Word: svengali
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about any chance for an accomodation with the evil empire. Granted their chances were not propitious, given the beligerent Russian frame of mind and intransigence on Euromissiles, but they were non-existent under the maximalist approach to arms control favored by Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger '38 and his Svengali, Ricahrd Perle, who have had the President's ear on these matters...
Courts are limiting the work of police "Svengali squads...
Until recently such situations prompted many police departments to call in the "Svengali squads," the teams of specially trained police hypnotists that sprang up across the country in the '70s. Pioneered by the Los Angeles police department, the widespread use of hypno-investigators led to hundreds of convictions, many of them in cases where battered rape victims blocked out memory of the crimes. Even the FBI trained some of its agents in hypnosis. But the courts have not been so mesmerized. In recent years a number of state supreme courts have declared that hypnotically induced testimony is inherently unreliable...
...reversed part of the California Supreme Court decision, allowing witnesses and victims who have been hypnotized to testify as to their prehypnotic recollections, while stipulating that sessions be conducted only by disinterested outside psychiatrists. But since it is witnesses' posthypnotic testimony that is most valuable to police, the Svengali squads in California and elsewhere continue to wither away...
DIED. James Mason, 75, suave Svengali of British and Hollywood films for a half-century; of a heart attack; in Lausanne, Switzerland. Mason took a Cambridge architecture degree but was soon displaying his haunted good looks and claret baritone on the London stage and screen. In scores of romantic melodramas, from The Seventh Veil (1945) to The Deadly Affair (1967), he polished his image as the ruthless lover. Behind his sophisticated sadism there was often the suggestion of a dark past and a doomed future, shrouding such troubled protagonists as the Irish fugitive in Odd Man Out (1946), Rommel...