Word: caucus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Boss. Nowadays this is usually done with tact-but originally it took toughness as well. Shortly after he took over in 1964, Barzel called a caucus of the party's 240 deputies and announced that if one more squabble erupted in public, the party could consider his resignation. "Everybody looked at Konrad Adenauer and the other older leaders, waiting for challenge," recalls one deputy. "It did not come. Young Barzel walked out of there the boss...
That is the way it mostly went last week in the Senate caucus room, where the Federal Reserve Board's old foe, Texas Congressman Wright Patman, had summoned Board Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr., four more of the seven board members and four other witnesses to four days of hearings about the Federal Reserve's discount-rate rise. The hearings changed no one's mind or position one iota, but they produced some clarification of the events that led up to the rate rise and considerably heightened speculation about President Johnson's choice to replace Vice...
...government controls on all imports, supposedly to halt a buying panic that was rapidly depleting Rhodesia's hard-currency reserves, but perhaps to suggest that big events-such as a unilateral declaration of independence-lay ahead. Then, after a furious 24 hours in which he presided over a caucus of his Rhodesian Front Party and held three long Cabinet meetings, came an even more ominous gesture: the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency...
Inferior Lizard. As the Klan's high mugwumps fidgeted through four days of congressional catechism in the old House Caucus Room last week, they resorted to the same Pavlovian routine of pious nonresponse as their avowed archfoes the Communists. The Klan's chief panjandrum, Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, 36, probably challenged the Communist record before the same committee by taking the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments a total of 158 times in two days, invoking the mumbled formula: "I respectably decline to answer that question...
American ways of thinking and being were as fluid and uncertain as the American frontier. Boorstin explores them in an erudite and eloquent essay on the American gift of gab. With verbacious vitality, the growing American language devoured Indian, Dutch, German, Spanish, French and Negro words. Others were invented (caucus, lynch-law, squatter), improvised (sockdolager, spondulix, absquatulate), and embellished (kerflop, kerthump, kersouse). The general exuberance also burst out in political oratory and tall talk ("Bust me wide open if I didn't bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin' savagerous...