Word: flacks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Danton Walker, Broadway columnist for the New York Daily News, was neither the first nor the best example of that vaguely journalistic genus, the gossipmonger. In his 23 years of reporting flack-work, rumor, trivia and hearsay, his wit was generally perishable, his essays at political thinking were often bottom drawer (Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Batista was "the most dynamic and forceful personality I ever interviewed"), his prophecies of events were mercifully forgotten, his items were usually inconsequential, though short enough to be mildly habit forming, like peanuts. But he was less given than his predecessors to malice in print...
Hardly had General Electric and the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers started bargaining in Manhattan last week for a new contract, when the loman G.E. delegation simply rose and stomped out. The reason was-as a G.E. flack discreetly put it-that I.U.E. President James B. Carey shouted "a twice-repeated command of obscenity" at Philip D. Moore, chief G.E. negotiator...
...Abraham Lincoln made a phone call from Gettysburg to his press-agent in Manhattan. Abe was rebellious. He was going to shave his beard and wear a cardigan. The flack demanded that he keep the beard, shawl, stovepipe and string tie, or he would wreck his "image." Abe then announced that he had his speech neatly typed, and this distressed the flack even more. "Abe," pleaded the pressagent, "how many times have we told you: on-the-backs-of-envelopes...
...nimbly as I can, this flack has hurried to correct your observation that Gambler Frank Costello bought the Hoffman touch [March 7]. Frank Costello never bought my touch-he sought my advice and got it for nothing. I have done as much for former Ambassador Joe Kennedy. I gave him free advice for Son Jack. "Get him a haircut," I advised...
...often called "The Human Mailbox," an earth-blanketing pressagent more interesting than many of his clients. Onetime Manhattan p.r. man and for 20 years critic and columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, Irving Hoffman disengaged himself in 1952, began to roam all continents as a sort of gypsy flack. He is or has been everybody's buddy-from Wendell Willkie to Polly Adler, Truman Capote, Pablo Picasso, ferry boat captains, prostitutes, J. Edgar Hoover, the Maharani of Baroda, and countless men of the cloth...