Word: bogeyman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...laughs from dead trends and left leftovers. A translator-novelist-critic of Irish and American descent and European education, he now lives in Ireland. His novel When the Kissing Had to Stop, a political cautionary tale of a Russian takeover from a fellow-traveling British government, made him a bogeyman to left-leaning intellectuals. It also won him a Communist Party accolade-"fascist hyena...
Like drowning men, panicky voters have clutched at a Nixon-Bogeyman image as the last plausible rationalization for caring about the 1968 electoral system. Maybe there is no one to vote for this year, but at least there are Nixon and Wallace to vote against. Angry students, ready to blow up all three candidates, have been enticed back in Humphrey campaign offices, which had shrewdly re-named themselves "Stop Nixon Headquarters...
...first, Nixon seemed to play into the bogeyman role. The scenario was all too clear: there was the smiling Nixon at the Republican convention, Strom Thurmond on one side and Spiro Agnew on the other. There was the soulless Nixon, emerging with "official stands" on things like war and racism after consulting the public opinion polls. There was the unified-party Nixon, steam-rolling John Lindsay, Edward Brooke, Ronald Reagen together into one big, happy, featureless group of supporters. And worst of all, there was the Machiavellian Nixon, keenly aware that even though his moves alienated the blacks...
...wizened puppet moved across the stage, he fit the bogeyman pattern, and his first few words confirmed the image. At first he told a few forced jokes about Humphrey ("he talks about a debate--why, he is a debate"), did some buttering-up of the locals ("I am grateful to be John Volpe's friend"), and then took a tentative swing into the platitudes of The Nixon Speech--the same one he has used since the convention...
...left town. Nixon had admitted the things that angry students had yelled all along. Kids don't like him, he sadly realized, and black people probably thought he didn't like them. The unexpected admission and the apparent sincerity were disconcerting. Students in the audience, scrambling to preserve the bogeyman image, come up with tortuous explanations. All this humble business was a big show, they said. Nixon's just trying to fool...