Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, many members of the shattered Kennedy mafia cast their lots with the last-minute candidacy of George McGovern. Among them was Robert Kennedy's press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, whose face became known nationally when he announced Kennedy's death in Los Angeles. Mankiewicz later collaborated on a syndicated insiders' political column. Now, at the end of the month, he will rejoin McGovern as a top adviser. McGovern will get one of the most astute aides of any Democratic candidate...
Does it really serve truth to pretend that Italians have had no connection with the Mafia? And what difference does it make if they did? It is obvious to the point of boredom that, despite this connection, the vast majority of Italian Americans are law-abiding citizens. What is gained by pretending that Jews and blacks and Armenians are not different from one another, or that they lack racial and ethnic characteristics? What cause is helped when oppressive minorities declare that only black comics can tell jokes about blacks, or only Jews jokes about Jews? The babble of competing minorities...
...simplicity, the purity of the idea has proven irresistible. After being picketed and besieged by mail, the Justice Department became the league's first convert. Attorney General John Mitchell agreed to deport the Mafia-as a word, that is. In a confidential memo the Mitchell kiss of death was to be reserved not for the Mob, but for all Justice Department employees who used the terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra officially. The league subsequently persuaded the film makers of The Godfather, which is about practically nothing but the Mafia, to excise the hated term from their screenplay. That...
Behind the "don't-mention-Mafia" campaign, behind the talk about promoting an "image of law-abiding Americans," are two intriguing social forces. One, breathing heavily, is a positive lust for respectability. The irony is that the men of the Mafia, for reasons of camouflage, have arrived at the life-style of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. But the double irony is that propriety has now become its own parody. While the children of the league labor to prove how sober, hardworking, puritanical they are, the children of the Mayflower, dressed in a travesty of the 1930s...
...stationery when one writes letters to the New York Times. The decisive moment of victory in the game is not when an oppressed minority gets off the defensive but when it puts everybody else on the defensive. When, like the Italians with their anti-Mafia crusade, it makes others not only act but talk and think the way it wants them...