OnWARD with Peter J, Ward   You don’t want to get on Cindy Adams’ bad side. The 92-year-old New York Post gossip mainstay is more powerful than a herd of elephants, stepping over those to reach her destination. But the brash outer shell protects a hardcharging journalist with some serious chops. You may think she’s all rumor and innuendo and watercooler fodder. However, this Queen of New York gossip is a reporter like no other. Throughout her 40+ year career at the Post, she has interviewed some of the most powerful dictators of their time, like Sukarno in Indonesia, Manuel Noreiga of Panama, and the Shah of Iran. She charmed them all, later writing an autobiography on one: Sukarno: An Autobiography, as Told to To Cindy Adams. “He liked me from the first time we met,” Adams said in a recent phone interview. Her late husband, comedian and columnist Joey Adams, was tapped by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 to head a cultural exchange unit to South Asia, and he took 25 entertainers with him. “That was how I met Sukarno, for the first time,” she recalled. “I asked him why he was wearing a uniform the first time we met,” she said. “He looked at me and said, ‘I have 150 million people, and I am in charge’. I laughed and said to him, ‘I think you damn well know you look handsome in it!’ and he started to laugh.” Randy Levine, president of the New York Yankees, has known Cindy Adams for more than 30 years. “I think she is a star. And you know, like anything, sports, the news business or the entertainment business, it’s about who attracts eyeballs,” said Levine. “And she attracts a lot of eyeballs,” he emphasized. “Nobody...... Read more on Full Issue!