected leader of his party in 1976.

In 1979 the Progressive Conservatives won a plurality of seats in Parliament, and Clark became head of a minority government. Only six months after he took office, however, his government fell on a budget question; in the subsequent general elections in February-March 1980, his party was defeated by the Liberals headed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Clark served as the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party until 1983. That year he held a formal leadership-selection meeting and was defeated by Brian Mulroney. Clark served in Mulroney's government as secretary of state for external affairs (1984–91) and president of the Queen's Privy Council (1991–93). He also served briefly (1993) as United Nations special representative to Cyprus. In 1998 Clark was again elected leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and in 2000 he won a seat in the House of Commons.

Clinton, Bill

2010-02-10T06:38:00.001-08:00

Introduction

born August 19, 1946, Hope, Arkansas, U.S.

by name of William Jefferson Clinton , original name William Jefferson Blythe III 42nd president of the United States (1993–2001), who oversaw the country's longest peacetime economic expansion. In 1998 he became only the second U.S. president to be impeached; he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999. (For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see presidency of the United States of America. See also Cabinet of President Bill Clinton.)

Early life

Bill Clinton's father, William Jefferson Blythe III, was a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before his son was born. His widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, married Roger Clinton, and, despite their unstable union (they divorced and then remarried) and her husband's alcoholism, her son eventually took his stepfather's name. Reared in part by his maternal grandmother, Bill Clinton developed political aspirations at an early age; they were solidified (by his own account) in July 1963, when he met and shook hands with President John F. Kennedy.

Clinton enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1964 and graduated in 1968 with a degree in international affairs. During his freshman and sophomore years he was elected student president, and during his junior and senior years he worked as an intern for Senator J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fulbright was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, and Clinton, like many young men of his generation, opposed the war as well. He received a draft deferment for the first year of his studies as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford in 1968 and later attempted to extend the deferment by applying to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Although he soon changed his plans and returned to Oxford, thus making himself eligible for the draft, he was not chosen. While at Oxford, Clinton wrote a letter to the director of the Arkansas ROTC program thanking the director for “saving” him from the draft and explaining his concern that his opposition to the war could ruin his future “political viability.” During this period Clinton also experimented with marijuana; his later claim that he “didn't inhale” would become the subject of much ridicule.

After graduating from Yale University Law School in 1973, Clinton joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas School of Law, where he taught until 1976. In 1974 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1975 he married a fellow Yale Law graduate, attorney Hillary Rodham (Hillary Clinton), who thereafter took an active role in his political career. In the following year he was elected attorney general of Arkansas, and in 1978 he won the governorship, becoming the youngest governor the country had seen in 40 years.

Governor of Arkansas

After an eventful two-year term as governor, Clinton failed in his reelection bid in 1980, the year his daughter and only child, Chelsea, was born. After apologizing to voters for unpopular decisions he had made as governor (such as highway-improvement projects funded by increases in the state gasoline tax and automobile licensing fees), he regained the governor's office in 1982 and was successively reelected three more times by substantial margins. A pragmatic, centrist Democrat, he imposed mandatory competency testing for teachers and students and encouraged investment in the state by granting tax breaks to industries. He became a prominent member of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that sought to recast the party's agenda away from its traditional liberalism and move it closer to the centre of American political life.

Clinton declared his candidacy for president while still governor of Arkansas. Just before the New Hampshire presidential primary, his campaign was nearly derailed by widespread press coverage of his alleged 12-year affair with an Arkansas woman, Gennifer Flowers. In an interview watched by millions of viewers on the television news program 60 Minutes, Clinton and his wife subsequently admitted to having marital problems. Clinton's popularity soon rebounded, and he scored a strong second-place showing in New Hampshire—a performance for which he labeled himself the “Comeback Kid.” On the strength of his middle-of-the-road approach, his apparent sympathy for the concerns of ordinary Americans (his statement “I feel your pain” was an often-mocked phrase), and his personal warmth, he eventually won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. Facing incumbent President George Bush, Clinton and his running mate, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, argued that 12 years of Republican leadership had led to political and economic stagnation. In November the Clinton-Gore ticket defeated both Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot with 43 percent of the popular vote to 37 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Perot; Clinton defeated Bush in the electoral college by a vote of 370 to 168. (See primary source document: First Inaugural Address.)

Presidency

The Clinton administration got off to a shaky start, the victim of what some critics called ineptitude and bad judgment. His attempt to fulfill a campaign promise to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military was met with criticism from conservatives and some military leaders—including General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In response, Clinton proposed a compromise policy—summed up by the phrase “Don't ask, don't tell”—that failed to satisfy either side of the issue. Clinton's first two nominees for attorney general withdrew after questions were raised about domestic workers they had hired. Clinton's efforts to sign campaign-finance-reform legislation were quashed by a Republican filibuster in the Senate, as was his economic-stimulus package.

Clinton had promised during the campaign to institute a system of universal health insurance. His appointment of his wife to chair the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, a novel role for the country's first lady, was criticized by conservatives, who objected both to the propriety of the arrangement and to Hillary Rodham Clinton's feminist views. They joined lobbyists for the insurance industry, small-business organizations, and the American Medical Association to campaign vehemently against the task force's eventual proposal, the Health Security Act. Despite protracted negotiations with Congress, all efforts to pass compromise legislation failed.

Despite these early missteps, Clinton's first term was marked by numerous successes, including the passage by Congress of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which created a free-trade zone for the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Clinton also appointed several women and minorities to significant government posts throughout his administration, including Janet Reno as attorney general, Donna Shalala as secretary of Health and Human Services, Joycelyn Elders as surgeon general, Madeleine Albright as the first woman secretary of state, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman justice on the United States Supreme Court. During Clinton's first term, Congress enacted a deficit-reduction package—which passed the Senate with a tie-breaking vote from Gore—and some 30 major bills related to education, crime prevention, the environment, and women and family issues, including the Violence Against Women Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

In January 1994 Attorney General Reno approved an investigation into business dealings by Clinton and his wife with an Arkansas housing development corporation known as Whitewater. Led from August by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater inquiry consumed several years and more than $50 million but did not turn up conclusive evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.

The renewal of the Whitewater investigation under Starr, the continuing rancorous debate in Congress over Clinton's health care initiative, and the liberal character of some of Clinton's policies—which alienated significant numbers of mainstream American voters—all contributed to Republican electoral victories in November 1994, when the party gained a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. A chastened Clinton subsequently tempered some of his policies and accommodated some Republican proposals, eventually embracing a more aggressive deficit-reduction plan and a massive overhaul of the country's welfare system while continuing to oppose Republican efforts to slow the growth of government spending on social programs. Ultimately, mainstream American voters found themselves more alienated by the uncompromising and confrontational behaviour of the new Republicans in Congress than they had been by Clinton, who won considerable public sympathy for his more moderate approach.

Clinton's initiatives in foreign policy during his first term included a successful effort in September–October 1994 to reinstate Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted by a military coup in 1991; the sponsorship of peace talks and the eventual Dayton Accords (1995) aimed at ending the ethnic conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and a leading role in the ongoing attempt to bring about a permanent resolution of the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis. In 1993 he invited Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yāsir ʿArafāt to Washington to sign a historic agreement that granted limited Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho. (See primary source document: The Oklahoma City Bombing.)

Although scandal was never far from the White House—a fellow Arkansan who had been part of the administration committed suicide; there were rumours of financial irregularities that had occurred in Little Rock; former associates were indicted and convicted of crimes; and rumours of sexual impropriety involving the president persisted—Clinton was handily reelected in 1996, buoyed by a recovering and increasingly strong economy. He captured 49 percent of the popular vote to Republican Bob Dole's 41 percent and Perot's 8 percent; the electoral vote was 379 to 159. Strong economic growth continued during Clinton's second term, eventually setting a record for the country's longest peacetime expansion. By 1998 the Clinton administration was overseeing the first balanced budget since 1969 and the largest budget surpluses in the country's history. The vibrant economy also produced historically high levels of home ownership and the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years.

In 1998 Starr was granted permission to expand the scope of his investigation to determine whether Clinton had encouraged a 24-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, to state falsely under oath that she and Clinton had not had an affair. Clinton repeatedly and publicly denied that the affair had taken place. His compelled testimony, which appeared evasive and disingenuous even to Clinton's supporters (he responded to one question by stating, “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is”), prompted renewed criticism of Clinton's character from conservatives and liberals alike. After conclusive evidence of the affair came to light, Clinton apologized to his family and to the American public. On the basis of Starr's 445-page report and supporting evidence, the House of Representatives in 1998 approved two articles of impeachment, for perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton was acquitted of the charges by the Senate in 1999. Despite his impeachment, Clinton's job-approval rating remained high.

In foreign affairs, Clinton ordered a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998 in response to Iraq's failure to cooperate fully with United Nations weapons inspectors (the bombing coincided with the start of full congressional debate on Clinton's impeachment). In 1999 U.S.-led forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conducted a successful three-month bombing campaign against Yugoslavia designed to end Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. In 1998 and 2000 Clinton was hailed as a peacemaker in visits to Ireland and Northern Ireland, and in 2000 he became the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War. He spent the last weeks of his presidency in an unsuccessful effort to broker a final peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Shortly before he left office, Clinton was roundly criticized by Democrats as well as Republicans for having issued a number of questionable pardons, including one to the former spouse of a major Democratic Party contributor. In subsequent years Clinton remained active in political affairs and was a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. His autobiography, My Life, was published in 2004. Later that year the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum opened in Little Rock. In 2005, after a tsunami in the Indian Ocean had caused widespread death and devastation, Clinton was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to serve as a special envoy for relief efforts.

In 1999 Hillary Rodham Clinton launched her candidacy for the New York Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. After a hard-fought race, she defeated Republican Representative Rick Lazio to become the first wife of a U.S. president to win elected office.

Constantine II

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born June 2, 1940, Psikhikó, near Athens

king of Greece from 1964 to 1974.

After spending World War II in exile in South Africa, Constantine returned to Greece in 1946. When his father became King Paul I in 1947, Constantine became crown prince and succeeded to the throne upon his father's death on March 6, 1964. Fearing leftist infiltration of the army, he dismissed Premier Georgios Papandreou in July 1965 and appointed interim premiers until April 21, 1967, when a military coup forestalled the election he was planning for May of that year. Attempting a counter-coup from northern Greece on Dec. 13, 1967, he had few sympathizers and almost immediately fled to Rome with his family. The military regime retained control of the monarchy and appointed a regent in Constantine's place, granting the king a free return if he so desired.

On June 1, 1973, the military regime ruling Greece proclaimed a republic and abolished the Greek monarchy. A referendum on July 29, 1973, confirmed these actions. After the election of a civilian government in November 1974, another referendum on the monarchy was conducted on December 8. The monarchy was rejected, and Constantine, who had protested the vote of 1973, accepted the result.

Costello, John A(loysius)

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born June 20, 1891, Dublin

died Jan. 5, 1976, Dublin

prime minister (taoiseach) of Ireland from 1948 to 1951 and from 1954 to 1957.

A prosperous lawyer who had served as attorney general, he owed his selection as prime minister to a coalition of several parties (including his own Fine Gael) and prominent independent politicians united in opposition to Eamon De Valera's Fianna Fáil (Republican Party). During his first term as prime minister, he introduced into the Dáil Éireann (Irish Assembly) the Republic of Ireland Act (1948), by which Ireland withdrew from the Commonwealth of Nations. His second government was marked by a sharp increase in acts of terrorism by the unlawful Irish Republican Army (IRA). He resigned as opposition leader in 1959, when De Valera became president and Sean Lemass prime minister.

Coty, René (-Jules-Gustave)

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born March 20, 1882, Le Havre, Fr.

died Nov. 22, 1962, Le Havre

last president of the Fourth French Republic, from 1954 to 1959.

After taking degrees in law and philosophy and pursuing a local political career, Coty was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1923. He sat with the left Republicans and specialized in matters of merchant shipping and government reform.

In December 1930 Coty served briefly as undersecretary of the interior and then left the Chamber for the Senate. He remained relatively inactive during World War II and returned to the Chamber in 1945. The next year he joined the Robert Schuman government as minister of reconstruction and urban affairs. He then returned to the Senate and was its vice president until his election to the presidency on Dec. 23, 1953, on the 13th ballot.

Coty served with dignity but was less active in trying to influence policy than his predecessor, Vincent Auriol, had been. In the crisis of May 1958 his threat to resign helped to induce the national assembly to elect Gen. Charles de Gaulle as prime minister. He retired on Jan. 8, 1959, when de Gaulle was installed as the first president of the Fifth Republic.

Craxi, Bettino

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born February 24, 1934, Milan, Italy

died January 19, 2000, Al-Hammamet, Tunisia

byname of Benedetto Craxi Italian politician who became his nation's first Socialist prime minister (1983–87).

Craxi joined the Socialist Youth Movement in his late teens and became a member of the Italian Socialist Party's central committee in 1957. He won a seat on the city council of Milan in 1960, was elected to a seat in the national Chamber of Deputies in 1968, and became a deputy secretary of the Socialist Party in 1970. After the Socialists performed badly in the 1976 general elections, Craxi became the party's general secretary. He proceeded to unite the faction-ridden party, committed it to moderate social and economic policies, and tried to dissociate it from the much larger Communist Party. In addition, Craxi used the Socialists' role in coalition building to give the party a voice that was greater than its electoral weight.

Under Craxi's leadership the Socialists were members in five of Italy's six coalition governments from 1980 to 1983. His decision to pull out of the Christian Democrat-led coalition in April 1983 provoked general elections in June that resulted in Craxi's opportunity to form a government. He formed a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and several small, moderate parties. As prime minister Craxi pursued anti-inflationary fiscal policies and steered a pro-American course in foreign affairs. Craxi's move away from traditional forms of socialism prefigured the transformation of European politicians in the 1990s, such as that of British prime minister Tony Blair of the Labour Party. Craxi replaced the party's hammer-and-sickle symbol with a red rose. He formed a new coalition government in 1986 but resigned in early 1987.

In February 1993 multiple charges of political corruption forced Craxi to resign his post as party leader. He never denied that he had illegally solicited money for the Socialist Party but claimed that all the political parties had done so and that the Socialists were being targeted for political reasons. Craxi left Italy for exile in Tunisia later that year, just before being convicted for some of the charges. He never returned to Italy.

Cresson, Edith

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born January 27, 1934, Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, France

née Campion premier of France from May 15, 1991, to April 2, 1992, the first woman in French history to serve as premier.

Daughter of a French civil servant, she studied at the School of Higher Commercial Studies, earning a doctorate in demography, and in 1959 married Jacques Cresson, an executive with the automaker Peugeot. She joined the Socialist Party in 1965 and worked vigorously in François Mitterrand's failed presidential campaign of that year. She ran unsuccessfully for a parliamentary seat in 1975 but was subsequently elected mayor of Thuré (1977), member of the European Parliament (1979–81), and mayor of Châtellerault (1983). After Mitterrand's election to the presidency in 1981, Cresson served in a number of ministries—agriculture, tourism and foreign trade, industry and foreign trade, and European affairs—and became known for her outspokenness and combativeness.

In 1986 Cresson was elected as a Socialist deputy from Vienne. When Michel Rocard resigned the French premiership in 1991, her friend Mitterrand appointed her premier. She sought to improve France's industrial competitiveness while reducing social inequities. Rising unemployment and declining support for the Socialist Party among the voters prompted Mitterrand to replace Cresson as premier after she had been in office less than a year, however.

Dacko, David

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born March 24, 1930, Bouchia, Moyen-Congo, French Equatorial Africa [now in Central African Republic]

died Nov. 20, 2003, Yaoundé, Cameroon

president of the Central African Republic from 1960 to 1965 and from 1979 to 1981.

Dacko, a former teacher, held ministerial posts under Barthélemy Boganda, the prime minister of the autonomous Central African Republic. Claiming a family relationship, Dacko succeeded to the prime ministership in 1959 after Boganda's death. In 1960 the republic gained its full independence, and Dacko became the country's first president. He ruled the Central African Republic as a one-party state and in 1962 easily won the presidential elections. Dacko was unable to improve the country's failing economy, however, and, with the Central African Republic facing bankruptcy, he was overthrown by Jean-Bédel Bokassa on the night of Dec. 31, 1965/Jan. 1, 1966.

On Sept. 21, 1979, after 13 years of brutal rule (which included Bokassa's proclamation of a “Central African Empire”), Dacko, aided by French troops, in turn overthrew Bokassa, announcing that the country would revert to a republic with Dacko as president. His presidency was again plagued by numerous problems. Soon after taking office, Dacko survived an assassination attempt, and, following his reelection in 1981, there were riots in Bangui. He was removed from office in September 1981, when General André Kolingba seized power. Dacko unsuccessfully ran for president in 1992 and 1999.

Daddah, Moktar Ould

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born December 25, 1924, Boutilimit, Mauritania, French West Africa

died October 14, 2003, Paris, France

statesman who was independent Mauritania's first president (1961–78). He was noted for his progress in unifying his ethnically mixed, dispersed, and partly nomadic people under his authoritarian but enlightened rule.

Of aristocratic background, Moktar Ould Daddah was the first Mauritanian to graduate from a university and to become a lawyer. When he returned from Paris in the mid-1950s, he joined the more moderate of two rival parties, the Progressive Mauritanian Union, and in 1957 was elected to the territorial assembly. By 1958 he was president of the Executive Council and the natural choice for prime minister in 1959 and president in 1961 after Mauritania attained independence. Meanwhile, in 1958 he had established a new unity party, the Mauritanian Regrouping Party, which in 1960 incorporated the chief remaining opposition party.

Moktar Ould Daddah's first aim was national unity, a delicate problem in a country divided between a minority agricultural south and a largely nomadic Moorish centre and north. At first he tried to balance regional notables and impatient young modernizers in a basically parliamentary regime, but in 1964 he shifted to an authoritarian one-party system (Mauritanian People's Party, of which he was secretary-general). In July 1978 dissatisfaction with the costly attempt by Mauritania to annex part of former Spanish Sahara resulted in his ouster by a military coup d'état led by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Ould Salek.

Daud Khan, Mohammad

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born July 18, 1909, Kabul, Afghanistan

died April 27, 1978, Kabul

Afghan politician who overthrew the monarchy of Mohammad Zahir Shah in 1973 to establish Afghanistan as a republic. He served as the country's president from 1973 to 1978.

Educated in Kabul and France, Daud Khan, a cousin and brother-in-law of Zahir Shah, pursued a career in the military. He rose to command an army corps in 1939 and held the post of minister of defense from 1946 to 1953. As prime minister (1953–63) he instituted educational and social reforms and implemented a pro-Soviet policy. He was also an advocate of Pashtun irredentism, the creation of a greater “Pashtunistan” in Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. This caused the relationship between the two countries to deteriorate and eventually led to Daud Khan's resignation. His overt participation in politics was severely curbed in 1964 when a new constitution barred members of the royal family from holding political office.

On July 17, 1973, Daud Khan led a coup that overthrew Zahir Shah. He declared Afghanistan a republic with himself as president. Once in power, Daud Khan sought to suppress the left and lessen the country's dependence on the Soviet Union. On April 27, 1978, however, he was killed in a coup that brought to power a communist government under Nur Mohammad Taraki.

de Klerk, F.W.

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born March 18, 1936, Johannesburg, S.Af.

in full Frederik Willem de Klerk politician who as president of South Africa (1989–94) brought the apartheid system of racial segregation to an end and negotiated a transition to majority rule in his country. He and Nelson Mandela jointly received the 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace for their collaboration in efforts to establish nonracial democracy in South Africa.

De Klerk was the son of a leading politician. He received a law degree (with honours) from Potchefstroom University in 1958. Soon afterward he began to establish a successful law firm in Vereeniging, becoming active in civic and business affairs there. In 1972 he was elected to Parliament for the National Party. His legal talents and the respect in which he was held won him a number of key ministerial portfolios, including mines and energy affairs (1979–82), internal affairs (1982–85), and national education and planning (1984–89). He was elected leader of the House of Assembly in 1986.

After President P.W. Botha fell ill in January 1989, de Klerk was elected leader of the National Party and successfully opposed Botha's resumption of office after his recovery. De Klerk was formally elected president by South Africa's tricameral Parliament on September 14. He owed his political success to the power base he had built up in the Transvaal, where he had been chairman of the provincial National Party from 1982.

As president, de Klerk committed himself to speeding up the reform process begun by his predecessor and to initiating talks about a new postapartheid constitution with representatives of what were then the country's four designated racial groups (white, black, Coloured, and Asian [Indian]). Though faced with a strengthened right-wing opposition in Parliament (the Conservative Party), de Klerk quickly moved to release all important political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela (in 1990), and to lift the ban on the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-African Congress. Thereafter, he frequently met with black leaders, and in 1991 his government passed legislation that repealed racially discriminatory laws affecting residence, education, public amenities, and health care in South Africa. In 1992 he called a referendum in which almost 69 percent of the country's white voters endorsed his reform policies. That same year, de Klerk undertook serious negotiations with Mandela and other black leaders over a proposed new constitution that would enfranchise the black majority and lead to all-race national elections. In the meantime his government continued to systematically dismantle the legislative basis for the apartheid system.

Under de Klerk's leadership, the governing National Party reached agreement with the ANC in the summer of 1993 on a transition to majority rule. De Klerk led his party's campaign in South Africa's first all-race elections in April 1994, in which the ANC obtained a majority of seats in the new National Assembly. De Klerk subsequently joined a government of national unity formed by Mandela, taking the post of second deputy president. He resigned as head of the National Party in 1997, when he announced his retirement from politics.

de Valera, Eamon

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Introduction

born Oct. 14, 1882, New York, N.Y., U.S.

died Aug. 29, 1975, Dublin, Ire.

original name Edward De Valera Irish politician and patriot, prime minister (1932–48, 1951–54, 1957–59), and president (1959–73). An active revolutionary from 1913, he became president of Sinn Féin in 1918 and founded the Fianna Fáil Party in 1924. In 1937 he took the Irish Free State out of the British Commonwealth and made his country a “sovereign” state, renamed Ireland, or Éire. His academic attainments also inspired wide respect; he became chancellor of the National University of Ireland in 1921.

Early life.

De Valera's father, who was Spanish, died when the boy was two. He was then sent to his mother's family in County Limerick, Ireland, and studied at the local national school and at Blackrock College, Dublin; he graduated from the Royal University, Dublin, and became a teacher of mathematics and an ardent supporter of the Irish-language revival. In 1913 he joined the Irish Volunteers, which had been organized to resist opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. In the anti-British Easter Rising in Dublin (1916), he commanded an occupied building and was the last commander to surrender. Because of his American birth, he escaped execution by the British but was sentenced to penal servitude.

Released in 1917 but arrested again and deported to England in May 1918, de Valera was acclaimed by the Irish as the chief survivor of the uprising and was elected president of the revolutionist Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”) Party, which won three-quarters of all the Irish constituencies in December 1918. After a dramatic escape from Lincoln Jail in February 1919, he went in disguise to the United States, where he collected funds. He returned to Ireland before military repression ended with the truce of 1921 and appointed plenipotentiaries to negotiate in London. He repudiated the treaty that they signed to form the Irish Free State, however, because it accepted the exclusion of Northern Ireland and imposed an oath of allegiance to the British crown.

Rise to power.

When Dáil Éireann (the assembly of Ireland) ratified the treaty by a small majority (1922), de Valera supported the republican resistance in the ensuing civil war. William Thomas Cosgrave's Irish Free State ministry imprisoned him; but he was released in 1924 and then organized a Republican opposition party that would not sit in the Dáil. In 1927, however, he persuaded his followers to sign the oath of allegiance as “an empty political formula,” and his new Fianna Fáil (“Warriors of Ireland”) Party then entered the Dáil, demanding abolition of the oath of allegiance, of the governor-general, of the Seanad (senate) as then constituted, and of land-purchase annuities payable to Great Britain. The Cosgrave ministry was defeated by Fianna Fáil in 1932, and de Valera, as head of the new ministry, embarked quickly on severing connections with Great Britain. He withheld payment of the land annuities, and an economic war resulted. Increasing retaliation by both sides enabled de Valera to develop his program of austere national self-sufficiency in an Irish-speaking Ireland, while building up industries behind protective tariffs. In 1937 the Free State declared itself a sovereign state, as Ireland, or Éire, conceding voluntary allegiance to the British crown.

De Valera's prestige was enhanced by his success as president of the Council of the League of Nations in 1932 and of its assembly in 1938. The menace of war in Europe induced British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in 1938, to conclude the “economic war” with mutual concessions. Britain relinquished the naval bases of Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly. In September 1939 de Valera proclaimed at once that Ireland would remain neutral and resist attack from any quarter. Besides avoiding the burdens and destruction of war, he had brought temporary prosperity, and he retained office in subsequent elections.

In 1948 a reaction against the long monopoly of power and patronage held by de Valera's party enabled the opposition, with the help of smaller parties, to form an interparty government under John A. Costello. But this precarious coalition collapsed within three years, ironically, after declaring Ireland a republic by formal law, an act de Valera had avoided. De Valera resumed office until 1954, when he appealed unsuccessfully for a fresh mandate, and Costello formed his second interparty ministry. No clearly defined difference now existed between the opposing parties in face of rising prices, continued emigration, and a backward agriculture. De Valera claimed, however, that a strong single-party government was indispensable and that all coalitions must be weak and insecure. On this plea he obtained, in March 1957, the overall majority that he demanded. In 1959 de Valera agreed to stand as a candidate for the presidency. He resigned his position as taoiseach (head of government) and leader of the Fianna Fáil Party. In June he was elected president and was reelected in 1966. He retired to a nursing home near Dublin in 1973 and died there in 1975.

Demirel, Süleyman

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born October 6, 1924, İslâmköy, Turkey

politician and civil engineer who served seven times as prime minister of Turkey and was president from 1993 to 2000.

Born into a peasant family, Demirel graduated in 1948 from the Technical University of Istanbul as an engineer. He entered politics in 1961 and was elected to the National Assembly that same year as a member of the Justice Party (JP), becoming the party's leader in 1964. On October 27, 1965, after the general elections, he became the youngest prime minister in his country's history. As prime minister he improved Turkey's ties with its NATO allies and instituted development programs for his basic constituency, the Turkish peasantry.

Demirel was reelected in 1969, but his moderate policies faced growing opposition from both the left and the right, and, upon his refusal to allow the military to assume a policy-making role in efforts to combat terrorism, Turkey's military commanders forced him to resign in March 1971. In March 1975 a coalition of the JP and smaller right-wing parties in a Nationalist Front once more restored Demirel to the prime ministry.

Demirel pursued a policy of economic growth, in spite of civil violence and terrorism from extremist factions, inflation, and a trade deficit. But the electoral coalitions that now enabled him to maintain power were inherently weak, unstable, and governmentally ineffective. His fourth ministry fell in June 1977, but he achieved a fifth prime ministry from July to December 1977 and a sixth from November 1979 to September 1980. As the country continued to be torn apart by extremist violence, the military overthrew his government on September 12, 1980. Demirel was banned from participating in politics for a time, but he once more was returned to office as prime minister in November 1991, with the electoral defeat of the governing Motherland Party. He resigned that post in May 1993 after he was elected president of Turkey. In 2000 the National Assembly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the president to seek a second term, and Demirel was thus barred from running for reelection. He left office in 2000.

Deng Xiaoping

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born Aug. 22, 1904, Szechwan province, China

died Feb. 19, 1997, Beijing

Wade-Giles romanization Teng Hsiao-p'ing Chinese communist leader, who was the most powerful figure in the People's Republic of China from the late 1970s until his death in 1997. He abandoned many orthodox communist doctrines and attempted to incorporate elements of the free-enterprise system into the Chinese economy.

The son of a landowner, Deng studied in France (1921–24), where he became active in the communist movement, and in the Soviet Union (1925–26). He then returned to China and became a leading political and military organizer in the Kiangsi Soviet, an autonomous communist enclave in southwestern China that had been established by Mao Zedong. Deng participated in the Long March (1934–35) of the Chinese communists to a new base in northwestern China. After serving as the commissar (political officer) of a division of the communists' Eighth Route Army (1937–45), he was appointed a secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1945 and served as chief commissar of the communists' Second Field Army during the Chinese Civil War (1948–49). After the communist takeover of China in 1949, he became the regional party leader of southwestern China. In 1952 he was summoned to Beijing and became a vice-premier. Rising rapidly, he became general secretary of the CCP in 1954 and a member of the ruling Political Bureau in 1955.

From the mid-1950s Deng was a major policy maker in both foreign and domestic affairs. He became closely allied with such pragmatist leaders as Liu Shaoqi, who stressed the use of material incentives and the formation of skilled technical and managerial elites in China's quest for economic development. Deng thus came into increasing conflict with Mao, who stressed egalitarian policies and revolutionary enthusiasm as the key to economic growth, in opposition to Deng's emphasis on individual self-interest.

Deng was attacked during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) by radical supporters of Mao, and he was stripped of his high party and government posts sometime in the years 1967–69, after which he disappeared from public view. In 1973, however, Deng was reinstated under the sponsorship of Premier Zhou Enlai and made deputy premier, and in 1975 he became vice-chairman of the party's Central Committee, a member of its Political Bureau, and chief of the general staff. As effective head of the government during the months preceding the death of Zhou, he was widely considered the likely successor to Zhou. However, upon Zhou's death in January 1976, the (Maoist) Gang of Four managed to purge Deng from the leadership once again. It was not until Mao's death in September 1976 and the consequent fall from power of the Gang of Four that Deng was rehabilitated, this time with the assent of Mao's chosen successor to the leadership of China, Hua Guofeng.

By July 1977 Deng had returned to his high posts. He soon embarked on a struggle with Hua for control of the party and government. Deng's superior political skills and broad base of support soon led Hua to surrender the premiership and the chairmanship to protégés of Deng in 1980–81. Zhao Ziyang became premier of the government, and Hu Yaobang became general secretary of the CCP; both men looked to Deng for guidance.

From this point on, Deng proceeded to carry out his own policies for the economic development of China. Operating through consensus, compromise, and persuasion, Deng engineered important reforms in virtually all aspects of China's political, economic, and social life. His most important social reform was the institution of the world's most rigorous family-planning program in order to control China's burgeoning population. He instituted decentralized economic management and rational and flexible long-term planning to achieve efficient and controlled economic growth. China's peasant farmers were given individual control over and responsibility for their production and profits, a policy that resulted in greatly increased agricultural production within a few years of its initiation in 1981. Deng stressed individual responsibility in the making of economic decisions, material incentives as the reward for industry and initiative, and the formation of cadres of skilled, well-educated technicians and managers to spearhead China's development. He freed many industrial enterprises from the control and supervision of the central government and gave factory managers the authority to determine production levels and to pursue profits for their enterprises. In foreign affairs, Deng strengthened China's trade and cultural ties with the West and opened up Chinese enterprises to foreign investment.

Deng eschewed the most conspicuous leadership posts in the party and government. But he was a member of the powerful Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, and he retained control of the armed forces by virtue of his being chairman of the CCP's Central Military Commission. He was also a vice-chairman of the CCP. Owing both to his posts and to the weight and authority of his voice within the party, he remained China's chief policy maker throughout the 1980s. In 1987 Deng stepped down from the CCP's Central Committee, thereby relinquishing his seat on the Political Bureau and its dominant Standing Committee. By so doing he compelled similar retirements by many aged party leaders who had remained opposed or resistant to his reforms.

Deng faced a critical test of his leadership in April–June 1989. Zhao had replaced the too-liberal Hu as general secretary of the CCP in 1987. Hu's death in April 1989 sparked a series of student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing demanding greater political freedom and a more democratic government. After some hesitation, Deng supported those in the CCP leadership who favoured the use of force to suppress the protesters, and in June the army crushed the demonstrations with considerable loss of life. Zhao was replaced as party leader by the more authoritarian Jiang Zemin, to whom Deng yielded his chairmanship of the Military Commission in 1989. Though now lacking any formal post in the communist leadership, Deng retained ultimate authority in the party. Although his direct involvement in government declined in the 1990s, he retained his influence until his death.

Deng restored China to domestic stability and economic growth after the disastrous excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Under his leadership, China acquired a rapidly growing economy, rising standards of living, considerably expanded personal and cultural freedoms, and growing ties to the world economy. Deng also left in place a mildly authoritarian government that remained committed to the CCP's one-party rule even while it relied on free-market mechanisms to transform China into a developed nation.

Desai, Morarji

2010-02-09T06:50:00.001-08:00

born Feb. 29, 1896, Bhadeli, Gujarāt province, India

died April 10, 1995, Bombay

in full Morarji Ranchhodji Desai prime minister of India (1977–79), first leader of sovereign India not to represent the long-ruling Congress Party.

The son of a village teacher, Desai was educated at the University of Bombay and in 1918 joined the provincial civil service of Bombay as a minor functionary. In 1930 he resigned to join Mohandas Gandhi's civil-disobedience movement and spent almost 10 years in British jails during the struggle for independence. During the 1930s and '40s he alternated prison service with ministerial posts in the government of Bombay, rising to the chief ministerial post in 1952. He gained a reputation for administrative skill as well as for harshness.

In 1956 Desai was named commerce and industry minister in the Indian government, for which he worked in high capacities until 1963, when he resigned. He became deputy prime minister in 1967. In 1969 he again resigned to become chairman of the opposition to Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party. He was arrested in 1975 for his political activities and detained in solitary confinement until 1977, whereupon he became active in the Janata Party, a coalition of four smaller parties. That same year, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi unexpectedly held elections after a 19-month suspension of political processes, and Janata achieved a surprising and overwhelming victory. Desai was chosen to be prime minister as a compromise candidate among Janata's leaders. After two years of political tension the Janata coalition began to unravel. Desai announced his resignation on July 15, 1979, after numerous defections from the coalition in Parliament, to avoid a vote of no confidence.

Diefenbaker, John G(eorge)

2010-02-09T06:49:00.001-08:00

born Sept. 18, 1895, Grey County, Ont., Can.

died Aug. 16, 1979, Ottawa

leader of the Progressive Conservative Party who was prime minister of Canada in 1957–63, following 22 years of uninterrupted Liberal rule.

After serving in World War I, Diefenbaker practiced law in Saskatchewan. He was made king's counsel in 1929. In 1936 he was chosen as leader of the Saskatchewan Conservative Party, serving at that post until 1940, when he was elected to the Canadian House of Commons for the constituency of Lake Centre. His quest for leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1948 was unsuccessful, but he became party leader in 1956.

The general election of 1957 brought victory for the Conservatives, breaking the 22-year Liberal monopoly, and Diefenbaker succeeded Louis Saint Laurent as prime minister. In the 1958 election the Conservatives won an unprecedented 208 of the 265 House seats. In the next election, however, in 1962, the Conservatives lost their majority. A crisis over the proposed manufacture of nuclear weapons in Canada caused several ministerial resignations and forced Diefenbaker to call an election in 1963, when Lester B. Pearson, leading the Liberals, became prime minister. After struggling to retain party leadership, Diefenbaker resigned as party leader in 1967 and was succeeded by Robert Stanfield. Diefenbaker became chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan in 1969, at which post he served until his death.

Diouf, Abdou

2010-02-09T06:48:00.001-08:00

born Sept. 7, 1935, Louga, Senegal

politician who was president of Senegal from 1981 to 2000.

Diouf, the son of a postman, was a member of the Serer people and a devout Muslim. He attended the well-known Lycée Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, then capital of Senegal, and the University of Dakar. In 1958 he went to Paris and studied law at the Sorbonne. Shortly after his return home in 1960, Diouf joined the civil service and was appointed to a succession of posts, including regional governor (1961–62), secretary-general to the government (1964–65), and minister of planning and industry (1968–70). On Feb. 28, 1970, Diouf, a member of the Socialist Party, became prime minister, a post that had just been reinstated through a change in the constitution. He retained the position for 11 years, and, upon the retirement of President Léopold Senghor and in accordance with the constitution, Diouf became president in 1981.

As president, Diouf stressed cooperation with other African countries. In the early 1980s he oversaw the creation of Senegambia, a loose confederation between The Gambia and Senegal that existed between 1982 and 1989. He gained national prominence as a delegate to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1983, playing a key role at the June 23 summit meeting, and as that organization's chairman in 1985–86, when his decisive leadership and moderation restored confidence in the troubled body. He served a second term as OAU chairman in 1992–93, and he was also chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Islamic Conference, and the G-15 nations.

After the 1988 elections, which Diouf easily won, charges of fraud led to violent protests. A state of emergency was declared, and Abdoulaye Wade, leader of the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), was briefly imprisoned. Unrest continued, however, as the country faced a faltering economy, border tensions with Mauritania, and fighting by Casamance separatists. In the March 2000 elections Diouf was defeated by Wade, thus ending the Socialist Party's 40-year rule of Senegal.

Doe, Samuel K(anyon)

2010-02-09T06:47:00.001-08:00

born May 6, 1950/51, Tuzon, Liberia

died Sept. 9/10, 1990, Monrovia

soldier and Liberian head of state from 1980 to 1990.

Doe, a member of the Krahn (Wee) tribe, enlisted in the army at age 18. He rose through the ranks to become a master sergeant in 1979. Like other indigenous Liberians, Doe resented the privilege and power granted the Americo-Liberians, descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the colony of Liberia in 1822. In April 1980 Doe led an attack by a group of Krahn soldiers on the Liberian executive mansion, killing President William R. Tolbert. Later, 13 prominent Tolbert associates were summarily tried and executed.

After the coup Doe assumed the rank of general and established a People's Redemption Council (PRC) composed of himself and 14 other low-ranking officers to rule the country. Doe suspended the nation's constitution until 1984, when a new constitution was approved by referendum. In 1985 he won a presidential election that was denounced as fraudulent by some observers. Doe faced opposition both at home and abroad, where his regime was often described as corrupt and brutal. His term of office was burdened by deteriorating economic conditions, and his life was continually threatened by assassination attempts and plots, which he suppressed with considerable brutality. These actions, along with Doe's favouritism toward his own Krahn tribe, sparked a rebellion against him that began in eastern Liberia in late 1989. By July 1990 the rebel forces had advanced into the capital city of Monrovia, but Doe refused to yield power. As the civil war continued, he was captured and assassinated.

dos Santos, José

2010-02-09T06:46:00.001-08:00

born August 28, 1942, Luanda, Angola

in full José Eduardo dos Santos politician who became president of Angola in 1979.

In 1961 dos Santos, a militant nationalist, joined the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola; MPLA), which supported independence from Portugal. He was chosen by the movement to study in Moscow, where he trained as an engineer, specializing in the problems of the oil industry, an important sector of Angola's economy.

After returning to Angola in 1970, dos Santos served as an active fighter with the MPLA's Second Military Front in Cabinda, the oil province of Angola. A frequent representative of the MPLA at international forums, he was elected to the executive committee of the movement's political bureau. After the country achieved independence in 1975, several groups vied for control of Angola, including the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola; UNITA), which was led by Jonas Savimbi. The MPLA eventually declared itself the government, establishing a single-party system, though UNITA continued to stage guerrilla attacks. In 1975 dos Santos became Angola's first prime minister, and three years later, when that post was eliminated, he was named planning minister.

Following the death of President Agostinho Neto in 1979, dos Santos came to power. Pragmatic and flexible, he attempted to improve relations with the West, especially the United States, which did not recognize the MPLA-led government. In the early 1990s he abandoned Marxist-Leninism and ordered the withdrawal of Cuban troops that had been in the country since the late 1970s. The changes did little to appease UNITA, which intensified its attacks. In 1991 dos Santos signed a peace agreement with UNITA and agreed to multiparty elections. After he defeated Savimbi at the polls in 1992, however, UNITA resumed the fighting, which continued into 2002. Elections slated for 1997 were postponed indefinitely, and dos Santos remained president.

Douglas-Home, Sir Alec

2010-02-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

born July 2, 1903, London, Eng.

died Oct. 9, 1995, The Hirsel, Coldstream, Berwickshire, Scot.

also called (1951–63) Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home , or (from 1974) Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel of Coldstream British foreign secretary from 1960 to 1963, prime minister from Oct. 19, 1963, to Oct. 16, 1964, and, after the fall of his government, Conservative opposition spokesman in the House of Commons on foreign affairs. He was also foreign secretary from 1970 to 1974.

As Lord Dunglass, the courtesy title he held until he succeeded in 1951 to the earldom of Home, he sat in the House of Commons as a Unionist (1931–45, 1950–51). He served as parliamentary private secretary to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1937–39), undersecretary of state for foreign affairs in Winston Churchill's “caretaker” government (May–July 1945), minister of state for Scotland (1951–55), secretary of state for Commonwealth relations (1955–60), deputy leader (1956–57) and leader (1957–60) of the House of Lords, and lord president of the council (1957–60) before his first term as foreign secretary. In October 1963 he disclaimed his peerages for life, took the name Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and succeeded Harold Macmillan as prime minister during a Conservative Party crisis, the most spectacular feature of which was an adultery scandal involving John Dennis Profumo, secretary of state for war from 1960 to 1963.

Admittedly having slight knowledge of economics, Sir Alec as prime minister was unable to improve the deteriorating British balance-of-payments situation. He antagonized numerous Conservatives by inducing the House of Commons to pass legislation against price-fixing. Both as foreign secretary and as prime minister, he gained U.S. approval for his firm anti-Communism. As chairman of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference (July 1964), he achieved some compromise between extremist views on racial problems. Throughout his ministry he was faced with the prospect of a forthcoming general election, which took place on Oct. 15, 1964, and brought a Conservative defeat. He was succeeded (July 1965) as party leader by the future prime minister Edward Heath. In December 1974 he was created a life peer, Baron Home of the Hirsel of Coldstream. In 1976 he published his autobiography, The Way the Wind Blows. He also published Border Reflections: Chiefly on the Arts of Shooting and Fishing (1979) and Letters to a Grandson (1983).

Dubček, Alexander

2010-02-09T06:43:00.000-08:00

born Nov. 27, 1921, Uhrovec, Czech. [now in Slovakia]

died Nov. 7, 1992, Prague, Czech. [now in Czech Republic]

first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Jan. 5, 1968, to April 17, 1969) whose liberal reforms led to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Dubček received his early education in Kirgiziya (Kyrgyzstan) in Soviet Central Asia, where his father, Stefan Dubček, a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, had settled. The family returned to Czechoslovakia in 1938. During World War II, Dubček took part in the underground resistance to Nazi occupation and after the war rose steadily in Communist Party ranks, becoming in 1958 chief secretary of the regional committee in Bratislava and a member of the central committees of both the Slovak and the Czechoslovak Communist Parties. In 1962 he became a full member of the Central Committee's Presidium.

In October 1967, at a Central Committee meeting in Prague, Dubček rallied the support of party and economic reformers, as well as Slovak nationalists, against the leadership of Antonín Novotný. Novotný was forced to resign as first secretary on Jan. 5, 1968, and Dubček replaced him. During the early months of 1968 the Czechoslovak press was granted greater freedom of expression, and victims of political purges during the Stalin era were rehabilitated. On April 9 a reform program called “Czechoslovakia's Road to Socialism” was promulgated that envisaged economic reforms and a wide-ranging democratization of Czechoslovak political life. The trend of developments aroused concern in the Soviet Union. From July 29 to August 2, the top leaders of the two countries conferred at the Slovak town of Cierna; their deliberations concluded with only minor compromises by Dubček. Still dissatisfied with developments in Czechoslovakia and fearful of the implications of liberalization, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country the night of August 20–21. Dubček and five other Presidium members were seized and taken to Moscow, where the Soviets wrested major concessions from them. On his return to Prague Dubček gave an emotional address to his countrymen, requesting their cooperation in the curtailment of his reforms.

Dubček was in a weak position. Gradually, his more progressive aides were removed, and in April 1969 he was demoted from first secretary of the party to president of the Federal Assembly (the national parliament). In January 1970 he was appointed ambassador to Turkey, but, after being expelled from the party, he was made an inspector of the forestry administration, based in Bratislava.

Dubček returned to prominence in Czechoslovakia's national affairs in December 1989 after the country's Communist Party had given up its monopoly on power and agreed to participate in a coalition government. On December 28 he was elected chairman of the Federal Assembly, and by 1992 he had become the leader of Slovakia's Social Democrats. He died of injuries suffered in an automobile accident.

Duvalier, François

2010-02-09T06:41:00.001-08:00

born April 14, 1907, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

died April 21, 1971, Port-au-Prince

byname Papa Doc president of Haiti whose 14-year regime was of unprecedented duration in that country.

Duvalier graduated in 1934 from the University of Haiti School of Medicine, where he served as a hospital staff physician until 1943, when he became prominently active in the U.S.-sponsored anti-yaws campaign.

A contributor to the daily Action Nationale (1934), Duvalier was markedly influenced by the mystic scholar Lorimer Denis and became a member of Le Groupe des Griots, a circle of writers who embraced black nationalism and voodoo as the key sources of Haitian culture.

A supporter of President Dumarsais Estimé, Duvalier was appointed director general of the National Public Health Service in 1946, and he directed the anti-yaws campaign in 1947–48. He was appointed underminister of labour in 1948 and the following year became minister of public health and labour, a post that he retained until May 10, 1950, when President Estimé was overthrown by a military junta under Paul E. Magloire, who was subsequently elected president. Duvalier returned to his former work with the American Sanitary Mission in 1951–54 and began organizing the resistance to Magloire. By 1954 he had become the central opposition figure and went underground.

After the resignation of Magloire in December 1956, Duvalier's followers participated in most of the six governments that were formed in the succeeding 10 months. Running on a program of popular reform and black nationalism, Duvalier was elected president in September 1957. Setting about to consolidate his power, he reduced the size of the army and, with his chief aide, Clément Barbot, organized the Tontons Macoutes (“Bogeymen”), a private force responsible for terrorizing and assassinating alleged foes of the regime.

When Duvalier was stricken by a heart attack in 1959, Barbot acted in his stead. Upon recovery, the president promptly imprisoned his aide. His manipulation of legislative elections in 1961 to have his term extended to 1967 and other corrupt and despotic measures precipitated a termination of U.S. aid to Haiti. That summer he had Barbot murdered, after the latter, on his release from prison, had attempted an insurrection. Other attempts to overthrow Duvalier were equally unsuccessful.

Late in 1963 Duvalier moved further toward an absolutist regime, promoting a cult of his person as the semidivine embodiment of the Haitian nation. In April 1964 he was declared president for life. Although diplomatically almost completely isolated, excommunicated by the Vatican until 1966 for harassing the clergy, and threatened by conspiracies against him, Duvalier was able to stay in power longer than any of his predecessors. His regime of terrors quelched political dissent, at the same time achieving for Haiti an unusual degree of political stabilization. On Duvalier's death, power was transferred to his son, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”).

Duvalier, Jean-Claude

2010-02-09T06:39:00.001-08:00

born July 3, 1951, Port-au-Prince, Haiti

byname Baby Doc, French Bébé Doc president of Haiti from 1971 to 1986.

The only son of François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier, Jean-Claude succeeded his father as president for life in April 1971, becoming at age 19 the youngest president in the world. Partly because of pressure from the United States to moderate the tyrannical and corrupt practices of his father's regime, Duvalier instituted budgetary and judicial reforms, replaced a few older cabinet members with younger men, released some political prisoners, and eased press censorship, professing a policy of “gradual democratization of institutions.”

Nevertheless, no sharp changes from previous policies occurred. No political opposition was tolerated, and all important political officials and judges were still appointed by the president. Under Duvalier, Haiti continued a semi-isolationist approach to foreign relations, although the government actively solicited foreign aid to stimulate the economy. Duvalier graduated from secondary school in Port-au-Prince and briefly attended law school at the University of Haiti. In 1980 he married Michele Bennett, who later supplanted Duvalier's hard-line mother, Simone, in Haitian politics. In the face of increasing social unrest, however, Duvalier and his wife left the country early in 1986, and a six-member council replaced him.

Ecevit, Bülent

2010-02-09T06:37:00.000-08:00

born May 28, 1925, Constantinople [now Istanbul], Turkey

died Nov. 5, 2006, Ankara

Turkish poet, journalist, and politician, who served as prime minister of Turkey in 1974, 1977, 1978–79, and 1999–2002.

Ecevit attended the American Robert College in Istanbul and served as an embassy official in London (1946–50). He returned to Ankara as a writer and journalist with the newspapers Halkçi and Ulus, the official organ of the Republican People's Party (RPP), which his father had represented in the National Assembly.

Ecevit was elected to the National Assembly as an RPP member for Ankara (1957, 1961) and Zonguldak (1965, 1969), having joined the party council in 1959. He gradually emerged as leader of the left-of-centre group, and during his service as minister of labour (1961–65) he legalized strikes for the first time in Turkish history. In 1966 Ecevit became secretary-general of the RPP under İsmet İnönü, whose cooperation with the country's military government he opposed. Ecevit became chairman of the RPP in 1972 and prime minister in January 1974.

As head of government, Ecevit declared an amnesty for all political prisoners and authorized (July 20, 1974) Turkey's military intervention in Cyprus after the Greek-led coup on that island. His request for a vote of confidence from the National Assembly in September 1974 failed, and, after a severe political crisis, tenuous power passed to Süleyman Demirel of the Justice Party. After further crises in 1977, during which Ecevit briefly formed a government (June 21–July 3), he was again prime minister in January 1978. Acute economic and social difficulties, however, led to the fall of his government in October 1979.

Ecevit remained active in politics and was deputy premier in 1998 when Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz was forced to resign following a corruption scandal. Ecevit formed a new government, and in April 1999 his Democratic Left Party won a plurality of votes. A coalition government was created, with Ecevit as prime minister. Months after he took office, Turkey suffered a devastating earthquake, and Ecevit drew criticism for the government's slow initial response to the crisis and its refusal to allow Muslim groups to participate in relief efforts. A staunch secularist, Ecevit had pledged to curb the growing influence of Islam in Turkish politics.

At the start of the 21st century, Ecevit's administration faced a number of challenges. The Turkish economy continued to falter, and the country experienced its worst recession in some 55 years. There was also bitter opposition to a number of reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty and increased civil rights for Kurds, that were meant to ease Turkey's admittance to the European Union; after much political maneuvering, the EU-related reforms were eventually passed by the National Assembly. The situation worsened in May 2002 when Ecevit became ill but refused to name an acting prime minister. There were calls for his resignation, and subsequently numerous party members and ministers resigned, which caused Ecevit's coalition to lose its parliamentary majority. In July 2002 the National Assembly voted to move up elections, which were held in November 2002. Ecevit's Democratic Left Party was overwhelmingly defeated, receiving about 1 percent of the votes.

Among Ecevit's literary works are a Turkish translation (1941) of Rabindranath Tagore's song poems, Gītāñjalī, and a translation (1963) of T.S. Eliot's play The Cocktail Party. A book of his original poetry, Bir şeyler olacak yarın (“Things Will Happen Tomorrow”), was published in 2005. His political writings include Ortanin solu (1966; “Left of Centre”), Bu düzen değişmelidir (1968; “The System Must Change”), Atatürk ve devrimcilik (1970; “Atatürk and Revolution”), Demokratik sol (1974; “Democratic Left”), and Işçi-köylü elele (1976; “Workers and Peasants Together”).

Eden, Anthony

2010-02-09T06:34:00.000-08:00

born June 12, 1897, Windlestone, Durham, Eng.

died Jan. 14, 1977, Alvediston, Wiltshire

in full Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, Viscount Eden of Royal Leamington Spa , also called (until 1961) Sir Anthony Eden British foreign secretary in 1935–38, 1940–45, and 1951–55 and prime minister from 1955 to 1957.

After combat service in World War I, Eden studied Oriental languages (Arabic and Persian) at Christ Church, Oxford. Elected to the House of Commons in 1923, he was appointed undersecretary of state for foreign affairs in 1931, lord privy seal (with special responsibility for international relations) in 1934, and minister for League of Nations affairs (a Cabinet office created for him) in June 1935. He became foreign secretary in December 1935 but resigned in February 1938 to protest Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

On the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Eden reentered Chamberlain's government as dominions secretary. When Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, Eden was named secretary of state for war, but from Dec. 23, 1940, until the defeat of the Conservatives in July 1945, he served once more as foreign secretary. On Oct. 27, 1951, after Churchill and the Conservative Party had been returned to power, Eden again became foreign secretary and also was designated deputy prime minister. In 1954 he helped to settle the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute, to resolve the quarrel between Italy and Yugoslavia over Trieste, to stop the Indochina War, and to establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).

In 1953 he became seriously ill, and, although he underwent several operations, he never fully regained his health. Succeeding Churchill as prime minister on April 6, 1955, he attempted to relax international tension by welcoming to Great Britain the Soviet leaders N.S. Khrushchev and N.A. Bulganin. His fall began on July 26, 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, head of the Egyptian state, nationalized the Suez Canal Company, in which the British government had been a principal stockholder since 1875. This action led to an Anglo-French attack on Egypt on November 5, one week after an attack on Egypt by Israel.

British public opinion was more favourable to Eden's show of force than the Labour and Liberal parties had expected; his supporters regretted, however, that he did not fulfill his intention of occupying the key positions of Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez. By December 22, partly through U.S. pressure, British and French forces had been supplanted by UN emergency units, but the canal was left in Egyptian hands rather than subjected to international control. The next month, on Jan. 9, 1957, Eden resigned, giving ill health as his reason.

Eden was knighted (K.G.) in 1954 and created Earl of Avon in 1961. Eden's memoirs were issued in three volumes, Full Circle (1960), Facing the Dictators (1962), and The Reckoning (1965).

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

2010-02-09T06:31:00.001-08:00

Introduction

born October 14, 1890, Denison, Texas, U.S.

died March 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.

In full Dwight David Eisenhower 34th president of the United States (1953–61), who had been supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during World War II. (

Early career

Eisenhower was the third of seven sons of David Jacob and Ida Elizabeth (Stover) Eisenhower. In the spring of 1891 the Eisenhowers left Denison, Texas, and returned to Abilene, Kansas, where their forebears had settled as part of a Mennonite colony. David worked in a creamery; the family was poor; and Dwight and his brothers were introduced to hard work and a strong religious tradition at an early age.

“Ike,” as Dwight was called, was a fun-loving youth who enjoyed sports but took only a moderate interest in his studies. The latter was perhaps a sign of one of his later characteristics: a dislike for the company of scholars. Dwight graduated from Abilene High School in 1909, worked for more than a year to support a brother's college education, and then entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, a decision that left his mother, a pacifist, in tears. He excelled in gridiron football but injured a knee in his second year at the academy and was forced to stop playing. In the remarkable class of 1915—which was to produce 59 generals—he ranked 61st academically and 125th in discipline out of the total of 164 graduates.

Commissioned a second lieutenant, he was sent to San Antonio, Texas, where he met Mamie Geneva Doud (Mamie Eisenhower), daughter of a successful Denver, Colorado, meat packer. They were married in 1916 and had two sons: Doud Dwight, born in 1917, who died of scarlet fever in 1921, and John Sheldon Doud, born in 1922.

During World War I, Eisenhower commanded a tank training centre, was promoted to captain, and received the Distinguished Service Medal. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas. From 1922 to 1924 he was assigned to the Panama Canal Zone, and there he came under the inspiring influence of his commander, Brigadier General Fox Conner. With Conner's assistance, Eisenhower was selected to attend the army's Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Then a major, he graduated first in a class of 275 in 1926 and two years later graduated from the Army War College. He then served in France (where he wrote a guidebook of World War I battlefields) and in Washington, D.C., before becoming an aide to Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur in 1933. Two years later he accompanied MacArthur to the Philippines to assist in the reorganization of the commonwealth's army, and while there he was awarded the Distinguished Service Star of the Philippines and promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to the United States shortly after Germany's invasion of Poland initiated the European phase of World War II, and in March 1941 he became a full colonel. Three months later he was made chief of staff of the Third Army, and he soon won the attention of Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall for his role in planning war games involving almost 500,000 troops.

Supreme commander

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Marshall appointed Eisenhower to the army's war plans division in Washington, D.C., where he prepared strategy for an Allied invasion of Europe. Eisenhower had been made a brigadier general in September 1941 and was promoted to major general in March 1942; he was also named head of the operations division of the War Department. In June Marshall selected him over 366 senior officers to be commander of U.S. troops in Europe. Eisenhower's rapid advancement, after a long army career spent in relative obscurity, was due not only to his knowledge of military strategy and talent for organization but also to his ability to persuade, mediate, and get along with others. Men from a wide variety of backgrounds, impressed by his friendliness, humility, and persistent optimism, liked and trusted him. A phrase that later became one of the most famous campaign slogans in American history seemed to reflect the impression of everyone who met him: “I like Ike!”

Eisenhower was promoted to lieutenant general in July 1942 and named to head Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa. This first major Allied offensive of the war was launched on November 8, 1942, and successfully completed in May 1943. Eisenhower's decision to work during the campaign with the French admiral François Darlan, who had collaborated with the Germans, aroused a storm of protest from the Allies, but his action was defended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A full general since that February, Eisenhower then directed the amphibious assault of Sicily and the Italian mainland, which resulted in the fall of Rome on June 4, 1944.During the fighting in Italy, Eisenhower participated in plans to cross the English Channel for an invasion of France. On December 24, 1943, he was appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and the next month he was in London making preparations for the massive thrust into Europe. On June 6, 1944, he gambled on a break in bad weather and gave the order to launch the Normandy Invasion, the largest amphibious attack in history. On D-Day more than 156,000 troops landed in Normandy. Invading Allied forces eventually numbered 1,000,000 and began to fight their way into the heart of France. On August 25 Paris was liberated. After winning the Battle of the Bulge—a fierce German counterattack in the Ardennes in December—the Allies crossed the Rhine on March 7, 1945. Germany surrendered on May 7, ending the war in Europe. Although Eisenhower was criticized, then and later, for allowing the Russians to capture the enemy capital of Berlin, he and others defended his actions on several grounds (the Russians were closer, had more troops, and had been promised Berlin at the Yalta Conference of February 1945). In the meantime, in December 1944, Eisenhower had been made a five-star general.

Eisenhower was given a hero's welcome upon returning to the United States for a visit in June 1945, but in November his intended retirement was delayed when President Harry S. Truman named him to replace Marshall as chief of staff. For more than two years Eisenhower directed demobilization of the wartime army and worked to unify the armed services under a centralized command. In May 1948 he left active duty the most popular and respected soldier in the United States and became president of Columbia University in New York City. His book Crusade in Europe, published that fall, made him a wealthy man.

Eisenhower's brief career as an academic administrator was not especially successful. His technical education and military experience prepared him poorly for the post. In the fall of 1950 President Truman asked him to become supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in early 1951 he flew to Paris to assume his new position. For the next 15 months he devoted himself to the task of creating a united military organization in western Europe to be a defense against the possibility of communist aggression.

First term as president

As early as 1943 Eisenhower was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. His personal qualities and military reputation prompted both parties to woo him. As the campaign of 1952 neared, Eisenhower let it be known that he was a Republican, and the eastern wing of the party, headed by Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, made an intensive effort to persuade him to seek the Republican presidential nomination. His name was entered in several state primaries against the more conservative Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio. Although the results were mixed, Eisenhower decided to run. In June 1952 he retired from the army after 37 years of service, returned to the United States, and began to campaign actively. At the party convention in July, after a bitter fight with Taft supporters, Eisenhower won the nomination on the first ballot. His running mate was Senator Richard M. Nixon of California. The Democrats nominated Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois for president and Senator John Sparkman of Alabama for vice president.

Despite his age (61), Eisenhower campaigned tirelessly, impressing millions with his warmth and sincerity. His wide, friendly grin, wartime heroics, and middle-class pastimes—he was an avid golfer and bridge player and a fan not of highbrow literature but of the American western—endeared him to the public and garnered him vast support. Like her husband, Mamie Eisenhower projected a down-to-earth image. She remained an ardent supporter of him, though their marriage had been strained by rumours of an affair during World War II between Eisenhower and his driver-secretary Kay Summersby.

Eisenhower urged economy and honesty in government and promised to visit Korea to explore the possibilities for ending the Korean War, which had broken out in 1950 between communist North Korea and pro-Western South Korea and soon involved United Nations (mainly U.S.) troops and communist Chinese forces. Many Republicans, including Nixon, spoke of pro-communist disloyalty within the Truman administration and called for stringent antisubversive measures. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won handily, carrying 39 states, winning the electoral vote 442 to 89, and collecting more than 33 million popular votes. (See primary source document: First Inaugural Address.) The Republican Party won control of Congress by a slim margin but lost both houses two years later.

Eisenhower's basically conservative views on domestic affairs were shared by his secretary of the treasury, George M. Humphrey. The administration's domestic program, which came to be labeled “modern Republicanism,” called for reduced taxes, balanced budgets, a decrease in government control over the economy, and the return of certain federal responsibilities to the states. Controls over rents, wages, and prices were allowed to expire, and in 1954 there was a slight tax revision. At Eisenhower's insistence Congress transferred the title to valuable tideland oil reserves to the states. But there was no sharp break with policies inherited from previous Democratic administrations. The needs of an expanding population (which grew from 155 million to 179 million during the Eisenhower era) and the country's overseas commitments caused budget deficits during five out of eight years. The minimum wage was increased to $1 per hour; the Social Security System was broadened; and in the spring of 1953 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created.

The right wing of the Republican Party clashed with the president more often than the Democrats did during his first term. For example, Eisenhower expended a great deal of time and energy defeating the Bricker Amendment of 1954, the bill sponsored by Republican Senator John Bricker of Ohio that would have limited the president's liberty to negotiate international treaties that violated the rights of U.S. states. The bill fell only one vote short; it was a victory for the president's extensive lobbying campaign. But by far the largest challenge came from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. In part to preserve party unity, Eisenhower had refused to publicly condemn Senator McCarthy's charges of communist influence within the government. Although privately Eisenhower expressed his distaste for the senator, at times he seemed to encourage the attacks of McCarthyites. Hundreds of federal employees were fired under his expanded loyalty-security program. With his approval Congress passed a law designed to outlaw the American Communist Party. Following the sensational hearings on McCarthy's charges against army and civilian officials, televised nationally for five weeks in the spring of 1954, McCarthy's popularity waned, as did the anticommunist hysteria.

Foreign affairs drew much of Eisenhower's attention. He and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, worked hard at achieving peace by constructing collective defense agreements and by threatening the Soviet Union with “massive retaliatory power”; both strategies were designed to check the spread of communism. Another strategy was unknown to the public at the time but was heavily criticized in later years: the use of the Central Intelligence Agency in covert operations to overthrow governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954).

Eisenhower kept his campaign promise and visited Korea shortly after his inauguration. Partly, perhaps, because of Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953 and partly because Eisenhower hinted at his willingness to use nuclear weapons, the president was able to negotiate a truce for the Korean War in July 1953. In December of that year he proposed to the United Nations that the countries of the world pool atomic information and materials under the auspices of an international agency. This Atoms for Peace speech (see original text) bore fruit in 1957, when 62 countries formed the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In July 1955 the president met with leaders of Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union at a summit conference in Geneva. His “open skies” proposal, by which the United States and the Soviet Union would permit continuous air inspection of each other's military installations, was welcomed by world opinion but was rejected by the U.S.S.R. In September 1954 Eisenhower and Dulles succeeded in creating the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to prevent further communist expansion. It was composed of the United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan. NATO was strengthened in 1955 by the inclusion of West Germany.

Critics contended that there were frequent disparities between the administration's words and its deeds in the field of foreign relations. While threatening to “unleash” Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, the United States signed a defense treaty with Nationalist China in December 1954 that inhibited Chiang's ability to attack the communist Chinese. Moreover, Dulles spoke of “liberating” captive peoples in communist countries, but the administration stopped short of this and limited itself to protests when uprisings occurred in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956). While the secretary of state promised “massive retaliation” against communist aggression, the president made the decision to limit the American role in the Indochina crisis between France and the guerrillas led by Ho Chi Minh to pushing for a partition of Vietnam into a communist North and a noncommunist South and to providing financial and military aid to the latter.

Second term

A heart attack in September 1955 and an operation for ileitis in June 1956 raised considerable doubt about Eisenhower's ability to serve a second term. But he recovered quickly, and the Republican convention unanimously endorsed the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket on the first ballot. The Democrats again selected Adlai E. Stevenson and named Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee as his running mate, but Eisenhower's great personal popularity turned the election into a landslide victory, the most one-sided race since 1936, as the Republican ticket garnered more than 57 percent of the popular vote and won the electoral vote 457 to 73. (See primary source document: Second Inaugural Address.) Nevertheless, the Democrats once more captured both houses of Congress, a feat they were to duplicate in 1958. Eisenhower was the first president to serve with three Congresses controlled by the opposition party.

The election campaign of 1956, however, had been complicated by a crisis in the Middle East over Egypt's seizure of the Suez Canal. The subsequent attack on Egypt by Great Britain, France, and Israel and the Soviet Union's support of Egypt prompted the president to go before Congress in January 1957 to urge adoption of what came to be called the Eisenhower Doctrine, a pledge to send U.S. armed forces to any Middle Eastern country requesting assistance against communist aggression.

When the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 17, 1954, declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka), controversy and violence broke out, especially in the South. In September 1957 Eisenhower dispatched 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to halt an attempt by Governor Orval E. Faubus to obstruct a federal court order integrating a high school. This action was the most serious challenge of his presidency. On several occasions Eisenhower had expressed distaste for racial segregation, though he doubtless believed that the process of integration would take time. Significantly, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first such law passed since 1875.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth. Americans were stunned by the achievement, and many blamed Eisenhower for the administration's insistence on low military budgets and its failure to develop a space program. Steps were taken to boost space research and to provide funds to increase the study of science, and these culminated in the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in July 1958. The administration again came under fire in the fall of 1957 for an economic recession that lasted through the following summer. For fear of fueling inflation, Eisenhower refused to lower taxes or increase federal spending to ease the slump.

Following the death of Dulles in the spring of 1959, Eisenhower assumed a more vigorous and personal role in the direction of American foreign policy. He traveled over 300,000 miles (480,000 km) to some 27 countries in his last two years of office, a period historians have termed the era of “the new Eisenhower.” His masterly use of the new medium of television—holding regularly televised news conferences and participating in high-profile motorcades in foreign capitals around the world—and his exploitation of the advent of jet travel captivated the public and led some scholars to term Eisenhower the first of the imperial presidents. To improve relations with the Soviet Union, he invited Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to visit the United States. Khrushchev toured parts of the country in September 1959 and held private talks with Eisenhower. Another summit meeting was planned, and a new era of personal diplomacy seemed at hand. But when a U-2 reconnaissance plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers of the United States was shot down over the U.S.S.R. in May 1960, Khrushchev scuttled the talks and angrily withdrew his invitation to Eisenhower to visit the Soviet Union. Eisenhower admitted that the flights had gone on for four years and shouldered much of the blame for the ill-timed affair. In January 1961, during the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, which for two years had been under the control of Fidel Castro.

Although his administrations had a great many critics, Eisenhower remained extraordinarily popular. In his Farewell Address (see original text) he warned against the rise and power of “the military-industrial complex,” but his successors ignored him amid the perceived demands of the Cold War. When he left office, Congress restored his rank as general of the army. He retired to his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and devoted much of his time to his memoirs. In 1963 he published Mandate for Change, which was followed in 1965 by Waging Peace. A lighter work, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, appeared in 1967.

Elizabeth II

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born April 21, 1926, London, England

In full Elizabeth Alexandra Mary , officially Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from February 6, 1952.
Elizabeth was the elder daughter of Albert, duke of York, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. As the child of a younger son of King George V, the young Elizabeth had little prospect of acceding to the throne until her uncle, Edward VIII (afterward duke of Windsor), abdicated in her father's favour on December 11, 1936, at which time her father became King George VI and she became heir presumptive. The princess's education was supervised by her mother, who entrusted her daughters to a governess, Marion Crawford; the princess was also grounded in history by C.H.K. Marten, afterward provost of Eton College, and had instruction from visiting teachers in music and languages. During World War II she and her sister, Princess Margaret Rose, perforce spent much of their time safely away from the London blitz and separated from their parents, living mostly at Balmoral Castle in Scotland and at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, and Windsor Castle.
Early in 1947 Princess Elizabeth went with the king and queen to South Africa. After her return there was an announcement of her betrothal to her distant cousin Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of the Royal Navy, formerly Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. The marriage took place in Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947. On the eve of the wedding her father, the king, conferred upon the bridegroom the titles of duke of Edinburgh, earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich. They took residence at Clarence House in London. Their first child, Prince Charles (Charles Philip Arthur George), was born November 14, 1948, at Buckingham Palace.
In the summer of 1951 the health of King George VI entered into a serious decline, and Princess Elizabeth represented him at the Trooping the Colour and on various other state occasions. On October 7 she and her husband set out on a highly successful tour of Canada and Washington, D.C. After Christmas in England she and the duke set out in January 1952 for a tour of Australia and New Zealand, but en route, at Sagana, Kenya, news reached them of the king's death on February 6, 1952. Elizabeth, now queen, at once flew back to England. The first three months of her reign, the period of full mourning for her father, were passed in comparative seclusion. But in the summer, after she had moved from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, she undertook the routine duties of the sovereign and carried out her first state opening of Parliament on November 4, 1952. Her coronation was held at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.
Beginning in November 1953 the queen and the duke of Edinburgh made a six-month round-the-world tour of the Commonwealth, which included the first visit to Australia and New Zealand by a reigning British monarch. In 1957, after state visits to various European nations, she and the duke visited Canada and the United States. In 1961 she made the first royal British tour of the Indian subcontinent in 50 years, and she was also the first reigning British monarch to visit South America (in 1968) and the Persian Gulf countries (in 1979). During her “Silver Jubilee” in 1977, she presided at a London banquet attended by the leaders of the 36 members of the Commonwealth, traveled all over Britain and Northern Ireland, and toured overseas in the South Pacific and Australia, in Canada, and in the Caribbean.
On the accession of Queen Elizabeth, her son Prince Charles became heir apparent; he was named prince of Wales on July 26, 1958, and was so invested on July 1, 1969. The queen's other children were Princess Anne (Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise), born August 15, 1950; Prince Andrew (Andrew Albert Christian Edward), born February 19, 1960, and created duke of York in 1986; and Prince Edward (Edward Anthony Richard Louis), born March 10, 1964. All these children have the surname “of Windsor,” but in 1960 Elizabeth decided to create the hyphenated name Mountbatten-Windsor for other descendants not styled prince or princess and royal highness. Elizabeth's first grandchild (Princess Anne's son) was born on November 15, 1977.

The queen seemed increasingly aware of the modern role of the monarchy, allowing, for example, the televising of the royal family's domestic life in 1970 and condoning the formal dissolution of her sister's marriage in 1978. However, after the failed marriage of her son and Diana, princess of Wales, and Diana's death in 1997, popular feeling in Britain turned against the royal family, which was thought to be out of touch with contemporary British life. In line with her earlier attempts at modernizing the monarchy, the queen, after 1997, sought to present a less-stuffy and less-traditional image of the monarchy. These attempts have met with mixed success.
She is known to favour simplicity in court life and is also known to take a serious and informed interest in government business, aside from the traditional and ceremonial duties. Privately she has become a keen horsewoman; she keeps racehorses, frequently attends races, and periodically visits the Kentucky stud farms in the United States. Her financial and property holdings have made her one of the world's richest women.

Erdogan, Recep Tayyip

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born February 26, 1954, Rize, Turkey

Turkish politician, who became prime minister of Turkey in 2003.
In high school Erdogan became known as a fiery orator in the cause of political Islam. He later played on a professional football (soccer) team and attended Marmara University. During this time he met Necmettin Erbakan, a veteran Islamist politician, and Erdogan became active in parties led by Erbakan, despite a ban in Turkey on religiously based political parties. In 1994 Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul on the ticket of the Welfare Party. The election of the first-ever Islamist to the mayoralty shook the secularist establishment, but Erdogan proved to be a competent and canny manager. He yielded to protests against the building of a mosque in the city's central square but banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in city-owned cafés. In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred after reciting a poem that compared mosques to barracks, minarets to bayonets, and the faithful to an army. Sentenced to 10 months in prison, Erdogan resigned as mayor.
After serving four months of his sentence, Erdogan was released from prison in 1999, and he reentered politics. When Erbakan's Virtue Party was banned in 2001, Erdogan broke with Erbakan and helped form the Justice and Development Party. His party won the parliamentary elections in 2002, but Erdogan was legally barred from serving in parliament or as prime minister because of his 1998 conviction. A constitutional amendment in December 2002, however, effectively removed Erdogan's disqualification. On March 9, 2003, he won a by-election and days later was asked by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to form a new government. Erdogan took office on May 14, 2003.
As prime minister, Erdogan toured the United States and Europe in order to dispel any fears that he held anti-Western biases and to advance Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Although the previous government had refused to allow U.S. troops to be stationed in Turkey during the Second Persian Gulf War, in October 2003 Erdogan secured approval for the dispatch of Turkish troops to help keep the peace in Iraq; Iraqi opposition to the plan, however, prevented such a deployment. In 2004 he sought to resolve the issue of Cyprus, which had been partitioned into Greek and Turkish sectors since a 1974 civil war. Erdogan supported a United Nation plan for the reunification of the island; in April 2004, Turkish Cypriots approved the referendum, but their Greek counterparts rejected it.