Word: cassandras
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sticky End. Irish-born (County Derry) Bill Connor has been Cassandra ever since he started in newspapering on the Mirror in 1935. The son of a civil servant, Cassandra did a variety of odd jobs until Mirror editors, intrigued by his arrogant, self-assured, insulting ways, gave him a job as a columnist. Cassandra ("One of those titles cooked up in a pub") was an overnight success. He also got the paper into very hot water, which is just where the saucy, sensational Mirror likes...
During World War II Cassandra's attacks on the government were so savage that the Cabinet came close to suppressing the paper. After Dunkirk Cassandra bellowed for an all-out attack on Germany, even though Britain could barely defend itself at the time. He complained that the British army was weak because it was ruled by the "military aristocracy of the Guards, second-class snobocracy in the center, and behind it all the cloying inertia of the civil service." In the House of Lords, the Lord Chancellor pointed out that the legendary Cassandra had come to "a sticky...
Interview with McCarthy. At war's end he began his first column: "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted." Like many another British journalist, Cassandra puts himself in the middle of every story, to the virtual exclusion of anyone he is writing about. Last year, in a series on Senator Joe McCarthy, Cassandra seldom let even him get in a word as he wrote: "I told him I detested everything he stood for. I opposed what he was doing, and that on further acquaintance I felt almost certain that I would hate his guts. Furthermore, what...
...Cassandra's theory of reporting fits his headlong methods. "It's easy to be wrong," says he, "but it's not easy to plunge ahead as if you were right without giving the other point of view." No one could ever accuse Cassandra of giving the other point of view on anything from dogs ("Man's best friend is a fake and a fraud, and the sooner he is taught to lay eggs or produce milk the better") to doctors ("I don't like their mumbo jumbo, their smooth, lying inefficiency...
...Cassandra, who writes in longhand, seldom consults a note or reference source, is more interested in getting his prose right than his facts. Meeting Cassandra in person for the first time, says one old friend, is like being "involved in an extremely unpleasant motor crash." But neither his barbed manner nor the arrogance of his column is any accident. Says Cassandra: "I know how to be hostile, suspicious and skeptical. I can wield these unlovable qualities like a whip...