Word: rasputine
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Like a ghost out of his own past, the frail Russian prince sat in a darkened Manhattan courtroom and watched a TV re-enactment of one of history's most famous assassinations-the 1916 murder of Rasputin, the lecherous monk who held Svengalian power over the Czar and Czarina. Then the lights went on, and Prince Felix Youssoupoff, the man who did the deed, now a 78-year-old Parisian, got down to business-his $1,500,000 suit against the Columbia Broadcasting System for invasion of privacy...
Pray! Hard of hearing now, stumbling over questions as translators worked with him in French, the last living participant in the all-but-forgotten plot described the fateful night of Dec. 29, 1916. He invited Rasputin to a midnight snack in the basement of his Moika palace, the prince told the court. There, while accomplices played Yankee Doodle on the phonograph upstairs, Youssoupoff fed Rasputin cakes and wine sprinkled with cyanide "sufficient to kill several men instantly." Rasputin merely "coughed," looked "drunk," and asked the prince to sing. Appalled, and in no mood for warbling, the prince ran upstairs...
Though he rejected the job of U.S. Solicitor General in 1932 (the same year he turned down a judgeship on Massachusetts' highest bench), Frankfurter became such an intimate adviser of Franklin Roosevelt that Mississippi Congressman Daniel McGhee labeled him "the Rasputin of this administration." As F.D.R.'s top talent scout, Frankfurter manned the New Deal ramparts with such protégés as Dean Acheson, Jerome Frank, David Lilienthal, Thomas Corcoran and the ill-fated Alger Hiss. Predictably, they were called "Happy Hot Dogs," from the Latin felix for happy. Then came "the 1939 death of Justice...
Texas liberals, who are unhappy with their Governor because he settles for so many half-loaves and refuses to talk like a liberal, are scathingly portrayed as a cynical, ingrown coterie that spends most of its time boozing and rutting. Fenstemaker, groans one liberal, is "Mahatma Gandhi and Rasputin, the Prince of Darkness and the goddam Mystic Angel." But he concedes that the old fox "knew what absolutely had to be done; he could engage himself and then withdraw without losing that commanding vision...
...some, Ngo Dinh Can seemed to be the ablest of the ill-fated Ngo brothers. Although he never held an official position in the Diem regime, he was the overlord of central Viet Nam. A rural Rasputin in high-collared mandarin robes who wenched and swindled lustily, he nevertheless ran his fief so effectively that it had less trouble from the Viet Cong than any other area. Can in vain advised his brothers, President Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, to ease the measures against the Buddhists-not out of idealism but to avoid rocking the boat...