Word: thirdhand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once upon a time, Presidents might have fudged the facts to a few Congressmen in smoke-filled rooms, but who was the wiser? If voters heard the words second- or thirdhand, how could they judge them? Now it's impossible to fib in obscurity. Americans can already mouth the words when they see the incessant reruns of that finger-jabbing image: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Sissela Bok, the high priestess of the scholars of lying, says the TV camera has made it far more dangerous for a President to prevaricate than it was 50 years...
...Hersh insists that Kennedy not only approved the coup but also knew about and at least acquiesced in plans to murder Diem and his brother. His evidence for this is almost nonexistent: a cryptic, secondhand account of a conversation between Kennedy and CIA agent Edward Lansdale, a vague thirdhand account of a secret visit to Diem in 1963 by the President's friend Torbert Macdonald, the unsupported speculation of officials on the edges of events at the time. He argues that the Kennedy Administration supported the coup because it had received reports that Diem was negotiating a settlement with North...
...says, "Having seen the summary file ((on nuclear espionage)), I can tell you there are no such names as Sudoplatov mentions in it." He makes one tiny exception: "One of our sources had a discussion with someone who knew Oppenheimer in 1945." But the report about the conversation was thirdhand and maddeningly vague, and nothing came...
When out troops left Iraq and Panama, so did our cameras. Our killings were thirdhand, and no Iraqi Nayirahs have yet appeared on CBS to recount the horror we left behind...
Print the quote, whatever the source. For Kelley, all sources are treated as equal. The recollections of an unnamed secretary repeating thirdhand gossip are given the same weight as on-the-record comments from actual witnesses. (And sometimes more weight.) This ascribes far too much authority to what may be nothing more than idle gossip or office chitchat. It also fails to account for sources who may have their own axes to grind...