Word: spoilsmen
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...odds, this transition once again will be a shirttail operation, underfunded, ill defined, rushed and harried by spoilsmen and political operatives. Campaigns have become an industry of moneygrubbers and pitchmen, only a few of whom should be allowed into power. The nation and Ronald Reagan might have been better off had 1980 Campaign Director Bill Casey, a renowned Wall Street buccaneer, been left there rather than given the CIA as spoils. Jimmy Carter's sad history might have been different had he kept his campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan out of the White House loop. And John Mitchell, Richard Nixon...
...whole nation. The Jacksonian concept did not immediately prevail. During the Civil War, the Senate was subservient to Lincoln. But with war's end and Lincoln's death, it rapidly reasserted itself and achieved its pinnacle of power if not prestige. Its leaders were party bosses and spoilsmen; in the burgeoning economy of the Reconstruction Era, many a robber baron found that a state legislature could be bought and, with it, a Senate seat. When one Senator seriously proposed a bill unseating those Senators whose places had been purchased, Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho replied: "We might lose...
...only unfair but wholly unrealistic . . . We are aware that "nobody wants to end or to impair the merit system," but in view of the tenor of the piece as a whole, its derogation of career employees, its repetition of some of the most moth-eaten of the spoilsmen's cliches, such a qualification loses any real meaning or force. Virtually every attack on the merit system in history has been advanced under the cover of pious protestations. But when those attacks have succeeded -as they sometimes do when public vigilance falters-the real nature of the evil virus...
...floor of the U.S. Senate last week, two aged, reactionary spoilsmen, both vindictive, determined and ruthless, were waging a joint fight for power. Both, chip by chip, were being whittled down to size. One was 80-year-old Kenneth Douglas McKellar, the choleric Tennessee feudist who heads the all-powerful Appropriations Committee; the other was Nevada's silver-maned, silver-minded Patrick A. McCarran, 73, chairman of the scarcely less powerful Judiciary Committee...
...tirade's end the puffing Senator had admitted that three of his immediate family are on the Federal payroll, that he is still sponsoring an amendment which would give Senate spoilsmen control of all Federal jobs paying more than $4,500 a year, and proved that he has a terrible temper. He had specifically denied only one Pearson charge: "I never pulled a knife on any Senator...