Word: watchdog
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...brick Old Pension Office Building on Judiciary Square, he will take a post which demands all the painstaking concentration which often made him better informed on House bills than their authors. When the late niggardly John Raymond McCarl (see p. 62) occupied the office, Washington dubbed him "Watchdog of the Treasury" for such piddling practices as forcing General John J. Pershing to pay for his own Pullman ticket after he had lost his voucher. Franklin Roosevelt, who cares little for such trivialities, was glad to see McCarl's term expire in 1936. After an unsuccessful attempt to abolish...
Died. John Raymond McCarl, 60, first U. S. Comptroller General (1921-36); of a heart attack; in his Washington law office. Softspoken, florid Comptroller McCarl took his job very seriously. "Watchdog of the Treasury" during his 15-year term, he annoyed the administrations of Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt II by refusing to O. K. checks for expenditures not authorized by Congress. Sample McCarlism: refusal to pay $1.50 for a Government employe's lunch because "there is nowhere in Virginia where one can buy a lunch worth...
Britain and France had just reduced their China garrisons. Japan was fulminating against the U. S. in its role of watchdog. The conferees went off to Manila with their boss's judgment (coinciding with their own): if Japan takes the present war as an occasion to move in on French and British interests, the U. S. must do everything short of war to resist. If you live in a firetrap, Nelson Johnson might say, and the apartment of the two people across the hall catches fire, you don't go on reading that romantic novel; you get busy...
Newspapers, as usual, were solidly in line. One morning the leading newspapers of Tokyo all ran strikingly similar editorials on how the U. S. was becoming the "watchdog of the Far East" on behalf of Britain and France...
...that good money be sent abroad after bad. But the President explained that the borrowers were to be good South American neighbors, not wicked European defaulters. The money would all be spent in or for the U. S., opening and reconstructing export markets. Moreover, Jesse Jones would be the watchdog on duty...