Word: mcginniss
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Longhair Publicity. Joseph McGinniss, columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer, pursued John Wayne from his "inspirational reading" at the convention to the Poodle Lounge at the Hotel Fontainebleau. In the boozy gloom, Wayne reviewed his speech. "What the hell did I say? I have no idea what the hell I said." Then he remembered a little. "Permissiveness is the biggest problem we have. The people in these colleges and these ghettos and these goddam longhair punks." And it's all the fault of the press, he said. "Nothing is ever any different from how it ever was except all these...
Enraged and horrified by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Philadelphia Inquirer Columnist Joseph McGinniss wrote: "You do not live in a country any more but in a cesspool. It does not happen anywhere the way it happens here. The country does not work any more. All that money and power have produced has been a bunch of people so filled with fear and hate that when a man tries to tell them they must do more for other men, instead of listening they shoot him in the head...
...McGinniss' immediate reaction was echoed by much of the rest of the press: many columnists and editorial writers quickly decided that the U.S. was consumed with violence, with sickness. Then, last week, after the first wave of dismay had passed, the press began to have some sober second thoughts. McGinniss' own paper, in fact, took him to task in an editorial for "responding immaturely and emotionally to the overwhelming horror of the moment. We vigorously condemn his blasphemy of America...
...Time for Weeping. Without going as far as the Inquirer, other commentators declared that the McGinniss kind of reaction was indeed overdone. "Some psychologists," wrote New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker, "believe that the 'sick society' idea is a sort of American defense mechanism; these dreadful things having happened, some Americans are anxious to regain their self-regard and the respect of others, and therefore hurry to accept the responsibility for awful events." It may be, agreed David Broder in the Washington Post, that the wave of assassinations heralds a "social breakdown," but it "seems...