Coupe Dispatch Quotes

But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition. Communist China had never had an orderly succession—for half a century, every transfer of power had involved coups or power struggles.

We’d been told by Nicole’s friend Ron Hardy that the intercom controlling the lock on the front gate was broken. If Nicole had wanted to let a visitor in, she’d had to go down and open the gate manually. If this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill. He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head, making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the staircase wall. She would have been knocked unconscious long enough for him to deal with Ron before going back to dispatch her with the coup de grâce.

Visiting white reporters from New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and elsewhere filed their dispatches by telegraph, providing not only moment-to-moment updates but also a nearly unanimous portrayal of the white supremacy campaign as a welcome corrective to corrupt Negro rule.