Word: turncoat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DURING THE LAST twenty years, at least, literary critics have approached the legacy of Louis-Ferdinand Celine with trepidation, if they have deigned to remember his contribution to French literature at all. He was an unsavory fellow: perceived as a political turncoat; ungrateful towards his staunchest friends; a convicted Nazi collaborator. In an epigraph to his pamphlet called Mea Culpa, Celine taunted, "There are still a few hatreds that I lack. I am sure that they exist." Hatred is a distasteful and difficult subject...
...novel, The Company [May 31], instigated the following speculation. If other historical miscreants had written novels based on their experiences, American literature would have been enriched by the following: a psychological study of treason by Benedict Arnold, detailing how a simple soldier was pressured by society to become a turncoat: a thriller by John Wilkes Booth showing how he was really a misunderstood hero who had been seduced into crime by evil Yankee villainy; a political novel by Jefferson Davis, describing the daily life and irritations of a fictional President...
...mate like Howard Baker or William Brock, the two attractive Tennessee Senators, or perhaps the glamorous John Connally. The Texan dwarfs the two Senators as a campaigner, but he burdens Ford with his wheeler-dealer reputation. As a convert from the Democrats, he is now seen as a political turncoat...
...from the crisp gags, is the smug conviction that California has captured the great Neil Simon and thus is one up on New York. But it is not quite that simple. Simon has not succumbed to California; he has just borrowed it. He asks: "How can I be a turncoat when everything about me-all the baggage I've accumulated since my birth-is pure New York?" In Manhattan, Simon lived in a comfortable East Side townhouse. Now he has a massive electronic gate blocking the entrance to the ten-room house, gardens and pool that he shares with...
...former Texas Governor John Connally, a spellbinding speaker who hankers to be President. But it still seemed unlikely that the Republican delegates, basically the same kind of conservatives who nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 and only grudgingly accepted Richard Nixon in 1968, would give their nomination to a Democratic turncoat. It seemed far more unlikely that the Republican Convention would move to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, still a pariah to the party's dominant right wing. Yet Rockefeller will control most of the huge New York delegation (154 delegates, making up 7% of the convention's votes), and he might...