Word: democratizer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Johnson's balanced approach won considerable nationwide support, including a comment from Dwight Eisenhower that he "unquestionably has made the right decision." There was, however, no letup in congressional criticism. Chief among the sharpshooters was Arkansas Democrat J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who floor-managed the landmark congressional resolution in 1964 by which the President has authority to take "all necessary steps" to resist aggression in Southeast Asia. Fulbright now confesses that he played "a part that I am not at all proud of at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin. That would...
...odds, it was the most flaccid filibuster in memory. There was no reading of recipes or telephone books, none of the oldtime Bible-spouting, rip-snorting oratory. Dirksen and his filibuster co-captain, North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin, had assigned each of their 27 teammates to a group and a captain; each was prepared to carry on night and day if pushed. But nobody was pushing. Majority Leader Mansfield refused to hold marathon sessions, saw to it that the Senate always recessed in time for dinner, and once even in time for lunch-all of which moved Oregon...
...used to advantage a Senate rule by which no committee other than Appropriations may meet while the main body is in session. "I must insist on that rule," he intoned in his best steamboat-Gothic profundo. "I cannot, helter-skelter, permit one committee to meet and not another." Arkansas Democrat William Fulbright protested in vain that his Foreign Relations Committee urgently needed to review President Johnson's $275 million supplemental request for economic aid to South Viet Nam. The problem could easily be resolved, Dirksen countered, by getting Mansfield to withdraw his motion to take up repeal...
...editors emerge triumphant from court after tangling in print with their readers. Last week Gene Wirges, 39, former editor of the weekly Democrat in Morrilton, Ark., was sentenced to three years in prison for perjury...
Wirges' conviction was only the latest incident in a long history of troubles that eventually cost him his paper. While he was in command, the Democrat attacked the well-entrenched local political machine of Sheriff Marlin Hawkins, a close ally of Governor Orval Faubus. After accusing the machine of election fraud, Wirges was threatened, beaten up and shot at. Harassed by every possible legal weapon his enemies could dream up, Wirges lost two libel suits for a total of $275,000. A $75,000 judgment was later overturned by the Arkansas Supreme Court; the $200,000 verdict has been...