Word: rumors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...meet his standards. Once asked when he would cease hounding a man. Mollenhoff replied, "When he drops." By the time he joined the White House, many were already weary of his zealotry. But with his new powers, Mollenhoff, 48, is a still fiercer hunter. There is even a rumor making the rounds that the lawyer-journalist-investigator will be J. Edgar Hoover's successor as FBI chief. "If I have made some people uneasy," Mollenhoff once said, "it's not really me that's bothering them. It's something else." If in the past a troubled...
Celes King is director of the Los Angeles Rumor Control and Information Center, which serves as a switchboard for the black and Mexican minority organizations. King, a chunky brown man in his 40s, sits in a storefront office on a cheap vinyl couch. I ask him if the blacks are happy. King laughs bitterly. He points out that juvenile unemployment in the black community is 25% to 30%; adult unemployment is 12% to 15%. Transportation is a big part of the problem. Los Angeles is a horizontal city, and it's huge. Most industrial jobs are ten to 20 miles...
...third and final stage of a rumor's life, the information is tailored to suit the vendor's interests and emotional needs. Those who believe that McCartney is dead, for instance, are in part sublimating their fear of the grave. For whenever death visits another person, it must delay its appointment in Samarra with you. Frequently, the death of a public figure breeds a host of rumors about the supposed deaths of other public figures. Within hours after Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, rumors falsely consigned General George Marshall, Bing Crosby and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia...
...almost impossible for people in the public eye to escape from rumors. That paragon of puritanical virtue, Queen Victoria, was thought by some of her contemporaries to be the secret wife of Disraeli or the secret mistress of her Scottish gillie, John Brown. Since rumor sometimes represents vicarious wish fulfillment, certain movie stars have been popularly credited with sexual exploits that defy physical ability...
Politics and government are simply inconceivable without the ubiquitous presence of rumor; it is a fixture of every state polity. In the form of trial balloons, rumors are deliberately lofted to survey popular sentiment. Before Gutenberg, word of mouth constituted man's principal means for exchanging knowledge, and it would be difficult to prove that modern instruments of communication have improved things much. If legend and myth are solidified rumor, so may be the printed picture and word-secondhand hearsay that is susceptible to the same kind of distortion that rumor undergoes in its journey from one willing...