Word: matter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...VIII to marry a divorced American woman was unthinkable. Class resentment and sexual envy were aroused in the British public by the disclosure that the Tory Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had fraternized with Christine Keeler and assorted other shady characters. But when Profumo lied about the matter to the House of Commons, he destroyed his standing with the Establishment as well. Such flouting of tradition brought about his own resignation and contributed to a Labor victory the following year...
...reaction to the Chappaquiddick mystery once again illustrates that in the processes of public judgment, perhaps the most powerful factors are appearance and imagination. Scandal is a relative matter. How people react to an alleged or suspected indiscretion depends on time and place, on who knows and who tells, on the prestige-and vulnerability-of the persons involved. Pure caprice is often a factor. What one man gets away with for a lifetime may destroy another overnight. Charles Parnell fell from power because of the honest love of a married woman, while his near-contemporary, David Lloyd George, remained Prime...
Even if they are surrounded by enemies ready to pounce at their first lapse, public figures can get away with a lot if their misdeeds are only a matter of gossip. The U.S. President, in particular, is well insulated against excessively prying eyes. Warren Harding employed the Secret Service to keep watch over his liaisons in the White House. Franklin Roosevelt's affair with his wife's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, was successfully kept out of print even though it almost broke up his marriage. Washington gossips amused themselves with stories about John Kennedy's attentiveness...
...Blows. Nothing of the sort, says Vidal. "I do not prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality," he writes, "or, for that matter, heterosexuality to homosexuality . . . But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime." Vidal insists that "I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom." He calls Buckley one of those "morbid, twisted men" who are always "sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others...
...Paul, Minn., the reaction was almost as if another leader had been shot. "I haven't felt like this," sobbed one Catholic housewife there, "since Jack Kennedy was killed." No one, as a matter of fact, had died, but one of Roman Catholicism's most articulate and progressive shepherds in the U.S. had been abruptly estranged from his flock. The Most Rev. James P. Shannon, who had resigned as auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis earlier this year (TIME, June 6), last week announced that he had married. The wedding took place...