Word: vicuna
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...From the '30s to the '60s, scoops in his syndicated column ("Wash ington Merry-Go-Round") or on his Sunday radio broad casts became headlines: the Roosevelt court-packing plan, F.D.R.'s destroyers-for-bases swap with Churchill, the Patton soldier-slapping incident, Sherman Adams' vicuna coat and many other tales, worthy and less worthy...
...turning point. In that year a Peruvian government undertook to save the animals by creating a 16,000-acre preserve called Pampa Galeras in the windswept highlands in the southern part of the country. Peru also signed a pact with Bolivia that banned for ten years the hunting of vicuna and the sale of products made from the animal; subsequently, Chile and Argentina joined in the La Paz Convention. In 1973, 51 nations voted to place the vicuña on the endangered-species list and bar it from the commercial market...
Remember when the gift of a vicuna coat was enough to get a respectable Republican hounded out of Washington...
...didn't. When it was disclosed during a 1958 congressional hearing that New England Textile Manufacturer Bernard Goldfine had given Adams a number of gifts, including hotel accommodations in Boston and a vicuna coat, calls began to rise, even in the Republican Party's own ranks, for Adams' resignation. At first Eisenhower stoutly defended his aide. But it was a congressional election year, and party pros were convinced that the Adams affair was damaging their chances. Vice President Nixon, assigned to weigh party sentiment, found that virtually all Republican candidates wanted Adams out. That jibed with Nixon...
Trifles such as a deep freezer and a vicuna coat tainted the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations with charges of petty graft. So when one of President Nixon's speechwriters, William Safire, had an article accepted by the New York Times, he was advised by the President's counsel, John Dean, not to accept the $150 payment, as it might be construed as a conflict of interest. In his new book about the Nixon Administration, Before the Fall, a deadpan Safire-now a Times columnist-recalls his feeling at the time. "That was a good idea, I thought...