Word: wicks
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...Comedian Jimmy Durante used to put it, everybody wants to get into the act. The act in question last week was the investigation of United States Information Agency Director Charles Z. Wick's surreptitious tapings of his telephone conversations with Government officials, celebrities and foreign businessmen. By week's end two congressional committees and the General Services Administration had launched investigations into Wick's low-fi misdeeds. When the New York Times, in its third front-page story on the subject in seven days, revealed that last March Wick taped two conversations from a Palm Beach hotel...
Reading the morning paper, more often than not, offers further examples of the President's particular brand of language. Last week, for example, the President defended the conduct of the chief of the United States Information Agency, Charles Wick...
...think that Charles Wick is a dishonorable man in any way. I can understand his forgetting sometimes when he was talking to people particularly that he knew, "[Wick's taping] was different... [from someone]" trying to keep a record on other people's conversations what he was actually trying to do was to immediately transcribe so that he could provide the suggestions that were being discussed to the people that would have to implement them...
...this quotation is pieced together, but if one remembers the facts of the matter it is embarrassing to figure out what the President is actually saying. What, for example, does Reagan mean when he says. "I don't think Charles Wick is a dishonorable man in any way?" If "dishonorable" means anything it means lying and Mr. Wick lied several times when he told reporters early in the investigation of his taping that he had never taped without permission. The issue is not "forgetting"; one does not forget taping a conversation the way one forgets an address. And finally, what...
Indeed, the only one who is not displeased by the USIA chief's conduct is the President, who last week called Wick "honorable," and pledged to let him "continue" in his post. Perhaps Wick's previous Wattian statement this summer that the reason Margaret Thatcher opposed the Grenada invasion was that she was a "woman" should have clued the President earlier on that another staff member was falling by the wayside. Perhaps the USIA chief's alleged summer redecoration of his house with public funds should have alerted Mr. Reagan that Wick was spluttering. Let us at least hope that...