Mr. Rumsfeld, who is making his second tour at the Pentagon, was considered one of Washington's most cunning operators.
Smith may well be a crook, but, like other noir protagonists who fall prey to the machinations of more cunning operators (Frank Chambers, in "The Postman Always Rings Twice," say), he is not without pathos.
That first day, rumpled and dust-covered after the ten-hour drive from Lahore in this crate, I was met, as I would be met each time I drove back in the early years, by these suave, ruthless, cunning operators, lined up in the farmhouse portico and waiting to embrace me, size me up, and then retire — like a conclave of Renaissance cardinals — to plot my confusion.
Even the badge on Sven Goran Eriksson's gleaming white Leicester City tracksuit, depicting a fox's head, seems to suit the Swede's wily personality and reputation as a crafty, even cunning, operator.
To corporate nine-to-fivers in their fluorescent cubicles who came West with dreams of wild parties and wide-open-town millions, this figure takes on a romantic tinge -- Sammy Glick, cunning operator, betrayer extraordinaire, the quickest rat in the maze.
Like Earl and Huey Long, of Louisiana, he was a kaleidoscopically strange and contradictory political beast: a man of civil rights, a man of fallen character, a cunning operator, an arrogant hack, a builder, an underminer, a spokesman for the dispossessed, a bullshit artist.
Meimarakis's down-to-earth style and language appeal, said Vassilis Monastiriotis of the London School of Economics, to "a broad cross-section: both working-class voters, who see him as a man of the people, and the traditional higher-income New Democracy supporters, who see him as a cunning operator able to hit Tsipras below the belt".
A cunning political operator, he subsequently added the portfolios of foreign affairs, defence, education, and government policy to the premiership.
Wilson's speech was in part that of a cunning political operator, exploiting techno-futurism in just this way.
Since it is run by Charles Margai, nephew of the first prime minister and son of its second, there is little danger of new brooms sweeping through Freetown's shabby corridors of power.The 69-year old presidential front-runner, Solomon Berewa, is the incumbent vice-president, renowned as a clever and cunning political operator.
A talented and cunning political operator, Paul was precisely the sort of man the Florentines needed to assist them in their defence against French and Spanish threats.
